Sure, I was late for lit mag, but I felt calm, finally, and grateful for the quiet, and though I hurried down the stairs, I didn’t run. The night stretched out before me, calm and quiet too, and if I was five minutes late, nothing would change. Slowly, I wrapped my scarf back around my neck and picked my way through the snow.
As I approached the student union, I could see her through the glass door. Elizabeth, lingering by the stairwell. The harsh lighting made her blond hair fluorescent, and as I watched, she checked her phone. I stood there for a second, just looking at her. I knew that she had a poem in her backpack that she had written about the willow tree in her backyard at home. I’d been writing about last year, stories about art thefts and explosions and kidnappings that the rest of our club found “unrealistic.” Despite what they—and everyone at Sherringford—knew about the details of Dobson’s murder, the facts of my European misadventure were still too wild to believe.
And while I wrote compulsively about my life, trying to make heads or tails of it, Elizabeth refused to write about any of it at all. Her attacker. Her hospital stay. In the world of her poems, none of it had ever happened. I admired that, weirdly enough. Her determination to rewrite her life with the worst parts excised.
Standing there in the hallway, she looked a little like a stranger. I never looked at her from across a room anymore; she was always under my arm. In a lot of ways, boarding school made it difficult to date without feeling married. Every morning, I passed the three redbrick buildings between my front door and hers. I met her in the lobby of her dorm, which always smelled like microwave popcorn and too-sweet perfume. Because I usually slept through breakfast, she had a to-go cup of tea for me, and we walked to class together, talking about homework, warming our hands with our hot drinks. Four times a week, we’d walk together to lunch; three times a week, to dinner. We worked in the library most nights in the table by the café. After lights out, we didn’t send each other selfies, or even really text—what else did we have to say?
Now that it was winter, we’d stopped wandering the grounds, looking for places to make out; instead, we laid together in my bed, me on the outside, her on the inside, and instead of talking, we listened for a hall assistant to come by so that I could drop my right foot down onto the carpet. (During guest hours, keep one foot on the floor! said the signs in the stairwells. Below, someone had drawn an anatomically correct picture of something you could do with all four feet firmly on the ground.) Mostly, we were talking. About New York City versus London; about her sister, who wrote and recorded these strange, aching songs we played off YouTube; about where we’d go if we had a car and I could take her on a proper date. Sometimes she’d just sleep on my chest while I read for AP English, and I listened to her breathe while I dog-eared my text. It made me feel sort of guilty, but I had enough to do that finding time to work was a relief. My American applications were in, but the English ones weren’t due for another few months, including King’s College London, my top choice. Unlike Tom and Lena, who were set to coast through senior spring, I was still on hard burn.
Most of the time, I felt like I was being sensible with her, this girl who was willing to trust me with her heart, even after everything that had happened to her because of me. I was treating her carefully. She was treating me carefully. Elizabeth had brought up the idea of us sleeping together a few weeks ago, and we tabled it—maturely. But maybe we only felt comfortable doing that because if we weren’t making out, why would we be having sex?
In other moments, I felt like I was dating the foreign exchange student who lived in my house. She was familiar, almost too much so, and still she was strange to me. And safe. She was safe.
Together, we were safe.
And still, for whatever reason, I couldn’t make myself go inside to meet her.
I watched her, now. Her worried eyes, her mouth. Her making the decision to go upstairs without me. When she was out of sight, I sent her a text—sorry, just got back, go on without me.
It’s okay, babe, she wrote back. I’ll call you after. I didn’t think I could sit and listen to a group of people critique a piece of my thinly veiled autobiography tonight. If you were on the lit mag staff, you’d have to sit through them critiquing the work you’d submitted for each issue. Last fall, someone had said, Your narrator should make some better decisions. It was like therapy, except the therapists had been given bludgeons.
I wandered back to the dorm, slowly, trying not to live in my head. My presentation. I had to think about my presentation. A wind picked up, enough to drive the cold up my sleeves and down my shoes, and I strayed off the path to cut through the sciences building.
The first floor of the sciences building. Not the fourth. (Why was I thinking about the fourth floor? Stop thinking about the fourth floor, I told myself.) A straight path through.
Physics. I needed to get my head on straight. I was giving a presentation on astrophysics tomorrow, a five-minute introduction to basic theories that involved no math and still had taken me hours to wrap my brain around, and though I’d done all the heavy lifting, I still needed to organize it into something resembling a speech. I wandered through the physics wing, looking at the displays that the teachers had made on matter and force and energy, and by the time I made it back to my dorm, I’d managed to regain some semblance of focus. Why did I feel like I was going to fly apart?
At the front desk, no Mrs. Dunham. Just her MAKING ROUNDS sign, the letters faded. The bag of Thai food was hanging from my doorknob. I took it and unlocked the door.
Two steps in, I stopped. A warning in the back of my chest, some kind of panicked pull that surprised me. No. Nothing was wrong. It was just an aftershock from earlier, from my Incident, or that text, or maybe my panic over my father’s offer, and I forced myself to shut my eyes and breathe. I was safe. I was fine. To emphasize the point, I shut the door behind me and locked it.
I could see all the exits. I could see the whole of my room. No one else was there.
Still.
Grimly, I made myself check. In the closet. Under the desks. My papers were where I’d left them, the physics syllabus and my notes and the essay I’d written on Beloved. My sheets were a mess at the end of the mattress. I’d left the window cracked to counteract the overeager radiator, but I was three floors up, and no one could have climbed up the front of our building to break in here, not since the school installed all those spotlights after Dobson’s murder.
A breath. Another. I set my dinner up next to my laptop and went to click over to my physics presentation. With luck, I could be done and in bed by midnight.
It wasn’t there.
I had left with my presentation open on my laptop, and it wasn’t there.
I checked the cloud. My email. I searched my files. I opened up a different word processing app, just in case I’d used it by accident. Nothing.
Five hours of work. I had been gone for fifteen minutes. And it was gone.
How could I be so stupid? I rifled through the papers on my desk, knowing there wasn’t a hard copy but looking anyway, like an idiot, a panicking idiot. I would have had to shut the application. Drag the file to the trash. When I’d come in, was I really that distracted? That upset? How could I have—
A feeling, like a finger skimming the back of my neck. I whirled around in my chair, but I was alone.
That was, of course, when my phone buzzed.
Six
Charlotte
I HAD HAD ONE FINAL CONVERSATION WITH MY BROTHER, Milo, in the weeks after the incident at Sussex.
He’d come to Switzerland, to Lucerne, where I was living with our mother. She had let him in. She made a small fuss over him—brushing invisible lint off his shoulders, adjusting his collar—and then, those gestures completed to her satisfaction, returned to her desk to complete her onboarding materials for her new employer. She’d found a lab in Switzerland to take her on. A place to disappear into, to forget.