“Hey. Sorry about that.”
“What the hellwasthat?”
“No idea. I just transferred in.” I slipped my glove off. “I’m supposed to be doing archery.”
“Oh.” He gazed at my stitched palm, his hostility fading a little. “Did you shoot yourself?”
“Something like that.”
“Gnarly.” He chuckled a little. “Still, you were probably safer at the archery range. That guy’s nuts.”
“Like he said, it’s all about the craft.”
Jayden laughed again, looser now. “What are we? Witches?”
“The magic of you, transformed into not-you. Thanks for taking the fall for my fuckup. You’ll be out of there in two weeks. I have to get agradefrom that guy.”
“Right. Sure.” He gave me a genuine smile at last, looking me up and down. Ordinary boys are predictable. “No harm, no foul.”
“Let me buy you a drink.”
I took Jayden to Riley’s, a bar full of men who held on to their beer bottles between sips, as if wary of earthquakes.
No one looked at us as we went into the back room.
“Are they really gonna serve us?” Jayden whispered.
“Look around.”
The back room was awash with late afternoon light and Helshire relics—lacrosse sticks, an oar signed by some long-ago crew team, two croquet mallets crossed in a heraldicX.
“This was a Helshire bar,” I said. “Back when the drinking age was eighteen.”
“Wasn’t that a long time ago?”
“Forty years.” The other students glimpse us in passing—the town understands that we are eternal.
The bartender appeared, lurking nervously in the passage from the main room.
“What do you want?” I asked Jayden.
“Um, beer?”
The bartender went away.
As I’d suspected, Jayden was first-generation Helshire and knew nothing about legacy families. But after the bartender brought his beer, rank-smelling fizz from a tap, and my gentian-forward white Negroni, I learned a lot about him.
He was the only son of two real estate agents, taking a bland spread of Intros: Biology, Psych, Colonial Encounters, English Lit.
“Just realized,” he said halfway through our first drink, “I don’t even know your name.”
“Jessica.”
No recognition. Jayden didn’t know much about Peter. This was probably a waste of time. But I kept him prattling until, halfway through his third beer, his consonants began to slur.
“That was wild about that kid,” I said. “The one who fell.”
His eyes lit up. “Peter Morton, yeah! He was in my study group.”
