It was too fine a day to hurry. Forcibly resisting the tug of the bell at her heels, she ambled down the hill.
After a minute she began to whistle. She couldn't help it.
Even when she arrived at the schoolyard and found it empty, doors shut and a solitary carrion-dog skulking across the soccer field, that warm sense of well-being stayed with Jane. She was going to the mall today—Ratsnickle had promised to show her how to jigger the change box on the shuttle bus. It wasn't until she actually stepped into the redbrick school building that her mood darkened. The hollowing echoes of those gray halls were a mumbling surf of misery. The fluorescent light fixtures hummed a jittery song.
In the depths of the building, the hideous creature that the Principal kept in his office screamed. Her stomach flipped over, as if somebody had scraped fingernails down her spine.
Hunching her shoulders slightly, Jane hurried to her homeroom.
Fat old Grunt puffed out his cheeks like a toad in display when she walked through the door. "Well! Miss—" A quick, almost imperceptible sidelong glance at the attendance roster he kept taped to his desktop. "—Alderberry, have you deigned to grace us with your presence? And only six minutes late? How charming! Perhaps you would care to share the source of your oh-so-fashionable tardiness with the rest of the class?"
Jane flushed and stared down at the floor. "I was looking at a flower," she mumbled.
Grunt put a hand to his ear and bent his knees out to either side, bobbing his round body lower. "What's that?"
"A flower!"
"Ohhhh, I see." His expression was so exaggeratedly solemn that scattered giggles arose here and there in the room. "Lost in the rhapsodic contemplation of our precious little floral friends, were you?" Now the entire class was laughing outright at her.
She could sense Grunt slipping around behind her, up on his toes, with that slithery, exaggerated bounce of a walk he employed when he was playing to the back rows. Grunt was proud of his histrionics, and often boasted to his pupils that they made him the most clearly memorable—and therefore best—teacher in all the district. "But my dear, sweet Miss Alderberry, don't you know that flowers are never fully enjoyed until they are—"
He was in back of her now, his breath sour over one shoulder, and she knew from having seen this same ritual enacted upon others, that he was dipping that sharp little chin of his down, down, until chin, smirk and all, disappeared entirely in fatty folds of neck and cheek, and his mouthless face was dominated by the vicious gray light glinting from the dusty twin disks of his spectacles. She knew what was coming, and knew too that if she didn't put up with it, she would be kept after school in retaliation and miss out entirely on going to the mall. Or, worse, she could be sent to the Principal's office, to learn firsthand what it was like to look a basilisk in the face. Jane squeezed her eyes tight with humiliation.
"—plucked!" He thrust his hand between her legs and snatched up at her crotch. With an involuntary chickenlike squawk, she clumsily leaped and twisted away. The class convulsed with mirth, all of them braying, snorting, snickering, laughing as if they had never seen him pull this joke before.
"Take your seat, Jane!" Grunt said sternly. "We have work to do, and no time to waste on your foolishness."
It was a long walk to the slow learners' row in the back of the room, where she and Ratsnickle both sat.
Jane had no friends in the class and thus to her they were largely indistinguishable, an anonymous field of feys and weirds. But even had she known them all, Ratsnickle would still have stood out among their malicious faces and wicked expressions. Two red little eyes peered madly from an uncombed thatch of hay, and a wise-guy grin cocked up one side of his mouth. His arms were too skinny and too long, at odds with his lumpish body; but once you accepted that, he had beautiful hands, fingers wondrously long and so fluidly jointed they could wrap twice around a Coke bottle.
He turned away when she sat down.
Jane felt an icy coldness tighten her face. Her hands gripped the sides of her desk so tightly the nails turned white. An alien resolve took hold within her. She waited until Grunt turned and bent to pick up the chalk. Then she straightened her back and flipped him the finger.
Only those kids nearest her saw. At their laughter, Grunt whirled. But Jane was prepared. Her hands were out of sight, and her expression was neither guilty nor innocent, but sullen and defensive in exactly the right proportions. Grunt turned back to the blackboard, baffled.
Ratsnickle swallowed back a guffaw. A lilac maid caught Jane's eye and smiled. Jane nodded back, ever so slightly, and opened her textbook.
She was learning.
At lunchtime, she hovered at the edge of the cafeteria, tray in hand, looking for an empty place. There was no point in sitting with dwarves, thumblings, or grigs, even if she could have fit into one of their chairs; they were all too clannish, each in their own way. Nor would it be wise to sit too close to a lamie, gwarchell, or kirk-grim. A corner seat would be good, preferably with another empty chair to serve as buffer from that table's cliques. She didn't want to seem presumptuous. Or a chair between two disparate groups; she could stare straight ahead of her then, and be ignored.
Finally, because there were no good alternatives, she took a place alongside Ratsnickle.
Ratsnickle was deep in conversation with a lanky fey named Peter of the Hillside. Jane shared a couple of classes with him. Peter was wearing acid-wash jeans and a denim jacket with the Wild Hunt's "Horns of Elfland Tour" logo painted on the back. He had a bad complexion and a good haircut. He looked up, not at her, when she sat, and addressed the air: "Who's the git?"
Jane stiffened.
"She's with me," Ratsnickle said. "Okay?"
Peter shrugged. "All the same to me."
Jane ate in silence, afraid to join in the conversation. It was all about machines—Peter was apparently a shop major—the psychology of wyverns, the aberrant behavior of a drill press that had been with the school for as long as anyone could remember and might have to be put to sleep. Jane listened in fascination. Her classes, where they touched on machinery at all, were purely theoretical; she envied the boys their hands-on experience.
When she gathered up her tray to leave, Ratsnickle offhandedly said, "Still on for this afternoon?" She nodded yes, and fled.
Because she lagged so far behind the rest of her class, Jane had to go to the pale man for two hours' tutoring every afternoon. The pale man was a tall, thin creature who wore beige chinos, a white shirt, and canvas deck shoes. His skin was as lifeless as his clothing, and his eyes deader yet.
As always, he did not look up when she entered. He sat motionless on a wooden chair, hands on knees, back to the chalkboard, staring straight ahead of him into nothingness.
"Hello? I was sent here for remedial?"
The pale man looked up. He nodded wanly. Unhastily, without emphasis, he picked up a book, opened it, paged forward a leaf, and then back one. "There are three stars in the heavens," he said, "moving about Jupiter, erratic sidereal bodies which establish a lesser zodiacal process for that wanderer in its mighty twelve-year progression about the sun."
Jane had to concentrate hard to catch the meaning of his words, so flatly were they delivered. If she didn't watch it, she'd find herself zoning out, thoughts drifting off into the empyrean as he droned on and on. The pale man would let her. He didn't care in the least. He was a forest creature, and exiled from his proper environment he had grown so enervated, thin, and attenuated that he seemed hardly to be there at all. There was a natural strength and vigor all other living things possessed that was lacking in him.