“You do know how you look, though, right?” she continued.
Jeb’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
She blushed slightly, as though embarrassed to be pointing out something so obvious. “Jeb, was it?”
Jeb nodded.
“When you look at all of the other men in the Academy, what do you notice about them?”
Jeb shrugged. “I’m taller than some of them, shorter than others, and around the same height as most of them.”
“Anything else?” she prompted, looking at him meaningfully.
He shook his head. “No, I can’t say that there’s anything else I notice. There’s a variety of hair color, I suppose, but mine isn’t something wildly outside of the norm, I don’t think, at least.”
She shook her head as though mirroring him. “No, it isn’t that.” She covered her face with her hand as though trying to figure out how to explains something incredibly simple to somebody who seemed almost willfully obtuse. “Um,” she finally said, “when you go through doors, what do you notice?”
Jeb’s frown reasserted itself. “Since coming to the Academy? When I enter a doorway I don’t always come out where I would expect to if the geography was fixed. Is that not the normal experience here?”
“No, it is,” she confirmed. After a second she asked, “is that not what your experience has been historically?”
“No, why?” Jeb asked, “do you come from somewhere else that isn’t built strictly physically?”
She shrugged. “We’re getting away from the point here. Do you ever notice that, for instance, your shoulders clip into doorways here?”
“No more than usual?”
“The usual amount is none,” Annabeth replied, deadpan. After a moment her facade cracked and she let out a smile. “But, just to clarify, you haven’t noticed anything different about the doorways here as compared to wherever you come from?”
“Hey,” Jeb replied, playing along, “how do you know that I’m not from the Capital?”
She rolled her eyes. “Is that a legitimate question? Because if so, I can start going through the list.”
Jeb’s smile froze on his face. “Um, no, that’s ok.”
She nodded, a smile creeping back onto her face. “I understand. I’ll repeat my question, though, have you noticed anything about the size of the doorways here, or how you interact with them?”
“No? Why?”
She let out a sigh, as though there was nothing she wanted more than to end the conversation. “I can’t play along much longer. Jeb, you’re significantly wider than every other member of the Academy. Ok,” Annabeth quickly amended, “I don’t know for certain that you’re wider than literally every member, but you are certainly much wider than the standard.”
Jeb looked down at his shoulders. They were thicker than they had been when he was younger, he knew, but they didn’t seem any thicker than when he left home. Visually tracing a line from the outside of his shoulders to the outside of Annabeth’s, he nodded slightly.
“For now,” he said, “I’ll accept that I’m broader than you. Why would that make the rest of you treat me differently, though?”
“Couldn’t tell you. People who are different tend to get excluded, though. That’s always true, and part of why I was trying so hard to blend in during this course. Given that that ship has sailed, though, would you want to study together sometime?” She flapped her eyelashes as though that would convince Jeb.
“Uh,” Jeb replied, “sure? I haven’t really been studying that much for this course yet, though. Mostly I’ve been working on my other courses and projects.”
“That’s totally fine!” she beamed and bounced out of the classroom.
“That was strange,” Jeb said to the empty room. Shrugging, he made his way over to Intermediate Lute, where he hoped that Catherine might be willing to deny that statement.
When he found her before class, she noticed that something was wrong right away. “Did something happen in Alchemy class?” she asked in a whisper, mindful of the crowded room.
“No? Yes? I’m not sure,” Jeb replied honestly. He shook his head, “sorry, that isn’t helpful. I met one of my classmates, though, and she said that the rest of the course thought that I was weird.”
Catherine nodded, then froze halfway through the motion as Jeb did not continue his story. “And...?” she prompted. Seeing Jeb’s face, she hurried to add, “Jeb, I told you that you were strange, and that I would happily tell you about it whenever you wanted. The fact that you never brought it up again made me think that you’d come to terms with it on your own over break. I can see now that was a bad assumption, though. Did she say what about you was so strange?”
“She implied that my shoulders are a lot broader than everyone else's here are.” Looking at Catherine, Jeb noticed that she was also far narrower than he was. He frowned as he looked around the classroom and saw that everyone else there was also far smaller than him. When he looked back at Catherine, he saw that she was nodding.
“I’m glad that you learned this for yourself,” she said calmly
“Why is everyone here so small!” Jeb exclaimed.
A few of his classmates turned at the outburst, but he ignored them. Catherine looked at him strangely. “Jeb, are you not particularly large where you come from?”
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Jeb shook his head then paused, trying to remember everyone else in his hometown. “Truthfully, I think I’m one of the smaller people in my hometown. Well, excluding children, of course. It was even a joke as I was growing up.”
“What was the joke?” Catherine asked. Jeb saw a few more of his classmates lean in as though they were also curious.
“What’s Jeb short for?” Jeb asked.
“Oh! I didn’t know that your name was short for something!” Catherine exclaimed.
“No, no,” Jeb said, shaking his head, “you’re supposed to ask that.”
“What’s Jeb short for?” she asked him.
“Haven’t hit my growth spurt yet, I suppose.” Jeb’s smile fell slightly when he saw that Catherine wasn’t smiling with him. “So normally the joke would be that someone would ask one of my family members and they would say that in explanation, but-”
“No, I got that,” she hurried to say, “I just um, don’t think that’s a very funny joke.”
“Oh.” Jeb said sadly. “I guess I’m not very good at telling jokes.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t think it’s that, Jeb. I think that just may not be a particularly funny joke.”
“It always got laughs in my hometown.”
Catherine didn’t have any response to that. Luckily for her, their Professor took that chance to enter the room and begin class. Jeb pulled out his lute and started playing along with the warmups. When a bell signaled the end of the period, the rest of the class filed out.
Catherine waited for the room to clear before turning back to Jeb. “I really don’t know what to tell you. I have no idea why people in the rural parts of the country would be so much larger than people from the Capital, especially when they don’t have Farming Classes.”
“It’s ok,” Jeb said, waving her comment away, “I’m just glad that my shoulders are the only strange thing about me.”
“Sure!” Catherine chirped. Something in her tone made Jeb think that she didn’t really believe what she was saying.
“Is there something else?” he asked.
“Jeb, what else about you would people notice?” Catherine turned the question back on him. He tried to introspect, thinking about the way that he interacted with the Academy differently than the rest of his peers.
“I mean, they could notice that I’m not only in courses from a single College. Since they would have to take courses in multiple Colleges, though, I can’t see where that would happen.”
“Okay, that’s understandable,” Catherine said in a patient tone, “except that you know that Declan and I are friends. Even though we met through you, we have found that we have a number of mutual friends. We might have met even without you.”
“So people think I’m weird because I’m in courses from different Colleges? That makes no sense! I’m in an Introductory Alchemy course, for students who have no experience with the subject.”
“I never said that,” she replied. “I just asked you to think of other ways you might be different than other students here. If you can’t think of any, then what makes you think that there’s anything else that they’re noticing?”
Jeb noticed that she didn’t explicitly say that there was nothing else the other students noticed, but decided not to say anything. If she wanted to keep something a secret, she was allowed to. “I’ll keep thinking about it,” he said.
Relief flashed across Catherine’s face before she managed to school her expression back into something neutral. “We should grab breakfast sometime soon!” she said, clearly glad that the conversation was ending.
“That would be nice!” Jeb said, and the two both left to go to their next activities. In the Stacks, Jeb wandered around, hoping that they would lead him to something which explained why people in the Capital were so small. As he kept walking, more and more books passed him by. None seemed to repeat, which meant one of any number of things, the most plausible of which were either that there was not a book which clearly explained the answer, or that for whatever reason, Jeb was not supposed to know the answer to that question. After an hour or so without making any progress, he started traveling towards Margaret. She was standing beside his desk, clearly waiting for him.
“Jeb,” she began, something in her tone guarded, “is there something you want to tell me?”
Jeb thought about the question. “I have something I want to ask you, but I can’t imagine it’s whatever you’re thinking of,” he replied honestly.
“Try me.” Her tone was dry, which concerned Jeb slightly.
“Is there anything about me which is different than the other students at the Academy?”
She blinked rapidly, as though completely taken aback by the question. “Well, yes. Would you like me to enumerate the differences, or simply highlight a few of the relevant examples?”
It was Jeb’s turn to blank. “If you weren’t expecting that question, why do you already have an answer ready?”
She shrugged. “I was expecting you to ask me at some point. Truthfully, I am more surprised that it took you so long to ask.”
“A few highlights would be nice,” Jeb admitted, “but what did you want to talk to me about?”
“I was going to ask you if there was a reason that Professors were coming to the Library in hopes of hiring ‘the Druid we keep in the Stacks’.”
Jeb stood a little straighter and looked around. “You do? Where? I’d love to meet them!”
She stared at him, clearly unamused. It took a moment for her words to sink in, but when the did, Jeb cringed slightly. “Oh. They think that I’m the Druid in the Stacks?” he guessed.
She nodded, paused mid bob, and shook her head. “Yes and no. They know that you are Jeb, a third term student in the Remedial College. They just also know that there is a trained Druid who spends his time hiding in the Stacks and selling Manaweave to Professors in the College of Letters.”
“I don’t think that I started that rumor,” Jeb said. “If I did, I apologize.”
She sighed deeply and sat down in his chair. Jeb resisted the urge to ask her to stand up.
“I did not really think that you started the rumor,” she said after a long silence. “It just would have made the next few weeks a little easier. Now, immediately after we were audited for suspicious communications with your hometown Librarian, we are being audited because someone at the Capital thinks that we are harboring a fugitive.” She shook her head, forcing a smile onto her face. “As with the last audit, though, there is nothing in it which concerns you.”
Given that both audits had come about as a direct consequence of Jeb and his actions, he wasn’t sure how true that statement was. He didn’t really want to deal with another Auditor, though, so he refrained from commenting. She looked at the pile of books on his desk.
“Hmm,” she commented, “it might be a little difficult to honestly tell the Auditor that we do not have a Druid in the Stacks if these are the books you have chosen to spend your time reading. Have you considered what Class you are aiming to earn with your next Class Change?”
Jeb reeled at the sudden segue. “I hadn’t really considered it,” he admitted. “I guess I hope that I’ll get to remain a Wizard. Truthfully, though, I don’t see much of a benefit to any Class, given the way that the Academy runs.”
Margaret nodded. “That is a common sentiment in the first few years of a student’s time at the Academy. In time, you will understand the ways that your Class benefits you, even when it does not directly aid you in your coursework.”
“I think we may be talking past each other,” Jeb said. “My Class has been sealed in different amounts every term except for this one. Even now, my Alchemy Professor is encouraging me to do my best to reject any influence from the System on my actions.”
A book fell onto Margaret’s outstretched hand. With a start, Jeb realized that its cover was labeled “Jeb Humdrum Academic Record.”
“Interesting,” she said after a long moment, tossing the book back into the endlessly shifting shelving of the Stacks. “I will retract my statement for you in particular, and I will add this experience to the list of reasons you are different than other students.”
Jeb chuckled at the idea that she had a physical list. The laughter died in his throat as he saw a piece of paper float down into her hands. She quickly scrawled a few lines onto the page and tossed it back up.
“What was that?” he asked.
“The list of reasons you are different from other students,” Margaret replied. “What did you think it was?”