“Just come back please. And head straight to your dorm. We’ll be making an announcement later.”
Maria hung up then, leaving me flabbergasted and staring at Ethan with my mouth open. He said good-bye to Oliver a moment later. He was pale. Paler than usual.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“They didn’t tell you?”
“No. Just said to come home.”
He took a deep, shaky breath.
“Someone’s dead.” He looked at the floor while he said it.
My phone clattered to the table. Inside my head, I heard the raven caw.
Neither Ethan nor I spoke the entire ride home. We’d paid Veronica and left her the rest as a tip—we were out the door before she even had time to count the change. The entire ride back, all I could think was, Not Elisa, not Elisa, please not Elisa. I’d tried calling her cell phone, but whether it was shitty backwoods reception or her not being by her phone or worse, she never picked up. My stomach was acid; I nearly screamed at Ethan to drive faster, but kept the frustration in check.
Is that what this was about? I whispered inside my head. Munin didn’t answer. The silence was deeper than death. I felt like I was on the other side of a tidal wave, the calm emptiness following the executioner’s ax. Even though I still had no clue what was going on, a part of me knew this was the worst. And, horrible as it made me feel to think it, the worst was over.
For now.
Campus was swarming with cops when we arrived, their lights cutting through the snow in scratches of red and blue on white. It felt like rolling into a dream, only I knew I wouldn’t wake up when it was over. I watched the lights shift with morbid fascination as Ethan pulled to a stop outside my dorm. It wasn’t until he spoke that I realized I was, in fact, still there in my body and needing to act.
“Call me if you need anything, okay?” he asked.
“Of course. Likewise.”
I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek before running inside.
I guess I expected chaos—after all, isn’t that what we’re taught to expect? Sobbing friends, cops demanding order while a white-clothed body is rolled out, a familiar hand slipping from obscurity? But there wasn’t anyone milling about in the foyer or lounge area. Everything was empty, silent, save for the distant sound of crying and the lone figure at the desk.
“Kaira,” Maria said, standing like she was going to say something else. The words seemed to get stuck behind her lips; we stared at each other for a long moment.
“Who was it?” I asked, my voice rough. I didn’t mean for it to sound so harsh, so clinical—Islington was a small school, barely topping four hundred students, so there was no way this wouldn’t be personal. Please not Elisa.
Maria walked around the desk and gave me a hug without saying a word. My heart dropped.
“Mandy,” she finally said. She hugged me tighter. “I’m so sorry.”
My breath caught in my lungs. How was that possible? I knew Mandy, vaguely. She was a ceramicist. And yeah, she kept to herself most of the time, but I’d never had any warning signs with her; isolation was just the nature of being in the ceramics studio.
“What happened?”
“We don’t know yet. They’re releasing more information later tonight. For now, it’s mandatory sign-in. You should get up to your room—Elisa’s already up there.”
? ? ?
Elisa was sitting on her bed with her knees curled to her chest when I opened the door. She looked a little shell-shocked, but I’d seen her in far worse states.
“Hey,” she said. She slipped from the bed and wrapped me in a tight hug. “You okay?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, I think so. I mean . . . did they tell you what happened?”
“Just that Mandy killed herself,” she replied. She took a half step back and looked me in the eyes. “You’re sure you’re okay? I mean, were you guys close?”
“I knew her. Last I saw she was preparing her thesis for tomorrow.”
Hell, I’d spent a few minutes with her this weekend in the ceramics studio. Her project was one hundred ceramic origami cranes. She joked that it was the most frustrating meditation ever: folding pieces of paper into cranes, dipping them in slip (a sort of runny clay mixture), drying them, and then praying the shape held when firing in the kiln. She’d been working on it for the better part of a month.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Elisa said. “She was in my physics class. She didn’t seem like the sort to take her own life.”