Chapter Five: In Which I Enlist Some Help, or, Walken Toomes
The dining hall was one of my favorite rooms. This wasn’t because I particularly enjoyed my time there, nor was it because I liked the food, although most of the meals were actually quite tasty. Mainly, I liked the dining hall because all of the students were laid out before me like open books. You could learn so much just by observing people’s eating patterns.
Besides that, though, I found the room itself hilarious. Despite the fact that Norlocke Academy had a maximum occupancy of sixty students (thirty boys and thirty girls), and currently only housed forty-six, the dining hall could hold much more than that. Whoever had designed Norlocke had decided that the dining hall should not only be the largest room in the entire school, but it should have enough space to fit a ridiculous number of full-sized tables. I believed there to be three reasons behind this: to provide a similar feeling to a regular boarding school; to give the sociable children room enough to fit all their friends at only one or two tables; and to provide plenty of space so that all of the extremely unsociable children, or those with the biggest issues, could comfortably sit all by themselves, with multiple empty tables in between them and any other people. I couldn’t find any other explanation for the unnecessary number of full-sized tables in the unnecessarily large room.
Interestingly enough, at the current time, there were very few tables with only one occupant. Nearly half of the students – nineteen, to be exact – sat at the table nearest the bay windows that overlooked a view of the tallest mountains in Fraighe. The rest of the students were scattered amongst the other tables, in groups no smaller than three and no larger than seven. Before the arrival of Glass Farthingdale, there were only ever two tables with less than three people seated at them.
I made up one of those tables. But no, I wasn’t alone. I always had someone sitting with me, at least after my first few days of attending Norlocke. Those days I had sat by myself.
Walken Toomes, the boy who sat opposite me, was a quiet, sleepy sort of fellow, and probably the only one in Norlocke’s prestigious history who had been sent there without having any issues at all. Despite that fact, or possibly because of it, the other students had ostracized him. They thought him an oddball because he rarely said anything, and had little to no interest in anything except his music. I, however, appreciated his silence, his disinterest in anything that I did, and his general lack of issues. For those reasons, he made a nice person to have around, and he’d somehow ended up sitting at my table and working with me on any group assignments. And yet, even though we had no one else besides each other, neither of us would’ve exactly called the other their friend. We were at an awkward spot where we were well past being acquaintances, but hadn’t gotten anywhere near being friends. I didn’t know what we were.
He was, however, extremely reliable. Which was what I needed at the moment.
Supper was halfway over, and Glass Farthingdale had yet to make an appearance, when I said, “Walken.”
Walken looked up at me, his gigantic spoonful of chicken pot pie three-quarters of the way to his mouth, his pale brown eyes half-hidden behind heavy eyelids and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles nearly identical to my own. Interestingly enough, those were not the only physical traits we had in common. Although our eye color is different (mine are a dark blue-green), his hair is a bit curlier than mine, and his nose pointier, we looked almost exactly alike. We had almost the same build – slender, and of an average height (he was only one inch taller than me) – and could’ve fit into each other’s clothes if we’d tried. Both of our noses were straight and dusted with freckles; our lips thin and faintly pink; and our faces, which were round and almost unnaturally pale, were framed by short, curly, dark brown hair. While I secretly thought our similar appearances a rather strange phenomenon and one which might one day come in handy, and Walken hardly seemed to notice, the other students liked to tease us about it. We were derisively called “the twins”.
“What?” Walken asked slowly, his spoon plunking back down onto his plate, his shoulders hunching forward. He was typically a rather expressionless fellow, but his reaction gave away the fact that he was worried. We hardly ever spoke to one another, so I figured I understood why.
I leaned forward ever so slightly across the table and whispered, “The Headmaster wants to see me in his office later. I’m going to need you to create a distraction.”
Although I wasn’t entirely sure how friends, or even casual acquaintances, were supposed to behave around each other, I was pretty sure that most people, upon hearing my statement, would react negatively. At the very least, they’d probably say something along the lines of, “You’ve been called to the Headmaster’s office again?” At the most, they’d be extremely uncooperative. Worst of all, they might ask why I needed a distraction, which I wasn’t going to explain to anybody.
Walken just said, “Okay. What time?”
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