“Still, um, miffed that Nero punched you in the face?” Eliana asked tentatively.
“No, I’m miffed that he exists,” Adara snapped as she glared at the muscular boy and his punk-rock girlfriend. The couple was soon joined by her twin brother, who didn’t give any greeting before the group shoved their way through other students to descend the staircase.
“He is, uh, a bit rude,” Eliana agreed as she watched them disappear. “Do you think it’s a good idea to go to this…thing if Nero’s going to be there? You don’t seem to have the best restraint when it comes to…um, your hatred for him.”
“I think this is an excellent idea,” Adara said with a forced and somewhat sinister smile before she resumed her scowl and stomped away. When she arrived at the door to room 307, she rapped on it incessantly.
“Wha—what are you doing?” Ackerly stammered in clear disorientation when he opened the door. Without the magnification of his glasses, his earthy eyes appeared less prominent, especially as he squinted. He wore a loose white t-shirt and green flannel pants—the same outfit she had been given for sleepwear. She would have been tempted to mock his matted and frayed bed-head if she weren’t dreading what she assumed would be an Avner worship fest.
“Why are you…awake?” Ackerly asked groggily. Beyond him, his bedroom was a sheet of black.
“We’re going to my brother’s mysterious jam session. Why aren’t you and Nerdworm ready to go?”
“What’s hap—” Tray began to say as he approached the door, but only a brief flash of his pale torso hit the light before he rapidly retreated back inside with a yelp.
“Don’t get so frazzled, Nerdworm,” Adara called after him. “I’ve seen you shirtless before.” Eliana’s eyebrows perked slightly, so she added, “We lived in the same house, okay? It was inevitable. Now, Greenie, are you going to get ready or not?”
“Um…I dunno. I was sleeping—”
“We’re not getting in trouble for something so stupid, Stromer!” Tray yelled from within the room.
“What’s going on here, guys?” Seth asked as he purposely bumped into Adara before planting himself at her side. With his arm against hers, she couldn’t quite remember what he’d asked. “Are you being a baby, Tray? Don’t wanna get in trouble—”
“Fine!” Tray shouted exasperatedly. “Give me a minute to get ready!”
Eyes bulging, Ackerly whipped his head back to face his roommate. “You’re going?”
“Yeah, and so are you.” Adara grabbed his arm to yank him out of the room. “I need to show you something in my room first, too.”
“You really want to go through with that?” Eliana mumbled, but her roommate ignored her completely.
“Wait—I need my glasses!” Wrenching his arm from her grasp, Ackerly scurried back into his room.
“Freaking blind people,” Adara muttered, tapping her foot impatiently as she waited for him to reemerge.
“I can’t go to this thing in my pajamas,” he said once he returned with his glasses perched on his nose. “Everyone will make fun of me.”
“I’m wearing pajamas,” Seth said as he motioned to his orange flannel pants. “It’s cool.”
Adara pursed her lips but chose not to make a snarky response. “Just get your ass out here, Greenie—we don’t have time to waste. You two make sure Tray comes,” she added to Eliana and Seth.
“Should we try to get my roommate to come, too?” Seth cast an uncertain glance toward the door to room 302. “He’s—well, he’s sitting in his bed, chewing his nails, and I was too scared to talk to him.”
Slowly, Adara’s eyebrows rose. “You were too scared to talk to him?”
“I’ll go talk to him,” Eliana volunteered swiftly—too swiftly, in Adara’s opinion. “Don’t worry, we’ll all be there.”
“Where’s your girlfriend, by the way?” Adara asked Seth, who merely shrugged. “Hm. Well, maybe it’s better that way. Greenie, let’s go.”
Ackerly was reluctant to allow Adara to drag him across the hall to her room, but his state of agitation was quickly altered to a state of astonishment when they entered. “What…what is this?” he questioned, gazing around the room with protruding eyes.
“This is part of our prank on Nero,” Adara informed him with a smirk of pride. The half of the dormitory room she called her own was covered completely in potted plants, each one a different species of cacti.
“Looks more like a prank on yourself,” he observed warily. “Where did you get all of these cacti, anyway?”
“Not important. The plan, Greenie, is to move all of these plants up to Nero’s room while he’s at this jam thing.”
“So…we’re not going?”
“We will,” she said as she picked up a cactus, “once we finish this.”
Sighing, Ackerly proceeded to help her collect a few pots. By the time they exited the room, their arms overflowing with the prickly plants, the Stark twins had left and the corridor and the stairwell were completely empty. Rather clumsily and clamorously, the two ascended the spiral staircase, dropping at least three cacti on the way. While Ackerly cleaned up the mess, Adara went to retrieve the other pots, and by the time they’d arrived on the seventh floor with all of the plants, it was only a few minutes until midnight.
“How do you know which room is Nero’s?” he asked as he glanced around at the eight doors in the square corridor identical to the third floor.
“I overheard him mention it to a friend earlier this week,” she bragged. “C’mon, we need to get these pots inside.”
“O-okay,” he stuttered as he gathered a few in his arms and followed her to door 706.
Nero’s room was disorderly and held a distinct odor of rotting food. Ackerly looked like he was holding his breath as they decorated the dressers, desks, and beds with the pots, but Adara was immune to the smell, as she often lived in the same amount of filth.
“There,” Adara breathed once every cactus was safely within. “Now the real fun begins.”
“Wha—we’re—we’re not done? The jam session is starting now—”
“This will only take as long as you let it take, Greenie,” she told him with a jump of her eyebrows. “I want you to force all of these cactuses to grow in a way that will disable Nero from even walking into the room.”
Ackerly’s wide eyes blinked in shock. “You want me to…to what?”
“You can do it, can’t you—make these plants grow?”
“I can…make them grow to their normal size, or maybe a little bigger, but not large enough to occupy the entire room—”
“Have you ever tried?” she challenged, cocking her head to the side.
“I—I—well, no,” he admitted, forcing himself to swallow. “I—I guess I could—”
“Do it,” she commanded as she leaned against the doorframe. “I’m waiting, Greenie.”
With a deep inhale, Ackerly walked to the far end of the room and placed his hands on the farthest plant. He’d told Adara earlier what it was called, but she hadn’t cared enough to remember. As he closed his eyes, probably praying the plant would spring up at an unnatural rate, she wished she’d listened to his plant rants; miraculously, the cactus she’d deemed as boring was visibly growing.
Adara watched in gleeful awe as the long tubercles sprouted upward and outward, gaining thickness with their length. There was something mystical about the way they curled and wove through the room, ensnaring all in their path. Even though she would have rather ingested poison than vegetables, she thought, for the first time, that maybe she wouldn’t have minded having a plant Affinity herself.
“Holy flowers,” Ackerly swore upon opening his eyes. Finding that one of the spiky extremities was pressed against his glasses, he staggered backward and gawked at his work. “Did I just…”
“No, it happened on its own.” He didn’t react to her sarcasm; he remained petrified, baffled by his own Affinity. Sighing, Adara pushed off the doorframe and nudged his arm. “Now do it to the oth
er ones and let’s get the hell outta here.”
Ackerly nodded mindlessly before taking hold of the next cactus and repeating the nature-defying process.
Tray often wished he were the only human on Earth, unbound completely from the whims of a frivolous society. Now, as they descended the unlit stairwell into the Physicals Building’s basement, was one of those times.
“This is tight, dude,” Seth enthused, his grin gleaming in the stray beams of flashlights.
“What’s tight is the fact that the entire student body has snuck out after curfew and none of the teachers have noticed,” Tray retorted with growing displeasure. Unlike his brother, he’d changed out of his pajamas and put on his orange cargo pants. He couldn’t look like a classless clod, even at an underground music festival—or whatever this event was. Luckily, in all of his anxiety, he’d managed to grab a flashlight and even a textbook for a bit of fun reading during this dreaded activity.
“You’re not really using the word tight in the right context,” Seth said as they landed in the basement corridor, which was lined with white walls and dull lights. “You’re trying to make it sound negative, but it’s meant to be positive, like ‘awesome.’”
“Well, in that case, nothing about this is tight.” Eyes narrowing, Tray inspected the mysterious corridor, brimming with giggling students. “I only agreed to come because I was hoping to watch Adara make a fool of herself by trying to defy that kid Nero, but she isn’t even here.”
“She’ll come,” Seth assured as he peered over his shoulder to search for her. “She just had to show that green-haired kid something. Not sure what she’d have to show him that she wouldn’t want to show to me, but…”
Tray clicked off his flashlight and shoved it into the pocket of his pants. “Are you jealous of Ackerly?”
“Pft—no. Adara can have other best friends if she wants. There’s no jealousy in these veins, my brother. Ackly is the green one.”
“Ackerly,” Tray corrected as they approached an open doorway the other students were flooding into, “but I don’t like him much, either.”
“Why—because he’s smarter than you? Are you jealous?”
Tray grumbled but said nothing coherent as they entered a ginormous room resembling an empty warehouse. The students were gathering in a circle around a collection of orange mats. At the center stood Avner Stromer and his girlfriend, Zeela, along with two other older students Tray didn’t recognize.
“Avner really runs this thing, huh?” Seth said, watching Adara’s brother laugh with the other three. “He was always a likable guy, sure, but I never thought he’d be so popular.”
“At least he’s popular for being friendly rather than for being mean, like some people we know.”
“Oh, there you are!” Kiki exclaimed as she emerged from the gathering crowd and came sprinting toward the twins. “I was worried you weren’t going to come and I’d have to hang out with my awful roommate the whole time.” She paused to glance back at Lavisa, who stood alone, picking at the split ends of her yellow hair. “Yeah, she’s disgusting. I tried to tell her that her ugly hair always needs to be in a ponytail, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”
“I think it looks good,” Tray said at first. When Seth’s eyebrows shot up, though, he cleared his throat and added, “It’s fine—it looks fine.”
“No one cares what you think, loser,” Kiki spat before linking arms with his brother. “C’mon, babe, let’s go be alone.”
“Not sure how you plan to be alone in a room full of people,” Tray mumbled, but he was really just talking to himself because the couple had already disappeared into the crowd. He now stood by himself on the outside, watching as the last few stragglers trickled in. He was considering going into the far corner of the room and reading when someone abruptly popped up beside him.
“Tray or Seth?” Hartman asked with quizzical, orange eyes. “I can never tell the difference between you two.”
“Tray,” he answered blandly. “Do you think Seth would carry a book?”
“Can’t say, since I don’t really know you two that well,” Hartman said, shrugging. “Hey, are you excited for this thing? My roommate, Carrick, said he heard it’s kinda like wrestling but using our Affinities instead of our hands. I dunno, man, but it sounds lit.”
“The phrases today’s youth come up with…” Tray sighed as he stared up at the concrete ceiling.
“Carrick couldn’t come tonight, though,” Hartman went on, as though Tray cared. “He hurt his foot in training today—what a bummer. I guess, since it’s past midnight now, it’s technically tomorrow. Hey, Lavisa looks like she’s standing alone. She is smoking hot, if you ask me. I’m considering making a move on her—you know, romantically—but I’m afraid she might beat me up. So…should we go stand by her?”
“Sure,” was Tray’s indifferent response as he reluctantly trudged after the freckled boy toward Lavisa. When they stepped up next to her, she was chewing the tips of her hair in a strange attempt to eradicate her split ends.
With her glacial, judgmental, mustard eyes, she glanced sideways at them and said a wary, “Hello.”
“What’s up?” Hartman greeted as smoothly as he could. Tray didn’t think it was very smooth at all.
“Chewing my hair,” she said. “You?”
“Uh—well, I’m not doing that, but…uh, that’s cool,” he said with a little shrug. “You pumped for the awesome shiz about to go down?”
“I heard we were going to eat peanut butter and jam sandwiches, which they lack in the cafeteria, but seeing as there’s no food here at all, no, I am not pumped.” With that, Lavisa stuck a clump of hair back into her mouth to gnaw on.
“Peanut butter and jam?” Hartman whispered to Tray, who didn’t bother to listen, because Avner was trying to call the group of two hundred students to attention.
“All right, all right! Settle down, guys. You don’t have to listen to me, but this’ll definitely go quicker if you do.” The room fell mute with only the faint sounds of echoing voices bouncing off the bare walls. Avner cleared his throat and then clapped his hands together as his lips curved slyly. “All right, everyone, this is what we like to call JAMZ. You upperclassmen know all about it, but for the primies, this is a…club, you could say, that my three friends and I formed after our first year in Periculand.” He motioned toward the three others standing around him. The girl who was not Zeela was the only one to wave. “The name JAMZ is an acronym, not anything that implies we’ll be eating peanut butter and jam, like some of you have been spreading around.”
“Damn,” Lavisa swore through her hair.
“Why do they all call it that? What happened to jelly?” Hartman whispered to Tray, but again his inquiries were ignored.
“The J stands for Jamad, my friend here,” Avner said as he gestured toward the only other boy among them. He was tall, thin, and dark, except for his cool blue hair and eyes, bright and blinding compared to his brown skin. With a crooked smirk, he gave the crowd a nod of acknowledgement.
“The A stands for Avner, me. The M stands for Maddy, our friend right here.”
The short, pudgy girl between Avner and Jamad produced a bright smile. Her hair and eyes were the same shade of orange as her cargo pants, and with her tanned skin, she gave off a burnt but warm vibe.
“And lastly, but certainly not leastly, the Z stands for Zeela, my gorgeous girlfriend,” Avner concluded, wrapping an arm around the white-haired girl to his left. Half-smiling, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses, she seemed more guarded than gorgeous.
“Well, my brother’s turned into a disgusting ball of sap since he got here.”
Tray dropped his book at the sound of Adara’s voice. Scrambling to pick it up, he stood again to find she’d appeared beside him with Ackerly not far behind.
“Where have you been?”
“With your roommate, Nerdworm. Is that a problem?” Her voice was honeyed, but her grin was manic.
Disregarding her taunt and
Ackerly’s little wave, Tray reverted his attention to Avner’s continued speech.
“Now, the four of us are the leaders here, and not because we’re better than anyone but because we know the rules and want to make sure no one gets hurt. JAMZ is, as many of you have guessed, a time we use our Affinities in a friendly competition, but it does get a bit wilder than the training sessions—in a fun way.
“The premise of this competition is that two of you will step onto these orange mats and use your Affinities to accomplish the goal of getting your opponent off the mats. The goal is not to hurt them or debilitate them—we’ve had a few problems with that in the past.” His eyes lingered in the direction of Nero, who had punched Adara. Tray might have given the guy points of appreciation for that if he weren’t obviously a brute. At his sides stood a set of twins—a girl and a boy Tray vaguely remembered Adara dubbing the Pixie Twins.
“So,” Avner pressed on, “to get this thing started, are there any upperclassmen volunteers who would like to demonstrate what a clean competition might look like?”
“I’ll do it if anyone’s brave enough to challenge me,” Avner’s friend, Jamad, said with a white-toothed grin. A few people chuckled, but no one did seem brave enough to challenge him until a gold head of hair emerged from the crowd.
“I’ll challenge you, J. I’ve been told I’m quite provoking,” Orla Belven cooed, her eyes shimmering in the dim lighting. Throughout his childhood, Tray had encountered Orla a few times, and he’d always remembered her being even less appealing than Kiki. Now…well, he couldn’t deny that she was at least a little attractive.
“Oh God,” Avner groaned as he massaged his forehead. “Anyone else?”
“Nah, nah, I can take her,” Jamad said as he patted his friend on the shoulder. “You all should step back, though. This is about to get intense.”
As Avner, Zeela, and Maddy reluctantly stepped off the orange mats to make way for the duel, Ackerly leaned toward Adara, and Tray heard him whisper, “That’s the guy with the ice Affinity I’ve been telling you about.”
Blood: An Affinities Novel (The Affinities Book 1) Page 18