“It’s what you are. Especially now.” I overexaggerate wiping my cheek. “Gross.”
He keeps laughing.
I wait until he meets my eyes. “You don’t have to be a priest. You don’t have to do anything that doesn’t work foryou. If that makes me a bad influence on you, then hell yeah, I’ll keep leading you to the dark side. I want you to be happy.”
He sobers. “Iamhappy. I’m fine. And I won’t let her talk bad about you anymore. I promise.”
I hope my smile is appropriately unbothered. “The way I see it, your penance is dealing with both of them by yourself on the drive home.”
He blanches. “Uh, I can stay home for break. Help distract you from next semester.”
“I don’t need a babysitter. Go home. Some alone time might be good. Get me all centered or whatever.”
His eyes brighten. “You’ll try meditating again?”
Every time I do, it’s like non-sexy masochism, but I usually endure an hour of it every few months for his sake.
“Sure. I’ll meditate.”
It’s more likely I’ll lock myself away and drown in freak-outs, but even that might be cleansing. Purge me of all my anxiety so I can face the spring semester like the competent, mature wizard no one believes I can be.
Orok’s look is full of such disbelief we could bottle and sell it.
But he relents, mostly because I don’t give him a choice; I slip into my room.
“Happy Urzoth’s birthday,” I tell him.
“Love you,” he calls as he heads downstairs.
“Fuck off,” I singsong back to be a dick.
But Ghorza hears me. “Sebastian!Howdareyou—” Orok must cut her off, because she huffs. “I don’t understand why you let him speak to you like that!”
I shut my bedroom door and pound my forehead against it.
Chapter Four
A competent, mature wizard.
There are, most assuredly,partsof those things in me, so I spend my Winter Break of Solitude desperately digging them out. I get up every day at a reasonable time and go to bed at an even more reasonable time and keep up with personal hygiene, all of which are at least nuggets of pyrite in mining for emotional intelligence, right?
On the first day of spring semester, as I head through campus toward my—sorry,our—new dedicated lab space in Bellanor Hall, I’m rather pleased with myself. I’ve got a whole new outlook on life. Live and let live, c’est la vie, and other such phrases I absorbed during 2A.M.internet searches forhow to work with someone you hate without dreaming about murdering them.
I said I went to bed and woke up at reasonable times, not that Isleptat reasonable times.
But those aforementioned internet searches, while immediately telling me not to commit murder, led to an approach I have not yet tried: killing Elethior with kindness.
We’ve been at each other’s throats. We’ve insulted each other and played dumb pranks. But neither of us has tried to be, gasp,cordial,so by gods, that’s what I’ll do.
And the fact that I’ll be the first of us to attempt this feat of adult sensibility means I win the moral high ground forever and ever, so he can suck it.
I daresay I’ve got a pep in my step as I jog down the hall toward the lab, ready to test out this new resolve to extend an olive branch. Turn over a new leaf. Nurture a fresh seedling.
Why did the internet give me so many plant-based mantras? Are all psychologists druids?
I find the door to the lab on the first floor of Bellanor Hall, a keypad glowing arcane blue next to it. I half expect the code I was given not to work, for Elethior to have used his winter break to oustme—but I enter the four-digit number and there’s a low beep before the keypad shifts to green and the door unlocks.
A sense of rightness settles over me. This is all really, actually happening.
