The Cake in the Freezer (Angeline's POV)

I should have opened the stall door. It was the first thing I thought, but I let it pass. I was alone in here, and there were three of them. Arabella's laugh kept bouncing off the tile, and I stayed in the last stall, hoping they'd go away soon.

Arabella always had it in for Melica. Her parents wanted her to come out on top, but Melica was better at everything that didn't need a wolf. Grades, strategy, tactics, every written exam, and she did it all without an Alpha's blood. Arabella's parents were furious that she lost to someone like Melica. After they left, I came forward to comfort her, and I still regret it. Now I was collateral damage in her hatred of Melica.

"She'll think we're being nice."

"It's her birthday. Of course she will."

"The candle's already in the cake."

"Is it the violet one?"

"Obviously the violet one. Two breaths of that smoke and she'll be hot and stupid. By the second verse, she'll be taking her clothes off in front of the whole hall."

"Somebody should film it."

"Somebody will."

"And if Angeline finds out?"

"Then she'll cry in a bathroom stall for an hour, like usual. Remember when Melica fractured her collarbone because of her? They're so pathetic."

They laughed. I was in a bathroom stall. I put my hand over my mouth, and I felt ridiculous. They were right.

You're hiding, Angeline, Ayagen said.

Ayagen never came out of me after I turned fourteen. She was the quietest wolf in our year, and her silence made everyone assume she was gentle. She wasn't. She just had nothing to use but her mouth.

I'm listening, I told her.

You're hiding. It's not the same thing.

The door of the powder room swung, and their voices moved away down the corridor. I did not move. Then I heard someone else outside, a man's weight on the floorboards. I knew whose stride it was. Steven walked with his weight a little on the outside of his left foot ever since he broke his ankle at thirteen. I set the bone myself.

He stopped outside the door. I held my breath.

Then he was gone, fast. He only moved like that when something mattered. He heard. He didn't wait for me. He didn't open the door, and he didn't say my name. He simply ran. Toward Melica, like always.

It was the same as his eighteenth birthday. Even though he was fated to me, it was still Melica.

I stood there with a mouth full of things I should have said to him, and none of them was thank you for going to help her. They were all some version of you didn't look for me.

There it is, Ayagen said.

---

I wish I could say the walk was only about the bullying.

It was partly the bullying. When I told Adrian to stop the car, I meant what I said, and I had Melica's broken collarbone to prove it. But three weeks before, at the east steps, Steven said her name before he said mine. He asked, "Where's Melica?" without looking up, and then he saw me and smiled and said, "Hey, you." I stood there holding my thermos. I told myself it was nothing.

You wanted her out of the car, Ayagen said, because he always looks for her first.

That's not true.

I live inside you. Try again.

Then I watched through the back window as Steven's car slowed beside her on the road, and I saw her get in. When I told him she insisted on walking, I watched his face to see whether he'd correct me. He didn't. He let me have the lie. I was so relieved I almost cried, and I'm still ashamed of how relieved I was.

I held on to his arm all the way to the powder room. I just held on, like he was always about to run away. Would you look at that? I was right. The moment I let go of his arm, he went back to his first love.

I left the stall when the corridor was quiet for a full minute. I washed my hands to stop the shaking. Then I followed their voices.

They left the cake in the freezer to set.

The dining hall kitchen was empty. The cooks had gone out to set tables, and the door to the walk-in freezer stood a hand's width open.

The cake was on the second shelf behind a tray of ice. It was three layers, with blue piping that read Happy Birthday, Melica. Somebody worked hard on it. That was almost the worst part. In the center of the frosting, in a little ring of sugar roses, sat a single violet candle.

I could smell the resin from the doorway.

I knew it. It smelled of burnt sugar and iron. It was the same smell as the top shelf in Mother's herbarium, a jar I wasn't allowed to touch. Mother told me when I was ten that it was only for the old and the dying, to ease them. I stood there, holding the freezer door, and asked myself how Arabella Crossvixen found it.

Ask, Ayagen said.

Later.

You always say later. What do you think it's going to be, a relief?

I did not ask. I just looked at the candle.

I couldn't take it out. Arabella's gang would see it was gone and start over, and next time I would not be standing in the right freezer. I couldn't tell a teacher. Mother would hear about it, and Mother once told me that healers who got dragged into scandals stopped being trusted with the dying. I couldn't tell Adrian, because Adrian would say it was Melica's call.

I could have found Melica. That was the only option that was clean and good and mine. I had every reason to do it, and every sentence I tried to build ended in and how do you know?

So I did something smaller.

My satchel, with every vial I owned, was on Melica's shoulder two corridors away. I left it with her that morning. Of all days. I went to the canteen shelf at the back of the kitchen, the one the cooks kept for stews, and I looked at what a healer could do with a pot of dried herbs and a kitchen mortar.

Chamomile and lemon balm to quiet the smoke, so the resin would carry calm instead of fire. Ginger and thyme folded into the frosting, to keep her steady on her feet. I ground the first two to powder. My hands were still shaking terribly as I rolled the violet wax in it, slowly, until the candle looked like it had been left in a drawer. I pushed the ginger and thyme into the frosting around the base, smoothing the surface back over with the flat of a knife.

I was patting the last of it down when I heard her voice at the door.

"Angeline? Are you in here? You look like you were in a horror movie in the hallway."

I put the knife behind my back. The mortar was on the counter in plain sight. I draped a tea towel over it, and I turned around with a face I had practiced.

Melica stood in the doorway with three bags on her shoulders and my satchel hanging from her wrist. Her hair came loose. She was wearing a vintage necklace I had never seen before, a small silver moon on a thin chain, and she kept touching it, as if checking it was still there.

"You left your vials." She held the satchel out. "I figured you'd need them. You look gray. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine." My voice came out so level I almost believed it. "I was just getting hot water."

"In the freezer?"

"Next to the freezer."

She looked at the towel. "It smells like a church in here."

"It's the herbs. For my nerves."

"Right." She laughed, small and real. I couldn't remember the last time she laughed like that around me. When Father adopted her, I thought having a sister would bring us closer. All I got was someone who tiptoed around me, and a glorified assistant. "Someone put a note in my locker. Like, a real note. A party. Dining hall, four o'clock. Something feels off, but I guess I should just count my blessings."

I could not look at the freezer.

Now, Ayagen said. Now. Say it. Say: don't go.

"That necklace is lovely," I said. "Where did you get it?"

Her hand went to it again. She wasn't hiding anything. That was the awful part. She was just happy, and ecstatic, like it wasn't breaking my heart. "Steven gave it to me. For my birthday."

I tried to give her a bigger smile. A jealous Luna is never a good look. "It's normal for Alphas to care for every wolf in their pack." That was what Mother said.

"It suits you," I choked. He wasn't going to be the Alpha of my family's pack. That would be Adrian. Steven and I would lead another. He didn't need to care this much about Melica. Why?

You're jealous of a necklace, Ayagen said, and her voice had no cruelty in it, only a terrible clarity. You're standing in a kitchen with a poisoned cake behind you, and you're jealous of a necklace.

"Do you think I should go?" Melica asked. She looked at me the way she did when we were small, when I was the one who knew things. "To the party. I know it's probably a trick. But maybe they're just tired of hating me."

I had one sentence to give her. I had practiced a hundred sentences in my life for people who were dying, and I was never once at a loss.

"People can change," I said. "You should go."

Coward, said Ayagen.

Melica grinned. She dropped the satchel into my hands, and for a second her fingers pressed over mine. "Okay. If I'm not back by five, tell Alpha Arnold I died heroically."

"I'll tell him you died heroically," I said.

She left. I listened to her footsteps go down the corridor, light and quick. I wondered why, for the first time in years, she believed someone might be kind to her.

Why today? Ayagen said. Because Steven was kind to you?

I put the cake back on the second shelf. I straightened the tray of ice. I closed the freezer door until it clicked, and then I stood there with my forehead against the steel.

It will be weaker, I told Ayagen. The smoke will be weaker. The herbs will keep her on her feet. She'll feel dizzy, and that's all. She'll be fine.

That's what you tell your patients, said Ayagen, when you don't know.

I took my satchel and went back out into the corridor. The thermos was sitting on the bench outside the powder room where Steven put it down, upright, with the cap screwed on. He never left anything of mine behind. He left it there to run.

I picked it up, and it had gone cold.

I stood there until I could hear the dining hall filling, chairs scraping and voices rising, the whole school finding its seats for a girl who was about to be taught a lesson. I told myself I had done enough.