“Sounds like you’re selling yourself short.” Mickey squinted in disapproval.
I shrugged. “Just a realist. I’m a sprinter, Caleb’s a marathoner. At the beginning of the school year, I get straight As. By midyear, they drop to mostly Bs, and come the end of the year, there’s at least one C in there. Maybe a D if the teacher didn’t like me.”
He chuckled. “Sounds like you don’t have enough incentive.”
I opened my mouth to say I had plenty of incentive, but Mickey quickly added, “So your brother’s a nerd, then?”
I snorted. “Nerd is putting it mildly.” I yawned, forcing myself to look at him through half-lidded eyes. “He skipped two grades. Two. The guy’s learning a third language, builds computer programs, and once built a robot. He’s like…” I paused, waving a hand into the air above me. “Super Nerd.”
I yawned again, stretching my arms overhead before letting them fall back to the floor. “Sometimes, you remind me of him.” My eyelids had gotten so heavy that it took too much effort to try to keep them open.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that a good thing?” he asked.
I tried to crack my lids open but yawned instead. “I think, yeah,” I mumbled, my tongue heavy in my mouth. “Yeah.”
Chapter 8
The next few days passed in a blur of classes and catch-up assignments. Honestly, there wasn’t much else to do—not even binge-eating junk food, since Maeve didn’t seem to believe in the stuff.
The only memorable thing that had happened was when I first stepped into Irish class and found Edon leaning back in his seat at the back of the room, his arms folded as he grinned at me. I’d ignored him and he seemed to have returned the favor. But sometimes I could feel him staring at me, and on the few occasions I’d check to see I wasn’t imagining things, his lips would turn up into a charming, crooked smile, turning my insides into a fluttery mess.
I’d stopped checking.
By the time my first assignment in Irish class was due, I was ready to kill it. Sure, I hadn’t figured out why people here couldn’t stop staring at me or why most everyone at school acted a little off. And I didn’t even want to think about why my meds hadn’t worn off yet, as evidenced by my Irish teacher looking like she had a dragon lurking underneath her very human surface. But after Mickey had grilled me for a couple of nights on Irish vocabulary, something seemed to shift, clicking into place. Irish just made sense now, and I wasn’t about to question it. I was lost in math, drowning in Shakespeare vocabulary, and physics made my brain feel like mush, so Irish had become a refuge from feeling like a complete idiot.
So yeah, I had the pronunciation down, and I totally knew I nailed the homework assignment—with the help of some advanced vocabulary courtesy of the Internet. When I’d asked to use the computer the night before, Maeve looked like I’d asked for drugs. I could have sworn her eye twitched as she unlocked the study door so I could get on her desktop PC.
“Ms. James, your turn,” Ms. Pendragon said, gesturing toward the half-podium sitting on top of the table at the front of the room.
I quickly stood up from my seat, a broad smile on my face, as I strode up the aisle and faced the class. I glanced down at the notecard in my hand and looked up, making sure to not look in Edon’s direction. Mickey frowned at me as if he knew I was up to no good.
I grinned even wider.
His frown deepened as he crossed his arms and leaned back in his seat.
The other students in the class shifted forward, like this might be awesome.
Well, I wasn’t about to disappoint.
“Mo Chlann,” I began, pausing for dramatic effect before launching into the description of my family.
There was a long pause as Mrs. Pendragon’s jaw worked. Everyone else sat in their seats, frozen. I swallowed. My assignment wasn’t quite going over the way I’d expected.
“Ms. James. I am certain that your mother is not, in fact, a hamster. And your father smelling of elderberry… I am assuming you are referring to the alcoholic beverage. I asked you to describe your fam—” She paused as a snicker started in the back. She shot them a glare, silencing them. “—your family. Not insult them.”
“But I didn’t. At least not my brother.”
“Yes, you mentioned he was cold.”
“No, cool.”
Mrs. Pendragon arched a single brow.
I shook my head. “Fine. But you recognized the movie, right?”
She blinked.
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail?”
“Do you mean to say you plagiarized as well?”
Crap.
“No! I didn’t plagiarize anything. Everyone’s watched that movie, right?” I looked around the class. No one looked at me now except for Mickey. And probably Edon, but my gaze skipped over his seat out a healthy sense of self-preservation. I didn’t need to look at him to know that he was smirking at me—and it’d be enough to make my stomach a knotted mess.
“Oh, come on. It’s not that old. Well, maybe it is, but someone’s got to have seen it.”
More blank stares.
“Ms. James…”
“Never mind.” I trudged back to my desk in a huff.
Mrs. Pendragon took a deep breath. “As a reminder to the class, please confine yourselves to the assigned vocabulary when completing future assignments.”
I ground my teeth.
“Your father smelled like elderberries?” Mickey whispered to me as he stared straight ahead at the next shmuck telling everyone his sister’s hair color.
“It’s a quote from an awesome movie.”
“That no one’s ever heard of.”
“This place keeps getting worse.”
“Well, people here are very—”
The opening door cut Mickey off. A wispy, timid
