Beyond, the party was very clearly getting started. It wasn’t all that crowded yet… as we’d just seen, people were enjoying the chance to be out at night and taking in the sights. The tower had a great big basement lounge, and it seemed like students of multiple disciplines had helped prepare it.

The walls and ceiling had been covered with a dungeon chic illusion. There was thick fog swirling around everyone’s ankles. Hovering pumpkins were everywhere. Harpsichord thrash that reminded me of Viktor was playing ambiently, with no sound crystals to distract from the illusion. It was punctuated periodically by flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder.

A disappointingly large number of the students who were already present had skipped costumes, or done lame things like wearing a “This Is My Costume” t-shirt. One guy had on that stupid t-shirt with a picture of a chain mail vest on it. It seemed like a lot of the early crowd was made up of those who just wanted an excuse for a party.

There were some people who’d made the effort, though… some of them quite ghoulish. There was one guy with a bunch of what were probably modified spectral arrows sticking out of his body at different angles, the wounds appearing to bleed. Another kid had a meat cleaver stuck in his head, and there was a girl walking around with bleeding stumps just below her elbow. The drink hovering about a foot past the end of one of them did little to make the illusion less disturbing.

I was kind of relieved to see that most of those who’d gone the “monster” route had thought of undead versions. I had a moment of weird deja vu and nostalgia when I spotted the exact same model of cheap rubber ghoul mask that had been my hidden treasure so many years before.

“Steff’s going to kick herself for missing this,” Amaranth said.

“Yeah,” I said. I had a suspicion she’d appreciate the stump girl. “Seems like this would be her kind of scene.”

“Yeah, but also, there’s that gladiator that she likes,” Amaranth said, pointing.

She hardly needed to… it was Pala the semi-giantess that she was talking about. She’d left her spear behind for the night. It took me a moment to figure out what her costume was… she was wearing a skintight one-piece that seemed to terminate in the briefest miniskirt imaginable and barely contained her massive chest. It had a pattern of green diamonds, varying from very pale to almost white. There was something vaguely familiar about the style of it, but I didn’t put it together until she turned her head a little and I saw she was wearing pointed ears.

She was dressed as an elf, complete with an elven-style dress in what was probably the largest size she could find. It was a really lucky thing that elven gowns had the whole flowing, trailing thing going on, or else she would have been completely indecent.

“The real shame is that if Steff had just waited to take the potion, she could have come here and then used it,” I said. “I guess I can understand her excitement, but I can’t believe she’d miss a chance to dress up… it seems right up her alley.”

“Do you think she might have taken the potion in the morning because the dance was tonight?” Ian said. “Like, she wanted to jump on the chance to go… filled out?”

“I really doubt that,” I said. “Dee told her it would take the whole weekend and she’d be incapacitated for it.”

“Yeah, I guess she’d have to be almost suicidally foolish with a simultaneous delusion of invulnerability or something to try it,” Ian said. “Seriously, did I misunderstand what was happening or was she not up and trying to walk around like everything was normal earlier?”

“Point taken,” I said.

Pala was talking to someone who would have looked like a kind of big hulking guy, if he’d been standing by anyone else. He was wearing what looked like motorcycle gear: leather for more flexible protection than metal armor gave, and a helmet adapted from the typical jousting helmet with a modern transparent visor.

He didn’t look like he was doing a Mecknight, specifically. Their cycle suits had even more of an armor look. There was something odd about the proportions of it… then he turned and started walking and I realized it wasn’t the outfit but the body beneath it.

“Is that Moeli?” I said.

“Yes, baby,” Amaranth said. She sounded a little irritated and I wondered at what, but then she said, “I never thought about how being a nymph takes some of the fun out of a masquerade.”

Then I realized he was in the same leather jacket I’d seen him with down at his post behind the desk. Without the headgear, I hadn’t been able to tell what he was going for.

“Give me your coat and then let’s go say hi to them,” Amaranth said.

“Why?” I asked, handing her my coat.

“Because we’re at a party and we just spotted people we know,” she said, helping me get my cape on. “It’s a dance. Let’s be sociable. If we wanted to stand around talking to each other, we could have stayed in your room.”

“I’d say ‘people we recognize’,” I said. “Do we really know Pala?”

“She’s nice,” Amaranth said. “Ian, you know her, right?”

“Um, kind of,” he said. “I mean, we use different locker rooms. I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with her.”

“Well, let’s go rectify that,” she said.

Alone, I would have felt weird about walking up to two people who were already talking and jumping into their conversation. With Amaranth leading the way… I still felt weird.

But I would obey.

“Yeah, I’m actually building a motorcycle as an auto shop project,” Moeli was saying as we approached. “Well, a model of one. But it’s full-sized.”

“My friend has a motorcycle,” Pala said. “She drinks at the inn I stay at.”

“Not a real one, though,” I said, disbelief crushing my awkwardness aside.

“No, it is very real,” Pala said. “Just not so easy to find. The Inn of the Black Doors. You have heard of it?”

“I mean, it’s not a real motorcycle,” I said. “It can’t be.”

“No, I suppose it’s really a wolf.”

It made as much sense as anything else, so I let it go.

“You know,” Moeli said, turning to me, “just because something’s not real doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with enjoying it. Some of us have a little thing called imagination.”

“Hey, I like them, too!” I said quickly. “I just… I like to keep what’s possible separate from what’s not. What’s your automata teacher think about your choice of project?”

“He hasn’t said anything,” Moeli said. “I’m going to keep it for when I get my enchantment degree.”

“You’re an enchantment student?” I asked.

“Armoury,” Moeli said. “I’m going to get enchantment after that.”

“A lot of the classes are the same,” I said. “Why not just double major?”

“I like to focus on one thing at a time,” he said.

“But won’t you be in school forever that way?”

“The second degree won’t take as long.”

“Don’t you want to get out there and start earning money, though?” I asked.

“I’ll take what I can get, but I’m not a gold farmer,” Moeli said. “I just want to be able to make really cool shit.”

“Oh,” I said, and I couldn’t figure out what to follow it up with.

I could understand what he meant… I wanted to make neat stuff, too, like figures that could enact more complicated scenes… but the idea that he’d go to school for a bunch of extra years and not be looking for a pot of gold at the end of that particular rainbow was a little foreign to me.

“My friend has a motorcycle,” Pala said again.

“What’s her name, honey?” Amaranth asked.

“Oh, it is a he,” Pala said. “His name is Skald. She lets me pet him sometimes.”

“She?”

“My friend,” Pala said.

“Skald… is… her motorcycle,” Ian said. “Who is really a wolf.”

“Yes,” Pala said, nodding enthusiastically.

“It’s an interesting world you live in, isn’t it?” Ian asked.

“Oh, I don’t live there,” Pala said. “I board there. Not many connections remain between the world I live in and this one, but the inn has doors everywhere.”

“Black doors,” Ian said.

“Yes,” Pala said.

Ian gave Amaranth and me a look that said, very eloquently, this is why I don’t have many conversations with her.

“You should go say hello to Coach Callahan,” Pala said.

“Wait, is she here?” I asked.

“No, it is just Moeli and I,” she said, looking around in confusion. “Coach Callahan is over there.”

I didn’t want to look, but felt compelled to. There she was standing in a corner of the room, along with an adult man I didn’t know who wasn’t in costume… Coach Jillian Callahan.

Dressed as a slutty Universal School Girl.

She was looking around the room while the guy next to her nattered on. She spotted us looking at her and I would swear that her eyes lit up, but she looked around a little and then scowled.

“Ooh… Steff is going to absolutely kick herself,” Amaranth said.

“I don’t think she’s going to have to,” Ian said.

“Steff is the alfr whose penis Coach Callahan likes to tread on, yes?” Pala said.

“Um…” I said.

“Yes, yes, she is,” Amaranth said.

Pala’s face looked a lot like Two’s did when she required clarification. I thought I heard a tiny rumble of thunder that wasn’t coming from the atmospheric effects. She shook it off, though.

“Coach Callahan takes sex perverts very seriously,” she said. “She keeps images of them in her desk so she can recognize them if she sees them.”

“Yes, I know, I’ve seen them,” Ian said. “So many times.”

“So, did you get a tan?” Moeli asked Amaranth.

“Oh, no, my skin doesn’t tan,” she said. “It’s bark color.” She grabbed a length of her green hair and held it out. “I’m a dryad, see?”

“Oh, I thought maybe you were a mermaid,” Moeli said. “One of them has the green hair. I saw the other one outside, walking around glammed as a harpy or bird woman or something.”

Iona’s truer state was as feathery as it was scaly… I wondered if she’d decided to dispense with a costume entirely and come as herself?

“She didn’t seem to be heading this way, though,” he said. “I guess maybe she’s going to a private party.”

It was possible… but the other possibilities chilled me. Hell, that possibility chilled me. Iona, slinking off in her natural form to go to a private party. Catered, maybe?

“I’m sure this isn’t the only Veil party on campus tonight,” Amaranth said. “One of the reason the school holds these events is to give a supervised alternative to the student ones.”

“There’s your roomie,” Ian said. I looked back towards the entrance, where a party of four had just entered: Two, her friend Hazel, Hazel’s cousin Honey, and Oru. Hazel and Honey were keeping as much distance between each other as they could while still being with the group.

Oru looked… the only word for it was ghastly. She’d had her skin tinted a white, but it looked pallid and corpse-like, particularly in the eerie lighting conditions. Her thick, spiky hair had been curled somehow, but it looked more like springs than burrow gnome hair. She was wearing one of Honey’s actual dresses. That part she carried off well enough… Honey’s dresses weren’t flattering enough to depend on the chest of the wearer.

Really, she looked like nothing so much as an evil little porcelain doll.

Then she smiled.

Goblins have very wide mouths, in proportion to the rest of their heads. They have no lips to speak of, but they do have lots of teeth, which are sharp and set at no particular angle.

“Sweet Khersis, I’m going to have nightmares for a month,” Ian said.

“Well,” Amaranth said, “I, for one, think she looks… um… very in keeping with the spirit of the occasion?”

“You’ve got that right,” I said. “If they give a prize for the scariest costume, I don’t see how anyone’s going to top that.”

“Mackenzie?” a voice said from behind me. A hand fell on my shoulder and I turned around as thunder pealed, then jumped six feet out of my skin at the sight of a scarecrow, covered in shadow.

Discuss this chapter on the Livejournal feed.

Others started to file into the lounge while we were finishing our meal, including Sooni and her cat girl entourage. Sooni took one of the easy chairs and guided Kai down to a position seated on the floor between her legs while Suzi and Maliko took up positions leaning against either side of the chair.

Honey took the chair that Steff had vacated, giving a polite greeting to all of us but avoiding Hazel’s attempts to draw her into conversation.

Trina and the Leighton twins came in with sub sandwiches that didn’t look like they’d come from the corner store. I would have bet that they had just come from the catered meal in the downstairs lounge. That was probably three votes I could forget about.

“Hey, good luck with the election,” Trina said to me in a sweet, cheery voice as she went to the fridge and got out a bottle of orange soda with her name written all the way around the label.

“Thanks,” I said neutrally. I wondered if she would have sounded as insincere to me if I hadn’t overheard her talking to Feejee before. Well, she could have changed her mind… and her personality.

Sara said something to Tara in what sounded like baby talk, and then they both burst into laughter.

Kiersta arrived after almost everyone else, carrying a box covered in brown cardboard and a stack of cards to the kitchen counter, before going to stand by the TV at the front of the room.

“Can I get the… uh… candidates up here?” she said, as the room filled up. As soon as Sooni stood up, Suzi and Maliko slipped into her chair. The Yokai girls were all so slender that the two of them could fit side-by-side in the seat.

I started to get up from Amaranth’s lap, but she held me back a moment and whispered, “Don’t forget to wish Sooni good luck.” I nodded, and she kissed me on the back of my head and then let me go.

“Good luck,” I said quietly to Sooni as I took my place beside her in front of the glass wall.

“Thank you,” she said courteously, but just as quietly. “I wish you luck as well, though I am certain I will be beating somebody tonight.”

She flashed a toothy smile and I resisted the urge to look at Kai, the much-abused “friend” Sooni’s parents’ money had bought for her. I couldn’t let myself be distracted by her implied threats.

“Is everybody here?” Kiersta asked. I looked around while she counted heads. Barley, Belinda, and Leda were missing. “We’re short four… um, five,” she said, without much obvious interest. “Who are we missing?”

“Belinda said she had stuff to do,” Raquel, the human girl with permanent stoneskin and the nickname of “Rocky”, said. “And Leda said she doesn’t believe in democracy, or something.”

“That’s two,” Kiersta said. “Who else?”

“Puddy,” I said. I’d grown so used to her absence that it hadn’t hit me until that moment that I hadn’t even been expecting to see her. “And Mariel.”

“Oh, yeah,” Kiersta said, not looking particularly happy to be reminded of Puddy’s existence. I really couldn’t blame her for not stopping everything to go tell them they had to come to the meeting. It was probably her job to do just that, but… I wouldn’t have, either. “And, uh, Barley.” Her eyes flickered to the time piece on the wall. “I guess that’s everybody that’s coming, then. Let’s… uh… do this.”

“I think Barley deserves a chance to vote,” Amaranth said. “We could wait a few minutes to see if she turns up, or I… somebody could go look for her?”

“Barley put in her housing transfer form this morning,” Kiersta said. “It’s officially effective Monday but I don’t think she’ll be coming.”

“Oh,” Amaranth said. This shouldn’t have been unexpected, but she sounded like the news had knocked the wind out of her. “Where’s she going?”

“I couldn’t say,” Kiersta said.

Amaranth’s mouth opened and formed the word “oh” again, but nothing came out of it. I mouthed the words “hug her” to Two, and she did.

“So… um… the ballots are over by the sink,” Kiersta said dully. “If you guys want to take turns filling one out and putting them in the box…”

“Couldn’t we take a few minutes to speak first?” I asked.

“Uh… I guess,” she said. “If you want to. Just… don’t take all night, okay?”

“That is a very good idea,” Sooni said, smiling her widest, most painted-on smile, and giving a slight nod of her head to me. “I think that you should be allowed to go first, as you thought of it.”

All eyes turned towards me. It was obviously a trap. This wasn’t a formal debate, but by going second she would have a chance to address what I said, and she looked gracious for “letting me” go first.

My throat constricted. So did my stomach. Why had I eaten so much?

“Hi,” I said. “Um… everybody knows that there’s something wrong with this campus,” I said. “Some of us may have it worse than others, but we’ve all been shoved into a corner by people who would rather we weren’t here at all. I don’t know how much I’d be able to do as a single freshman senator, but I could keep pushing and make sure that our issues are issues. As your senator or on my own, I already plan on doing whatever I can to make sure we’re not excluded from any student activities… and I’ve got a few other ideas, too. Like, what if instead of catering meals in the basement, the dining hall catered to our specific needs? I mean, not everybody has the same requirements for food. That’s just one example,” I said, hoping nobody would ask for another, because at the moment I was coming up blank. “But it’s a good example, because it shows a very simple way the school administration could be more responsive to our needs without any real cost to others. That’s the kind of thing I would push for as your senator. Um… thank you.”

There was some clapping, mostly from exactly who you would have expected to clap for me, with a little polite pushing-together-of-hands from others.

“Okay,” Kiersta said. “Sooni?”

Celia hissed.

“That’s enough of that… um… Cecily?” Kiersta said.

“Celia,” Celia said. “And I was just wishing her well in the language of my people.”

“It’s true,” Amaranth said. “She was.”

“Oh,” Kiersta said.

“Thank you,” Sooni said, beaming.

Celia hissed some more, and the reptile woman who I only knew as “Hissy” made a sound that might have been a laugh.

“Celia!” Amaranth said reproachfully.

“Everybody settle down,” Kiersta said. “Sooni, you want to get this over with?”

“Yes, please,” Sooni said. “Before I begin, I would like to apologize to my opponent for the mean-spirited and poorly spelled campaign posters some of my more zealous supporters put up. I have spoken to those who were responsible,” she said, as if she had command of a vast political machine instead of a trio of indentured servants posing as her friends, “and they have assured me it will not happen again.”

There was applause… from “those responsible,” naturally… and she smiled demurely and waited for it to subside.

“Now then… now then…” she said, and opened her mouth as if she was about to speak, then closed it again. She raised two fingers to her closed lips and puffed her cheeks slightly… the girliest of girl burps.

“Oops… pardon me,” she said, giving a little giggle that was echoed by her feline followers. “I just had a delicious deli sandwich with lots of ham and turkey from the downstairs lounge. In my homeland of Yokan, we do not have any meat except for fish and sometimes birds, because there are no other ‘animals’ such as the outside world has. Some nights, I do like to go to the dining hall because it reminds me of home: there is lots of rice… but not much meat.”

There was some scattered laughs at this, and more than a few knowing nods.

“My friends, we have one of the nicer dorms to live in,” she continued, tenting her fingers in front of her and tilting her head at different angles as she spoke, as though to make sure everybody got a good look at her elaborate braided buns and her furry fox ears. “It is supposed to be racist that we have a whole room of crystal balls downstairs? Some of the other halls have magic mirrors in every room. Some have scented jet spells in the baths. Some have private showers but no baths. Are we going to protest because every dorm hall is not exactly the same? Maybe the only way to make things fair is to not let anybody have anything at all? I do not think anybody would enjoy that. Also, some of you have human friends or relatives… how do you think they would feel if they found themselves placed upon the menu to meet Miss Mackenzie’s ‘specific needs’?”

“That wasn’t what I meant!” I protested.

“Shh!” Maliko hissed. “You had your turn!”

“Let Sooni talk!” Suzi added.

Sooni inclined her head slightly and affected a sympathetic tone, pretending not to have heard the interruption.

“I do not ask anybody to vote against Miss Mackenzie because she is a demon,” she said in a simpering purr that would have suited one of her nekos better. “That would be wrong. But remember that the person you select to represent you today will represent you, as far as the rest of the campus is concerned. I will not drag anybody’s personal life into this, but you would do well to think about what image you would like for Harlowe Hall to have. Thank you.”

She gave a deep bow at the waist, giving all those behind her… that being me… an entirely unnecessary view of her ass, bare except for a black thong. How did a culture which required bows like that produce skirts like that? There had to be some kind of substantial undergarment that she’d decided she could do without, here in the decadent west.

Maybe a more naturally assertive person would have tried to counter her speech, but I could only see that playing into her hands. Suzi and Maliko would shout me down for trying to take a second turn… and probably get at least some knee-jerk responses from others by playing on the idea of fairness. Kiersta obviously wanted to get her duties over as quickly as possible, so she’d be no help.

“You guys can go… um… sit down,” Kiersta said. Suzi and Maliko moved and sat on the armrests of the chair, and Sooni took their place without breaking her stride. The pair of catgirls flanking her made it seem almost thronelike. I sat on Amaranth’s lap, of course.

“Sooni… she was staring at your bottom,” Maliko said in a carrying whisper. “The whole time.”

I blushed and turned my face towards the wall. Amaranth gently turned my head back around.

“Okay,” Kiersta said. “Who’s first?”

A couple of people stirred uncertainly, but before anybody else could make up their minds, Hazel hopped down from her chair and began pulling it out.

“‘scuse me, love,” she said as her chair accidentally bumped Two’s. Two scooted aside and Hazel pushed the chair up against the counter.

“I’m voting for Mack Blaise,” she announced, standing on her toes to drop her card into the box, “who would’ve thought better of puttin’ the ballots up somewhere that a quarter of us can’t begin to reach.”

Well, she wasn’t too good with fractions, but I wasn’t going to begrudge the support.

“Um, let’s keep the voting private please,” Kiersta said, though it didn’t sound as though she really cared.

Honey looked abashed at her cousin’s outburst, but Shiel the kobold was already waiting beside the chair when Hazel hopped down and Oru the goblin was the third. I could have kissed Hazel. Not because I find girls inherently attractive, but because she’d managed to give me credit for something I hadn’t thought of, but should have.

Honey waited until a few other people had cast their own ballots before she got up, as if to distance herself from the unseemly spectacle that had come before… but she still used the chair. I liked the fact that she pulled it back over to where Hazel was standing, patient and uncomplaining.

“Um… here you go,” she said, looking unnecessarily flustered about the whole thing.

“Thank you,” Hazel said, and she put her chair back in place and sat down.

Feejee gave me a little smile as she went up to vote… but then, so did Trina. Sara and Tara made no pretense of not looking at each other’s votes as they filled out two ballots in a row with their joint right hand.

“Excuse me, baby,” Amaranth said when she got up to vote, giving me a pat on the butt as I slid off her lap. It was such a small gesture and one that not everybody would immediately have equated with spanking, but the association in my mind left me glowing pink until after she returned to her seat and pulled me back into her lap. “Go vote, Twoey,” she said, and Two did.

Sooni was very pointedly not getting up to vote, so I didn’t, either. Finally, we were the only two left.

“After you,” she said, nodding deferentially at me.

“I spoke first,” I said. “So you should have your vote first.”

“You are very gracious,” she said, and walked with all her natural poise and grace over to the counter and cast her vote. There was no question in my mind that she was voting for herself.

When I’d finished, Kiersta asked, “Has everybody voted?” a couple times, and after being assured that everybody had, she went and took the top off the box and began pulling out ballots, making tallies on a sheet of paper.

We watched her count through the votes twice… and then a third time. She started yet again, this time sorting the ballots into two piles. I counted as she did so, and realized the result the moment before she turned around and announced it.

“It’s… it’s a tie,” she said in disbelief.

“What?” Sooni exclaimed in a tone of total outrage that I hoped people were listening to. “It can’t be! Count them again! Count them again!” Her voice was almost as shrill and high as Mariel’s at the end.

“Um… what happens now?” I asked, since Kiersta wasn’t paying any attention to Sooni.

“We’re… um… supposed to do a run-off,” Kiersta said. “Next Friday. Shit!”

That pretty much summed it up for me, too.

End Of Book Four: The Body Politick
Next Begins Book Five: Class Acts

“What happened to you?” they both asked at the same time.

“Belinda did,” I said. “Trying to make good her threats. I’d kind of hoped she’d given up or forgotten… but I guess she was just waiting for the student elections.”

“Oh, are you okay?” Amaranth asked.

I nodded.

“I didn’t hurt her,” I said. “I didn’t have to.”

“I will,” Steff said darkly.

I shook my head.

“Please, don’t,” I said. “It’s over and done with.”

“Well, let’s get you upstairs, anyway,” Steff said. “Put your arm on my shoulder, hon.”

They both supported me the rest of the way to my room… Steff more so than Amaranth, who didn’t seem to know how to actually help but felt a need to be included. The worry and concern for me etched on her face was a little like seeing her in physical pain.

Sooni was lurking in the doorway of her room when we got there.

“You have been out brawling?” she asked. “Or getting dates?”

“Oh, go choke on a furry cat muff,” Steff said.

Sooni’s bronze skin flushed… well, copperish. Her eyes narrowed, her nostrils flared, and at first I thought she was smiling, but then I realized the corners of her mouth were pulling back in a feral snarl, before she disappeared behind her closed door.

“That was uncalled for,” Amaranth said as the three of us filed sideways a little clumsily through my door.

“It wasn’t nice,” Steff said. “But it was very much called for. I’ll have that fucking tail for a wrap if she comes near our Mack.”

“Steff, chill,” I said. “She’s not going to attack me. Not physically.”

“I’m sorry,” Steff said darkly. “I just feel a serious need to hurt somebody right now. I missed my shot at Belinda…”

“Let’s get Mack off her feet,” Amaranth said soothingly. “Do you want on the bed, honey?”

“The chair’s fine,” I said, and I leaned on Steff while she pulled it out for me.

“What all’s hurt?” Steff asked.

“My back, my head… especially my head, my ankle… I probably wouldn’t have been able to walk on it if I hadn’t found out what a real hurt ankle feels like when I tripped over a protection circle the other day,” I said.

“Oh, honey, what were you doing messing around with nasty white magic shit like that?” Steff asked.

“I was down in the summoning room, trying to figure out why Two had called up a demon,” I said.

“She what?” Steff asked.

“What?” Amaranth said. “She wasn’t supposed to tell you!”

We both turned to look at her. Steff’s face had become cold and blank.

“She didn’t,” I said. “But I’m not stupid… anyway, you said Two said it was a secret.”

“Well, she did!” Amaranth said, defensively. Then, a little less confidently, “Because I told her to… but Mack, baby, I only did it because I knew you’d blame yourself if you knew she got hurt investigating demons.”

“Amy, how could you?” Steff asked. “After last time…”

“Well… nothing really bad happened last time,” Amaranth said, seeming to shrink back in on herself. “So I thought that… maybe… in a way… it had kind of worked, after all?”

“Amaranth, I can’t be in a relationship with somebody who lies to me,” I said. I knew before I saw her face twist into an expression of inexpressible grief that I’d worded that poorly. “So you need to stop,” I added quickly.

“Okay, but technically, I didn’t… um… I mean…” she said, and I could see her usual cheerful confidence rising back up and then fade quickly. “I’m sorry, baby. You’re right. I know better. I do.”

“Maybe if you’d remember that instead of always trying to know best,” Steff said. I watched her clench her fists and go rigid, her fingernails digging painfully into the flesh of her palms. “Ooh! You can be so frustrating…”

She kicked the wall, hard enough that it had to have hurt, though she didn’t show any sign of it.

“I know,” Amaranth said, and started to turn away from us.

“It’s okay,” I said, rising and embracing her.

She returned the embrace, clinging to me gratefully… a little too gratefully. Ouch.

“Oh, careful!” I said, wincing. “I got slammed pretty hard against a wall.”

“Poor baby,” Amaranth cooed, and she guided us over to the bed, settling herself down on the edge and pulling me into her lap. Steff dragged my desk chair over and turned it around backwards, sitting on it with her legs splayed around the back and her hands on top of the upright.

Some combination of the posture, the fact that she was sitting on a lower level than us, and the perpetual look of “want” in her eyes gave her an air of supplication that I wasn’t completely comfortable with. I didn’t like being above her. I didn’t like her looking up at me, up to me.

“Anyway,” I said, not wanting to lapse into silence on that rather awkward thought. I held up my hand, chuckling ruefully. There was no signs of damage, but the pain in the joints made it most comfortable to keep my fingers half-bent. “I took vengeance upon the wall that did it.”

“Oh, honey, let me see that,” Steff said and reached up to grab my faux-injured hand. She manipulated one of the fingers a bit roughly. “Does it hurt when I do this?”

“Ow… it does!” I said, the end of “does” becoming a bit of a whimper as she squeezed less-than-gently. I pulled my hand away from her. “But… it’s not broken,” I said, rubbing it with my left hand. “Just sore.”

“Oh, I know,” Steff said, grinning unapologetically. “I just wanted to… well…”

I sighed. I’d had plenty of pain the last few days, but on the other hand, a little more wouldn’t kill me and it wouldn’t do me any harm. I held out my hand to her.

“Only… not so hard, okay?” I asked.

Steff nodded, looking at my proffered digits as if they were a gift from on high… an image that once more gave me a twinge of discomfort. She took my hand gently in both of hers and lowered her head over it to bestow a kiss, then began to knead and probe as if she were giving me a vigorous and slightly unskillfull hand massage.

Honestly, it might have felt pleasant if my hand hadn’t hurt to begin with… and as it was, the spikes–well, maybe not exactly spikes so much as long, rolling hills–of pain at least distracted me from the ache in my head and ankle, and the enraptured look on Steff’s face was almost worth it.

She was looking at me avidly, reading every change in my face, every twitch, every reaction, like she would immerse herself in my pain if she could, luxuriate in it. It was a little bit frightening to realize that somebody could get such pure joy out of hurting others… hurting me… but I’d given my hand to her and I didn’t take it back. I was starting to remember how it had felt when she had pinned me down by my wrists and writhed against me, even on top of our clothing.

The rhythm of pain she inflicted began to remind me of the way she’d thrust… even more so as it proceeded to increase in both intensity and frequency. My eyes closed, and I imagined myself floating on my back in the water, riding a series of swells. I’d never been in the ocean, but I had some memories of lying on a raft in a lake rocked by the wake of self-propelled boats.

I hadn’t been much for swimming, but I’d enjoyed the sensation.

As Steff kind of brought the whole thing to a sort of a climax, I bit my lip to keep from crying out, then stopped to keep from biting through my lip. My already-abused back arched painfully, but after wrenching that one uncontrolled scream from me, Steff relented and then she really was massaging my hand, with all the nimbleness her elven heritage had given her.

My breathing slowed. The lake calmed, and I was just floating. The soreness in my hand had changed, becoming more like the not-entirely-unpleasant after effect of a moderately gentle spanking. The rest of my pain had somehow diminished in importance, if not severity.

My eyes opened, and met Steff’s. She looked oddly satisfied, yet hungrier than ever, as she brought my hand to her lips again and breathed, with a whisper that traveled like a soft breeze up the length of my arm, in a voice that existed only for me, “Slut.”

I shivered.

“Thank you,” I said as she released my hand.

“That was nice,” Amaranth said quietly, and it was only then that I realized she had the fingers of one hand playing over my breast and the other on my thigh. Actually, I’d almost forgotten that she was there after I closed my eyes. That sounds weird, considering I was sitting on her very nude lap, but she had become a warm, comforting presence… a presence without which I probably wouldn’t have been able to entrust myself to Steff. She’d facilitated the experience, but not been a part of it… though she evidently had enjoyed it all the same.

“You can keep going,” I said to Steff.

She shook her head.

“That was enough for now. I’m supposed to be working on self-denial,” she said. “Viktor thinks you might be good for me, there.”

“How?” I asked.

“Because I didn’t lose interest when you said we should wait,” Steff said.

Nobody said anything for a while. Amaranth stroked my hair and played somewhat absently with my breast. I think it was her version of mindless fidgeting. I really didn’t mind.

“So what now?” Amaranth asked. “Do you want to pursue any action against Belinda? There is a zero tolerance policy for student-on-student violence.”

Steff gave a little laugh at this.

“Well, there is,” Amaranth said, with a very Two-like sense of injury at the impugning of The Rules.

“I hate to admit it… but what I’m most concerned about now is what this will do for her voting. She didn’t beat me,” I said. “But she didn’t acknowledge that I won.”

“The ogre culture’s not big on the concept of ‘tie’,” Steff asked. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she skips the vote entirely… and tries to get a definitive answer later, when she’s had a chance to lick her wounded pride and convince herself you cheated.”

“I’m hoping she won’t,” I said. “I know it’s her culture… but she’s got a choice. Ogres are proud, but they’re not uniformly stupid. They’d be extinct if they refused to make treaties with obviously stronger powers, without putting them to the test first.”

“You have to remember Belinda deliberately chose to identify with her ogre side, though,” Amaranth said thoughtfully. “If she’s defensive enough about it, she might take ogrish culture more seriously than a full-blooded ogre who grew up in it would.”

“True,” I said. “I can hope, though.”

“You can always hope for the best from people,” Amaranth said. “Do you need anything, baby?”

“I think what I really want is a hot bath,” I said. Despite the unpleasantness with Trina, my last one really had been extremely relaxing, and since I didn’t have any injuries to heal, I couldn’t think of a better treatment for the pain.

“Oh, do you want company?” Amaranth asked.

Under other circumstances… and with a truly private bath… that would have been tempting. Well, it was tempting anyway. Just not tempting enough.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I just want to relax.”

“Oh, hey!” Steff said. “If you really want to relax, give me a couple minutes. I can run over to my room and get you some peppermint bath salts, and a little sachet of herbs you can drop in the water… I use them for muscle pain and fatigue. I don’t know if they’ll work for you, but they won’t hurt.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said.

Before she left to fetch her stuff, we agreed to all get food from the store and eat it in the lounge after my bath, so we could be hanging out there right up to the meeting. Steff’s floor had their meeting at the same time as ours, so she’d leave shortly before, but she’d be there for moral support in the mean time. They’d make sure Two knew the plan while I was in the bath.

When Steff returned, I declined both of their offers of support to the bathroom–which Steff wasn’t allowed to enter, anyway–and made my own teetering way there instead. Feejee was in her customary tub again, as I’d half-expected… I could have said “hoped” or “feared” with about equal accuracy. I wanted a chance to make up for my earlier mistakes but feared making things worse.

“Hi,” I said. I turned away as I undressed but resisted the powerful impulse to hide behind the curtain while I did this.

“Hey,” she said, a little lazily. “You might want to look out… I heard a rumor earlier that Belinda’s looking to jump you some time today. I don’t like spreading gossip, but… just in case it’s true…”

“It’s true,” I said, turning to face her as I spoke. I did my best not to blush when I realized I’d just bared my chest to her. She walked around with hers on display all the time, after all. “Or it was. But thanks for the warning, anyway.”

“You’re welcome.”

I started the bath. The running water covered the need for conversation for a while. I turned the heat up all the way again and dumped the salts in under the running water. The alchemically treated powder effervesced impressively, tinting the water pink as it did so. The aroma of peppermint was just strong enough not to be overpowering. I climbed into the tub while the water was still running and breathed it in. When the tub was almost full, I turned the water off and then… with a little trepidation… added the herbs. There was no immediately noticeable difference.

“Feejee?” I asked.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry… about the way I’ve acted,” I said. “I don’t mean to be rude.”

She didn’t answer immediately.

“I know,” she said eventually.

“I’m just not used to having… people be friendly to me,” I said, not sure if it would be presumptuous to call her my friend. Dee had been flattered when I’d acknowledged her as such, but she’d more or less invited people to do that.

“I like to think I’m just a friendly person,” Feejee said, after another pause.

“You are,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

After that, Feejee was content for us to soak in silence, in mutual solitude. It might have just been the hot water, the tingling sensation of the fizz, and the soothing minty vapor… or it might have been something in the herbs after all… but a soothing, peaceful sensation began to spread through my body, and for a while I was able to forget not just my pain but my problems.

I’d have to take baths more often, I decided.

I wondered if Two knew about baths. I’d have to find out.

She’d probably like rubber duckies as much as she liked teddy bears.

That’s almost exactly what getting suckerpunched by a fucking ogre isn’t like.

What is it like? More like one of those spring-loaded gauntlets you see in slapstick shows. Only, less funny.

Of course, technically, Belinda may have only been half-ogre, but she identified herself as an ogre… and after getting hammered upside the skull out of nowhere I was willing to grant her that point.

Not only are ogres far from slow, they’re also not slow-witted… not when it comes to fighting, and especially in their favorite style: dirty. Belinda must have been watching me for days, planning this so I’d be alone and she wouldn’t be interrupted.

She caught me in the hallway just after I left my logic class, with my head still full of shifting spell sequences and half-formed plans. She simply stepped out of the darkened doorway of one disused classroom and decked me, half-carrying, half-pushing me into the room across the hall in the process and shutting the door.

I didn’t process all of that at once, of course. I only put it together after I finished pondering the question of how my skull could be in one piece after I’d distinctly felt my head exploding in a massive fireball of pain.

It was Belinda’s voice which started to bring me out of the daze brought on by the combination of pain, jarring physical displacement, and the dark room I found myself in.

“I told you I was going to get you,” she said. Her breath, hot and oddly sweet, was right in my face. Her face was on a level with mine… not because she was stooping but because she had me pinned with one stubby-fingered hand against the wall. Her face–which kind of looked like a boulder had a child with one of those really ugly, pudgy-faced baby dolls–was uncomfortably close to mine. Though, of course, I couldn’t actually see it that well. Because the room was dark. “You should have listened. You should have been ready. Did you think I was bluffing?”

“I’ve… uh… had other stuff on my mind,” I said, a little apologetically. “Sorry.”

I actually meant that to be mollifying, somehow. Yeah. It wasn’t my best idea, but then, I’d just been suckerpunched by a fucking ogre.

“You watch your fucking mouth!” she said, grabbing my shoulders with both hands and shaking me with considerable violence… though considerably less violence than hitting me would have involved, for which I was grateful. “All through high school I had to put up with shit from people like you, and I’m sick of it. This is my time.”

She got shit from people like me? What school did she go to, and why wasn’t I allowed to go there?

“Don’t look at me like that!” she said, slamming me back against the wall. I guess my incredulity must have showed. “You know what I’m talking about… I know your type. You were one of the smart kids, too good to talk to anybody else… always talking shit about the jocks and laughing when you don’t think they can hear you… acting so damned superior when you have to tutor someone. Well, who’s laughing now, smart kid?”

“Um… is it you?” I asked, and was rewarded with another punch in the face. If it hadn’t been for the wall behind me, I would’ve hit the floor. Instead, I slammed against the wall. That was so much better. She let go of me and I fell heavily to the floor.

It sure wasn’t the knowledge that she could hit me as hard as she wanted as often as she wanted without killing me that made me brave, because honestly, that’s not much of an encouragement to keep mouthing off.

So why the hell didn’t I shut up?

“No, I’m serious,” I said shakily, as I picked myself up. It was like something had turned on… or been turned off… inside me… and I no longer cared what she did to me. “Is it you? Are you… are you laughing? Is this actually funny to you?”

“You bet your ass it’s not!” Belinda raged.

“Then who is laughing?” I asked, and got a vicious backhand for my trouble.

“Nobody!” Belinda bellowed. “That’s who!”

“Then why are you doing it?” I asked, getting up again.

“Because you’ve got it coming,” Belinda said. “I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks!”

“You must be terribly disappointed,” I said. “Because you don’t look like you’re having a very good time.”

“Yeah?” she sneered. “I’ll have a good time with you after I’ve taught you some respect. Yeah. Everybody else gets a piece, why not me?”

“Oh, so, are you going to rape me, Belinda?” I goaded. She hadn’t hit me the last two times and I seemed to be gaining some kind of weird momentum. Maybe the repeated blows to the head had done some damage, somehow… the situation might not have been funny, but my condition was starting to verge on hysteria. “Why not? That seems to be the number one solution for all life’s petty complaints. High school sucked? Shitty childhood? Go ahead and have one, on me!”

“You think I won’t?” Belinda asked, her voice cracking weirdly. Why did people keep asking me this?

“I think you’ll do whatever the fuck you please!” I said. “Why not? You’re Belinda, the hot shit warrior jock! Or you were in high school. Biggest and baddest on the team, I bet, right?”

“Damn straight I was!” she said.

“Damn straight you were!” I echoed. “But now you’ve come to a major university. You’re not the only half-ogre here. You’re not the only monster player. Worse, there’s probably human fighters from bigger high schools, with better budgets and better training programs, showing you up.”

“You shut your filthy cock hole,” Belinda screeched.

“You were the big boss of a little dungeon,” I said. The whole thing was a scenario I probably would have had no clue about if it had never been used as background plot material on TV shows and in novels, but from what I understood, it was one of those rare clichés that only get to be a cliché because they happen in real life. It was like the tale Steff had spun about failing a class and losing my scholarship: it could happen. You never think it’ll be you, but nobody’s immune. “Now you’re just another freshman player filling out the roster and now you’re going to beat on me until you feel better about it, aren’t you?”

“Fuck… you!” Belinda screamed in response, bent down to bellow directly in my face. “You’re nothing! You got that? Nothing!”

“Then what the fuck are we even doing here?” I screamed, right back at her and twice as loud.

“I’ll fucking kill you!” Belinda screamed. “Do you understand that, you bug-eyed little freak? Do you fucking comprehend it?”

“I comprehend just fine,” I said. “I just don’t care. You hear me? I am past caring. Ever since I got here, people have been slapping me around… I woke up the first day and my roommate was ‘ha-ha, just pretend’-ing to murder me in my sleep! Fucking Mariel slaps me around! I am sick and fucking tired of everybody thinking they can solve their problems by beating on me! Or on anybody else! When the hell exactly did violence become the first resort?”

Belinda was beyond taken aback.

“You want to hit me? Hit me!” I yelled. “Beat me! Rape me! Kill me, if you want to! Who knows? You might get a fucking medal for it! And when you’re done, your sad… little… life will be just as sad and just as little, and the only thing that will be different is you’ll have nobody left to blame for it. So, come on… come on!”

My pulse was pounding in my ears and my breath was coming hot and ragged, like I’d just run a marathon… or maybe a sprint, if that actually gets you worked up more. I don’t know. I could see it working either way. What do I know about running?

“You’re fucked, Blaise,” Belinda said, shaking her head in disbelief. “You are seriously fucked in the head.”

“Probably!” I agreed. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I told you what I’m going to do… I’m going to pound you,” Belinda said.

“Yeah? You said you were going to kill me,” I reminded her.

“I will!” she said.

“Go ahead,” I said.

She didn’t.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she insisted.

“I know you’re not,” I said. “I wish you were, but you’re too stupid to be. The real problem is that you think it won’t mean anything if I don’t fight back… you’re right, actually, but it still won’t mean anything even if I do.”

“I’ll kick the shit right out of you either way,” Belinda said defiantly.

“But you want me to fight back,” I said.

“It’s more fun that way,” she sneered.

“We already established this isn’t about ‘fun’… but you want me to fight back? I’ll fight back,” I said. “But… we’re doing it my way. Civilized.”

“A civilized fight?” Belinda asked. “No such thing.”

“Sure there is,” I said. “We’ll take turns. You hit me as hard as you can, and then I’ll hit you, and so on. Got it?”

“You got a fucking death wish,” Belinda said.

“That would explain a lot,” I said. “Are you in?”

She answered with her fist. It was somehow lacking in comparison to the previous ones. I know she wasn’t holding back on purpose, but I think she’d already put a lot of what she had into those earlier blows. Also, she might have been more than a little unnerved already.

I was hoping so. She’d have to be, if what I had planned was going to work. If not, I’d have no real choice but to mess her up, badly.

Also, I’d have to let her hit me again.

“Alright, runt,” she said when I got back to my feet. “Your turn.” She grinned a smug, toothy grin. “I’ll even be nice and let you actually take it.”

“That’s good of you,” I said. I raised one skinny arm, balled up a tiny fist, drew back my elbow… and then lashed out blindly to my side, knocking a big chunk of cinder block out of the wall amid a shower of plaster and dust.

Incidentally, that hurt quite a bit more than her punch had. My scream of pain sounded pretty primal, though. I think it might have passed for rage.

“What the fuck?” Belinda asked, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open. She was staring at the crater my wild blow had gouged out of the wall.

“I missed,” I said, giving a lopsided grin, and resisting the urge to cradle my injured-feeling hand. “Not much of a fighter. Well… next time. C’mon, your turn.”

“Fuck this,” she said.

“It’s your turn,” I said. “Hurry up, I really want to try again.”

“Fuck this,” she repeated. “You’re using magic.”

“No magic,” I said, shaking my head. “Just me.” I bent down and picked up the chunk of brick, then crumbled it in my hands. I didn’t really want to do it… I knew I was doubling the work of whoever would have to put it back together… but I didn’t know how else to get the point across to Belinda that I could really hurt her, without really hurting her.

“This is what I am, Belinda,” I said, letting the pieces fall from my fingers. “You can beat on me all you want, but you can’t beat me, because the moment I fight back, you’ll look like that,” I said, pointing at the hole in the wall.

“You’re fucked in the head,” she said again, in a choked voice.

“Probably,” I said, once more. “What are you going to do about it?”

There was a moment when she might have launched herself at me with total abandon. I saw it on her face. She might have decided to hell with it, I was still a scrawny nerd no matter what tricks I might pull. If she did… well, I’d have to lash out, and quickly. I’d been learning–slowly but well, as Amaranth would say–that I wasn’t a fighter. If I hesitated, she’d be all over me, and she’d win. She couldn’t hurt me, but she could incapacitate me… and then do whatever she wanted.

I took a step towards her, squaring off my shoulders and lifted my hands.

The moment passed.

“Fuck this,” she said one more time. “You didn’t win.”

Then she was gone, the same powerful stride she’d used to ambush me carrying her out the door like a ballista bolt.

I can’t imagine what our “conversation” had sounded like to those out the room, but I had to believe it had been audible. Even with the identity and racial heritage of the participants unknown, it wasn’t all that surprising that nobody was in too big a hurry to investigate.

I sat down on the floor, not even bothering to stagger over to a chair. Also, the room was still dark, and I’d done enough damage to it for one day.

I’d only meant to catch my breath, but as the rush of excitement and imminent danger passed, pain seemed to seep back into my body and the floor seemed more and more to be the place to be. It was mostly in my head and arm but also in my back, shoulders, and one ankle, which I’d landed on when Belinda dropped me.

I’d won. No matter what she said, I’d won. I’d avoided violence, and still won. I’d yelled and lost my temper… and I would have to, as Dee had put it, “make an act of contrition” for that… but Amaranth could be proud of me for not having hurt anybody. I could be proud of myself.

I was laughing, even though the situation had not got one tiny bit funnier, when the door opened and a light came on.

“Just what’s going on in here?” a man asked. He was dressed relatively casually, in jeans and a polo shirt, though he was more than a bit old for a student, with noticeably salt-and-pepper streaks in his temple. Also, I couldn’t see a student opening with that line.

Well, it was getting a bit late in the day. He could be a teacher who’d been done with classes for a while… or maybe some departments had casual Fridays. I didn’t know.

“A couple people were fighting in here,” I said, truthfully, getting to my feet. “One of them knocked a chunk out of the wall.”

“And you just stood there and watched?”

“No, sir,” I said. I didn’t know the man or what his position was, so I decided to play it safe and respectful. “I tried to stop it.”

“These students today… and will you look at that,” he said, going over to examine the hole I’d knocked in the wall. He shook his head and clucked. “What were they fighting with, bolts of force? Still… not even worth bothering maintenance with. Not on a Friday, anyway. Not worth the headache.”

He waggled his fingers over the broken pieces. Their uneven surfaces began to glisten and then became smooth and round as they turned to beads of liquid, which then flowed together into a single, thick puddle. The hole in the wall drew the viscous liquid to it like a lodestone, and then the wall was solid. He made a similar attempt to draw the plaster back together, which failed and backfired in a cloud of white dust and particulate shrapnel uncomfortably close to his face.

“Don’t you have some place to be?” he demanded of me suddenly.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Um… do you want me to send for…”

“I think I can handle a little patch job!” he said indignantly, and I took my cue to leave. Not wanting to garner any more attention, I made an effort to walk normally until I was out of his sight, though my ankle didn’t want to support my weight. I could bear it, though. I knew what a real broken ankle felt like.

This was just a cheap knock-off. I could handle it.

After Ariadne and Belinda, I could handle anything.

Just… not right that moment… preferably.

Ow.

Ow.

“Was that righteous, or what?” Steff said, looking at the crowd of students with bemused and bewildered expressions on their faces, some of whom were still filtering out of the classroom. “Fuck… did everybody walk out?”

“She canceled class,” I said.

“The professor became infuriated when Mack refused to leave and then dismissed everyone,” Dee said. She cocked her head slightly to the side. “Did you not hear?”

“I heard Ariadne going orcshit, but I couldn’t really make out what she was saying,” Steff said. “Or what exactly happened before. My question is, does all this make you all the more hot for her, or less?”

“I’m not ‘hot for’ her!” I protested.

“I guess that means ‘more’,” Steff said. “Anyway, how about our Dee here? Maybe I had you pegged wrong, girl,” she said to Dee. “Not that I’ve ever pegged you… or I would peg you… or I’d need a peg… but seriously, hon, you just might want to think about changing your major from divine magic to high sassery.”

“I spoke hastily, and in anger,” Dee said. “It’s nothing to be proud of.” She gave a curt bow. “I apologize to both of you for my rudeness.”

“Um… it wasn’t directed at us,” I said.

“You were witness to it,” she said, looking at me expectantly.

“Oh,” I said. “Um… that’s okay, really. Uh… apology accepted?”

“Thank you,” she said, making a small bow. “I must go make an act of contrition, after which I shall proceed to the office of the registrar.”

“Okay,” I said. “And… thanks for standing up for me.”

It sounded inadequate, but it had to be more adequate than nothing, right?

“There was no other possibility,” Dee said. “Her behavior was indecent beyond the bounds of tolerability.”

“Do you really believe that?” I asked.

“Did you find it particularly tolerable?” Dee asked.

“No, I mean… do you really believe that there was no other possible action?” I asked.

“There were perhaps other ways in which I could have acted… some perhaps better than others,” Dee said. “But under the circumstances, there was no alternative to action. Now, if you will excuse me, I must ask my gods to forgive me, on behalf of all the others I wronged.”

“Okay,” I said. “Bye, Dee.”

“Goodbye.”

She put up her cowl and headed down the hall towards the exit.

“She knows what she did was right,” I observed to Steff. “To the point she feels it was literally necessary… but she’s going to ask her gods’ forgiveness for her ‘outburst’, all the same.”

“Yeah, she’s pretty fucked up, alright,” Steff said.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, a little irritably.

“No, really, I think it’s adorable that she talks to her imaginary friends,” Steff said. “Maybe next time you lose your temper, you should try talking to your stupid Mecknight dolls?”

“Steff, will you give it a rest?” I said. “Please?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I meant to say ‘stupid Mecknight enaction figures.’”

“Not that!” I said. “Though I’d appreciate you laying off… but I meant, why can’t you leave Dee alone?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, in tone of wounded innocence most people only adopt when they know exactly what they’ve done and why it’s wrong.

“You were so upset when I insulted your religion, but you have to cut Dee’s down every time it comes up,” I said. “Doesn’t that strike you as just a little bit hypocritical?”

“Well, yeah, but… it’s okay for me to be hypocritical,” Steff said, giving a crooked smile and a wink. “It’s only bad when other people do it.”

“I’m serious!” I said.

“Shit, okay,” Steff said, rocking back. “You don’t have to get all upset about it. I’m only joking around, honestly…”

“Well, Dee doesn’t have the same sense of humor you do,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be all bitchy about this… but with so much shit happening on this campus already, do we have to add to it?”

“I guess not,” Steff said. “Look, I wasn’t serious… let’s just drop it. And, talking about dropping things… you wanna head over to the reg office and get this unsightly blemish removed from our schedules?”

“I’ll walk over with you,” I said. “But I’m not letting her run me out of there.”

“Come on, Mack… there’s principles, and then there’s being stupid,” Steff said. “And principally, this is stupid.”

“It’s like Dee said… there’s no other choice,” I said.

“Sure there is,” Steff said. “Quit. Drop it. There’s no shame… you beat her. You won.”

“Not if I quit,” I said.

“If she fails you, you’ve lost,” Steff said. “Anyway… Amaranth would want you to avoid the conflict, right?”

“That’s a low blow,” I said.

“It’s true, though,” Steff said.

“It’s true that she’d want it, but you don’t have a problem with conflict,” I said.

“I don’t want you turning into a martyr,” Steff said. “I mean, I don’t want to pry into your private stuff… well, I want to pry really deep into your private stuff… but can you afford to fail a class?”

I sighed. The thing was, she was right.

“Probably not,” I said.

“And what good are you going to do for anybody here if you wash out?” Steff asked hotly. “Anyway, what will you accomplish if you keep the class?”

“I might learn something,” I said. “There’s a rumor that says that’s what we’re here for.”

“You’re an enchantment major,” Steff said, suddenly angry to the point of tears for some reason. “So don’t give me a bunch of ‘love of knowledge’ crap… you’re a gold farmer, pure and simple.”

“That’s uncalled for,” I said, a little detachedly. Where had this hostility come from? It was a little bit baffling… and that made me want to get even angrier in turn. I didn’t, though. Partly because Steff was my friend and I loved her, but partly because I think I’d already hit some kind of emotional overload. Things had been coming at me so fast and so strong for so long that I’d really kind of hit the bottom level of the dungeon in some regards. “Yeah, maybe I don’t want to be poor all my life, but I like learning.”

“I’m sorry,” Steff said, and she sounded like it. “It’s just…”

She sniffled and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Look… you should do what you feel is best, okay, hon?”

She started inspecting her fingernails for minute flaws, raised her hand to her mouth and started to bite one, and then quickly lowered it, looking very briefly ashamed, and then began the examination again.

“You’re afraid that I’ll leave,” I realized. “That I’ll fail the class and lose my scholarship.”

“It could happen,” Steff said, speaking with a weird rapidity that reminded me of Mariel at her most manic. “Don’t think it couldn’t… a lot of people end up screwing themselves that way. Don’t kid yourself, Mack. It could happen.”

“I know, but I mean… you’re really upset by the idea,” I said, looking up into her face.

“I’m not in love with you!” Steff blurted out in response.

Okay, that wasn’t random.

“I didn’t say you…”

“It’s only been like a week and a half, anyway,” Steff went on. “So the whole idea is ridiculous. Anyway, I don’t even believe that romantic love is possible, without sex, and you haven’t exactly been… so… I’m not.”

“Okay,” I said. I could have added “I believe you”… but that would have been a total and abject lie. Steff was in love with me. In terms of weird thoughts, that maybe ranked above Steff has a penis. “Look, I’ll go to the registrar’s office and find another class to join… something else that looks interesting. Another history class, if I can.”

“Oh, okay then,” Steff said. She seemed a little bit spellshocked. “Good. I’m… I’m glad you came around.”

“I mean, if I am here to learn… I’ll probably learn more from a teacher that doesn’t hate my guts, anyway,” I said. It felt like I was backing down, but I figured there was more than one principle worth acting on… if Steff was that worried, that distressed, over the possibility–likelihood–of me washing out of school, that was something I couldn’t avoid acting on. Like Dee, my choice was already made. “And what you said makes sense.”

“What I said?” Steff asked, sounding as though she’d already forgotten it.

“That I won’t be able to do much good if I’m not even on campus next semester,” I said. “That.”

“Oh,” Steff said. Her brain seemed to reset itself. “Oh! I totally forgot! After I gave him suitable praise for his artistic genius, Viktor told me he wants to meet you… no, actually, he said he needs to meet you.”

“Um, okay,” I said. Had Amaranth spoken to him about my request to take Steff out on a real date? For that matter, was it actually a good idea to go through with it, if there was a chance Steff was in love with me? Or did that just make it an even better idea?

“Alone, too, he said,” Steff said. “But don’t worry… I’ll kind of introduce you guys, to break the ice, you know?”

“When?” I asked.

“Not tonight,” Steff said. “He’s going to be revising. But he said this weekend, for sure.”

“Okay,” I said. “As far as I know, my schedule’s wide open.”

“Only… remember to be respectful to him, okay?” Steff said. “You see, ogre relationships are kind of… unilateral, in nature. I mean, the word which usually gets translated as ‘lover’ literally means the sole of your boot. I’m beneath him, Amaranth is beneath me, and you’re beneath her, so…”

“So, I’m way beneath him,” I said. “That’s… nice.”

“Oh, it’s not like that!” Steff said. “I mean, it isn’t anything to take personally. It’s more like a… propriety… thing. Also… um… don’t mention diluted pomegranate nectar in front of him.”

“Um… I’ll do my best not to?” I said uncertainly.

“It’s kind of a signal we’ve arranged,” Steff said. “Like a safe word… only kind of in reverse.”

“Do I want to know what that means?” I asked her.

Steff laughed.

“Honestly?” she said. “Probably not… though maybe. Actually, you might even be into it.”

“Into wha… you know, never mind,” I said. “I’m going to stick with my instincts on this one. I don’t want to know.”

That, of course, made Steff really want to tell me… but I held firm. It was part of my whole “willpower” thing I was working on. I must say, it was a lot more dignified than blowing my top… even if there was some plugging of ears and singing of “la la la” involved.

When we got to the registrar’s office, I dropped from elven history and got myself signed up for a course in early republican history instead. Okay, so it wasn’t as exciting as elven history, but it would still be interesting. I also made myself a promise: even though I’d dropped out of her class, I wasn’t going to surrender to Professor Ariadne. Now that she had less leverage over me, I would try talking to her and find out exactly what it was about me that she hated–or feared–so damn much.

I could only deal with one problem at a time, though. I wasn’t going to be good for much at the floor meeting if I had a bunch of thoughts jumbling around in my head about Ariadne and her bizarre vendetta, or Steff and her semi-half-unprofessed love for me, or Viktor and his extracurricular activities.

Luckily, there was a test paper waiting on our desks when I got to my logic class. The professor had arrived early so that people could jump right in, which meant Sooni missed out on her customary passing swipe. An hour of working out the best structures for layered spells did a pretty good job of clearing out my head. The work was intricate, but not unduly challenging… that made it almost meditative. It was such a very orderly subject, and I left the class feeling ready for anything the evening might bring.

It is a sad… though inescapable… fact that no amount of logic test questions whatsoever will do jack shit to prepare you for dealing with an ogre’s fist.

“Whatever happens tonight, baby, I’m proud that you tried,” Amaranth said. “We all are. Right?”

“I’m shocked that she tried,” Celia said. “I’ll be proud if she wins. No… probably still shocked.”

“Thanks,” I said wanly. I actually appreciated her candor, somehow. I was starting to believe there was no malice in Celia. Not that she didn’t mean exactly what she said. She just didn’t mean anything personal by it.

“I think that Mack will win,” Two said. “Voters are supposed to select the candidate best suited to represent them and Mack is more suited than Sooni.”

“Two, hon, you should do P.S.A.s before the real elections,” Steff said. “Maybe if people knew they’re supposed to vote for the candidate who’ll do the best job, we wouldn’t have so many useless assholes winding up as consul.”

“I don’t know why anybody bothers to vote in those things anyway,” Celia said. “Don’t they know the popular vote is meaningless?”

“That’s not true,” Amaranth said. “Under the Imperial Constitution, emperors are legally obligated to look at the popular vote before appointing new consuls… and in nearly fifty percent of the cases where the consular election results were released, the emperor’s choice matched the popular vote.”

“May the Republican spirit never die,” Celia said sarcastically, raising her chocolate milk in a toast, and on that cheery note breakfast ended.

Near the beginning of my thaumatology lecture, I thought I saw Professor Goldman’s eyes catch a few times as they moved past me, and the still larger empty area around me.

“You know,” Goldman said about halfway through the class, breaking his usual cadence. “At the beginning of the term, I told you that I’m not much of a stickler for attendance. I feel like it’s your time and your call how you want to spend it, whether you’ll get more out of an hour of listening to my mellifluous recitation or an hour of sleep… but all the same, every once in a while I do like to offer incentives to stack the deck in my favor. So, today I’m giving an attendance bonus… no, let’s make that a double bonus. Every student who is present today will be given two free one hundred percents, to substitute for their lowest test or quiz scores.”

The response to this was varied–ranging from stunned disbelief to outright applause–but overwhelmingly positive. Professor Goldman gave a little bow and a smile, then held up his hands until order was restored.

“Of course,” he added, “I count attendance by checking against the seating chart you all filled out at the beginning of the year, so if for some reason you’re here but you aren’t in your own seat, you’ve already been counted absent. Better luck next time.”

His eyes didn’t so much as flicker upwards, but nearly everybody else in the room looked back at me… or rather, at the people who had moved two or three seats away from me, who were only just beginning to comprehend that they’d just cost themselves two free grades.

Or that I had cost them two free grades.

One boy rather belatedly decided to get up and move back to his seat, in the row in front of me.

“Why, what is this apparition I see suddenly manifesting in an empty seat?” Goldman said. He glanced down at the chart in his hand. “You can have one free hundred… Mr. Mallory… well, since I can’t give an ‘E’ for effort. I wonder will we have any other unexpected arrivals?”

A handful of other people… maybe half of the displaced students… scurried back to their seats. Goldman marked them off as they did, and continued to watch the area avidly, but nobody else showed any sign of moving. Those who were still out of their proper seats seemed to be looking anywhere except at him.

“Anybody else?” he said. “Nobody? Okay, then. Let’s continue.”

He finished the class as if nothing had happened, though people kept glancing in my direction. I didn’t know how to feel. If I’d watched Goldman pull that stunt in defense of somebody else–like Twyla or Dee, or Two–I would have admired him all the more for it.

Why had he had to go and do it for me, though? If people were going to resent my presence anyway, I’d rather they did it from a distance.

“We will be having our first major test on Monday,” Goldman said at the end of the class. “It will be over everything we’ve covered in class for the past two weeks, plus the assigned reading.” He paused to let that sink in. So far, his lectures had only covered the essential highlights of each chapter, with his own additions and anecdotes, and his quizzes had only been about the things covered in the lecture. I would have guessed that most of the class had yet to open their textbook, if they’d even bought it. “It will be extremely difficult and last the whole hour.”

This announcement was met with a chorus of groans and protests.

When that subsided, he simply nodded and said, “I know, I know… personally, if I knew I could get a hundred for it anyway, I wouldn’t even bother showing up. Have a great weekend, everybody, and I’ll see most of you on Wednesday.”

Most of the room, knowing that they could skip class and still have a free perfect grade left, burst into applause at this. The reaction from the people who’d only been given one pass was a bit more restrained. The remainder looked mutinous, but said nothing. I left the classroom as fast as I could.

Okay, so while I honestly wished he hadn’t pulled that last stunt, I couldn’t really hold it against him. He’d meant well. If I was going to blame anybody, it should be the people who’d provoked the response.

Anyway, I liked Professor Goldman. His goofy honesty and genuine interest in his chosen subject had impressed me from the beginning. It wasn’t too early to start thinking about my schedule for the next semester–it was really never too early for that–and I wondered if he taught any smaller classes that I could get into. It seemed like he’d be a fun teacher to interact with.

I was halfway tempted to show up on Monday, just to see how I’d do on the test. I’d kept up with the assigned reading, of course, and so much of it was familiar to me anyway… if I took it and it ended up being my lowest grade, it was no loss since I could still take the hundred for it. All I’d lose was an hour that I would normally have spent in class anyway.

On the other hand, though, I’d spend that hour surrounded by people who would have every reason to be pissed at me and who would blame me for the fact that they had to be there.

As mixed as my feelings were about the whole thing, Professor Goldman’s actions–and the speed with which some of my classmates had overcome their revulsion in the interest of their grades–had left me feeling better about things. Trina was one person. Okay, there was also Sooni, and Maliko, and Belinda, and Puddy, and Sara and Tara… but they were all, individually, “just one person.”

Well, except for Sara and Tara.

The point was that there were all kinds of people in the world. That thought buoyed my mood through lunch, where I let Two help me put together and eat an outrageously oversized ice cream sundae in a cereal bowl with three brownie squares in the bottom.

I had a free period after lunch, but Steff was supposed to be listening to Viktor’s latest “creation” (she said this with air quotes) and Amaranth had class, so I spent the time thinking about what I would say at the floor meeting, before the ballots were cast. I figured it was important to keep things short and sweet, so as not to put my foot in my mouth… but also not leave out anything crucial. Also, I kept going back and forth about whether or not it would be a good idea to bring up any of Sooni’s misdeeds. Probably not. It might sound like I was desperate. I’d stick to the issues, and my own qualifications.

If I could figure out what they were.

After my brainstorming session, I was still in better shape than I had been that morning, but I’d managed to work up a cloud of doubts again… just in time for elven history, where I dealt with another of all of those kinds of people in the world: the bitter, unreasoning harpy.

I half-expected Professor Ariadne Einhorn to drop a class change form on my desk, already filled out except for my signature. I was wrong, but not by much.

“I would just like to remind the entire class,” she said, again looking directly at me as she spoke, “that today is absolutely the final day that you may drop out of this class without being assigned a grade, and that the registrar’s office closes half an hour early on Friday, so you will need to get there before 4:30 if you, for any reason, have any doubts about your ability to earn a passing grade.”

Was she threatening to flunk me? As far as I knew, she hadn’t graded us on anything yet. As the only homework she ever gave was the instruction “think”, I wasn’t sure how she could grade us.

“If I were concerned about my grade point average,” she continued, “I should probably want to go take care of the matter right… now, so I don’t forget to later.”

The room was deadly silent. I think the only thing that stopped me from taking her suggestion was the weight of eyes–hers and others–upon me. She had me. I couldn’t stand up to that kind of pressure. I never could. She’d won. Couldn’t she see that, and just let me go?

There was the slightest of sounds beside me.

“I was not speaking to you, Miss Delia Daella,” the professor said, and now that her gaze was off me, I turned to see that Dee had risen from her seat.

“Do not presume to start now,” Dee retorted, and swept past me, heading out of the room without a backwards glance.

“Well,” Ariadne said, a bit after Dee had gone. She seemed to have lost her stream of thought. “Well,” she said again, looking around the room as if hoping she’d find a cue somewhere. “Well, Steffain… you look eager to say something. Perhaps you would like to help me start our lesson by sharing with the class the famous final words of Aeolus of Kynemathia to his captors on the eve of his execution?”

“‘Go fuck yourself sideways with a spiked mace’?” Steff said.

Ariadne turned an even whiter shade of pale as Steff stood, bowed to the class, and headed for the door.

Then the dwarf, Karl, son of Krieg, of the Clan Ironholt, also got up and left the room.

To my even greater surprise, a human boy whose name I hadn’t caught followed, and then another boy and a girl did, as well. The professor tried her best to take these departures in stride, but was clearly shaken. Her little power play was not going according to plan.

I could hardly believe it myself. I mean, a somewhat embittered half-elf, a d… differently colored elf, and a dwarf might all be expected to take sides with somebody they saw as a victim of elven oppression, especially as two of the individuals were my friends… but I’d never talked to Karl, and I was certainly nothing to any of the human students, except maybe an oddity or a threat.

Though, I could understand not wanting to be locked into a class with a professor who apparently graded according to her arbitrary likes and dislikes.

“Well,” Ariadne said again, fixing her eyes upon me. “Are you even going to leave, now that you’ve incited half the class to desert?”

That seemed like an easy question. I was just squeaking by financially even with my scholarships. If I couldn’t keep up my GPA, it would be hard–if not impossible–for me to stay in school at all.

Dee and Steff hadn’t been thinking of their grades, though. They’d been standing up for what they thought was right… or at least, for me. I still wasn’t sure how much Steff actually cared about right and wrong in any larger sense than that.

Still, though, it had been a matter of principle.

“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I guess you’re going to have to flunk me.”

“You don’t think I’ll do it?” Ariadne asked.

“I’m… pretty sure you will,” I said, surprising myself at how easily the words were coming. She wasn’t haughtily beautiful any more. She wasn’t intimidating. I saw her for what she was: a bully… and like so many other bullies, she was scared of something.

“Then why stay?” she demanded shrilly. She’d lost every measure of control over her musical, magical voice. She also seemed to have forgotten for the moment that she was a teacher in a classroom. It was like we were the only two people in the room… for me, as much as for her. “Why?”

“Because I’m here to learn,” I said, feeling defiant. “Not for easy credits.”

The mention of credits seemed to bring her back to herself. I watched her eyes begin to look around the room as her world grew to encompass more than just me.

“Class… class dismissed,” she said weakly.

I had no idea what had just happened, but I thought I might have just won something, somehow. I felt weak and dazed, and I lost most of my monster brownie sundae in the women’s restroom down the hall, and I was committing myself to keep up a class with a teacher who personally loathed and had promised to fail me… but it still somehow felt like a win to me.

I guess that says more about my track record with victories than anything else.

Two was just coming out of her room. She’d put on her fuzzy white sweater with the matching hair bow. She hadn’t been wearing them before, so I figured she must have been caught out in the down pour.

“Hi, Mack!” she said. Her eyes rolled down the length of my body and then back up again. It would have been a disconcerting reaction from her, but the expression on her face was one of concern. “Are you okay?”

“Hi, Two,” I said. I reached up to brush some hair out of my face and found a couple blades of grass stuck to my hand. “I had my weapon class a bit ago.”

“I don’t think you did very well,” Two said.

“No, I guess I didn’t,” I said, smiling. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” Two said. That was new. Was “fine” better than “okay”? Was there a chart somewhere? “Do you know what a teddy bear does?” she asked me.

“Um, not really, I guess,” I said. As far as I knew they didn’t really do anything. The more expensive ones usually had enaction spells put on them, or vocal enchantments, or other features designed to make them seem more interactive, but I was pretty sure Two’s bingo prize had just been the basic model.

“Nothing!” Two declared in an awed tone. “They… just… sit there.”

“Oh,” I said.

Well, what else was I supposed to say?

If she had been the funny stupidly intelligent golem character on a stupid TV show, she probably would have been complaining about being given a prize that had no useful function and it would have been my place to try to explain to her the emotional value of a stuffed animal and be called illogical.

This was reality, though… and in reality, Two somehow found the idea of a useless toy impressive.

“They don’t do anything,” Two said, as if she feared I had missed the point. She sounded like a little kid who’d just run all the way from the school coach to the front door because she just had to tell her mom the exciting new fact she’d learned about squirrels or something.

Okay, so I’d been a dork in grade school, too.

“That’s… um… nice,” I said.

“It is!” Two agreed with wide-eyed emphasis. “It is nice.”

I was inches away from nodding my head and agreeing once again that yes, it was nice, when I had a better idea.

“Two… why is that nice?” I asked instead, conversationally.

“Because they always do what they’re supposed to,” she said. “They can’t not.”

“And that’s nice?” I asked.

“It is,” Two said, nodding gravely. “You can put a teddy bear on a shelf or in a curio cabinet or on your bed or in a toy box or among other stuffed animals or you can just hold it to your chest, but no matter where it is the teddy bear doesn’t have to do anything differently because it doesn’t have to do anything.”

“That is pretty impressive,” I said, smiling. It sounded like Two had done some serious research to find out the function of her newest possession, before deciding that it didn’t have one.

“Also, you can hold a teddy bear when you’re trying to sleep to keep from crying,” Two said. “But it’s like humming. It doesn’t actually do anything.”

It took me a moment to figure out what she meant about humming, but I wasn’t too distracted figuring it out to realize the significance of the rest of her statement.

“Are you still crying every night?” I asked.

She nodded.

“I’m sad every night,” she said, and it suddenly showed on her face, like the perverse opposite of the sun breaking through the clouds. Her voice became quiet, defeated… more like it had been at the beginning of the first week. “I don’t want to be.”

“Two,” I said. “Um… if Puddy officially moves out of my room, would you like to move in?”

“Yes, please,” she said, in that same voice.

“Um… would you like a hug?” I asked her.

She shook her head, to my surprise.

“Do you not like hugs?” I asked, worried that we’d unknowingly been causing her distress.

“I do like hugs,” she said, her voice regaining some of its color as she made the assertion. She continued to regain her strength and composure as she continued. “But you are very dirty and I’m wearing my pretty white sweater, so I do not would like to hug you right now. You should probably take a shower and put on clean clothes. Amaranth says that wearing dirty clothing and things will only make you feel dirtier about your woman parts.”

Hey, folks! Just in case you were wondering what’s the single most awful thing your adorably innocent kid sister figure can pick to talk about, there you go! Isn’t learning swell?

“Woman parts aren’t dirty,” she added, with soul-destroying levels of earnestness. “They’re just there.”

“Amaranth tell you that, too?” I managed to ask through a case of almost total paralysis.

“No,” she said proudly. “I figured that out by myself.”

An attitude like that could lead to problems if she ever got to the point of pursuing relationships beyond friendship, but I decided to let it go for the time being if only to let the conversation die. It had reminded me that I’d made up my mind to have a serious talk about sex with Two, but that was a conversation for another time, when I wasn’t half-covered in mud and reeling from the words “make you feel dirtier about your woman parts” coming out of Two’s mouth.

“You should take a shower,” she said again.

“It’s almost time for dinner, though,” I said.

“You are supposed to eat,” Two said, her eyes blinking while she worked things over in her head. “But you’re not supposed to be dirty…”

“You know, what I think I really need is a good, long soak in the tub,” I said.

The way my cold, damp clothes clung to me was starting to get me, and I was becoming increasingly conscious of the aches and discomfort in my back and waist from some combination of my fall during mixed melee or Steff’s vigorous exertions in an awkward position beneath the trees. I also felt a little physically and emotionally drained from it all, and somehow a hot bath sounded more therapeutic than a hurried shower before dinner.

“You’re supposed to eat,” Two said.

“I’ll grab something from the store when I get out,” I said. “I promise. It’s just… I am pretty dirty, and I didn’t really notice before but my back is kind of messed up from… um… when I was on the ground.”

There was no sense elaborating, really.

“You were doing sex things,” Two said confidently.

And, apparently, no need.

“Um, yeah,” I said, reddening. “Um…”

“I’ll go tell the others you’re taking a bath,” Two said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“The lady who refills the tubs told me there’s banana pudding tonight,” Two said. “I would bring you some but dining hall food is not to leave the premises.”

“That’s okay,” I said. I could think of about a dozen flavors of pudding I’d rather have than banana, but I didn’t say that. “Thanks.”

“Go take your bath,” she said, pointing insistently towards the bathroom.

I laughed.

“Okay,” I said. “I just need to get my towel and a change of clothes.”

“And don’t forget to eat!” she added as I headed towards my door.

I took a few moments to check my appearance when I got into my room. Not only were my clothes even dirtier than I’d realized, back and front–filth spreads, as my grandmother would have said–but my hair was sticking up crazily, and matted with leaves and grass.

Two had already headed down when I emerged. I hurried to the bathroom, eager to reach the privacy of one of the recessed stone bathtubs before I had another encounter like the one with the Leighton twins.

Fortunately, one of the tubs was unoccupied. Unfortunately, only one of them was.

“Come for a nap?” Feejee asked from the other one.

She’d shifted her legs back into their more natural tail form, just as she had the last time I’d seen her in the tub… when I’d spent a night sleeping in the other one to avoid becoming a nocturnal fire hazard. Feejee, who had naturally never encountered fire at the bottom of the fucking ocean, had innocently asked what it was, and I’d basically called her an idiot for it.

“I thought I’d put some water in this time,” I said, deciding to try for a joke. “That’s… um… the wet stuff that comes out of the faucet, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. She gave a weak laugh. “That’s the stuff.”

Okay, so we were past one hurdle. Evidently my little faux pas was one of those things that we could look back on and laugh at.

Now the only problem I had was that I had to get undressed in front of her. Not that she was staring, or had any reason to… clothing was about as common as fire in the undersea realm, and she never wore anything except her boyfriend’s jacket. She’d actually seen me naked on that previous occasion. I thought about that, trying to convince myself that it was no big deal… but somehow that made it a bigger deal instead.

“You’re obviously new at this,” Feejee said. “Step one is you take off your clothes. Step two is you turn on the water. Step three is you get in. If you’re feeling kind of crazy, you can mix up steps two and three.”

I must have been feeling really crazy, because I mixed up all the steps: after setting my clean clothes down, I stepped into the tub and drew the curtain, then took off my dirty stuff, carefully reaching around the curtain to set them on the floor.

“You’re pretty prudish all of a sudden,” Feejee said. I pretended I couldn’t hear her over the sound of the water turning on five seconds after she finished talking. The water that came out was freaking cold and I jumped when it splashed on my toes. It heated up pretty quickly… I’d only used the hot water knob and I’d turned it all the way. I hated cold, but heat didn’t bother me one bit.

“Awfully steamy over there,” Feejee said shortly after I turned the water off.

“I… uh… like it hot,” I said. Was she going to talk to me the whole time I was in there?

“A closed curtain isn’t very sociable,” she said.

“It helps keep in the heat,” I said. Did it? It probably had to, I guessed.

“I like my baths warm,” Feejee said. “But not too warm… and sometimes cold water can be bracing. Also, it makes my nipples stick out more, which apparently guys go for up here. Nobody honestly pays any attention to breasts in the ocean. Back home, it’s all about your flukes.”

“Oh,” I said. What the hell was a fluke?

“That’s why I was kind of surprised to learn that more topsiders aren’t interested in feet,” she said, evidently encouraged by my comment. I guessed that meant flukes were the fins at the end of a mermaid’s tail. “Rick is, though, which is good. He does like my breasts, too, and I’m fine with that, but I personally think even when I lose my scales, my feet are still my best feature.”

“Uh, right,” I said.

“Nobody ever pays any attention to them, though,” Feejee continued. “You like women, Mack… have you ever noticed my feet?”

I didn’t argue the “liking women” thing. There were at least two… well, three now, if I counted Gloria… women that I liked. I could and would have argued against “lesbian”, but “you like women” seemed to be at least technically true.

As for her feet… had I? It seemed to me when I thought about it that they had been a bit on the large side… they weren’t like snow shovels or anything, but rather long and maybe just a little bit more triangular than most feet, widening a bit towards the toes. They weren’t like ugly or misshapen or anything, but they weren’t exactly what you’d call dainty, like Steff’s… or even mine. I mean, I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at my feet, but now that the subject was up and I could look across the tub and see my toes wiggle under the water, they were… well… kind of cute. I guess that’s the advantage of being a scrawny little wuss: you get to have delicate feet.

I thought about Amaranth’s feet. She was a larger girl than Steff or me, of course, and her feet had to support all of that, but for all that they were still pretty shapely, and not the least bit what you’d call oversized.

“Mack?” Feejee prompted. “Are you okay?”

“Huh? Yeah,” I said.

“Well?” she asked. “What about my feet?”

“Um… are they kind of big?” I said, doubtfully.

“I think they are,” she said. “But nobody gives them a second glance, except Rick. That’s how I knew he was into me.”

“You know, I kind of just want to take my bath,” I said, trying to keep my tone friendly.

“Oh,” Feejee said. “I was just trying to make conversation.”

“I know,” I said. “But I’ve had kind of a long day, and…”

“It’s fine,” she said, a little snappishly. What was she getting irritated for?

“I don’t mean any…” I started to say, but she said, “I said it’s fine.”

Oh, well.

I heard her moving around in the water a bit after that, but other than that I might have been alone. I felt like I had a lot of things I should have been thinking about… but I couldn’t bring myself to think of anything, and it felt good. Was that what a teddy bear felt like, I wondered idly. The thought seemed a long time coming and a long time going, too.

A couple of times somebody came in to use the toilets or the sinks, but they passed through without saying anything. When somebody finally did speak, it shocked me out of a listless sort of reverie I’d fallen into, in which state it seemed like I could feel the water around me in the same way that I felt out the elemental water within my sample of earth.

“Hey, Feej!” the voice–which I recognized but couldn’t identify–called.

“Hey, Trina,” Feejee replied, and the voice fell into place, my mind assigning it the image of a girl with a large extra eye in the middle of her forehead.

“Party on the boys’ side later,” Trina said. “Thirsty Thursday. You in?”

“Who’s going?”

“Me, Sar and Tar… and maybe Twyla if they can’t ditch her, Gladys and a bunch from her floor,” Trina said. “It’s supposed to be BYOB, but you know we can score free drinks.”

“You, maybe,” Feejee said. “I suppose for me it’ll depend on if Rick comes or not. Anyway, I don’t mind providing my own… it’s not like I can’t afford it.”

“Yeah, I guess not,” Trina said. “Hey, did you get one of those weird letters shoved under your door?”

“Um… no,” Feejee said. “Not that I know of.”

“Really?” Trina asked. “There was one for both me and Amaranth, so I figured everybody…. oh, Khersis fucking Dei… you don’t think that means it likes me?”

“What are you talking about?” Feejee asked, sounding utterly perplexed. I was, too. When she’d said “weird letters”, I’d assumed that she was talking about my campaign letter… but this didn’t sound like that.

“That demon thing put this letter under my door,” Trina said. “Saying how we should all vote for it, and there’s this whole big ‘You don’t know me’ thing at the beginning… I couldn’t decide if that was scary or sad. I didn’t think I was even going to bother voting but now I will just to make sure Suzi wins.”

“I’m pretty sure the one who’s running is called ‘Sooni’,” Feejee said. “And yeah, I did get that letter… but I don’t think it’s as bad as you’re making it sound.”

“You’re not actually thinking of voting for it?” Trina asked aghast.

“Dunno,” Feejee said, and I heard a sound which I visualized as a flick of her tail, slapping the water. My mind translated that as a shrug.

“You can’t!” Trina protested. “I would just die if that thing was representing my floor.”

“You know, maybe I’ll see you at the party,” Feejee said, rather abruptly. It had the sound of a dismissal. “If I’m not doing something with Rick.”

“Oh, don’t be so damned sensitive,” Trina said. “Demons aren’t people, you know. They don’t even look like people unless they eat somebody’s face. I can’t believe nobody’s arrested it yet… or destroyed it.”

“I’ll talk to you later,” Feejee said.

“Um, I’ll tell Fin you’re a maybe, then,” Trina said. “Bye, then.”

“Goodbye.”

A bit after the door closed, Feejee said, “You could have said something to her.”

“You could have, too,” I said. For that matter, Trina might have noticed the tub with a closed curtain and the piles of clothes beside it. For a girl who could focus her eyes in multiple directions, she seemed to have a bad case of tunnel vision.

“I did say something,” she said.

I had meant she could have told Trina that the person she was talking about was right behind her, on the other side of a curtain… but since she had sort of been sticking up for me, I didn’t press the point.

I heard the water sloshing as she transformed and rose out of the tub.

“I want you to know,” I heard her say as she was toweling off, “that if I don’t vote for you… and I haven’t made up my mind… it’ll be because I think you’d make a lousy leader, not because of anything else.”

“Um… thanks?” I said. Was that what they called comforting, where she was from?

“You can say that nobody really knows you, but you don’t make yourself very easy to know,” she said. There was what I must assume was a deliberate pause, and then she added, “Or like.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do?” I asked a little… just a little hotly.

“Talk to people,” she said. “Get to know them. Get out a bit. Loosen up.”

“According to popular rumor, I’m loose enough as it is,” I said.

“You should come to the party tonight,” she said.

“On the boys’ side?” I asked. “After dark?”

“See, that’s what I meant by ‘loosen up’,” she said. “Nobody cares.”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“There’s beer,” she said.

“Double no thanks,” I said.

“Well,” she said on the way to the door, and I could practically hear her defeated shrug as she said it. “I tried.”

In the end it was only my promise to Two that kept me from bolting back to my room and hiding in it for the rest of the night. As it was, I ran down stairs and out to the corner store just before it closed to get myself a garden salad, and then hid in my room for the rest of the night. I ended up eating the salad with my fingers because I’d been in too much of a hurry to remember grabbing a fork.

If Trina’s reaction to my letter was typical–and I really had no reason to suspect her attitude was an isolated case–then I’d probably erred disastrously by writing it in the first place… it would have been better to just let my campaign quietly die.

By the time Amaranth came back from her Mechan meeting at a rather late hour, I’d managed to convince myself that a crushing defeat would be the least of my humiliation on Friday, and I ended up crying in her arms for a good ten minutes before she gave me a very light, very tender spanking and told me how happy Steff had been at the circle.

Well, that was something to look forward to, I told myself… after I failed to win the senate seat, I’d have more time for my friends, my relationship with Amaranth, and my growing relationships with Steff and Ian.

Three relationships, with people of three different genders.

Was it any wonder people thought I was weird?

Her stroke, aimed at my neck, had been a little bit off in both aim and speed, and so her spectral weapon had taken a sort of slow diagonal path through my shoulder and chest. The pain made the world gray out a bit and I fell backwards on grass slick from a mid-afternoon rain, and came to with her standing over me, her body framed against a dark gray sky and the tip of her mock sword hovering over my throat.

“I apologize,” she said, tilting her head deferentially. “If I had performed that maneuver correctly, your pain would have been both minor and brief.”

She pulled the sword aside and all of a sudden my focus, which had understandably been on the point of the blade, suddenly found itself locking onto a point beyond where the blade had been. Gloria was wearing a pair of those black sweatpants that are all tight instead of loose and baggy, and given her religious proclivities, she probably would have been embarrassed if she had realized the level of… topographical detail… that they revealed to me at that moment.

Oh, I thought as a blinding flash of insight went off in my head. So that’s what Ian meant.

That’s getting ahead, though. Let me jump back a bit.

This time I was present for the beginning of class, which consisted of demonstrations of technique in front of the whole class. Professor Callahan and Dobbs showed a variety of stances, and different moves and counters that could be implemented with a variety of weapons, calling volunteers from among the more experienced students to show how they might be adapted with knives, swords, axes, and other weapons.

Callahan called on Steff fairly often for this, and Steff was very clearly showing off for her, though the instructor looked far from impressed with her antics.

“I really think I’ve got a chance with her,” Steff said when she returned to the line, on the other side of me from Gloria.

“She looked like she wanted to spit on you,” I whispered, not really keen on the professor noticing I was talking during her demonstration.

“Oh, not me,” Steff said dismissively. “Maybe you, though,” she said. “That would be hot. You should try to provoke her, Mack.”

“Are you kidding?” I asked. “She’d probably just flatten me again.”

“That works for me, too,” Steff said, and she surprised me with a pinch on the ass. She had to stoop down a bit to do this, but I didn’t even see her move. Elves: they’re just more annoying.

I jumped and squealed, then clapped a hand over my mouth to stifle the squeal… after I’d already let it out.

“You got a problem, Crybaby?” Callahan asked, looking over.

“No, ma’am,” I said, sheepishly. “Professor,” I added, then remembered that fighters don’t really like being called that and corrected, “Uh, Coach.”

“Well… keep it that way,” she said, and went back to her demonstration.

After that, we broke down into our groups to practice. Dobbs, the T.A. who was in charge of newbies like me, had apparently decided to pretend I didn’t exist. I didn’t care, though. Gloria was probably a better teacher than he was.

I begged off taking offense. Aside from being far more comfortable with defense, I hadn’t actually absorbed a lot of the demonstration. Actually, except when I’d been watching Steff, I hadn’t really been paying attention at all. In my defense, though, Gloria was pretty distracting. It might seem odd, after having spent a couple weeks in the presence of cereal nymphs and elfbloods and animal folk, to say that a “mere” human seemed more exotic…

Wait… is that racist?

Is it racist to say that an islander is exotic? I mean, I’m not just talking about the color of her skin… which really was lovely… but rather the fact that her culture was completely different from mine. The Argentus Archipelago had never been a part of either the old Imperium or the Imperial Republic. I knew as much about it as anybody who paid enough attention in world history class, but that wasn’t the same as experiencing the culture, or meeting somebody who’d grown up in it.

You know, I’m just going to say she was from a culture that was exotic to me. That’s probably safest.

So, yeah… Gloria was from a culture that was exotic to me.

That was distracting.

“Is your surname really Blaise?” she asked after we’d both warmed up a bit.

“Yes,” I said. I didn’t mean to be terse, but it wasn’t that natural for me to converse while trying not to get hit by a sword.

“There was a demonhunter with that name,” Gloria said. “Brimstone Blaise.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” I said, stepping to the side to avoid her thrust.

“‘Him’ was a her,” Gloria said, her beatific smile twisting sardonically. “She was quite famous, once. I thought perhaps you took the name to mock her.”

“I got it from my mother,” I said. “And there’s no demonhunters in my family.”

“I guess that there wouldn’t be,” she said, a little grimly, and let it drop.

Nothing actually changed, but somehow I was suddenly less comfortable with the arrangement of me more or less standing there while she took swipes at me with a blade, phantasmal or not.

“What about your family?” I asked, trying to fill the gap. “I didn’t think there were a lot of Khersians in the islands.”

“There are not,” she said. “But Lord Khersis’s blessings are for all men, even those who labor in ignorance of it.”

“Or opposition to it?” I asked.

“That is ignorance,” she said. “No human can willfully do evil, once he has seen the truth.”

I couldn’t help laughing a bit at this, even as I was doing my best to fend off her attacks.

“You think that is funny, demon?” she asked, her dark eyes suddenly blazing. “You should not… for that fact will be the ultimate undoing of your kind.”

“No!” I protested, holding my hands out wide. “I just… I laughed because you reminded me of my… well, of Amaranth.”

“Of who?” Gloria asked. Apparently, she didn’t listen to salacious rumors as much as Ian did.

“She’s a cereal nymph in my dorm,” I said. “She doesn’t believe anybody’s evil, either.”

“I see,” Gloria said. I guess I must have hit a nerve, because her attacks became a good deal faster, and a lot less graceful. Eventually, after a particularly wild lunge-and-miss that carried her almost all the way past me, which would have left her totally vulnerable to a counterattack even from me, she stopped to catch her breath and calmed down a bit.

“My father was converted by missionaries,” she said, as if the previous conversation had never been interrupted. “He became a missionary in turn, and he and my mother and brothers traveled the Archipelago, carrying the news to all who would hear it. They settled down when I was born.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It can be dangerous to travel between the islands sometimes, and there are a few–a very few–who are hostile to the brothers of Khersis,” Gloria said. “It’s no kind of life for a young girl.”

I agreed, but I also thought it wasn’t the best kind of life for young boys, either. I didn’t say it, though. I had no idea how much older her brothers were. Maybe they’d already been nearly grown. It sure sounded possible that her parents hadn’t been fully expecting her arrival. Maybe they’d figured they were nearly done with childrearing when they decided to get a boat and take a tour of the Argenti. I didn’t know enough to judge.

“Oh,” I said, instead.

“Are you glad to hear that?” she asked me.

“To hear what?” I asked, confused.

“That my parents stopped spreading the word of Khersis because of me,” she said.

“Um… am I supposed to be?” I asked.

She looked at me long and hard for what felt like a good thirty seconds.

“You seem like such a nice person,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said, though it somehow sounded extremely uncomplimentary. I don’t know why. There was no sarcasm in her voice, no unusual emphasis. Maybe I was just reacting to her somewhat superior attitude, the regal, dignified bearing that grated so badly on Steff.

We didn’t really talk after that, except for a few pointers she gave me. Then, Callahan called time and Dobbs repeated it. That was when Gloria tried to “decapitate” me and, well, I’ve already told you what happened after that.

I should have been embarrassed to have found myself staring at her faunfoot as long as I did, but Gloria seemed oblivious of it to a degree I would have thought was impossible if I hadn’t ever met myself. When I realized that is when I really did become embarrassed, and immediately raised my eyes, trailing them up the length of her torso, passing over her breasts–okay, passing eventually over her breasts–and up to that haughty, noble face with the intense, sincere eyes.

Sometime in there was the moment that I realized Gloria wasn’t simply exotic… she was hot. Moreover, I was hot for her. Which was okay, because I had a boyfriend. I knew I wasn’t a lesbian so I could be secure enough to admit that I was a bit attracted to Gloria.

I would probably be a little bit more secure if I could get my mouth on Ian’s dick sometime in the near future, but I was doing okay even without it.

I was still pretty secure.

I kind of thought–hoped, really–that Gloria might reach down and offer me a hand getting up. It certainly seemed like something she would do, given that she started our sparring sessions with a respectful salute, in lieu of a blessing. The thought of her hand around mine was more than a little thrilling… but it wasn’t to be. She simply stared down, her eyes digging into mine like there was a prize inside them while giving absolutely nothing of their own away, and then she turned and strode away across the field, leaving me lying there with an increasing awareness of moistness in places not in contact with the wet, grassy ground.

Of course, the entire back of my clothes were soaked through, too. Getting off the ground was probably a good idea.

Steff came over and gave me a hand… or rather, both of her hands, rocking backwards on her heels to help pull me forward and up.

“Steff, how do you know if… I mean, can you tell if a person… is…?” I started to ask, then trailed off, leaving the question hanging… but totally hoping she’d get my meaning and save me from having to complete it.

“Thinking really hard about investing in goldfish futures?” she said. “Totally.”

I rolled my eyes.

“You know what I mean,” I said, and I was pretty sure that she did.

“I do,” she said. “And sometimes, it’s obvious. Sometimes, not so much. A nymph could, for sure… but listen, honey, you have to forget about her. She’s just not on the menu, okay?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Who isn’t?”

“Your tropical princess,” Steff said.

“But you said you can’t always tell,” I said.

“And I said sometimes it’s obvious,” Steff said. “Even if Glory had a single lezzy bone in her body–which she doesn’t–she would never act on it in a million years.”

“Her name is Gloria,” I corrected.

“‘Her name is Gloria’,” Steff repeated in a gushy, overwrought voice, clasping her hands and holding them to her chest. “Oh, Mack, you are crushing so hard… and honestly, it’s adorable, but I think you should probably think about getting a new sparring partner next week.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because staring at your new lady-love’s rack for an hour isn’t going to teach you anything you don’t learn from hanging out with Amy,” Steff said.

“What, are you jealous of her or something?” I asked.

“Jealous? Of her? Oh, no, honey… no,” Steff said. “I don’t do the whole jealousy thing if I can avoid it, and I wouldn’t do it for her. I could order you to look for a new partner, you know… I’m not sure it’s a good idea for her to have too much insight into your fighting style.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I don’t have a fighting style.”

“I’m just saying, if I had your particular heritage, I’d be a little nervous about letting a hardcore Khersian spend a couple hours a week practicing getting through my defense,” Steff said.

“You are jealous,” I said.

“I’m not!” Steff insisted. “And I’m not going to push this… but just… think about it, okay? I don’t want to see you getting hurt here, in any sense of the word.”

“You were getting all hot and bothered by the idea of Callahan decking me,” I reminded her.

“Harmed, then,” Steff said. “You aren’t emotionally invulnerable.”

“I’m tough,” I protested. “Sort of.”

She laughed.

“You really are, though,” she said. “Sort of. I mean, Amy and I both have gone to pieces in different ways and it’s you who puts everything back together… with a little prompting sometimes, maybe, but in a lot of ways you are the strong one in the group.”

“In one way, maybe,” I said. “Physically.”

She punched me on the arm. Really hard.

I didn’t so much say “ow” as much as just shriek in pain.

“What was that for?” I asked, rubbing around the spot that felt bruised.

“Making a point,” she said. “Or trying to, though you don’t make it easy. Anyway, just because Glorious Gloria’s out of reach doesn’t mean you have to go without… you know I’m always here for you.”

She looked at me, with her eyes that filled so quickly and completely with longing.

“I know,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to tear my eyes away from hers. “And I want to… but… it will be better if we wait.”

“It really won’t,” she said, putting a hand on my cheek and smiling wistfully. “But it’s cute that you think so. Can we at least go make out a bit, then?”

“Okay… but we’re not going past second level,” I said. “Or first,” I said, realizing I wasn’t as confident on my definitions as I thought I’d been. “Which one’s the one where you can touch my breasts?”

Steff giggled and I blushed madly.

“You are just too adorable,” she said. “I’m through wanting… I’m officially stealing you. Amy’s going to have to wrassle me for you if she wants you back.”

“Somehow I don’t think she’ll mind the wrestling,” I said, and let myself be led away from the field, into the trees, where I learned that kissing Steff was nothing like kissing Amaranth.

I couldn’t stop myself from wondering if it was a boy/girl thing, but I quickly concluded it was more that Amaranth was Amaranth and Steff was Steff. I couldn’t imagine that making out with anybody else would be like either of them. Steff’s kisses–and her hands under my clothes–were insistent and forceful, restrained but at the point of bursting. There was no missing the telltale sign of her physical sex now… doubly so when my hand went under her skirt and felt it, through her panties.

Aren’t elves supposed to be willowy? I thought, wildly. I wanted to tell her forget waiting, fuck waiting, she could put it in my mouth… but all the words that I knew seemed to have turned to hot liquid and dribbled right out of my head.

I squirmed a bit when she straddled me and began to buck, but there were four layers of clothing between us… her underwear, her skirt, my jeans, and my underwear… and she was rubbing against my midriff as much as… anywhere else. Even with the barriers between us, there were still twinges of panic each time I felt that hard mass brush beneath my waist, but Steff’s mouth was on mine and her hands held my wrists. It was comforting, in a weird way, to be pinned by her.

There was something wild and out of control about her, but I was under control. My body kept wanting to panic, but we–her and I–prevented it, together. Every time I thought it was going to overwhelm me, that I was going to start screaming or throw her off of me or worse, she’d bite my lip, hard, and I’d go limp, my resistance turning to water and flowing out of me.

Okay, I know I’m not making any sense here.

Finally, she made a kind of long sustained push, like she was trying to force herself through my clothes, through my body and possibly through the ground beneath me. She held herself like that, straining, for a surprisingly long time, then suddenly rolled off of me, pulling down her skirt and panties in the front. She was facing away from me, but I think she was coming on the ground. I didn’t try to look. I figured she’d turned away for a reason. It could have been that she didn’t want me to see her doing something so very masculine with her boy parts, but I doubted it.

After all, she’d made it very clear she wanted to fuck me in every way she could… at least one of which would make it very difficult for me not to see her thing. I think really the whole thing was more of her compromise: I said wait, so wait she would… but she’d still get herself off on me.

It worked, but I made up my mind to press Amaranth about asking Viktor, the first chance I got. If I was hot for Gloria, then I burned for Steff. I wanted to give her the pleasure she’d had to work so hard to get from me. I wanted her dick in me… in my mouth, anyway.

Hell, I’d even lick her balls, if she let me. If she wanted me to for some reason, I mean.

“You okay, honey?” she asked huskily, breathlessly… and I heard for the first time the barest hint in her voice of someone who could have been a half-elven boy named Steffain.

“Yeah,” I said. I was shaking the way you do after throwing up or a big scare, though I didn’t feel the least bit scared, except maybe in the rollercoaster or scary movie sense. Well, I’ve never actually been on a rollercoaster–I don’t like heights–but I assume it’s that same feeling.

I felt alive. I felt exhausted, though I hadn’t really done anything but lie there. My lower lip tingled, where Steff’s teeth had cut and dug uselessly into it. My clothes were a bigger mess than they’d been after weapons class. But Steff took me by the hand and we headed back towards Harlowe, and I have to say that mostly, I just felt good.

After I said goodnight to Ian but before I went to bed, Amaranth administered what she called a “moderate correction” for my anti-Arkhanite outbursts, to show that it had been wrong but that she knew I had learned and was sorry.

She called it a “moderate correction”… and it was definitely somewhere in between the brutal punishments I’d received with the studded side of my paddle and the tender, almost caressing spanks Amaranth gave me with her bare hand… but somehow “moderation” wasn’t the word it brought to mind.

When it was over, there was a slow, lingering kiss. Our bodies were close together, her breasts pressed up against me, but I hardly noticed; I was too wrapped up in the feeling of her lips, her breath, her warmth on me… in me. It was achingly good, though not without a small pang as I reflected on the fact that Ian still wouldn’t kiss me. We did fairly intimate things. We’d danced close and slow. He’d let me sit on his lap.

Was a kiss too much to ask? Maybe it was.

“You have it within you to be very tolerant,” Amaranth said after we broke the clinch. “I know it. I see it in you all the time. You’re such a beautiful, kind person, when you want to be.”

“I’m really not…” I started to say, but she held up a finger and shushed me.

“Shh,” she said. “I’m not going to argue your better qualities with you, baby… not tonight. I’ve got to run. Work, work, work, you know?” She giggled and gave an exaggerated sigh and heave of her shoulders, which did wonderful things to her chest. “It’s such a grind. Sleep well, okay? Goodnight, Mack.”

“Goodnight,” I said as she released me.

That night I dreamt about lying in Amaranth’s arms, kissing her, as we rolled around in a field of corn. I think it was supposed to be a field of amaranth, but I don’t really know what that looks like, and I’d spent the first nine years of my life around cornfields. They wouldn’t be my first choice for a place to roll around in. But, it was a dream, and all I felt was warmth, and comfort, and love.

The next day in my invocation class, I wasn’t terribly surprised to find that all the limpid, liquid feelings in my head just sort of flowed out of me into my pot of soil and were answered by a puddle of water bubbling up from its surface. The absorbent earth soaked it up fairly quickly. It took me most of the rest of the class before I got the hang of calling forth the water consistently, on purpose, and with a fair measure of control. I even managed to make the water squirt up in a tiny spurt, like a miniature geyser or a little fountain.

I showed the trick to Ian, thinking he might find it funny or cute.

“Will you quit messing around?” he snarled. “You’re wrecking my concentration.”

“Sorry,” I said, shrinking back. Even in the fight before, during, and after the first time I went down on him, I’d never seen him get quite this mad. If being hot under the collar was conducive to fire-calling, his log should have been ablaze… but it was inert, cold as ever.

Professor Bohd asked him to stay behind after class. I had a pretty good guess what it was about: there was only one more day left to drop or change classes, and if Ian hadn’t shown any progress after two weeks, there was a good chance he wouldn’t be able to pass the class.

I waited outside the classroom for him to come out. He nearly stormed past me when he did.

“Oh,” he said, when he saw me. What a greeting, huh?

“So, um… what’s up?” I asked. It seemed less nosy than “What did she say?” and less presumptuous than “Let me guess…”

“She wants me to get some tutoring,” he said.

“Oh,” I said.

“From you,” Ian said.

Somehow, the pronouncement of that simple second person pronoun made me feel lower than “bitch” or “cunt” did, and without any of the associated tingliness.

“Well… that could be fun,” I said, trying not to take his anger personally. He was majoring in elementalism. He needed this class. Of course he’d be upset.

“Fun? My dad is an invested disciple of the Crimson Tongue!” Ian raged. “Do you know what he’d say if he found out I can’t call fire without my girlfriend’s help? He’d freaking disown me! After he killed me.”

“Well, it’s a good thing he probably won’t find out until parent-teacher conferences,” I said, trying to take a light tone. I wouldn’t lose my temper. I wouldn’t. “Unless the professor sends you home with a note pinned to your overalls.”

All thoughts of my anger flew swiftly away in the face of Ian’s. He looked mad enough to hit something. Actually, he looked like he was mad enough to hit me… but then he turned away and went rigid, his arms at his side, his hands clenched in fists.

“It’s a big joke to you, isn’t it?” he said, once he’d calmed down a bit.

“No!” I said. “I just meant, college is different… your parents are far away and they’re not going to find out this stuff if you don’t tell them.”

I watched him struggle to control himself a bit more.

“I’m sorry,” he said once he’d cooled down more or less completely. “It’s just… you don’t understand how it is. With my dad, I mean.”

“I don’t,” I agreed. “I never knew my father, but I hope to hell he’d be disappointed if he knew how I turned out.”

“Why?” Ian asked, momentarily puzzled. “Oh! Because… he’s… yeah. Sorry. Sometimes I almost forget you’re not human. Fully human, I mean.”

“I wish you could forget it all the time,” I said. “No, strike that. I wish I could forget it.”

“Hey, do you want to go get some lunch?” he asked. “My treat.”

“Okay,” I said. “I suppose everybody’s probably wondering where I am, anyway.”

“Um… I actually meant the two of us,” he said. “Like, get a burger in the food court or something.”

“Oh!” I said. That did sound nice and boyfriend-and-girlfriendly. Though, Amaranth and our friends might wonder where I was. “Um…” I stalled, trying to figure out the best way to convey this concern to Ian without making it sound like I wanted to get out of eating with him.

“You need Amaranth’s permission to go to lunch with me?” he guessed.

“No!” I said, defensively. Of course I didn’t. Wait… did I? “Um… I don’t think I do. I don’t know.”

“Great,” Ian said scathingly. “Well, you go find her and ask her if it’s okay, and I’ll just wait here for you to get back.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. “I mean, she’s never had a problem with me dating you. She likes it.”

“But you’d dump me if she did have a problem with me,” he said sourly.

“You know, most girls listen to their friends’ opinions about who they date,” I said. I was fairly sure this was true. Television said so. Television promised dire karmic consequences for girls who dated guys against the instincts and advice of their friends. There had to be some kind of basis for that, right? “So it wouldn’t be anything weird or strange if I did.”

“Most girls aren’t so dependent on their friends’ opinions that they let them lead them naked up and down the halls on a leash,” Ian retorted.

“Just where the hell did you hear that?” I asked.

“It’s all over campus, Mackenzie,” he said. “Everybody knows the kind of shit you get up to with Amaranth, and I have to listen to them talk about it.”

“Well, sometimes what ‘everybody knows’ happens to be wrong,” I said sharply… though I did an impressive job of modulating my voice. I did an even better job of modulating it when I hastily added, “She only made me walk naked up and down the hall by myself, once.”

“Great, well, next time I hear somebody saying the part about the leash, I’ll be sure to correct them,” Ian said.

“You could tell them it’s none of their business,” I said.

“That stops working when you start doing things in public,” Ian said. “You make it everybody’s business.”

“Are you going to tell me you didn’t go bragging after I went down on you?” I asked.

“That’s different,” he muttered, having the grace to be embarrassed instead of angry.

“How?” I asked.

“I’m a guy,” he said. “When the talk turns to sex, I need to have something to say.”

“You couldn’t just talk about one of your endless conquests from your high school days?” I asked.

“Well, um,” he said, his cheeks and the tips of his ears flushing a delicate pink. “The thing is, that’s in the past… and… now is… I mean, high school can seem a long time ago, you know?”

It should have bothered me that he was lying to me… that he kept lying… but like he’d said, it was different for guys. Besides, it was cute to see him flustered, and at least he was on the defensive instead of the offensive.

“Um, do you still want to get lunch?” I asked. “I honestly wasn’t thinking about getting Amaranth’s permission, until you mentioned it. I don’t know why I got so defensive.”

“Sorry,” Ian said. “And yeah. Where do you want to eat?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s good?”

“Well, what do you like?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, and laughed. “I’m kind of still figuring that out.”

“Oh,” he said. He got a weird look, and then smiled shyly. “I know one thing you like…”

“What?” I asked, blushing. I don’t know why I blushed. Part of it was definitely the sorts of things I liked which flashed through my mind… but a lot of it was just something in his voice, in the way he smiled.

“This,” he said, taking my hand in his.

“We’re in public,” I reminded him as we set out, hand-in-hand, towards the student union.

“So? Let the whole world watch a little public hand-holding action,” he said, and I giggled. “I’ve always been a bit of a voyeur, anyway.”

“Exhibitionist,” I corrected him. “Voyeurs would be the people doing the watching.”

He stopped walking so suddenly I almost pulled him off-balance. I turned to look at him, and saw the look of irritation at having been corrected… watched him biting something back, then stop and reconsider, arguing something inside of himself.

“You don’t have to be such a bitch about things,” he said finally, and letting the words out seemed to relieve a lot more tension inside him than could be accounted for by this single puff of irritation. Then he just started forward again, like nothing had happened.

Me? I melted. I melted into him, practically hanging off of him for the rest of the walk.

I’d felt a sick, hollow feeling when Puddy had called me her bitch… but I liked the idea of being Ian’s. Really, though, was it so strange that I might enjoy it, when you considered everything else that I seemed to like? I mean, I actually sort of liked licking his balls… well, no I didn’t. Nobody could actually like that. But I didn’t mind it very much, and I liked the fact that he enjoyed it. Though, it was weird that he did.

Ian had got a pair of cheeseburgers from White House. I had chicken strips. At first, I was just sort of sitting there while we ate, wrapping myself up in that wonderfully awful word, and Ian ended up telling me about how back in middle school, he’d wanted to go out for band but his dad had forbidden it. He ended up buying his first lute–used–with his own money the summer before his sophomore year. He still hadn’t been allowed to take any music classes. His dad had told him he didn’t have time, with all the advanced classes and things he needed to get ready for college. But, he’d bought books and practiced by himself.

I told him a little bit about my own high school experience… like the fire in the girls’ room that I’d been blamed for, despite the fact that everybody and their sister threw their cigarettes in the trash can there, and the time I got stuffed into a locker and hadn’t dared to move because I was afraid I’d be expelled if I broke it.

Afterwards, I felt kind of bad. Ian had said he wanted to have more meaningful conversations, and then we went and wasted an hour on trivial, inconsequential bullshit about high school and stuff.

It was oddly enjoyable, though, even considering that my story basically consisted of me confessing that I was and always had been a loser. The food wasn’t bad, either. People like to dig on fast food, but… well, the chicken wasn’t anywhere near as savory or flavorful as Hazel and Two’s had been, but it was good, and there was honey to dip them in.

In fact, there was more honey in the two shallow little dipping containers they gave me than I could use on the strips. Ian watched in something between amusement and amazement while I licked and sucked out the rest. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever had honey before, but it was amazing.

“What?” I said, suddenly self-conscious. “I don’t like to waste.”

“If I go get you another one, will you do that again?” he asked, a little bit awed.

It was actually a couple hours later that I figured out what that had been about.

Steff begged off from the nominal festivities, claiming a pressing commitment with Viktor. As she departed, she reminded Amaranth, “Don’t forget about tomorrow night, hon!”

“I won’t!” Amaranth called after her.

“What’s tomorrow night?” I asked.

“The next circle meeting,” Amaranth said. “You’ll be okay on your own, right, baby?”

I nodded, taking this as her polite way of telling me that I wasn’t invited. That was just fine with me, though… I had better things to do than sit around listening to a bunch of new-age scientific nonsense.

Okay, I didn’t actually have anything to do, but that was still an improvement.

The bingo game was set up in the student union, in the same space where the dance had been held. The game was a fundraiser, with the purchase price of a daubing pen and one or more cards being the cost of admission. It was a little confusing at first: you could buy more than one card but the sign announced the cards were good for the whole evening… then Two explained that you could play multiple cards in a game, with the marks clearing themselves automatically after a bingo was verified.

“Weren’t you listening?” she asked, sounding a little exasperated. “You’re supposed to listen when somebody is talking to you.”

“Sorry,” I said, and she helpfully explained the whole thing again from the beginning.

It was going to be a fun night.

Inside the torture chamber, long tables had been set up with folding chairs facing one end of the room. Hazel and Honey were already there, with their cards arrayed on the table in front of them. There was no sign of Celia. I wasn’t too surprised. She’d talked about coming just to make a point, but otherwise hadn’t seemed too enthused at the idea.

The gnomes had borrowed booster seats from the dining hall. Two led us over towards them, taking a seat beside Hazel and pulling me down into the chair next to her.

Amaranth took the seat one down from me, to my surprise.

“Why aren’t you sitting by me?” I asked.

“You invited Ian,” she reminded me. “You probably should sit next to him.”

“Can I sit on your lap, then?” I asked.

She chewed at her lip while she thought, and I could tell that she was feeling torn about something… and that the answer which eventually came out of her mouth would be no.

“I think that might be one of those things that could be considered rude to your date?” she said, the uncertainty in her voice making it a question. “But if he’ll let you sit on his lap, I’ll sit next to you guys,” she added hopefully.

“Okay,” I said, though I wasn’t at all sure Ian would go for that.

He didn’t. In fact, he gave me a look like I was crazy when I suggested it.

“Why not?” I asked him, whining only ever so slightly, as he slid into the seat next to me.

“We’re in public,” he said.

My first impulse was to ask what that had to do with anything… but my second was to realize that was exactly how I would have reacted to the suggestion that I should sit on a boy’s lap, just a short time ago. That was a little bit of a revelation to me. When I’d first arrived at MU, I’d been in danger of freaking out any time I thought anybody was watching me do anything in public. Now I could climb into Amaranth’s lap without a second thought about who could see me or what they would think.

Though, if I did start dwelling on what people thought, I probably could get a halfway decent freak out going.

“Oh,” I said, a little bit late.

“Um… do you want me to get you something to drink?” Ian asked. There was a concessions stand set up at the edge of the room, selling baked goods and cans of soda.

“Um, okay,” I said. “Strawberry, if they’ve got it.”

I had slightly more recent experience with the world of beverages than I did with food. Liquids had always been easier to keep down than solids.

“What if they don’t?” he asked.

“Anything sweet,” I said.

He returned shortly with a can of red cream soda for me and cola for himself. At my other side, Two had just finished her breathless recitation of the Hallowed Rules and History to Hazel.

“My mum took me to a human-style bingo hall once,” Hazel said. “Of course, we do things a bit differently back in the shire. Our bingo cards have got all the numbers in three long lines, and you’re out to fill up one line all the way across. We’ve got proper callers, too, who don’t just look at the ball and read it off… no, they put a bit of polish on it.”

“They polish the balls?” Two asked. Beside me, Ian spit and sprayed his drink all over his cards. I gave him a dirty look. It wasn’t that funny. She didn’t know any better.

“What I mean to say is, if they pull out the number fifty-five, they don’t just say, ‘fifty-five’,” Hazel said, intoning the number in the unnaturally deep, slow voice of the very small imitating the very large. “They’ll say something clever, like ‘Saints alive, we’ve got all fives!’… or even just ‘snakes alive!’, because, you see, the fives look a bit like snakes.”

“They do?” Two asked.

“Or else they’ll just do clever rhymes,” Hazel said. “Like ‘number one, just begun,’ or ‘thirty-four, dirty wh…’… well, you get the idea, right?”

“No,” Two said, shaking her head. “I do not.”

“Right, then,” Hazel said. “You know how the number two kind of looks like a duck on the water?”

Two shook her head again. I was kind of with her on that. I mean, now that Hazel pointed it out I could kind of see it, but I’d never once found myself looking at the numeral 2 and saying, “Hey, that looks like a duck.”

“Well, just trust me that it does… so if it’s twenty-two, they call it ‘two little duckies’ and all the players go ‘Quack quack’,” Hazel said.

“What if you don’t say ‘quack quack’?” Two asked.

“Well, then, everybody knows you’re new, don’t they?” Hazel said.

“Oh,” Two said. She sat in thought for a few moments, then said, “I need clarification.”

“What about, love?” Hazel prompted.

“Is it a rule?”

“Is what a rule?” Hazel asked.

“That when the caller says ‘two little duckies’ you have to say ‘quack quack’?” Two clarified.

“Well, no, it’s not exactly a rule,” Hazel said. “It’s just the way we do it, is all. Because it’s fun, you see?”

“Oh,” Two said doubtfully. “Okay.”

I hid my smile behind my hand. Their friendship was a very weird pairing, but it seemed to be good for her.

The actual game turned out to be… well, not exactly fun, but somewhat enjoyable. Surprisingly meditative. There was a sort of rhythm to it, or at least there was after the guy doing the calling got the hang of it. I was playing on three cards, and it was pretty easy for me to line them up and then go down the designated column to see if I had each number.

Actually, it wasn’t long before I’d find myself thinking, “Oh, N-39… I just saw that on the third card!” but I still went down the columns, anyway. Partly it was to make sure I didn’t miss anything, but it was mostly just because I’d settled into a method and was sticking with it. I guess I’m not so different from Two in that regard.

I had to giggle when I heard Two softly say “Quack quack,” following the announcement of I-22. She was evidently having a good time. She finished checking her cards in record time, but never got impatient waiting for the next number to be called… she was doing something, so it was okay.

Ian was not having quite as good a time.

“This is so pointless,” he groused during the short break while the judges verified a bingo. “They might as well just pick a name out of a hat and say, ‘Okay, you won!’ and let everybody go home.”

“You don’t have to be here,” I pointed out.

“You asked me here. I want to be here,” he said. “It’s just… there isn’t even any skill involved.”

“Oh? You know, you’re missing numbers,” I said, looking at his five cards. “B-3 was called… and I-18, too. You have that one twice. Were you even trying?”

“I was,” he said. “But it’s so boring… and I wouldn’t have won even with those spaces, so what’s your point?”

“That there is skill involved,” I said. “You have to listen.”

“That isn’t a skill,” Ian said.

“Maybe not for you,” I said.

“Like you would know,” he said. “We don’t exactly have long, meaningful conversations, you know?”

“I’ve personally always felt that sex is the most meaningful form of discourse,” Amaranth said in a light, conversational tone. “Of course, with oral sex, it’s even more like a conversation.”

“Uh, right,” Ian said, mortification blossoming on his face. I was right there with him.

“Look,” I said, eager to get the conversation back to a safer topic. I figured that bingo, for all its faults, was about as safe as you could get. “I wanted you to be here, and you only came to be with me… so why don’t we do this together?”

“What do you mean?” Ian asked.

I took his cards and mine and arranged them in two rows of four, then pulled my chair closer to his.

“We’ll play together,” I said. I pointed. “You do that half and I’ll do this one. It’ll be more fun.”

“How?” he asked skeptically.

“Because it will,” I said.

In the end it was, if only because I kept consistently finishing my half while he was still hunting his way through his, and after I started on his half enough times he just gave up and let me do the whole spread.

Of course, this meant I kept scooting in closer next to him, and finally ended up with his dick pressing against the seat of my jeans while I methodically checked the numbers on the cards, which I’d re-arranged from two rows to two columns for better efficiency.

Yeah, sitting on a boy’s lap was a bit different than sitting on a girl’s.

By the time the last number was called, Two and Hazel had consumed about a dozen frosted cupcakes between them, and Two had scored a total of two bingos with the twenty cards she efficiently checked and marked. Her efforts netted her a gift card for free movie rentals, and a teddy bear that she declared, after a careful examination, was named Hand Wash.

At the end of the evening, I snagged a copy of the CSC’s activity calendar. Whether I won the election or not, I was going to make sure Harlowe Hall was informed of any upcoming events they might put on.

Oh, and Ian and I didn’t get any bingos.

He did get a prize afterwards, though.