Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (Wicked Lovely 5.50)

“I’m saying I think you should be prepared to look elsewhere.” She stands up, keeping the desk between us. “You, and your kind.” She lets her eyes rest on my mouth.

I freeze. My kind?

She knows.

Still, I say nothing, nothing I am thinking. I feel my hands curl up around nothing. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means we don’t want you here. That’s why we have these interviews. I can spot you a mile away. Spot you, screen you. Stop you. People like you.” Sh

e smiles but there’s nothing friendly about it. I don’t smile back.

“Like me?”

“ . . . It’s fallen to us to keep out the wrong sort for hundreds of years before you came along. We’ve got the general safety of the entire student body to consider. . . .”

That’s not the body I’m thinking of at the moment.

“. . . standards to ensure. A population to build. After all, this isn’t just the Ivy League. This is Harvard. We’re wealthier than a small country, smarter than a large one.”

She swallows a smile down her throat. I watch it go.

“I see.”

She holds out her hand. “Good-bye, Ms. La-fay-ette.”

“It’s La-fay-ette. Ma’am.”

“Is it?”

I tighten my grip on her hand, and feel my finger slide down to her wrist. Her pulse flutters like a bird, like a thousand throbbing little birds, flying away as fast as they can.

Turns out, the birds know best.

V.

In the darkness, we move between the trees, crisscrossing the pathways on Harvard Yard. The moon is bright and round, but there is little light, except for the pale glow of our skin, Hopper’s and mine.

“Slow down, Hop. I ate too much, too fast. Feels like I’m going to burst.”

Hopper slows, and I fall into step next to him. “You know what they call that?” He looks at me in the moonlight. “The Freshman Fifteen.” He smiles and I smile back, unbuttoning the top button on my jeans.

“Hope it’s a lot more than fifteen.”

“Hope so, Wrennie.”

I take Hopper’s hand and I hear the gravel beneath our feet, beneath the cold bite of the November night. I pull on the strap of my backpack, which holds a full thermos for the road. I’m going to give it to Hopper. Even now I can hear his stomach grumbling, louder than mine ever did. Anyway, we have a long drive ahead of us tonight. South, as far as we can get before the light. Tomorrow I will be happy our town has no name. Sort of slows down any hope of Breather law enforcement, not that I’m worried.

Hopper squeezes my hand. I might let him make out with me on the bus.

My pack feels light. It’s nearly empty, I had forgotten. I left behind a trash can full of college brochures and course catalogues back beneath the desk in the Admissions office.

Just after the body hit the carpet.

Just before I’d clicked “ACCEPT.”

Twice.

Once for Maynard Hopper Wilson, the smartist kid in the hole school, and once for me.