Page 13

We went to lunch.

That’s not a euphemism for violence. We did actually go off to find ourselves food.

With his casual pomposity, Sullivan—after shrugging loose of Rowan’s grip—led our mismatched group to the dining hall, lightly stepping over the spongy remnants of his opponent.

The crowd withered from him like flesh from a flame.

If he cared at all about the impression he made, if he noticed their terror and their nervous appraisal, Sullivan evidenced no indication of it, his face as expressive as the mostly eaten one spread over the floor.

Portia stepped daintily around the mess without comment, remote again, almost secretarial in her poise.

Rowan was the only one of us to pay any mind to the sad heap of remains: he went down to a squat beside a white curve of rib, and touched conciliatory fingers to the damp bone.

His usual effrontery was nowhere to be seen.

In its place, an intense thoughtfulness that vanished when he realized he was being watched.

“Why the gloves?” I said in lieu of what I wanted to say instead, which was, What are you hiding under all that vulgarity?

Rowan looked down at his hands, turning them slowly in the light.

He was, for the most part, dressed in the uniform of every emo-grunge kid I’d ever met: washed-out flannel, graphic tee, skinny jeans, black Converse.

The gloves, however, were straight out of a falconer’s or welder’s tool cabinet: they were thick and utilitarian, meant to protect the wearer.

The fingers were hachured with creases, wrinkled in every angle and direction.

Rowan had gone out of his way to force some dexterity into them.

No, I adjusted the initial thought. He wasn’t wearing those gloves to protect himself.

On cue, with perfect and practiced dickishness, he said, “Gloves are a kink of mine.”

I left it at that.

As with everything else in Hellebore, the dining hall was unnecessarily grand with its frescoed ceiling—another clever trompe l’oeil (the school was lousy with them), this one depicting a blue sky fleecy with clouds and wasps the size of airplanes, false sunlight coruscating through their massive wings—and overdecorated windows, the latter briared with flowing traceries and inlaid with lead-light.

Every student in the hall, and there were surprisingly many, was sheened with the rainbow light streaming through the stained glass.

Even the hot food station was a vision of excess.

Instead of being set on steel steam tables, the troughs of entrees—these were ordinary enough, comprising of sausages, orange chicken, steamed broccoli, and all the other victuals familiar to anyone in college—were set in carved camphor structures, and the salad bar rose above a sculpture of a forest in which skinless deer hunted frightened knights.

“Gross,” said Rowan, sidling up beside me as I ladled a generous portion of kung pao chicken onto my plate.

My mother was generically Asian, as she liked to put it.

Whenever someone prescribed an ethnicity to her, she acknowledged it as what she was, though whenever I’d seen her do so, it was with the same bored expression.

My stepfather had joked about her being inscrutable and exactly how he liked his women: difficult enough to read that he could justify not giving a shit.

After all, it wasn’t his fault she hadn’t tried harder.

She never laughed. When we were alone, she’d tell me our work in the world was to endure.

Fuck that.

Anyway, as a result of this disinterest in her heritage, our home never saw home-cooked meals, only an abundance of the nominally Asian takeouts that my stepfather had loved; it was an improvement, however, over when my actual father was alive, the latter disdaining anything but the blandest, beigest of meals.

For the most part, I haven’t regretted leaving, but a part of me would always be sorry I never got to become the kind of middle-aged woman who could berate their mother for her choices in men.

“Don’t knock it until you try it,” I told him absently.

“The kung pao?” he said. “No, that I like. Talking about the weird carvings. They could at least make them sexy.”

I pretended I hadn’t taken any notice of the wooden friezes, the stark and frightened faces of the knights mouthing an exaggerated oh, which earned me a throaty chuckle; Rowan was buying none of it. He winked.

“Gruesome stuff, huh?”

“More of Bella Khoury’s work, I imagine.”

“You know, I’ve always wondered why she was so obsessed with carnivorous deer.”

“Probably a metaphor for how the poor dream of eating the rich,” I said, adding a token amount of broccoli. I thought of her portrait again, her sullen eyes. “Or something to that tune.”

“I think it could be for shock value,” said Rowan loftily, the eternal contrarian, heaping a bloody mass of chopped-up steak onto his plate, the white ceramic pinking with the runoff.

“Art exists because the artist doesn’t want to be forgotten.

Because the artiste ”—he stretched the word into its French counterpart, taking clear pleasure in the act—“wants to live forever in the minds of their audience.”

“Do you really think that?” I was amused despite myself. Rowan grinned at me from the other side of the steaming trays, ladling gravy and fries atop a throne of red meat to create what looked like an American’s idea of poutine. “Given everything I’ve heard, I somehow doubt it.”

Toward the north end of the hot food station, right under the tray holding the massive serving of badly stirred risotto, was a bas-relief of six fawns, identifiable by the speckled pelts and the softly drawn ears, with their muzzles buried in the unspooled mess of a hunter’s entrails, the man still alive despite being unraveled, his face a rictus of agony.

There was a filmic quality to the whole hideous affair.

I had to wonder if Khoury had carved this from imagination or if she’d used references, and if references had been used, had it been a collage of images or had she a specific muse?

“No,” said Rowan.

“What do you think then?”

Rowan waited until I met his eyes again to say: “I think she needed to do something with her rage at the world or she’d burn it all down.”

A shiver wormed through me. Before I could reply, he added, diffusing the moment, “Pity I was born too late to meet such a goth mommy. I bet she was a freak in the sack.”

I laughed. I was beginning to like him. It was hard not to.

Rowan was caddish and crass but he was funny and self-deprecating about it which made all the difference.

Here was a man who didn’t just disbelieve his own hype but took an active pleasure in making himself a fool for the world’s entertainment.

“Maybe the curriculum will include necromancy,” I said. “That way you’ll be able to find out.”

“If I should be so lucky,” said Rowan, his shit-eating grin at odds with those eyes of his, blue like the bottom of a lake.

They held a dangerous sincerity, an interest I couldn’t help but be flattered by: it felt like an invitation to share in a conspiracy, like a heart carved out and held up to me on a plate.

Like I said: dangerous. In another life, I might have bitten down on that bloody bait but I wasn’t looking to stay at Hellebore and even if I was, it wouldn’t be for him.

I snuck a glance over Rowan’s shoulder, and saw Portia sitting beside Sullivan, reanimated, jovial, laughing.

Any animosity that the two had possessed toward each other seemed to have since dissipated.

As I stared at them, it occurred to me that Portia’s inconsistencies hadn’t killed my interest: they had deepened it, something I resented.

Relationships were nooses and people deadweight: the romantics always ended up hanging from their hearts.

And I hadn’t survived this long to die for a pretty face.

“So, your name is Alice, huh?”

“Alessa.”

“Huh,” said Rowan. “Short for Alexandra?”

“Nope.”

“Alessandra?” said Rowan, overemphasizing the middle syllable.

“Nope,” I said, filling the last crescent of empty space on my plate with pickled radish, less because I had any craving for it and more because of the incongruence of their presence. An entire array of Americanized food and then for some reason, authentic danmuji. “It’s just Alessa.”

“Weird name but okay.”

“Glad you approve, I guess,” I said sourly.

This was the second time today someone’d taken an unwholesome interest in my name, both of whom were white as cocaine.

I was ready then to find a different table to nurse my lunch when a short, skinny boy rushed up to us, his heavily freckled face a rictus of badly suppressed terror.

“You don’t want that,” said the boy to Rowan. His Scottish accent was thick enough to slather on a piece of toast.

“Don’t want what?”

As a collective, we weren’t old enough yet to have accumulated even fine lines, but there was something about how the skin hung on the boy’s bones that made me wonder if he’d ever had a day’s worth of joy in his life: it was around his mouth, the basset hound tilt of his eyes.

His pale green gaze twitched between Rowan’s plate and the door to the kitchen.

The boy cleared his throat and pointed a bony finger at the bastardized poutine.

“ That. The meat’s, well”—he swallowed, blatantly nervous—“it’s not good, you see?”

“It’s rotten?” I said, squinting at my own plate and what little I could see of Rowan’s under its armor of gravy. I hadn’t taken any of the steak but if one entree had been allowed to spoil, the state of everything else was now in question.

“I heard that in haute circles, rotten steak’s kinda like a delicacy,” said Rowan with far too much glee. “Well, they don’t say it’s rotten. It’s dry-aged. But technically, it’s the same—”

“No, n-no, it’s not rotten.” Panic had usurped terror’s place in the boy’s expression.

I realized then that while he had on one of Hellebore’s uniforms, his waist was aproned and his shirt was splotched with rust-colored patches of what I hoped was grease but suspected was not.

The humiliating pièce de résistance: a name tag identifying him as Eoan.

He fumbled for Rowan’s plate. “Please. Just pass it over here. I’ll make you something else—”

“If it’s not rotten, why can’t I eat it?

” demanded Rowan in a bright, happy voice, swooping his plate out of reach: he had five inches on Eoan but even if he hadn’t, Rowan had pendulously long arms and a reach that might have had the NBA knocking had he seemed remotely predisposed toward athleticism.

“Because it’s not for you. ”

We all turned as a fourth voice boomed. We turned to see a man of considerable age, thin white hair slicked back over a skull conspicuously absent of liver spotting.

His eyebrows were of identical color as was his neatly trimmed goatee, his flocked jacket, his pants (these were textured by gray pinstripes), and his shoes.

He was an obnoxious sight: no one wore this much white unless they were convinced the world would turn itself inside out to avoid dirtying his ensemble.

I’d have been more disdainful if not for the fact I couldn’t help but shudder each time his eyes grazed my skin.

“Professor Stone,” said the boy, nearly prostrating himself onto the floor. “I-I—”

Stone sucked his teeth at him, ignoring Rowan and I. “You put one of our meals in the wrong tray, didn’t you, Eoan?”

“No, no, it wasn’t—”

“Then who else could it be? Certainly, the servitors know better.”

“ Servitors? ” trilled Rowan, lowering his plate. “Tell me more.”

“There’s nothing to tell. They’re just automata that the school uses,” said Professor Stone, reaching over so he could harpoon a piece of meat with the tip of an extraordinarily long fingernail.

Gravy and other fluids dripped down a hand so bare of collagen, it was practically leather over bone.

He fed it almost sensually between his teeth, chewing open-mouthed as he spoke.

“I’m afraid the educational department’s budget is incredibly sparse. ”

“Isn’t Hellebore a private institute?” I asked.

I had to repress the urge to run as Professor Stone’s attention reverted to me.

His eyes weren’t white, per se, but they were close enough: not the pleasant milkiness of cataracts but something more artificial, almost like paint.

His pupils swam in those eggshell pools, and I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me or through me.

Next to him, Eoan was making hushing motions.

“You have me there. We’re semiprivate, does that help?”

I would have said no if not for the fact there was Eoan, looking like he was about to collapse into tears, and the sight of his abject misery had every alarm bell in my limbic system clanging in panic.

Rowan was backing toward a trove of cutlery, indifferent to the standoff.

I met Eoan’s eyes again, saw him mouth, please, please.

“That does indeed,” I said, sweetening my voice. “Funny things, those presumptions, huh?”

“You could say that,” said Professor Stone as he took Rowan’s plate in both hands, just as the latter was preparing to dig in.

“Like I said, though, I’m afraid this isn’t for you.

” His tone raised in pitch, becoming fussy: it was the voice you’d use on an infant or a misbehaving puppy, nauseatingly saccharine. “Faculty only, I’m afraid.”

“I call this rank discrimination,” said Rowan, grinning, but there was something in his eyes now, a wary light cousin to Eoan’s terror. “But solving that is probably above your pay grade.”

Professor Stone only smiled, lowering his head over the plate and then, like a dog, began lapping chunks of meat and potato into his mouth, his tongue an ungodly red as it dragged over the mess.

“You know what? I’m not hungry anymore.” Rowan backed up, hands flung up in objection. “I’ll grab an espresso or something. What do you say, Alessa?”

“Way ahead of you.”