Chapter 86: The Fall Festival, Part One
Chapter 86: Chapter 86: The Fall Festival, Part One
Chapter 86: The Fall Festival, Part One
Audra stood alone at the first-floor stairwell, looking down at the bottle Cyrus had dropped.
The horrible fruit drink had rolled to the base of the wall and settled there beneath the window. Its label had started to peel from the condensation, and a few drops of moisture clung to the plastic.
The feverish pull in Audra’s thoughts had faded.
What remained was quiet enough to make everything she had just done feel impossible.
She had used the glamourkin ring on Cyrus again.
Before that, she had only tested it on the boy who had followed her after the confession. Even then, Cyrus had stayed in her mind. The moment the ring took hold, the boy in front of her had become difficult to look at, and the image of Cyrus had appeared so sharply that she could not stop comparing them.
Then Cyrus himself had shown up.
Audra’s thoughts had stopped behaving normally after that.
She bent down and picked up the bottle.
The plastic was cold against her fingers.
Her grandfather’s words returned with uncomfortable clarity. He had warned that the first person of the opposite sex affected by the ring could trigger an unexpected reaction. Cyrus had been the first boy she used it on.
That much fit.
The rest did not.
When she controlled the housekeeper, the ring had not stirred anything beyond curiosity. When she used it on Nora, she had been irritated but still capable of thinking clearly. Yet the moment the artifact affected Cyrus, Audra’s emotions slipped out of proportion.
Her resentment had become sharper.
Her curiosity had become harder to ignore.
Her impulses had become difficult to control.
Could the ring create some kind of link with the first person of the opposite sex it affected?
Audra looked down at the pink stone resting on her hand.
The possibility felt ridiculous.
She had not been interested in Cyrus before using the ring. He had been a frustrating classmate with a suspicious face, a strange injury, inconsistent memories, and a habit of hiding behind his hair whenever someone looked at him too closely.
That was all.
She had not been waiting for an excuse to pull him aside.
She had not wanted to kiss him.
The thought made heat rise into her face.
Perhaps the ring did not create feelings. Perhaps it exaggerated them. Maybe it took a small annoyance, a trace of curiosity, or an ordinary impulse and turned it into something reckless.
That would explain why the boy from the confession had made her feel so unpleasant.
It would also explain why Cyrus had made her react the way she had.
Then Audra frowned.
No.
She did not have any feelings for Cyrus that could be amplified.
The explanation did not work.
A different thought took its place.
What if controlling someone required a price?
The glamourkin ring could make a person obey. It could erase their focus, shift their perceptions, and force them to answer questions. Maybe using it on a boy came with some kind of side effect for the wearer, one that pushed her toward Cyrus because he had been the first person of the opposite sex placed under its influence.
That possibility was not much better.
Audra turned the bottle slowly in her hand.
There were only a few ways to test the theory.
She could use the ring on someone else. She could compare the reaction. She could see whether the same irritation and pressure appeared again. She could study how Cyrus responded when the ring affected him compared to other people.
The thought was practical.
It was research.
It did not mean she liked him.
Even without the ring, Cyrus would be the one who became interested in her first. That was simply how things worked. He had spent enough time around her to understand that she was not someone people ignored easily.
The idea steadied her enough to start walking back toward the classroom.
Then another question stopped her halfway down the hall.
Why had Cyrus started breaking free from the ring’s influence?
The housekeeper had never shown any sign of resistance. Nora had accepted the altered memory without realizing anything was missing. The boy from the confession had woken up confused, but he had followed the instruction Audra gave him.
Cyrus was different.
He had begun to wake while Audra was still standing in front of him.
Audra remembered the slight movement of his throat, the way his fingers had twitched, and the change in his expression before she stepped away. She had felt the moment his mind started returning to him.
Her attention shifted to the simple ring on his finger.
It was easy to miss unless someone knew where to look. The metal was plain, almost cheap, with no stone or complicated design. It looked like something sold from a display rack at a convenience store counter.
Audra gave a quiet, embarrassed laugh.
She was being too suspicious.
Cyrus’s ring could not possibly be related to the glamourkin artifact. It looked ordinary because it was ordinary. The fact that it happened to be on his hand did not mean it was interfering with her ring.
She had to stop building theories around every small detail.
For now, she would continue studying the glamourkin ring carefully.
The answer would appear eventually.
Inside Classroom Three, Cyrus sat in his usual corner seat with the manga Faye had lent him tucked beneath one arm.
His thoughts kept circling back to Audra.
She had grabbed him in the hallway, dragged him around the corner, stared at him with an expression he had never seen on her before, then claimed she had mistaken him for someone else.
Mistaken him for someone else.
Cyrus looked down at his dark hair, plain glasses, wrinkled uniform, and deliberately forgettable appearance.
Even dressed like this, he was still Cyrus.
How had she mistaken him for anyone?
Maybe Audra was not as smart as everyone assumed.
The thought gave him a strange amount of comfort.
People treated Audra like she had everything. She came from money, looked good without trying, had excellent grades, and somehow managed to make every classroom feel quieter when she entered it.
The universe had probably balanced things out by giving her a few problems in the head.
That would be fair.
Cyrus shook his head once and opened the manga.
He had barely read two pages when Audra returned to the classroom.
She was carrying the disgusting fruit drink.
Cyrus looked up.
Audra passed her own desk without stopping. Instead, she walked directly to the back corner and set the bottle on his desk.
The room did not become silent, but the conversations around them thinned.
A few students noticed.
Audra’s attention moved briefly toward Faye before she turned and returned to her seat as though nothing unusual had happened.
Cyrus stared at the bottle.
He could not remember losing it.
The drink had disappeared somewhere between the vending machine and the classroom, but his memory of that walk remained clear. He had inserted the money, picked the drink, tasted it, found it awful, walked toward the stairs, run into Audra, and then returned to class.
The sequence felt complete.
Nothing in it included dropping the bottle.
Owen leaned toward him from the next desk.
"Why did Audra bring you a drink?" he asked.
"She probably found something I dropped."
Owen looked at the bottle, then at Cyrus.
"Maybe that is what happened," he said. "It did not look like that from here."
"What did it look like?"
"It looked like Audra bought you something."
Cyrus did not answer.
Owen’s expression shifted from surprise into reluctant admiration.
"You really do have strange luck," he said. "She walks over, puts a drink on your desk, and goes back to her seat like it is normal."
"It was not normal."
"That does not make it less impressive."
Several students had been watching.
Cyrus did not need to turn around to know it. He could feel the attention moving through the room in small, careful bursts. Some people looked at him. Some looked at Audra. Others pretended to focus on their phones while clearly listening for an explanation.
A quarter of the class had probably seen the whole thing.
Wonderful.
Cyrus rested his hand on the bottle and sighed under his breath.
He did not want to explain anything because there was nothing to explain. If he said Audra had only returned a drink he had somehow lost, people would assume he was hiding something. If he said he did not remember dropping it, they would probably assume he was even more suspicious.
The easiest choice was to stay quiet.
Across the room, the boy who had confessed that morning sat stiffly at his desk.
When Cyrus glanced in his direction, the boy straightened even more, as though he expected Cyrus to say something or confront him for some reason.
Cyrus had no intention of doing either.
The boy had stopped causing problems, which was good enough.
Maybe he had finally understood that following someone after a public rejection was a bad idea. Maybe someone had talked sense into him. Maybe he had scared himself after realizing how strange he had been acting.
Cyrus did not care.
As long as the boy stayed out of his way, everyone could pretend the whole thing had never happened.
He looked toward Audra’s back.
Her hair moved lightly when she adjusted her posture, but she did not turn around.
Then Cyrus looked down at the bottle again.
The drink still tasted terrible.
He took another sip anyway.
The flavor had not improved. It still tasted like someone had sweetened tree sap and tried to pass it off as fruit.
Cyrus set the bottle down.
The more he thought about it, the stranger the missing moment felt.
Audra could only have recognized the drink as his if she had seen him carrying it. That meant their paths had crossed near the stairwell. The boy from the confession must have been somewhere close too.
Yet Cyrus could not remember seeing either of them until Audra suddenly pulled him aside.
He remembered buying the drink.
He remembered tasting it.
He remembered walking back toward class.
Then there was a gap that did not feel like a gap because everything around it still connected smoothly.
Cyrus frowned.
Dropping something was not impossible. People lost phones, keys, wallets, and drinks every day. He could have placed it somewhere without thinking, left it on a windowsill, or let it slide from his hand when he turned a corner.
Still, he did not like how little sense it made.
The feeling stayed with him long enough that he wondered whether studying had finally made his brain worse.
That was possible too.
Owen turned toward him again before Cyrus could decide whether he should keep thinking about it.
"By the way, have you come up with any ideas for the Fall Festival?"
Cyrus looked at him. "Ideas for what?"
"For what our class should do."
Cyrus’s expression remained blank.
Owen leaned back in his chair.
"Everyone is supposed to help plan something," he said. "We could make food, run a game booth, set up something people would want to visit, or come up with another attraction. The festival is next week, so people are trying to decide early."
Cyrus looked around the classroom.
Several groups had already started talking about it again. Someone near the windows wanted a snack booth. A few students argued over whether games would make more money. One person insisted that a photo booth would be easier, while another reminded them that somebody would still have to make props.
Cyrus had never experienced anything like it.
"I have no ideas," he said honestly. "I did not grow up doing school festivals."
Owen considered that.
"We can figure something out," he said. "At minimum, you can help with whatever the class decides."
Cyrus nodded slowly.
That sounded manageable.
He still had no idea what a school festival was supposed to feel like, but it involved food, games, crowded halls, and people acting excited about things that did not matter outside school.
That seemed worth seeing.