Seeing as how Jia Li was too busy falling through a tree to actually see him catch the squirrel, she wasn’t exactly going to praise him for it. After all, if it wasn’t for him, she’d still be calmly sitting against a tree, studying. Instead, she was pressing a tissue against her palm to curb the bleeding of a cut he caused. Besides, he shouldn’t have been playing catch with squirrels anyway, and even if she didn’t care about that, she wasn’t exactly watching the whole thing happen. She had no idea how far the thing had come or if he hadn’t just thrown it himself.
“I’m not crying. Do you see tears? No. Just blood.” She tossed the bloodied tissue at him after she felt she had applied pressure for a sufficient amount of time. “Besides, that’s not all there is to it. My whole hand aches because you kicked it when you were running over me, and you were running pretty damned fast. I’m sure your scientific brain can figure out that the velocity at which you were running would make the force of the kick pretty hard.” Even if he had vehemently denied being a physics major when they last met, his little speech about lightning proved he had to like science to some degree.
Jia Li shook her head and sighed. “I don’t care about humans in Iraq. They’re there because their all-knowing leader sent them there to die, and they were too stupid to stand up for themselves.” Her entire life she had suffered through the discriminations humans cast on her. She knew on the individual level, some humans were okay, but she wasn’t very fond of them as a whole.
She ignored his tossing the squirrel into the air, knowing he was just trying to goad her. Then he commented on how she had revealed her race by going through the tree to avoid him. Ugh... She almost wished she could take it back, but a knee to the face would have been less pleasant than his knowing a small fact like that. “So what? So you know my race. I suppose you’re going to bring the humanists to burn down all of the trees until they get to mine, right?” She scoffed. It was unlikely that something like that would happen. This school was a safe-haven for supernatural beings. Jia Li figured humanists wouldn’t come within twenty feet of it.
The dryad didn’t exactly squeal when he tossed the squirrel her way, but she did make an audible gasp and leapt to the side when it rushed at her through the air. “I feel more at peace with squirrels that aren’t hyperventilating and half insane from someone tossing them through the air and catching them with a metal grip. Because they can’t exactly understand our speech, I expect them to be wary of anything large and walking on two legs immediately after the stunt you just pulled.”
She began gathering her book and her notebook, haphazardly into her book bag before zipping it. Her gaze moved to the distant where he’d indicated. “Did you trick them into believing you’re human or something? Who bets against something like that at this school?” Sure, her comment made it seem like any ol’ supernatural being could do it, but he deserved to be taken down a peg.