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“But isn’t it obvious we’re masking what he’s doing?”
Luke and Gabriel laughed. Gabriel dropped his hand onto my head, massaging at my scalp. “Trouble, stop. Don’t you think we know?”
I sighed, pursing my lips. “Don’t I get to know? I mean he’s fixing McCoy’s cameras, isn’t he?”
“Ixnay on the ... whatever’s Pig Latin for cameras. Don’t let the kids overhear,” Gabriel said, reaching around me to grab at Luke’s chip package.
Luke relinquished his food with an eye roll.
“Say thank you,” I muttered to Gabriel.
Gabriel narrowed his eyes at me. “Thank you, Luke,” he taunted, but grinned.
Luke laughed. “Well what do you know. She’s teaching Gabe manners. Never thought that would happen.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Gabriel said, throwing a chip at his head.
Luke and Gabriel started talking over me about another class they shared. Meanwhile, I focused on Victor. I felt like I hadn’t seen him in a while. Now the first chance I had to run into him with any amount of substantial time, I was in trouble and he was working to fix it. It made me think about the time he asked me out in the attic. Since that point so much had happened and he’d been busy with Academy work. It made me wonder if he forgot.
As I gazed at him, his eyes lifted, meeting mine. I lifted an eyebrow, confused.
“Stop it,” he said.
“What?”
“You’re distracting.”
“Sorry,” I said, scrunching my shoulders. I couldn’t do anything right today.
Victor flashed a smile at me, returning to his work.
By the end of lunch, Victor sent a text to Mr. Blackbourne to let him know his work was finished. I was guessing cameras on Mr. McCoy would be recording like they wanted, but Mr. McCoy wouldn’t stay in his office all day. Would they have all the cameras recording all day long? Or how would they get someone to monitor Mr. McCoy all the time? I pushed it to the back of my mind. Academy business. Let them handle it.
On the way to my next class, Silas walked ahead of me, and Kota walked next to me as his class was near ours. The hallway narrowed, with clusters of students, it was slow progress down the hallway.
When we stalled, Kota reached for my hand.
The boy next to me nudged my arm. He jerked his chin at me. “That your boyfriend?”
My eyes bugged out. “I ...” I didn’t have an answer.
“Yeah,” Kota said over my head at him, the command penetrating his voice. “She’s with me.”
Silas stiffened in front of us, pausing in his steps enough that I nearly bumped into him.
My breath caught. Was he serious? I looked back at him but his eyes were focused on the kid next to us.
The boy nodded his head at Kota. “You know she was holding hands with that other dude in the hallways.”
“She’s with me now,” Kota said in the same sharp tone. His fingers pressed into my palm, gripping me as he pulled me closer.
My heart was thundering and my cheeks were on fire.
The kid only smirked. The crowd shifted around us. The kid nudged someone on the other side of him, whispering. They laughed. Was it about us?
Kota leaned in, whispering in my ear. “If anyone asks you if any one of us is your boyfriend, you say yes. I don’t care who you’re with.”
Why would he want that? I didn’t quite understand. They were my friends but claiming they were my boyfriends? And all of them?
I thought of the notes I often got in class that North and the others collected. Were the guys trying to keep me from talking to anyone else? This confused me a lot. Next year, they would all be gone from this school and back at the Academy, wouldn’t they? Shouldn’t I make at least a couple of friends so I’d have someone to talk to when they were gone? Maybe not this kid, but Kota was so abrupt with him. He didn’t give him a chance when he could have just been curious.
Kota followed us to class, but said a quick word to Silas before moving on. Silas took one look at me, nodding to Kota and ushered me into the classroom.
All I could think was what would Victor say when he heard about this? What about North or the others think? It just seemed crazy.
As Silas and I took a seat in biology, he started pulling paperwork out of his bag behind me as I turned to him. “What did Kota say?” I asked him.
“He said you’re too cute for your own good,” he said, collecting his biology book.
“No really,” I said, blinking at him in disbelief.
Silas’s lips parted as he stared at me. “What do you want me to say? Should I repeat it verbatim? He said, ‘Sang’s too cute for her own good.’ I agreed with him.”
I released a short breath. He said that? And Silas thought I was cute, too? “I ... oh.”
Silas grinned at me. “What did he say to you?”
I blushed. “He said if anyone did that again, like if they asked if you were my boyfriend, I was supposed to say yes.”
Silas beamed. “Well? Kota’s the boss. Have to do what he says.”
I nodded slowly, turning in my seat to let the information sink in. Every other incident that day temporarily evaded my mind. Kota and Silas thought I was cute. Kota and Silas would claim to be my boyfriends. I didn’t dislike the idea, but it left me wondering how I would ever know their true feelings if we were going to be playing pretend when other people were around.
Dating was complicated.
BIG QUESTIONS
The biology teacher didn’t allow me the favor of teaching an actual lesson so I could sink into the sweet oblivion of half listening while processing the information. Instead he asked us to open our books and pair up with someone and answer the questions from a chapter. Silas looked happy. I was glad for the break in class routine but felt unsettled and now more shy than ever.
For the workload, all I had to do was read the questions out loud to Silas. He wrote down the question and wrote the answers without reading the text.
I leaned over the desk, scanning over his work. “How did you know the answer?”
“I’m smarter than I look,” he said, finishing the final question. He glanced up at me hovering over his shoulder to read what he was writing. “What?”
“I just feel like I didn’t do anything,” I said.
Silas laughed, passing the paper to me. “Write our names.”
“That’s not exactly better,” I said. I scrawled my name on the page. For fun, I wrote his name in girly script and putting a heart over the “i" in his name.
Silas grinned at me. “Cute.”
“Victor got mad at me when I did it to his name.”
“Victor’s got an image to maintain. Meanwhile, I don’t really care what people think of me.”
“What’s Victor’s image?”
“He’s the almost-famous pianist,” Silas leaned over his desk, propping his head up in his hand. “And his parents are rich. He’s usually the center of attention.”
My lips parted. “Really? I haven’t seen that here.”
“He tries to keep a low profile here. He prefers it. I think that’s why he was excited to come here. Normally he has to be very aware of who he’s with and what he’s doing. Here, no one knows who he is, but he still has to be careful. I don’t know what he worries about. Kids here don’t read gossip in the society columns.”
“Victor gets written about?”
Silas laughed loud enough to draw the attention of some of the other groups around us. “Not as much anymore. I think his youth prodigy days are almost over. But there’s a pile of girls hoping to get his attention and be the first Mrs. Morgan.”
My heart fluttered. Victor was a prodigy. Other girls wanted him. That had to be true about all of them, though. They were handsome and nice and while they might not be almost-famous, they had a lot of attractive assets. Victor had asked me out on a date. Was he dating other girls, too? Was I just one of many?
Silas’s eyes traced over my face. “Ma
ybe I shouldn’t have told you that.”
It was probably rude to sit here and talk about Victor when he wasn’t here. “Sorry, no. It was just a surprise. I guess I still don’t know you all that well.”
His mouth softened. “We’ve been busy.”
“Just a little.”
“Let’s fix that. Let’s go out this weekend.”
My heart started thundering in my chest. “Us? This weekend?”
“Unless you’re busy.”
