didn’t need the place cards except to find her own seat; she knew everybody at her table by at least their first name, because she’d been here almost three months now. Some of her fellow students she liked, and some of them she didn’t know more than to just say “hi” to in the hallways, and some of them (like Dylan) she actively disliked. But the ones you have to worry about are the ones who are out to kill you, Spirit reminded herself. And which ones are those?
She’d never had a flat-out bad meal at Oakhurst, though some of them had been pretty weird. Spirit tried not to think about what Mom had always called “Apology Turkey”—the real-turkey dinner she made sometimes the week after Thanksgiving, though it wasn’t an actual Thanksgiving dinner, just turkey. When the servers started going around, Spirit realized this was going to be like Thanksgiving dinner in a movie, with everything clichéd and perfect, from the stuffing and gravy to the cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes to the servers asking everyone if they wanted dark meat or white.
It all tasted like sawdust to her, and after a bite of her turkey, she set her fork down. Fortunately, the one thing they didn’t do here was nag you about eating if you didn’t feel like it. Maybe that was because they knew there wasn’t any junk food to eat.
“Hey, if you don’t want it, just pass it over here,” Dylan said, elbowing her. Under the table, he was pushing his leg against hers, too, but Spirit couldn’t work up the energy to care.
“Hey, Dyl.” The girl speaking was Kylee Williamson. She was in the martial arts class, but Spirit didn’t know much about her beyond that. “Know what an Energy Mage can do?”
“What?” Dylan asked suspiciously.
Kylee favored him with a bright hard smile. “Anything she wants. So if you want to keep enough Gift to be able to Jaunt your toothbrush tonight, lay the hell off. Know how Dylan ended up here, Spirit?” she added.
“Shut up,” Dylan said. There was as much desperation as anger in his voice.
“I don’t really want to—” Spirit said. Whether she wanted to know or not, she knew Dylan would hate her for knowing—rather than just enjoying tormenting her, the way he did now.
“I think you ought to know. Everybody ought to know about Mister Dylan I’m-So-Hot Williams. See, our last names are so close that our files keep getting mixed up, so one day I got ahold of his. Family vacation right? Mom, dad, three kids—”
“Kylee, shut up,” Dylan hissed.
“You bring the proctors over here and I’m not going to be the one in trouble,” Kylee said. She took a big bite of cranberry sauce. “So they ditched him at an amusement park in Florida. Took the police three days to track them down. Found ’em all dead. They’d run off to commit suicide rather than have him around anymore.”
“That’s a lie! They were murdered!” Dylan cried. He was halfway up out of his seat, and all of the silverware on the table was starting to shake.
“Dylan, don’t.” Spirit grabbed his arm and squeezed. “Don’t do it. Don’t.” If Burke were here, he’d help her. Loch would. Even Addie might. But they were all scattered around the room. And in another few seconds the proctors—or one of the teachers—would notice there was something wrong.
Dylan stared at her, his green eyes wide and unseeing.
“Yeah, stupid, chill,” Zoey said from Dylan’s other side. “You’re a jerk, but you don’t have to act like one. And I’m hungry.”
After a long tense moment Dylan settled slowly back into his seat and reached for his glass, but his hands were shaking so badly that he would have just tipped it over if Spirit hadn’t rescued it. She looked across the table at Kylee. How could you do something like that? How could you say something so cruel?
“You try sticking up for somebody else, you’ll just both go down when the time comes,” Kylee said softly. She picked up her knife and began to butter her roll as if nothing had happened.
The karate and kendo exhibition two days later wasn’t a disaster, but about all Spirit really remembered afterward about her own performance was that Mr. Wallis didn’t stop things in the middle to scream at her. She wasn’t just nervous, she was terrified—and knowing that most (and probably all) of her martial arts club teammates were crazy didn’t help at all. She already knew