The doors had auto-locked. I hit the unlock button and she pushed the door open. Turning back to me, she fixed her blue eyes on me again. Her voice was scornful. "I think you lack the capacity to learn what I could teach you, anyway. Smug bastard."
She slammed the door and I hit the gas before she could change her mind. I glanced in the rearview mirror, but all I saw was a whirl of dry leaves spinning up from the road.
-from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter
For some reason, the memory of that afternoon, the first day anyone had ever told me "no," stuck in my head with excruciating detail. I could remember everything about it for the rest of my life. The too-hot interior of James' car and the way that the worn cloth seat felt downy against the palm of my hand. The leaves outside the car, brilliant in their gaudy colors: the red-brown of the oaks was the same red-brown of his hair.
The thick feeling in the back of my throat--anger. Real anger. It had been forever since I'd been angry.
It had been forever since I hadn't gotten something I wanted.
I sulked until the sun blazed red just above the trees and the students returned to the dorms in knots of two, threes, fours.
There were several that walked alone, hands shoved in pockets or gripping backpack straps, eyes on the ground. They would've been easy marks; being away from their family and friends was hard and these little lonely souls had only their music for company. They glowed faintly to me, blues and aquamarines and watery greens, all the color of my eyes. Maybe if it hadn't been so soon after the last one, I would've been tempted. But I still felt strong, alive, invincible.
And there James was, in a group of four kids, which was all wrong. My marks never had friends--music was their life.
Someone like him shouldn't have had such an easy way with people. Shouldn't have even wanted it. I would've doubted that it was him, despite his short-cropped auburn hair and his cocky bastard walk, but the fierce splash of yellow-- my favorite color, for the record--that glowed inside him screamed music music music.
It was all I could do not to go rushing down there and make him want to take my deal. Or hurt him. Very badly. I had a couple of ideas that would take quite awhile to finish.
Patience. Get a grip.
So, instead, I fell into step behind his group of friends, unseen. I guess I could've been seen if anyone had thought to look really hard in the right way, but no one did. No one ever did, these days, though I'd heard from other faeries that it hadn't always been this way. The few kids that felt something of me now and glanced up saw only a whirl of fall leaves racing along the edge of the sidewalk, climbing into the air before spiraling back down to the ground. That was me, always, the invisible shiver at twilight, the intangible lump in the back of your throat, the unbidden tear at thoughts long forgotten.
As the kids walked past the dorm buildings, the group dwindled to two as the girls disappeared into their dorm. I could get closer then, close enough that the glow of him reflected on my twilight skin and made me want to touch him and pull bright strings of music out of his head. If only he'd said yes.
James and the remaining boy were talking about vending machines. One of them, a boy whose chief characteristic was an innocent, smiling face, was quoting statistics about how many people get killed by vending machines tipping over on them.
"I don't think they pulled the machines onto themselves,"
James was saying.
"They showed video," the round kid said.
"No, I think there's probably an avenging vending machine angel that pushes them onto grabby bastards who are bad sports about losing their money." James made a pushing motion, a panicked expression, and a squashing sound in quick succession. "Lesson learned, bucko. Next time, just accept that you've lost your fifty cents."
Round-o: "Except there wouldn't be a next time."
"How right you are. Dying would prohibit one from acting upon the lesson they'd learned. Scratch that. Let the record show that vending machine tragedies are not morality tales but a form of natural selection."
Round kid laughed, then looked past James at something. "Hey, man, there's a chick staring at you."
"Is there ever not?" James asked, but he turned to look anyway, past me at someone else. The yellow inside him flashed, twisted, flared toward me as if begging for me to turn it into something else. But his eyes didn't find me; they instead rested on a pale girl. Black hair, face washed out in the artificial light of a streetlight, fingers plucking anxiously at her backpack strap.
There was something missing from James' voice when he told
Round-o, "Hey, I'll be up in a second, okay? She's from my old school."
Round-head duly dispatched, James made his way through the circles of streetlight to where the girl stood. She had faint threads of orange glow running through her, like neon taffy, making me think that she would've made a good pupil if I hadn't liked mine young, handsome, and male.
James' voice was very brave, all funny and strong, even though the thoughts I could catch of his were chaotic. "Hey, crazy, what's up?"
She smiled back at him, annoyingly pretty--I didn't really care for attractive members of my own gender--and made a weird, crumpled, rueful face. Again, annoyingly cute. "Just getting ready to go up to my room. I came over this way because I always, um, never, because I never saw the fountain when it was lit up. And I wanted to."
Yeah, whatever. So you came over to see him and don't want to say it. Right. Stop being coy. I glared at her. James half-cocked his head in my direction, as if listening, and I skirted a few feet away from them. But at my sudden movement, the girl's eyes lifted abruptly, following me, frowning as if she saw me. Crap. I leaned down as if I was tying my shoe, like I was a real student and I was actually visible to everyone. Her eyes didn't focus on me after I'd bent down--she couldn't quite see me. She must have some of the second sight. That annoyed me too.
"Dee," James said. "Earth to Dee. Calling planet Dee. Houston, our communication lines seem to be down. Dee, Dee, do you read me?"
Dee pulled her eyes away from me and back to James. She blinked, hard. "Um. Yes. Sorry about that. I didn't get enough sleep last night." She had a very beautiful voice. I thought she must be quite a good singer. I finished fake-tying my shoe and started to walk very slowly toward the fountain, to hide myself in the water. Behind me, I heard James say something and Dee laugh, a relieved laugh, as if it had been awhile since she'd heard something funny and she was glad humor still existed.
I lay down in the fountain--invisible, I couldn't feel the wetness-and looked up at the darkening sky, the water rippling over my vision. I felt safe in the water, utterly invisible, utterly protected.
Dee and James walked to the edge of the satyr fountain and stood directly over the top of me, close to each other but not touching, separated by some invisible barrier they had constructed before I'd arrived on the scene. James cracked jokes the whole time, one meaningless, funny line after another, making her laugh again and again so that they didn't have to talk. His agony would've made a gorgeous song. I had to find a way to make him take my deal.
Dee and James stared at the satyr, who grinned back at them, permanently dancing upon a tiny oak leaf in the middle of the water. "I've heard you practicing," Dee said.