Page 44 of The Last Graduate
“Your chances are rapidly diminishing,” I said, and then I locked my leg over his and twisted him over with me on top, and he let out something between a laugh and a desperate gasp for air, and caught my hips, and after that we were just gone, an endless lush wonderful grappling as we arranged ourselves—the slide of his thigh against the inner skin of my own, the urgent sensation of his hardened muscled body working so perfectly with mine. We hadn’t very much idea of what we were doing—I’d got all sorts of detailed and educational materials from Mum obviously, but the pictures and diagrams and descriptions didn’t really convey anything of what it was actually like trying to fit two bodies together. I don’t think Orion had even as much of an idea as I did; I’m sure there was a sensible amount of sex ed in his past, and equally sure he’d ignored it entirely.
But we didn’t need any real idea—there wasn’t any goal in mind, I was so preoccupied with the dizzy glee of having dived in that I didn’t care about getting anywhere. Which was just as well, because he came less than five minutes into the festivities, and then went into a spiral of writhing and apologies until I punched him in the shoulder and said, “Comeon,Lake, if that’s the best you’ve got, I’m leaving you and going to lunch,” and he laughed again and kissed me some more and then followed my pointed hints until I’d had an equally good time, and then he moved back up on top of me and we moved together and it was—too many things to name all of them, with the sticky physical pleasure the least of them, far behind the sheer relief of walls tumbling down, giving in to my own hunger, the joy of feeding his, and if that hadn’t been enough, the unbelievable bliss of notthinking,of notworrying,for at least one glorious stretch of mindlessness.
Which worked really effectively until afterwards, when we were lying together sweaty and, at least in my case, incredibly pleased with myself: I felt I’d accomplished something unique and magical, that, unlike all the other actually unique and magical things I can do, wasn’t horrifying or monstrous in the least. I was draped over his chest and he had his arms round me, which would become intolerably uncomfortable at some point that wasn’t now, and then he sucked in a deep gasping breath and said, “El, I know you don’t want to talk about—if we make it out of here, but I can’t—” and his voice was cracking on the edge of tears, not just leaky sentiment but like he was barely holding on to keep from bursting into sobs, so I couldn’t stop him, and because I didn’t, he said, “You’re the only right thing I’ve ever wanted.”
I had my cheek pillowed on him, and you couldn’t have paid me to look him in the face at that moment. I stared hard at the drain instead, from which any number of helpful maleficaria could have burst and didn’t. “If no one’s mentioned this to you before, you’ve got really odd taste,” I said, and wished I didn’t mean it quite as much as I did.
“They have,” he said, so flatly I did have to look at him. He was staring up into the dark recesses of the pavilion ceiling with a muscle jumping along the side of his jaw, a blind look in his face. “Everyone has. Even my mom and dad…They always thought something was wrong with me. Everyone was always nice to me, they weregrateful,but—they still thought I was weird. My mom was always trying to get me to be friends with the other kids, telling me I had tocontrol myself.And then when they gave me the power-sharer and I drained the whole enclave…”
Every word out of his mouth was stoking my already substantial desire to show up on his enclave’s doorstep and set the entire place on fire. “They made it feel as though it were all your fault, and that as a result you owed it to all the rest of them to dump the mana you get, all on your own, into their bank, and accept whatever bits they like to dribble back out to you in exchange,” I said through my teeth. “Which, by the way, is the only reason you’re low on mana in the first place. You’d still beaglow—”
“I don’t care about the mana!” He shifted and I got myself out of the way to let him get up; he went and sat on the steps, looking out into the still-falling amphisbaena rain. I grabbed my t-shirt—the New York one he’d given me, which came down to mid-thigh on me—and put it on and went and sat next to him. He had his elbows on his knees and was hunched over as if he couldn’t bear watching my face, whatever he’d see on it when he told me about his horrible evil self who’d swallowed this swill from everyone round him so long that he couldn’t even tell the taste was rotten. “I like thehunting.I like going after the mals, and—” He swallowed. “—and taking them apart and pulling the mana out of them. And I know that’s creepy—”
“Shut your bloody mouth,” I said. “I’ve seen creepy, Lake; I’ve beeninsidecreepy, and you’re nothing like.”
He said softly, “That’s not true. You know it’s not. In the gym, when those kids tried to kill you—”
“Us,” I said pointedly.
“—you wouldn’t have hurt them,” he went on, without a pause. “And I—I wanted to kill them. Iwantedto. And it did freak you out. I’m sorry,” he added, low.
I said in measured tones, “Lake, I’m useless at this nonsense, but as my mum’s not here at the moment, I’m just going to feed you her lines.Didyou kill them?”
He gave me an annoyed look that no one ever gives Mum when she’s gently leading them along, so I don’t think I’d got the tone quite right, but that was his own fault picking me for an agony aunt. “That’s not the point.”
“I think they’d agree with me that itis.I’vewantedto kill loads of people. But wanting can’t do harm without a pair of hands behind it.”
He gave a shrugging heave of shoulders and arms. “The point is, I never wanted normal things. And that’s not my parents’ fault, okay? You can be mad at them if you want to be, but—”
“Thanks, I will.”
He snorted. “Yeah. I know you think they’re jerks for letting me hunt when I was little. They aren’t. That’s why they’renotjerks. Because that’s all I ever wanted to do. They tried to stop me. I’m not just saying that. You think Magnus is spoiled? They gave me anything I looked at for more than three seconds. Toys or books or games…I didn’t want any of it. When I was ten, I started sneaking out of school to hunt. So my dad—my dad, who’s one of the top five artificers in New York—literally quit working and hung out with me all day, trying to teach me himself, doing stupid kid projects with me in his home workshop. And I wasmadat him for it. After a couple of months, I threw a gigantic freakish tantrum because he wasn’t letting me hunt. I wrecked the whole shop, part of our apartment, chunks of major artifice projects…and then I ran away and hid down in the enclave sewage pipes. When my mom found me, she made me a deal: if I stayed in school all day and did all my homework and did a playdate every Saturday, on Sundays they’d let me take a gate shift and fightrealmals. IcriedI was so happy.”
I scowled over this confessional torrent. I was really disinclined to be sympathetic to his parents, for what I had to acknowledge were many grotesquely selfish reasons, which was making it hard for me to winkle out the other reasons I still didn’t like it. I did have to admit they had a right to struggle with a ten-year-old whose only idea of a good time was taking the guard duty shifts that otherwise would go to the best fighters that New York’s mana could hire. Their gates would attract at least as many mals as the school on a daily basis, if not more. The Scholomance isn’t in a major metropolitan area with five or six entrances, wizards coming and going the entire day. Ten years on a guard shift is enough to earn you an enclave spot; the only problem is very few people survive to claim it.
But Orion was saying, with perfect sincerity, “It made everything so much better. Then at least peoplelikedme for wanting it, even if they still thought I was weird. And then here—”
“And why did they even send you?” I interrupted, still looking for something to be angry about. “Just to look out for the other kids?Youdidn’t need protecting.”
“They weren’t going to,” Orion said. “I wanted to come. I know everyone else hates school. But I don’t. The Scholomance—the Scholomance is the best place I’ve ever been.”
I emitted an involuntary gargled noise of outrage.
He huffed a little. “Yeah, see, even you think I’m weird. But itis.I could do the one thing I wanted and also be doing something right, all the time. I wasn’t just weird and creepy. I got to be—a hero.” I grimaced; that wasn’t on the nose or anything. “Except whenever people tried to say thanks, or anything, I always felt like it was a giant lie. Because they thought I was being brave, and if they knew Ilikedit, they’d be weirded out, just like everyone from home. And yeah, I thought something was probably going to get me at graduation, because I wasn’t going to go until after everyone else was out—”
He delivered this statement with all the agonized soul-searching and drama of someone announcing he’d go for a nice walk; I suffered a burst of private irritation that died very abruptly when he said, “—but I didn’t really care.”
I stared at him stricken.
“I didn’twantto die,” he hastened to tell me, as if that was an enormous improvement. “I just wasn’t scared of it, either. I didn’t have a plan except to kill mals until one of them got me, so whynotin here? I’d get to help so many kids, not just my own enclave. I didn’t really know about that stuff, you know,” he added abruptly. “Not until I met you. I sort of assumed everyone lived someplace like New York. Even after I met Luisa, I thought she had it really bad, not that we had it so much better. But it made sense to me anyway. Why should I run out on everyone just to go home and hang out on New York’s gate until something got me there? I didn’t want anything else. Not like normal people—”
I grabbed his near hand, gripping tight. “Stop it!” I said, on the verge of shrieking incoherently. I knew that wouldn’t be helpful, buthelpfulfelt so far beyond my reach, it might as well have been on the moon, so I was tempted to go the other way instead.
My whole childhood, everyone always wanted me to be more like Mum, told me I ought to be; the only person who didn’t was Mum herself. But that insidious message didn’t manage to get too deeply into my head, because I was always wanting her to be more likeme.Less generous, less patient, less kind—and I don’t even mean I wanted her to be those things tootherpeople; I’d have been wildly glad if she’d ever have stooped to have a screaming match withme. But right now, with every fiber of my being, I wanted to have all her answers inside me: her clear understanding, what she would have said, the light she’d have shone for Orion onto the despair twisted like dark vines through his head, so he could see it and cut it out of himself and open up the room to grow. The only answer I had to give him was setting New York on fire, and much as I wished otherwise, I could tell that reallywasn’tan answer to his problem.
“There’s no such thing asnormal people,” I said, a desperate flailing. “There’s just people, and some of them are miserable, and some of them are happy, and you’ve the same right to be happy as any of them—no more and no less.”
“El, come on,” Orion said, with a weary air of being much put upon. I could have frothed in his face. “You know it’s not true. Therearenormal people, and we’re not. I’m not.”
