Page 34

The curtains are drawn, but light still pries at the edges, and Alice wants to burrow deeper, find her way back to Hoxburn, but it’s Monday morning and she has class and Rachel is still cursing.

She forces herself up, opens the door in time to see her suitemate dragging the laundry sack into the common room.

“What’s wrong?” she asks hoarsely.

Rachel kicks the laundry bag and mutters, “Hate it when I’m early,” and Alice should have stayed put, because she can smell it now, the blood on the sheets, and everything inside her gives a vicious twist, teeth sharpening in her mouth, and she has just enough time to close the door before Rachel glances up.

Alice shudders slightly, slumps back against the door, but the thin boundary of wood is not enough, and the blood is still there and the dream is still there and before she knows it, she’s biting into her own hand.

The blood slicking her tongue tastes sweet and wrong, like rancid honey, but it steadies her, at least.

“Are you feeling better?” Rachel calls through the door, and Alice forces her jaw to loosen, watches the puncture marks heal like a time lapse in reverse as she swallows her own blood and lies through her clenched teeth.

“Yeah,” she manages, “a bit.”

“Want me to grab you anything?” Rachel must be leaning against the door because Alice swears she can hear the other girl’s heart rapping like knuckles on the wood before she tells her no.

Mercifully, Rachel and her soiled laundry leave, and Alice slides down until she’s sitting on the floor. Her laptop lies discarded at the foot of her bed, the Post-it stuck on top.

She digs her palms into her eyes.

Last night, Alice found exactly zero Lotties in the school directory, but back home, Lottie is a common nickname for Charlotte, and she found twelve of those spread across four years in the record.

Each one had a photo, and none of them were her.

(Of course, it never occurred to Alice to ask Lottie if she was even a student, because by that point, her mind was blank, and her mouth was busy.)

After hitting that dead end, she spent the next few hours scouring social media, trawling for any pictures from the party.

There were plenty of those, though most were either tilted shots of bodies in neon light, close-up selfies, or artful pics of disembodied limbs, and she was just beginning to suspect that Lottie wasn’t there, wasn’t real, that Alice might simply be losing her mind, when she saw her.

It was almost dawn when she found the photo.

One and only one, and in it, Lottie’s face is caught mid-turn, violet curls lifting off her cheeks as she flashes the corner of a dimpled smile, the edge of a brown eye.

But it’s her. Alice knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, because even through the screen, she found herself tipping forward toward the other girl’s gaze, had to look away before she fell in.

Alice saved the candid to her phone, and after that, went crashing into sleep.

But now she’s awake, and it seems like such a narrow lead.

She still has no idea what to do, how to turn a single out-of-focus picture into a flesh-and-blood girl who can explain what’s happening to her, who can tell her why, and there’s a voice in her head saying that it won’t make a difference, that it’s already done, that no matter how far she goes, how far she’s come, there’s no escaping—

Class.

That’s it. Alice needs to go to class.

Sure, it feels a bit ridiculous, given what’s going on, but she knows how easy it is to fall behind, and then how hard to catch up.

She gets back to her feet, pulls on a top and a fresh pair of jeans, and as she does, she tastes Lizbeth’s detergent wafting from her drawers, smells the dregs of Jana’s perfume, which she dabbed behind her ears before the party, feels the scrape of her own hair against her face, the whisper of cotton as it shifts against her skin, and the warmth of her gold pendant where it rests against her sternum, all of it so sharp it’s overwhelming.

A heartbeat quickens in her ears, and Alice gasps and presses a hand flat against her chest, relief welling up like tears until she realizes the pulse isn’t coming from behind her ribs. It’s that familiar eight-count beat, and soon the voice kicks in.

“When I was a child / I got lost in the woods . . .”

Alice digs the phone out from under the covers and silences the song, and the pulse, plunging herself back into that uncanny silence.

Only it’s not really silent, is it, because if she listens, she can hear the footsteps in the hall and the groan of the pipes inside the walls and the tinny ghost of speakers playing somewhere on the Yard.

So many noises stacking, overlapping, tangling inside her head.

Alice drifts to the window, studying the blade of light between the curtains. She chews the inside of her cheek and reaches out, letting the sun graze her fingertips, bracing as she does for the sear of a hand on a hot stove, ready to recoil as her flesh begins to burn.

But it doesn’t.

There’s a strange sensation, sure, like ants crawling across her knuckles, a dizzy wrongness, like vertigo. She steels herself and pulls the curtain back, wincing as the too-bright light sends a lance of pain behind her eyes, like the onset of a migraine.

But she doesn’t go up in flames.

Alice: 1, common lore: 0, she thinks, even as she hauls the curtain shut, plunging the room back into relative shade.

Relative, because even with the blinds drawn, she can see everything in sharp relief, from the lines of tight script in the open textbook on her desk, to the wrinkles in her sheets, to the silver rings and bracelets adorning Lizbeth’s jewelry tree.

(All of it real and not sterling, Alice knows, because her roommate made a point of telling her as she was unpacking that her skin rejected alloys, so she simply couldn’t wear anything unless it was pure silver or real gold, even made a joke about her body having expensive taste.)

Now Alice reaches out and lays a questing finger on the nearest bangle, waits to see if it will singe her. This time, she doesn’t feel the wrongness of it, doesn’t feel anything at all.

Alice: 2.

And maybe she’s feeling bolstered by those two points stacked in her favor, or maybe it’s the fact that her first class is econ and one of the students in her section lives at the Co-op (which means he might recognize the girl in the photo on her phone) but Alice shoves on her shoes, nicks a pair of shades from Lizbeth’s desk, and sets off.

Halfway across the Yard, she has regrets.

Even with the shades, the sun is piercing, and though the daylight doesn’t burn her, it plants itself like a hot wet hand on the back of her neck, reminding Alice of the time her family went out on the open water.

The waves were rough, and she spent an hour retching over the side, and that’s how she feels now, off-balance, her stomach rising in her throat, only this time she is the ship and the girl and the rolling sea all at once.

By the time she reaches the nearest gate, her limbs are shaking, and when she finally stumbles into the safety of the building, she sags against the wall, waiting for the sickness to retreat.

A steady current of students fills the hall, headphones on, heads bowed, one of those grim reminders that your life is small and the world is big, and even when it feels like it’s falling down, it’s only falling down on you. To everyone else, it’s just going on as usual.

The scent of coffee reaches Alice from a kiosk.

Her throat feels like it’s made of sandpaper, and she pushes off the wall and orders a straight coffee, simple, black, hoping to rack a third point in the game of Alice versus common lore.

She takes a cautious sip, and shudders in relief when it doesn’t come back up.

But it doesn’t taste right, either.

She adds one sugar, two, three, but it’s like spraying air freshener over rot—all it does is add a second, noxious layer, a film on her tongue, and after that she gives up, dumps the contents from the cup, thirstier than ever as she heads for the econ auditorium.

The room is filling up, and she scans the growing crowd, until she finally spots the guy from the Co-op, manages to dredge up his name (Sam) right before she reaches his seat.

“Hey,” she says, and he looks up at her, starts to smile, and Alice swears she can feel his interest piquing, before she shoves the phone into his face.

“I’m looking for this girl,” she says, and his shoulders slump, before he even glances at the screen.

He shakes his head and mumbles, “Sorry, never seen her.”

“She was at the party.”

He shrugs. “So was half the class.” His mouth twitches. “Didn’t get her number?”

Annoyance prickles in her chest, but then the professor is clearing his throat, and everyone is taking their seat. Alice sinks into an open desk, stares down at the face on the screen, wonders if she should actually paper campus with flyers asking, Have you seen this girl?

She shoves the phone in her pocket, pulls the notebook from her bag, and tries to focus on the teacher’s voice—

(so loud she can hear the echoes trailing in its wake)

—his notes as they appear on the glaringly white screen—

(Has it always been that bright?)

—as the sights and smells and sounds around her mount—

(the scratching of pens, the typing of keys, the girl chewing gum two rows ahead, and the guy, four seats over, jiggling his knee, or the cell phones buzzing in backpacks on the floor, or the sweat and sweetness hanging in the air, thickened by stress, and sleeplessness, and strong caffeine)

—until it gets to be too much, and she puts her earbuds in, plays white noise as soft as it will go, hoping to muffle the people, the room, but it’s just like the coffee from the kiosk—

(one thing atop the other, coating it instead of canceling)