“New roommate?” Emma guessed.
“Two points to farm girl.” I scooted over to make room for Mei-Ling at the end. I wasn’t about to make her sit next to the posse of statuesque Valkyrie at the head of the table.
Yas took the opportunity to snag an uneaten roll from my tray. “You gonna eat this?”
I waved it away. “Take it. And, how are you not, like, five thousand pounds?”
“Growing boy,” he said, chewing over a mouthful of bread.
I greeted Mei as she sat down. Her eyes looked puffy from crying, and I asked earnestly, “How are you?”
But the tone of her reply was all business. “Fine,” she said, “thank you.” Her expression was unreadable as she nodded a cursory hello to my friends.
I suspected the vampires wanted me to look out for Mei-Ling, but it sure seemed like she needed more of a sense of urgency if she was going to look out for her own self.
With a shrug, I did the introductions. “This is Emma and Yasuo.”
They were looking at me as if I’d grown horns, and I had to suppress a smile. There were two things on this island that I loved: eliciting emotion from Emma and catching Yasuo off guard.
“This is Mei-Ling,” I said. “I’m showing her the ropes.”
Yasuo finally closed his mouth. But then he quickly opened it again to ask, “Isn’t that your Proctor’s job?”
Our new Proctor. Shudder.
Emma and I exchanged a charged glance. Then I looked at him with a raised brow. “Have you met Kenzie?”
“She’s no Amanda,” Emma said.
“Nobody is,” I agreed quietly.
Mei gave us a flat look. “Is that one of our instructors?”
“No,” I said. “Kenzie Samuels is the Proctor on our floor. It’s sort of like…”
“Like a dorm mother.” Yasuo guffawed at his own joke.
I ignored him. “She keeps an eye on things. There’s one assigned to each floor.”
Emma leaned in. “I heard the Guidons call her Killer Kenzie.”
That was the last thing Mei needed to hear, so I rambled on, explaining, “Proctors are always older girls. After Acari, you become an Initiate, and then comes Guidon—”
“If you live that long,” Yas muttered, and I kicked him under the table.
“Then finally you become a Watcher. You’ll meet some of those, too.”
“How long will that take?” Mei-Ling asked.
Yasuo laughed at that, and I cut him off. “A few years, maybe. I’ve never really asked.”
Mei’s eyes were void of emotion. Was she registering all this, or was she about to snap?
“You’ll probably have a class taught by a Watcher,” Emma chimed in brightly. She might be quiet, but she didn’t miss a thing and, undoubtedly, had sized up Mei and got what I was trying to do.
I gave her a grateful smile, nodding and adding, “You see them around—they have much better uniforms than we do.”
“I saw some of them when I was looking for a phone,” Mei said, and after a moment’s hesitation, added, “There isn’t one in the dorm.”
“A phone?” Yasuo sounded incredulous. “No phones here, kid.”
“I’m sorry.” I squeezed her arm, but she ever so subtly flinched away.
This Mei-Ling was remarkably steady for someone who’d seen her boyfriend killed, was abducted, taken to an island in the middle of the sea, and learned about the existence of vampires all in the space of, what, a few days? She might look like a sip of water, but she had an inner strength—that was for sure.
“So, Mei-Ling.” I leaned my elbows on the table, acting casual. “Did you have other hobbies in New York? Like martial arts or something?” Because why else would they have brought her here?
She gave me a frown. “Because I’m Chinese American?”
I put my hands up in surrender. “Because most girls here have some experience with kicking ass, and you don’t strike me as the shotgun type.”
Her frown cleared. “I’m not supposed to go to gym class. I need to be careful of my hands.”
My eyes flicked to those hands, with long, graceful fingers that I could picture flitting over piano keys or across violin strings. If she was this calm on her first day at a vampire training academy, I imagined she’d have been cold steel on a symphony stage.
She picked up her glass and drank the blood—that right there explained at least some of her composure. The drink brought a false sense of calm that, after enough doses, eventually became real calm. They must’ve been dosing her from the get-go.
Such careful treatment on the part of the vampires—it was baffling.
I studied her. If it weren’t for the extra consideration on their part, she’d obviously not survive. It wasn’t that Mei looked weak. She had the stiffest upper lip I’d ever seen. No, it was more that she looked tended. Cared for. Loved.She didn’t want to be here, but not in the same way that we didn’t want to be here. So many of us Acari didn’t want to be anywhere. If she were a musical prodigy, she obviously worked hard and had a competitive edge. But there was another sort of edge that was lacking. It was the one that’d been shoved, starved, stymied, and slapped into the rest of us in our lives before Eyja næturinnar.
So what was her deal? I wanted to keep her talking. “Have you met her yet? Kenzie, I mean. Blond bob? Kinda reminds me of an American Girl doll.”
Yas snorted. “If American Girl dolls wore catsuits and carried sai knives.”
My eyes lit. “Is that what those things are called?” Our new Proctor’s weapon of choice was a pair of daggers, each one flanked by two sharp, short spikes. They looked like something you might see wielded by some manga badass.
Yasuo made a little hissing noise, slowly sweeping his hands in front of his face like a ninja. “So desu ne,” he informed me in Japanese.
The guy had been born in Japan and prided himself on knowing his native weaponry. And I had to give him credit. He was one of the only people who’d respected the power of my throwing stars—and known their true name, shuriken—before I’d even learned to use them.
Still, I couldn’t let Yasuo get too smug. I nudged him. “Okay, sensei. Cool your jets.”
“You’re welcome, grasshopper.”
“Hush. Both of you.” Emma silenced us in her North Dakota prairie girl way. She was the only person I’d ever met who was capable of using the word hush without irony. I think it was because she could do things like skin a wild animal with just three flicks of her Buck knife. She turned her attention to Mei. “What classes are you taking?”
My roommate pulled a neatly folded paper from her jacket pocket.
“Hey, you finally got that syllabus you’ve been wanting.” My attempt at humor fell flat, so I just I leaned in to study her schedule. It was a weird one.
SCI 101
Intro to Phenomena
TTh 9–12
Tracer Judge
IND
Independent Study in Combat
MWF 9–12
Watcher Angel
IND
Independent Study in Fitness
TTh 2–5
Tracer Ronan
IND
Independent Study in Advanced Musicianship
MWF 3–6
Master Dagursson
“Ohhkayyy.” I shared a quick glance with Emma. This was Mei-Ling’s first term, and already she had three independent studies? “Well, Phenomena is cool.”
“Watcher Angel is her combat teacher?” Yasuo piped up, clued out as usual. “That’s the girl with the arms, right? Isn’t her nickname the Angel of Death?”
Watcher Angel had some seriously cut biceps. But Mei-Ling didn’t need to hear that right now. I narrowed my eyes, giving him my best STFU look. “Not helping.”
“Advanced Musicianship?” he went on, ignoring me. “What do you play?”
Something flickered in Mei’s eyes—it was an enviable mix of pride and self-knowledge. I imagined it was the thing that’d given her strength to get her this far. “Violin…or at least I did play the violin. I can manage most string instruments.” She shrugged. “Woodwinds, too.”
Yas grinned. “Tiger Mom?”
Mei-Ling’s eyes went flat with disdain. “What, you think you know the Chinese girl? You assume because I play the violin that I have a Tiger Mother and my sister is good at math? You just perpetuate your own clichés.”
I braced, wondering how Yas would handle it. Instead of getting upset, though, he just smirked. “Hey, you don’t give us much to work with.”
“Fine,” Mei said, sounding more clinical than angry. “I play the violin because it’s a beautiful instrument. I also play bass guitar in a garage band. My mom is awesome. She makes killer handmade dumplings, but she also volunteers at the soup kitchen and can rock a pair of skinny jeans. I work hard because I like to.” She gave him a teasing half smile. “You should try it.”
I wasn’t sure if this was still a charged moment or not—Mei wasn’t the easiest person to read—but I chimed in, hoping to ease the tension if there was any. “Handmade dumplings, huh? All I ever got to try were those gummy pot sticker things they have at Panda Express.”
Yas moaned. “I’d kill for their sweet-and-sour chicken.”
I rolled my eyes. “You say that about everything. You’d kill for an extra pat of butter. For a soy latte. For a Snickers bar. You’re losing your cred.”
Emma nodded sagely in agreement. “It’s true.”
I smiled and looked over to catch Mei’s eye, but instead of being cheered by our chatter, she sat silently, swirling a spoon in her congealed soup. Thinking about those handmade dumplings, no doubt. A thick silence followed.
Finally it was Emma who broke the ice and brought us back on topic. She peered at Mei’s schedule and cleared her throat. “They certainly gave you a lot of independents,” she said, stating the obvious in a neutral tone.