Chapter5 I'm a new student this year. Same as you

Wren Hale's POV

I stared at it for three seconds. The woman behind the counter followed my line of sight, then asked, "What are you looking at?"

I said, "There's a cat here. I've seen it before, back at my farm."

"A cat?" She pushed her round glasses up. "There's no cat in here. Finish signing and go sit over there and wait. Someone's coming to get you."

The ears on top of her head twitched again, the same way they had the second the red text popped onto her screen. I looked at the corner of the desk again. It was empty. Not even a hair left behind.

I pushed the signed forms back across the counter and went to sit on a bench at the side of the hall. Parents went out carrying suitcases. New students broke apart in twos and threes.

Outside the doors, the transfer rings flared and dimmed, flared and dimmed, sending people away one at a time. The lights overhead went out in rows, starting from the top of the hall, until only the few at the far end were still burning.

Iris had said someone would come for me. I sat there while the whole hall emptied out around me, and nobody came.

While I sat there, I started going back over everything that had happened today — especially meeting Iris, an actual elf, which was something I'd only ever read about.

From the transfer ring to the main gate, I'd been stealing looks at her ears. They were pointed, sticking up a little way out of her short hair, with a thin fuzz at the tips that took color when the light hit them.

I'd never seen anything like it. Everybody back in my town was human. The closest I'd ever come to another species was the half-elf accountant who'd come out to buy grain last fall, and his ears had been pressed flat under a hat where nobody could see them.

So the whole trip on the way here, I'd had one thing on my mind — what they would feel like. Like a cat's ears? Or like the green tip of a grapevine? The question sat in my throat.

I opened my mouth a few times and never got it out. She'd just pulled me out of a debt of one point two million. Touching her ears couldn't be the first thing I asked her for.

Later, I just stayed on the bench, letting my mind wander. By the time I snapped out of it, there was only one other person left in the hall.

I don't know how I'd missed him — or maybe I had looked up and just hadn't bothered, until now. Either way, my eyes landed on him now and stuck.

The student was on the last row of benches, by the wall, in the one spot where he could see every door in and out of the room. Not on his phone. Not reading. Just sitting there.

His uniform was buttoned to the top, crease-free, and it fit him the way school clothes were never made to — wide shoulders, narrow waist, sleeves pulling tight over his upper arms.

Then his face. Pale enough that his blond hair stood out harder against it, and his hair was the only thing about him that wasn't in place, a few strands falling over his forehead. Straight nose. High cheekbones. A jaw that went down clean into his collar.

His eyes were gold. Not warm gold — flat and bright, like metal, and nothing about that color belonged on a face. I couldn't stop looking at it. I'd seen gold in my life, on rings, on the hinges of the barn door, and none of it looked anything like this.

He turned his head in profile, and the tops of his ears came to a point — long and fine, like an elf's.

I kept looking. I knew I should stop, the way you know at a fence that you shouldn't put your hand through it, and I looked anyway. His hair, the line of his collar, the pointed tip of one ear against the window light.

He noticed. He looked over, confused, and our eyes met.

I looked away first.

There was exactly one elf I knew at this school. So I put the two things together, the way anyone would.

"Are you here to pick me up?" I said, and made myself walk over, then caught myself fussing — smoothing my hair behind my ear with one hand, the other picking at the strap of the bag in my arms. "I'm Wren Hale."

He didn't answer right away. For those few seconds, I guessed at what he was doing — checking my name against something, waiting for me to pull out proof.

His eyes went over me from head to foot, slowly enough that I started to wonder if I'd said something wrong.

"I'm not waiting for anyone," he said. His voice wasn't loud, and it wasn't impatient. "You've got the wrong person."

"...Then why are you here?"

"I'm a new student this year. Same as you."

That perked me up immediately. Going back to school was going to be a real challenge for me, but if I could make a friend right at the start, the rest of it wouldn't be so dull.

So I kept talking to him like we'd known each other for years, even though he didn't look like he wanted to talk to me at all.

"What's your name? Are you an elf too? The teacher who brought me here is an elf, and I'd never seen a real elf before. Your ears are so cool."

He didn't answer. He just looked at me. I stood there and took it for a second or two, and then my stomach started to sink. God. I'd said something wrong. I always said something wrong.

I went back through the whole thing — too many questions, that was the problem, and probably also the part where I called his ears cool —

Right when I'd decided he wasn't going to answer, he spoke, slow and unhurried. "My name is Lennox Beck. That's too many questions. I can only answer one of them."

The air came back into my lungs. Okay. He'd answered. That meant I wasn't in trouble, and he wasn't mad, and honestly — for someone who looked like he'd been carved out of a tree and left standing there — he was being kind of nice about it.

Probably, he was just a quiet guy who needed a second to warm up.

Then I looked at his ears again.

I told myself not to. I actually did tell myself not to. But they were right there, and I'd been wondering since I got here, and it had been sitting in my chest this whole time like a hiccup I couldn't get rid of.

So I didn't hesitate for a second. "Then can I touch them?"