“I knew you were trouble,” she says.
“You have no idea,” I tell her.
9
Cat
My first party at Kingmakers is my first party anywhere—not counting the tedious events we had to attend with my father and Daniela from time to time.
I always felt like a show pony, dressed up by Daniela and trotted out for some specific purpose. Usually to dance with some awful business associate of my father’s, who would invariably tell me that I reminded him of his daughter before trying to slide his hand down from my waist to my ass.
This was my first time getting dressed with friends, laughing and joking the whole time, after being offered a little pre-party drink from Chay, which I accepted because I was fascinated by the pear bobbing around inside, whole and intact, like a ship in a bottle.
“How on earth did they get it in there?” I asked Chay. “It’s a real pear, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “They attach the empty glass bottle to a branch while the pear is tiny and growing. It grows to maturity inside the bottle, then they cut the fruit stem and fill the bottle with liquor. It’s very popular in Germany, very common.”
She was doing Zoe’s makeup while she explained the drink to me, having already finished her own lacquered red lips and smoky swirls of dark liner all around her eyes.
I was supposed to be finishing my cat costume, but the pear brandy was already having an effect on me, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to draw my whiskers on straight.
“Hold on,” Chay said to Zoe. “I’m going to get my other eyeshadow palette.”
She hurried over to the wardrobe to rummage around. I took the opportunity to ask Zoe, “Are you sure it’s alright for us to go to this? Papa’s already furious about my grades . . .”
He wrote me a scathing letter after our cousin Martin ratted me out for my dismal performance in every practical exam I’ve had so far. If ink were acid, the words would have burned right through the page.
“Fuck him,” Zoe said coldly. “And fuck his letters.”
Dressed as an angel, her face sparkling with the glitter and her paper wings floating behind her, Zoe’s crudity made me laugh.
Zoe laughed, too. She took my hand and squeezed it, saying, “We’re going to the party, and we’re going to have a perfect night. Who knows how many we’ll get, but we’re taking this one.”
“You look gorgeous,” I told her.
I made the wings for her. I’d barely had any time to do anything artistic since coming to Kingmakers, and I missed that worse than I missed anything from home. I cut the feathers using a scalpel stolen from the Chemistry lab.
That was the first time I’d stolen anything, too. Kingmakers is full of firsts for me. My heart was racing so bad I thought I’d puke, but I slipped the scalpel up my sleeve all the same, hands sweating, thinking the professor was going to catch me even as I hurried to my next class.
I stayed up late to work on the wings while Rakel slept in the bed opposite, listening to her godawful metal music on her headphones. I could hear it seeping out, relentless drums and guitars and screaming. I don’t know how she sleeps with that racket assaulting her eardrums, when I can hardly stand the little bit I can hear, even with a pillow over my head.
I cut each feather individually. The meticulous process was incredibly soothing, better than yoga or meditation. Each feather became its own universe, perfect and precise, and totally under my control. Unlike everything else that happens at school.
I will say, I’ve been enjoying my computer classes at least. The only permitted laptops on campus are the ones in the computer lab. Placing my fingers on the keyboard feels almost as much like coming home as working on those paper feathers. Even though I’ve never done anything like Bitcoin transactions, digital security, or DDOS attacks, I’m picking it up much quicker than anything I’ve learned in my other classes.
So I’ve been surviving alright at Kingmakers.
It’s Zoe I’m worried about.
She told me what happened the day she was missing from the dining hall. She said Rocco tried to assault her and Miles Griffin helped save her.
Miles is throwing the party tonight, which makes me feel a little better about attending. But also a little worse, because I know that will only make Rocco angrier.
I told Zoe what Claire Turgenev shared with me, what Rocco did at his former school.
Zoe didn’t seem surprised.
“I know what he is,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Why?” I said. “Why can’t we at least try?”
“Look around you,” she said to me. “Look at this place. It’s seven hundred years old. How many students have come through here? Show me the ones who betrayed their families, who walked away and lived a happy life. Show me them. Show me the people who stood up to all of this and won.”
Still, even though Zoe told me it was hopeless, I do see a new level of rebelliousness in her. I could tell she was excited as she dressed for the party, and even more excited as we crossed the dark, open grounds toward the distant stables.
The party was already in full swing, students lined up outside the doors to pay their cover charge.
I invited Rakel. Or, I should say, I told her about the party in one of the rare intervals where she wasn’t wearing headphones and she seemed like she might not stab me for daring to speak to her.
“Who’s throwing it?” she said.
“Miles Griffin.”
There was no need to explain any further. Everyone on campus knows Miles.
“I might go,” Rakel said, as if conferring some huge favor on me.
I left it at that, not even brave enough to throw in a, “See you there.”
Rakel and I have not become closer friends in the nearly two months we’ve been sharing a room. The center of our dorm room is an invisible Berlin Wall that I’m not allowed to cross, and we never walk together, even when we’re leaving the Undercroft to go to the same class at the same time.
The closest she’s ever been to friendly was in our last Security Systems class, when I managed to successfully decode the mystery USB stick handed out by Professor Gillespie. He gave us no instructions whatsoever. I managed to image the USB stick and start forensicating it. It was TAILS, with LUKS encrypted partition. The professor forbade us from using cloud computing or any external system, so I had to brute force the password.
I was first to finish, in what Professor Gillespie informed us was record time.
Rakel leaned back in her chair to get a better look at my computer screen.
“How’d you figure that out?” she demanded.
“I ran hashcat against the LUKS password,” I said, showing her all the steps I took.
“How’d you know to do that? The professor never said.”
“Just trying different things,” I said. “I think . . . sometimes when you know you don’t know anything, you can find a solution somebody else might overlook. Trying even the ideas that seem stupid.”
On the next challenge, Rakel was quickest to finish.
“Nice!” I said, checking her solution in return. “That was smart.”