Steelhands - Jaida Jones [122]
It was also possible that Laure was avoiding me because she didn’t want me to force her to go to the library archives, but I’d gone to the trouble of making her up a set of quick-cards for each class, not to mention a handful of sample outlines for the essay topics I thought most likely to suit her interests. It was the nearest I could get to actually doing all her work for her—something which neither her pride nor my faith in her would allow.
If it turned out that she was still cross with me about the incident with the dorm leader, then I was going to become very cross with her in return. I had managed my best apology; the very least she could do was accept my sincerity, permitting us both to move on.
Weighted down with my study materials, I knocked at Laure’s door. The numbers screwed into the wood were badly tarnished, and I did my best not to look at them while I waited. Perhaps I’d return later with some polish, when my hands weren’t full of lecture notes. Briefly, I wondered if I had time to do it now, but my polishing handkerchief was somewhere deep in my pocket. I didn’t have time to pull it out before Laure wrenched her door open, eliminating the need for a decision one way or the other.
“Oh,” she said, looking me over, her eyes stopping on my notes like they were a pile of horse filth deposited onto her doorstep. “You’re studying already?”
I could have informed her that I’d begun my attempts at research a week ago, but that might have made her feel insecure about her own efforts. “Am I interrupting something?” I asked instead, not sure if I wanted to hear the answer. At least her eyes were focused. That was a good sign.
“Not really,” Laure said, scratching at the back of her neck. “Suppose I forgot we were supposed to work together. Come in, then. I was just having a snack.”
I might have divined that last piece of information for myself since there were crumbs in her hair and a smudge of what must have been chocolate at the corner of her mouth. On top of that—now that I could have a better look at her—she was looking a little peaked and unusually pale, with twin spots of color high in her cheeks, as though she’d just returned from a bracing walk in the cold. I stared at her, trying to discern whether or not she was exhibiting symptoms of another fever, but she was doing her stubborn best not to meet my eyes.
“Are you feeling quite all right, my dear?” I asked finally.
“ ’M fine,” she said, waving her hand in irritation. “It’s been warm in the room, so it’s getting me down. Do you think someone shoved something up the chimney again while I wasn’t looking?”
“I feel that if anyone was going to begin a campaign of ruining chimneys, they most certainly wouldn’t begin with yours,” I assured her, looking about for a clean place to put my studying materials. “They’d pick an easier target, certainly. One that belonged to someone less terrifying. Like mine.”
“You can be plenty terrifying when you want,” Laure said, stretching her arms up over her head and letting out a huge yawn. “I’d be terrified myself right now if I wasn’t so tired.”
“That’s just the studying you’re afraid of.”
I glanced around the room, taking in the mess but managing to limit my visible discomfort quite commendably. Laure had allowed the fire to go out, I noticed, and despite her complaint about the temperature, I found it rather chilly. And, of course, the rest of the room was a disaster—there was simply no other word for it—her desk absolutely covered in sheets of notepaper and her clothes strewn about on the floor and over one chair. Laure had a habit of taking things off, then leaving them where they landed. She found it more convenient at home, since her room was too small to fit a proper wardrobe, but she had one here.
Habit was no excuse for all the clutter, nor were her usual protests that there was a method to her madness.
“Sorry ’bout the mess,” Laure mumbled, sensing my distress. Perhaps I hadn’t hidden it as well as I’d thought. “Meant to