He rolled his eyes. “I’m not cosplaying anyone. I’m just wallowing pathetically in self-pity. Didn’t realize that was a crime.”
She gave him another scrutinous glare, and then a few moments laterahhed as if finally sussing him out.
“Let me guess, yet another of your forays into romance has ended bitterly?”
Octavius sighed. “You could put it that way.”
“Who was it this time? A Japanese heiress? The son of a Russian oligarch? The next Miss Argentina?” Fola asked teasingly, taking a seat next to him on the short piano stool. Fola always found her brother’s failed romantic excursions ever so amusing.
“Spanish prince,” he muttered.
This wasn’t the first time Octavius had been brutally dumped before, nor the second time, nor the third. But this one hurt for reasons he wasn’t quite sure of, especially since one of his previous suitors had gone through the great effort of dumping him via the boarding school’sancientfax machine. This time Octavius had at least been dumped in person, over chai lattes in Central Park. You’d think he’d be over it by now, given that it had been weeks since the dumping.
Maybe his melancholy was because it was finally dawning on Octavius that the problem in all of his relationships was, in fact, him.
“You know, despite all this being a tad too theatrical for me… I find myself almost feeling sorry for you,” Fola said as she ruffled his platinum-white hair.
She liked to call Octavius a serial dater, as though it were his choice to get repeatedly dumped and humiliated, like his life was a sad reboot ofGroundhog Day. He didn’tchooseto be dumped, it just so happened that his romantic relationships always ended the exact same way: first, with signs of mild disinterest, then with Octavius desperately trying to cling to the tail end of a ship that had long since sailed, followed by various torturous, almost barbaric, methods of severing ties. Fola wouldn’t understand it at all. She’d never been dumped before; she was usually the one who did the dumping.
He glared at his sister. “Anyway, I told you that I’m busy, so what are you still doing here?” he asked again, trying and failing to mask his growing agitation. “Clearly it isn’t just to mock me or because you ‘missed me.’ So what is it? And how did you even know I would be here?”
“To answer all of yourburningquestions… you’re right, I’m not here to call you back because I’ve missed you—which, for the record, I always do,dearly, my dear brother. I’m here because we are all being summoned back to the Manor to fulfill our yearly contractual obligations. And lastly, I knew you were here because I know how you think. Figuring out your movements was just one long maddening math equation, really.”
He didn’t like that she found him so predictable; sometimes he forgot how much of a mastermind his sister truly was. She’d always catch him in a lie, even before he’d opened his mouth to speak it. She was constantly several steps ahead of everyone else. He’d learned long ago to accept it.
Octavius looked at her, confused. “Yearly contractual obli—”
“What day is it today, Tavi?” she asked, cutting him off.
He shrugged. He had no clue when he’d last considered what day it mightbe, not when all the days felt the same, merging into one large ball of achromatic nothingness.
“It’s Friday, November twenty-third,” Fola said, answering her own question.
He stared at her blankly.
She blinked at him and then simply added, “Prodigy Ball Day.”
And there it was, the puzzle piece he was missing. The nightmare finally clicked into its dreadful place.
“Fucking hell,” he said, immediately rubbing the encroaching horror from his eyes.
The last he had checked, the event was still two blissful months away. This breakup seemed to have taken a bigger toll than he had realized.
“Yeah, fucking hell indeed. Everyone’s already gathered at the house for the ten-year anniversary press conference. I lied and told them you were out running errands. Of course, given that everyone knows you neveractuallyrun errands, it was a pretty far-fetched lie. Still, better than the truth of you being here, hungover, missing your classes to cry over someone you dated for five minutes.”
Octavius ignored his sister’s callous words about his love life.
“I thought that if I pretended it wasn’t happening, it simply wouldn’t happen,” he replied numbly.
“In what universe would Father ever cancel the Prodigy Ball? Let alone theten-year anniversary one, with apress conference?” Fola asked with a raised eyebrow.
“I don’t know, a universe where I’m lucky, I suppose.”
“Now, Tavi. What have I said about luck?”
“That it’s unreliable?”
“No, it’s worse than that,” Fola said, standing up from the piano stool. “It’s unmathematical, and therefore pointless to believe in.”
