Page 27

I shouldered past her to where they’d stacked my personal effects, leafing through the piles, still unsettled by the thought that the headmaster could control time.

There’d been a glutinous hallucinatory quality to those first few weeks, a sense of being toyed with; of lost hours and endless afternoons steeped in a fatal dullness, the tedium such that it made me desperate to do crimes.

Now, with this recent discovery, it felt like a definite thing, the implications of which terrified me in a way I wasn’t at all ready to process.

So I locked my abject horror behind a smirk, hoping neither of them would scent my new weakness.

“And I wouldn’t even need to ask? You’re such a darling. ”

“Fine, I’m a little sorry we ransacked your side of the room.” Her expression said this was the most contrition she was willing to show which was, well, fair. Anyone who’d ever met me knew Stefania was justified. Myself included.

I twitched a shoulder in her direction in acknowledgment, and Stefania rolled her eyes.

Johanna sighed. I didn’t blame her. There’d been progress in our relationship, something she had made clear she was overjoyed about, and it was evident that all of that would be set back by this confrontation with Stefania.

I glanced at the reading nook she’d cajoled me into helping her assemble: we’d scavenged furniture from across Hellebore, pulling it from shadowed corners and store rooms, even a standing lamp from the amphitheater where the headmaster performed her inaugural address.

The armchair we recovered last week—last month, last year, who fucking knew with a time-bending headmaster—was the crowning piece: piebald for the most part but still beautiful where it wasn’t, a linen-toned cream scarified by years of use, but so very comfortable from the weathering.

It was into its seat that Johanna poured herself, knees to her chest, an arm comfortably wrapped around her legs.

She stared at me, beaming sunnily, like we were girls at a sleepover and not trapped rats.

“Are you going to tell us what the story is with you and Rowan?”

I stared uncomprehendingly at her for a pathetically long time before what she meant clicked in my head.

“Oh,” I said, intelligently. The thought of being in competition with Johanna for anything, least of all a boy, curdled my stomach. “No, it’s not like that. I promise.”

She pursed her mouth. “I’m not jealous.”

The remark caught me off guard.

“Why would you be jealous? Oh.”

Stefania rolled her eyes with so much enthusiasm, I briefly expected them to clatter onto the floor. “Everyone knows they’re sleeping together.”

“I did not need to be part of that group,” I said. “Also, how?”

Johanna pinked winsomely.

“Barriers are a thing,” said Stefania, tugging at the skin along her nose bridge, aghast to play interpreter in this frankly uncomfortable conversation. “It’s basically magical herpes.”

I mimed frantically hanging myself, flinging an invisible rope over the rafters and tugging with due gusto. “I did not need to hear those words. Magical herpes. Kill me now. Take my room. I want nothing more than to die. Don’t let me live a life knowing those words have been said in sequence.”

“Oh my god, Stef!” said Johanna.

“Well, it is. Anyway, they do a lot of hand stuff.”

My roommate’s cheeks deepened from an attractive rosiness to a lurid, nearly purplish red.

For once, we were in alignment: neither of us were happy to have the mechanics of deathworker sex outlined so thoroughly.

Groaning, Johanna sank her head under her pillows, while Stefania looked dispassionately on.

“I interrupted. What were you going to say?”

“Kill me,” I said.

“Me first,” said Johanna and I was alarmed by how dangerously close we were to developing a rapport over this.

I studied the letter again in lieu of contemplating the logistics of avoiding magical herpes, affrighted at the concept I might be misreading a proposition.

The triple underline could have been symbolic of sexual intent, I suppose, but I was practically illiterate in the habits of my own generation so who the hell knew?

“I don’t want him.”

Johanna sprang back up. “It’s okay if you do—”

“He’s a skinny weirdo. Sorry you don’t have any taste.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Stefania, settling on the satin nightmare of Johanna’s bed. Snacks were spread over the foliated duvet, the sight of which made me only nominally sorry for my own continued existence: they’d been planning a celebration.

I thought about this more. I didn’t know yet what I felt about Rowan; had rarely, if ever, spent much time dissecting my feelings as a general whole, but I knew I didn’t hate him. Something about him resonated: a sense of kinship, of recognition and being recognized.

“Look, the two of us are entirely too alike for there to be any kind of attraction,” I said. “Just, no.”

“Mutual interests are important for compatibility,” said Johanna and then: “It’s okay. Honestly. We’re just friends.”

“With benefits,” said Stefania.

I chewed on my first response a dutiful twenty-five times before swallowing it down, smiling instead as Stefania broke into a packet of sriracha-flavored corn chips. “If you say so,” I managed, and it almost sounded polite.

“What the hell happened in the garden that day?” asked Stefania. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. She ate with her mouth open. “Fleur was furious.”

“He was all the school could talk about for a day and a half. A deathworker here in Hellebore,” said Johanna. “Most people weren’t aware of this beforehand. Now they are, and well, I think that’s a good thing.”

Deathworkers were almost indistinguishable from folklore at this juncture of history.

Most died while in the gestation phase, necrotizing their mothers’ wombs within days of implantation: the poor women were inevitably found liquefied, sludge and rot and nothing more, their little embryonic murderers dead in the decay.

The few deathworkers who survived to birth generally found themselves snapped up immediately, spirited away by cults and demon-possessed ministers, anyone with ideations of world domination.

Rowan was a winning lottery ticket, an urban legend, and now, with the stunt he pulled in the garden, he was a target.

“I don’t understand why anyone’s surprised,” said Stefania, a sigh in every syllable. “If there was anywhere you’d see a deathworker, it’d be here.”

Johanna shrugged. Semantics weren’t of interest to her, were rarely ever of any interest to her as they had a tendency to muddy the story, and it was the story Johanna loved best. She stared at me, unblinking, those green eyes of hers like tumbled malachite, deeper than Rowan’s, richer in hue.

“Whatever the case, are you going to go see him?” she said a little breathlessly.

I reread the letter— note, really, but his overelaborate packaging of it was the stuff of Jane Austen romances, and the word letter, with its implications of careful thought and long meditations on content, felt like the only word that did the presentation justice—Rowan had sent for what felt like the umpteenth time, lingering on the For Reasons.

“Sure, why the hell not?”