Chapter 627 | It’s Gothic Math [GT BONUS]

Chapter 627: 627 | It’s Gothic Math [GT BONUS]

The chair rolled back six inches and slammed into the desk. Ophelia landed across my thighs sideways, one arm hooked around my neck on pure instinct and the other clutching a fistful of my jacket. Her skirt had flipped up past both garter clasps, and my left hand had landed exactly where the stocking ended. There was nothing under my palm but smooth warm skin and the edge of a black strap.

We both froze in place, and the radiator knocked twice in the silence.

Her face went white first, and then it went red from the collarbones up, the color climbing her throat and flooding all the way to the tips of her ears. Her grey eyes had gone huge behind all that black eyeliner, and her mouth had fallen open in a small shocked circle.

"Belmont," she whispered, her voice barely working. "Your hand is on my leg."

"I know that, and I’m moving it now."

"You’re moving it very slowly."

"I’m moving it carefully, since there’s a garter clip here that I really don’t want to snap."

She made a sound I had never heard a human throat produce, high and strangled, and it could have been a laugh or a war cry. My hand came off her thigh, and she scrambled up out of my lap and yanked her skirt down with both fists. Then she backed away until she hit her own desk.

Across the room Dralun had not moved a single scale. He sat in his chair looking at us for a long moment, and then he looked at the ceiling like it had personally disappointed him.

"I didn’t see any of that," he rumbled.

"It was an accident, and I want it logged as an accident!" Ophelia pointed a shaking finger at me. "Mr. Stitches saw you, and he is filing a formal complaint with the Hero Commission."

"Mr. Stitches is lying face down under the window right now."

She spun around, saw the bear sprawled on the floorboards, and let out a wail of pure betrayal. She rushed over and scooped him up, brushed dust off his button face, and turned him around so his X-stitched eyes glared at me from the safety of her chest.

"That’s minus sixty for you," she said, "and plus ten because you didn’t snap the clip, so you land at minus one hundred ninety-four."

"How is that math supposed to work?"

"It’s gothic math, and you wouldn’t understand it."

The interface chimed in my ear before I could argue with gothic math.

\[Temptation Gauge Updated: Ophelia Lin — 9%\]

\[Emotional state: mortified / flustered / furious about the bear\]

\[Note: Heroine also reports elevated body temperature. Host is advised that this is not due to the radiator.\]

I closed the window without comment and decided it was a great time to make a phone call.

Grandma Lin’s voice exploded up the stairwell in rapid Cantonese before I could dial. Ophelia yelled one word back at her, and the next sentence from below came up so loud that the scanner rattled on the cabinet.

"Grandma says the tamales are here from Mateo’s abuela," Ophelia translated in a sullen voice. "She says there are twelve of them for the dragon and one for the skinny boy, and the dragon has to share."

Dralun was already out of his chair and heading for the stairs, and his tail cleared a path through the boxes behind him. I stayed where I was and pulled the phone out of my pocket while I read Carmen’s number off my wrist.

She picked up on the second ring, and she sounded breathless and scared.

"This is Carmen," she said. "Who is calling?"

"It’s Lukas Belmont, the guy from your hallway this morning. I told you I’d call about kindergarten."

The line went quiet for so long that I checked the screen to make sure the call had not dropped. When she came back her voice had changed, and it sounded thick and wet.

"I thought you were being nice," she said. "People from up there always say things to be nice."

"I have the answer for you now." I scrolled down the PDF Ophelia had pulled up. "Under Section Eleven of the Accord education provisions, Mateo’s school has to build him an Aspect plan, and the district pays for all of it. The Eighth Street clinic can write the letter on Thursday at his appointment, and the school gets thirty days to put the plan in place."

"The school pays for it?"

"It’s written into federal law, so they have to," I said. "If anyone at the front office says otherwise, ask them for Section Eleven by name. If they still say no, call me back, and I’ll bring a very loud dragon to their parking lot."

Carmen laughed, and it cracked halfway through and turned into crying. I sat there holding the phone and listening to her cry, and I didn’t try to say anything, because after last night I finally understood that silence could do the talking.

A small voice came through the speaker from somewhere in the background, high and thin and full of hiccups.

"Mama, is it the gold boy on the phone? Ask him if he has horns too!"

"Tell him I don’t have any horns," I said. "Tell him the dragon has much cooler ones, and I’m very jealous."

Carmen passed the message on, and Mateo shrieked in delight loud enough that I had to hold the phone away from my ear. She thanked me four times, and then she said something in Spanish that I didn’t understand, and then she hung up.

I sat in the creaky chair and stared at the phone screen until it went dark. The second heartbeat under my sternum pressed outward, warm and slow and steady, and it felt pleased with itself for some reason I couldn’t name.

Ophelia had climbed back onto her desk and opened her parasol again, and she was watching me over the lace edge. Her ears were still pink, but the fury had drained out of her grey eyes, and they looked softer now.

"You wrote her number on your arm," she said. "Nobody writes numbers on their arm unless they plan to use them."

"The pockets on this jacket are useless, and I didn’t trust any of them."

"Liar," she said, but there was no heat in her voice at all. "Plus five for calling her, and don’t get used to it."

Dralun came back up the stairs holding a foil tray in one claw and a single tamale on a paper plate in the other. He set the plate down on my desk right on top of Mateo’s incident form, and then he went back to his chair and opened the foil for himself.

After a minute he reached up to the shelf behind him. He pulled down a second ceramic mug that I had never noticed, plain white and chipped at the rim, and filled it from the cracked coffee maker. He slid it across the desk toward me without a word.

The coffee tasted like a campfire that had lost a fight with a tire, and I drank the entire mug anyway.

"That one was my sister’s before she moved to Fresno," Dralun rumbled. "Don’t drop it."