“Just ignore them,” Laurent murmured.
Easy enough for him to say. He grew up being one of the popular kids. I knew first hand just how mean people could be. I didn’t want to go back to being the ‘ookie’ girl, the one who used to fight back the tears as bullies sang at her while snapping their fingers. Laurent might not be targeted, but they certainly could go after just me.
“They’re just shocked; you brought a familiar in and we’re holding hands. They probably heard how powerful your aura was, too.”
Oh, yeah. For a split second, I’d forgotten that George wasn’t just a cat. He was proof that I had some serious mojo, backed up by how my aura flared under the influence of that amulet. Ha! They probably were in awe of me, trying to figure out how to get on my right side. Probably. Maybe. Shit, I really had a self-esteem problem, didn’t I? I needed to work on that. Well, no time like the present! I turned to look at Laurent and pasted the biggest, happy to be here with you looking smile ever on my face.
“That’s the spirit,” Laurent whispered, darting in for a quick peck on my lips. “Couldn’t resist.” He smiled right back at me, holding my eyes with his. My lips tingled where they had touched his. As far as kisses went, that one was definitely a cut above John Schwancker’s in seventh grade. That had been both my first and last kiss until now in all honesty. He’d ignored me afterward, then moved away two months after the junior high mixer dance. No one else had been brave enough to approach the ookie girl with the dumb name. Not unless you counted that creepy middle-aged guy who approached me during our senior field trip to Topeka. Any girl would have done for him. I think. I just happened to be the one he caught alone by the drinks machine at the rest stop our bus stopped at. I suppressed a shudder at the memory.
I looked away, scanning the dining area for my friends. I quickly found them, staring at me like they didn’t know what to think. I shifted George in my arm so I could raise that hand to wave at them. I jerked my head in a ‘come here’ movement. Felicia and Joanna looked away, but Jacob said something to them before getting up and striding over to where we were being let in at the head of the line.
“Hey, what’s up?” Jacob asked breathlessly. Laurent dropped my hand and placed two trays on the counter.
“We want you guys to come sit with us,” I replied, watching wide-eyed as a server placed a small dish of flaked salmon and a saucer with a little jug of cream on my tray for George. I turned my attention to Laurent. “Babe, can you get me some of that chicken? And mashed potatoes and gravy please, with peas.” Babe? Where had that endearment come from? Never mind, I’d roll with it. We were dating, and just because I called him a pet name doesn’t mean we’re going to elope tomorrow or anything.
Laurent’s eyebrows had shot up at my calling him babe, but he took it in stride. “Sure thing, Honey.”
Jacob bounced his eyes between the two of us as if trying to suss out if he was being played. “Sit with you? As in, you’re sitting somewhere other than the table we saved you a seat at?” he asked me cautiously.
“Yup. Laurent asked me out, and I said yes, but we both agreed that it wouldn’t be cool for me to sit with him and the guys at the royal table without y’all.”
Jacob stared at me as if I’d just grown two heads.
“You want one of those rolls, too?” Laurent asked me, as one of the cafeteria workers slid a pan of them under the lights, fresh from the oven.
“Oh, yes, please.” I turned my attention back to Jacob. “Come on, you know you want to. “
“It’s not a joke, Myers,” Laurent said, scooting the now full two trays down the counter to the drinks dispensers. “The table is for royals and their friends, friends they deem worthy of being good role models to the rest of our classmates. We want you to sit there because you belong there, on both counts.”
“What about Lydia? I’m sure she’s going to have something to say.” Jacob glanced longingly at the table in question.
“What about her? Given her recent behavior, she’s being asked to sit elsewhere. Hey, can you grab one of these trays for me?”
“Ah, yeah, sure.” Jacob took my tray and followed us over to the Royal table.
“Lydia and her crew haven’t shown up yet,” Charles informed us. “Word is, Rina and Jennifer went to wait for her outside the headmistress’ office, and they’re still waiting for her to come out.”
Jacob sat my tray down next to Laurent’s. “I’m just gonna go grab my tray and stuff, and tell the girls, okay? Be right back.”
“Sure,” Charles beamed at him. “These seats next to Brent and me are yours.”
Chatter began resuming as Laurent and I took our seats as Jacob dashed off. He returned moments later, with Joanna and Felicia in tow.
“I’m not about to say no to sitting at the royal table,” Joanna said, sitting her tray down next to Charles and sitting down. “Even if this turns out to be a one day only thing.”
“Yeah,” Felicia agreed, sitting down next to her. “Once in a lifetime, right?”
Jacob sat down on the other side of me, clanking his tray down on the table. “I told you guys, they’re going out now, and we’re her friends, so now, we’re also theirs, sorta.”
“Like I told Jacob-”
The cafeteria fell silent once more, and the hairs on my arms stood up as a voice interrupted our conversation.
“Well, isn’t this cozy?” Lydia asked, sarcasm tainting the innocence of the words she spoke.
“Shit,” Brent swore softly.
Rescue came in the unlikely form of Harvey, the second year Royal from outside the door earlier.
“Excuse me, sweet cheeks, but you’re blocking my seat. And, you’ve missed your time slot for getting your lunch, too, it looks like.” He stepped around her, plonking down his laden tray next to Jacob. A second guy, who had been standing outside with him in the line, came around and looked pointedly at Lydia while taking his seat next to Felicia.
“I was in the office! They have to let me have my lunch!” she retorted.
“Nope,” Harvey replied, popping the ‘p’ as he spoke. “Not unless you were given a note saying to let you claim your dinner outside of your allotted time.”
“We don’t. And you know we were told that we’d missed lunch when you were dismissed.,” Rina reminded Lydia.
“But it’s not fair! I should at least get to sit here where I belong and talk with my friends while everyone eats!”
More royals and their friends sat down, pretending to not notice Lydia. Yikes, she was getting full-on shunned. Had Brent and Charles talked to the rest of the royals?
A girl with lustrous, dark brown hair that naturally curled a bit at the ends and hung just past her shoulders cast Lydia a disdainful look. “I thought we told you yesterday that if you kept up with that grade school shit, you needed to go elsewhere. Your little trips to the headmistress and why were all over the school as soon as classes ended, so why are you here? Did you not get the memo?”
“You blew your last chance,” Harvey informed her. He leaned around me to address Laurent. “Your sister can stay if she wants, though. She’s not made any waves, she just has bad taste in friends.”
“Guys! Are you going to let them freeze me out?” Lydia implored the Trio. “We’ve been friends for years!”
“I don’t even know who you are anymore,” Rina said, as none of the Trio replied, instead of shoveling a bite of their meals into their mouths, which, in itself, spoke volumes. “I’m not going to stay, though, watching everyone else eat will just make me feel hungrier. I’ve got snacks in my room, so I’m heading back there.”
“Mreow!” George said from where he sat in the middle of the table between Charles and I. I sat his bowl of salmon in front of him. He could have his cream afterward.
“I’ll join you tonight for dinner, though,” Rina said, still talking to Harvey and Laurent.
Laurent swallowed his food. “Nope, but I’ll see you in Mathemegrams later.”
“Hold up!” Lydia called out after Rina. “What kind of snacks?”
“Um, bye,” Jennifer said, meekly before fleeing after her friends.
Laurent snorted. “I don’t care if Jennifer sits with us as well. She’s okay, just a follower. Get her away from Lydia’s toxic behavior, and she’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, sounds fine to me,” the dark-haired girl agreed. “Leave Lydia without her little circle of support, and she might wise up a bit.” She smiled at me. “I’m Toni, by the way.”
“Tuesday,” I told her.
“Oh, I know. You’re kind of famous, you and your cat. George, right?”
“Yeah, sorry, I should probably feed him under my chair, huh?”
“Nah, she’s alright,” Charles interjected. “She’s staying out of our food. Looks like she’s ready for her milk, though.”
“She?”
“Yeah, see, look, her tail’s up in the air. Definitely a girl.”
Oh. Not that it mattered. Girls could be called George.
“I wasn’t sure before, you know, while she was a ghost. And I didn’t have a chance to look properly during class once she finally turned all solid.”
“That’s so cool,” another guy said. “Having a familiar, I mean. And being a locii. That’s like, legendary.”
“My genius friend here is Mike,” Harvey said.
“Shut up,” Mike told him, good-naturedly.
Brent gave me a big grin. “I see you must have told my lunkhead friend yes.”
“You don’t mind? Him going out with me, I mean?” My gaze bounced between him and Charles.
“Not if you don’t mind he’s a lunkhead.”
Felicia and I laughed, while Joanna smiled as she speared a green bean with her fork. I was relieved his friends were okay with us dating. These Royals weren’t at all stuck up like I’d worried about. I think everything will be okay, after all. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I belonged. I hadn’t felt like that except at home with my aunt and uncle and when hanging out at Marla’s house. But even then, I hadn’t felt as comfortable in my own skin as I did now. Life had a funny way of working out, for sure.
Chapter 9
Mathemegrams should have just been called Magick Geometry, I decided. Because that’s what it was. It involved learning about the etheric dimensions and the geometric shapes to draw to work spells. Some of the simpler ones could be used as runes to create charms and wards. Others, we had to write the formula down, using chalk or something, then, like a magickal calculator, use the wild magick infused within the ether to solve for the hocus pocus version of x. There was only one problem I could foresee with this class. I sucked at math and scraped by with a C in all of my math classes. And that was only because Marla helped me study because when it came to numbers, she was a bit of a whiz kid. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d have flunked all of those classes and never graduated, I swear.
I needed to find myself a Marla. Hopefully, one of my newfound friends would be insanely good at this stuff and be willing to help a girl out. How embarrassing would it be if the supposedly most powerful girl, who happened to be part Fae and a locii, couldn’t learn how to actually do any spells because she didn’t know the right formula? Or she used the right spell formula but drew the wrong shape. I could just see it now- me standing before the entire class, carefully writing the spell out in chalk, only to sketch a stop sign shape instead of a pentagon. See, I don’t even know the name for the shape of that sign! Wait- yes, I do. The one with the name like octopus. Octo…no octagon!
“You any good at Mathemegrams?” I asked Felicia hopefully, running into her in the hall.
“I could be better,” she admitted ruefully. “I was hoping you’d be good at it since you’ve got so much magick and all.” She gave me a sympathetic look. “Guess that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a natural at the practical bits, though, huh? Especially if you didn’t have basic mathemegrams all through primary school on up.”
“Yeah, we did not. We learned plain old geometry and stuff like how to figure out angles and what the circumference of a circle was and all that jazz.”
“Makes sense, I suppose.”
“What does?” Laurent asked as he walked up to join us.
“Tuesday was just explaining how hard she thought Mathemegrams was going to be for her since she didn’t learn the magickal properties of basic shapes back at her human schools,” Felicia replied.
“Don’t worry,” he told me with a wink. “I’ve got you covered. No way I’ll let you struggle through that alone.”
I should have known he’d be a whiz at that. He didn’t seem to be terrible at anything other than manners upon occasion.
“Thanks,” I said gratefully. ‘I had visions of flunking out the first term.”
“Not going to happen,” Felicia assured me, cheerfully. “They’d assign you a tutor before they’d let that happen.”
“Yeah, if it looks like you’re not doing well, the faculty will assign you a mentor from the upperclassmen who will tutor you and supervise your homework,” Laurent added. “But we won’t let that be necessary.”
“Study buddies!” Felicia squealed.
Laurent gave her a tight smile. “Yes, indeed.” He reached for my books, and I gave them to him. “Where’s George?” he asked.
I shrugged. “He was there on my desk, half under my book, when he suddenly made a chirping sound and then went poof! Just like that. Caused my book to fall on the floor and everything.”
“Probably went back to your room,” Laurent suggested. “Cats often have a mind of their own, familiars or not.”
“I guess.” I hoped that was what happened. I was half afraid he’d gone back to being a ghost again, so far back that we wouldn’t be able to see him at all.
He reached out to touch my arm. “Hey, I really meant what I said. You know, earlier when I told you why I’d said to not mention George and stuff.”
“You told her that?” Felicia gave him a decidedly unfriendly look.
“Yeah, and it was a mistake. I thought I was helping her, okay? Not drawing attention to herself.”
I smiled at Felicia. “It really is okay. He screwed up a little, but he’s owned it. Let’s cut him some slack, okay?”
“Okay, if you say so.” She pointed at her eyes, then at him. “But we’ll be watching you, mister.”
Laurent rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah.”
“What's going on?”Jacob asked, walking up.
“Tell you later,” Felicia muttered, casting a still disgruntled glance at Laurent. Man, I hoped this was not going to blow up into a big issue. I wanted us to get along. That really wasn’t too much to ask, was it?
“Hey, hey!” Charles called out cheerfully, coming up to drape an arm around Laurent’s shoulder. “Now that we’re all done for the day, we heading back or what?”
“Where’s Brent?” I asked, looking about.
“Professor McNeil makes students clean the classroom, and Brent was one of the three McNeil assigned to do it this week.”
“Seriously?” I asked. McNeil taught one of the elective classes, Martial Magick.
“Yup, the penalty of having his class last in the day. He said to head on back, and he’d join us in time for dinner.”
“What is that class even about?” I asked, imagining something like kung fu or karate but with magick.
“It’s about tactical planning. You know, reading maps and figuring out how to best use the lay of the land for defense and stuff. Like, causing a rockslide to block off a mountain pass. This week’s homework is reading about some famous battles and how the generals deployed magick to help defeat the enemy.”
Okay, so nothing like what I imagined.
“Oh, okay. Um, we’re just waiting on Jacob and Joanna.”
“We’re here,” Jacob’s voice said from behind me, startling me. “Whoa, there, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I wasn’t expecting that,” I said, feeling silly.
Like Lydia or some pathetic person hoping to curry favor with her. She was right. I needed to be more on my guard.
“Let’s go, then,” Laurent suggested. “If we go now, we can get in some studying before dinner.” He looked at me. “We can start with basic Mathemegrams and then help you with your homework in that class after dinner.”
“It’s all new to her,” Felicia informed Jacob and Joanna.
“Oh, yeah. It wouldn’t be a class you’d have had in the human realm.” Joanna looked at me, pityingly.
“We’ll get you caught up in no time,” Brent promised.
“We best get going, then,” I agreed, sighing. “I have a lot of catching up to do.”
Laurent slid an arm around my waist, my book bag slung over his other shoulder. “You’ll get there,” he reassured me. I hoped he was right. No way did I want to flunk out.
After checking that George was indeed in my room and okay, I put my books away and quickly got changed. I was more than ready to get out of that uniform. I threw on my comfiest pair of old jeans and the Wonder Woman t-shirt that Marla had bought me to wear when we went to see it at the movies. A fresh pair of socks and my wedge heeled sneakers later, and I was ready to study. I grabbed my Mathemegrams book, a notebook, and a couple pencils before heading out to the common area. Jacob and Felicia were already sitting on a pair of sofas flanking the fireplace. I took a seat by Felicia, leaving room for Laurent to sit next to me.
“So, we’re really doing this then?” Jacob asked me.
“Where’re Joanna and the guys?” I asked, not wanting to go through all that again.
“She and the rest of the Royal Trio were called to a meeting with the Deputy Head,” Felicia informed me. “They got here the same time we did, and Laurent was just about to go looking for you when a staff member came looking for them.”
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