A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)

by Naomi Novik

My anger’s a bad guest, my mother likes to say: comes without warning and stays a long time.

She says it’s too easy to call people evil instead of their choices, and that lets people justify making evil choices, because they convince themselves that it’s okay because they’re still good people overall, inside their own heads.

I love having existential crises at bedtime, it’s so restful.

But maybe I got to count Aadhya and Liu as friends, now. I wasn’t sure, and what did it mean if I could? It wasn’t accompanied by nearly the warm triumphant glow of achievement I’d always imagined as part of the experience. I suppose I was still waiting for someone to give me the tatty friendship bracelet I’d never got at the Girl Guides.

I’d seen fairly often in my life: men occasionally aim it at my mum. Not the kind of expression you’re thinking of; men don’t lust after Mum in a leering kind of way. It was more like looking at a goddess, accompanied by thinking that maybe you might get the goddess to smile at you if you, I don’t know, proved yourself sufficiently worthy, and I’d never once imagined anyone pointing anything remotely like it at me.

Reader, I ran the fuck away.

“Thanks, I feel loads better,” I said. “And I wasn’t wrong! I wasn’t dating him.” “Yeah, that’s fair,” Aadhya said. “Only a boy would date somebody for two weeks and not mention it to them.”