Urna found me hiding under the first floor staircase. Curse her intelligence and her knowledge of my most secret hiding places. “Spill.” She huddled in the darkness by my side as I sat with my knees drawn to my chest.

“I can’t,” I mumbled into my legs.

“Yes you can. I saw Roney say something to you, but I didn’t hear it. And as your best friend, I consider it my responsibility to butt into all your problems and try to solve them. And especially to whup anyone in the butt if they hurt you.”

I had to smile at her loyalty. But what her cousin had done was strictly forbidden. In the dwarf world, we were never supposed to have romantic fantasies about anyone, let alone claim them. Admitting his love to me…, well that was huge. And utterly wrong. I was just thankful that he hadn’t done it in front of everyone, or both his and my name would be disgraced forever. We couldn’t be seen meddling with love and relationships until we were twenty. And by admitting his love to me, he had ruined my life forever. I could practically see my world come crashing down around me. My friends would give me the cold shoulder like I was the one who had committed the crime, my father would want to disown me, and Sempa would never let me forget about the incident.

“Roney said that he liked me,” I said, deciding not to mention the ‘love’ word.

“Oh, he was probably just messing around with you. Boys tend to do strange stuff. Don’t mind him for his dirty sense of humour,” Urna waved it aside.

“But his eyes, Urna. I’m telling you, he didn’t look like he was joking. Somewhere in there I thought I saw what my father has in his eye when he looks at mom’s pictures,” I snuggled deeper into the corner, grateful to the shadows for hiding my distraught face.

It was Urna’s turn to be puzzled. “But he knows… I’ll have to talk to him. He couldn’t have been serious. He knows what is right and wrong, and he wouldn’t rebel so much.”

“You do what you can with him, Urna. But I can’t face him. I can’t bear to see his face. I can’t even face the world,” I said.

“Get up!” she suddenly declared.

“Sorry?”

“I said, get up!” she yelled.

“How am I supposed to stand? You’re blocking the way?” I was still huddled near the corner, and there was no way I could get out and stand up with her beside me.

“Oops,” she said as she wriggled out and pulled me out. As I extended to my full height next to the staircase, still towering above everyone, I felt strangely exposed. After my harrowing experience, I didn’t want to face the world, let alone dwarf teenagers.

“Ok,” Urna stood in front of me. She grabbed my shoulders and locked me in her stare. “You are going to go back to class, sit next to Roney, and act like nothing happened. Just pretend you never heard those words. If he ever mentions the incident, you ignore him. Come to me and I’ll talk to him. And under no circumstances are you allowed to let the news leak!” she announced to me. Thankfully only a couple of kids were around, and neither of them payed any attention to her words. I did the only thing I could do, I nodded. Then I gulped.

“Good,” she finally broke the hold of her gaze.

As we walked back up the stairs, me walking really slowly because I could not imagine facing that boy again, I asked her a question. “Has it ever happened before?”

She knew exactly what I meant because best friends can always read your mind. “It’s not impossible. Some kids mature early, and their brain starts giving them certain signals. I’ve heard about it somewhere, and dwarves can romantically like others at our age. Even though it is deemed wrong in society, it is biologically possible. But society just hopes that they will be smart enough not to admit it out loud.”

I nodded. But Roney? I had seen him before only a few times, when I was hanging around with Urna or at her birthday parties. And he hadn’t been in my class last year, so I had completely forgotten about his existence. All he was to me was ‘Urna’s cousin’. Recent events had turned him into much more. The word ‘maniac’ popped up in my head, and I tried to drive it away. I realised it must be hard for him to, realising he has unusual feelings of love when nobody else does, and that he could be punished to him. He no longer seemed like a lunatic, but more of an unrequited lover of the stories I often read.

I delayed entering the classroom as much as possible, milling about in the corridors until the bell finally rang, and I trudged in last behind Urna. Roney was at our bench, flicking his pen towards his friend who was our neighbour and thankfully not noticing me. I walked to my place stiffly, sat down and stared straight ahead as I took out my books and waited for Mr. Monor to come.

Suddenly there was a poke in my back. I resisted the urge to look to my left. It returned. Roney sat right next to me, and I could see him from my peripheral view, prodding my back with a pencil. I ignored him, but the prods continued incessantly and with increasing vigour, and there was a cheeky grin on his face.

“What?” I whipped my head in his direction.

“Have I not already told you children that not a word will be uttered in my class?” came Mr. Monor’s voice from the door. He was looking at me dead in the eye.

I was practically squirming, but something made me look up and catch his gaze defiantly. “I didn’t do anything sir.”

“Rebelling now, are we? And lying too, I see. Well, I have no choice but to punish you,” his lips twisted into a sinister smile as he extracted a skewer from his pocket. And it wasn’t the normal kind of skewer, it was the ones that medieval teachers used to punish someone. I immediately recoiled at the sight, regretting my words.

“Oh, but you have done wrong, child,” he was by my side in an instant, flashing the skewers shiny surface in my eyes.

The skewer was a tool which was made to prick the students arm until it was red and swollen, one of the most brutal forms of punishment. Dwarf skin was thick, so the skewer rarely went deep enough to draw blood, but it could leave the arm unusable for a week if the were particularly vindictive. I shrunk away from the weapon that hadn’t been used in our school for years. I had only had to endure it once, but the experience had left me in a perpetual fear of it.

“No, sir. Please, not this. Give me any other punishment,” I begged him. My desperate brown eyes made contact with his black ones as he raised his skewer, then decided to lower it. “Out of the class. Now. You may listen in to the lessons, but you are not to interact with me or any of the students until the day is over.”

I nodded and picked up my bag. My cheeks burning with shame, I walked out of the room with multiple pairs of petrified eyes on me. But it was better than being next to Roney.

Two hours later, the last bell rang. Everyone trudged out except Roney and Urna as I waited. Finally the cursed boy emerged. He even had the nerve to give me a sheepish grin. “Sorry about getting you a punishment. I really did not want to, you know. I regret what I did, and I am sorry to see such a beautiful creature being degraded like this. I really like you, and I really wanted you to know, even if you don’t like me back.”

Are you for real right now? I stared at him for five whole seconds, dumbfounded. Then I grabbed my bag and ran out of the school in full speed.