Page 29

During the day, you’d think summer had an eternal stranglehold on Hellebore.

From morning to the deep violet dusk, the air was as hot and wet as the inside of a mouth panting from a fever, and it stank oppressively at all times of floral pungence, the smell of green things in riotous growth.

It was worse inside. Hellebore didn’t believe in central air or breathable fabrics.

We sweated through our classes, clammy in our uniforms, the reek of our sweat adding to the unpleasant atmosphere.

The nights, though, were much different.

My breath plumed white as I passed the wrought iron gates leading to the graveyard, hands slippered in my sleeves, fingers cupped around elbows.

To an observer, I probably resembled a disgruntled monk albeit an ostentatiously dressed one: rabbit fur trimmed every hem of my very festive velvet coat.

On another person, someone like Johanna or Portia, who was tall and whose body had aspirations toward beauty, it might have maybe looked a degree of good.

I wasn’t such a person and we’ll leave it at that.

Rather than behave like a normal person, I stood there and breathed until the fear was gone, forcing each inhalation to last for eight counts and each exhale to do the same.

Easier, yes, to cave to impulse: to run when and where it tells you to go.

I had no idea if someone was watching me in the dark, but they wouldn’t have the pleasure of seeing me disarmed by a particularly enthusiastic panic attack.

Slowly, I began finding my equilibrium again: my pulse slowed, restored to its usual clop.

“Not going to lie. Kinda impressed, actually. Most people would have legged it. You’ve got more balls than I gave you credit for.”

Rowan.

I looked up to see him slouching down a path, one of the many branching from the entrance like capillaries, headstones and grave markers jutting from the shadows.

Here and there, a mausoleum loomed from between the tessellation of black fir, the leaves desaturated in the cold moonlight, not altogether barren of color but grayer than any healthy plant should look.

He seemed at ease here and I realized then I’d never seen him so unguarded, his face gentled, young.

“What the hell do you want?”

“Help,” he said plainly.

Rowan could make a funeral out of a Christmas party: the vivid red of our school-assigned winter coat was a cheerless vermillion on him, like blood that had begun to cool. He looked like a butcher, drenched through.

“I know, I know, I’m not really good at talking to people seriously.

Snarking, yes. Being an asshole, sure, ” said Rowan, in visible agony at having to behave like a normal person.

His lashes were iridescent with frost. I was very afraid he might have been crying throughout whatever had led him to the graveyard this late in the frozen night, and that it would be my responsibility to comfort him through his misery.

“But this whole being vulnerable about your needs thing is really new to me so forgive me while I flail around a bit.”

“You get ten minutes,” I said pointedly. His boots, I realized, were damp with mud. All of him was crusted with dirt of varying levels of moisture.

“I need your help,” said Rowan. “I have some books inside the library that I’d like to find but I need someone to distract the Librarian—”

“It’s a library. You can just use normal channels to borrow said books.”

“Come on, Alessa. You know that doesn’t actually work. They don’t really want you to make use of that enormous reservoir of knowledge.”

I shrugged. “Okay. Find someone else to help you.”

“You’re the only person I can trust.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot? Find a better lie.”

“Okay, fine. No lies. No more prevaricating or whatever,” said Rowan, his gloved palms offered up like an olive branch.

His buzz cut had grown into a fleecy stubble, his curls beginning to tuft along his hairline, and it gave him a curiously puppyish look, an impression compounded by the fact his hair was the deep copper of a poodle’s coat.

“You’re right. You’re not the only person I can trust. It’s more like you’re the only person here who doesn’t have vested interest in the school. ”

“I find that incredibly hard to believe.”

“You’re the only person who has ever given me the time of day without trying to stab me in the face.”

At this, I had to laugh, a short bark of noise that curled his mouth into a hopeful smile. It went away when I said, very nonchalantly, “I’d buy that. Still, no.”

“I’ll help you escape the school.”

That caught me off guard. I’d lost three days to a headmaster who had openly threatened me with a lobotomy if I stepped out of line again. I was cold, and it was dawning on me I was risking said procedure for a boy who shouldn’t exist and who I barely liked—just for a very tenuous maybe.

“How?”

“I have ways, okay? Trust me,” said Rowan, for whom being difficult wasn’t just a habit but a higher calling, a compulsion equal to his fondness for cigarettes.

On cue, he attempted then to light one, only to have the wind pinch out the flame a second later.

He tried again a second time, a third, before calling it on the fourth try as the wind tumbled the cigarette from his hand.

“Just give me five minutes. I have also not smoked in two hours and it’s not helping my mood. ”

I stared at him. Rowan stared at his cigarette, very plainly evaluating the cost-benefits of retrieving it from cold graveyard muck.

“Sure,” I said when it became apparent he wouldn’t be useful until his bloodstream was replenished with more nicotine, another cigarette removed from its packet.

He hunkered against a nearby memorial: a very traditional-looking angel that had long gray arms stretched out to nothing, like it was imploring a soul to come home, its bow-shaped mouth so lovingly sculpted you’d think it was modeled on the memory of a first kiss.

The air soon smelled of cloves and tobacco.

It was under its half-furled wing that he stood, face in silhouette.

Feeling generous, I added, “I’ll help you. ”

“Really?”

“Yes,” I said, cursing inwardly a second later when a finger-gun was cocked in my direction. Irreverence was contagious. “Just try not to make it weird.”

“I don’t know if I can promise that,” said Rowan. Still in shadow, he waved his cigarette as he spoke, marking punctuation, the cherry a tangerine wisp bobbing in the dark.

The chill had begun to pool in my joints, less an interpretable temperature than an ache, like a haunting. I rubbed my fingers, blew on them, and that did nothing except spread the cold around. Rowan was smoking his cigarette like it could save him, and I wondered when was the last time he slept.

Then, he added: “Thanks.”

Rowan spoke the words with uncharacteristic passion, with the libidinousness of a flagellant opened up for his god, his desperate heart offered on the platter of that single syllable.

I took a step back. I was many things, but I wasn’t stone and I certainly wasn’t impervious to being the recipient of his focus, his feverish want.

My cheeks warmed as the clouds shifted, the moon laying its light over an eternity of tombstones, and I thought about how lonely someone needed to be to worry so much about those already beyond saving.

“Now, let’s get some knowledge!” he declared, tossing his head like a prize stallion.

No stain of his earlier vulnerability, however faint, lingered.

The Rowan I knew was restored: crass, swaggering, eminently punchable.

It was nearly perfect, this facade of his, but having seen it set down, I realized now how friable it was and how thin.

But I was absolutely relieved to see it, anyway.

“Yeah, let’s do it!” I said with more gusto than I’d mustered my entire life.

Rowan having sincere emotions was one thing.

Rowan having sincere emotions about me specifically was another.

Especially right then in the dark of the graveyard and after an indeterminable amount of time since my confrontation with the headmaster.

I needed at least eight hours of sleep before I could conceivably process even the idea of a romantic confession, particularly given his association with Johanna.

I didn’t have an issue with nonmonogamy.

I just didn’t want to be in a toxic throuple with those two.

I noticed then that he was staring at me. “I guess it could be worth it.”

“What are you talking about?” There was that look again, that intense attention.

“Ford said you’d be worth dying for,” said Rowan, lighting another cigarette.

“Ford said what?”

His reply was swallowed by a scream that shredded the air.

It said a little about Rowan and a lot more about me that we simultaneously bolted toward the source of the howling, all without consulting the other or pausing to debate whether forward was actually preferable to escape.

The scream was the baying of a cornered animal, it was the scream of someone who’d stared death in the eye and was now jonesing to break its neck.

That guttural defiance, more than any subcutaneous sense of nobility, was what had me running for the source: I understood too well to turn away.

The screaming led us toward the back of the school library, an imposing monument of gray-brown brick and gorgeous Palladian windows inlaid with church glass, traceried frames rampant with wasps and stucco deer skulls, because of course.

A cyclopean rose window stared from above the double doors of the main entrance.

On a plinth outside the front steps, the statue of a teenager resplendent in one of Hellebore’s very twee uniforms, a gladstone bag in one hand, gazed admiringly back.

“ Give them back! Give them back to me! You will listen. ” The voice we’d heard was now screaming demands. “You’ll give back my spouse. Give them back to me. ”

“You feel that?” said Rowan as we slowed.

I nodded. Each time the voice roared, an answering twinge shivered through me. On some mechanical level, I wanted to please the voice. I wanted to return said spouse, do whatever it took to salve its anguished rage. It wasn’t mind control, per se, but close enough to be discomfiting.

Rowan shouldered past a broad-leafed fern and there, banging their fists bloody against a service door, was a soft-figured femme in a confection of silks and crinoline, some of which I recognized as scavenged from the school’s upholstery.

Whoever they were, their skills as a couturier really were quite good.

“Hey,” I said. “What the fuck?”

They whirled around to face us, expression feral and panicked.

In repose, they might have been beautiful, cherubic with a kind mouth and heavy-lashed eyes, the irises a lightless velvet, but the whites were lacy with broken capillaries and their skin was a black ruin of makeup.

Gore matted the wet tangles of their hair, which was the pink of bloodied spit.

“She took them,” they panted, glancing miserably behind them. “She took Kevin. We had permission. We hadn’t gone over time. She had no right to take them.”

“Who took Kevin?” I said.

“The Librarian.” They pressed the heels of their hands into their eyes, their shoulders fluttering like trapped birds, like they would cry if they hadn’t forgotten how.

“Oh,” said Rowan. “Well, that’s actually kinda convenient.”