I place a book on Owen’s desk. He, too, knocks his to the floor. I could smack him across the head right now.
“Professor, Avery dropped—”
“Just pick it up, Mr. Collier. I don’t have time for petty interruptions.” Professor Waldman is smiling as she faces us, but her voice has a note of impatience in it.
“Backfired,” I whisper as Owen, scowling, reaches down to pick up his own book.
I give Bennett his book, expecting him to continue the saga of book-dropping. He simply nods up at Professor Waldman at the front, and quietly opens it to the first page. It’s a small victory, and not one I’ll be taking to heart any time soon. Let Bennett be nice to me here all he wants, he could crush me with one hand the next time we’re out on the practice course.
Nobody else seems keen to throw their books on the floor like children, so I hand out the rest without incident and return to my seat. Sawyer has already opened my book to the proper page and he pushes his notebook at me so I can quickly copy the small amount of notes he’s had time to take.
“The first lesson of creature studies is to forget everything you think you know about monsters,” Professor Waldman says. True to the general motto of the school, she’s wasted no time diving into her first lesson. No wasted syllabus days and going over class requirements. Here, it’s quite simple. Perform well and your survive, perform poorly … and you don’t. “Before you can learn to handle larger, more dangerous monsters, it’s important to understand where we stand,” she’s saying. “Humans, in their most natural state, are most akin, at least in my opinion, to pixies.”
She reaches up to the top of the board and, in one fell swoop, tugs down a large, oversized photo of a tiny human-like creature. While a couple students have started muttering around me, I just lean forward in my seat and drink in the sight.
It’s bald and wrinkly; with a face screwed up like it’s smelling something foul. The camera is a little blurry around the edges, but I can still make out the soft shape of fast-moving wings attached to the creature’s shoulder blades. From the size of the grass blades in the background, it can’t be much larger than the length of my thumb.
“Pixies?” I hear Pier whisper to the other boys in the back. “She’s got to be kidding us.”
Professor Waldman turns again and fixes her gaze on Piers. “I’m sorry, Mr. Dagher … did you have something to say?”
Piers sits up a little, but tries to look unruffled. “Nothing, they just don’t seem very dangerous, that’s all.”
Bennett’s arms flex menacingly across the top of his desk. “I could crush one of those things with one hand.”
Professor Waldman smiles, but it’s a secret, knowing smile that makes the smug look on Piers’ face falter.
“I’d very much like to see you try,” she says, then turns back to the rest of class. “I say ‘humans in their natural state’ because unlike us, the chosen few, most humans can’t even see monsters. Not anymore.”
She reaches up to pull down several more screens. I’d wondered about this—how all these monsters supposedly existed under human’s noses this whole time. In the stories my aunt used to tell me as a child, she always said that my parents were special—that they could see things that other people couldn’t, but I’d always just assumed that was another half-truth meant to make the actual truth go down easier.
But now, as Professor Waldman points out several scenes of carnage thanks to those same supposedly harmless pixies, I discover one more piece of the truth I took for a lie.
“The mind sees what it wants to see,” Professor Waldman says. “By the time they reach adolescence, most adult humans couldn’t see an iratxoak, or galzagorriak as they’re sometimes called, if they were looking right at them.”
Sawyer leans in closer again. “It’s why monster hunting runs in families,” he says. “Most people who see monsters end up in asylums otherwise. I mean … imagine seeing one of those things and no one believing you?”
I have just
enough time to catch a glimpse of the tiny blue-skinned man on one of the screens before Professor Waldman rolls it back up and tells us to turn to the next page as she moves on with her lesson on pixies. My mind is still reeling over what she said. It makes sense, I guess. If there really are this many monsters in the world, the only place to hide would be in plain sight.
“These pixies are indigenous to the Pyrenees,” she says, pointing out the border between France and Spain on a map tacked to the wall. “This is Basque country. Anyone here Basque?”
One boy raises his hand and Professor Waldman smiles at him.
“So, you’ve probably seen iratxoak before?”
The boy opens his mouth to answer, but she talks over him before he gets the chance.
“Many talented monster hunters have met their end at the hands of the iratxoak. Like most pixies, they’re only a danger if you fall prey to their tricks. You’ll find the smaller the creature, often, the more cunning you’ll have to be to defeat it.”
I scribble down notes as fast as my pen will allow, but I’m soon lost. There are so many different kinds of pixies and each one of them has such particular tastes … I see why Professor Waldman issued us such a solid warning. All it would take is for a hunter to mix up the harmless but impish pixie of the Scottish Highlands with the nearly identical, but deadly, pixie of the nearby Welsh moors.
The end of the lesson rolls around quickly. Professor Waldman lets us leave, but not before telling us to write a small essay on the identifiable traits of different pixies. I’m in the middle of gathering up my books when she calls me over to her desk.
“Miss Black, could you hold on a moment? You too, Miss Singer.”
Erin and I look at each other. I’m a little annoyed, sure this has to do with the little stunt the boys tried to pull earlier—but Erin looks positively terrified. Her face pales almost as badly as it did this morning after the obstacle course.