Fallen Angel (7 page)

‘Okay.’ She smiled at me. ‘You go to sleep. And drink your tea. I put about half the sugar bowl in it, just how you like it.’

I almost started crying again at that, but I just gave her a watery smile as she went out the door. I wanted to just sleep and cry, but I forced myself to sit upright. I sat for a moment with my head in my hands, then I made the packet of biscuits float towards me. I chewed on a pink wafer, but it was dry in my mouth, and the tea was too hot to drink.

I scrubbed at my face, leaving black makeup stains on my wrist, and left my room for the kitchen. The dorm floor was dark and quiet. When I flicked on the kitchen light, the brightness hurt my eyes, so I turned it off again and felt my way to the sink. I found a clean glass, and filled it with cold water.

When I turned around, Dmitri was standing right next to me. I choked on my water, and coughed and snorted for a good five minutes.

‘Why are you crying?’ he asked, looking concerned. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ I said. Then, ‘No.’

‘Ah.’ He paused, and cocked his head to one side. The gesture reminded me so much of Liam that I almost dropped the glass. I burst into tears again.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Um. Maybe you should go to bed? Yeah? You’ll feel better then?’

I nodded blindly, and stumbled out of the kitchen back to my bedroom. I sat down on my bed, then realised that I was still holding the glass. A sob choked me, and I made it float back towards the desk.

A small sound made me look up blearily. Dmitri was standing in the doorway, and he was looking at me curiously. ‘Is that your power?’

‘Yeah.’ A fresh wave of tears burst out of me. My heart hurt like someone was punching me in the chest with a sledgehammer. ‘Just that. It’s hardly a power at all. Look.’ I waved my hand, and my Funko figures rattled, and a book on the floor flipped open, and its pages rustled as though in a breeze. ‘Big fat whoop. Telekinesis. Wow. Such power, very magic.’

I tugged at my bootlaces hopelessly, feeling like I was drowning.

Dmitri took a few steps into the room. I thought he was going to say something, but instead he just said, ‘I’ll take that back for you.’

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but he picked up the glass. He paused with his hand on the door handle. ‘Goodnight, Lizzie,’ he said in a rather odd voice.

‘Goodnight,’ I sniffed. I hardly heard when he shut the door. I wrestled with my laces, and finally managed to undo them. I kicked my boots off and burrowed under the covers without bothering to undress any further. I closed my eyes and felt my tears leak out onto the pillow, knowing that there would probably be loads of mascara stains on the case tomorrow, but too sick and miserable to care.

*

I must have slept for a few hours. Then I was suddenly awakened by a blur of voices outside my room. The noise made my head hurt, and I stumbled out of bed to yell at whoever it was to kindly shut the hell up.

I fumbled my door open and looked blearily up and down the corridor. It was a crowd of about five people lurching back to their rooms. They were laughing, and they stank of booze. ‘Oi!’ I said thickly. ‘Shuttup.’

‘Sorry,’ they giggled. They wobbled farther on up the corridor. I was about to shut my door, but then I looked the other way. Outside Dmitri’s room, two people were pressed up against the wall. They were kissing.

It was Dmitri and David.

The next morning, Laura rolled into the kitchen looking far more chipper than seemed normal for someone who hadn’t come home until three in the morning. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘You all right? How are you feeling now?’

I nodded. ‘Yeah. Sorry about last night. I think essays and all kind of got me down a bit. And alcohol didn’t help.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Laura said. She patted my shoulder on the way to the fridge.

‘So,’ I said, trying to sound casual as I chewed on my toast, ‘how did it go last night? Did you guys do anything interesting?’

‘Just usual stuff, really.’ She turned around with a Pop-Tart in her hand. ‘I danced with a few people. Jamie was gross again. Dmitri was kinda quiet—I didn’t see him around much. David asked where you’d gone. I told him you were tired and had gone back to your room.’

‘Thanks.’

‘So yeah.’ She shrugged. ‘Just normal stuff, really.’

So Dmitri and David didn’t hook up last night?

I couldn’t say it. I turned back to my toast, and tried not to think about it. Kissing outside someone’s room didn’t automatically mean a hook-up (except that in most cases that was pretty much always what it meant). But even if it did, it wasn’t any of my business. If David wanted to hook up with Dmitri, it wasn’t something I could control or speak out against.

So long as Dmitri wasn’t using his mesmer to do it. No, that was unfair—Dmitri had promised not to use it. He’d said that he didn’t need to. I shouldn’t doubt him. And anyway, wasn’t that just like massive sour grapes on my part? David wasn’t interested in me, so he had to be enchanted by someone else?

God, what was
wrong
with me?

I finished my toast, and went back to my room. But I bumped into Dmitri just outside the kitchen. ‘Oh hi,’ he said. ‘Are you feeling better?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, thanks.’ I couldn’t actually remember much of what he’d said to me last night. Oh god, had he seen me having a meltdown? Oh god.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘You seemed pretty upset.’

‘Who was upset?’ David asked. He shut the door of his room, and smiled at us both.

‘Lizzie was,’ Dmitri answered before I could say anything.

‘It wasn’t anything really,’ I said quickly. ‘I was just really tired last night, so it made me a bit—but it wasn’t anything really. Just tired.’

‘Are you sure?’ David asked.

‘Yeah,’ I said. I couldn’t look at him, and pushed past them both. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to dash—got classes and…’ I hurried into my bedroom and sat on the bed, breathing hard.

Then I straightened my back and stared resolutely ahead of me. Okay. So David liked Dmitri. Okay. That was fine. I could deal with that. It wasn’t the end of the world. Nothing like this was the end of the world. Every part of my heart might be screaming out that it wasn’t fair, but if I’d learned anything form Liam, it was that life wasn’t fair. So I just had to nut up and shut up. I had class, and that was more important.

David was still my friend. And this would just be the test of how good a friend I was prepared to be for him.

*

I’d almost thought Dmitri wasn’t going to turn up to class, but he pushed open the door about two minutes before the tutor stood up. He scanned the room, and even though there were plenty of empty seats, he chose the one next to me.

I couldn’t stop the fearful flutter of my heart as he sat down. Even though we’d been friendlier of late, I still always made sure to choose seats well away from him, or with a wall on one side and someone else on the other. This was the first time he’d made a deliberate effort to sit next to me. I tried not to flinch away.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hi.’

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Good… good, thank you.’ I tried to laugh. ‘You did just see me this morning.’

‘Yeah, well.’ I glanced around, and saw that he was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. He smiled, but it seemed a little forced. ‘Last night was cool. For all of us.’

I didn’t know what he meant by that, but before I could ask, the tutor stood up and began, ‘Right, so, today we’re going to be thinking about the Victorians’ obsession with degeneration. Did everyone look at the material on Cesare Lombroso?’

I had looked at it, but not as thoroughly as I would have liked, so I tried to ignore Dmitri, and focussed instead on the class. Lombroso was a dude who’d made a study of people’s ears. He’d thought that you should be able to tell if someone was a criminal just by looking at them, and tried to see if criminals shared similar features, like eyes that were too close together, or big ears, or heavy jawlines. It sounded like a terrible, terrible idea, but the Victorians had been pretty hot on that kind of thing.

‘Do you think it would be good if this kind of thing actually worked?’ Dmitri murmured.

‘I guess so,’ I whispered back. ‘But it doesn’t.’

‘We still do it, though. We still look at someone and judge them by what they look like. We see someone who looks or dresses a certain way, and then we make assumptions on their behaviour, based on that information. Judging a book by its cover.’

‘People by their covers,’ I said, trying to make it into a joke.

But Dmitri said, ‘That’s exactly what we do all the time. You did it to me.’

I opened my mouth to protest, but I couldn’t argue, because that was exactly what I had done.

He tapped his pen on the desk. He seemed pensive more than miffed about it. ‘And I did it to you, as well. I took you at face value. I believed you when you said you had power.’

Now I frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’

He shook his head. ‘Last night. Don’t you remember?’

What had I done last night? What did he mean about power? ‘I do have power.’

‘I know you do. I saw it in action. Well, “action”…’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Lizzie, Dmitri,’ the tutor called. ‘If you’ve something to contribute to the class, then please wait until you’re asked to do so, hm?’

‘Sorry,’ Dmitri said.

I waited until the tutor was in full throttle again, then hissed, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Your power,’ he said. Again, he sounded fairly calm about it, just kind of thoughtful, and as though he were sorting it all out in his own head as he went along. ‘Your power with which you threatened me. It’s nothing more than a party trick. You can make pencils float.’ He sounded vaguely incredulous, like he couldn’t believe it, and that, even more than outright scorn, made my face turn bright red. ‘And I believed you straight away, without any doubts. Surely that’s not very safe. Or normal.’

‘I…’

He sounded almost dreamy, as though he were telling a story of something that had happened to someone else entirely. ‘Because that is the way of it. That’s how it goes. We believe and we lie, and even though we lie, we still want to believe. Like Lombroso. It makes it all so much easier.’

I felt cold. ‘What are you going to do now?’

He looked faintly surprised. ‘What do you mean?’

‘About me, and about David. Now that you know about it, about me, what are you—are you going to—’

‘I don’t think you quite understand, though,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to do anything. I don’t need to do anything.’

My heart withered and died inside me. ‘You—you’re—’

Dmitri waited, eyebrows raised.

I tried to stamp down on my swirling emotions. ‘You’re not going to use the mesmer on him. Are you?’

‘You know, I find it a little insulting how you think I need the mesmer to get a guy to like me.’

‘I—I didn’t mean it like that, I just—’

‘Lizzie and Dmitri.’ The tutor put his hands on his hips. ‘Right, that’s it. Both of you, out. If you can’t be quiet in my class, then you’ll have to leave. Even if you don’t want to learn, you shouldn’t try and sabotage those who do.’

I shoved my books and pens back into my bag. My face was bright red, and I could feel tears pricking in my eyes. Outside in the corridor, I turned on Dmitri. ‘You’re not going to use the mesmer on him, though. You said promised you wouldn’t, you said it was the oldest law, and—’

‘I’m not going to break the law,’ Dmitri said. ‘I’m not stupid. Don’t worry about that.’

‘But you and David…’

Dmitri shrugged slightly. ‘We—what’s the phrase?—we hooked up last night. But there was no mesmer involved. I told you. I don’t need to.’

I stared at him. I wanted to scream at him, wanted to punch him—but there was no reason to do so, apart from jealousy. He said he wasn’t using the mesmer; if he was willing to use the mesmer, then why hadn’t he mesmered me into being quiet and just accepting this?

He was right. He didn’t need the mesmer. David just liked him better than me, without any magic involved.

Dmitri shrugged. ‘Well, so that’s that. I’ll see you back at the dorms. David was saying about a movie night tonight. See you.’ He turned and went back down the corridor.

‘See you,’ I whispered, feeling as though the world were crumbling down all around me.