There were four of them.
A student Alice didn't recognize came first, walking slightly ahead of the others like it was a habit. Behind him, three more, moving at the relaxed pace of people who knew they'd get there eventually.
The one on the left Alice recognized immediately. There were only so many people who could walk into a situation grinning like it was the best thing that had happened to them all day.
Ethan.
He saw Alice first, probably because he was already looking for things to notice, and Alice was standing in the middle of a side path holding a stick above his head. His whole face lit up. He raised one hand in a cheerful wave, like this was a completely normal place to run into a classmate.
Alice lowered the stick slightly.
The one next to Ethan was already angling toward the upperclassman with the energy of someone with an appointment, said "Steve" without looking at Alice first, like that was enough context for anyone. Then he did look at Alice, changed direction, and came toward him instead, smiling the way people smiled when they were deciding between charming and very charming. He reached for Alice's hand.
Alice moved it.
Not dramatically. Not even quickly. Just a small, easy shift of the wrist so his hand was no longer where Steve's hand was going. Like stepping around a puddle.
Steve blinked. His smile held, clearly well-practiced enough for that, but his hand hung in the air for a moment with nothing to do.
Ethan, behind him, was biting the inside of his cheek very hard.
The third person in the group had come to stand at a slight angle from the rest. He had a particular stillness about him. He looked at Alice once, nothing especially readable in it, then looked past her toward the upperclassman.
Then he walked past her. No greeting, no second glance, straight past the way you'd walk past something you'd already decided wasn't your concern.
Alice watched him go.
The last one came level with her. He had a face that gave away about as much as a closed door, and something about the way he carried himself reminded Alice faintly of Bryan. Not in any specific feature. Just the general atmosphere of someone who thought before they spoke and meant it when they did.
He looked at Alice and said, simply and not unkindly:
"You can go. We'll handle it from here."
Alice looked at Anna.
She'd stopped looking dumbfounded. She was watching the group with the expression of someone who recognized them and wasn't afraid of them. Her wrist was already back at her side. Her breathing had slowed.
She looked fine. Not great, not unhurt, but fine in the way that meant she didn't need Alice to stay for her sake.
Alice set the stick down. Picked up his bag. Gave Anna one last look, the kind that was a question.
She gave him a small nod back.
Okay then.
"See you tomorrow," Ethan called after him, cheerful as ever.
Alice raised a hand without turning around and kept walking.
The principal's office was exactly where the campus map said it was. Alice adjusted his bag strap, knocked twice, and pushed the door open.
The woman at the desk looked up.
Then she stood so fast the chair rolled back and hit the wall, and she came around the desk with her arms already open, moving at a speed that did not match the general atmosphere of a principal's office.
"Alice!"
Before he could react, Aunt Mathilda had her arms around him, pulling him into a hug that was thorough and immediate and smelled faintly of the same perfume she'd worn since he was small enough not to reach her shoulder. Tall, silver-streaked hair, reading glasses pushed up on her head, the particular energy of a person who ran a school because she genuinely liked doing it.
She pulled back just enough to look at him. Hands on his shoulders, eyes doing a careful, thorough job of checking all of him at once.
"Let me see you." She turned him slightly. His face, his arms, the way he was standing. "You look well. Are you well? How was the first day?"
"Fine. So-so."
"You're sure?"
"Yes."
She kept looking. Alice let her. Aunt Mathilda was one of those people who needed to see something with her own eyes before she believed it, and he'd known that about her long enough to just stand still and wait.
She'd known his mother since before he was born. She'd watched Helen through all of it. The pregnancy, the man who hadn't stayed, the slow way that loneliness had settled into Helen and changed the shape of certain things inside her. Mathilda had been worried for a long time. She was still worried, mostly about Alice.
She hadn't approved of what Helen had done. There had been a period when he was around nine or ten where her visits had gotten shorter and her voice on the phone with his mother had gone very careful and level in a way that was its own kind of argument. They'd worked through it eventually, the way old friendships did. But the worry had never fully left her face when she looked at him.
She let out a breath, patted his cheek once, and stepped back. "Okay. Good." She went behind her desk, opened a drawer, and produced a large paper bag. "Your mother's fabric samples and a few pieces she lent me. You know how she is about her things." She set it on the desk. "I may have added a few things of my own. For you."
Alice reached in. Near the top was a folded shirt, plain, dark blue, clearly cut for a boy. He looked at it. Then at Aunt Mathilda.
She held his gaze. "Wear what you want to wear," she said. Just that.
Alice was quiet for a moment.
"I'm allowed to," he said. "She's not that strict about it anymore." He folded the shirt and put it back carefully. "You don't have to worry. I'm fine."
Something moved through her expression. Relief, and something still worried underneath it, and something older than both of those that had been sitting there for years. She looked at him for a long moment, then reached over and patted the top of his head the way she'd done when he was small.
"I know," she said. "I just like to make sure."
Alice let her.
"Sit down for a bit. Tell me about the morning."
Alice sat and told her some of it. The class, the campus layout, the professor with the quote on the whiteboard. Bryan and Lucy, since it had been a while since she'd seen them.
"Lucy still yaps a lot. Bryan is still Bryan."
"You should bring them by sometime."
"I didn't know you were the principal here."
"Well, dear. You never asked."
Aunt Mathilda listened the way she always did, leaning forward, asking questions that were actually about what he'd said. Five minutes became thirty without either of them noticing.