“I won’t.”
“Simon, you do. Every year. As soon as you see him. And I just think that maybe youshouldn’tthis time. Something’s happening. Something bigger than Baz. The Mage has practically disappeared, and Premal has been on some secret assignment for weeks—my mum says he’s stopped returning her texts.”
“Is she worried about him?”
“She’s always worried about Premal.”
“Are you worried about him?”
Penny looks down. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry—should we try to find him?”
She looks back up at me sternly. “Mum says no. She says we need to wait and pay attention. I think she and Dad are asking around, covertly, and she doesn’t want us drawing a lot of attention to them. Which is why you need to cool down. Just—keep your eyes open. Observe. Don’t knock over any furniture or kill anything.”
“You always say that,” I sigh. “But then when it’s us or them, you want me to kill something.”
“I never want you tokill,Simon.”
“I never feel like I have a choice.”
“I know.” She smiles at me. Sadly. “Don’t kill Baz tonight.”
“I won’t.”
But I’m probably gonna have to kill him someday, and we both know it.
***
Penelope lets me go back to my room after dinner, and she doesn’t try to follow—she’s stuck with Trixie and her girlfriend now that Baz is back in town. “Gay people have an unfair advantage!” she complains.
“Only when it comes to visiting their roommates,” I say.
She’s decent enough not to argue.
I’m nervous when I get to the top of the stairs. I still don’t know what I’m going to say to him.“Nothing,”I hear Penny say in my head.“Do your schoolwork, go to bed.”
As if it’s ever that easy.
Sharing a room with the person you hate most is like sharing a room with a siren. (The kind on police cars, not the kind who try to entrap you when you cross the English Channel.) You can’t ignore that person, and you never get used to them. It never stops being painful.
Baz and I have spent seven years grimacing and growling at each other. (Him grimacing, me growling.) We both stay away from our room as much as we can when we know the other is there, and when we can’t avoid each other, we do our best not to make eye contact. I don’t talktohim. I don’t talkin frontof him. I never let him see anything that he might take back to his bitch aunt, Fiona.
I try not to call women bitches, but Baz’s aunt Fiona once spelled my feet into the dirt. I know it was her; I heard her say,“Stand your ground!”
And twice I’ve caught her trying to sneak into the Mage’s office.“It’s my sister’s office,”she said.“I just like to visit it sometimes.”
She might have been telling the truth. Or she might have been trying to depose the Mage.
And that’s the problem with all the Pitches and their allies—it’s impossible to tell when they’re up to something and when they’re just being people.
There’ve been years when I thought maybe I could figure out their plan if I just paid enough attention to Baz. (Fifth year.) And years when I decided that living with him was painful enough, that I couldn’t keep tabs on him, as well. (Last year.)
In the early days, there wasn’t any strategy or decision. Just the two of us scuffling in the halls and kicking the shit out of each other two or three times a year.
I used to beg the Mage for a new roommate, but that’s not how it works. The Crucible cast Baz and me together on the very first day of school.
All the first years are cast that way. The Mage builds a fire in the courtyard, the upper years help, and the littluns stand in a circle around it. The Mage sets the Crucible—it’s an actual crucible, maybe the oldest thing at Watford—in the middle of the fire and says the incantation; then everyone waits for the iron inside to melt.
