MY STEPBROTHERS, MY MATES

Human in the Hall

CHAPTER FIVE

VIOLETTA

The cafeteria was still loud.

Not the normal kind of loud. The kind that happens when everyone is talking about the same thing at the same time and trying to look like they aren't.

Every table I could see had at least one person leaning toward another person, and every leaning person was looking at me.

I kept my hands flat on the table and stared at a fixed point on the wall across the room and did not move my face.

A boy at the table to my left made a show of lifting his head and sniffing the air. He said something to his friends and they laughed.

A girl behind him took out her phone and pointed it in my direction and I heard the shutter sound and I kept staring at the wall.

Jason was still sitting across from me smiling. Like he had just done something he was proud of.

I looked at him.

"How could you do that?" I questioned. My voice came out quieter than I wanted it to.

He shrugged one of his shoulders whilst looking completely unbothered. "I told you yesterday," he said. "You still had time to crawl back to whatever hellhole you came from. You refused." He tilted his head slightly. "So here we are."

"That was my business to share or not share—"

"Now it's everyone's." He smiled wider. "You'll have something interesting to tell Mama about your first day at school."

I stared at him.

He stared back and there was nothing in his face. No guilt. No hesitation. Not even the satisfaction of someone who'd done something cruel. Just blankness, like he'd made a small practical decision and was fine with it.

"Enjoy your day, human," he winked at me.

He stood up, picked up his tray, and walked back to his table without looking at me again.

The cafeteria noise shifted. Now that Jason had moved it was like someone had given the room permission and the whispers got louder and less whisper.

Someone at the table behind me said something and their whole group laughed.

A girl near the window said the word human loud enough that I heard every letter of it. Someone else said something about the Calloways and I caught my name in the middle of it and felt the whole weight of the room land on my back at once.

My throat tightened.

I kept my hands flat on the table.

I was not going to cry in this cafeteria. I was absolutely not going to do that.

A tray landed on the table across from me.

I looked up.

A girl dropped into the seat like she owned it. Short, dark hair, round glasses, a face that suggested the noise in this room was roughly as interesting to her as weather she'd already seen a forecast for. She looked at me, looked around the cafeteria once, and looked back at me.

"Hi," she greeted, her warm voice cascading over me like a waterfall. "I'm Petra."

She opened her lunch and started eating.

I blinked, confusion clouding my eyes. "Sorry?"

"Petra." She pointed at herself with her fork. "I sat next to you in the first period. You were in the back left, I was in the back right."

"I remember."

"Good." She speared something from her tray. "Then we've already established we can be in the same room without incident. We might as well eat together."

I looked around the cafeteria. Every table that had been watching me was still watching me. Some of them openly now. A group of girls near the far wall weren't even pretending.

"You know what's happening right now," I leaned forward, staring down at her.

"Yes." She nodded and waved off her arms.

"And you still sat down." I blurted out.

Petra looked at me over her glasses. "I sat down because you looked like someone who needed one person in this room to act normal." She shrugged. "Also I don't have anywhere better to sit. So we might as well be miserable together."

Something loosened in my chest.

I actually laughed. Short and surprised and completely against my will. "That's the most useful thing anyone has said to me since I got here."

"I tend to cut straight to it." She pushed her glasses up. "Eat something. It's harder to look composed on an empty stomach."

I picked up my fork.

Petra talked while we ate and I listened and the noise of the cafeteria became background instead of everything.

She explained the school with the efficiency of someone who had mapped its terrain carefully and had no emotional attachment to the findings. Who held actual power versus who performed it. Which teachers graded fairly and which ones graded by pack rank. Which parts of the building to avoid at certain times of day.

"Jason's table," she said, nodding across the room without looking, "is the highest status table in this cafeteria. Not because anyone announced it. Just because it is."

I looked at his table. He was eating and talking to his friends and hadn't looked in my direction once since he sat back down.

"He sat across from me deliberately," I said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes." Petra said it simply, like of course. "Sitting across from you and making that announcement was a message to every wolf in this room. He was telling them what you are and where that puts you." She took a sip of her drink. "He did it on your first day so it would be the first thing anyone here knows about you."

I looked at my tray. "Great."

"The good news," she smiled, "is that first impressions in this school are not permanent. The pack hierarchy shifts. Information becomes old. You just have to survive long enough for it to become old."

"How long did it take for your information to become old?"

She considered this seriously. "I've been here two years."

"So it never became old."

"I have you now," she grinned widely. "So technically the situation has improved."

I looked at her. She was eating her lunch with the same unbothered expression she'd had since she sat down. I thought about the whole cafeteria looking at me and Petra dropping her tray down like it was the most ordinary thing.

"Why did you actually sit down?" I asked.

She looked up. "I told you."

"You told me a reason. I'm asking for the real one."

She was quiet for a second. Then she said, "Because I know what it looks like when someone is about to let a room break them. And I decided I didn't want to watch that happen to you."

I didn't say anything.

She went back to eating. "Also you seemed interesting. I'm rarely wrong about that."

The corridor after lunch was worse than the cafeteria.

At least in the cafeteria I was sitting still and the room was doing the thing around me. In the corridor I had to move through it and the thing moved with me.

Students stepped aside as I walked but not in the way people step aside for someone they respect — in the way people step aside to get a better look.

I was almost in the next classroom when I heard footsteps matching mine.

Jason appeared on my left. Two of his friends fell in on either side slightly behind him. He didn't look at me right away. He walked beside me for a few steps first like we just happened to be going the same direction.

Then he said, "Enjoy the attention while it lasts."

His voice was pleasant. Like he was giving me advice.

"It fades fast," he continued. "And when it does, what's left is just a human girl in a school where she doesn't belong. No announcement required."

His friends laughed. The students nearby who had been trying to look like they weren't listening stopped pretending.

I kept walking.

I did not look at him. I did not change my pace. I kept my face completely neutral and I counted the steps to the classroom door and I kept counting until I reached it and pushed it open and went inside.

I heard one of his friends say something as the door closed behind me. I didn't make out the words. I didn't try to.

It's the last period.

I found my seat and sat down and opened my notebook and I wrote one line at the top of the page before the lesson started.

It had nothing to do with whatever we were about to cover. I wrote it because I needed to and underlined it twice.

*I have survived worse than this building.*

I looked at it for a moment. Then I looked up at the board and got my pen ready.

The door opened.

I didn't turn around. I didn't need to. I could feel him come in.

A chair scraped back directly behind me.

I kept my eyes on the board.

He leaned forward.

His voice came low and close to the back of my neck.

"Still here, little human?”