Evan. Time to Really Get Pissed.
Evan thought Lauren would have puking sense to leave it alone, but she was a Bakili, and he supposed someone like that wouldn’t be able to recognize a situation that wouldn’t bend to her will because of that. When he was seven paces past her, she said, her voice thick with tears, desperate, “Evan, I didn’t know! I just want—”
She cut off, her eyes widening in alarm as Evan spun and got real up in her personal bubble, very quickly, giving up on keeping his cool at this most recent insult and letting his face twist into a snarl. She started backing off as he moved within arm’s reach of her, back further into the atrium of the Performance building, until Evan growled, “Hold still.”
To his vague surprise, she did. Evan stepped in close, leaving no more than three decimeters separating their faces, and he glared into her eyes. This turned out to be a tactical error—out here in the better light in the open atrium, this close, he could see the color of her eyes, which were not, as he’d thought, one of the typical variations of deep brown that most people with dark eyes (eg most people) possessed, but actually a very deep blue that from any distance looked black, like the sky had been the night before when he’d first set out, near the end of twilight, not long before full dark. Maybe it was just the messy dark blue mascara around her eyes that gave the impression, but Evan didn’t think so. They were, he couldn’t help but think, startlingly beautiful, which was a word he was starting to get angry at himself mentally applying to the girl.
Feeling thrown and not terribly clear headed in his anger, Evan tried to marshall his thoughts enough to make mouth words happen. He really just couldn’t get his brain and tongue on the same page, though—what came out of his mouth, to his surprise and some dismay, was, “You’re gonna have to do better than that, there are a lot of girls in our class with fancy colored eyes.”
Luckily this seemed to throw Bakili as well. “P-pardon?” she asked, in the tone of voice of one trying to parse a total non sequitur, those twilight hued eyes big and confused and full of pain.
“Unimportant, forget it,” Evan said, feeling his face flush. “What is important is that I’d literally just told you not to shitting talk to me until I want to talk to you, and I was walking away from you, which for polite, normal people usually means that no more conversation is required, desired, or going to happen. But you, Lauren Bakili, seem to believe you’re so important, that you’re such a special puking princess, that it’s totally cool for you to trample over the boundaries I’d literally just drawn to prioritize your own vomitous need to excuse yourself. But not only that, you’re so self-involved that the reason you should be viewed as innocent is that you didn’t know? What utter diarrhea! You didn’t know what, that forcing the entire class and most of the upper and eventual lower classes to pretend we didn’t exist on the implied threat of Nisha challenging and kicking the shit out of them in the duel was wrong?”
“No!” Lauren whimpered. “That wasn’t—we never threatened to hurt—”
“Oh bullshit,” Evan said. “But whatever. The threat of a little ostracization of their own? Or at least censure? Widespread knowledge that they were on your shitlist and that they’d never stand a chance of being respected or well-liked while they were?”
“No,” Lauren now whispered, dropping her eyes and breaking her tremulous eye contact at last. “What I didn’t know was that you were her brother. Or Captain Cadell’s son. And that… that you didn’t deserve any of it. Katie Kay said you were a different Cadell. I didn’t imagine she’d lie about something like that.”
Evan stared at her, dumbstruck, for what felt like a very long time, as she looked down and away, letting her unpinned-back nightsky hair fall across her face.
“You certainly know how to pose yourself,” Evan finally said, which didn’t seem like the response she hoped for, based on her expression as she looked back up at him. “Gods, I really shitting hate the way you are making me feel right now. I can’t tell if you’re a naive gullible fool, or if you just think I am. If you’re an amazing actress who is trying to play me or just a flighty fucking fashionista with no real understanding that other people’s feelings matter as much as yours, except for it being really important for everyone to like you and make you feel good about yourself.
“If you intentionally used that non-waterproof make-up so that your lovely silent weeping would be as impactful as possible, like maybe I’ll be more willing to forgive you because I feel bad for making the pretty girl cry. If you’re trying to get me all flustered with, with those eyes and everything, or if, if, you are always fucking like this and I’m just—” Evan didn’t know what just he was. He realized he was trembling with fury and anxiety and a strange desire to—
Evan didn’t want to be near her anymore, so he stepped back several paces.
Lauren’s eyes had made weird expressions he couldn’t process in his current state of mind as he spoke. Now, in a tone of voice that was an odd combination of hurt dignity and the cautious, gentle tone people in movies always took with hurt or angry hunting hounds, she said, “This is my natural eye color—I have the same color eyes as Baba[1], and I’m the only girl of my generation to have them. I don’t wear water-proof mascara as a matter of course—I don’t cry easily, and had no expectation I might get my face wet today. Talking to you was a spur of the moment decision, and obviously a mistake.” she swallowed. “Evan, I’m so, so sor—”
[1] Lilo Bakili, called Baba by her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the founder of the Bakili clan, an immigrant Light Bearer who created her name upon arriving in Seattle and buried her past and origins so thoroughly that no one knows her original name or place of origin, beyond somewhere within a thousand kilometers or so of the south or east coasts of the Mediterranean up through the east coast of the Aegean. Probably.
“Lauren Bakili, you have exactly one chance to apologize to me,” Evan said. “Don’t waste it now, because it will not work.” Her mouth snapped shut audibly, but the flicker of relief that he saw in her eyes made him angrier. So he added, “The chances of it accomplishing anything that you might want it to are slim, and depend on many things, chief among them how you decide to try and make this up to us. There are many wrong choices. Megan will certainly have to forgive you enough that she wants me to hear you out. Even if that happens, how Angie feels about you will very much matter to me. And, I suppose, Chris.”
“Not d’Maughn?” Lauren asked in a choked voice. When had Evan started thinking of her as Lauren? And why? That is not what he wanted to think of her as.
“Ryan is Ryan, which is something that can’t be explained but only experienced.” This seemed to truly flummox her, which he enjoyed immensely. “Bakili, even if your bullshit excuse about not knowing I was Virginia’s brother is true, it’s still stinking bullshit. The best thing it could say about you is that you’re the most gullible, naive, self-involved girl on the West Coast. But you’re considered erudite and sophisticated by our classmates, and you were a top scorer in the exit exams, so while you’re certainly gullible and naive, I know you’re not stupid.
“There were plenty of reasons for you to not ostracize us. Basic decency would have been enough for me, had I been in your shoes, but I guess I wasn’t raised rich. But if me being Virginia’s brother was a good enough reason to not do what you did, it certainly wouldn’t have taken much effort to ask around and see if anyone else could confirm whether Katie’s lies about me not being her brother were true. For that matter, you could have checked with other people about whether anything she said was true. You wanted to do what you did, and I’m not going to buy that you are an innocent victim of Katie’s manipulations. You could have found a reason to not do it with no problem, if you’d wanted to.”
Her voice faint (Evan didn’t know why he kept letting her respond), Laur—Bakili said, “I wasn’t—we weren’t totally—I swear, it didn’t even occur to me Katie could be lying about your sister. I never brought it up with anyone, nor did anyone bring it up to me.”
Evan, suddenly, felt so tired. He closed his eyes. The heat completely drained out of his fury, leaving behind cryogenic anger soaked with turgid hurt. He only sort of caught Bakili talking about how the people she talked to had said they didn’t know if the “you” were secretly awful or not, just that “you” weren’t friendly. He missed details. They didn’t matter.
“Bakili,” he said, cutting her off in mid sentence again, keeping his eyes closed. “Shut up. I don’t want to hear your voice anymore. This has been a fun confirmation slash reminder that the three of us are such unlikeable nerds that not one person stood up for us enough for anyone to tell or ask you about my sister, which I guess is what we get for being awkward introverted wallflowers. And for Ryan being Ryan.”
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Silence, for a moment, then she said, “Evan, I didn’t mean—” and then she cut herself off. Evan appreciated that. How was she going to try and refute that?
He took several breaths, hoping to keep control over his voice when he spoke. “Bakili, I’m not talking to you again, not anytime soon.” He did okay. “Come up with a better apology. If you want to explain yourself, do that, rather than making excuses. Maybe, if Megan pushes me enough, I’ll talk to you someday. Maybe even this term, as unlikely as that seems at the moment. I hate being this angry, so if you’re very lucky and play your cards exactly right, I’ll get to where I don’t actively hate you, someday.”
As he turned away from her, he threw in one more dig. “And if it ever happens, it will be partially because I probably can’t afford to entirely alienate your family if I want to hunt or delve in this city,” he said. He didn’t really care if he hit the mark, and he left the building. She didn’t speak again.[1] He barely noted the audience they’d acquired.
[1] A little later, after a short cry in the bathroom that made her late for orchestra, as she reapplied her makeup, Lauren reflected that that could have gone worse. While she rather felt like she’d just had her nose rubbed on her own Dorian Grey-esque portrait and that she deserved every moment of it, he hadn’t even called her Beastly, or monstrous, or even a bitch or a snake or a rat or any sort of offensive animal at all. And he’d been vulgar in other ways, so it wasn’t that he was afraid to cuss. He’d been remarkably restrained all things considered, and whether he’d intended to or not, he’d told her that he thought she could, at least to some extent, redeem herself with Megan, and maybe him and his friends as well. She allowed herself to feel a tiny bit of optimism, though her dread at the prospect of talking to the other two increased considerably.
MEGAN. BETWEEN SECOND AND THIRD.
Megan trembled. She felt cold. Her voice hadn’t worked as Evan strode right by her and out of the room. She didn’t know if he’d ignored her or somehow not seen her.
“Sometimes, you were the demon yourself, or your entire family were demonbound, and you caused the breach my father died in, too. You know, the time he saved your uncle’s life.”
“Well, the second of my family members dying to save the life of someone rich and important, and this one actually, literally related to you, is a decent stopping point.”
Bloody shits. Evan’s father was dead?
ANGIE. BEGINNING OF THIRD PERIOD.
“What’d she say?” Ryan asked Evan.
“What’d you say?” Angie asked Evan.
“Why did you even talk to her?” Ryan asked Evan.
“Did you give her hell?” Angie asked Evan.
“Guys,” Evan said, “We have like four minutes. Let’s get inside and I’ll tell you what I can before class.”
Angie shut up, and so, after a moment of hesitation, did Ryan.
The three of them entered their Algebra classroom, only to stop short. Instead of sitting center row, second from the front like the day before, Wintre Ion Callerui sat one row from the side of the room and one desk from the back, where, if the Exiles all sat where they had the day before, she would be in front of Evan and next to Angie, with Ryan catty corner to her in the back corner.
Wintre Ion perked up slightly when she saw them, and gave them a languid wave. Her hair, which she had up in twintails, was a shade of green close to chartreuse at the moment—it went fine with her walnut-wood brown skin, but Angie had a hard time imagining doing makeup when your hair would be a thousand hues of half a dozen colors over the course of the day. She wondered if it was an inherent mystical trait, or one Wintre Ion paid for.
Evan and Ryan exchanged glances, then started walking to the other back corner, which was empty.
Angie started to follow, but Wintre Ion called out across the room, “Hey, no, guys, don’t do that, come sit with me until we’re friends, won’t you?” She gave them a friendly, if rather self-satisfied, smile.
Evan sighed, then turned and approached Wintre Ion and his desk from the previous day. Ryan shrugged and followed, and Angie came third.
When Evan reached conversational distance, he said, low enough to avoid being heard by the entire classroom, “Wintre Ion, I don’t have any energy for this right now. Last night I fought a Beast. I got my hip clawed open to the bone and a concussion that I’m only not still in the hospital for because Chris gave me his emergency healing potion. I got four hours of sleep. And I just chewed out Lauren Bakili. If you want to hear about that last one, be silent and listen. Otherwise, we’re sitting over there.”
Wintre Ion’s eyes went wide and then got wider as he spoke, helping Angie to determine that her irises really were a rich, bright red, and it wasn’t some trick of the light. It was somehow attractive rather than eerie, which impressed the hell out of Angie. Her hair, despite the color, seemed utterly natural, with various shades and natural highlights appropriate to the greenish color her hair seemed to be at the moment. Angie was only a little jealous. Not Third Eye level or anything, like with Wintre Ion’s boyfriend Ardath Osterly, but her hair seemed fun.
Wintre Ion mimed zipping her lips, so Evan stifled a sigh—he might as well not have bothered, Wintre Ion clearly noticed—and sat down behind her. Ryan and Angie exchanged glances and took their seats, leaving Angie sitting next to Wintre Ion.
Evan scootched his desk over toward Ryan and Angie a little and said, “We ran into each other in the gym building atrium, it was really empty, so there was no way to avoid each other. She approached me and tried to talk to me, but I didn’t let her. Instead, I told her about her recurring role in my nightmares. Sh—”
“Your nightmares?” Wintre Ion asked. “Seriously? Are you—”
“Shht,” Ryan said, frowning like you would at a kitten that ruined your toilet paper. “Bad Wint. May I call you Wint? You’re being bad so I’m going to call you Wint. You speak again and you have to sit in the badbox.”
Wintre Ion stared at Ryan as if he’d grown six extra heads.
“Ignore him,” Angie and Evan both said simultaneously. Angie chuckled, and Evan smiled briefly.
Evan continued. “But don’t talk again. You dishonor yourself by speaking when you said you wouldn’t. We could have just sat over there.”
Wintre Ion’s nostrils flared and she didn’t look happy to be addressed that way, but she did look at Evan with something like respect.
“I didn’t let her talk while I did so,” Evan said, picking up as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “She didn’t seem to enjoy learning I’d had nightmares about her. I finished and thought that would be the end of of it. But when I went to leave, she had the audacity to not just talk to me as I fucking walked away from her, but to try and tell me she didn’t know my sister was Virginia. As if I hadn’t been her brother it would have made what she did to us okay.”
Wintre Ion’s eyes got very wide, and she stared at Evan in all apparent shock. He gave her an unimpressed look and said, “Good gods, now you seem horrified?”
“I didn’t know either, for real. Her timing was abominable,” Wintre Ion said quietly. “It was bad enough a thing to do, even if you had been bad people, but if she started it right after your sister—”
“Enough of that,” Evan said, with only a faint edge to his voice. He was trying hard to not actively offend the pretty, popular girl, for some reason. Still, Wintre Ion promptly stopped talking.
Evan continued, “I got up in her face to show my displeasure, got briefly distracted by her stupid weird eyes—”
Angie blinked, Ryan grinned, and Wintre Ion made a sort of choking-on-nothing noise.
“—and chewed her out for doing exactly what I told her not to do, which was speak. Then despite myself we had a short conversation, in which I continued to show my utter contempt to her, and told her that she only had one chance for me to accept an apology—”
Ryan nodded. Angie nodded too, not feeling happy. She did not want Evan to accept Lauren’s apology, but she worried he would anyway. She worried she would have to, at some point. Wintre Ion looked at Evan as if he’d just drawn his sidearm and was waving it around in utter silence.
“—and it would only happen if Megan wanted it to. She kept trying to justify herself and told me that no one had warned her at all, which was a great reminder that no one beside Megan, Tammy, and Beth liked us when we were kids—”
Wintre Ion gave Evan a look that combined shock with devastation to create a sad, puppy dog eyed expression. Evan actually noticed this one and gave Wintre Ion a skeptical look, cutting off his sentence. She got sadder and vaguely upset looking. Evan said, “Please. You think something like this could happen to cool kids? So I told her to shut the fuck up and leave me alone, and that I wouldn’t be talking to her again until Megan asked me to—” and at that point the bell rang. Ryan groaned.
“And I walked away and it was over. Chill,” Evan said.
“Oh. Perfect,” Ryan said. Angie rolled her eyes.
Wintre Ion looked around at the three of them for a little bit. Evan looked tired, Ryan smiled back at her with the air of a cream-sotted cat, and Angie tried not to give her anything. Before Wintre Ion turned toward the front of the class, she smiled at Evan, though it was a touch strained, before turning toward the front of the classroom with a contemplative look on her face.