“You’re not running away from home,” Kora told him, “Theogony is part of your home.” She didn’t stop walking. It was the middle of May (the spires above them stabbed like fishbones into a clear blue sky), but it was too cold for her to stand still. It was usually too cold for her to stand still.
“But I live at the Seminary…”
“You live in Morningside Heights, don’t you?”
“Yeah…”
“Well,” she said, reasonably, looking around, “all these big buildings are in Morningside Heights. And the all the Columbia buildings, too, and the Teacher’s College, and Barnard College…and Grant’s Tomb. You remember I said how big Grant’s Tomb is?”
Davie nodded, his pretty black eyes wide.
“So you see, you can’t really leave home, because it’s all your home.” She thought quickly, changing tones. “Anyway, I live everywhere. I just go around to all the places, and everyone knows me, and I do whatever I want.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Davie, but his eyes didn’t shrink, and he was following.
“I stay here at night all the time,” she said truthfully, though she didn’t mention where, or how. “I might as well live here, anyway, it’s where I’m going when I grow up. Everyone says. I’m not going to be adopted…”
“Why not?”
“I’m just not, everyone says. I’m going to grow up and go to school at the College and learn to help Superum babies like Ramona. That’s how come I get to go around and look in all the windows…there’s the Swan building. Hurry up, before someone sees us.”
The Swan building’s sides were full of long pointed windows, which meant that it had nice, deep window-ledges. Kora had to climb quite a few of the trees along the walk (hauling Davie up after her, since he couldn’t climb at all) before she found the one that looked into Ramona’s classroom. But she found her, in one of the small rooms at the end, doing Something Interesting.
Ramona was always doing something interesting. Today she had her arms up to her elbows in a tub full of water, her slim, careful hands swirling and rolling the water against the sides without sloshing. Then, she took her arms from the tub, droplets of water still shining on her arm-hairs, to write something important on the board. The soft brown hair piled on top of her head wobbled a little, and she pressed her lips together, tight and careful and serious.
“What’s she doing?” asked Davie. Kora had let him have the ledge so he would see better.
“Demonstrating,” she guessed authoritatively. She could see almost everything from the right tree branch, anyhow. She leaned a little harder on the branch so Ramona would see her in the window when she looked up, and not just Davie.
“Where’s the babies like me?” asked Davie.
“In there,” Kora answered vaguely.
“Where?”
“Somewhere…” Ramona took a long time writing her important things on the board.
“I don’t believe you.”
Kora leaned hard as she could on the branch so it tapped the window. She did it again. Ramona didn’t look up.
“I don’t believe you,” Davie said again.
Kora leaned out as far as she could, face toward the glass, and rapped her knuckles on the window. Ramona turned from the board and went right back to her tub of water. She did not look up.
“I don’t see them,” asserted Davie with finality.
“Pay attention!” Kora told him sharply, “This is important for you to learn. Put your face up against the glass.”
Davie smooshed his face against the windowpane. It made him look funnier than she thought it would. “Put your tongue out a little,” she said, and Davie did.
“She’s not looking,” said Kora, scowling. “You have to rattle the window. Hit the window. Just a little bit.”
Davie brought his flippers down against the window, surprised by the deep, ringing complaint it made. Davie grinned.
Kora grinned, too, but then pressed her mouth into a careful, serious line, like a teacher’s. “Harder,” she said.
Ramona’s classroom window had bowed and broken with a long, unsudden, shuddering groan, a slow-motion fissure meandering up through the two-hundred-year-old leaded pane.
But she hadn’t thought it would until it did. That was the truth. Ramona wished she could say that without sounding so much like Kora herself, sullen and culpable.
But she and the Cambion girl both slouched under Dean Sophie’s raised eyebrows, her not-quite-frowns. And Bernadette…well, Bernadette’s sterner faces always made explanations feel flimsy and insufficient. And today, the beautifully dark face of the Haitian ex-nun seemed particularly uncompromising.
Across the room, someone had made the mistake of seating Kora in a chair that swiveled, and she now swung around and around as wildly as the pivot would allow. Her victim and partner-in-crime was kept from sobbing only by the absolute puzzle of trying to spear a straw into a juice-box with his flippers. So the Dean’s questions fell on Ramona.
“How long, do you think, were they out there unsupervised?” She asked the question dryly while rifling through her desk, as though it wasn’t an accusation.
Ramona pinched her lips together. “I have no way of knowing…she goes everywhere.”
A small smile hovered on Dean Sophie’s mouth. “Yes. We’re all aware of her little adventures in the underworld. We’ll discuss those in a moment.”
So there was to be a discussion, then. Ramona shifted in her seat. “I can’t really tell you what she does down there. I don’t know anything about it.”
“No. I don’t expect you would,” said the Dean, dismissively, “we’re not even entirely sure which entry-point she’s using.” The girl spun on, showing no signs she knew her secret was being talked about. At least, Ramona thought, with a look over at the poor seal-boy squirting juice down his front, Kora hadn’t dragged this one down into the steam-tunnels.
Dean Sophie continued, eyebrows high. “What I’m asking is, how long were they at the window? How much time had elapsed before you…‘noticed’ Miss Gillespie outside your classroom, unsupervised, with a very young child?”
Unsupervised! Of course Kora had been unsupervised! She was a campus rat, a hurricane. When was she ever anything but unsupervised! As to the young child, well…she always seemed to find one to follow her into chaos when she wanted one.
Ramona searched to find a tone of voice that was adult and undefensive. “I was lecturing. I was in the middle of a lab.”
“Well, of course. But…you didn’t hear the pounding? People in surrounding classrooms seem to think it was going on for some time.”
“I had no reason to think they were capable of breaking the window.”
“Yes, so you’ve said. You didn’t feel it necessary to go out and see to them at all?”
Bernadette lifted patient eyebrows. Dean Sophie leaned over her desk expectantly. Did Ramona really need to explain? Did she really have to tell them that this was exactly the sort of thing the Cambion girl lived for, to create enough of a disturbance that someone somewhere would fly into an entertaining rage and drag her back to her schoolbooks?
“My students are behind on the selkie birthing material. We’ve only just started the MacRitchie treatise on preparing natal salt-baths…”
(At this, Kora whispered something in the seal-boy’s ear, and began to spin her chair so flamboyantly that its pivot screamed, until Bernadette clamped a firm hand on the back of it.)