Fallen Angel

by Melody John

  ‘Sorry,’ they giggled. They wobbled farther on up the corridor. I was about to shut my door, but then I looked the other way. Outside Dmitri’s room, two people were pressed up against the wall. They were kissing.

  It was Dmitri and David.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The next morning, Laura rolled into the kitchen looking far more chipper than seemed normal for someone who hadn’t come home until three in the morning. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘You all right? How are you feeling now?’

  I nodded. ‘Yeah. Sorry about last night. I think essays and all kind of got me down a bit. And alcohol didn’t help.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Laura said. She patted my shoulder on the way to the fridge.

  ‘So,’ I said, trying to sound casual as I chewed on my toast, ‘how did it go last night? Did you guys do anything interesting?’

  ‘Just usual stuff, really.’ She turned around with a Pop-Tart in her hand. ‘I danced with a few people. Jamie was gross again. Dmitri was kinda quiet—I didn’t see him around much. David asked where you’d gone. I told him you were tired and had gone back to your room.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘So yeah.’ She shrugged. ‘Just normal stuff, really.’

  So Dmitri and David didn’t hook up last night?

  I couldn’t say it. I turned back to my toast, and tried not to think about it. Kissing outside someone’s room didn’t automatically mean a hook-up (except that in most cases that was pretty much always what it meant). But even if it did, it wasn’t any of my business. If David wanted to hook up with Dmitri, it wasn’t something I could control or speak out against.

  So long as Dmitri wasn’t using his mesmer to do it. No, that was unfair—Dmitri had promised not to use it. He’d said that he didn’t need to. I shouldn’t doubt him. And anyway, wasn’t that just like massive sour grapes on my part? David wasn’t interested in me, so he had to be enchanted by someone else?

  God, what was wrong with me?

  I finished my toast, and went back to my room. But I bumped into Dmitri just outside the kitchen. ‘Oh hi,’ he said. ‘Are you feeling better?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, thanks.’ I couldn’t actually remember much of what he’d said to me last night. Oh god, had he seen me having a meltdown? Oh god.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘You seemed pretty upset.’

  ‘Who was upset?’ David asked. He shut the door of his room, and smiled at us both.

  ‘Lizzie was,’ Dmitri answered before I could say anything.

  ‘It wasn’t anything really,’ I said quickly. ‘I was just really tired last night, so it made me a bit—but it wasn’t anything really. Just tired.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ David asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. I couldn’t look at him, and pushed past them both. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to dash—got classes and…’ I hurried into my bedroom and sat on the bed, breathing hard.

  Then I straightened my back and stared resolutely ahead of me. Okay. So David liked Dmitri. Okay. That was fine. I could deal with that. It wasn’t the end of the world. Nothing like this was the end of the world. Every part of my heart might be screaming out that it wasn’t fair, but if I’d learned anything form Liam, it was that life wasn’t fair. So I just had to nut up and shut up. I had class, and that was more important.

  David was still my friend. And this would just be the test of how good a friend I was prepared to be for him.

  *

  I’d almost thought Dmitri wasn’t going to turn up to class, but he pushed open the door about two minutes before the tutor stood up. He scanned the room, and even though there were plenty of empty seats, he chose the one next to me.

  I couldn’t stop the fearful flutter of my heart as he sat down. Even though we’d been friendlier of late, I still always made sure to choose seats well away from him, or with a wall on one side and someone else on the other. This was the first time he’d made a deliberate effort to sit next to me. I tried not to flinch away.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Good… good, thank you.’ I tried to laugh. ‘You did just see me this morning.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ I glanced around, and saw that he was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. He smiled, but it seemed a little forced. ‘Last night was cool. For all of us.’

  I didn’t know what he meant by that, but before I could ask, the tutor stood up and began, ‘Right, so, today we’re going to be thinking about the Victorians’ obsession with degeneration. Did everyone look at the material on Cesare Lombroso?’

  I had looked at it, but not as thoroughly as I would have liked, so I tried to ignore Dmitri, and focussed instead on the class. Lombroso was a dude who’d made a study of people’s ears. He’d thought that you should be able to tell if someone was a criminal just by looking at them, and tried to see if criminals shared similar features, like eyes that were too close together, or big ears, or heavy jawlines. It sounded like a terrible, terrible idea, but the Victorians had been pretty hot on that kind of thing.

  ‘Do you think it would be good if this kind of thing actually worked?’ Dmitri murmured.

  ‘I guess so,’ I whispered back. ‘But it doesn’t.’

  ‘We still do it, though. We still look at someone and judge them by what they look like. We see someone who looks or dresses a certain way, and then we make assumptions on their behaviour, based on that information. Judging a book by its cover.’

  ‘People by their covers,’ I said, trying to make it into a joke.

  But Dmitri said, ‘That’s exactly what we do all the time. You did it to me.’

  I opened my mouth to protest, but I couldn’t argue, because that was exactly what I had done.

  He tapped his pen on the desk. He seemed pensive more than miffed about it. ‘And I did it to you, as well. I took you at face value. I believed you when you said you had power.’

  Now I frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

  He shook his head. ‘Last night. Don’t you remember?’

  What had I done last night? What did he mean about power? ‘I do have power.’

  ‘I know you do. I saw it in action. Well, “action”…’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Lizzie, Dmitri,’ the tutor called. ‘If you’ve something to contribute to the class, then please wait until you’re asked to do so, hm?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Dmitri said.

  I waited until the tutor was in full throttle again, then hissed, ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your power,’ he said. Again, he sounded fairly calm about it, just kind of thoughtful, and as though he were sorting it all out in his own head as he went along. ‘Your power with which you threatened me. It’s nothing more than a party trick. You can make pencils float.’ He sounded vaguely incredulous, like he couldn’t believe it, and that, even more than outright scorn, made my face turn bright red. ‘And I believed you straight away, without any doubts. Surely that’s not very safe. Or normal.’

  ‘I…’

  He sounded almost dreamy, as though he were telling a story of something that had happened to someone else entirely. ‘Because that is the way of it. That’s how it goes. We believe and we lie, and even though we lie, we still want to believe. Like Lombroso. It makes it all so much easier.’

  I felt cold. ‘What are you going to do now?’

  He looked faintly surprised. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘About me, and about David. Now that you know about it, about me, what are you—are you going to—’

  ‘I don’t think you quite understand, though,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to do anything. I don’t need to do anything.’

  My heart withered and died inside me. ‘You—you’re—’

  Dmitri waited, eyebrows raised.

  I tried to stamp down on my swirling emotions. ‘You’re not going to use the mesmer on him. Are you?’

  ‘You know, I find it a little insulting ho
w you think I need the mesmer to get a guy to like me.’

  ‘I—I didn’t mean it like that, I just—’

  ‘Lizzie and Dmitri.’ The tutor put his hands on his hips. ‘Right, that’s it. Both of you, out. If you can’t be quiet in my class, then you’ll have to leave. Even if you don’t want to learn, you shouldn’t try and sabotage those who do.’

  I shoved my books and pens back into my bag. My face was bright red, and I could feel tears pricking in my eyes. Outside in the corridor, I turned on Dmitri. ‘You’re not going to use the mesmer on him, though. You said promised you wouldn’t, you said it was the oldest law, and—’

  ‘I’m not going to break the law,’ Dmitri said. ‘I’m not stupid. Don’t worry about that.’

  ‘But you and David…’

  Dmitri shrugged slightly. ‘We—what’s the phrase?—we hooked up last night. But there was no mesmer involved. I told you. I don’t need to.’

  I stared at him. I wanted to scream at him, wanted to punch him—but there was no reason to do so, apart from jealousy. He said he wasn’t using the mesmer; if he was willing to use the mesmer, then why hadn’t he mesmered me into being quiet and just accepting this?

  He was right. He didn’t need the mesmer. David just liked him better than me, without any magic involved.

  Dmitri shrugged. ‘Well, so that’s that. I’ll see you back at the dorms. David was saying about a movie night tonight. See you.’ He turned and went back down the corridor.

  ‘See you,’ I whispered, feeling as though the world were crumbling down all around me.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘Last week of the first term!’ Laura crowed, flinging a handful of popcorn into the air.

  David picked kernels of popcorn out of Dmitri’s hair and ate them, grinning. Dmitri grinned back at him, and slung his arm across David’s shoulders.

  I tried to smile as though I didn’t care.

  ‘We should do something,’ Laura said. ‘Before the holidays.’

  ‘The beach,’ I said. I’d meant it sarcastically, but David’s eyes lit up.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Dude, it’s winter,’ I said. ‘You know. In case you missed it, it’s freaking freezing.’

  ‘Yeah, but think about it! The crashing waves, the freezing winds, the unparalleled force of nature in all its raw power… And also nobody else will be there.’

  ‘There is that,’ I acknowledged.

  ‘There’s a guy in one of my classes who has a van,’ Laura said excitedly. ‘We could—oh my god, I know what we should do, we should take the van down and like camp over there; it’ll be just like one of those indie movies with loads of Imagine Dragons on the soundtrack, but it’ll be even more hipster because it’s in winter, not summer.’

  ‘So hopefully fewer lens flares!’ I agreed. I was actually starting to get a bit excited about it now. ‘Oh, dude, we totally should. What do you guys think?’

  Dmitri shrugged and looked at David. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Do you want to go?’ David asked him.

  ‘I’ll go if you go.’ Dmitri glanced around at the rest of us as though he meant all of us in that ‘you’. But I knew he meant David.

  ‘Wow,’ David said. ‘So it all rests with me now. I hold our future in my hands.’

  ‘Yeah, don’t hurt yourself,’ Laura said, flicking another popcorn kernel at him.

  David grinned. ‘Then yeah. We should totally do it!’

  ‘Sweet!’ Laura cried.

  ‘Sweet,’ I echoed.

  Dmitri smiled at David, then at the rest of us. He hadn’t treated me any differently since he’d found out about my power. Since he’d hooked up with David.

  I didn’t know whether to be mad about that or not. I think I would have preferred it if he had been mean, rubbed it in my face and been catty about it all. Then I could have hated him, and that would have felt good.

  But he wasn’t mean. He never went on about it; he never made it seem like he’d won and I’d lost—he was nice, and he was so clearly into David, and David so clearly into him, that all I could do was squash down my hurt feelings and sit on them so they never showed. I think Dmitri could tell, though; he knew how upset I was sometimes. But even then, he was tactful, diverting attention when I didn’t think I’d be able to hold it back for any longer.

  So damned tactful. So damned nice.

  I tried to be glad about that, for David’s sake. That was another thing—if Dmitri had been a jerk about things, then I could have felt justified in hoping that he and David would break up, because David deserved to be with someone nice, someone as nice as he was. But Dmitri wasn’t a jerk; he was so damned pleasant that I hated how miserable I felt, because he and David were doing really well.

  I knew I should be happy for David’s sake, and I tried to be, and I tried to like Dmitri. It was very hard.

  ‘So wait, how far away is the beach?’ Dmitri was asking.

  ‘Dunno,’ Laura said. She had her phone out, and was busy texting. ‘About a hundred miles?’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yeah, actually.’ She laughed. ‘Wow, a hundred miles. But yeah, that’s why we need the van.’

  Unless we fly there, I thought, and bit my lip. Without meaning to, I glanced over at Dmitri, and I found him looking at me. We exchanged glances, and he grinned. I grinned back, a bit uncertainly.

  ‘How long’s it going to be?’ David asked. ‘Overnight?’

  ‘Maybe? Or two nights?’

  ‘My train ticket for back home is already booked,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a nine hour train ride up north, so I’ve got be back here by Friday.’

  ‘Okay, just the one night, then.’

  ‘So, wait,’ I said, ‘we’re going this week? Like, tomorrow?’

  ‘I guess so, or the day after. See what Ted says.’

  ‘Wow,’ David said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I feel like we’ve pushed the big red button.’

  ‘Don’t, stop, come back,’ Dmitri said, perfectly imitating Gene Wilder’s deadpan delivery.

  ‘Aw, babe!’ David said in delight. ‘Your first movie quote in everyday conversation! Quick, let’s take a picture.’

  Dmitri rolled his eyes. ‘Oh my god, you’re such a dork.’

  ‘Says the person who just quoted Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,’ I said. I actually smiled, and tried to mean it. ‘And it’s the original as well, not the remake.’

  ‘If you did quote the remake, I would have to have severe words with you,’ David said.

  Laura’s phone buzzed, and she checked it, then said, ‘Okay, so Ted says we can have the van, but only if he can come with a mate.’

  ‘Who’s the mate?’ Dmitri asked.

  ‘He doesn’t say,’ Laura said.

  ‘It’s going to look a bit weird if you ask, though,’ I said. ‘And what if he says someone who we hate, and then we say no, and it’s going to be obvious that we said no because we hate the other person.’

  ‘We don’t hate anyone, though,’ David said. ‘Well, at least I don’t—I don’t know about the rest of you psychos.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Oh, it should be fine, shouldn’t it? What’s Ted like, Laura?’

  Laura lifted one shoulder in half a shrug. ‘I don’t know him that well. He’s a bit too Kerouac for me, really.’

  ‘Kerouac?’ Dmitri asked.

  ‘Oh man,’ David said, ‘you’ve got to see The Rum Diaries—it’s insane.’

  ‘That was Hunter S. Thompson,’ Laura said.

  ‘Pff, same thing.’

  ‘Kerouac,’ Laura said to Dmitri, ‘was a literary iconoclast who was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.’

  ‘You stole that from Wikipedia,’ David said.

  ‘Well…’

  ‘He was a writer who was, like, totally a hippie, and he hitchhiked across America until he drank himself to death,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ Dmitri said. ‘I hope Ted doesn’t think that that’s our plan.’

>   ‘Maybe that’s Ted’s plan,’ Laura said, busy texting back, ‘but I’m telling him that if he brings along the stash of weed that he’s always writing about, we’re booting him out and leaving him by the wayside. Then he can really live the Kerouac experience.’

  *

  It was all arranged surprisingly quickly. We would leave the very next day, after lunch, giving us all time to gather things together.