“How is he?”
Penelope blushes and takes a bite of sandwich so she doesn’t have to answer right away. It’s only been a few months since I saw her last, but she looks different. More grown up.
Girls don’t have to wear skirts at Watford, but both Penelope and Agatha like to. Penny wears short pleated ones, usually with knee-high argyle socks in the school colours. Her shoes are the black sort with buckles, like Alice wears in Wonderland.
Penny’s always looked younger than she is—everything about her is round and girlish, she has chubby cheeks and thick legs and dimples in her knees—and the uniform makes her seem even younger.
But still … she’s changed this summer. She’s starting to look like a woman in little girl’s clothes.
“Micah’s good,” she says finally, pushing her dark hair behind her ears. “It’s the most time we’ve spent together since he was here.”
“So the thrill isn’t gone?”
She laughs. “No. If anything, it felt … real. For the first time.”
I don’t know what to say, so I try to smile at her.
“Ugh,” she says, “close your mouth.”
I do.
“But what about you?” Penny asks. I can tell she’s been waiting to interrogate me and can’t wait any longer. She glances around us and leans forward. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“What happened when?”
“This summer.”
I shrug. “Nothing happened.”
She sits back, sighing. “Simon, it’s not my fault that I went to America. I tried to stay.”
“No,” I say. “I mean there’s nothing to tell. You left. Everyone left. I went back in care. Liverpool, this time.”
“You mean, the Mage just … sent you away? After everything?” Penelope looks confused. I don’t blame her.
I’d just escaped a kidnapping, and the first thing the Mage did was send me packing.
I thought, when Penny and I told the Mage what had happened, that he’d want to go after the Humdrum immediately. We knew where the monster was; we finally knew what he looked like!
The Humdrum has been attacking Watford as long as I’ve been here. He sends dark creatures. He hides from us. He leaves a trail of dead spots in the magickal atmosphere. And finally, we had a lead.
I wanted to find him. I wanted to punish him. I wanted to end this, once and for all, fighting at the Mage’s side.
Penelope clears her throat. I must look as lost as I feel. “Have you talked to Agatha?” she asks.
“Agatha?” I butter another scone. They’ve cooled off, and the butter doesn’t melt. Penny holds up her right hand, and the large purple stone on her finger glints in the sunlight—“Some like it hot!”
It’s a waste of magic. She’s constantly wasting magic on me. The butter melts into the now-steaming scone, and I bounce it from hand to hand. “You know Agatha’s not allowed to talk to me over the summer.”
“I thought maybe she’d find a way this time,” Penelope says. “Special measures, to try to explain herself.”
I give up on the too-hot scone and drop it on my plate. “She wouldn’t disobey the Mage. Or her parents.”
Penny just watches me. Agatha is her friend, too, but Penelope’s much more judgemental of her than I am. It’s not my job to judge Agatha; it’s my job to be her boyfriend.
Penny sighs and looks away, kicking at the chair. “So that’s it? Nothing? No progress? Just another summer? What are we supposed to do now?”
Normally I’m the one kicking things, but I’ve been kicking walls—and anyone who looked at me wrong—all summer. I shrug. “Go back to school, I guess.”
* * *
Penelope’s avoiding her room.
She says Trixie’s girlfriend came back early, too, and they don’t have any personal boundaries. “Did I tell you Trixie got her ears pierced this summer? She wears big noisy bells right in the pointy parts.”
Sometimes I think Penny’s Trixie diatribes are borderline speciesist. I tell her so.
“Easy for you to say,” she says, all stretched out on Baz’s bed again. “You don’t live with a pixie.”
“I live with a vampire!” I argue.
“Unconfirmed.”
“Are you saying you don’t think Baz is a vampire?”
“I know he’s a vampire,” she says. “But it’s still unconfirmed. We’ve never actually seen him drink blood.”
I’m sitting on the window ledge and leaning out a bit over the moat, holding on to the latch of the swung-open pane. I scoff: “We’ve seen him covered in blood. We’ve found piles of shrivelled-up rats with fang marks down in the Catacombs.… I’ve told you that his cheeks get really full when he has a nightmare? Like his mouth is filling up with extra teeth?”
“Circumstantial evidence,” Penny says. “And I still don’t know why you’d creep up on a vampire who has night terrors.”
“I live with him! I have to keep my wits about me.”
She rolls her eyes. “Baz’ll never hurt you in your room.”
She’s right. He can’t. Our rooms are spelled against betrayal—the Roommate’s Anathema. If Baz does anything to physically hurt me inside our room, he’ll be cast out of the school. Agatha’s dad, Dr. Wellbelove, says it happened once when he was in school. Some kid punched his roommate, then got sucked out through a window and landed outside the school gate. It wouldn’t open for him again ever.