I glared at her incredulously while Orion whimpered his way through digging out a plaster from his backpack and covering up the mark of her deeply planted incisors. She sat on the edge of the desk washing her face and whiskers with an air of enormous satisfaction. “I don’t need a chaperone, much less one who’s a mouse,” I hissed at her under my breath. “Aren’t you lot having babies when you’re a month old?” She only twitched her nose at me dismissively.
Orion avoided looking at me at all the rest of the morning, which was quite a trick when we were sitting next to each other. Of course, I managed it myself, too. I wasn’t at all tempted to do otherwise. Even in the moment, whatever we’d been about to do had seemed like a bad idea, and thankfully I wasn’t in the moment anymore. I’d never been in a moment with anyone before and I didn’t like it at all. What business did my brain have coming up with a patently stupid idea like kissing Orion Lake in the stacks instead of doing my classwork? It felt like nothing more than the symptoms of a mindworm infestation, per the description in the sophomore maleficaria textbook: mysterious and uncharacteristic foreign thoughts inserting themselves at unwanted and unpredictable times. If only I had a mindworm infestation. All I had was Orion sitting next to me in his too-small t-shirt from sophomore year that was the only clean one he had left this week and his arm about four inches away from mine.
I spent those three hours staring at my latest poem from Myrddin class, which strangely refused to translate itself. At this rate, soon I’d start failing my own classes. To add insult to injury, when the bell for lunch rang, Orion sat back in his chair and sighed and said, “There, I got it,” and he’d finished the entire worksheet. He’d still have to actually brew the potion, but that wasn’t a horrible burden: it was a reflex-boosting concoction that would make him even more of a terror to mals everywhere. It was an outrageously good remedial assignment. My remedial alchemy assignments are always poisons that kill instantly, kill gruesomely, or sometimes kill instantly and gruesomely.
“Good,” I said sourly, packing up. “Do you need any more help with it, Lake, or do you think you can manage the measuring spoons after lunch without supervision?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, with a glare, and then he remembered that something had almost happened and apparently he didn’t think it had been such a bad idea as all that, because he stopped glaring and blurted, “Unless you want to come,” which was horribly absurd: Want to come help me with my remedial alchemy assignment down in the lab was possibly the worst date ever and he had absolutely no business inviting anyone to do it, and I had absolutely no business even thinking about saying yes.
And I’d also promised Aadhya to help her tune the lute this afternoon, so I couldn’t say yes. Just as well. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said coolly, as I snatched up my last two books. He went sheepish and curled in, and I swept away into the aisle back towards the reading room and the stairs, silently congratulating myself on having stomped on his aspirations, except as we started to clear our trays, Aadhya said to me, “Are we still on for tuning the lute now?” and Orion shot a narrow-eyed look across the table at me like Oh so you would have said yes otherwise wouldn’t you. I avoided his eyes. He didn’t need any more ideas than he already had, and neither did I. Instead I hurried off with Aadhya to an empty classroom to work on the lute, only the instant we got clear of other people she nudged me in the arm and raised her eyebrows and was all, “Wellllll?”
“What?” I said.
She gave me a shove. “Are you dating now?”
“No!”
“Oh, come on, seriously, look me in the face and tell me you didn’t kiss at least once up there,” Aadhya said.
“We didn’t!” I said, in glad and perfect honesty, and at dinner I grudgingly gave Precious the three ripe red grapes out of the fruit cup I’d bagged that was otherwise only full of tired-looking honeydew and pale underripe pineapple chunks that stung in my mouth. “Don’t take this as encouragement,” I told her. She accepted them with smug graciousness and ate all three one after another and went to sleep in her cup with her tiny belly distended.
* * *
There’re almost no holidays in the Scholomance. They’d be a pointless fiction, but that’s not why we don’t have them; we don’t have them because we—and the school—can’t afford them. We need to be working, all the time, just to keep the lights on. So there’s only graduation and induction day, on the second of July, and the semesters are divided around the first of January, which is also when the senior class rankings get posted and the winter cleansing happens. But that leaves one extra day in the first semester, which the Americans decided was a terrible problem that obviously had to be addressed. So one day each fall, after the last of the remedial post-midterms work has been turned in—or not—we have Field Day.