…or, Mass Cure Light Absences
I’d rattled Iason by asking him to the dance first. Thing was, he was even more rattled by my disappearance, because he took it.
Maybe he didn’t want to push his luck. Maybe. That would be a first. When it came to things like that, he’d always erred on the side of erring. He’d gotten off on how far he could push me. I’d put my foot down. At the time I hadn’t known if I’d done it too hard or not hard enough. Maybe it had been just right. But then he could also just be reacting to recent events.
It could be both. Maybe he’d needed both shocks. Did it make a difference? If I only cared about results it didn’t. I wasn’t sure that was the case but I also wasn’t sure what else would bother me.
No reason I had to sort all that out right that minute.
“Do you need healing?” he asked.
I checked the elbow I’d landed on the hardest. The skin was scraped, but not bloody. It moved all the ways it was supposed to and none of the ways it wasn’t.
“I think I’m fine,” I said. “Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“If you wish to tell me,” he said. “When I found the spot where the farmer’s wagon vanished, it was easy enough to surmise what had happened, given what the farm boy told me about their ancestral hex.”
“I guess it would be,” I said. “His name’s Bobby, by the way.”
“I am aware of that,” Iason said, and I liked him a little better already. “Let me take you back to your dorm. I can inform Marlot that you’ve returned while you rest.”
“I don’t know if I need to rest,” I said. “It wasn’t that long for me.”
I did, though. My body only thought it was Thursday, but it did think it was Thursday night. There’d been enough to get my heart racing before Fay took us on a boat tour of scenic plummeting to our dooms.
“Come,” Iason said, putting his arm around me. “I will take you.”
He said it that way because the innuendo reflex ran that deep, but it wasn’t an innuendo.
“Yeah, okay,” I said.
My ankle waited until we were almost to Pelinor Hall to inform me that skipping the healing center had been a mistake. The elbow had hurt more to begin with, but I didn’t walk on my elbow. I decided to grin and bear it. By the second flight of stairs the grin was a grimace, but we didn’t have to go any higher.
“Are you certain that you are alright?” Iason asked me.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Does everyone know I was missing?”
“I do not know,” Iason said. “Bryony does. Marlot does. I believe she did not give her concerns an airing before I confirmed that you were gone late yesterday, and she has not been on campus since then.”
“I’m just wondering how I’m going to explain things to people,” I said. “Or if I’m going to have anything to explain.”
Truth was, I was a little disappointed that no one else was waiting for me. One day missing wasn’t long enough for people to start holding vigils or anything, but a little recognition would have been nice. The hallway was dead. It was not quite eight in the morning on a Saturday, of course. That salved my ego a little.
The mention of Professor Bryony put something in my head: my professors. They were the ones who’d really need an explanation. Bryony accounted for half my classes on Friday and she would be cool about it. She knew what kind of hazards there were in the faerie-haunted countryside. Hall seemed like an easy sell. He wasn’t a hardass, and could probably be bought off with a personal account of the trip. It was my etherscaping class that could be a problem. The instructor didn’t grade on attendance, but that didn’t mean he’d let it slide.
The best thing to do would be to send an a-mail to all three of them at once with the bare facts and offer to meet with them to give them more details if needed. It had to seem less likely that I’d be jerking all three of them around. I’d tell Iolana that I’d corroborate her story for any teacher who doubted her. Then she’d have to do the same for me.
Iason left me at my door with a kiss on the cheek. He touched my wrist before he went. I had some thought about taking care of the a-mail or trying to “see” if Violet was up and about, but the bed looked pretty good. The couch underneath it looked not as good but much closer. If not for the fact that I woke up lying across it I would have bet money I fell asleep before I got to it.
Hi!
I do hope to see you continue this story because it is so cool to see the campus from a different veiw point.
I finally managed to find this story again and get caught to where i had left to see that you havent gone much further with it. That is rather disapointing but, I understand that you are really concintrating on ToMU, which is going great btw!
You are dfoing a great job keep up the great work!