A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(49)

I’d already been resigned to my fate, though, and a Saudi girl who’d been at Ibrahim’s table that morning had a booth near me; she lent me her dictionary in exchange for a promise to proofread her English-language final paper. I copied out the alphabet into my notebook first and then started slogging away on the worksheet, copying out every word I looked up. And for a silver lining, I also couldn’t understand a single word of the venomous tirade that the booth voice poured into my ears in between grudgingly telling me how to pronounce and . I imagine it was full of particularly juicy horrors.

There was a lot of other non-magical whispering going on around me the rest of the day, among the other kids. It occurred to me, much too belatedly, that I’d just graduated from pathologically rude bitch to enclave-hater. It’s not that we don’t all know that it’s unfair, but nobody says so, because if you say so, enclavers don’t invite you to join them on the better side of the unfair. Orion’s shine might have gone off, too, if enough enclave kids had decided that Todd was right. Maybe the two of us would end up sitting alone. That would be epic. My unpopularity massive enough to drag down Orion Lake himself.

    It didn’t look good when I first got to the cafeteria at lunchtime. None of the enclavers who’d been making up to me lately said a word; no more study group invites from Sarah today. But as I came off the food line, Aadhya got there from shop with three other artificer-track kids and waved to me on her way into the line. “Save us seats, El?” she called across the room. Nkoyo and her pals, who were a few kids behind me, heard her; I don’t know if that made the difference or not, but she said, “I’ll get us water if you do a perimeter,” and though Jowani and Cora exchanged slightly anxious looks, they followed her lead.

By the time I’d set the perimeter and we were sitting, Aadhya and her crew were there, and they’d even got me an extra piece of cake to say thanks, the way you normally do when you ask someone to save you a place. Not that I had any personal experience before now, as people had always previously made their excuses if I asked them. Liu came, too, and sat down quietly on my other side. She was still carrying a faintly shell-shocked expression, incongruous with the actual color in her face, which had shifted at least ten degrees over on the spectrum from undead to just pale; even her hair had hints of brown in it under the sunlamp. “Did you do a UV potion, Liu?” one of Aadhya’s friends said. “You look great.”

“Thanks,” she said, softly, and bent over her food.

There almost wasn’t room when Orion and Ibrahim arrived from lab. A couple of people shifted to let him sit next to me without so much as a word. I was mostly resigned to that, too. After my performance this morning, people would now assume we were dating even if I tipped his soup over his head. If he did start actually dating someone, everybody would have us in a love triangle for the year.

Todd was in the cafeteria, too. He already wasn’t being frozen out completely: a group of loser freshmen had taken seats at the end of his table. He’d probably have a new alliance in time for graduation, if his old one didn’t just swallow it and take him back and leave it to the grown-ups to deal with him when they got out. Maybe they wouldn’t. His parents were powerful and important if his alliance had the right to offer a guaranteed-in to the enclave, which they would’ve needed to get the class valedictorian. He’d tell them about the maw-mouth going past his room and they’d understand, of course he had to protect himself, and it wasn’t like he’d really committed murder. Mika was going to die anyway in a week. It made sense to trade him for an enclave kid, a kid who had a chance, a kid who had a future. Just thinking about it made me angry enough to want to push Todd into the dark myself.

    I didn’t have a concrete plan for work period, but without even saying it, I’d more or less assumed Orion and I would go to the library together again. But as we were busing our trays, he said to me abruptly, “Go ahead, I’ll find you.”

“Suit yourself,” I said shortly. There wasn’t any great stroke of genius needed to guess what he was planning to do, but I didn’t tell him he wasn’t going to find a maw-mouth lurking anywhere in the school, or that he was a moron for trying. I just went on to the library alone.

I meant to go to my desk, but when I came in through the reading room, the place was half empty. Most of the tables and squashy chairs had been badly scorched, and there was a lingering stink of smoke mingled with something smelling a bit like the cafeteria brussels sprouts. They’re the one thing that’s never ever poisoned. But even taking all of that into account, the place was unusually deserted. There were freshmen with actual seats instead of just being on the floor. After a moment I realized that everyone was probably thinking—accurately, as it happened—that if you were a hungry maw-mouth, the library would be the perfect hunting ground. Probably anyone who wasn’t desperate would also avoid the stockroom, exactly as Todd had suggested.

    It was too good an opportunity to pass up. “Move on,” I told one of the more ambitious freshmen, who’d dared to snag one of the coveted armchair-and-desk combos in the corner that was normally filled with kids from the Dubai enclave, none of whom were in evidence at the moment.

The kid gave it up without a fight; he knew he’d been reaching. “Can I sit by you?” he asked. That was new. Probably he was betting Orion might turn up.