Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater Page B

people.
    “I miss home,” Eric said.
    “You live five miles from here. You’re not entitled to miss home,” I said. I was multitasking. Talking with Paul and Eric, reading Hamlet , and doing my geometry homework. Eric was non-tasking: lying on his face on the floor distracting us from homework. Teachers’ assistants lived on campus and did double duty as resident assistants, keeping students in line, but the idea of Eric as an authority figure was fairly hilarious; he wasn’t any more responsible than the rest of us.
    “There’s microwave macaroni at home,” Eric replied. “But if I go back for it, I’ll have to put gas in my car.”
    “People like you deserve to starve.” I turned to the next page in Hamlet . “Microwave macaroni is too good for sluggards like yourself.” I missed my mom’s macaroni. She put about eight pounds of cheese in it and a pig’s worth of bacon on it. I knew it was probably an evil plan to clog my arteries at a young age, but I missed it anyway.
    “Does it say that in there?” Paul asked from his bed. He too was wrestling with Hamlet . “It sounds very Hamlet . You know, ‘you are not well, my lord, ay, and all that, you are naught but a sluggard.’ ”
    Eric said, “ Hamlet rocks.”
    “Your mom rocks,” I told him. Outside our open door, I saw a bunch of guys run down the hall with swim trunks on, yelling. I didn’t even want to know.
    “Dude, I just want to know why they can’t just say what they mean,” Paul said. He read a passage out loud. “What. The. Hell.” Then he added, feelingly, “The only part I get is this: ‘ Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us.’ Because that’s just how I feel when I have to see my sister-in-law.”
    “That part’s not that bad,” I said. “At least you can tell what they mean is ‘Horatio says we’ve been smoking mushrooms, but he’ll change his mind when he too craps his pants after seeing the ghost.’ It’s not like this ‘colleagued-with-the-dream-of-his-advantage ’ stuff here. I mean, he just goes on , doesn’t he? Can you really blame Ophelia for killing herself after five acts of this? She just wanted the voices to shut up.”
    Actually, I just wanted the voices to shut up. The swim-trunk guys were making laps up and down the hall, and on the floor above us someone was pounding their feet in time to inaudible music. Down the hall, some idiot was practicing his violin. Really high. Really catlike. My head was throbbing with it.
    Paul groaned. “Man, I hate this book. Play. Whatever. Why couldn’t Sullivan just assign The Grapes of Wrath or something else in plain English?”
    I shook my head and dropped my thick volume of Hamlet on the floor. There was a shout from the floor below, and a thump under my feet as someone threw something at their ceiling. “At least Hamlet is short. I’m going to go down to the lobby for a sec. Right back.”
    I left Paul frowning at Hamlet and Eric frowning at the floor and went downstairs. The lobby was still noisy—some idiot who played piano worse than me was pounding on the old upright down there—so I pushed out the back door. The back of the dorm was covered with a high-ceilinged portico, held up with massive creamy columns. The rain was coming down hard, but not hard enough to blow water under the roof.
    But it was cold. I pulled my sleeves over my hands, balled the edges in my fingers to keep the chill from getting in, and spent a long moment staring at the hills behind the dorm. The rain had bleached the color from everything, filled the dips between the hills with mist, and brought the sky down to the ground. The landscape before me was old, unchanging, beautiful, and it hurt in a way that made me want to have my pipes in my hands.
    I wondered if Nuala was watching me. Close, invisible, dangerous. In the library, I’d looked online for a stronger ward against faeries than the iron, and found one that I’d written down on my hand, on the base of my pinky