Page 72 of Saint Céline
I looked up from the page. “Doing what?”
“That thing where people decide you’re fascinating even though you haven’t said anything particularly intelligent.”
I smiled because I knew it would annoy her. “Maybe I’m naturally fascinating.”
“No one is naturally fascinating. People are either informed or loud.”
“That’s a tragic worldview.”
Across the library, two girls from our year glanced toward our table, whispered something, then smiled when I caught them looking. I smiled back automatically, soft enough to seem kind but not desperate enough to seem eager. Katherine watched the entire exchange with her mouth pressed into a thin line.
“They invited you to Lila Hawthorne’s party, didn’t they?” she asked, not looking up from the worksheet.
I looked back down at the page. “Maybe.”
“Céline.”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Saturday.”
She went very still for a second, then returned to marking my answer as if she had not cared in the first place. “You didn’t tell me.”
“I was going to.”
“No, you weren’t.”
I said nothing because she was right. I hadn’t told her yet because some part of me wanted to hold the invitation privately for a little while before it became ours. That was cruel, maybe, but I had so few things that arrived in my hands first. Katherine had given me Bellamont, the uniform, the backstory, the vocabulary of this life. Almost everything I had here had passed through her first.
But the invitation had not.
Lila had asked me at lunch, her voice bright with casual certainty, as if it was obvious I belonged in a room full of girls whose mothers wore diamonds at school fundraisers and whose fathers had buildings named after them.
“You should come Saturday, Céline. It’ll be fun.”
Not Katherine and Céline.
Just Céline.
I hated how good it felt.
Katherine capped the red pen and slid my worksheet back across the table. “Your answer for question three is terrible.”
“You say that about all my answers.”
“Because most of them are terrible.”
“That feels targeted.”
“It is. You’re confusing osmosis with diffusion again.”
“Those are almost the same thing.”
Katherine looked genuinely offended. “Never say that in public.”
I laughed, and for a moment she almost smiled too. Then the silence settled again, heavier than before.
