Page 22

I

Alice spills into the darkened Yard.

She was right, the fresh air does feel mercifully good. The heaviness is gone, the wall of low clouds replaced by open night.

She walks, her body coming unstuck a little, stride by stride, as she heads across the lamp-lit quad.

The sky overhead is more indigo than black, and the breeze runs its fingers through her hair, swipes a cool palm against her cheek, and when she drags in a few lungfuls of cold air she can taste the damp pavement from the storm the night before, and the decaying leaves, and at last she feels better.

Then her stomach cramps.

A sudden hollow twist, a reminder that Alice hasn’t had anything to eat since well before last night’s party. She thinks—hopes—the pangs might just be hunger, knows it’s too late to grab a proper dinner at Berg, but she heads there anyway, hoping to find something she can stomach.

She steps inside the dark wood hall, with its vaulted ceilings and its chandeliers, and as she grabs a tray and joins the narrow queue, her appetite flares, sudden, and surprisingly deep.

She waits her turn, tries to roll the stiffness from her spine, her attention drifting as she does to a pack of guys on their way out.

(She’s always thought of it like that, a pack, whether it’s the men who huddled, shoulders hunched, under the awning of her granddad’s pub, or the boys who went racing through the streets of Hoxburn on bald-tired bikes, or the lads who stood outside the chippie swapping joints and bottles in paper sacks.

It’s something in the way they perch, heads swiveling together like dogs scenting trouble, or mischief, or prey.

And every time Catty would see a group, she’d flash a feral grin, and snarl as they passed, and when Alice would ask what she was doing, and she’d shrug as if it was obvious, and say, “I’m showing them my teeth. ”)

Alice reaches the front of the line, and ladles oatmeal into a bowl, tops it with honey and dried fruit.

At an empty table, she sinks onto the bench, her mouth watering as her body finally comes online and she realizes she isn’t just hungry, she’s famished, she’s starving.

She spoons a heaping bite, and it is the best thing she’s ever tasted.

Right up until she swallows.

Somewhere between her tongue and her stomach, something goes wrong, some vital miscommunication, and that one bite begins to fight its way back up.

Alice rises, and runs, makes it across the hall and out the doors to the nearest bush before her stomach empties, wrings itself out hard enough it leaves her doubled over, heaving and shaking and sick.

Her legs tremble, and her head spins, and she crouches, forehead against her knees, waiting for the shudder to run through her, waiting for her stomach to unclench and her world to settle.

Her body is waging some kind of war against itself.

She can’t make sense of the signs. Her stomach rumbles, even as it revolts.

She tries to swallow, and feels the drag of sand inside her throat, and if this is a hangover, it’s officially the worst she’s ever had.

Alice tries to make a tally of the shots she took the night before, even though she knows, deep down, this isn’t that; has spent a good portion of her first month here being subjected to lectures by well-meaning adults, trying to ease the transition from dependent to independent life.

Cautionary tales of sudden freedom, and the dangers that go with it.

(As if Alice didn’t grow up in a place where kids drank well before they ever learned to drive.)

No, this is something else.

A stomach bug, maybe? Some kind of flu?

Alice is still sitting on the curb, feeling well and truly sorry for herself and trying to catalog the symptoms in case she has to find a clinic, when she senses movement—the twitch of a body drawing closer—and looks up to see a guy jogging toward her.

She tenses, suddenly on guard, before the guy slows, steps into her pool of light, and she thinks, I know him.

(Well, not know, but he has one of those familiar faces, the kind stamped on half the underclassmen she’s passed between the halls and the classrooms and the student mixers. Floppy brown hair and a crimson jumper, and a moneyed slant to his vowels that says he’s not from Boston.)

The important thing, in that moment, is that he seems to know her.

“Hey,” he says, “it’s Alice, right?” She nods, trying to place him, and after an awkward moment, he says, “Colin,” and sounds a little hurt, and she mumbles that she’s sorry, she isn’t feeling well, says she’s never been good with names and faces.

Which is true, even though she didn’t have a problem back in Hoxburn, where strangers were few and far between.

“Here,” he says, holding out a water bottle. “You look like you could use it.”

It is a small, kind gesture, and she takes the bottle, which is unopened, so she breaks the seal and drinks.

Her throat is desert dry, and she is thirsty, so thirsty, but the water won’t go down.

She feels her throat snap shut so fast she almost chokes, has no choice but to swirl the water in her mouth, and spit it back onto the curb.

“Thanks,” she says, handing the bottle back. Her nods for her to keep it. But he doesn’t leave.

“Bad night?” he asks, and Alice nods, getting to her feet. She wobbles, her vision dipping in and out. He holds out a steady hand, and she is too tired not to take it.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s get you home.”