“Oh, you’re fine,” he says, but like everyone else, he’s obviously incredibly uncomfortable.
“I’ll be up later tonight,” Sid says.
“Sure. Thanks. Grab food before we go, April. You need to eat.”
“I know!” she snaps, taking out the measuring cup she keeps in her knapsack to control her portions before ladling carrots and ham onto a plate. “I know how to manage my own body!”
“I never said you didn’t.” The sooner we get out of this room, the better.
Once we’re in our bedroom, I give her time to administer an insulin dose and start her meal. Her hands are shaky, the needle drawing a prick of blood, when usually she’s so slick nothing shows on her arm after she’s done. I don’t interfere, except to tell her how much honey I used per pound of carrots so she can enter all of it into her dose computations. Someone should tell her math teacher about this, and he’ll pass her in an instant. Geometry can’t be more important than the things she needs to calculate every day.
I wait for her to finish eating, so we both have a chance to cool off. When she’s done, I take a steadying breath. “I’m only asking because I care about you. What happened?”
She sets down her fork, balancing an empty plate on her knees. “I hit someone.”
“But why? I thought you were studying.”
“I was.” She presses her hands into her eyes. “That’s all I ever do. I was in the school library, studying.”
It sounds terribly lonely. “And?”
“And when I got up to go, Gia Lawson was waiting outside for me. Some of the other girls put her up to it, I think. I don’t know how anything works.” She sniffs hard. “But they were standing down the hall. Maria Patterson and Cirie Gagnon and… I didn’t see everyone. At first, I thought it was just Gia, until they started laughing.”
“What did she do to you?”
“You wouldn’t get it!” April lurches up from the bed, and her plate nearly topples off her knees. Not for the first time, I want to tell Sid to buy some more furniture, but this isn’t my apartment. For now, I take the plate and cutlery off her lap and set it on the floor where she won’t break it by accident. “You’ve never dealt with any of this.”
“Hey! I was fourteen when we left Astolia. I’ve been to high school.” Sort of. “There were class politics. Girl drama. All that stuff. You can tell me.”
April gives me a withering glare. “Did all the kids make fun of you for being a Wildling with a weirdo sister who married her sanctuary host, too?”
My mouth falls open. “Excuse me?”
“Gia was asking me…” She clears her throat and holds her hands up to make scare quotes around the next words. “If I was abig slut tooand sleeping with Carlos, since that’s what my sister did the second she got here.”
My heart and face burns for this poor girl. My girl. “How did they know about—”
“Maria Patterson.” April buries her face in her knees. “Her older brother is that douchebag who came in thecarriage to the guild tour. He must have learned about you guys and then… rumours, I guess.”
“The little shit.” I’m not sure if I mean Maria or Bradley. I have half a mind to punch either one in the face now, too.
“And—and when I told her you weren’t sleeping together, they…” She gasps for air, close to tears again. “They laughed! They laughed even harder and called you a tease and—and Gia kept saying the wordcockblockand I didn’t know what that meant, so I hit her in the face. I slapped her as hard as I could, then everyone screamed and…” Her eyes are wild as she looks at me. “How was I supposed toknow? How was I supposed to know telling them would make it worse? It’s stupid! It’s so stupid. Like, first they were calling us sluts, and then when I tried to fix it—”
“April.” I wrap my arms around her, pulling her off the chair. “I’m so sorry. You didn’t hit enough of them.”
“I don’t want to hitanyone!”
“I know.” I rub my hand in circles over her back. “Which is why I can joke about it. You’re not going to do it again, right?”
“Of course not!” April pushes me away, swallowing back the few tears she let herself cry. “They’re never going to let me into that summer program now.”
“You don’t know that. You’re assuming the worst.”
“But it isn’t fair. I’m not the problem! I’m…” She rubs her face. “I want to go to bed.”
“Sure. In a minute.” I smooth her hair. “What about the other girls? Did they get in trouble?”
“Gia did. Not the rest. The other girls sold her out the second the principal asked them.Gia was so mean! We don’t know why she did it!And like, all they actually did was laugh. The teachers couldn’t pin any of it on them. None of it’s fair.”
