ANGIE. TIME TO FUUUCKING BAIL ON THIS SHIIIIIT.
Tremulous, shaking, Megan said, “Nisha, are you about to tell me that my oldest friends are called the Asphodel Exiles when people gossip about them at other middle schools, and that you and Lauren lied to my face about it a year and a half ago?”
Upon hearing her, Ryan, and Evan’s unofficial party name in Megan’s voice, Angie’s guts, already in knots, clenched up so tight she thought something might snap in there.
“Hey yeah, check it out!” Katie “Katier” Ryuyama said to Nisha Twighs, mock brightly. “Not close to angry, jenn-you-wine-lee angry! Never would have thought I’d see the day Megan would get so angry she couldn’t hide it! Except wait, sorry, that’s a lie: I would have thought maybe it might happen on this day, specifically, and said so too. The day she found out about the Exiles? This ring any bells, Nisha?” By the end, she sounded like a home child caretaker whose charges had just destroyed a very expensive something-or-other despite having been warned, ad nauseum, not to rough house nearby.
“Um. Yes?” Nisha Twighs responded, probably to Megan, maybe to both of them at the same time, with that question-like upturn of the voice that people would sometimes use when they wanted to neither answer truthfully nor own the answer they gave, but had to do both.
After a long moment in which the murmuring of the crowd around them was not at all loud but still somehow deafening, Megan growled, “Explain.”
“Alright, pause it,” Angie snapped, stepping forward while doing so, such that she no longer was cowering behind Evan. She didn’t know why she’d been doing that in the first place. “I can’t be here for this.”
Nisha looked at Angie with hazy, panicked relief and Katier looked at her with an expression of obvious sympathy as Angie turned to face Evan and Ryan and said, “I’ll see you guys in the class later. Ryan, if Megan manages to stick around after this, try and get her contact info for me.” She met Evan’s gray eyes and raised one brow slightly. “Ev, you good here?”
Evan nodded without hesitation—a bit of a surprise there. “Yeah, I need to hear this,” he said, though he sounded like he’d rather be facing down a Beast. Granted, Evan would rather face down a Beast than do a lot of things—it was perhaps his only ambition, in the wake of his sister’s and father’s deaths. Angie wondered if Megan knew about Evan’s father. Seemed unlikely, given her general ignorance otherwise.
Angie turned and stepped to where she could face Megan, putting her back to Nisha and Katier. Megan’s expression lay somewhere between haunted and ready to do some haunting. “Megan, I hope I’ll see you later, if you can keep it together enough to stick around the whole day. Let Ryan and Evan know what classes and lunch and stuff you have, would you?”
Megan gave one sharp nod, her expression hardly changing, but her eyes were filled with horror as she met Angie’s gaze. It was gratifying. Not as gratifying as the shocked dismay Nisha Twighs seemed to be feeling on learning that she’d been wrong, but more so than the half-assed support Katie Ryuyama had apparently been giving them, which was also more than half-infuriating. She could’ve just bloody well told Megan what was going on at any point, after all.
Angie turned and strode past Nisha and Katier, who flinched away from her. She didn’t let the thin, cold smile play across her lips until after she was past them, but her satisfaction at their discomfort with the truth being exposed to Megan didn’t lessen the furious pounding of Angie’s heart at those words. The shitting Asphodel Exiles. Her smile faded again within moments.
As she approached the edge of the crowd of onlookers, she stared past those closest to her path without looking directly at their faces. She let her expression slip into the cold, no-shits-left-to-give-so-don’t-even-think-of-messing-with-us mask that she, Evan, and Ryan had learned to adopt as their default facial expressions in the early months of being the Exiles. This was before it had become clear that the worst bullying they were ever going to experience would be shitty speculations spoken by credulous cowards behind their backs but within earshot.
They’d stuck with wearing don’t-fuck-with-us expressions anyway, just in case, and because it seemed to make people uncomfortable, which, while perhaps childish, they’d come to find satisfying. They’d leaned into making people uncomfortable after a while.
So perhaps it was her expression. Perhaps it was the impact of their confrontation and her walking away from it like this. Perhaps it was whatever rep she’d accumulated from the many layered rumors that had come to surround them over three years of middle school. Or, perhaps it was all three that, as though she were a hydromancer splitting a lake in two, caused the crowd to part before her. People’s gazes dropped or averted as she passed. Or they turned to their companions and faked conversations, laughably trying to pretend they hadn’t all been standing around and gawking at the confrontation she’d just left behind.
That was, except for Jun Song. By rep, one of the better members of the Asphodel tourney team, Jun was also rich in some manner or another—Angie hadn’t ever paid enough attention to him to know why he was rich. He was also stupid good looking. Of course, none of these facts mattered even the slightest to Angie, since her Ryan appealed to her more than… well, no other boys had ever really appealed to her, so their exile had been convenient in that way, at least. She’d had no competition for his affections.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
But the way Jun looked her up and down as he stepped into her path made her realize that he thought his good looks would matter very much. He spoke to her as she reached a reasonable distance for him to do so. “Well, that seemed—”
“Please,” Angie sneered, slowing but not stopping, putting three years of frustrated scorn into the word. “I’m not interested in talking to a friend of Lauren Bakili and Brandon Chase-Xavier after what they did to me the past three years.”
Jun’s jaw wagged soundlessly for several moments—he probably wasn’t interrupted very often. With a hesitation he seemed to find alien, he said, “Well, I mean at this point I’m pretty sure that’s going to be a sort of mutually exclusive category, and I’ve thrown in with the side that has the girl I’m seeing, but—”
“Piss! Off!” Angie spat, and was past him. She braced for having to deal with him further, but he must have thought better of it. Her rep, she imagined, was not something a wise person would want to push without knowing for sure it wasn’t true. Even in this day and age, when law enforcement was quite good at detecting and preventing the sorts of hexes, curses, and magical assaults that rumors claimed she was capable of. Might not be enough to save you even if justice was served afterwards, after all.
Angie parted the crowd until she reached the path between the Vocational and the Humanities buildings, and then she was all but free. Sure, a fair number of people outside the active crowd of gawkers milled around still, many of them clearly wondering what was going on with said crowd, and some of them eyed her curiously—perhaps as a result of the way the back edge of said crowd parted to let her pass. But once she was properly into campus the number of familiar faces dipped precipitously, and most of the glances she got were short and got shorter the further she got from the crowd, until most of the kids she strode past didn’t glance at her too much more than at anyone else. She was surrounded by people who mostly did not yet know who she was.
A sense of palpable, beautiful relief at being on a school campus where people were barely paying her any attention, something she’d not really experienced in three years, washed over Angie.[1] She turned to her right as she reached the split in the path, heading toward the Math and Science building on the east end of campus, which contained the freshfolk locker halls.
[1] For the moment, she ignored the fact that there was no way it would last.
Angie stretched her legs, enjoying the warm September morning sunlight on her skin. Behind her, Megan was… was deciding what would happen now. Ryan and Evan would report back to Angie on how that went. The three of them might, just might, be about to break free of the dreadful fog they’d lived under since Virginia Cadell’s death three years before at the hands of one of the vile Beasts Below. Virginia had been hunting them in turn, as had been her duty as a Light Bearer—a victim of the showboating, solitary hunting culture of Pacific Coast Light Bearers as much as the Beast itself.
Angie might, maybe, might be able to get her best friend back.
“HEY YOU CRAAZY KNIFE-NOSED BITCH!” someone shrieked across the quad, literally staggering Angie with a visceral shock, like being punched in her lower belly from the inside. How could someone think it acceptable to shriek a b-word at someone across a high school campus? Angie looked around with appalled scorn.
And found her head spun by the fact that no one around her seemed to be following suit. No one else was looking around—they were all going about their business, catching up with friends or peering at their phones or, in a couple of cases, checking out the more appealing physical bits of passersby.
“YEAH THAT’S RIGHT HEMORRHOID HEAD, I’M TALKING TO YOU!” the same voice screamed, Angie was pretty sure from the north, and she realized her mistake.
“Oh of course,” Angie said to herself. “Why was I surprised or confused for even a second?” A couple of older boys passing by gave her puzzled looks, which she noticed as she looked north for the screamer.
North of her, the lawn[1] of the east quad, a roughly forty meter by thirty meter, somewhat uneven quadrangle[2], was broken up by crisscrossing walkways, a scattering of trees, several small flowerbeds[3], and a couple other clumps of shrubbery, along with a few benches and picnic tables. One of the trees, near the center, was a large beech tree that spread its branches and cast shade over a good chunk of the lawn, the edges of its leaves already starting to turn golden and orange for the season. Four black-billed magpies[4] perched on the branches of the beech, all staring at her. As she fixed their gaze upon them, one of them screeched, “HEY BURNING SHIT FOR BRAINS YOU DID IT GOOD JOB!” and fluttered its wings in a manner that was clearly meant to convey sarcastic clapping.
[1] Lawns in the traditional sense are rare in Fredonic society with the space constraints they have, and have always been used first and foremost as dog bathrooms parks, mostly as filler where other plant-life would be less appropriate. They were also used to break up multi-building campuses in a way that made getting around them slightly easier than it would be if all the space between paths was, like most free space in most Fredonic cities, filled with foodstuff producing or otherwise useful plants.
[2] It’s not called the east square, after all.
[3] Which almost always possess mystical or medicinal applications rather than being strictly ornamental, even at as nice a school as Persephone High. Not that there are many flowers that don’t have some sort of useful mystical function.
[4] The black-billed magpie, like all magpies and most jays, is notorious among those capable of speaking with them for being particularly foul-mouthed, even among passerine birds.
The other kids weren’t paying attention because they couldn’t understand it like she could.