Rooming with the Wicked

17 | a real pain

Group work was bad on a good day, and despite sitting in alchemy class, the one place where everything usually made sense, today wasn't even semi-decent.

After last night's unplanned trek through the forest had ended up taking way longer than expected—thanks brain for having the orientation of a hamster—I'd fallen into bed like a wet sack of potatoes. Wet because as fate would have it, it had started pouring about five minutes after I'd left Danox with a half-full bottle and a smile.

All that would still have been fine if I'd gotten some decent sleep. Being a light sleeper had its perks, but when you had three roommates, one of which was one-hundred percent night owl—my money was on Haze just because he was the only one I saw napping away during the day—the pros did not outweigh the cons.

The slight panic of waking up with the constricting sense of suffocating didn't help either. It had felt like something was pressing down on my chest, obstructing my airways, but, of course, there was nothing there. Nothing I'd seen anyway, but that wasn't much of a surprise considering I'd jumped up and tossed my blanket off me right away.

And now I was supposed to engage in conversation and teamwork. Awesome.

Eloise kept throwing me dirty glances, she was probably as pleased to be sitting at the same table as I was. Well, at least I didn't have to suffer through this alone.

"So, I was thinking," Jared or Jake or whatever his name was said, "me and Ariel start the base and you two"—he pointed at Eloise and another girl whose name I hadn't even tried to remember—"start peeling persu root."

Jaydis's words about me being slow for not knowing who was in my classes came to mind and I almost smiled. He was sitting in his usual spot, but it wasn't Haze next to him today. It was Danox.

Weird... Not that I was particularly upset about Haze's absence.

Danox's gaze kept flitting to me, but whatever he was thinking, he kept it hidden well. Maybe he was still upset about being outplayed by a human.

When one of the others, a silver-haired naiad, reached across the table and accidentally knocked a container off, Danox's hand shot forward and he caught it before it landed on the floor.

The naiad said something and he frowned, setting the small can onto the tabletop hard enough for it to fall over right after he let go. Yup, as grouchy ever.

"Why?" Eloise whined, bringing my attention back to my own group. "I hate peeling these things, they smell like dirt. Last time my hands were yellow for like two days."

The other girl rolled her eyes. "You're supposed to wear gloves, you know?"

My three group members argued back and forth long enough that everyone else had a clear head start and the supply table looked like a battlefield. When I stood up to start, our self-appointed team leader grabbed my arm. "What are you doing?"

"Getting ingredients?" I questioned.

"Bu-but—" His sneeze drowned out any conversations happening around us. Wiping his nose on his shirt, he stared at me. Then he leaned down to sniff the sleeve of my hoodie.

Twisting my arm out of his grip, I stepped back. "What the—what are you doing?"

"Do you have a dog?"

"What?"

"I'm allergic," he explained, sniffling.

"So?"

He rolled his eyes. "Well, I just sneezed."

"I noticed."

He waved his hands, eyes wide. "Because of you."