Page 6

EMMA PACES BACK and forth across a square of moonlight on the dorm room floor.

It’s past midnight. She barely paid attention in her last class of the day, Philosophy and Ethics, but a line from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is stuck in her head anyway.

“Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world,” he wrote.

Emma’s interpretation of this is simple: If a person can’t picture something happening in their mind, they think that it can’t actually happen in real life.

That person would be wrong, of course, and Emma is living proof of it. She’d never imagined a world where she lost her family like dominoes, one after the other. But here she is.

Twelve steps to the east wall, twelve steps back to the west. Emma’s probably walked a mile just inside her dorm room tonight, while her roommate, Olivia, snores under a flowered comforter.

Olivia hasn’t heard anything about Emma’s essay yet, and Emma hasn’t told her about getting marched into Hastings’s office.

If Emma couldn’t imagine things happening in real life, Olivia is an example of someone who can’t distinguish between her real life and her online one.

The whole campus is buzzing about Emma’s morning exploits, but Olivia’s most important contacts aren’t on campus—they are her followers and subscribers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, all feeders for her OnlyFans, which she says she’s only doing in order to be able to afford Yale.

If Olivia isn’t studying, she’s building her brand, expanding her audience, and analyzing algorithms. Meanwhile, Emma googles “climate crisis” and “teen mental health” and “modern day slavery” and “five stages of grief” and then writes essays about self-immolation. It’s possible they aren’t the best fit.

She peels off her socks and tosses them into the corner.

Sinks into her uncomfortable desk chair.

She’s never going to be able to sleep. She wishes she could blame Olivia’s snoring, but it’s Emma’s own brain that’s the problem.

Thoughts swirling with nowhere to go. Words waiting in her throat.

It’s bad in the day, but it’s gotten intolerable at night.

If only I could call Claire.

She’s still pissed she never got to finish reading her essay out loud. But not because she wants the good grade she thinks she deserves. An A doesn’t matter when you’re dead. But if she can make her death matter, she’ll call that a win.