A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) - Naomi Novik Page 0,79
Instead I’ve spent three years putting it off and coming up with convoluted plans for how I was going to arrange my dramatic revelation and meanwhile, at the first chance I got, I just started being as rude as I could to every enclave kid who crossed my path. I’d certainly done my very best to chase Orion off. If he wasn’t a towering weirdo who liked that in a person, I’d have succeeded. And now Aadhya saying, “I won’t tell,” like she was making me a promise, and I’d said, “Thanks,” instead of saying No, no, tell everyone!
But if I’m not joining an enclave, I really don’t want anyone to know, after all. If people in here find out I destroyed a maw-mouth, some of them are going to look up that same journal article I read on the subject and understand what I am, what I can do. I could certainly stop being angry at Magnus then, because probably half of the enclavers would start trying to take me out. Especially if any of them pick up a whisper of my great-grandmother’s prophecy. And I still want to live.
Filled with all these cheery and relaxing thoughts, I passed a comfortable night in which I slept perhaps three hours all broken up with marvelous nightmares of being back in the maw-mouth and wide-awake bursts of gnawing anxiety in which I contemplated my odds of making it out of here alive all on my own with my nine remaining crystals against a whole graduation hall full of maleficaria. There was a side of gnawing hunger, too; I’d thrown up most of my day’s food. My throat was still sore and painful the next morning, and my eyes were gummy.
Aadhya had been knocking on my door in the mornings on the way to the loo. I half expected her not to come that morning, but she called round, and then Liu poked her head out and called, “Will you wait a moment?” We stopped at her door while she grabbed her toothbrush and flannel and comb, so I didn’t even have the worry of whether we were going to talk about the things I didn’t want to talk about. As we walked, Liu and I talked about our history papers instead, and in the bathroom Aadhya and I took first watch while Liu grimly attacked the mysteriously appearing snarls in her waist-long hair. She was having to pay back three years’ worth of great hair days all at once. Malia is great for your looks, right up until it really really isn’t.
“I need to cut this all off,” she said out loud, with gritted teeth. It was the sensible choice, and not just for saving time on hair care: you don’t want to offer any mals a convenient handhold. Almost everyone in here shares the same fabulous hairstyle: half grown out after having been shingled as short as possible, as quickly as possible, the last time you had a chance to use a pair of proper scissors or hair clippers. Bringing a pair of bad ones that close to vital bits like eyes and throats is a very iffy proposition. If you’d like to know the hard-and-fast rule for telling whether a pair has gone to the bad, so would all of us. There’s a senior named Okot from Sudan, one of the maintenance-track kids, who blew most of his induction weight allowance on a battery-powered electric razor and a hand-crank charger. He’s made an absolute killing loaning it out to people over the years, and at the start of this year, he promised it to a group of five freshmen, who’ve spent all their free time since building him mana for graduation. Now he’s in an alliance with three enclavers from Johannesburg.
Going fully shaved like that is popular if you can afford it. Dreadlocks are unfortunately not a great idea thanks to lockleeches, which you can probably imagine, but in case you need help, the adult spindly thing comes quietly down at night and pokes an ovipositor into any big clumps of hair, lays an egg inside, and creeps away. A little while later the leech hatches inside its comfy nest, attaches itself to your scalp almost unnoticeably, and starts very gently sucking up your blood and mana while infiltrating further. If you don’t get it out within a week or two, it usually manages to work its way inside the skull, and you’ve got a window of