When I finally got tired of feeling sorry for myself, I stood and tried to shrug off the worry. I wanted to go to bed, but I remembered Lady Elaine’s insistence that I complete a dream entry as soon as a session ended. Considering how badly the rest of the night had gone, I didn’t want to piss off the old woman. Lance and Eli might be able to make my social life hell, but I had a feeling Lady Elaine could do a lot worse.
Sighing, I walked over to the desk where the eTab sat in its docking station beside my desktop computer. I opened it to the dream journal, typed a quick entry, and hit send. Then I pressed the home button and was about to put the eTab to sleep when I noticed the instant message app blinking at me. Only one person would IM here.
I opened a message from a user called OracleGirl: “Did the bird look like this?”
Below the message was a drawing of a bird that bore a striking resemblance to what I’d seen.
“Yes,” I typed back. “But the one in the dream had black feathers instead of red. What kind of bird is it?”
Lady Elaine took a long time responding. “Phoenix.”
Huh. I’d heard of them before, but I’d never seen one. They were as rare as unicorns and usually lived in the most remote places, far away from the eyes of ordinaries and magickind alike. Lady Elaine’s interest in the bird made me uneasy. I was on the verge of asking the oracle what it meant when her next message derailed me.
“Why did your dream-session end so early?”
I groaned. I hadn’t planned on telling anybody about Eli booting me from the dream. The last thing I wanted was to get a reputation for being a narc. But I didn’t see a way out of it short of lying—not such a good idea with an oracle—so I told her what happened.
“I see,” Lady Elaine responded when I finished. “Don’t worry. I’ll have a talk with Eli in the morning.”
Awesome. Couldn’t wait to see the results of that one.
7
The Diary
Eli wasn’t at breakfast the next day. I got to enjoy that fact for all of two seconds. Then I made the mistake of walking by Lance’s table with my tray in my hand and saw him reenacting my fall from last night.
I heard him say, “Yeah, she totally wrecked our room. Spilt soda all over the place. The girl’s psycho, I’m telling you.”
I took a step toward him, planning to knock him out of his chair, then pour milk on him for good measure.
Selene put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t bother.”
She was right, and I knew it. The Will wouldn’t let me hit him. I contemplated using Mr. Ankil’s snatch-and-smack trick, but I hadn’t practiced it yet, and Lance wasn’t carrying his wand, just the stupid joker playing card he liked to fiddle with whenever he was bored, weaving it in between his fingers like he was some kind of card shark.
I’d once asked Selene what the deal was with the card, and she explained that Lance was obsessed with the Joker from Batman. In an ordinary high school, he would’ve been ridiculed for this behavior, but not at Arkwell. Most magickind teenagers were fanatics about ordinary pop culture. Almost everybody was a Comic-Con–attending, play-dress-up fan boy. And he had the nerve to make fun of me. Go figure.
I spent the rest of breakfast doing my best to ignore the laughs coming from behind me. I decided this was how I would live my life from here on out—pretending like the bad stuff wasn’t happening.
But I found out later that you couldn’t pretend something didn’t exist when it was staring you in the face. Or in my case, when it came up behind me in the hallway and closed my locker door while I wasn’t looking. I supposed I was lucky Lance hadn’t shut it on my fingers.
“Thanks, you jackass,” I said, glaring.
He grinned at me like a cat that knows it’s got the mouse cornered. He had bright green eyes, light brown hair, and a wide mouth, a bit like the Joker’s, actually. Still, he was handsome enough I had no trouble understanding why Selene had once dated him. “Anytime, sweetheart.” He leaned against the adjacent locker, arms crossed, head cocked sideways, and reeking of attitude.
“Don’t you have something better to do?” I said, reentering the combination. “Like, entertaining your little friends some more? I know. You could do something really spectacular this time like pat your head and rub your tummy. Or walk and chew gum. That is, if you think you can manage it.”
“No thanks. I’d rather sit here and look at you. It gives me so much pleasure.”
“Yep, I get that all the time.” I wrenched my locker door open, trying to whack him in the face with it. That would’ve given me loads of pleasure. The Will might restrict direct physical violence, but accidents happened.
Lance dodged the strike easily, and before I could stop him, he closed the door again.
“Would you quit it? Seriously, I’ve known cockroaches more mature than you.”
He leaned toward me close enough I could smell the musky scent of his shampoo. It was a surprisingly pleasant smell from such a rotten guy. “You could always report me like you did Eli. Then maybe I could spend the morning in the principal’s office and get an awesome lecture on proper dream etiquette, too.”
So that was what this was about. I should’ve known. I almost apologized, then remembered who I was talking to. I felt bad I’d gotten Eli in trouble, but he deserved the apology more than this creep. “Go away. You’re not worth the effort.”
“Oh, baby, you have no idea what effort I’m worth.” Lance made a rude gesture with his hips.