he didn’t ditch everybody to go hang with the cool kids.”
“What?”
“Well, it’s what you did, right? None of us heard from you that whole senior year. You didn’t even say hi to him in the halls.”
“I was busy,” I said. “I had to get into college. You don’t know—”
“I don’t know. Like I didn’t have college? Is this what happens after we ship? Are you going to be busy again? When you get tired of hanging with people like Matt and laughing at them?”
“That is fucking bullshit.” I was angry, but Lisa was more so; she was shaking. I don’t know why people thought she didn’t have emotions. She just kept them in weird places.
“You live off Simon and you didn’t even know him. At least Simon knew what friendship was.”
In actual fact, that was my summer in Paris, and I’d talked up the idea that I was prelaw, and I wouldn’t have had the gumption to tell anyone I was a gamer, not that I got anywhere by not mentioning it. I’d shed the whole dorky thing, like a juvenile delinquent whose court records were sealed forever at sixteen. But anyone could see that a person like Simon would carry his dorky youth with him for his whole life. That he might be out of juvie but he’d never lose that memory of the first night, the bars clanging shut and the taunting in the dark.
Chapter Forty-Two
Lorac, do you think Lisa likes me?”
“Like-likes you?”
“Yeah.”
“This seems more like a Brennan question.”
“Can’t you do magic to figure this out?”
He sketched a quick little figure in a puddle with the tip of his staff and frowned at the ripples. “You don’t know her that well, do you?”
“No. She’s pretty hard to read.”
I wondered if Brennan wouldn’t indeed have been a better person to ask.
“Should I ask her out?”
He shrugs. It’s not really a Lorac question, but he’s the only one around. “Why not?”
“But what would happen?”
“I can see the future, but only in parts and only under third-edition rules, the augury and divination spells.”
“All right. What do they do?”
“This is augury: Caster may dwell on a proposed course of action and receive a general sense of its outcome, positive or negative.” He mumbled a few words under his breath and drew a complex polygon in the air with one finger.
“Well?”
“Basically it turns out all right, I suppose. Mingled essences of relief, bliss, regret, anger.”
“What? That sounds like it sucks. What about divination?”
“Divination: Caster may dwell on a proposed course of action and receive specific images, clues, and impressions regarding the short- and long-term outcome and consequences.”
“Okay, so try that.”
He hesitated.
“Very well.” He pushed a few chairs apart then dimmed the lights. He knelt without apparent difficulty for a sixtysomething magician, fished a piece of chalk from within his robes, and began sketching a complex figure on the floor, a bit like a crab.
“I’m drawing a little diagram of what time looks like if you’re looking straight into it—like looking down a tunnel and seeing a circle, if the tunnel were an angry ten-dimensional crab, which is what, in vastly oversimplified terms, we mean by the human word time.”
He rapidly sang an arcane song under his breath—the words weren’t in any human language; the melody was close to “California Girls.”
“What does it show?”
“Not sure,” he said.
“Come on. I thought you were a wizard.”
He sighed, then he looked at me with eyes that had seen the top three levels of the abyss, that had looked out across countless battlefields and into the eyes of the Lich King. “If I tell you, will you swear to stop bothering me?”
“Fine.”
“First of all, I can’t really tell if she like-likes you,” he began. “But she’s lawful neutral.”
“And?”
When he was done, I knew a bit more than I wanted to, and none of it answered my question.
Some of it I already knew. I knew that Lisa’s mother was a librarian, her father was a paleontologist. She was an only child.
I knew she was five feet tall for most of high school and carried a huge backpack, so she had to walk looking up a little. She got beaten up by a group of older girls once, and didn’t tell her parents.
She got crushes no one knew about. She drew in her textbooks. When her father bought an Apple][Plus, she didn’t know girls weren’t supposed to use it. She played Sierra On-Line games and solved Mystery House in a long weekend.
Her first serious boyfriend was in freshman year of