A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(29)
We all paced our eating and cleared up our plates at the same time, so nobody was left sitting on their own at the table. I was still feeling weird and shaky inside when I went to bus my tray. I was glad Ibrahim was right ahead of me: I glared at the back of his head, thinking about his smirk. I desperately wanted to be angry again, just a bit angry. But he glanced back at me as he walked away, and he didn’t smirk; instead his face just fell. I stared back at him in confusion, and then Orion shoved his tray onto the rack just behind me and said, sounding irritated, “Hey, what was that about? Do you have a problem with Chloe and Magnus or something?” exactly like he’d expected me to come and sit with them.
Which he probably had. Who wouldn’t sit at the New York table if they had the slightest chance; what kind of fool wouldn’t take that over sitting on her own, wondering if anybody else was going to join her? “Oh, was I supposed to trot along behind you?” I snapped back. “Sorry, I didn’t realize I’d attained hanger-on status; I imagined I’d have to genuflect properly first. You ought to have a badge or something to give out to people. You’d get to watch them fight over it and everything.”
I felt just as mean as it sounded. Orion made a little half-twisting move away to stare at me, his face gone mad and surprised at the same time, blotchy on the cheeks under the greenish dots where he’d been spattered with something in his last lab session, probably. “Oh, go to hell,” he said, a little thickly, and walked away from me fast, his shoulders hunched in.
There were about five different clusters of kids scattered between us and the doors, and they all turned towards him as he went past them, faces full of hope and calculation. Every single one of them running the same equations that were in my own head every single day, every single hour, and because they weren’t stupidly stubborn morons, they were all happy to be nice to Orion Lake in exchange for getting to live; they would have fought over the chance to be his hangers-on. And he knew it, and instead he’d actually been making an effort to hang around with me, and if he wasn’t waiting for me to turn maleficer anymore, that meant that what he wanted was—to hang out with somebody who wouldn’t genuflect to him.
I hated the idea; it made him too much of a decent person, and what right did he have to be a decent person, on top of a monumentally stupid gigantic hero? But it was more or less the only thing that made sense. Just standing around in the cafeteria as everyone else pours out is a bad idea, but I did precisely that for almost a whole minute, staring after him with my fists balled up, because I was still out of my tree: angry with him, and with Chloe, and with every last person around me; I was even angry with Aadhya and Liu, because they’d made me want to cry just by deigning to sit with me.
Then I went after him. He had gone to the stairs like everyone else, but instead of going up to the library like everyone else, he was heading down, alone, to do work period in the alchemy lab or something, like a lunatic. Or like someone who’d rather be attacked by mals than be gushed at. I gritted my teeth, but there wasn’t any help for it. I caught up to him halfway down the first flight. “Can I point out, not four days ago you accused me of being a serial killer,” I said. “I’m justified in not grasping that you wanted me to sit with you for lunch.”
He didn’t look at me and hitched his rucksack higher up on his shoulder. “Sit wherever you want.”
“I will,” I said. “But as you mind so much, next time I’ll tell you beforehand that I don’t want to sit with your enclave mates.”
He did look then, with a glare. “Why not?”
“Because they do want genuflection.”
His shoulders were starting to stop hunching. “It’s called sitting down together,” he said, dragging the words out exaggeratedly. “At a table. In chairs. Most people can get through lunch without turning it into an act of war.”
“I’m not most people,” I said. “Also, the seating arrangements are an act of war, and if you haven’t noticed, that’s just embarrassing. Do you think that everyone’s always trying to sit with you for your amazing personality or something?”
“I guess you’re just immune,” he said.
“Bloody well right I am,” I said, but he was grinning at me a little from under his overgrown hair, tentatively, and apparently I was lying.
I DON’T HAVE a very good idea of how people behave with their friends normally, because I’d never had one before, but on the bright side, Orion hadn’t either, so he didn’t know any more than I did. So for lack of a better idea we just went on being rude to each other, which was easy enough for me, and a refreshing and new experience for him, in both directions: being gracious to the little people had apparently been hammered into him from an early age. “I’d respond to that, but my mom’s pretty big on manners,” he said to me pointedly the next day after dinner as I yanked him away from the stairs down. I’d just told him he was a stupid wanker for trying to go and hide in the alchemy labs again.
“So is mine, but it didn’t stick,” I said, shoving him up the stairs to the library. “I don’t care if you like sitting hunched alone at a lab table like a ghoul. I get enough near-death experiences in here without creating extra opportunities.”