Chapter 44: Chapter 44: The White-Haired Student Rumor

Chapter 44: The White-Haired Student Rumor

"Could you tell me a little about your family situation?"

Cyrus lowered his head.

The question had arrived exactly where he expected it to arrive, but expecting a knife did not make it any less sharp. He let his fingers rest against the edge of the low table, counted a breath, and made his voice come out steady.

"About half a year ago, my parents disappeared. After that, my memory started having problems. I’ve been living on my own since then."

Daphne Whitlock’s pen stopped over the form.

"You had memory problems?" she asked.

Cyrus kept his head slightly lowered. "I lost a lot of it."

Daphne had read enough from the school file to know about his parents. That part had already stood out to her. A student living alone was not something St. Alder Academy could treat casually, especially not when the paperwork around his guardianship looked thin and unusually tidy.

The amnesia was different.

That detail had not been in the file.

"How much have you recovered?" she asked.

Cyrus shook his head slowly. "I have not recovered much."

The answer landed too quietly for the room. Daphne did not write right away. Even the faint movement of her pen stopped.

She had expected awkwardness, poverty, maybe a guarded teenager pretending he was fine because pride was cheaper than asking for help. She had not expected missing parents and lost memory sitting across from her in the same bare apartment.

No wonder someone had helped him transfer. No wonder he lived like this. A student his age should have been worrying about homework, not rent, dinner, and whether an adult with a clipboard would decide his life needed rearranging.

Cyrus did not give her long enough to examine him too closely.

"After the memory loss, I met someone kind," he continued. "He helped me and gave me work. I earn my living expenses at his place."

Daphne’s pen moved again, though her attention remained mostly on Cyrus. "That’s the job you came back from tonight?"

"Yes, it is."

"Does the school know?"

"They know I work part-time. I try not to let it affect class."

That was not fully true. It had affected class plenty. It had affected math most of all, along with anything that required him to stay awake while a teacher spoke in a warm room. Still, since Malcolm had adjusted his hours, the lie was becoming closer to the truth.

Daphne gave the answer a small nod of acceptance, but the home visit form no longer seemed to matter as much as it had a few minutes ago.

Cyrus watched her through the cover of his hair.

This was the annoying part about lying. A bad lie needed constant repair. A decent lie needed maintenance. The best kind of lie was one that made the listener do half the work for you.

Missing parents, memory loss, a kind adult, a part-time job, a student trying to survive. These pieces fit together well enough that people usually stopped digging. They became busy feeling sorry for him, admiring his resilience, or pretending not to pity him.

The fake amnesia story had never been sentimental to Cyrus. It was a tool. Tonight, it sat between him and Daphne like a folded paper screen.

He only had to make sure the shape behind it looked believable.

Daphne glanced down at the form, then back up at him. "The person who helped you, is he safe?"

Cyrus did not need to fake the answer this time. "He’s a good person."

Malcolm Baird was too good, really. Good enough that Cyrus sometimes had to remind himself that kindness could become dependence if he stopped paying attention.

Daphne seemed to accept that. Her pen moved down another line.

For a few seconds, the home visit almost resembled what it was supposed to be: a teacher making sure a student had somewhere to sleep, something to eat, and enough adult support to not fall apart.

Then Daphne looked up again.

"What about your younger brother?"

There it was.

Cyrus had known the question was coming.

Daphne’s tone changed by the smallest amount when she asked it. The difference would have been easy to miss if he had not already been watching for it. Less school paperwork, more personal interest. Less teacher, more neighbor.

The nonexistent younger brother had become the real purpose of the visit.

Cyrus let his silence last just long enough to seem like hesitation rather than calculation.

"He’s at his own home."

Daphne’s fingers tightened slightly around the pen. "His own home?"

"He isn’t actually my brother." Cyrus raised his head a little, still letting his bangs hide his eyes. "I ran into him by accident before. He was lost and mistook me for his brother. I was worried he’d wander off somewhere unsafe, so I brought him here for a while."

Daphne listened very carefully.

Cyrus kept going before she could cut into the weak parts. "Later, I had work, so I couldn’t keep watching him. He said he might come find me on some weekend when he had time, but my schedule has been messy."

That was the good thing about an imaginary child.

He could appear whenever Cyrus needed him.

He could fail to appear whenever Cyrus needed him gone.

A lost child mistaking him for someone else sounded ridiculous, but not impossible. Children were ridiculous by nature. Human children seemed to specialize in running, misidentifying people, touching things, and surviving only because adults kept intercepting them before disaster.

Daphne did not answer at once.

Cyrus could not see her full expression clearly with his head angled down, but he could feel the weight of her attention. She was turning the story over, looking for an edge.

He made his breathing steady.

If she pressed too hard, he could add details. A nearby street. A worried parent. A phone call he never needed to prove because no one would ask for a stranger’s private information. Lies were safer when they stayed soft around the edges.

Daphne finally lowered her pen to the paper again.

"So he might come by again?"

"He said he might."

"I understand what you mean."

She wrote something down.

Cyrus released a small breath through his nose.

This home visit was exhausting.

At least his ability to invent nonsense had improved. If his talent for lying had been poor, he would still be locked away somewhere, being handled and watched until his own life became a schedule someone else maintained.

Compared to that, fooling a teacher with a folder was manageable.

Daphne asked a few more questions, all of them framed in a normal teacherly way.

"What kind of work do you do?"

"I do service work at night."

That answer was technically true. A bartender served customers. He mixed drinks, wiped counters, listened to people talk too much, and occasionally received tips from women who projected entire tragedies onto him because of a ring and a sad story. Service work covered all of that neatly.

"What are your hours like?"

"They change sometimes. From now on, I’ll mostly be getting back around this time."

"Because of school?"

"Yes, because I need more time to study."

"That is good to hear."

Cyrus did not dislike hearing it. He only disliked that warmth had a direction now.

Daphne worked through the remaining form questions with more restraint than he expected. Basic living arrangement. Food. Transportation. Whether he needed school support. Whether he had emergency contact information on file. Cyrus gave answers that were clean, boring, and carefully incomplete.

The kindest lies were the ones that did not make people ask follow-up questions.

Near the end, Daphne turned a page, and her teacher face became a little more genuine.

"There is one more thing about your grades," she said.

Cyrus felt his good mood fade.

Daphne glanced at the file. "Your math and science grades are low. Is that connected to the memory loss?"

He was silent for a beat.

That question was unfair.

If he blamed the fake amnesia, he looked pitiable. If he admitted the truth, he would have to explain that he had never built a proper foundation because ordinary schoolwork had not been his priority while escaping captivity, managing a Frostborn body, hiding his appearance, paying rent, and avoiding dangerous women.

Unfortunately, that answer would not fit on a school form.

"Recently, a classmate has been tutoring me," he said. "There’s a Most Improved Student Award with prize money. I’m working toward that."

Daphne looked mildly surprised. "You know about that?"

"My classmate told me."

"It does exist," Daphne said. "The review process is strict, but if your improvement is clear, you could be considered."

"I’ll work hard."

"I’ll keep an eye on it too," Daphne said. "If you run into trouble, you can tell me."

Cyrus gave her a polite answer. "Thank you, Ms. Whitlock."

The words sounded harmless. The offer did not.

A teacher keeping an eye on his grades was normal. A neighbor bringing him food was helpful. A beautiful adult woman sitting in his apartment at night with access to school paperwork was less normal. Put those things together, and the shape became harder to ignore.

Daphne closed the folder.

"That’s all for tonight. You should eat and get some rest."

Cyrus stood and walked her to the door. There was nothing else to send off except the person who had brought him dinner, collected his personal information, and asked about a child who did not exist.

At the threshold, Daphne glanced back once.

"Don’t stay up too late," she said.

"I’ll rest soon."

Daphne returned to her own apartment, and the hallway quieted.

Once Cyrus shut the door, he stood still for a moment. Then he walked straight to the bed and dropped onto it with a long, satisfied stretch.

A home visit was not that impressive after all.

She had learned some things, but nothing that mattered too much. Missing parents and fake amnesia were already part of his shield. Service work was vague enough to avoid explaining the lounge. If he had said bartender, Daphne might have asked where, what kind of place, how late, and whether the school should know more.

That would have been annoying.

More importantly, the so-called younger brother was no longer his brother. That meant Daphne might stop trying to feed him just to reach the child.

Cyrus stared at the ceiling for a few seconds.

Then he reconsidered.

If Daphne stopped bringing food, that would be a loss. If he got hungry enough, the little white-haired boy could always visit the neighbor on his own. A lost child who had once mistaken him for an older brother might reasonably come back looking for help.

That counted as a perfectly normal coincidence.

Cyrus sat up, pushed his hair out of his face, and opened the food container. The meal inside still held a little warmth. The convenience-store hot dog beside it had cooled, but it remained edible. He respected food that stayed useful even after being ignored for paperwork.

Daphne’s cooking was good.

He would not call it life-changing, but it was good enough that he cleaned the container with a seriousness usually reserved for important tasks. Afterward, he washed up, put the empty container aside, and crawled into bed feeling far more satisfied than a boy living under multiple lies had any right to be.

He did wonder who cooked better, Daphne or Faye.

That question was worth future investigation.

Two days passed easily enough, and Friday arrived under a bright, breezy sky.

By lunch, St. Alder Academy felt livelier than usual. Friday had a way of making even the hallways less miserable. Students moved between classrooms with louder voices, looser shoulders, and the strange confidence of people who believed the weekend could save them.

No one paid attention to the gloomy boy moving through the crowd with his hair hanging low.

That suited Cyrus fine.

Since his hours at The Full Moon Lounge had changed, his sleep had improved enough for even school to notice in small ways. He no longer spent entire mornings folded over his desk like a corpse waiting for permission to become paperwork. He still slept through more than he should, but the difference was visible if someone sat near him.

Owen noticed.

Faye noticed.

Audra definitely noticed, though she pretended not to.

Most of the class did not. Invisibility remained one of Cyrus’s few reliable assets at school.

Lately, he had even started walking around during lunch instead of staying planted near his seat. He had been at St. Alder for a while, but he barely knew the building beyond the places required for class, tutoring, and survival. There were hallways he had never bothered to explore, stairwells that smelled faintly of dust and floor polish, club rooms with posters taped to the doors, and windows that faced different angles of Grayhaven’s coast.

It was strange how much space a school had when he was not sleeping through it.

That day, he had finished tutoring with Audra a little earlier than usual. With time to spare, he wandered through a less crowded stretch of the building, then turned back toward his regular classroom.

The hallway carried pieces of conversation from every direction. He heard weekend plans, homework complaints, a club meeting, someone’s failed attempt at flirting, and someone else’s dramatic retelling of a cafeteria accident that had probably been less impressive when it happened.

Then one conversation caught him.

A boy and a girl stood near the side of the hallway, not blocking traffic, but close enough that Cyrus heard them as he passed.

The girl laughed first. "You’re still looking? You really believe there’s some white-haired hot guy hiding at this school?"

"I saw him with my own eyes," the boy insisted. "Why would I make that up?"

"We barely have any white-haired students. Are you sure you weren’t seeing things?"

"I wasn’t seeing things. After we split up in the woods during the cooking trip, I saw him. He was wearing our uniform, and he had white hair. He was seriously good-looking."

"Even if that’s true, what, his hair color changes?"

"I don’t know what happened. I still saw him, so I’m going to keep looking."

Cyrus lowered his head as he walked past.

So someone had seen him.

During the off-campus cooking activity, after the spicy food had forced his body into that smaller form, he had been so focused on escaping Daphne and getting back to normal that he had missed a witness. His original Frostborn appearance must have shown long enough for a student to catch it.

That was bad.

The situation had not become catastrophic yet, but it had crossed into the kind of problem that could grow teeth later.

If the rumor stayed at the level of a boy searching for a mysterious handsome student, it was embarrassing and annoying. If someone who actually understood rare-blood traits heard that a student’s hair might have changed color, the situation could become something else entirely.

Cyrus kept his pace normal.

Most humans did not know enough about Frostborn to connect the pieces. They knew rumors, fairy-tale versions, field-guide scraps, and whatever nonsense spread between students who wanted the world to be more exciting than homework. A white-haired boy in a uniform was only a curiosity to them.

To the wrong person, it could become a trail.

As he neared his classroom, Daphne Whitlock came from the opposite direction.

She looked thoughtful, carrying a thin folder against her chest as if she had been interrupted halfway through some teacher errand. Their paths met in the middle of the hall.

Neither of them stopped.

Daphne gave no sign beyond the ordinary awareness a teacher might show a student. Cyrus gave no sign beyond the ordinary avoidance a student might show a teacher.

They passed each other as if the home visit had never happened.

For once, normal behavior was a relief.

Cyrus was almost at the classroom door when two male classmates stepped into his path.