Deirdre bit her lip. “I had no idea how crazy the class schedule would be. But—wow. It’s so good to see you.”
There was a long, awkward moment where a hug would’ve usually happened, before last summer. Before Luke, and way before that text message I’d sent—the one neither of us could forget.
“You’re very tanned,” I said. A lie; Dee didn’t tan.
Dee sort of smiled. “And you cut your hair.”
I ran a hand over my head, let my fingers worry over the new scar above my ear. “They had to shave it to put the stitches in. I just shaved all of it to match. I wanted to shave my initials in it, but—this will come as a shock to you—I just now realized that my initials spell JAM. It was kind of humiliating.”
Dee laughed. I was absurdly pleased that she did. “It sort of suits you,” she said, but her eyes were on my hands and the scribbled words that covered both of them up to the wrist. More ink than skin.
I wanted to ask her how she was, about the faeries, about the text, but I couldn’t seem to say anything important. “Better than it would you.”
She laughed again. It wasn’t a real laugh, but that was okay, because I hadn’t really meant it to be funny. I just needed something to say.
“What are you doing here?”
Both Dee and I spun and found ourselves facing one of the teachers: Eve Linnet. Dramatic Lit. She was a small, pale ghost in the dim light. Her face might’ve been pretty if she hadn’t been scowling. “This isn’t school grounds.”
Something nagged me as wrong, though it took me a second to realize what. She’d come from the hills, not from the school.
Linnet craned her neck as if she’d just noticed Deirdre; Dee’s face was red as if we’d been caught doing something. Linnet’s voice was sharp. “I don’t know what sort of schools you two came from, but we don’t allow any of that sort of behavior here.”
Before last summer, I would’ve made some joke about Dee and I—about how it wasn’t like that, how I was her bound love slave since birth, or how nothing had happened because Dee was repulsed by a certain chemical component in my skin. But instead I just said, “It wasn’t like that.”
I knew it sounded guilty, and she must’ve thought so too, because she said, “Oh, it wasn’t? Then why were you all the way out here?”
I had it. I looked past her, toward the hills, and her eyes darted along my line of vision. “We were waiting for you.”
Dee looked at me sharply, but not in the way Linnet did. Linnet looked angry, or afraid. For a long moment she didn’t say anything at all, and then, finally, she said, “I don’t think any of us should be here right now. Let’s go back to the dorms, and I’ll just forget this whole thing ever happened. It’s a terrible way to begin a school year, anyway. In trouble.”
As Linnet turned to lead us back to the school, Dee cast an admiring glance in my direction, and then rolled her eyes toward Linnet, thoughts plain: she’s crazy!
I shrugged and allowed Dee half a grin. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with Linnet’s sanity, though. I think that I wasn’t the only one who had gone running out to meet that music.
James
Day eleven (11) (onze), according to the ticks on my left hand. The first week—all coy introductions in class and fluffy assignments—was over, and the second week was showing its teeth. Out came the giant homework assignments, the writing-upon of boards, and the general rending of garments that go with high school. It was funny—I’d really thought in the back of my head that a school filled with music geeks would be different from a regular high school, but really the only thing that was different was that we played our roles according to where we sat in the orchestra. Brass players: jerks. Woodwinds: snobby cliques. Strings: overachievers with their hands up all the time. Percussion: class clowns.
Bagpipers: me.
The only class that didn’t change much the second week was Mr. Sullivan’s English class: first period, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays. Bring your own caffeine. He let us drink coffee in class. It would’ve been hypocritical for him not to.
Anyway, Sullivan had started out the school year sitting on his desk and playing music on the stereo as he taught. While the other teachers buttoned down and buttoned up and got serious in week two, Sullivan stayed the same, a young, knobby diplomat for Shakespeare and his ilk. He’d assigned us murderous reading assignments in the first week, and those didn’t change either. We might’ve cared more about the murderous reading assignments if we hadn’t been allowed caffeine and to shift our desks around as we liked and to swear when needed.
“We’re going to be studying Hamlet,” Sullivan announced on day eleven. He had a huge travel cup in his hand; it made the whole room smell like coffee. I’d never seen him without coffee. As a junior faculty member, he lived on campus and doubled as our dorm’s resident advisor—his wife, rumor had it, had left him for a CEO of a company that made crap like My Little Ponies or something. The hall by his room always smelled like a shrine to caffeine. “How many of you have read it?”
It was a small class, even by Thornking-Ash standards: eight kids. No hands went up.
“Heathens,” Sullivan said pleasantly. “Well, it’s better if you’re all Hamlet-virgins, I suppose. Surely you’ve at least heard of it.”
There were mumbling noises of assent. I hadn’t read Hamlet, but I was on good terms with Shakespeare. From the moment I heard, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” I’d been okay with Shakespeare. No fanboy stuff or secret handshakes or anything like that. But if we passed each other in the hall, we’d probably nod at each other.
Sullivan pressed on. “Well, let’s start there. What do you guys think of when you hear ‘Hamlet’? No, Paul. No hands. Just call it out.”