by Sara Wolf
Except then I spot the burn scars.
You can always tell burn scars from every other type by the way they pucker the healthy skin around them. It’s by his collarbone, the skin pearl-white and shiny in the sun, the pucker running like a seam down into his shirt.
You don’t get burned in fights.
I swallow, hard.
An easy smirk crawls across Alistair’s lips as he wipes the flecks of Gabe’s blood off his cheekbones. I half expect him to lick it like the grody sicko he is. He just beat a guy up for no good reason and he’s smiling about it. In a school full of entitled kids, there was bound to be at least one raging dickwad - I was just hoping they wouldn’t be violent. Or unstable. Or that I’d meet them, like, ever.
Deep green eyes suddenly slide over to me. And then narrow to deadly slits.
Fucké.
“What are you looking at?” Alistair asks in a clear voice. It’s a confrontation for sure, but he just sounds…tired about it. Like he’s done it a million times before.
“A waste,” I blurt. He raises one intimidating brow, the corner of his lip twitching.
“Of what, exactly?”
“Oh, I dunno. Good genes, mostly.”
His mouth goes flat. It feels like the wind dies and the birds stop chirping as those deep green eyes vacuum in every inch of me. I hold my ground like he’s a charging bear - he could come for me next. I could yell, or kick him in the nuts, or better yet swing my heavy bag at his nuts; whatever I’m gonna do to him it involves nut-damage, that’s for damn sure. But just as I’m waxing poetic about targeting testes, he suddenly breaks eye contact and pulls at his tie, the thing coming loose around his neck and the starched collar of his white dress shirt drooping open even more. It’s a transparent attempt at seeming cool and unaffected, but I struggle not to look at the way the burn scar just keeps going down his chest, and going, and going -
“I’ve learned not to put a lot of stock in genes,” He finally says. “Unless they’re boot-cut.”
So the asshole likes to make dad puns. Fantastic. What am I even doing? This guy isn’t worth my best Sunday roasts, let alone my limited lifeforce on planet earth. His cuffs are splattered in blood, and it’s making me nauseous - that feather-stuffed head and worm-stuffed gut feeling. I turn on my heel and start to walk away.
“Name.” Alistair’s one word resonates over the lawn. I freeze, but refuse to give him the satisfaction of turning around.
“Sorry?”
“You have a name, I assume?” He drawls.
“No. I was raised by giant fruit bats.”
“That explains the smell,” He says. I sniff warily at my armpits before he asks again. “Do you have a name, or not?”
“A few,” I lilt. “‘Annoying’, ‘Know-It-All’, ‘Troublemaker’, ‘Pick-Up-Your-Socks-Or-So-Help-Me’. My personal favorite is a tie between ‘Hell No’ and ‘That Bitch’, though.”
He makes a clicking noise with his tongue. “You’re a chatterbox, aren’t you?”
“More of a chattertupperware, really.”
“Cheap, see-through, replaceable,” he muses lightly, adjusting his bloodstained cuffs. “Sounds about right.”
I blink. Once. Twice. A hundred times in a second. Through my sudden bout of inconsolable rage, I’m almost impressed. I’m used to people stuttering and tripping over themselves, but Alistair didn’t even pause in ripping me to shreds. He was ready for me. Or…it’s more than that. He wasn’t just ready for me. He was daring those teachers to say something with his eyes. He was ready for them, too, but they didn’t say shit.
I, on the other hand, have said Some Shit.
I turn and face him, finally, and almost swallow my tongue.
His eyes gleam out from beneath his whirlwind bangs; not tired anymore. Patient, dim-lit, like a fox waiting at the end of a tunnel for the rabbit to come out. Waiting for anyone to come out.
But Lilith Pierce isn’t ready to come out. It’s safe in here, in her own bubble. Impenetrable. She’s blocked up all the entrances, and only she knows where the exit is. Since the day she broke her knee she’s started setting up trip-wires around her mind for people like Alistair. Traps. For people who want to hurt others. Who could hurt her.
You can never really know someone. Not even the people you love. Not even the people who say they love you.
Memories are weird. Things fade, but the odd inconsequential thing stays, like a memory of eating a PB&J or listening to a certain song, or watching Mom put on makeup. But I remember this, always, clear as day - lying in the hospital bed, looking up at the white ceiling with a cast on my leg and pain searing through my IV-drip morphine haze. I remember making a promise to myself, to the tile ceiling, to the machine beeping out my pulse; this would never happen again. I wouldn’t let myself get hurt again. I’d keep a lookout. I’d be my own guard, my own sentry, my own brave knight. I’d keep my eyes open all the time for anyone who looked like a threat, for anyone who didn’t look like a threat. Anyone. Everyone.
Never. I’ll never let it happen again.
Alistair Strickland wants me to say something like everyone else won’t. To poke my head out so he can crush it like he crushed Gabe.
A single flicker of his dark eyelashes. One of my trip-wires snaps. I push my glasses up on my nose.
“Nice try. But I’m not falling for your bullshit.”
I turn on my heel and dash after what’s left of Ana in the distance.
8
The Touch (Or, How each finger is both the arrow and the apple)
When you take all the douchebags out of the equation, life suddenly gets a lot more enjoyable.
“Chocolate croissants!” I chime in the breakfast buffet line, and point rabidly down the table laden with gleaming pastries and steaming trays of scrambled eggs and ham. “Ooohhh shit! Those little jam cookies grandmas always have!”
“Linzer cookies,” Ana says next to me, patiently filling up her plate with sensible eggs and toast while I pile as many sugar-drenched pastries into a cereal bowl as I can. The chef behind the buffet line making crepes to order winces as I point at his round flat pan and shout ‘HOLY CREPE!’. People stare. I lower my voice to a whisper.
“Ahem. I mean…holy crepe.”
Ana just laughs. “You should try the orange juice - it’s fresh-squeezed.”
I snatch a cuppa, and a handful of little chocolates in a bowl just sitting there for no reason (candy for no reason!!!), and follow her through the glass-ceiling’d cafeteria. The piercing blue sky shines down on us, the usual bleach-scented tables of public school jammed with screaming cliques nowhere to be seen. In their place are dozens of small, round tables with white tablecloths and only five chairs at a time. It’s like a damn restaurant.
I sidestep a cheery potted plant. “How many people are there at Silvere, anyway?”
“Four hundred or so?” Ana tilts her head. “About a hundred for each year.”
“Year?” I frown. “You mean like, grade?”
“Fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh year,” She says. “I’m in sixth year. And you’re…?”
“I’m, uh. A junior?”
“Oh riiiight; because Americans do the Sophomore-Freshman thing. Are they? Fresh men?”
“Ugh, not a chance in hell.”
Over breakfast Ana does her best to give me directions to my first class (A Global History of Economics), but halfway through she checks her phone and gasps, saying she’s got exercise at the volleyball court across campus. She’s so fast I can barely shout my ‘thanks for everything!’ after her before she’s gone in a puff of vanilla perfume. The empty table reminds me where I should be around this time; meeting up with Ruby, walking across the football field, talking about life and death and college and whatever else we worry about. Everything else. Now that Ana’s gone and I’m left with the sound of my own brain, it’s hard not to notice the distinct lack of noise in the cafe; no frantic parrot-shrieking or piercing hyena-laughter like I’m used to from
Northview High. No banging of plastic trays on plastic tables or blasted music from tinny phone speakers. Instead, there’s just peace. Quiet. A gentle murmur and the faint tinkling sound of silverware scraping over ceramic. It feels like I could sneeze too loud and bring the whole place down. It feels wrong. Grown up. Lifeless.
I’m so deep up my own auditory ass I almost don’t see Alistair walk into the cafe. And considering how he towers over the tables and cuts paths in the crowd like hot piss on snow, that’s saying something. With his blazer casually slung over his shoulder and his blood-flecked shirt on full display, he lopes over to Rafe and Maria’s table, but he doesn’t make it all the way. Most of the crowd has the good sense to part around the tall ass dude with a bloody shirt, but three or four guys in particular didn’t get the memo. They stand there like a hairball in the shower drain, blocking everything up, pretending they don’t see him. And they’re definitely pretending. It’s impossible not to see someone like Alistair - he’s tall, sure, but he’s one of those people who are just really there, dark and heavy and impossible to ignore; a thundercloud on a sunny day.
One of the guys pretends to just notice Alistair then, measuring him up and down with a glare. Is there gonna be another fight? I thought this was supposed to be a fancy school with proper manners and shit.
“Something wrong?” Alistair asks the guy. Tired. Conversational. It does nothing to lighten the guy’s intense glower. But it does everything to attract the entire cafe’s attention. He didn’t even say it loud, but everybody looks; over their teacups, their phones, their last-minute textbooks-before-first-period. The cafe still rumbles with words, but quietly, like someone’s turned the collective volume down even more. Everyone’s waiting on tenterhooks for something to happen. Expectant. Like this is a thing that’s happened before. Or happens a lot.
The guy stabs his furious brown eyes into Alistair’s flat, unmoving green ones. They’re dick-whipping, aren’t they? Having just a big ol’ dick-whipping competition, but like…silently. Psychically. Psyilently. There’s definitely animosity between them, somewhere I can’t see.
And then it passes. The guy scoffs, and the dangerous tension dissipates like cigarette smoke in the wind.
“No.”
“Good.” A smile pulls Alistair’s long mouth up, but grimly and barely. “Now get out of my way.”
The guy tilts aside, and Alistair pushes past him and his friends at a clipped pace and makes it to Maria and Rafe’s table at last, collapsing in a chair and crossing his boots on top of the table. I’d be pissed at the sheer arrogance, but I won’t allow him to take up that much space in my brain. The redhead girl from this morning, though, feels strongly otherwise. She sits at the table diagonal from mine and does the same thing the guy did except even more furiously, if that’s possible; glowering at Alistair with the power of a thousand teary suns and viciously stabbing a waffle with her fork the whole time. Her beautiful hair is completely disheveled. She looks a hot mess. I shepherd the chocolates from the bowl into my bag and slide into the seat next to her.
“Hey. You okay?”
“No,” She says. “How can I be okay when he’s - when that asshole -”
I’ve seen enough Sundance movies to know when someone’s swearing in French. She mutters a nonstop barrage and stabs her waffle again and again and the fork makes a spine-tingling screech across porcelain every time. I clear my throat.
“Speaking of assholes, you’re tearing that waffle a few new ones.”
She looks down and releases her deathgrip on her fork. “Merde. I’m just so…so angry!”
“Completely understandable. Alistair was a fucking mega-jerk to that Gabe guy, and you were just trying to stand up for him!”
And with the tiny bit of empathy, her anger wavers, her lip blubbers, and she collapses on the table with her head in her arms. I judiciously move the waffle plate away before she can syrup her bangs. She sobs, and I rub her back as comfortingly as I can manage on a Monday morning jetlagged to hell and back.
“Hey, it’s okay,” I murmur. “It’s okay to stand up for people! You did the right thing. Alistair’s just a raging chode.”
She sniffs and looks up with watery eyes. “What…what’s a chode?”
“A ding dong that’s wider than it is long.” She immediately starts wailing again, and I coo. “It’s okay! Everything’ll be okay.”
Over her shuddering shoulders, my smudged glasses spot Alistair looking right at our table - dead-center at me. Even when he isn’t making any expression with his mouth, his wide lips are drawn-down at the edges, like his face is stuck permanently, deeply frowning. Deeply disapproving. He clearly doesn’t give a shit about the girl next to me, or her pain. She’s bawling her eyes out and all he can do is stare like she deserves it and it’s all I can do to not flip him off. He’d like that. Bullies like him feed on attention, and I’m determined to starve him out.
“Here,” I reach into my bag, and pull out a chocolate. I put it in front of her sobbing head, and she looks up a fraction with puffy eyes.
“That’s not going to help,” She hiccups.
“It might.” I smile. “When I was a kid, it helped all the time. Just a little treat, you know? When you’re feeling down. It might not look like much, but sometimes it’s all you need.”
She stares at it, glowering, and finally drops her head back into her arms. I sigh and pick the chocolate up - can’t let it go to waste.
Silvere doesn’t have any loud, screeching bells to indicate class changes because of course they don’t - a friendly, musical little chime ringing out over the PA speakers instead. The redhead girl trudges off, so miserable and bleary-eyed she nearly runs into a pillar. I watch nervously as Alistair and his cronies start to merge in the crowd towards her. Redhead notices him, too, and stabs her finger in his direction.
“I’ll never forgive you for this, Strickland! Je te hais! JE TE DETESTE!”
It all happens so fast. She grabs a half-finished orange juice from a tray and before anyone can blink or pull out their phones she dunks it directly on Alistair. The pulp splashes over his tangled mop of black hair, his face, soaking his blood-flecked shirt so thoroughly it clings to the long v-shape down his stomach. I freeze. The crowd moving to class goes stock-still. The chef behind the counter making crepes gapes, batter dripping of his frozen ladle. Everything poises on a knife’s edge of silence.
Maybe it’s the jetlag. Maybe it’s the liquid sugar coursing through my veins from the ten pastries I just ate. Maybe it’s a fundamental personality flaw in the form of a lack of discretion. Or maybe it’s the fact I just can’t stand the dude, because I whoop at the top of my lungs.
“Hell yes! Kick his little nuts in!!!”
The redhead is smarter than me - she doesn’t cheer. She runs. The entire cafe whips around to look at my yelling - Alistair included, his pulpy eyelashes glaring - and I make an alarmed ‘oop’ sound and instinctually drop underneath the nearest table. There’s a burning ten seconds where I’m 200% sure someone’s gonna yank the tablecloth up and start shouting at me to respect the headmistress’s grandson or what the fuck ever, but the crowd’s shuffling resumes eventually. I peek out from under the tablecloth - Alistair’s boots still standing there.
Next to him, short-enough-to-see Maria clears her throat. “Two new enemies.”
Alistair exhales. “I’ll add them to the list, then.”
Are they talking about me and the redhead? There’s a scribbling sound, and I peek out to see Alistair writing something on a small pad of paper. My name? God I hope it’s not my name. How would he even know my name? Wait a freakin’ second - he has a whole list of enemies? He just carries that around, ready to add onto it whenever? What the fuck? That’s miserable. Les Miserables. Wow. I can speak French too.
Rafe’s booming, barrel-chested laughter scares my intestines out of my anus as it echoes off the cafe walls; “Hey, at least you got your Vitamin C for today, Ali!”
If life had a keyb
oard I’d be smashing the lmao at this point. But like, stealthily. There’s a beat. I hear Alistair scoff, and then watch his scuffed boots walk away.
“Dunce.” Maria nudges Rafe in the ribs with a sharp little elbow and follows Alistair dutifully.
“Whoa - where’re we going?” Rafe blurts, his massive Timbs stamping after her. “Wait for me!”
I barely make it to my Economics class with thirty seconds to spare - Ana’s directions were great, it just took me longer than expected to crawl out on all fours from the cafe without being seen by another living soul.
The classroom’s smaller than I expected from this massive chateau, with a polished wood floor and extravagant oil paintings of battles and half-naked ladies everywhere. It looks like any room in a museum, except for the part where the windows are ceiling-to-floor and flanked by lace curtains, and the part where there’s a very modern-looking roundtable in the middle of the room.
“Desk?” I mouth at what I assume is the teacher - a man in a charcoal grey sweater and horn-rimmed glasses.
“Pardon?” He quirks a brow in French.
“D-Desk?” I mime a rectangle desperately. “Sitting…place. For me. New person.”
“Ah,” His wrinkled eyes light up. “You must be Miss Pierce. I am Professor Guillard. The headmistress told me to expect you today.” He gestures to the roundtable. “There are no desks in Silvere. We prefer a communal style of learning. Please, choose any seat.”
