Page 24 of Bound to the Dorm Elf
ROVAX
The human campus is a battlefield of noise and movement.
Skylar calls it “morning classes.” I call itchaos with a schedule. The air smells like wet stone from last night’s rain, fried food drifting from some open window, and too many bodies moving in too small a space.
I keep half a step behind her, matching her pace but scanning everything. Doorways. Corners. Who’s looking at her. Who’s looking atme. Most don’t hold my gaze when I meet their eyes, but some do — too long, too curious — and I file those faces away.
“This is what I mean,” Skylar mutters over her shoulder, her voice low but sharp enough to cut. “You can’t just…stare people downlike that. It’s not blending in.”
“They looked first,” I answer.
“That doesn’t make it less weird!” She stops dead in the middle of the walkway, forcing me to halt beside her. The crowd flows around us, annoyed murmurs and shuffling feet. “Look, if you want to go unnoticed, you’ve got to?—”
“Bend my neck like prey?” I arch a brow at her.
She throws her hands up. “God, you’re impossible.”
“No,” I say, leaning in just enough that my words are for her alone, “I amalive. And I stay that way by not looking away first.”
Her eyes flash, frustration and something else under it — something I can’t name yet. “Yeah, well, here it just makes you look like you’re about to pick a fight in the quad.”
I glance around us. “No one has drawn steel.”
“That’s not the point!” She groans and starts walking again. “Okay, rule number two — posture. You don’t have to stand like you’re about to get knighted all the time.”
“It is my natural stance.”
“Well, un-natural it. Slouch a little.”
I try it. My spine protests like I’ve just told it to fold in half. “This feels… wrong.”
“It looks normal,” she says. “Trust me.”
I don’t. But I do it anyway, at least until my back starts to ache from the indignity.
We stop at some small food stand where she buys two cups of something hot. The paper vessel is warm against my palms, the scent bitter and rich.
“It’s coffee,” she says, watching me like she’s expecting me to fling it into the nearest bush.
I sip. My mouth floods with a taste like burnt bark and dark earth, sharp enough to make my jaw tighten. “It is… strong.”
“That’s a good thing,” she says, and drinks hers in long pulls.
We walk again, weaving between clusters of students sprawled across the lawn. She keeps pointing out things like “the student center” and “the gym” — places I pretend to commit to memory but mostly mark for entry points and sightlines.
“Rule number three,” she says, “when someone asks you a casual question, don’t answer like you’re challenging them to single combat.”
“That is how one learns the measure of a person,” I say.
“Not here it’s not.”
A man in a green hoodie calls to her from a picnic table. “Hey, Skylar!”
She waves, but before she can answer whatever he asks — something about the softball schedule — I cut in. “Why do you wish to know?”
The man blinks. “Uh… just curious?”
I hold his gaze for three heartbeats, weighing the truth in his tone. He laughs awkwardly and turns back to his friends. Skylar groans.
