Free Fallen Angel by Melody John Page A

upset.’
     
    ‘Who was upset?’ David asked. He shut the door of his room, and smiled at us both.
     
    ‘Lizzie was,’ Dmitri answered before I could say anything.
     
    ‘It wasn’t anything really,’ I said quickly. ‘I was just really tired last night, so it made me a bit—but it wasn’t anything really. Just tired.’
     
    ‘Are you sure?’ David asked.
     
    ‘Yeah,’ I said. I couldn’t look at him, and pushed past them both. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to dash—got classes and…’ I hurried into my bedroom and sat on the bed, breathing hard.
     
    Then I straightened my back and stared resolutely ahead of me. Okay. So David liked Dmitri. Okay. That was fine. I could deal with that. It wasn’t the end of the world. Nothing like this was the end of the world. Every part of my heart might be screaming out that it wasn’t fair, but if I’d learned anything form Liam, it was that life wasn’t fair. So I just had to nut up and shut up. I had class, and that was more important.
     
    David was still my friend. And this would just be the test of how good a friend I was prepared to be for him.
     
    *
     
    I’d almost thought Dmitri wasn’t going to turn up to class, but he pushed open the door about two minutes before the tutor stood up. He scanned the room, and even though there were plenty of empty seats, he chose the one next to me.
     
    I couldn’t stop the fearful flutter of my heart as he sat down. Even though we’d been friendlier of late, I still always made sure to choose seats well away from him, or with a wall on one side and someone else on the other. This was the first time he’d made a deliberate effort to sit next to me. I tried not to flinch away.
     
    ‘Hi,’ he said.
     
    ‘Hi.’
     
    ‘How are you feeling?’
     
    ‘Good… good, thank you.’ I tried to laugh. ‘You did just see me this morning.’
     
    ‘Yeah, well.’ I glanced around, and saw that he was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. He smiled, but it seemed a little forced. ‘Last night was cool. For all of us.’
     
    I didn’t know what he meant by that, but before I could ask, the tutor stood up and began, ‘Right, so, today we’re going to be thinking about the Victorians’ obsession with degeneration. Did everyone look at the material on Cesare Lombroso?’
     
    I had looked at it, but not as thoroughly as I would have liked, so I tried to ignore Dmitri, and focussed instead on the class. Lombroso was a dude who’d made a study of people’s ears. He’d thought that you should be able to tell if someone was a criminal just by looking at them, and tried to see if criminals shared similar features, like eyes that were too close together, or big ears, or heavy jawlines. It sounded like a terrible, terrible idea, but the Victorians had been pretty hot on that kind of thing.
     
    ‘Do you think it would be good if this kind of thing actually worked?’ Dmitri murmured.
     
    ‘I guess so,’ I whispered back. ‘But it doesn’t.’
     
    ‘We still do it, though. We still look at someone and judge them by what they look like. We see someone who looks or dresses a certain way, and then we make assumptions on their behaviour, based on that information. Judging a book by its cover.’
     
    ‘People by their covers,’ I said, trying to make it into a joke.
     
    But Dmitri said, ‘That’s exactly what we do all the time. You did it to me.’
     
    I opened my mouth to protest, but I couldn’t argue, because that was exactly what I had done.
     
    He tapped his pen on the desk. He seemed pensive more than miffed about it. ‘And I did it to you, as well. I took you at face value. I believed you when you said you had power.’
     
    Now I frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’
     
    He shook his head. ‘Last night. Don’t you remember?’
     
    What had I done last night? What did he mean about power? ‘I do have power.’
     
    ‘I know you do. I saw it in action. Well, “action”…’
     
    ‘What do