Chapter 125: Something that belongs to her

Chapter 125 — Something That Belongs to Her

The student activities noticeboard stood at the junction of two corridors, where it caught everyone on their way to breakfast and held them there like a spider’s web. Roxanne and Isla had passed it a hundred times without looking up. This morning, a bright orange notice stopped them both.

Moonstone Autumn Social. Student events committee seeks volunteers. Music, food stalls, games, dancing. Decorations and activities team urgently needed.

Roxanne read it through twice. After the royal functions she had endured, the receiving lines and the seating charts and the careful smiles, the words student-led sounded almost like a different language.

"You’re reading it very seriously," Isla said.

"I’m reading it carefully."

"You’re reading it like you want to sign it."

"I’ve never organised anything."

"You have spent an entire term dealing with other people’s drama." Isla tapped the sheet. "I think you can manage an evening without any."

It was an annoyingly good argument. Roxanne took the pen dangling from a string and wrote her name beneath three others, under decorations and activities. Her handwriting looked small and certain on the page.

Nice, her wolf remarked. You didn’t ask anyone’s permission.

Nobody needed to give it.

Exactly.

The first volunteer meeting took place that afternoon in a cramped room off the main hall, where eleven students sat around two pushed-together tables and nobody agreed about anything.

"A ballroom," insisted a tall second-year named Cordelia, whose hair was pinned with great precision. "Chandeliers, a string quartet, proper dancing. People remember elegance."

"People remember fun," said a broad boy called Jace, leaning back in his chair. "Games. Outdoor stalls. A tournament of some kind. Nobody wants to stand around in good shoes."

"It’s the Autumn Social, not a wrestling match."

"It could be both."

The argument rolled on for twenty minutes, each person trying to bulldoze the next, until a girl at the end of the table put her head down on her folded arms. Roxanne watched the room turn in circles and thought that the whole thing was less like a committee and more like eleven people trying to wear the same coat.

"What if it isn’t one thing?" she said.

Heads turned.

"Divide the space. A formal area for dancing, with lanterns and music. A games corner, loud and casual. And a food section in the middle, where everyone has to walk through to get anywhere else, so people mingle."

A silence followed. Cordelia tilted her head. Jace stopped rocking his chair.

"That could actually work," Cordelia said slowly.

"I’d play in the corner," Jace admitted.

"I’m offering the idea," Roxanne added, before anyone could get comfortable. "I’m not volunteering to carry out everyone’s part of it."

A few people laughed, and the chair of the committee, a harried senior with a clipboard, began assigning tasks at once. Roxanne took decorations and layout, with Cordelia on fabrics and a quiet first-year named Wren on lighting. They set a deadline for the first planning update, and the room broke into talk that was, for the first time, pointed in a single direction.

The trouble arrived two days later, in the form of a sheet of figures.

"The budget," said the chair, tapping it with a pencil. "Decorations were allotted considerably less than we assumed."

"How much less?" Cordelia asked.

The chair told her. Someone groaned. Jace suggested they abandon the lanterns altogether and use whatever they could find, which would mean, Roxanne realised, bare walls and a few paper streamers.

She could have taken it to the Moonstones. A word to Lucien, or the Headmaster, and the money would have appeared by lunchtime. The thought occurred to her and she set it aside at once. This was her problem, and she wanted to solve it herself.

"Give me an hour," she said.

She found the key to the storage room at the bottom of a drawer in the activities office, and unlocked a long, cold room under the east stair. Shelves of old props loomed out of the dark. She went through them with a lamp, lifting dust sheets, opening crates.

Lanterns. Dozens of them, in tarnished brass and paper, left from some forgotten winter festival. Bolts of faded fabric in deep reds and golds. Coils of string lights tangled together like sleeping snakes.

Roxanne sat on an upturned crate and sketched on the back of an old notice, the pencil moving quickly. A canopy of fabric swagged beneath the rafters, lanterns hung at staggered heights, string lights wound through the swags. It would not look expensive. It would look warm, and deliberate, as though it had always been meant to be that way.

She carried the sketch back to the team. Wren studied it for a long time. "That would actually look lovely," she said softly.

"Test it," said the chair. "In one of the small halls."

Roxanne felt something loosen in her chest. It was not pride, exactly. It was quieter than that, the satisfaction of a knot coming undone under her fingers.

The following afternoon, she was in the activities room with her sketches spread across a table when the door banged open.

"Has anyone seen Jace?" Liam asked, striding in. "He volunteered to do the music and then disappeared. I’m told he owes me a song."

"He’s in the hall," Cordelia said, not looking up.

Liam did not go to the hall. His attention had landed on the sketches. "Ah. Design work." He leaned over the table. "Lovely. But where is the glitter?"

"There isn’t any."

"A grave oversight. Ribbons, at least. Fountains. A giant ice sculpture of a swan."

"If you contribute one more idea involving excessive glitter," Roxanne said, without lifting her head, "I will assign you to clean the storage room."

"I would be an excellent decorations assistant."

"You would be a hazard."

"I am a hazard with enthusiasm." He rolled up his sleeves. "Give me a task. A small one. Something to prove myself."

Roxanne looked at him for a moment, then pushed a crate toward him. "Sort the usable lanterns from the broken ones. Good in that pile, bad in that one."

To her surprise, he did it. He complained throughout, loudly and creatively, about dust and cobwebs and the cruelty of lanterns, and he held each one up to the light with ridiculous gravity. But the piles grew, and every one of them was sorted correctly.

"Done," he said at last, brushing off his hands. "May I choose one song for the social?"

"I’ll consider it if you behave."

"I always behave."

"You have never once behaved."

"I have a reputation to protect," said Liam, and went off in search of Jace, whistling.

That evening, Roxanne sat on her bed with the sketches fanned around her, a lamp turned low. She adjusted a swag here, moved a lantern there. It occurred to her, as she worked, that she was looking forward to this. Not because the brothers might attend. Not because anyone would be watching. She simply wanted to see the idea become real, to stand in the finished room and know she had made it.

You are happier when you have something to anticipate, her wolf observed.

I don’t need you analysing my emotions every time I smile.

You are free to ignore the observation.

Roxanne laughed out loud in the empty room, and went back to her drawing.

The team gathered the next day after classes in one of the smaller student halls, a plain, rectangular room with a dull ceiling and a floor that smelled of polish. They hauled lanterns up ladders and draped fabric across the beams, and then Wren flipped the switch.

Half the string lights stayed dark. The fabric sagged unevenly on one side, and two lanterns swung into each other with a dull clunk. The room looked like a party that had given up.

"It’s not working," Jace said.

"We could scrap it," someone muttered.

Roxanne stood at the centre of the floor, looking up. She could see what was wrong. The swags were too loose, the lights tangled, the lanterns hung at the same height. "Give me ten more minutes."

They gave her fifteen. She climbed the ladder herself, retied the swags tighter, and had Wren trace the dead lights back to a single faulty connection. They staggered the lanterns, high, low, high. Cordelia pulled the fabric taut and pinned it with a deft, quick hand. Jace held the ladder and, to everyone’s astonishment, did not make a single joke.

Wren threw the switch again.

Light spilled across the ceiling, gold and amber, soft against the red cloth. The plain room had become something else, a place where people might actually want to spend an evening. Nobody spoke for a moment.

"Oh," said Cordelia quietly.

Then everyone was talking at once, laughing, pointing out details, and the chair clapped Roxanne on the shoulder and declared that this would be the basis for the whole event. She stood at the centre of the little glowing room and felt warm all the way through. Nobody important had noticed. It did not matter in the slightest.

She was packing away her sketches when her phone buzzed with a message in the volunteer group chat. She read it standing up.

The academy has approved the event. The main hall is available, but only if the team presents a complete plan by Friday.

She checked the date.

Friday was two days away.

Well, her wolf said dryly. It seems you have found yourself a new problem.

Roxanne smiled as she gathered her papers.

No, she answered. I’ve found myself something to do.