He leaned close, and Alex winced at his breath, and wondered if he ever brushed his teeth. Alex tried to look away without seeming bothered.
“No? You scared or something, huh?”
“What is your problem, Steve?” Emily asked sharply, impaling lettuce with a plastic fork. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”
Steve’s eyes narrowed.
“He one of yours, Emily?”
Alex noticed a hint of caution in the idiot’s voice. Alex was starting to understand why orphans were so much more vulnerable at the Academy. It was a lot like how things had worked back at the Youth Facility, where the only thing more dangerous than being in one of the gangs was not belonging at all.
Emily shook her head.
“He just got here, Steve. Why don’t you try not to make us all look like assholes this time, huh?”
“Why don’t you stay the fuck out of my business, Emily? If he isn’t one of yours, then it isn’t any of your concern.”
“This is boring,” Alex said, turning back to his lasagna. “You don’t have shit to say to me, anyway.”
He set his teeth when Steve flicked his ear with the tip of his index finger, determined not to make a noise. It was painful, but controlling his temper was more difficult. Alex was tempted to settle things right then, but he reminded himself that it would be better to pick his time.
“You’re lucky, fag. But one of these days, your girlfriend won’t be around, and then you and me are gonna have a little talk.”
Steve’s grin was dumb, obscene.
“I think we probably will,” Alex said, trying to sound more confident than he felt, struggling to cut the crust of the lasagna with a frustratingly dull plastic knife. “Watch your back, asshole.”
“Whatever.” Steve stood for a moment, leering, and then he sauntered off to bother someone else.
For a long moment, the table was silent, as Emily and Vivik stared at Alex. Alex shoveled food in his mouth without paying it any attention, forcing his shoulders to relax, his jaw to unclench.
“So, Emily, was what Anastasia said about you true?” He kept his voice casual, trying to cut a roll in half with the questionable plastic knife.
“Sure,” Emily replied, opening her milk, still looking at him with obvious concern. “I was going to tell you. There’s nothing sinister about it. I was born into the Raleigh Cartel, on the opposite side of the fence as Anastasia. But since I’m still a student here at the Academy, I’m unaffiliated.”
“Emily,” Vivik said around a mouthful of salad, “you aren’t being entirely honest with Alex.”
Emily set her milk back down on the table and then glared at Vivik.
“How so? I still haven’t made any decisions, yet. I’m not like Anastasia — my family isn’t particularly important.” Emily looked pleadingly at Alex. “I’m not trying to recruit you, Alex, I promise.”
“Not yet anyway,” Vivik muttered, pulling the foil cap off a container of yogurt. “Weren’t you going to do some introductions, anyway?”
“Well, I’d hoped to finish lunch first,” Emily complained, glaring at Vivik. “But since you’re getting all pushy about it.”
Emily looked around the room briefly, and then pointed to a nearby table where two boys and a girl sat, talking quietly and seriously.
“So that table over there are the other Hegemony cartel kids from our class — the girl is Louise and the guys are Manual and Gary.” Emily turned around in her chair, and pointed to a set of two tables in the center of the room, each with several students eating lunch at them. The conversations here seemed to Alex to be a bit more natural, more appropriate to the age of the speakers, if not the setting. “Those are mostly orphans, over there, Rise, Sujan, and Chris at the near table, and that’s William, Choi, and Marko at the far table. You already met Anastasia and the Black Sun contingent…”
“And what about them?” Alex asked, pointing at the far corner of the room.
“Who?” Emily asked, turning around to look. “Oh, bad scene.”
“How so?” Alex asked, feeling his gut tighten. Even from here, he could hear the big guy’s tone of voice, and he didn’t like it at all. He couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he’d been around enough to read between the lines.
“The bastard from earlier, his name is Steve, and his hanger-on is Charles,” Emily said grimly, “and they are bad news for the girl sitting at that table.”
“The weird one with blue hair, we call her Eerie, she’s half-Fey.” Vivik looked down at his food and shrugged. “The one they aren’t bothering, the redhead, Margot, is a vampire.”
“Wait, what?” Alex stared at Vivik, his fork frozen halfway to his mouth.
“It’s… complicated.”
“We don’t kill them?” Alex asked incredulously.
“Ha, uh, no,” Vivik sputtered. “Not since blood banks were invented, anyway.”
“But they eat at the cafeteria? I mean, like, food?”
“Well, yes,” Vivik said, brightening up at the change of topic. “Just because they can’t produce hemoglobin on the own doesn’t preclude them from varied nutritional requirements.”
Alex glared, and Vivik sighed.
“Yes,” he confirmed tiredly. “Yes, they eat food.”
“There is an understanding,” Emily interjected, shaking her head. “The vampires have a sort of embassy, here in Central. The younger ones usually come to the Academy for a while. The only Fey I know about is Eerie, so I don’t know what her deal is, but she’s been at the Academy forever. They’re both students here.”
“Except that they’re treated a bit different then everyone else, right?”
Vivik looked up at Alex’s strange tone of voice, and tried to look him in the eyes, but Alex refused to meet his gaze.
“Mostly, yeah,” Vivik admitted sheepishly. “Some people give Eerie a pretty hard time. Nobody bothers a vampire, particularly not Margot, but…”
As if on cue, there was a crash and then a brief cry from the corner table. Alex didn’t even bother to look up.
“And Steve, he’s a tough guy, right?”
Alex stood up, still looking at the ground in front of him.
“He’s the biggest and the strongest kid here, right?”
“I guess so,” Emily said, worried. “At the moment. I think Anastasia left already, or he wouldn’t have pulled this.”
“Alex, what are you thinking of?” Vivik asked, looking up with obvious concern. “The staff here won’t let anything too bad happen.”
“Right,” Alex said, turning away abruptly and walking from the table. “That’s good, then.”
“Alex?” Emily called after him, but Alex was already halfway to the lunch line.
It was the same everywhere. Alex could have written a book about it.
School. Mental hospital. Juvenile Hall. Work camp. Halfway house. Alex had been to them all, and he’d seen the same thing in every one of them. After the first few years, he’d pretty much gotten used to it.
There was always someone who threw their weight around, someone who intimidated everyone else. It didn’t even matter that Steve hadn’t started on him yet — he would eventually. It was inevitable, Alex being the new kid, lacking the obvious security that came with the cartels. Even if Alex hadn’t had a giant bull’s-eye hanging on his chest, he’d be targeted for being new, different, and friendless. This was yet another price that Alex would pay for staying unaffiliated.
He ran his eyes along the cafeteria counter, now half-disassembled by a host of white-clad staffers. Alex settled on a solid-looking metal tray.
“I’m going to borrow this for a second, ‘kay?”
Alex didn’t wait for an answer from the puzzled worker, heading rapidly off toward the corner table before his nerve gave out.
Alex had spent some of the time after his trial in a State Hospital. Two weeks after he’d arrived, he’d been attacked by a couple Dominican kids in the kitchen where he mopped the floors. He’d ended up half-killing one of them with a metal cooking pot, and then spent two weeks in the infirmary with a hole in his gut from where the other kid had stabbed him. No one had bothered him again, after that. He’d even played cards with one of the Dominicans, a few times, while they were both the infirmary.