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I

Boston, Massachusetts

The house has a heart and it is pounding.

The bass shudders through the wall, and Alice leans back into it—that wall, as out of place as she is, a shock of freshly painted green, fairy lights running up and down like little neon flowers—and lets the beat knock against her own ribs, imagines herself in the belly of some great beast instead of the crowded blue co-op, one hand clutching her phone and the other holding a cup of something that smells like turpentine.

Everyone else looks like they’re having fun, so Alice does her best impression of a mirror, and wonders for the third or fourth time what she’s doing there.

She vaguely remembers someone knocking on the suite door earlier that night, saying “Party at the Co-op,” and an hour later being swept along with her suitemates, Jana and Rachel and Lizbeth, the mass of them not yet friends, no longer strangers, V elcroed to each other by their newness and the first few weeks of uni.

Lizbeth, who’s from Kent (the university put them together, probably thought they were doing them a service, not realizing how different English and Scottish are), and has the kind of accent people call crisp, clean (which Alice cannot stand because it makes hers wrinkled, dirty, by comparison) and who actually called her pastoral the day they met, as if Alice were a painting and not a girl from the other side of the same island.

As for Rachel and Jana, one’s from New Jersey and the other from New York (and the day they all met it took Alice half a conversation to realize they were speaking English, too, because they both talk so fast that it’s like someone went in and took all the spaces out), and when Alice finally got a word in, Rachel let out a gleeful squee and said, “Oh my god, you sound like Outlander !” even though her accent has never been that thick.

The only thing that made it better was the fact they made the same fuss over Lizbeth’s clipped consonants, saying she sounded like the queen, and at least Alice got to keep her name, while the two of them only ever refer to Lizbeth as Queenie now.

(And Her Highness, but only when she isn’t there.)

They’re the ones who dragged her here. Alice doesn’t even like parties, but she’s trying, fresh start and all that, so she let them doll her up, and the four of them set out for the Co-op like a pack, and she was just starting to think that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, but then they hit the front door and just kind of broke apart, and now Alice is alone and hugging the green wall like it’s an anchor, a finish line instead of a starting point.

If her sister Catty were here, she’d nag Alice for being a barnacle, pry her off and fling her back into the social tide, but Catty’s an ocean away, so Alice escapes into her phone instead, and opens the photo app.

Sometimes she takes pictures, but mostly she just watches. It’s easier to look at the world this way, to take it in. (Four inches of metal and glass is as good as a shield, since no one notices a phone, and if they do, they just assume you’re looking at yourself instead of them.)

On her screen, the party is reduced to a picture in a frame. Someone has thrown colored kerchiefs over all the lamps, and the crowded room becomes a medley of colored blooms. The music erased, transmuted into movement, a blur of bodies.

Alice stares through the screen, combing the sea of half-learned faces, searching for her suitemates.

She doesn’t find them but she does spot three familiar heads bent together in the open kitchen, pouring drinks.

Not Jana or Lizbeth or Rachel, but more girls from floor three: Sam and Hannah and Elle.

(Though, in truth, Alice isn’t sure which is Sam and which is Elle—not because they look alike, just because they always seem to come as a pair, and when Hannah first introduced them as “Sam and Elle,” she didn’t point out which was which, and now it feels too late to ask.)

Alice starts heading toward them, against the current, elbows and shoulders and hips bumping hers, but somehow she’s the one who says, “Sorry,” “Sorry,” “Sorry.” Hannah sees her coming but doesn’t look happy, doesn’t wave, and Alice suspects it’s because Hannah tried to bond with her week one over the most fuckable guys on their floor (and Alice should have told her there and then that she was gay, but the last thing she needs is the drama or the pointed looks, like she’d try it on with any of them just because they had the right parts) so she’d shrugged and said they all looked nice enough and Hannah had snorted and said she must have low standards because the pickings were so slim back in Scotland.

And now that Alice is remembering that conversation, her legs don’t want to move, the current is too strong, and the other girls suddenly feel very far away, and she’s about to return to her spot on the green wall when someone clips her elbow, sloshing the turpentine in her cup, and the drink didn’t even spill, not really, just a few wayward drops on black jeans, but it’s the excuse she needs to escape.

She ducks into the hall, and there’s the front door, and past it, the mile walk back to the Yard, and it would be so easy to just leave, leave, go back to Matthews, which is probably a graveyard of abandoned rooms because it’s Saturday night and everyone is here, and Alice knows she shouldn’t go, because she decided, the day she left home, that everything back in Scotland was then, and this is now.

The moment when her whole life starts.

Only she’s been here three weeks, and the now s keep piling up, keep passing her by.

There was the now after she waved goodbye at the airport, and the one after the plane took off, and after she landed in Boston, and after the cab spit her out outside the nearest gate, and after she hauled her bags into her new room, and after classes started, and after she stepped into this house.

And it turns out there’s no magic threshold, no fresh start, and Alice is still Alice, and maybe it’s the too-loud music ringing through her teeth or the fact a storm’s been building all day and the air outside the Co-op is just as heavy as the air within, but she feels a little dizzy, a little sick, a little drunk.

She only had two shots back at Matthews, courtesy of Rachel, just enough to shave the sharp edges off her thoughts, and it clearly wasn’t enough, because she can feel the panic ticking like a bomb behind her ribs, and—

(Sometimes, when her head used to take her body hostage, Catty would cup Alice’s face and say, “Hey, hey now, you’re just confused. You think this is panic but you’re wrong. It’s excitement. You’re having fun! This is what fun feels like!”)

This is what fun feels like, she tells herself now, turning away from the front door and looking for a bathroom instead.

A moment, that’s all she needs, a moment alone, a chance to collect herself.

There is a toilet halfway down the hall, but the line is four deep, so she keeps going, until she finds a bedroom at the end with an en suite.

Alice crosses the room, lit only by a single bedside lamp, its light veiled purple by the scarf cast over the shade, and disappears into the bathroom, closing the door, a single wooden slab of armor against the world.

For a second, she’s cocooned in darkness, a solid, all-surrounding black, but then she flicks the wall switch on and flinches in the sudden, too-white light.

And there she is, reflected in the dingy mirror over the sink.

Alice Moore, eighteen and caught between.

Neither particularly short nor tall, hair more ash than blond, fringe growing out after she hacked it short over the summer, so now it falls right into her eyes, which aren’t exactly blue, or green, or gray, but an uncertain mix, like every part of her is undecided, stuck midstride.

The kind of looks their gran always said she’d grow into, as if her skin is just an outfit that needs to be tailored, styled, worn right—she feels like there should be a manual for that.

After all, she’s seen those girls who can wear anything, and make it look natural, effortless, chic—and then there’s Alice, who always feels like she’s playing dress-up in someone else’s closet, and looks that way, too.

Nothing fits, even if it’s fitted, because it’s not really about the size of the body or how it fills the clothes, but how much space it takes up in the world.

Alice shrinks, is swallowed, disappears.

No—disappearing would be better, because maybe in the absence of Alice she could become someone else.

One of the feral girls, who have been planted and watered in their bodies, who have pruned their looks, or let them grow wild, the same girls who turn their full brows into a wolfish power, their painted lips into a weapon.

Now Alice leans in close, until her hips cut into the sink and her breath fogs on the glass, blurs the image of the girl on the other side.

You’re having fun, she tells her heart, and her heart thuds back in all its stupid anxious glory no no no no and Alice wants to cut it out, wants to be a different version of herself, one that isn’t so goddamn insecure.

The fog on the mirror melts away, revealing her face.

She’d done the makeup back at the suite, mascara and winged liner and a smoky lid, and she doesn’t remember rubbing her face but she must have because one eye is already smudged, shadows streaking her cheekbone like a bruise, and instead of trying to fix it—Alice didn’t bring the makeup, didn’t even bring a purse—she smudges the other one, too, trying to make the imperfections even, wincing when the liner gets in her eyes and makes them water, burn, but the result is a stripe of darkness, like a mask.

A disguise, and for a second, just a second, it feels like someone else is staring back.

A different version of herself, snap a photo now and you wouldn’t know about the cluttered head and anxious heart, all you’d see is those blue-green eyes made brighter by the surrounding dark, the pale blond hair made wild by the humid night.

She wishes she could trade herself for the girl in the glass. This other Alice, who doesn’t care, who takes up space, who has no growing left to do.

If not for forever, then at least for tonight.

And maybe it’s the bass thudding through the walls, or maybe she’s just tired of being herself, or maybe it’s all that waiting waiting waiting for her life to start, but she decides to take a chance.

If Catty were here she would make it a game (not that Catty actually needed an excuse to be reckless, but Alice likes games, because games come with rules, and it’s easier to be bold when there are boundaries, edges, and ends).

So here it is.

The game. The rules.

When Alice steps out of the bathroom, she will turn right to the party, not left toward the door, and she will be the girl in the mirror, the backward reflection of herself.

Not Old Alice, but New.

New Alice, who leans in instead of out.

New Alice, who doesn’t say sorry every time she so much as skims the air around another person’s space, as if none of it belongs to her.

New Alice, who knows that the knocking of her heart is just her body telling her brain that she is having fun—

(And besides, it’s not for forever, time spooling away like a street, but just for a night, hell just for an hour, and then she can turn back into a pumpkin when it’s done.)

She checks her phone and sees it is eleven, on the dot.

An hour, she thinks, and then she leans in and kisses the mirror, leaving a pale pink ghost on the glass. She flicks off the light and throws the door open, suddenly bold, ready to embrace the ticking clock—

And then she sees the girl on the bed.