A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,39

worth, even though they didn’t know that I really was. When she asked to keep me out of the Scholomance, what she was offering to do was let me watch her get eaten before I got eaten myself.

So I don’t get to be safe. I don’t get to take a deep breath. I don’t even get to lie to myself that after I get out of here, I’ll be okay. I won’t be okay, and Mum won’t be okay if I stay with her, because the mals are going to keep coming for me, and people don’t like me enough to help me even if I scream. So I don’t bother to scream, but right then in the lunchroom I wanted to stand up on the table and scream at all of them the way I screamed at those bastards in the commune; I wanted to tell all of them I hated them and I’d set them all on fire gladly for five minutes of peace, and why shouldn’t I, since they’d all stand by and watch me burn instead. I’d had that scream inside me since I was nine, knotted up with Mum’s love, the only thing keeping it in, and it wasn’t enough. Mum wasn’t enough. She couldn’t save me all on her own, not even she could do that, and for a few days of stupid pretending, I’d had other people, too, what I needed to survive, and that had been long enough for me to forget it wasn’t real.

I was bent over my tray and my book, fighting not to scream, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Ibrahim sitting down with a couple of his friends and glancing over at me, and his mouth went happy for a moment. He was pleased that Orion had dumped me, and I’d asked for that, too, hadn’t I? I’d asked for that smirk, because I’d told him off, only fuck him anyway. Sarah and Alfie were sitting down at a London table, carefully not even looking my way, as if I’d suddenly gone invisible.

And then Aadhya put her tray down across from me and sat down. I didn’t get it for a second; I just stared at her stupidly, and she said, “Would you swap for milk? The lower tray was looking weird, I steered clear.”

My throat was just shut up for a moment, choking around a solid knot like stale bread. Then I said, “Yeah, I’ve got spare,” and held my second milk carton out to her.

“Thanks,” she said, and gave me back a roll. Liu was sitting down next to me by then with a friend of hers from writing class. A couple of maintenance-track kids, English-and-Hindi-speakers from Delhi, sat down next to Aadhya, and they said a hello that didn’t go out of its way to exclude me. I said hello back, and I sounded normal to my own ears, I don’t know how, and a couple of the moderate-loser kids I didn’t actually know, but whose table I had sat at last week—last week, had it been only one week?—were going by, and they hesitated and then tentatively came over and one said, “Taken?” pointing to the bench, and when I shook my head, they didn’t slide in all the way towards me, they left some room, but they still sat down next to me. Nkoyo said, “Hey,” as she went by with Cora and a couple of her other friends, on her way to another table.

I had to work hard to keep my hands from shaking while I ate the bread roll, carefully breaking it into small pieces and putting a thin scraping of cream cheese on each one. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand. This was exactly what I’d been aiming for when I’d made sure to ask Liu to sit with me, when I’d invited Aadhya to work on the mirror. I’d shown them I was reliable, that I’d share what good luck came my way with people who had thrown me a crumb, and now they were showing me they’d recognized it, and that they were willing to throw me more of those crumbs. And that was just good sense on their part, even without knowing that I was going equipped. It wasn’t a miracle, it wasn’t that they’d suddenly decided they liked me. I knew that. But I didn’t want to scream anymore, I wanted to cry, like a new freshman dripping tears