Pearl Before Swine ch 10: Second Day
~THE PEARL~
A sound tugs me from the land of slumber, and I float in pursuit of its call, just below the surface of sleep. It is not a word, not a voice of any living thing, quieter and smoother than a hiss.
It ends in a thud, peeling my eyes open. Through the window over Issoria’s bed, starlight trickles in, mixed with a shadow. The sound repeats as a long and limber form slides the glass back in place, then descends onto the mattress.
Are those wings at her back or a cape? I wish Tulip had left her lamp on, but she no longer sits at the desk. Her breaths patter from the top bunk.
“Are you Issoria?” I whisper, and the figure freezes, one boot pulled off.
“Joy, my new roommate is a light sleeper.” She drops the shoe and kicks off the other one. Both land with a crash. While my heart races in time with their echoes, the rhythm of Tulip’s breaths remains unchanged.
I prop myself on an elbow. “My name is Pearl.”
“I know.” Fabric also meets the floor, and she plops, pulling the blanket over herself.
“Halcyon came to the door looking for you.”
Fluffing her pillow, she sighs. “If he asks again, tell him I’m not here.”
“Even if you are?”
“Yes. Goodnight.” Pillow cradled, she lays down her head. Moonlight slithers through the curtained window and limns the white sheet. While the shape beneath is slender and mostly human, again, something seems off about her back.
“Why do you wish me to speak false words like a villain?”
“Aren’t you the dimmest star in the sky?” With an exasperated release of breath, she stretches her legs beyond the end of the mattress. “The honest answer is that I don’t want to talk to him, but if you told him that, he would barge in, so you’ll tell him I’m not here.”
I blink at her, though I doubt she can see me hidden in the cave-like shadow beneath Tulip’s bunk. “Why do you not want—”
“I’m sleeping now.”
“Then how are you talking?”
With a loud snore, she rolls over.
I purse my lips in a pout, full of questions and with no one to inquire of. Even when very tired, Terra would never fall asleep on me like that, and his answers were different in manner from those I have received here. Jun’s emerged reluctant and flustered, but I treasure it. It makes more sense to me than Tulip’s claim that love is only chemicals, but her words stick with me as well.
By her definition, I love Terra, though that should not be possible. Do my feelings for the Essence of the Land match Jun’s description, too?
Do I want to protect Terra?
I do not think he needs protecting. Nothing has ever harmed him, and I doubt anything can.
Do I want to remain in his presence because I fear missing the occasion of his smile?
Maybe. Terra’s mirth fills me with warmth stronger than the sun, and while I want to soak up every drop of it, I can take pleasure in simply knowing he is happy, even if I am not present.
What if I turn the statement around? Does Terra love me?
He has never let anything hurt me, and my delight reflects in him. He also laughs at my confusion and helps me work through it, a grin present all the while.
These days, are there things other than me that make him smile? What I fear is that with me gone, joy will abandon him, and Terra will not smile at all.
***
“Welcome to Great Minds Think Café. Vidal is offering free hugs with your purchase today. May I take your order?”
I look at the young man standing behind the counter, red uniform covered by a white apron. Nearly everything about him, from the angle of his shoulders to the squint of his charcoal eyes, reminds me of the word “pinched.”
“Who is Vidal?”
“My boss. But don’t tell him I said so.” His words roll with a relaxed ease like gentle rain, and I tilt my head.
“Do not tell him you said he is giving away free hugs or that he is your boss?”
“Either.”
I glance behind him at the bustling crowd of humans eating their first meal of the day. Variously shaped tables dot a spacious balcony hemmed in by half walls of metal lattice. Like Tulip’s bunk, a second terrace forms the ceiling, and lazy fans churn the white steam that gathers along its underside. Bright, morning rays slice through the fog, none alighting upon a human offering hugs.
My gaze returns to the man behind the counter, and I cannot read the script on his name tag, but it appears to have five characters.
“Are you Vidal?”
He glances at his badge. “That depends on who wants to know.”
“Stop flirting with him, Pearl.” Tulip yawns beside me. “You heard what his roommates said about the state of his bathroom. You don’t want him to love you.”
His eyes become even thinner, and his lips twist. “Did you just come here to bully me?”
I giggle like Tulip taught me as she secured my hair in a tail of ringlets before we left our room. “Your roommates bullied our door last night.”
He leans closer to Tulip, gaze shifting between us. “Do I want to know what that means?”
My roommate grins. “Definitely not. Two scrambled egg plates and two dark teas, please. Charge ’em both to the dean.” She waves a laminated note.
“Spoiled princess,” probably-Vidal mutters as Tulip tows me away with an arm looped through mine.
At a rectangular table in the furthest corner, Jun, fork in hand, digs into a pile of yellow mush. A smile pulls across my face, but its edges sharpen and cold radiates through me as I calculate Tulip’s path. She heads right for him.
Why this chill? I want to speak with him. Yet, the thought of him looking up and noticing me is such a heavy thing. It weights my feet, and soon, Tulip is dragging me.
“We’re gonna sit here, okay?” She plops me in a chair next to him. It is hard and delicately balanced, rocking with my shallow breaths. “While I go pick up our order, you save our seats, Pearl, and you know, chat.” Then she just leaves.
What should we chat about?
The question runs again and again through my mind, and all other words flee before it as if they fear being forced out into the world. The breeze swirls around us, stroking my exposed neck with frigid fingers. Tulip said I should leave the top part of my jacket open, but now I question that advice.
Across from us, Halcyon peeks over the edge of a thick book, and I marvel at the blue of his wide eyes. While shallower than Jun’s, they possess a metallic quality and gleam like the edge of a polished blade.
“Morning,” Jun says after he swallows.
I let out the only words I have left. “What should we chat about?”
“I’m good as long as you don’t ask me to define anything today.” He scoops up another bite.
I close my mouth, trapping in a question about what the yellow mush on his plate is. Two fatty strips of meat lay atop it. They are so small. How is that supposed to satisfy his hunger?
In a tiny voice, one question slips out. “Is it wrong that I ask you things?”
“No, it’s just that…” He trails off, face reddening before his gaze drops to his plate.
Cold again without the touch of his eyes, I duck and lean closer, speaking quickly. “I appreciate your explanation yesterday. It gave me much to consider, and I adore what you said. Pike claimed he did not like words and poetry, but I think they are as beautiful an art as any. Yours were poetic.”
Like a ray through moving clouds, his sightline slides to me, crowding the corner of his eye. “But you weren’t—how long were you eavesdropping on Pike and I?”
“It’s ’cause she likes you.” Tulip takes the seat next to Halcyon and pushes a plate toward me across the table. The same yellow mush piles it. A bottle follows, filled with liquid the forest green of Sal’s eyes.
At the thought of him, I look around. Where is Sal? Does he not take morning sustenance at the same time as everyone else?
“They make a lovely couple, don’t you think, Halcyon?”
With a glance at Tulip, the birch tree holds the book closer to his face.
“We barely know each other.” Jun sets down his laden fork, and his face turns to me in full, crooked nose aligned with a grin. “I wouldn’t be opposed to that changing, though the dean said you don’t remember where you come from or what you were doing in the forest.”
“I know the latter.” Returning his smirk, I drop my voice to a whisper. “I was saving you.”
Though he makes a valiant effort to hold it in, a laugh bursts through his lips, and he swivels away. “Yes, but that can’t be the only reason.”
I peek at Tulip, but she shoves a spoonful in her mouth and chews exaggeratedly. I must do this on my own.
Nibbling my lip, I scoot closer to Jun. “What if it was?”
He clears his throat, blue eyes narrowing at me until they return to his food and he reclaims his fork. “Don’t tell my siblings. I’d never live it down.”
My breath hitches audibly. Excitement is a buzz shooting through every tangled vein. Do his siblings look like him? Sound like him? Move like him? Are they just as reckless? Do they bear their own variations of the scar across his brow?
The questions froth and jam on the tip of my tongue, and only the simplest manages to launch. “You have siblings?”
“Four older sisters and three older brothers, not in that order. They think I’m crazy.”
“Why?”
He does not look at me. He does not move at all. “For coming here. For believing that—”
“Something had to die for you to have that on your plate.” The interrupting voice rings hollow and sharp, much like a flute.
“Pike.” Jun starts to whirl, then catches himself, setting his forearms on either side of his meal. “Don’t sneak up behind people and say stuff like that. It’s a good way to get a knife through your neck.”
Pike hooks an elbow around Jun’s shoulders, something I doubt he could do if they were both standing. “How’s your arm?”
“It’s there.”
“And bandaged quite nicely.” Pulling a chair from the table behind us, he squeezes it between Jun and I.
If Halcyon, utterly absorbed in his book, possesses eyes of blades, then Jun’s are fire.
“What makes you think I’d rather sit next to you?”
“Jun, hush. I’m the first friend you made here.” Laying down his plate, Pike picks up a fragrant roll of seaweed and turns to me.
My nose wrinkles, but that does not stop the stench from invading my nostrils. “That does not smell nice. Why are you eating it?”
“Because I’m not a baby chicken murderer.” He eyes the yellow fluff on my plate.
“You would not eat a baby chicken? Why not? Do you fear them?”
Jun laughs, and my heart jumps with the rapid, monotone beat.
Pike laughs, too, but his is hollow, almost choked. “No, I don’t fear them. I pity them. I care about them.”
“That is not the way of nature. They are not your own kind, and they are not stronger than you.” I shake my head, gaze leaping from his face to the yellow mush on my plate and back again. “When you consume them, they become a part of you, part of something stronger.”
His jaw swings to the side, dull, human teeth revealed by a grimace. “Yeah, but they’re dead.”
“The dragon eats the deer if the dragon can. He needs the sustenance. That does not make him a villain.”
Halcyon peeks at me, but when I look at him, he ducks behind his book again.
Pike holds both palms upward in a wide shrug. “To the deer, it makes him a villain.”
“Would you have the dragon starve, then?”
“We’re not dragons, though. We can eat something else, like a plant.” He holds out a seaweed roll, and I lean away.
“Leave her alone.” Jun’s hand hovers just shy of Pike’s shoulder. “She’s a superior being. If something deserves to live, then it will. It will keep growing stronger to ensure it will.”
I like that idea, so akin to the notion that things will improve. I wrap it in my hope that I will never move backward, that though I was once immobile and voiceless, I will never be that again. I will only continue to get better.
I like the debate, too, and have no shortage of points to make. “Even plants possess life that is snuffed out when you eat them.”
Pike’s green eyes widen. “Whoa, it is way too early for that kind of depth, and Halcyon didn’t sleep at all last night.”
“The book was interesting,” Halcyon mumbles.
Arms crossed, Pike leans both elbows on the table. “It was a farmer’s almanac. I’ve never found any books in that series particularly riveting.”
On the other side of him, Jun bites into his crispy strip of meat, and the crunch shivers through me like a miniature symphony. There is not much to them, but how I wish I had some.
I shovel a spoonful of yellow mush in my mouth. It is warm and slightly gooey with a strong sense of umami.
Twirling her spoon through the contents of her own plate, Tulip says, “I’ll assume then, Pike that you were named after the fish, not the weapon.”
He shrugs. “I don’t see why it can’t be both.”
Jun coughs, then clears his throat, and Pike throws a glare at him.
“Sorry, it just seems like it would be against your pacifist beliefs to want to be named after something made to hurt others.”
“You know, many plants and animals in nature have thorns or bright colors to deter attackers. It’s a warning not to fight me, bro, the ultimate move of pacifism, preventing fights from happening in the first place.” He shoves another seaweed roll in his mouth.
Jun shakes his head, but a smile warms his words. “Just make sure to brush your teeth. Your classmates don’t want to have to smell that all morning.”
“Speaking of class”—Tulip’s gaze darts between the three of us—“Pearl would like to accompany you this morning, Jun.”
Pike gags on his seaweed and swallows as quickly as he can. “What? Last time she went outside, everyone got attacked.”
“I have other classes,” Jun retorts, sitting straighter, “but she should probably stay with you, at least for the morning, Tulip.” He grins at me. “Ask me after that, and I’ll probably say yes.”
Through a mix of heady disappointment and flighty hope for later, I return his grin.
Before anyone can move, Halcyon shoots to his feet so fast, his chair flips and lands halfway on the table behind him.
With a quick, “Excuse me,” he runs.
Continued in chapter 11: Manipulation
Thank you for reading!