Page 4

“Who?” I began. It wasn’t just the owner of the hand who was fever-warm, but the room itself: the heaters were on at full blast. I could hear steam chatter and clank through a maze of pipes, hissing like a cornered animal. “The fuck are you?”

The hand slid out of mine. A white girl of similar age to me shouldered through the canopy and sat herself on the edge of my new bed, hands set primly on her thighs.

She was very blond, very pretty, very much something that made every hair on the back of my neck rise.

My skin wanted to crawl down between the mattress and its frame.

It was her eyes, I decided, that had so thoroughly upset me.

They were wide and green where they weren’t dilated pupil, a noxious and effulgent shade of absinthe.

Paired with the docile smile she wore, her eyes made her look like a wolf serving time in the brain of a fawn, a wolf so starved it would eat through its own belly if only it could reach.

“I’m Johanna,” she said meekly. Healing sores dappled the cream of her throat, like bite marks. “I think you’re my roommate, which is not what I was expecting.”

She ended the sentence with a frazzled laugh, both an accusation and an apology in her expression.

There was something in her tone I did not like, a thoughtless possessiveness over our current environment that said to me this wasn’t someone who had ever been told no.

Johanna wound a hank of golden hair around a finger until the skin of the digit turned white.

“Did you wake up here too?” I said, in lieu of asking, What were you expecting?

“I came here the normal way,” she said. Cathedral windows sprawled over the wall opposite my bed, showing mountain peaks crowned with snow. “Me and my best friend, we applied to be students in Hellebore and were approved.”

“Good for you.”

When I said nothing further, Johanna added: “Her name is Stefania.”

“I didn’t ask.”

To Johanna’s credit, she hardly reacted to my vitriol.

If I hadn’t been eagerly looking, I’d have missed the sudden flutter in her mouth and at the corners of her eyes, as if a current had been very briefly run through her, but I was, and it made me grin to see.

She was human enough to upset, then. Good.

“So,” she said, too well-bred to be kept on the back foot for long.

Her expression cleared and it was like the sun coming out after a thousand years of dark.

Her smile should have reduced me to worshipful cinders; it should have made me want to beg forgiveness for being such a hateful little gremlin.

Under different circumstances, it even might have.

However, I’d been recently kidnapped in my sleep by educators and I was pissed. “What’s your name?”

“Alessa,” I said absently, looking over the room again. A distant bell tolled what I assumed to be the hour. Softer still was a murmur of voices seeping through the pearl-colored walls. “Alessa Li.”

Johanna nodded and freed a small leather-bound notebook from a pocket in her dress, licked the tip of a finger, and began leafing through the water-warped, much-highlighted pages until she arrived at a blank space. She wrote my name down, underlining it twice.

“Is that your full name?” she asked conscientiously.

I stared at her in blunt amazement.

“What?”

My new roommate colored. “East Asian people tend to have more than one name, don’t they? Alessa would be your Christian name—”

“I’m not Christian.”

“Okay, that wasn’t the best choice of word, but you know what I mean.”

I did, but I glared balefully at her instead, happy in my meanness.

“I was wondering,” she said, clearing her throat, “if you had an Asian name too.”

It took me entirely too long to parse her question, so appalled was I at her presumptuousness, and when I did, all I could do was bray with laughter.

“What’s so funny?” she demanded.

“Listen, just listen for a second,” I said when I had the wherewithal to speak coherently again, swabbing the tears from my eyes with a sleeve. “It’s very clear to me that I am the last person you wanted in this room with you—”

“That is unfair. ”

“—and you are trying so very hard to be polite,” I continued, inexorable, remorseless as the heat death of the universe.

“But with all respect, I don’t want to be here.

I don’t want to be your friend. And I damn well don’t want to play twenty questions.

Also, really ? Do you not think it’s maybe a little bit gauche to ask for someone’s whole and truest name?

I have absolutely read up on what people do with such things. Haven’t you?”

The flimsy edifice of her self-esteem broke at last, her smile vanishing like kerosene-soaked paper touched to a flame. She bleated something that might have included the word sorry as she rose, stiff-limbed and sobbing, to totter out of the room.

In her hurry to leave, Johanna left the door ajar, and I watched in silence as the corridor filled with people.

A great majority were in their late teens, early twenties; a few anomalies drifted through the throng: sorcerous-looking geriatrics in jewel-hued robes and prepubescents who all but sloshed in their school attire, hems dragging.

Most strode past without acknowledging the exposed entryway.

Those few who did met my eyes with a mix of disapproval and uncertainty, their expressions ranging from furtive to frightened.

It wasn’t until much later that I would understand why that open door was such an egregious sight in Hellebore.

More bells began to sound, deep and mournful.

The students increased their pace, all funneling in the same direction.

I wonder sometimes what might have happened if I had been kinder to Johanna, or quicker to move, if I had been savvy enough to close the door, hide myself, scale down from a window, do anything other than gawk moronically at the crowd while in plain view of the hall.

If nothing else, I think I’d at least have kept my dignity.

“Assembly,” slurred a custardy, rotted voice, a voice that could only have come from lungs that had ballooned with decay and a throat so rimed with bacterial overgrowth it was borderline useless.

Yet despite this, the word was spoken with no little volume.

It boomed loudly enough to echo through my bones.

My mother used to tell me that in the seventies, there had been a preoccupation with anthropomorphizing food—likely to disguise the fact none of it was very good.

The massive figure leering through the doorway might have been a Christmas centerpiece from back then.

Its head resembled a child’s papier-maché masterstroke in all but one way.

Whoever had created the thing hadn’t had any paper on hand and so had resorted to sheets of raw muscle instead.

It had eyes but no eyelids, a lipless grin of a mouth.

It wept lymph as it stared at me, never breaking eye contact, not even as it ducked to enter the room, upsettingly graceful for what was essentially a giant Lego figure crafted of uncooked meat.

I screamed. I screamed like a little girl handed a frog for the first time.

“Assembly,” it said again, shambling forward, and that was very much it for my escape fantasies.

The meat man waited until I dressed before herding me into a vaulted corridor, the ceiling frescoed with dead men swaying from nooses of their own intestines, all hung on the branches of fig trees so heavy with fruit their boughs sagged almost to the ground; with black-haired, blank-faced women who had the eyes and wings of wasps, hovering above labyrinths of books; sweet-faced knights too young and too lithe for their pitted ancient armor; and carnivorous deer.

The last was an especially prominent motif.

The artist was obsessed with those deer.

They had them in every scene. Sometimes, the deer were prey, supine before triumphant hunters, a glory of entrails bared to the eye.

Most times, though, the deer were the predators, stalking frightened men through black woods, their muzzles steaming, a red glare in their eyes, which were only pupil.

“The painter was a woman named Bella Khoury,” came a conspiratorial voice in my ear, its timbre low, amused. “Legend has it that she used her own blood to create those.”

I looked over. Beside me, falling in graceful lockstep, was an older girl in an ensemble—she had on at least three layers of finely made, carefully layered tweed—that should have had her basting in sweat but somehow did not. “That so?”

“Oh yes. That part was true. The part that was a lie was that she did it because a man had broken her heart,” said the girl drolly. “Can you imagine? A man inspiring such art?”

I laughed. She laughed. I guessed my companion to be about twenty-five from the soft lines beginning to fan from the corners of her eyes and the edges of her mouth; she carried herself like someone much older, though.

The horn-rimmed glasses and slightly myopic stare didn’t help that impression at all.

“Was she the one who came up with the school’s heraldic crest? Seems like her style.”

“I think it was the other way around, actually. She spent the entirety of her time in Hellebore painting the ceilings like she was possessed. After graduation, she purportedly vanished, and the school decided to honor her by incorporating her favorite design elements into the armorials,” said the girl, shedding her glasses to raise them up to a slat of pale light.

No dust traveled the beam, which seemed impossible given the walls were drenched in gold-shot, ancient-looking tapestries.

There should have been dust everywhere, no matter how vigorous the janitorial staff.

There should have been at least some, but against all logic the air remained clean and unpleasantly equatorial.

“Did all this work get her extra credit?” I asked.

“It got her immortalized.”