Justin Hardy – Vulpes House
Justin loped on up to the Cervus table, still very much grinning that grin of his. He might have had a bit of a blind-spot, so far as Emerson was concerned, when it came to his powers of mental dissection, but he could read the slight change in the other boy’s eye easily enough. He’d seen it a hundred times before, probably more. It was the way he reacted to inevitably being hit on, this slight contraction of his very being that was easy to miss.
”Hot guy,”, he greeted Micah with an upnod. He repeated the upnod in Savant’s direction. ”Other hot guy.” His hand delved into his messenger bag, and he extracted a bouquet, which he offered to Emerson.”M&M.”* No, not flowers; that was a bit too conventional for his tastes. Bunched up in his hand were somewhere in the vicinity of two-dozen popsicle sticks, sans popsicle. Half of the cheap would was discolored, faint red or purple or orange, but there were little words printed on them. During the summer month, Justin’s younger siblings went through frozen treats like Kleenex, and he’d managed to scavenge together and clean up some of the better cast-offs. See, each stick had a joke on it, the punch-line to which was only revealed once the popsicle had been removed. He figured Em would get a kick out of them (they were just the sort of terrible pun-driven bits of humor he delighted in), and this sentimental, sweet gesture was only the first step in his as-of-yet-undetermined-number-of-phases plan to win the Quodpot jockey’s big ole’ heart.
He was watching his friend’s reaction carefully as he casually folded his scrawny arms across his chest and regarded the three of them in a more general sense. ”How was everyone’s summer? Mine was awful, but then, they always are. Did you hear that Nevaeh Abernathy went to Beauxbatons?” His grin got even wider and goofier, a touch scandalous. Knowing just about everyone and many of their secrets meant that Justin was usually pretty on top of the school’s gossip grapevine, and he had just paid a visit to the Arietem table, where it was all anyone could seem to talk about. ”Oh, I almost forgot.”
He reached into his bag of tricks again, withdrawing three small vials of brown liquid. With somewhat frightening dexterity, he tossed them in quick succession, one to Micah, one to Savant, and then one to Emerson. ”New merchandise. Put three drops of that in anything besides milk or orange soda, and it’ll look and taste just like butterbeer, but… decidedly more potent." He wasn’t quite sure why orange soda was exempt, but, that was magic. ”Try it out, share it around, you know the drill.” Then he remembered something. ”Only three drops. Not four, unless you want some gnarly mutton chops. They only last a couple days, but, not everyone can pull them off.” He peered at Micah, canting his head a bit. ”You probably could, actually.”
He’d lost his train of thought, imagining Micah with gnarly mutton chops. He tapped one of his long index fingers on his chin. ”Where was I? Oh, yeah. Tentative name is ‘Betterbeer’.” He shrugged. ”But yeah, I just wanted to say hi and drop off presents. I’ll let you guys get back to your testosterone-fest.” This was crucial to his plan. Do something nice, something sweet, then disappear so that Emerson could reflect on how nice and sweet it was before Justin had the chance to slip up and say something perverted.
*Note: it’s worthwhile to mention that Justin’s favorite nickname for Emerson (a play on the common truncation “Em”) is best not spelled out phonetically in order to avoid confusion. Justin associates Emerson with the brightly colored candy, tough on the outside but sweet on the inside produced by Mars, Inc., not the American recording artist Marshall Mathers.