Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [8]
Loch brandished the larger of the two boxes.
“iPod?” Spirit mouthed.
Loch was about to answer, but Mr. Devon had stepped up in front of the fireplace.
“Every winner—and you’re all winners here at Oakhurst—knows that one of the sweetest fruits of victory is the chance to kick back and enjoy what they’ve won. All of you have worked hard this year. Now is the time to enjoy yourselves. A dessert buffet is set up in the Refectory. Enjoy!” he added, clapping his hands together and smiling brightly.
Spirit thought it was the creepiest thing she’d seen—at least in the last few days.
Ms. Corby strode off ahead of Doctor Ambrosius, and Mr. Devon followed. When Doctor Ambrosius’s study doors closed behind them, everyone began to shuffle in place and head in the direction of the Refectory. Muirin was off like a flash, of course. Unlimited sugar.
“Yup. iPod,” Loch said, unwrapping the larger of the two boxes. “It’s the Gift du Jour.”
The “Gift du Jour” was brown, with the Oakhurst crest engraved on the back, and his name: Lachlan Galen Spears. Loch made a face, and Spirit winced in sympathy. It was awful to have a dorky name.
“They come in gold and cream, too, of course,” Addie said kindly. “If you don’t have one when you get here, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get one for your first Christmas.”
“Huh,” Loch said, sounding surprised. “It’s charged. And preloaded.”
There was no real point in trying to push through the mob of students heading for the Refectory, and one thing Spirit could say for Oakhurst was that when it decided to let them fall off the healthy diet bandwagon, it didn’t stint on the junk food. There was no need to hurry—there’d be more sugar and chocolate than all of them could eat in a week.
Bread and circuses. For a moment she could hear Mom’s voice in her head. Mom had—used to have—a saying for every occasion. In Ancient Rome, the emperors used to keep the people from making trouble by giving them free food and free entertainment. Bread and circuses.
That’s what we get, Spirit thought. Every few weeks there’s another school dance, and a lot of candy, and most of the kids don’t look past that, to all the things that are wrong with this place.…
“What color is yours?” Loch asked. With a feeling of resignation, Spirit unwrapped the larger of the two boxes. Her iPod was cream-colored. Same crest cut into the back, and her name: Spirit Victory White. She didn’t bother to complain, even mentally, that now everyone at Oakhurst would know her middle name. “Victory” was just about as awful as “Spirit”—she’d always hated her name—but maybe someday she could just tell people her name was “Vicky” or something. She woke her iPod and looked at the preloaded playlist.
“Ah, I recognize this,” she said mockingly, scanning the start of the list of titles. “This is next semester’s Music History stuff.”
“Heaven forbid we should actually use these for recreation,” Addie said, her voice dripping with irony. “That would be frivolous. However could we expect to excel?”
“Ah, but you forget. We’re all already winners here at Oakhurst,” Loch replied, deadpan.
“Come on,” Burke said. “It’s cleared out a little, and we should go find the Murr-cat and stop her from eating herself into sugar shock.”
“Fat chance of that,” Addie answered.
* * *
The Refectory was full, but not crowded. Most of the crowd was around the dessert buffet, and Spirit had to admit it looked pretty. There were cakes on stands, pies, plates of brownies and blondies and cookies, pyramids of perfectly round scoops of ice cream frozen so hard that it would take them at least half an hour to melt, boxes of chocolates and marzipan shaped like fruit, and—because this was a school full of teenagers—stacked cases of soda.
The four of them, by mutual consent, took one of the empty tables at the opposite end of the room from