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Quentin grabbed his own fingers and pulled, relocating his joints. The popping noise made me want to vomit.
“Dear god,” I croaked. “How did . . . why was that . . . so hard?”
“He was an identical copy of me,” Quentin said. He spat a bloody tooth out to the side. “What were you expecting, a pushover?”
I watched his blood sink into the ground and sprout a little daisy with perfect white petals. Whatever. I was beyond surprise when it came to Quentin at this point.
“He seemed so eager to get away from us before that I thought he’d be weaker,” I said. “But he fought like a prison inmate from Krypton. He nearly killed the both of us just now!”
“You know we would have had a bigger edge
if you ever let me use you as a weapon.”
The bad atmosphere between Quentin and me must have also passed if he was bringing up this topic again. Hooray for a return to normalcy. “I told you no already.”
Quentin pouted. “Think of it as a deeper, more intimate form of teamwork,” he said. “There’s no shame in it. If anything, you’re the dominant one when we couple ourselves like that.”
“Okay, so part of why I will never fight with you as a staff is your inability to describe the process without sounding like a total pervert,” I said. “Besides, I can’t imagine a worse opponent than your evil doppelganger. As long as you don’t get your ass copied like a brand-name handbag again, we’ll be fine in the future.”
“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “There’s Red Boy . . .”
“When I saw the fire I thought this was Red Boy.”
He winced. “If it had been Red Boy, there wouldn’t be any school left.”
We lay on the lawn for a good while, gulping the clean air and prodding our bruises for deeper breaks.
“I need to apologize,” I said.
“For what?”
“Making you think I was ever going to say that spell.”
Quentin smiled. “I’m sorry, too. For believing that you actually might.”
I hesitated.
“Where were you after Third Period?” I said. “Before we saw each other at lunch?” I felt pretty stupid asking; there were more important things to talk about.
“In the computer lab with Rutsuo,” he said. “Why?”
That was all the way on the other side of the school from where I saw him playing tonsil hockey. “Really? You weren’t with Rachel?”
Guilt dawned over Quentin’s face. He ran a hand through his hair.
“I’m sorry for what happened earlier,” he said. “I know you don’t like her much but I didn’t realize helping her with her Spanish homework would upset you. I’ll stop.”
I thought about turning on true sight to verify his statements, but decided to simply trust him instead. “That’s all the two of you do together?”
He looked genuinely confused. “Yeah. What else would I be doing with one of your classmates? I have to fit into this school if I want to be near you, and everyone just studies all the time. You’re a bunch of gigantic nerds.”
Well there was my answer. It was the Six-Eared Macaque that had gotten to first base with Rachel. I cringed on her behalf and felt supremely glad that I’d sent the asshole who’d duped her to Hell.
It was going to be pretty awkward for Quentin though, the next time they ran into each other. In a lingering fit of pettiness I declined to warn him, even though the real Quentin had done nothing wrong.
“You can hang out with whoever you want.” I closed my eyes and leaned back against the nearest tree. “It’s not like I own you or anything.”
Once Quentin and I were able to make ourselves presentable enough, we circled around the building to join the rest of our class.
