“Mags,” hissed Jill, clutching at my elbow, dragging me to a stop. I probably didn’t struggle all that hard.
“Uh,” I said again. “I—er—I haven’t seen you here before.” And then felt myself turn purple. That was almost as bad as asking for his phone number.
“I have been here only a few days,” he said. He had a slight accent, but I had no idea where it was from. Well, I had pretty much no idea about anything with him staring at me like that. “Now I am glad I came to this town,” he said, still staring at me.
My jaw really did drop. I’m sorry, but it did. I’m not ugly or anything, or stupid (at least not usually, about things other than math and science and taking tests), but this guy . . . guys like this don’t stare at girls like me.
“Her name’s Maggie,” said Jill. “Usually she talks,” and gave my elbow a shake. “When’s your break? Come join us. If you want.”
“I would like that,” he said. “Thank you.” He flicked a little piece of his smile at Jill and then refocused on me. “I will see you later.”
“Oh—great,” I said (I think that’s what I said), and then Jill was dragging me again, forward this time, toward our table.
Wolf whistles greeted us. Keisha and Lindsay had been sitting down while I was having my little encounter with Mr. To Die For, and one of the other waiters was putting down a pitcher of beer and some more glasses. “Hey, give her a beer,” said Laura, only half-annoyed that Mr. TDF had noticed me, not her. She was pretty tight with Ryan, and Ryan was a good guy.
“Anybody get his name?” said Jill, who was apparently my agent for the evening.
“Casimir,” said Zach. “Is that weird or what?”
“Not everyone is from No Town, Nowhere,” said Jill. “I think it’s a nice name. Casimir. Yeah.” She grinned at me.
There was a lot about that evening I didn’t take in very well. I was completely dazzled by Casimir, of course, but that wasn’t all of it. It was like the lights that had flickered when we came through the door went on flickering in my brain somehow. As if something was turning itself on and off. As if my wireboard was being rerouted or something. I didn’t like it.
But then again it might just have been Casimir. He was enough to make anyone short out a few circuits. He did join us during his break—Jill saw him coming and nearly shoved Hadar off his chair to make space for Casimir to sit down next to me. He’d taken the apron off but the P&P T-shirt underneath was still hopelessly long and baggy. He’d brought a cup of coffee with him, so I got to say something else totally lame: “Oh, I can’t buy you a cup of coffee then.”
He looked faintly puzzled—maybe he was having second thoughts about me: I wouldn’t have blamed him—and then the smile (and the dimple) broke out again. “No, I have my coffee, thank you,” and I think he was going to say something else—like maybe I could buy him a coffee some other night or even that he’d buy me something some other night? Maybe it was just my brain going zot. ZZZZ. Zingo. But Jason interrupted and said, “So, where are you from? You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”
“No,” said Casimir. “I learnt my English in England.”
“That’s not an English accent,” said Jason, and I thought, what’s he so pissed off about? Jason’s really good-looking if you like them blond and stuck on themselves, but he’s never thought I was worth more than “hi,” and it’s supposed to be girls who get rats’-assy about looks.
Casimir said that he’d been born in Ukovia and his parents were Ukovian and he had spent most of his childhood there, but then he had been sent to boarding school in England and only came home for holidays. He said some stuff about how different Ukovia and England were and then Jason interrupted again and said, “Are you here to go to school?”
I hadn’t been paying much attention to what Casimir was saying, although the sound of his voice was making me feel all petted and velvety. He was sitting close enough—there were nine of us wedged around a table for six—that I could feel his body heat. When he moved his arm or his knee, it would brush mine (that made my brain turn on and off). I was trying to think of a way to say “Back off, Jason,” without getting in his face about it. But I heard Casimir saying “Runyon” and I snapped back to attention.
“I accepted a place at Runyon,” he said, “because it has perhaps the best physics of the worlds department of any school in Newworld.”
“The physics of the worlds?” said Jason in a disbelieving voice, and a little silence fell.
My heart sank. Only loopheads wanted to know any more about physwiz than that silverbugs should be popped and where to find your local Watchguard. Senior year you have a bunch of required seminars in stuff the government says you have to know something about: history of magic, why they gene-chop you, what they think they know about cobeys, like that. They’re all short—none of them lasts more than two weeks—and from everything I’ve heard they don’t actually teach you anything, but it goes on your Watchguard record that you’ve been cranked through the informed-citizen education machine. Most of it’s just stuff like all of school is stuff (although I was a little interested in what they were going to tell us about gene-chopping), but physwiz freaked a lot of people. Every year there was a petition from some of the parents that it’s an inappropriate subject for high school kids and should be removed from the syllabus. Since these were usually the same parents who had meltdowns when a book their kid checked out of the school library had the word “vagina” or “dickhead” in it, the petitions were mostly ignored. But physwiz creeped out a lot of relatively sane people too.
I knew Runyon had an important physwiz department. But it was its own little territory and anybody who didn’t have to go there didn’t. When I had the campus tour last year our guide reluctantly waved a hand at a path through some trees and said vaguely, oh, physwiz is down there, and then flipped back into guide mode and started talking about advisers and food. I guess I knew, but it was the sort of thing you didn’t want to know, that Runyon’s physwiz department was a big deal, really more of a brain bureau with students.
The cutest boy in the known universe is a loophead. Well, that might help to explain why he seemed to like me.
“Oh, wow,” said Jill, not willing to let my unexpected conquest go without a struggle. “Um. Are there, you know, jobs in physwiz—the physics of the worlds?”
Other than being disappeared by a brain bureau, I added silently.
“I want to study history,” Jill went on, “but my mom keeps telling me I need to get a degree in something that’ll let me pay back my student loan.”
“I hope there are jobs,” said Casimir, “because it is what I want to study. But there is a trust, the Nowak Trust, to bring students here, and to send some of your students to Oldworld, to study the physics of the worlds. I was offered a much better scholarship to come here than if I stayed home. And if there are no jobs, well”—and he made a short, graceful gesture that wasn’t from around here either, but it meant that (momentarily) his shoulder pressed against mine—“this is a nice place to work. And the coffee is good.”
Everybody but Jason laughed, and then Casimir’s break was over and he left. I tried not to be too obvious about watching those shoulders and that butt walking away, but when I surreptitiously glanced around the table almost everyone else was watching too. Then our pizzas arrived, fortunately for me, because everybody got busy eating and forgot to give me a hard time.
When it was time to go—school-night curfews for another whole year, joy—Lindsay and Keisha were getting a ride home with someone else, so it was just Jill and me. We were all leaving when Jill suddenly said, “Oh, where is my—um?” and went back. She made a big show of looking around her chair and under the table, and then she glanced at the door, but Laura, Ryan, and Ashley were waiting for us. “No, you go on,” she said, and flapped her hands at them. “I’m sure I’ll find it in a minute.”