Page 58 of By the Orchid and the Owl
“I don’t hate you, Rayna. You just tried to hoard your best friend from everyone else, set ants on me because you knew you couldn’t compete with my looks, and slept your way to the top of the social chain in a matter of weeks.” She paused to examine her cuticles again. “Why would I hate you for that?”
“I have not,” I said through shaking lips, “slept my way to anything.”
No, all that teasing with Coen had amounted to exactly nothing. Nothing besides a tormenting build of desire in me that I’d never experienced with anyone else. To think that I’d been using him for some stupid social ladder? It was absurd.
Jenia feigned a curious tone. “Why’re you holed up in his room every weekend, then, if not to sleep your way to the top?”
Getting medicine to prevent my power from bursting through my skin and cutting you up into tiny, fleshy pieces right now.
“That’s what I thought,” Jenia said, her eyes blazing with triumph. “Listen.”
She leaned forward, as if to tell me a secret even though we were a room apart.
“You might feel good about yourself right now, but once Coen and his friends pass—orfail—their Final Tests next year, who are you left with? All your friends are either fat, weird, or stupid, and you’re nothing but a dirty little whore pretending to be an angel.”
The testing door sprung open. Mr. Conine appeared once again.
I stared and stared at Jenia, who in turn stared at her cuticles.
“Rayna Drey,” Mr. Conine said. “Thanks for your patience, Rayna.”
“Good luck!” Jenia called brightly. “Lovely chatting with you, dear!”
Dear. Everything—from my blood to my bones to my brutally twisted heart—had frozen inside my skin. I had to force myself to uproot my ass from the chair. Had to force each step toward Mr. Conine, blinking and blinking as I tried to get rid of Jenia’s words, to toss them away like they were nothing.
“Are you alright, Rayna?” Mr. Conine asked quietly when I’d neared him.
“Fine,” I mumbled.
“You’ll be okay.” He clapped a comforting hand on my shoulder and motioned me to follow him. “It’s nothing more than what we’ve done in class.”
Right. The test. Perhaps Fergus and Jenia had meant to dismantle me piece by piece so that I’d fail it. And while this one didn’t officially count, it would make or break my first impression to the Good Council, so I really, really needed to do well.
After all, I couldn’t have Dyonisia Reeve picking my name out from a list of general passes and investigating me further all because I’d let a little mold and name-calling get into my head. I couldn’t allow her to notice me.
“I’m fine,” I said again, raking in a deep breath.
Letting my insides melt back into place.
And following Mr. Conine into the testing room without looking back.
CHAPTER
21
The room had completely transformed since our History test mere hours ago.
Rather than desks and papers, it now overflowed with various animal prisons situated throughout the room in meandering patterns, like a snake’s lair. And thereweresnakes in here, writhing together in a tank to my left, eyeing the young capybaras in the cage next to them. There were terrariums of buzzing crickets, wire cages of frantic mice, aquariums of fish and frogs and snails. There was even an entire coop of plumed peahens nesting in straw.
On a perch above this conglomeration, watching everything, sat a spectacled owl.
I blinked at it. The owl didn’t blink back. Even though my entire sector was named after it, I had only seen two or three of its kind my entire life. They were as rare as white tigers and usually kept to themselves even at night.
“Um.” I looked up at Mr. Conine, who’d settled himself into that bloodred velvet armchair at the head of the room—perhaps the only unchanged thing about this place. I could barely hear my own voice over the din of all the animals, though.
“It looks so good,” rasped a snake.
“Don’t make eye contact,” said a capybara to another.
