MEGAN. BEGINNING OF SECOND PERIOD.
No more than thirty seconds after parting ways with Beth, a pair of boys in very fashionable clothes stared at Megan wide eyed in a very noticeable way as they approached. Megan tried to ignore them, but as she walked past they suddenly flipped direction and fell into pace on either side of her. “Hey there, hot stuff,” one of them said.
“Ugh,” the other said, “Please pardon my crude friend, or at least don’t hold him against me. His name is—”
“I’m sorry, I don’t really care after his opening line,” Megan said. “He should stop walking with me. Are you wingmanning? Why introduce him?”
“We have a thing,” the second boy said, sounding both surprised and disappointed. He looked vaguely familiar, so he was probably someone she should know. He was good looking, she supposed. The first boy too. But she no longer felt the way she had three days ago, that longing a good looking boy had made her feel. She’d barely noticed any cute boys in any of her classes.
“I’m not interested in your thing,” Megan said. “Go away, I need to meet a friend.”
“Sorry to have bothered you,” the second boy said, glaring daggers at the first. The first looked mortified, as he should. They both stopped following her immediately. At least they were raised well.
Nobody else bothered her on the way to class, where still nobody else bothered her.
Megan strode, as well as she could, up to Oberon Stormheart upon his stepping into the Fredonic Civics classroom. He looked at her with wide, trepidatious eyes as she approached. As well he should have.
She stopped less than a meter from him and put her hands on her hips. “Oberon, we flirted a lot before you started dating Ardath and Wintre Ion. Did you ever want to ask me out?” Megan said, her voice low, angry, and pitched only for him.
“Yeesss,” Oberon said, with the grimace of a man caught stealing his neighbor’s newspaper. In a slightly more normal tone of voice, he said, “But I assumed I’d be a dead man when you found out about the Exiles while we were dating. Or had dated.”
“Good instinct. Coward,” Megan said, and turned her back on him.
“That’s not really fai—”
“I really dug you,” she said over her shoulder. “You would have been my absolute hero if you’d just told me,” she added, then walked away without looking at him again.
She ignored him completely the rest of the period.
EVAN. BEGINNING OF SECOND PERIOD.
“Evan Fucking Cadell,” a girl’s voice said. Evan looked around with mild surprise, as he was having a hard time summoning to mind anyone who could possibly be addressing him in that manner, especially in the gym on the second day of class. He hadn’t realized he knew anyone in the class who hadn’t participated in exiling them.
After a moment, Evan ascertained that the blonde girl who’d been watching him the day before approached. As she got close, he determined she was maybe half a decimeter shorter than himself, at most, and quite slender, dancing along the line where skinny or scrawny would be more appropriate adjectives. She made Evan look bulky, and Evan was a wiry fuck. She wore a pair of blue lycra gym shorts, a white gym tee-shirt, a dark blue sports bra under the shirt that more or less matched her shorts, and blue sneakers that also matched the shorts. She was quite fair, pale, even, and more so than Evan, who was quite fair. (Evan mostly just freckled, and burnt before he tanned.)
Evan tried to place her face, which was familiar, but he could not connect it to a name or memory. She was super cute, with her ash blonde hair done up in a braid crown above her brow length bangs, a soft, ovular face with a well defined (but still soft) jawline and a tapered chin, a small nose, and large, ingenuous dark blue eyes. She had thin lips which quirked into a sly smile as she said, “You clearly don’t remember me. I’m wounded.” She had bright white teeth and braces, and seemed to be one of those lucky kids on whom braces seemed cute rather than dorky.
Evan glanced away, rubbing at his neck just below his ear, feeling bad. “I’m sorry. It’s clearly been since we were kids. You look familiar.” He glanced back at her, noting that she didn’t really look hurt so much as amused.
“Here’s a hint,” she said, her smile slipping a little. “I’m related to someone I’m pretty sure you hate to death.”
Evan only hated one person to death, so it was a top-notch hint. “Else!” he said. Katie Kay’s cousin. He hadn’t thought about Else for at least two years, and it’d been four since he’d last seen her. Now she was in his PE class. “Uh, sorry if I hurt your feelings. It was an out-of-context problem. I thought you lived in Tacoma, so I didn’t expect you to, you know, be in my PE class at Persephone.”
She smiled, wide and open mouthed, a pleased expression with perhaps a sarcastic edge. “You did it! I’m so proud of you! Do you remember my surname or am I still the winner?”
Evan closed his eyes, trying hard. “Gibbler?” he tried, feeling like it was something in that neighborhood.
Else laughed again. “Close, but this ain’t horseshoes, kid.” She stepped back twice rhythmically, shimmying her arms and hips in a small victory dance as she sang a musical sting: “I am the win-ner, I am the win-ner!” before she winked at him. “Geistler, sucker. Else Marie Geistler.”
“Of course,” Evan said mildly. He should have remembered. It was a nice name.
The thought surprised him.
“Okay then,” Else replied, taking another step toward him and looking at him with an abrupt intensity, which allowed him to see her eyes were a dark blue. “So first of all, my ‘rents still live in Tacoma, but they wanted me to come to school up here because it’s such a good school, and my cousin’s here, and my cousin hangs out with the popular kids of really important people. Except I don’t know if that’s going to be the case anymore? So I’m living with Katie and her family.”
“Oh no,” Evan said.
“Oh yes,” she said ruefully. She barely seemed to breath as she rolled on. “So what the fuck’s been going on the last three years? What’s the deal with y’all being... exiled? Or whatever? Katie told me that I wasn’t allowed to talk about you three around Megan or Beth the first time I saw them in seventh year, and that I couldn’t talk to you if I ever saw you. She didn’t outright say Lauren’d have me killed if I broke the rule, but she implied it. So Katie, and Lauren I guess, were psychotic about keeping Megan away from you for reasons unclear, except then suddenly you all show up to school together yesterday, causing disasters and facing down with Nisha and Katier like you’re about to have an impromptu duel.
“And then you all had lunch with the new Light Bearer together yesterday, and then you all show up this morning together with him and have another weird confrontation out in the lane with Beth and Katier? Kay—who hates that nickname, by the way, but she’s too afraid to tell Lauren, don’t let it get back to her that I told you, but I love that she hates it—she flipped her everloving shit yesterday after school, ranting about your ‘stupid birthday shit,’ and then crying and then getting angry again, but she was so angry that it was all a bunch of blagh blagh blagh. Man, what’s going on? You gotta fill me in, I’m dying here.”
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Evan stared at her for a moment after she finished, as he attempted to digest that logorrheal tsunami. As he did, she sort of quirked an eyebrow at him and took another step closer to him, her eyes roving up and down his body in a way that was starting to give him deja vu back to Katier that morning. “Um. Well. I guess you don’t remember how our birthdays are the basis for our friendship with Megan?” People were streaming into the gym at this point, others were talking now and there probably wasn’t that much time before the second bell and the instructor showed up. Evan didn’t want to take his focus off Else, though, because she was starting to stand too close for comfort and she’d always made him nervous anyway.
“Mmm…” Else said. “You were all born on the same day of the month but different months or something? And Megan, that charming little goof, decided it meant you guys needed to be friends when you were kids?” She took another small step toward him, eyes avid as she made too much eye contact.
“Yeh,” Evan said. “The nineteenth, two months apart.” He could smell a citrusy scent wafting from her. “Is that lime?” his mouth said without him telling it to, and he swallowed after, mortified.
Else smiled, a wicked expression incongruous with her appearance as a whole. She said, “It’s a citrus blend, yuzu-lime-grapefruit. You like it? It’s amazing for making my sweat not stink, I don’t know what it is about it. Explain!”
Evan flinched. “Well, Megan wanted to make up and start being friends again, so that’s that part, and then Chris was born June nineteenth two months after Angie.”
“What, and Chris, an effing adult in high school, said, ‘Oh sure, that makes sense, I wanna be friends ‘cause of your weird birthday thing with these people you only just started talking to for the first time since elementary school?’ to Megan or something? I mean, she’s super hot, but that seems like a lot even for a hot girl.”
In spite of himself, Evan snorted at that. “Yeah, no joke, that’d be crazy. No, uh, something... magic… happened. When they met. I sneezed.”
Else closed her eyes for maybe as long as two seconds, and then opened them again and said, “You… sneezed?”
The bell rang at this point, but Else seemed fully prepared to ignore it, judging by the way she continued to look at him as they waited for it to stop. Once it was done, Evan said, “Um, I think as a phys, uh, physiological reaction to whatever mystic thing happened? I don’t really get it. I don’t think even Ryan and Angie do, ‘cause they’re normally better about explaining stuff to me.” Pretty much everyone else also continued talking, so maybe the coach wasn’t there yet. While he kept his eyes on Else, too wary not to, he was pretty sure he caught people watching him and Else in his peripheral vision. “They each wore a bell-shaped luck charm, and when it happened both charms transformed into real bells. Ryan thinks there’s some sort of magic bond between the five of us, now.”
Else looked pretty... incredulous. That was definitely the word Evan would use for her expression. She did it very well. “That’s… wild. So… he just rolled with it?”
“Yep,” Evan said with a shrug. “It made such an impression on him that he’s seemed pretty comfortable with… everything. After getting the magical arts department head to check it out, anyway.”
Else still seemed like she couldn’t believe all this. Evan shrugged again. “He seems to like us, but I think he’s similar to Megan and mostly just likes everyone, until given a good reason not to. I don’t really expect him to hang with us full time to the exclusion of other people.” Else looked like she was mulling over this. Nice thing about her was she’d always been expressive, pretty easy to read. He added, “He’s very friendly and would be happy to talk to you if you want to just talk to him. He can explain himself better than I can.”
“OKAY ya first-a-jers!” bellowed Coach Vitalarii, emerging from the girls’ locker room. “It’s time to get to it! I want ya to take five laps at double pace to get warmed up! Then we’re outside. It’s a beautiful day and we’re going to play football.”
“Oh, yeah,” Evan said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small packet of folded paper, pleased to get out of football. “I need to go give this to Vitalarii.” He started walking toward the coach as the rest of the class broke into a desultory jog around the gym.
“What’s that?” Else said, falling into step with him without a moment’s hesitation. “A note on the second day of school?”
“Um,” Evan said. He eyed her askance for a moment, uncertain how to answer, and since they both had long legs and it hadn’t been that long a walk, by that point he’d reached Vitalarii and Else had stopped a few paces back. Vitalarii frowned at him like he was an escape room.
Before he could say anything or open his mouth, Vitalarii snapped her fingers and said, “Right, you’re Cadell. Gramyre gave me a heads up. Lemme see your discharge orders.” She took the paper Evan proffered, as he heard Else mutter something he couldn’t make out behind him.
“Yeh… yeh,” Vitalarii said, nodding as looked over the paperwork. For a minute or so Evan stood in silence as she read. Then she said, still looking at the papers, “Havin’ your blood drawn on your first hunt is a good omen, when it’s not serious. You should be pleased. And Gramyre seemed impressed with your shooting. Guess that stands to reason, what with him taking you out the day you met.”
She returned her regard to Evan. “I’m going to go make copies of this in a bit. Says you should be fine with a standard pace walk for long periods to keep your tone. You’re going to need to do something while you heal or you’re going to be out of shape by the time you’re healthy again. You’re going to be spending this period walking every day, boy. Enjoy the reprieve.”
Evan blinked at that, wondering if that was just a baseless quip that happened to reflect how he felt about sports that did not involve pistols, or if his feelings about most sports were somehow clear just by looking at him. Evan’s physical fitness goals were entirely based around staying in good enough shape to pass the hunting licensing exam.
“Go on, get going,” Vitalarii said with a jerk of her head.
Evan nodded, turned and started walking at a standard pace, which was brisk but not really even as fast as he typically moved when he wasn’t walking with other, shorter-legged people.
Else was staring at him with her mouth open in a delighted grin, and with two long strides was rather closer to Evan than he was comfortable with. In fact, she kept coming, and (gently) collided with him, stopping herself from actually running into him by catching hold of his left arm for an extended moment with both hands, her hands sliding down his bare arm—for the second time that day a girl made him shiver, goosebumps rising under her touch and all up and down his arm. She sort of kept hold of the crook of his arm with the long, delicate fingers of her right hand and caught him around his wrist with her left hand, barely touching him but effectively hanging onto him. “You went hunting with Chris last night!?”
That thing Vitalarii said, about it being the same day he’d met Chris, rushed back to him, and another layer of apprehension coated his mood. It hadn’t really occurred to him when they’d been discussing what their story was going to be earlier, and certainly not the night before... But, their cover for his dumb stunt, the only one that was available to them given the circumstances, really broadcast a lot of information to people not on the inside. It was going to result, at best, in needing to explain their magic birthdays on a regular basis, which was a ridiculous phrase. Magic birthdays. This was not something for Evan to look forward to.
And with or without the magic birthday context, it made Evan look like, well, someone a Light Bearer thought was cool enough, and good enough, to take hunting the same day they’d met, and people would still want to know why or how he pulled it off. In response to their exile, Evan had taken to mostly keeping his skills with the pistol under the table, but he seemed to have accidentally blown up his own spot.
He really didn’t know what he’d hoped to accomplish the night before. In the harsh light of day it seemed an absolutely idiotic course of action, and he was fucking embarrassed, even if he had saved that woman’s shade.
Else said, “Arrrre, you okay?” She almost purred it, but did not otherwise react to the goosebumps on his arm under her fingers.
“Else, you know how I feel about touching,” Evan said, trying to focus on the words with effort.
Else blinked hard and let go of him, simply keeping pace instead. “Still?” she pouted.
“Still. I haven’t seen you for four years, Else. We’re not at touching yet.”
“Girl!” Vitalarii’s voice came, seeming pretty directed at them, and sure enough the coach was looking right at them. “Else your name is! Stop bothering that boy and get to double timing!”
Else said, “Crap. Well, I’ll bother you later, then,” winked at him again, and started the slow jog that was double the standard pace.
Evan couldn’t help but note that Else’s blue Lycra shorts really served to highlight the movement of muscles in her long legs and her bottom. Evan felt his face starting to get warm, and subsequently kept his eyes off Else’s behind, though kept an eye on her otherwise. She made him nervous, after all.