Page 26

I’m not ashamed to say I slunk back to my dorm room after being dismissed by the headmaster, starving for the comfort of the familiar.

Like a child, I wanted to crawl under my blankets and cry until any urge to do so dried up to something more sensible, like maybe a devouring fury at my circumstances.

Unfortunately, my ambitions of being pathetically miserable were circumvented by the fact that not only was Johanna in our room when I arrived, she had her faithful friend Stefania in tow.

If my roommate was a summer heatstroke in human form, Stefania was the dead of winter: porcelain skin and pitch-black hair, a mass of silver piercings along both ears, black clothes and platform boots that gave her the look of a nineties goth and at least three inches on the two of us.

The two stared at me, expressions like those of teenagers caught passing their mother’s best bottle of scotch between them.

“Well,” said Stefania. “This is embarrassing.”

It took me a moment to parse what the hell she was referencing and when I did, any desire to sit and feel sorry for myself went away, obliterated by indignity.

“What do you think you’re doing with my duvet ?”

Until they slipped out of my mouth, I didn’t think that I, or anyone else for that matter, could fill the words my duvet with so much possessive fury.

The two girls shared a look, eyes traveling guiltily down to the corners of the blanket they had in their hands: it seemed I’d interrupted them midway through housekeeping.

Behind Johanna, a pillar of pillows slouched, denuded of their covers, a few feathers poking out of their skins.

My clothes had been folded and shoved to the side, separated into two distinct heaps—handwritten keep and donate signs hastily hung above them—which made little sense as it was all school-issued but hey, sure, there’s no accounting for fashion.

“We’re… we—” Johanna started and stopped, dropping her gaze, the skin around her cheeks and the graceful curve of her nose bridge turning a liver-red, embarrassed, I guess, to be caught molesting my bed linens.

“We thought you were dead,” Stefania said with much less drama. She had the thickest hair I’d ever seen on a person, irrespective of gender. She wore it loose over her shoulders, which made her appear even paler.

If I was someone more tedious and we were somewhere less dangerous than Hellebore, I might have said something to the tune of, Why the hell would you think that? Instead, I stared at the marauded nakedness of my bed and asked, “Yes, but why are you fucking around with my bed?”

“We thought, if you had, well, um—”

“Died?” I supplied. After several months together, I felt safe in saying I loathed her.

Unused to dislike, I guess, Johanna had all but waged war on my dislike of her, ambushing me with presents, besieging me with compliments: it was a surgical effort, beautiful in its thoroughness.

It did jack to improve my opinion which unfortunately just exacerbated Johanna’s need for approval.

Hell wasn’t just other people; hell was living with them.

Johanna winced. “That, yes. We thought it would be an opportunity to, you know, move Stefania in.”

“I told you it wouldn’t work.”

“ You said it was because Hellebore would reassign the room share to someone else,” Johanna shot back, one corner of my duvet dropped, the other woven into increasingly tight knots as she spoke. “It was a good idea.”

“How about you two kill whoever Stefania’s roommate is and move Johanna into their spot?” The pair froze, gaping at me. When neither of them moved to riposte or comply, I said exasperatedly, “Just go away.”

“Is this because of Rowan?” asked Johanna with sudden deranged mischief, filching a long rectangular envelope from the inside of her cardigan. She thrust it at me, the previous conversation seemingly forgotten in the wake of this question.

“Rowan?”

“He told me to pass you this note,” said Johanna. “Well, invitation, I guess. He wants you to meet him in the graveyard.”

I took the envelope from her, turning it over, examining the luxurious cream paper, the debauched lap and its broken wax seal, the last a scintillant indigo, embossed with what I now knew was a warning symbol: a mark that said here was a deathworker.

With a finger, I traced the ridges of the design: a headless crow with one wing spread and the other a bloody wreck. I frowned.

“When did he give you this?”

“He gave it to her yesterday. At lunch,” said Stefania. “He said it’d make sense. So kudos to him, I guess, for being right.”

I read the letter inside: it was brusque, to the point, the contents precisely as Johanna described.

He wanted me to meet him in the school’s cemetery at midnight.

For Reasons, he’d written, underlining the words thrice, as though the unnecessary capitalization wasn’t emphasis enough.

I looked up to find Johanna staring earnestly at me.

Preoccupied with the weirdness of the entire situation, it took longer than it should have for me to realize what she’d done.

“You read the letter.”

“We thought you were dead!”

“This was private.” I didn’t care about Rowan but it was the principle of the matter.

An oily warmth rode up my throat and spread out to my ears.

I kept my voice a white-knuckled calm, saying, “If you ever touch anything of mine again, anything whatsoever, I’m going to unstring you over Hellebore like you were a ball of fucking yarn, you diseased little rat. ”

A cheap shot, a gun in a knife fight. I knew what I’d done but I couldn’t help myself.

Johanna jolted like I’d slapped her hard, her face angled to hide the psoriatic welts fountaining up from her collar.

In the beginning, it’d been scarcely more than a discoloration, like she’d been kissed too hard by a lover.

Over the weeks, the bruise grew abscessed and the lesions spread, a constellation of sores that wouldn’t heal for love of magic or modern medicine.

Johanna eventually took to wearing high-necked shirts and dresses, which worked until it didn’t.

I knew it killed her to be disfigured like such.

I knew it was dickish to mention her condition.

But I didn’t care.

I was angry. There wasn’t anything in the room that belonged to me in any substantive way; I’d have been happy to burn all of it if it’d get me released from Hellebore.

I had no attachment to any individual item.

None of them carried sentimental value. Nonetheless, they were mine, and I hadn’t consented to them being touched, or moved, or put aside so someone else could make themselves at home in the ruins.

I also most definitely hadn’t agreed to have my personal correspondences read.

“ Chill, ” said Stefania.

“Die in a fire,” I countered inventively.

Rows of teeth cracked apart at her shoulders, the knobs of her wrist bones, the long stem of her throat.

Through them, I could see wet muscle and a myriad of tongues, coiled in the shadows like worms or a bulge of intestines.

Stefania raised one corner of her lips in a snarl, her dark eyes very nearly black in the evening light.

“We can see how much chiller you get if I take off a limb.”

“Oh, please. We’re in Hellebore. You’re not scary.”

Stefania swaggered forward a step, the duvet forgotten in a heap.

“I’m not trying to scare you,” she said. “I’m just telling you what’ll happen if you keep fucking around.”

I decided then that I wanted a fight. It’d been a long enough day.

I no longer wanted to cry myself hoarse but there was nonetheless a welter of raw emotion that needed release or I would implode.

A fight, one full of literal teeth, with someone who acted like they were spoiling for the same, felt exactly like what the doctor had ordered.

But then, because she was that kind of sanctimonious bleeding-heart showboat, Johanna rushed between us, arms out and palms raised so we would keep separate.

“Please,” she said, voice trembling. “It was an honest mistake. We thought—”

“I was only gone for a few hours!”

“Days,” she corrected.

I paused.

“What do you mean days ?”

“As in, multiple twenty-four-hour periods,” said Stefania, a bit unnecessarily. “Three, to be precise.”

“I’ve been gone for three days?” Any thought of violence died with the revelation.

My interlude with the headmaster had felt like minutes.

I could have understood it being actual hours, what with how trauma could smudge one’s perception of time.

But days? Small wonder that Johanna had given me up for dead.

“People die quick around here,” said Stefania.

“In that case,” I said. “I guess I’m… sorry for losing my shit.”

Johanna spluttered. Stefania tensed like she’d expected me to sucker punch her.

When it became clear I was being sincere, the pair dropped their own pretenses.

Johanna collected herself; Stefania zippered up the mouths that had opened across her, faint red inflammations where the lipless maws had welded themselves shut the only sign they’d ever been there.

“Words I’d never thought would come out of your mouth,” said Stefania. When I glared at her, she shrugged, unrepentant, and said, “Johanna is my best friend. I have heard all the stories.”

“Look, it’s fine,” said Johanna, her smile brittle and bright as glass, a fever light in her blue eyes. “Things happen. We’re all tense. Alessa, I hope you can forgive me—”

“Done,” I said, not wanting to hear her flagellate. “As long as you can promise me you haven’t given away any of my things.”

“We were hoping to disinfect them first, so no,” said Stefania.

“Under different circumstances, I could see us being friends,” I said.

“Under different circumstances,” said Stefania in return, “I could see eating you.”