The Unfairfolk (Valenbound Book 1)

by Sara Wolf

  Ana puts her hand on mine as she gets up. “I’m serious - I’ll translate your homework tonight, okay? Just slip it under my door.”

  “Okay,” I nod. “Thanks. You’re a lifesaver.”

  “More like a Starburst,” She corrects with a wink. “I like those better.”

  “Right. Note to self; find a candy store ASAP.”

  I watch her go, and the moment she slides into the table the girls around her burst out laughing. My brain automatically assumes they’re laughing about me (too tall, too big, too crass), until I remember they probably have better things to talk about - like fashionable handbags and Qing dynasty China and going to Ivy League colleges. Fucking hell - who cares what anyone says about me? I’m not here for me. It’s just…seven months sure is a long time to be here for not-me.

  Mom’s face, her teary smile as she waved me off at the airport.

  I’ll make it, somehow. I’ll make it if I have to drag myself up a cliff by my fingernails.

  I shovel pasta in my mouth and dump my bowl in the washing bin as fast as I can.

  I’m still not used to the massive polished-wood halls that echo your every fart, the gold leaf on the wallpaper, the quartz-shot marble around the windows. I walk around with my jaw open so much I’m surprised a damn fly hasn’t flown down my esophagus. Who am I kidding - flies don’t exist here. Such a huge, decadent place, all of it just to teach rich people’s kids. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this is unfair. I mean, it is unfair. Capitalism is a sharty little bitch. But as I watch kids in uniform walk by laughing and taking selfies, smoking juuls on the lawn behind trees, I realize they don’t care about the gold-leaf wallpaper, or the Oxford professors, or five-star meals handmade by a chef.

  This is just normal to them. This is just how they live.

  And that’s what really blows my mind. Precious, expensive, important things are just a part of their normal, every day existence.

  So what - when they have all the money in the world - do they consider precious? What does ‘special’ mean for them? Sure, there are scholarship students who’re normal people, but for most of these kids, they won’t have to worry about anything for the rest of their lives. Everyone here is smart, full-stop. They’ve had tutors since diapers. But if they can’t get into the exact college they want, I’m sure Mommy and Daddy will buy their way in. Even after they’re done with school, their parents have access to enough wealth and influence to get them jobs. Good ones. And even if they don’t get jobs, Mommy and Daddy will give them money for rent so they’ll never be homeless, or go hungry.

  I wonder what it’s like - to be that secure?

  The kids here…their future is so certain. The total opposite of the rest of us, of me, whose Mom is killing herself taking extra shifts just to pay off the school she attended to get the job in the first fuckin’ place. They’ve never had to worry about missing rent or the electricity being turned off or beans and rice and hot dogs five nights a week for dinner, have they?

  I freeze. But Mom…she married Will. Which means I’m one of them now, aren’t I? Until Mom and Will divorce. Not that I want that, but. I know the statistics. They got a pre-nup because Mom insisted on it, which means she doesn’t get anything after it’s over. I’m one of these rich kids until Mom and Will divorce, or until he hits her -

  C’mon. He wouldn’t do that. Try to trust people, maybe, idiot.

  ‘Daddy wouldn’t do that to you, honey. You’re the most important thing in my life.’

  If I close my eyes, I can feel his hands on my back, and the push. The push that ruined my life. Ruined me.

  I focus on a massive oil painting of a gentle hill, a rising sun, and breathe. One step at a time. But the answer still remains all around me, without a single question ever being asked.

  People lie. And sometimes, it even sounds sincere.

  Sometimes, it even makes you feel safe.

  From somewhere down the hall, someone’s singing interrupts my dark thoughts. It’s a smooth voice, a gentle voice.

  “Make new friends but keep the old…”

  The massive wooden hall echoes every syllable eerily, crisp and yet quiet. It’s a kid’s song. Sung by a guy my age, it sounds like, with a slightly British accent. That’s a Girl Scout song, isn’t it? An American Girl Scout song. At least, that’s where I know it from.

  It’s just a song.

  So why does it sound so creepy?

  It’s the big halls, isn’t it? It’s the fact no one’s here but me. I can’t see the person singing it, but I can see their shadow hanging around the corner. My height. A dark blue Silvere blazer cuff on their arm, the one part of him that sticks around the corner. Long hands, elegant fingers. He’s just standing there. Singing.

  “…One is silver and the other’s gold.”

  I don’t know why. Or how. But the man in the restaurant - that impossible red-eyed man - rears his head in my mind. He tried to sing. Maybe not this song, but a song.

  It’s just a student. Just a rich kid. Just a guy, singing listlessly.

  But a cold, sick feeling tightens in my stomach, and I leave the hall as fast as I can.

  10

  The Bridge (Or, How magic is the only thing that matters anymore)

  PARIS, SIX MONTHS AGO

  A golden-haired boy smokes a cigarette and sits cross-legged on the railing of a bridge overlooking the Seine.

  He’s hungover. He hasn’t been home for four days now. He’s been to loud clubs, to louder bars, to quiet cafes, to people’s apartments where the quiet is filled with the moans of little deaths. To the uptown and downtown, to the old and new arrondissements - he’s been everywhere. His parents never notice, nor do they care - as evidenced by his cold, unmoving phone and the empty flat filled with bottled water and vodka and not much else.

  This is not all true, he admits to himself. His phone indeed moves; it buzzes with texts and missed calls begging him to come and party. To come and visit. To come. Wanted, longed after. Attention. But none of it from the people he wants.

  The summer lights of Paris burn like acid, tonight.

  Because he knows.

  He knows no matter how many beautiful creatures ply his bed, no matter how well freely-offered drugs distort reality with colors and shapes and noises, he knows now magic will never be real. This is the end. He’s tried everything. Searching every high, every low. When the distracting ride is over, gray normalcy always waits for him in the doorway back to reality, like an aging, disappointed father.

  He’s held on to that shadow, that white deer, for so long. Refused to consider it was wrong. He saw what he saw with his own two eyes, and nothing can ever change that. Not time. Not Alistair telling him children like to play make-believe. Nothing. He thought he could hold on to the shadow and the deer forever, no matter what it took. But hope is a dangerous thing to keep a hand on, full of hidden thorns. They’ve pricked and bled him for so long. He’s anemic for magic. Sick for it. So many months of waiting. Of watching. Of going back to Silvere year after year and staring into the dark woods for any sign of movement. Any sign of those red eyes, of white hooves.

  Nothing.

  Magic came, and then abandoned him.

  He watches the water rushing below and thinks; in the next world, will there be magic? There’s none here. There’s nothing but people and buildings and lies here. Humans so desperate for escape they drown themselves in booze and chemicals. He thinks, for a moment, everyone is like him. Everyone wants magic to be real. And yet somewhere on the road of life everyone’s grip on that belief is crushed by the iron fingers of reality.

  But unlike everyone else, he has not given in. He’s not weak like them. He’s not let go. He’s not loosened his grip on it, not once.

  Until now.

  It hit him, in the strobe lights of a club at 4 a.m. The ecstasy had worn off, in more ways than one, and he’d looked around him and saw the crowd for what it really was - not angels of neon with a hundred eyes and singing han
ds, not horned creatures with glittering skin, but humans. People, sweat-soaked and desperate to forget their worries.

  Him, too.

  You’re not special, the blacklight had crooned. There is nothing special in this world. It is all smoke and mirrors. Light and shadow. There’s only life ahead of you, the only race that feels so terribly dull and slow.

  He leans forward, letting the cigarette fall out of his mouth. It spirals towards the water, red-hot end twinkling like a meteor until cold steel drowns it.

  He teeters.

  He teeters.

  He teeters.

  On the edge between despair and hope.

  11

  The Dinner (Or, How being evil is easy)

  According to the snoozefest of a book Von Arx gave me, every student at Silvere has six periods. Just six. And here I am, cursed to have 12 a year.

  Hah! Ha-ha.

  Objectively perfect jokes aside, there are only three periods a day here at Silvere - the evens on Mondays and Wednesdays, and the odds on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with alternating Fridays. Which means my next period - sixth period - frees me from the stuffy chateau and inflicts me on nature. I walk past the exercise field in which they’re most definitely playing Un-Football a.k.a soccer, past the manure-scented horse field and to what Ana called the ‘general’ field. On the very end of the perfectly green and perfectly rectangular stretch someone’s set a bunch of multicolored hay targets up. A little wooden stand holds a bunch of dark bows and quivers stuffed with arrows. The bows are so high-tech they look more like James Bond gadgets - all tension wires and weird gears.

  I do a quick head count; only four people, teacher included. Obviously this ain’t the most popular P.E. class - not compared to swimming, with its pool full to the brim with splashing students. The teacher - Ms. Soyon - has massive hands and a fresh smile and straw hair wilder than the wind. When she takes off her jacket to demonstrate proper bow drawing form to me, I try and fail not to ogle her incredibly defined shoulder muscles. Jesus Christ, I’m gay. Well, half-gay. Maybe. Nobody knows jackshit about what I am, what neat little box I’m supposed to fit into, least of all me. I don’t know any French and she doesn’t know very much English, but that doesn’t stop us.

  “Archery is not single force,” She says, smiling wide. “The string moves when you move, but is not the mechanism. I teach you to move the string, but you learn to move the arrow.”

  “Okay. Uh, I mean,” I wince. “Oui, madame.”

  A snide ribbon of laughter ripples through the other three students at my terrible accent, but Ms. Soyon’s face just brightens. She turns and fires the bow, the arrow whistling across the grass at breakneck speed and landing on a distant target, smack dab in the little red center. The four other people ‘ooo’ a bit.

  I sigh dreamily. “I love watching women succeed at everything they do.”

  “Um.” A guy next to me irritates in perfect English. “Men exist too?”

  “Theoretically.” I pick up a bow and immediately try to draw the string, but it doesn’t budge. It looks like a string, feels like a string, but it might as well be a bag of bricks.

  “Oh!” Ms. Soyon thunders over the grass towards me. “Not that. That string is for experience.” She hands me another bow. “This one for easier.”

  I aim the bow and Ms. Soyon flutters around me, adjusting my stance, my shoulders, even my chin with her firm hands. When she’s finally satisfied, she stands back and beams with expectation, motioning to the only unused target on the line.

  “Move your eye to the red, and draw.”

  Determined not to look weak in front of this amazing warrior-woman, I suck in a breath and pull the string back with all my might. It’s just a color. Just red, Lilith. Like a crayon, or an apple. Something nice. Not blood. Not -

  Unholy vampire shit - pulling this bow is like trying to pull apart a spring-loaded bear trap.

  “G-God.” I pant. “You do this every day?”

  “And many nights! Sometimes in Olympics!” Ms. Soyon pats me on the back and laughs, except her idea of a pat sends me plummeting face-first into the ground. I wasn’t ready for herculean strength which, honestly, my bad. The other students try to smother their cackling and fail miserably. Ms. Soyon ignores them, boisterously helping me up with a string of apologies.

  “Wow,” I right myself. “That is some tasty grass.”

  “Very sorry,” Soyon brushes her massive hand over my back to get the green bits off. “I did not think -”

  “It’s okay,” I assure her. “Tres bien. Seriously. As far as eating shit experiences go, that was a pretty pleasant one. Not even one concrete. Or dog dookie.”

  Soyon cuts a stern look to the giggling students, and they quiet down and go back to shooting their bows. And thus ends my first flirtation with archery. After another half-hour of pure tricep torture, I’m covered in raw fingerskin and sweat. My arms quiver like crazy, and all I did was try to draw the bow a few times. I thought this’d be a get-out-of-P.E-free card! Think again, silly bitch.

  I can’t be pissed at myself for long, though - not when the sunset washes the campus in a silky peach-jam glaze. I turn and watch the gold medallion of the sun slide below the hills. People push busily past me, all of them sweaty and hungry and used to it, used to this breath-taking view, so utterly used to it they just turn their backs on it. But the sunlight melting like a pat of butter into the dark, severe jigsaw mountains, the black-veined trees reaching out gilded leaves…I can’t just ignore it. This sky is so fuckin’ clear. There’s no smog, and the light pollution from the tiny village nestled in the valley below the school doesn’t do diddly to hide the sky. You never see trees like this in LA - hell, you never see stars like this in LA. They glow like diamonds up here, like the god of beauty threw glittering fistfuls of precious gems on a stretch of ice-blue velvet just for me.

  But when the sun finally disappears is when the sky truly decides to go off.

  “Fuckin’ hell,” I whisper through awe-clenched teeth.

  Color seeps into the twilight sky. Light, sweet colors. Wavy bands of luminous violet and emerald stretch across the heavens. Those…have to be auroras, right? I thought they only showed up near the poles? They’re not as bright as the pictures I’ve seen but they’re wispy and here, and they’re real, and they look like the tails of ghost dragons.

  The sky never looks like this in LA.

  I’m pretty sure it doesn’t look like this anywhere else in the world. This is a fairy tale. A movie. Something too perfect and beautiful to exist. I rub my eyes, check my glasses to make sure I haven’t smeared anything. Nope. Still there. I snap a picture on my phone, even if the machine eye only does it half-justice, and send it to Ruby.

  “I told you, didn’t I?”

  I’m so mesmerized I barely look over at the voice - Trevino. She stands next to me, uniform still spotless even after a full day of school. I’m sweaty and oily and she looks as fresh as if she’s just woken up. How does she do it? Miracles? Baby powder? The world will never know. The gentle night wind plays with her sheet of ash-brown hair as she presses on.

  “Silvere is a special place.”

  “Why’s that?” I ask. Trevino sighs softly.

  “It’s a place to escape. To get out from under the thumb of our parents’ expectations. Society’s expectations,” She looks up at the aurora. “It’s a place where we can become our own person without the pressure of countless eyes watching us.”

  “None of the eyes,” I agree. “But still all the wealth and luxury.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” She shoots me a look, the remnants of sunset highlighting some gorgeous amethyst streaks in her irises. I try and fail not to be entranced.

  “Nothing,” I wrap my arms around my knees. “It’s just, you make being rich sound bad. And I can’t stand that self-pitying shit.”

  “Is that all you can see?” Trevino scoffs under her breath. “The money?”

  “Hard not to,” I jerk my
thumb back behind me. “When you’ve got all these chateaus and chefs.”

  Is this…fighting? Are we fighting? I don’t fight with people - I avoid them. I know Trevino doesn’t like me - she made that clear after class. So why’s she standing here with me, talking with me?

  “So, uh. What does your family do?” I ask. Trevino raises one finely plucked brow.

  “Family?”

  “Yeah.” I nod. “Everyone here like, leads with what their family does, instead of their names. Or where they’re from. It’s weird. So I figured you -”

  “I’m a scholarship student.” She cuts me off.

  “Oh.” I pluck a blade of grass. “That’s why you know so much shit in Econ.”

  “I do not ‘know’ so much ‘shit’,” She repeats disdainfully.

  “How’dya explain the chain-hand-raising you do in class, then?”

  I’ve got her on that one, and she knows it. Trevino sighs, folding her arms over chest.

  “How else is one supposed to stand out in a place like this?”

  “Oh, I dunno. Couple Chanel bags might do the trick.” I tease. “One on each arm.”

  I make a motion like I’m carrying double-heavy bags on each bicep, my nose high in the air. Trevino doesn’t give a single twitch - her expression pure steel.

  “And actually, what the fuck is up -” I start. “- with everyone referring to each other by their last names?”

  “Etiquette,” Trevino deadpans. “Specifically international business etiquette. First name basis is for family and close friends only.”

  “Freakin’ weirdoes,” I mutter.

  “‘Weirdoes’ only because it’s not your way of doing things.” She corrects stonily.

  I half-expect her to leave any second. But she just stays, her spotless white tights at my eye-level as she stares up at the aurora. It’s not like I’m looking up her skirt, but with so much light from the sky, and my angle slightly beneath her, it’s easy to see the faintly raised, parallel lines on her thighs. I know that pattern.