Ballad (17 page)

James

“The inner sanctum,” Paul said, voice reverent, as I knocked on the door to Sullivan’s room.

I gave Paul a withering look but the truth was I was curious as hell. First of all, to find out what Sullivan wanted. And second, to see what a teacher’s room looked like. I’d always sort of figured they came out during the day to teach classes and then got stored in shoe boxes under someone’s bed until they were needed again.

“What do you think he wants?” Paul asked for the hundredth time since we’d gotten the note on our door.

“Whoever knows what Sullivan wants?” I replied.

Sullivan’s voice sounded from inside. “It’s unlocked.”

Paul just looked at me, eyeballs round, so I pushed the door open and went in first.

Being in Sullivan’s room was … weird. Because it looked like
our
room. The same old, high ceilings painted in white-that-was-not-really-white (“bird-poop white,” Paul had called it, but I’d ignored him, because
I
was supposed to be the sarcastic one) and the little bunk with the drawers underneath it and the creaky, pitted wooden floors. One drafty window looked out on the parking area beside the dorm.

The biggest difference between our rooms was that Sullivan’s had a tiny kitchen area tucked next to a bathroom all his own. And unlike our room, which smelled sort of like Doritos and unwashed laundry and shoes, Sullivan’s smelled like cinnamon from a candle on his nightstand (very Martha Stewart) and like flowers. There was a big vase of daisies sitting on his miniature kitchen table, which I guessed was the source of the floriferous odor.

Paul and I looked at the daisies and then at each other. Dude. Flowers were awfully … pretty.

“Do you want an omelet?” Sullivan asked from the kitchen area. It was weird to see him without his teacher uniform on. He was wearing a black hooded Juilliard sweatshirt and jeans that seemed suspiciously trendy for an authority figure, and he was holding a spatula. “I can’t cook anything but omelets.”

“We just came from dinner,” Paul said. He looked a little scared of Sullivan, as if discovering that he was a real person and not that much older than us was something terrifying.

I walked over and looked into the skillet. “It looks like scrambled eggs.”

“It’s an omelet,” Sullivan insisted.

“It still looks like scrambled eggs. Smells like them too.”

“I assure you, it’s an omelet.”

I pulled out one of the mismatched chairs at the round table and sat down. Paul hurried to follow my example. “You can assure me it’s a suckling pig if you like,” I said, “but I still think it’s scrambled eggs.”

Sullivan grimaced at me and performed the elaborate ritual necessary to transfer scrambled eggs to a pan while still allowing them to maintain an omelet shape. “Well, I’m going to eat while we talk, if that doesn’t bother you guys.”

“I would hate to see you wither away on our behalf. Are we in trouble?”

Sullivan dragged his desk chair into the kitchen and sat down with his eggs. “
You
are always in some kind of trouble, James. Paul never is. How long is it until sundown, anyway?”

“Thirty-two minutes,” said Paul, and Sullivan and I both looked at him. I realized in that moment that I’d never really looked at Paul since the first time I’d seen him. I’d just sort of formed a first impression of him based upon round eyes behind round glasses and a round face on a round head, and just kept accessing that first round image every time I looked at him since then. It seemed strange that I hadn’t really noticed how sharp the expression in his eyes was, or how worried the line of his mouth was, until we were sitting under a little florescent light at Sullivan’s kitchen table, weeks after we’d spent every night in the same room. I wondered if he’d changed, or if I had.

“You’re a regular meteorologist,” I said, a little pissed at him for showing Sullivan he cared about when the sun went down, and also for somehow changing his round demeanor while I wasn’t watching. “Or whoever it is who knows when the sunrise and sunset and moon phases are.”

“No harm to being informed,” Sullivan said, and shot me a look as if the statement was supposed to make me feel guilty. It didn’t. He took a bite of eggs and spoke around them. “So I heard from Dr. Linnet today.”

Paul and I snorted, and I said, “What’s she a doctor of? Ugly?”

“Weak, James. She’s got a PhD in some sort of English or psychology or something like that. All you need to know is that those three letters after her name—P. H. D.—mean that she has the power to make our lives excruciatingly difficult if she wants to, because I have only two letters after mine—M. A. Which at this school, translates into ‘low man on the totem pole.’” Sullivan swallowed some more egg and pointed with his fork to a folder on the table. “She brought me your outlines. Apparently they made a deep impression on her.”

“Yeah. She shared some of her impressions with us during class.” I opened the folder. Our duplicate outlines were tucked neatly inside, one of the corners still crinkly where Linnet had bent it back and forth. That
still
pissed me off.

“She brought up several …
weighty
points.” Sullivan set his plate down on the table and rested his feet next to them. “First of all, she noted that your outline seemed to interpret my assignment rather loosely. She thought my approach to my class in general had been lax. And she also seemed to think that James showed quite a bit of attitude in her class.”

I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t like any of her weighty points were particularly untrue.

“She recommended—let me see. Hand me that folder. I wrote them down, because I didn’t want to forget them.” Sullivan stretched out his hand and Paul gingerly placed the folder in it. Sullivan pulled out a sheet of paper from behind our outlines. “Let’s see. Recommendations. ‘One. Establish narrow rules for your assignments and be prepared to enforce them
diligently
, particularly with difficult students, of which you have at least one. Two. Maintain strict teacher-student relationship to engender respect. Three. Be particularly unforgiving when grading difficult students; attitude problems arise from a lack of respect and excess of ego on their part.’”

Sullivan lowered the paper and looked from me to Paul. “Then she recommended that I tell you”—he nodded toward Paul—“to redo your outline, within the limits of the assignment, before Monday’s class for a chance to improve your grade from a C to an B, and to give you”—he looked at me—“a C and tell you to redo your outline before Monday to keep it from being an F.”

Paul’s mouth made a round shape that I’m sure he wasn’t aware of. I crossed my arms across my chest and didn’t say anything. Whatever Sullivan was going to do, he’d already made up his mind—a blind monkey could figure that out. And I wasn’t about to beg for a better grade anyway. Screw that.

Sullivan slid the folder onto the table and crossed his arms, mirroring me. “So I have just one question, James.”

“Go for it.”

He jerked his chin toward the outlines. “Who do you have to play Blakeley’s character? I think I would make an excellent Blakeley.”

Paul grinned and I let one side of my mouth smile. “So does this mean I’m not getting a C for the outline?”

Sullivan dropped his feet off the table. “It means I don’t do well with rules. It means some bitter drama teacher isn’t going to tell me how to teach my class. This play
burns
, guys. Even in the outline, I can see it. It could be wickedly self-deprecating satire and I don’t see why you guys shouldn’t do your best and get a grade for it. But you’re going to have to work harder for it than the rest of the class—they only have to write a paper.”

“We don’t care,” Paul said immediately. “This is way cooler.”

“It is. Where are you going to rehearse?”

But neither of us answered right away, because in the distance, the antlered king began to sing, slow and entreating.

With some effort, I spoke over the top of the song. “Brigid Hall.”

“Interesting choice,” Sullivan said. He slid his gaze over to Paul, who was drumming his fingers on the table in a manic, caffeine-inspired way and blinking a lot. Paul wasn’t out-and-out singing along with the king of the dead, but he might as well have put out a big neon sign saying “How’s My Driving? Ask Me About My Nerves: 1-800-WIG-N-OUT.”

I glared at him.

“Something wrong, Paul?” Sullivan asked.

“He—” I started.

“I hear the king of the dead,” Paul blurted out.

Well, that was just ace. I put my chin in my hand and tapped my fingers on the side of my face.

Sullivan glanced at me and back at Paul. “What’d he say?”

“It’s a list of the dead,” Paul said. With just his fingertips, he held onto the edge of table, white knuckled. He squeezed his fingers like he was playing a tune on the table. “Not the currently dead. The futurely dead. Do you think I’m, like, certifiable now?”

“No.” Sullivan went to the window and heaved his shoulder against it. It creaked and then gave. He slid it up a few inches; cold air rushed in along with the song. It tugged at my bones, urging me to rise up and follow. It took all my willpower not to jump up and run outside. “Lots of people—well, not
lots
—many people hear him in October, up until Halloween.”

“Why?” Paul asked. “Why do I have to hear it?”

Sullivan shook his head. “I don’t know. He says different things to different people. It doesn’t mean you’re crazy.” Somehow, though, it wasn’t reassuring. He said it like being crazy might be a more appealing alternative. He went to his counter and got a notepad; he laid it down in front of Paul’s face.

Paul obediently picked up the pen from next to our papers. “What’s this for?”

Sullivan shifted the window open a bit more and looked at me again before he answered Paul. “I’d be very grateful if you’d write down the names he’s telling you.”

James

The lobby of Seward was an immensely safe sort of space, and I was definitely needing womb-like security in a major way by that point. It had four of the world’s most comfortable chairs, which is important in a safe space, and four squashy ottomans to go with each of them. It also had four alcoves in each of the corners, each containing a wonder of the world. North corner: a piano older than Moses, that sounded like a calliope. South corner: a reproduction of a Greek statue—some headless chick with perfect boobs. East corner: a bookshelf with every piece of Important Fiction That You’ll Never Read in Impressive Hardcover. West corner: vending machine (because sometimes Doritos were all the breakfast you were going to get).

It was two o’clock in the morning. Down the hall, Sullivan was behind his closed door, oblivious to my wandering. Somewhere on the fourth floor, Paul was snoring. I envied his ability to sleep. I felt like I ought to pace or scream or something; I couldn’t stop thinking about Halloween. Every time I did, my hair stood on end again and fresh goose bumps spread along my shoulders. Sleep was out of the question.

The lobby held its breath, silent and dark, tinted weirdly red-orange by the streetlights outside the front windows. The world’s most comfortable chairs cast shadows that stretched and grew to ten times the size of the chairs themselves. I crashed in one of them and sat there, so motionless that it felt like I had forgotten how to move.

I felt alone.

I didn’t have a pen. I took the worry stone out of my pocket and ran my thumb over it until the urge to mark my skin faded.

Nuala, are you here?

“I’m here,” she whispered from one of the other chairs; she sat on the very edge of it, as if ready to jump up and run if she had to. I don’t know why she bothered whispering if I was the only one who could hear her, but I was too glad to see her to tease her about it. I hadn’t seen her since the practice on the hill, and I’d almost thought she’d gone for good. Sort of half-standing, I dragged my chair across the wood floor until our chairs faced each other and our bare knees were touching.

I looked into Nuala’s face. I didn’t really want to ask her the question out loud.
Do you really think we’re going to die, like Paul thinks? And do you think it’ll be Them that does it? I mean, not a freak dorm fire?

In the dim light, Nuala’s pale eyes were black and I could see dark circles beneath them. “They’re killing faeries. Solitary faeries, like me. The ones that have a lot of contact with humans. I saw the bodies. Maybe they think we’ll warn you of something. Not that they’ve told us
shit
.”

It was weird to think that she looked tired. She looked very human and vulnerable, dwarfed by the sheer size of the chair behind her. If it had been Dee, I’d have needed to comfort her or make a joke, but with Nuala, I didn’t have to pretend. She could already see what was inside my head, so there wasn’t any point in showing her anything but the truth.

And the truth was I was starting to feel like things were getting out of control. I dropped my face into my hands and rubbed my eyes until I saw sparks of color.

“Haven’t you already seen it, though? You’re supposed to be super-great-seer-guy.” Nuala’s voice was bitter, as if she thought I’d deliberately withheld tales of imminent death and destruction from her.

“Nuala, all of Paul’s revelations, you telling me there’s worse than you here, something weird going on with Dee—it’s all news to me. I’m just not a good psychic. I can tell when something’s not right, sometimes, but I can’t tell what it is, or when it is, or if I’m supposed to do anything about it. I’ve tried to make it make sense, but I can’t. It’s just feelings instead of words. And you want the honest-to-God truth? There’s so much weirdness going on I can’t even pick out what makes my hair stand on end. I’m just—” I stopped.

“ … overloaded,” Nuala finished for me, reading my thoughts. “Whatever’s happening has to be something big as hell.”

I jerked, thinking I heard sounds in the night. Both of us froze, sitting quietly, listening, until we were sure there was only the sound of trucks rushing distantly by on the highway and that it was just us.

Even though the dorm was silent, I didn’t speak out loud again. Instead, I rubbed my thumbs over Nuala’s slender, bare knees, tracing the lines of her bones and the place where her kneecaps pushed against my kneecaps. I stared at the shadows we cast on the floor.
What the hell’s going on, Nuala?
Why won’t They leave us alone? What could They possibly want from us?

She was silent a long moment, watching my lettered fingers on her skin. Her voice was a little uneven: “Power. She wants power. I think she’s made an alliance with the
daoine sidhe
.”

Those are the ones called by music, aren’t they? I thought they were enemies of the queen.

“Of the
old
queen. The one your not-girlfriend helpfully got killed in all her teen brilliance. That was back when the
daoine sidhe
could only appear on Solstice, or with awesome music. But something’s changed. It couldn’t be that way unless the new queen was allowing it. The faerie that—” Nuala stopped, tried again. “The faerie you saw—the swan asshole—he was one of them. He shouldn’t have been able to dance unless it was Solstice.”

“I’d like to find him.” The words surprised me. Out loud, and angry.

Nuala looked at me, eyes dark and fierce, and her expression said:
me too
.

“You look tired,” I said. For some reason, I didn’t like to see her looking tired, just like I didn’t like to hear her falter when she described the swan faerie.

She didn’t even think before answering, which I was beginning to figure out meant she was lying. “No, I don’t.” She looked away from me and then said, abruptly, “I’ll find out what they’re doing. I don’t have anything to lose. I’ll be dead in a week and a half anyway.”

I sighed, and pressed my hands flat against the sides of her legs, waiting for my arms to race with goose bumps. Nothing happened. “You’ll rise again, though. Like a phoenix, right? From the ashes. So you won’t really die.”

Nuala made a harsh gesture toward her chest. “
This
girl will die. Everything that makes me who I am now will be gone. Just because another body climbs from the ashes doesn’t mean it’s me.”

I slid my hand along her thighs just far enough to take each of her hands where they were braced by her legs. I gathered them into my own and held them between us. She had such long, soft hands. Nothing like my square, blocky palms, with fingers muscled hard from so much piping. “I’d be freaking out if I were you. You’re so brave it makes me feel bad.”

“You’re brave,” Nuala said. “Stupidly so. It’s part of your charm.”

I shook my head. “This summer, before I had my car accident, I
knew
I was going to crash. I knew the moment I woke up that day to go to the gig. I knew it all day long. I just kept waiting for it to happen.” I laughed in a very unfunny way. “I was a wreck all day. And then, when it happened, all I could think was,
so this is it
.”

“You can’t read my mind.” Nuala’s hands were tense in mine. “I’m freaking out. You wouldn’t think I was so brave if you knew what I was thinking.”

I looked at her. “What
are
you thinking?”

She immediately dropped her eyes to our hands; our fingers had somehow knotted together. My rough, written-on fingers all tangled around her slender, unmarked ones. “How hard it is. How unfair. How much it’s going to hurt like a
bitch
to get burned alive.” She laughed, too, harsh and unhappy.

“Why do you go? If you know you’re going to die in a bonfire on Halloween, why not just lock yourself in a room somewhere? Then when they light the fires and ask you to come out, just tell them they can put their matches where the sun don’t shine.”

Nuala gave me the most scathing look in the history of scathing looks. “What a
clever
idea. I’ve
never
thought of that. And I’m sure all the previous versions of myself never did either.
Idiot
.”

“Okay, okay. Point taken. This will probably earn another scathing look, but are you sure?”

“Sure about what? You being an idiot?” Nuala laughed derisively, but her fingers were trembling in mine; I held her fingers tight to still them.

“Sure that you’re going to be burned.”

“Were you sure you were going to die in a car crash?”

She had me. I made a face.

“I just
know
, okay? Everyone else knows and a million faeries have told me, but even before that, I knew. I can’t even stand to be near a candle.” Nuala’s shoulders shivered; she clamped her arms to her sides to still them. “I thought for the past few years that it would be the dying that really hurt, because it’s not like I had anything worth remembering. Nothing I couldn’t do again, you know? But now it’s the forgetting. I don’t want to forget.”

“What changed?”

Nuala stared at me, and her voice was furious. “
You
, you asshole! You ruined everything. You’ve made everything
impossible
.”

When they say “my heart skipped a beat,” they’re full of crap. Really, what they mean is, your heart sort of stutters and thinks about stopping for a second before it remembers that beating is good for it.
Oh shit, no, Nuala. Not me. Not stupid, cocky me.

She jerked on my hands. “Shut up! I already know you’re a prick.”

“Well,
that’s
a relief.”

Nuala spared me from having to come up with something else to say. “I was thinking about attraction. I have this theory on it. On love.” She wouldn’t look at me.

I swallowed, but managed, “This ought to be good.”

Nuala shot me a hard look. “Shut up. I don’t think love has anything to do with how the other person is. I mean, maybe a little. I think what really matters is you yourself. Like, you know, let’s say you lo—really liked a self-involved ass. That doesn’t matter. What matters is how that ass makes you feel. If you feel like the best person in the world when you’re with him, that’s what makes you like him. It really isn’t about how nice a person he is at all.”

I ran my tongue over my bottom lip. “I like it. It’s like the selfish person’s guide to love. It’s not you, baby, it’s
me
I’m in love with.”

Nuala smiled self-consciously at nothing in particular. “I thought you’d see what I meant.” She paused, and when she started again, it was like she couldn’t stop, like the words just kept tumbling out of her. “I like what I look like now. I like what I act like. Everyone thinks I’m going to jump you and suck out your life because I want you so bad, because you’re such a great piper. They don’t think I can resist. But I
can
. Here you are and you look
amazing
and I haven’t taken anything from you. I don’t even want to. I mean, I do, I mean, it’s
killing
me not to, but I don’t want you to give up any of your life for me. I’ve never done that before. I’m—
proud
of myself. I’m not just a leech. I’m not just another faerie. I don’t want to use you. I just want to be whoever it is that I am when I’m with you.”

I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t know how I felt. I didn’t feel like writing anything on my hands. I didn’t feel like jumping and running from the room. I didn’t feel awkward or weirded out or freezing cold or hungry or anything. I just felt like sitting here with my knees touching her knees and with my forehead leaning against our collective ball of fingers.

“I don’t want to forget this—that because I fell in love with you, I didn’t kill you,” Nuala said. Her voice was funny; it was hard for her to say what she was saying. “You don’t have to say anything. I know you’re in love with stupid, selfish Ungirlfriend and not me. That’s okay. I just—”

I leaned forward and kissed her. I know I took her by surprise because her lips were still forming a word when my lips touched them. My skin tightened with cold, just a little, as I kissed her, but no goose bumps.

I leaned back into my own chair and closed my eyes. Opened them again. Sucked in my lower lip, that tasted all of summer and Nuala, and pushed it back out again.