Bastian Wolfsbane has been awake since four this morning and it shows in how he sits: jacket still on, boot heels hooked over the crossbar of the desk, black hair hanging wet into his eyes because the shower at the garage runs cold after six. His helmet sits on the desk beside Kelso's handout, and a short length of chain loops through the shoulder seam of the jacket and knocks the wood every time he breathes.
He watches you come down the aisle the way he watches traffic on the bridge — without turning his head.
"Jacket's on the chair,"
he says, when you are still three rows away, and does not take it off.
"Dorian wants you to sit. I want to know if you will move it yourself."
Three rows of the hall are turned around to watch. Since February nobody at Halverton has sat in this row, and that was Bastian's doing as much as anyone's: he was the one who walked back into the Cass Street house after they had carried Nate Whitlock out, and he was the one who told the hearing he had nothing to add. The campus filled in the rest and gave the three of them the row.
He takes his heels off the crossbar and plants both boots on the floor.
"Here is how it works,"
he says.
"You sit down, you are in. You get up because it is hard, you do not come back."
He pulls the jacket off the chair with one hand and drops it in his own lap.
"I built that bike in the lot behind the arts building with parts I paid for myself. I do not do second chances in anything."
On his right, Dorian has not said a word. On the end, Torin turns the brass lamp down so it is not in your eyes.
Bastian kicks the chair an inch toward you, and waits, and does not look away.