Fangirl

mean?”
    “I mean, now what ?”
    “I don’t know,” Simon said.
    “Well, what did you do when you found the others?”
    “Nothing. I just found them. The letter just said to find them.”
    Baz brought his hands to his face and growled, dropping into a frustrated heap on the floor. “Is this how you and your dream team normally operate? It’s no wonder it’s always so easy to get in your way.”
    “But not so easy to stop us, I’ve noticed.”
    “Oh, shut up,” Baz said, his face hidden in his knees. “Just—no more. No more of your drippy voice until you’ve got something worth saying. It’s like a drill you’re cranking between my eyes.”
    Simon sat down on the floor near Baz, near the fire, looking up at the sleeping rabbit. When his neck started to cramp, he leaned back on the rug.
    “I slept in a room like this,” Simon said. “In the orphanage. Nowhere near this nice. There was no fireplace. No Moon Rabbit. But we all slept together like this, in one room.”
    “Crowley, Snow, was that when you joined the cast of Annie ?”
    “There are still places like that. Orphanages. You wouldn’t know.”
    “Quite right,” Baz said. “My mother didn’t choose to leave me.”
    “If your family is so grand, why are you celebrating Christmas with me?”
    “I wouldn’t call this a celebration.”
    Simon focused again on the rabbit. Maybe there was something hidden in it. Maybe if he squinted. Or if he looked at it in a mirror. Agatha had a magic mirror; it would tell you if something was amiss. Like if you had spinach in your teeth or something hanging from your nose. When Simon looked at it, it always asked him who he was kidding. “It’s just jealous,” Agatha would say. “It thinks I give you too much attention.”
    “It was my choice,” Baz said, breaking the silence. “I didn’t want to go home for Christmas.” He leaned back onto the floor, an arm’s length from Simon. When Simon glanced over, Baz was staring up at the painted stars.
    “Were you here?” Simon asked, watching the light from the fire play across Baz’s strong features. His nose was all wrong, Simon had always thought. It started too high, with a soft bump between Baz’s eyebrows. If Simon looked at Baz’s face for too long, he always wanted to reach up and tug his nose down. Not that that would work. It was just a feeling.
    “Was I here when ?” Baz asked.
    “When they attacked your mother.”
    “They attacked the nursery,” Baz said, as if he were explaining it to the moon. “Vampires can’t have children, you know—they have to turn them. They thought if they turned magical children, they’d be twice as dangerous.”
    They would be, Simon thought, his stomach flopping fearfully. Vampires were already nearly invulnerable; a vampire who could do magic  …
    “My mother came to protect us.”
    “To protect you, ” Simon said.
    “She threw fire at the vampires,” Baz said. “They went up like flash paper.”
    “How did she die?”
    “There were just too many of them.” He was still talking to the sky, but his eyes were closed.
    “Did the vampires turn any of the children?”
    “Yes.” It was like a puff of smoke escaping from Baz’s lips.
    Simon didn’t know what to say. He thought it might be worse, in a way, to have had a mother, a powerful, loving mother, and then to lose her—than to grow up like Simon had. With nothing.
    He knew what happened next in Baz’s story: After the headmaster, Baz’s mother, was killed, the Mage took over. The school changed; it had to. They weren’t just students now. They were warriors. Of course the nursery had closed. When you came to Watford, you left your childhood behind.
    All right for Simon. He had nothing to lose.
    But for Baz …
    He lost his mother, Simon thought, and he got me instead. In a hiccup of tenderness or perhaps pity, Simon reached for Baz’s hand, fully expecting Baz to yank his arm from its socket.
    But Baz’s hand was cold and limp. When Simon looked closer, he realized that the other boy was asleep.
    The door flew open then, and for once, Cath thought, Reagan’s timing was perfect. Cath closed her laptop, to let Levi know she was done reading.
    “Hey,” Reagan said. “Oh, hey. Christmas cups. Did you bring me a gingerbread latte?”
    Cath looked down guiltily at her cup.
    “I brought you an eggnog latte,” Levi said, holding it out. “And I’ve been keeping it warm in my mouth.”
    “Eggnog.” Reagan wrinkled her