Page 32 of House of Hearts

Monday is a gloomy affair. The whole campus has grayed out over the weekend, grown stiff and cold like a funeral procession.

The streamers have been picked off the ground and the gourds have been thrown in the trash and the madness of Friday is overtaken by the monotony of the several weeks until Thanksgiving break.

Graphite digs a hole in the page, and I groan to myself. Is this curse really that hard to parse? I feel like the answer is infuriatingly in reach, but I’m this close to slamming my head into the desk when Calvin waltzes in late, per usual.

His tardy arrival shouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary, but he’s acting incredibly off. Calvin is the type of guy to strut into a room and bask in everyone’s attention like his very life depends on it.

Right now he seems like a paranoid husk of himself.

“Is he okay?” Birdie whispers from our balcony seats. “He looks…”

She doesn’t need to finish that thought as he scrambles his way up the steps and trips over his own two feet in the process.

He’s not looking where he’s going because he’s busy looking everywhere else, scoping out all the corners as if he expects a hit man to be waiting in the wings.

When no one takes him down in a mafia-style assassination attempt, he manages to secure his seat, and even then, he searches the room frantically.

Tripp throws him a weird look, but even he must understand that finding your brother in a magical coma does this to a guy.

Class continues like that. Our professor prattles on while Calvin gets jumpier by the second.

His paranoia reaches a boiling point mid-lecture and manifests in the snap of a pencil between his fingertips.

The pressure splinters it in two and the eraser half thunks into a girl’s head in front of him.

Dr.Sampson’s stub of chalk drags a screeching path down the blackboard, and the sound has Calvin erupting from his seat. He flies up in a worried frenzy, his chair skidding back as he rises to his feet before it tips backward onto the floor.

The class has gone deathly silent, the only sound the flustered panic of Calvin throwing his belongings haphazardly in his bag, papers flying all around him and his expression distant and horrified.

He doesn’t say a word on his way out, just takes the stairs two at a time and escapes the room with a ragged breath and a slam of the door behind him.

The auditorium breaks out in a whispered chorus of gossip. “What the hell was that about?”

For the first time ever, even Tripp seems thrown off as he looks up from his phone to our balcony seats. He doesn’t need to say a word as he meets our eyes because it’s written all over his face.

Something is wrong with Calvin.

It continues like that all week. The next incident falls on Tuesday morning in Sutherland Hall. We briefly make eye contact across the dining hall, and he promptly freaks out. There’s no warning as he drops his untouched food, tray and all, into the trash and runs out.

“God, what’s his damage?” Amber asks, first to Oliver and then to the rest of us when her boyfriend only shrugs.

“He was like this in study hall with me, too. He was so weird, it actually inspired me. Okay, follow me here, guys. Full spread in the Herald . Title: ‘Lockwell’s Lost It.’ How does that sound? ”

Oliver crunches a celery stick between his teeth and uses half of it to point at her. “It sounds like a lawsuit.”

“A lawsuit for what?”

“Libel.”

She huffs. “Is it libel if it’s true?”

Cafeteria-gate isn’t the last Lockwell incident. It happens again as I’m racing to Shakespearean Lit. The class is hardly worth racing for when I have a Queen of Hearts card in my pocket, but I hate using it and I hate being late for anything most of all.

I run into Calvin outside the English building. He’s muttering to himself while walking in a frantic circle. Cracking his knuckles, chewing on his nails, messing up his already-messed-up hair.

I know I should force myself to walk past him and make it to class, but my legs have another agenda entirely. Before I know it, I’m standing at his back, tugging on his sleeve.

“Calvin?” I ask, and that simple word is all it takes to break him from his trance.

It zaps to the core of him, and he quickly stumbles away, staring at me in what can only be described as an unflattering blend of shock and horror.

He shakes his head. “I’m late.”

“Calvin!”

He’s running now, taking off like the spooked hare in the maze. “Sorry, I’m late! Can’t talk!”

His silhouette retreats hastily in the distance, farther and farther until he’s a lost speck in the landscape.

Rain has returned to Hart. It rampages against the windows and summons the worms up from the earth, where they lie waiting and writhing.

That’s how I feel, too. The mattress groans beneath my weight, and I pull the duvet up to my throat. Birdie might be a typhoon at the best of times, but there’s something comforting about hearing her toss and turn.

“I can’t believe he didn’t even show up to our last meeting,” she gossiped while slipping into pajamas before bed. “He’s taking everything really, really hard…which is fair, but…I don’t know. Sadie still comes to meetings.” She shook her head and turned to me. “What do you think?”

“I think…” What did I think? That his mind was a mess after the graveyard? That he was still revolted from our almost-kiss? “I don’t know.”

But neither of these feels like the reason for this behavior. There’s a puzzle piece missing from the board, a gap in the equation rendering it unsolvable. Something is wrong, and for the life of me, I don’t know what.

It’s still on my mind as Birdie mumbles into her pillow. I can’t say how long I lie there, staring up helplessly at the ceiling, before exhaustion finally catches me. Sleep sinks into my bones, dragging me under the second I least expect it.

I dream of a woman in white.

She’s a young bride opposite my easel, her beauty captured on canvas with each stroke of my brush.

Her lacy sleeves billow against her wrists, and her train hangs behind her like a gauzy blur of lake fog.

She looks achingly like Calvin. The same Cupid’s bow lips and firefly eyes, the same chiseled jaw and prominent cheekbones. I know who she is immediately.

Helen Hart.

Which makes the man beside her Oleander Lockwell. He’s an indiscernible shadow of gray, his dream-self a murky smudge in my mind’s eye. Helen’s the only one in total clarity here, her forced smile wavering in place on her lips as I paint.

I dip my paintbrush in fresh color, but before I can paint her bouquet, she shakes her head. “Violet.”

What?

I open my mouth, but it’s not my voice I hear. I’m merely a spectator in someone else’s skin. “Pardon, miss?”

“Paint me with violets instead.”

“Whatever for?” Oleander’s disembodied voice asks.

She doesn’t dignify his question with an answer. Her voice is pleading when she returns to me. “Violets, please.”

I do as she asks, swishing my brush in vibrant purple rather than the orange of the marigolds she’s holding.

It’s only as I finish the last petal that the windows shatter in a sudden spray of glass.

The couple sits unfazed even as the wind rips their portrait off its easel and the rain melts their image away.

Helen’s still speaking, but her words are riddled and strange as the storm drenches me down to the bone.

“There’s fennel for you, and columbines.

There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me. ”

Rainwater trickles down my cheek, slipping a path off my brow and down my nose until it finds its way to the crack of my lips.

It tastes like rust and salt.

The dream fades with the very real feeling of droplets splattering against my skin. Sleep crusts in the corners of my eyelids, and I whine as I wake up to the sensation of something wet.

Likely a leak. We’d get those back at home all the time. I rub my eyes and blink into the darkness, anticipating the next drop.

Except it’s not rainwater.

A bloodied woman hovers in the air above me.

Anastasia in the flesh, a waking nightmare from the dream that was her sister.

She’s a fury of curls, her hair as dark iron red as her blood.

It drips from the horrible hollow in her chest, the tip of a knife piercing through her rib cage.

The hilt of the blade appears to be decorated with a cursive initial, but the letter itself is shadowed and indistinguishable in the dark.

She stares down at it, aghast as the blade sinks deeper and deeper yet.

Pushed in by an invisible hand, frighteningly close to my own skin.

Her thin, featherlight brows lift in terror, and her mouth gapes like a fish on dry land.

I make a soft noise in the back of my throat.

The start of a question. The rest of it dies on my tongue.

I clatter around for the lamp on the bedside table, unsure if I want to see this woman—this ghost—in full, horrifying detail but knowing I can’t face anything in the dark. Yellow light floods the room, chasing her image away like a sputter of smoke.

With a cupped hand to my mouth, I muffle my scream before it can fully leave my chest. Birdie is still blissfully asleep on the opposite end of the room, her arms flung up to the headboard and her chest rising and falling in measured beats.

I could wake her. I should wake her. Except when I open my mouth again to call out her name, nothing comes out.

Panic has robbed the air from my lungs and buried this room several feet under. I’m left with a pocket of air, each shallow gasp depleting the oxygen further. I breathe in what I can, and it’s as unpleasant as a mouthful of soil, heavy and dry on my tongue.

I need to get the hell out of here. Logically, I know I’m not buried alive, but my nails are seconds from clawing at the walls, splintering my fingers down to jagged stubs of plaster and paint.