Page 5

“Good enough, I guess. What can any of us ask?”

The girl buffed her eyewear on a sleeve, then replaced them on her nose, smiling thinly at me when she was done.

She was unreasonably beautiful even with her eye bags, which were the density of neutron stars: she had a face for magazine covers, a profile someone with more smarm might have described as editorial, with its high cheekbones and amused mouth.

“Portia,” she said.

“Is that what they ask for?” I couldn’t help myself, a hint of a flirt in my voice. “Your name? I don’t blame them.”

Her answering melancholic smile had my heart misplacing a beat. “They usually start with your name. Then it gets much worse from there.”

I didn’t have an adequate response for that.

Everything I thought of felt too glib, too na?ve.

Her voice carried a burden of history and it felt then like if I wasn’t careful, the weight of it would crush whatever might be growing between us.

The fact I worried about the early death of this small and uncertain thing would surprise me later when I had time to sleep and ruminate on the events of that first day.

I couldn’t remember the last time I cared to nurse a conversation like that, couldn’t remember wanting tenderness or ever having any knowledge of its shape.

Right then, though, all I wanted was for her to stay.

“I’m Alessa, by the way. Alessa Li. Now that you have my name, we’re even. I can’t do anything to you that you can’t do to me.”

Her smile dimpled along her right cheek. “Shame.”

In lieu of acknowledging that, I cleared my throat and asked, “Are you a teacher?”

“Do I look old enough to be one of the teachers?”

“Recent kidnappee, I’m afraid. I don’t know much except for whatever is in the marketing pamphlets,” I said, making note of our surroundings: the archways feeding into smaller corridors; the many doors and their matching brass plaques; the occasional stairwell, glinting bronze as they spiraled through ceiling and inlaid-tile floor.

Hellebore stretched like memory and, like memory, it was imperfect, made of smudged angles and movement at the corners of the eyes. “The teachers could be hot.”

“You think I’m hot?” Her left cheek didn’t quite indent, but it made an earnest attempt.

“I plead the fifth, as the Americans say.”

“I’m afraid American law doesn’t extend here. Hellebore’s a land of its own.”

“Like a country?”

“Like a prison run by secret police.”

“That isn’t worrying information at all.

I absolutely wasn’t already concerned about their disinterest in bodily autonomy,” I said as we turned a corner into a new corridor, the walls of which were a deep burgundy where they weren’t polished wainscoting; the trimmings oxidized gold instead of wood, and paneled with yet more paintings.

They were everywhere. Whatever else Bella had been, she was certainly prolific.

“It’s not ideal, ” said Portia, her smile receding to a thoughtful frown, even as she slowed beside one piece of artwork, this one older, starker than the rest. Students gusted past. “But I like to tell myself that the benefits outweigh the costs.”

“The costs,” I repeated, my regard for her cooling.

Portia seemed to take no notice, her eyes softening as she took in the painting beside us.

Gone, the nightmare deer and their soft-faced prey.

Gone, the women with their wasp wings and iridescent eyes.

Gone, the expansive detailing, the sumptuous foliation of the background, the weird medieval animals in the margins.

In lieu of all that, a textured black background, roughly swatched onto the canvas, and the equally rough sketch of a woman, sloe-eyed, furious-looking, standing alone before a canvas, palette and brush in hand

“Only known portrait of the artist,” said Portia conspiratorially.

“I expected someone less…” I considered the second part of that sentence as it formed on my tongue, strangled it so I had space instead to say, “I take that back. She looks the correct amount of angry.”

“And why is that?”

The first months after I left home, caked in my stepdaddy’s remains, were made up of a formless spread of days, the hours seeping together, like blood when it is still fresh from a vein.

I’d spent most of them in one library or another, careful never to drowse: An alleged student, shabbily dressed as she was, they wouldn’t throw out, but an unhoused derelict, on the other hand?

No city in the Americas is truly good to its unwanted, at least in my experience, and I’d been young enough then to be at risk of being returned to my mother, something I promise you neither of us wanted: she’d not taken well to the death of her husband.

I could still recall how I looked in those first difficult weeks, could still remember my expressions in the mirror.

I’d been angry. Angry at myself. Angry at the world.

Angry most of all at the fact I had to behave, to play by their rules prescribed or else.

The girl in the painting held the same sullen, smoldering, clenched-jaw rage I’d carried, and more.

“Well, I’m assuming Bella was never paid for her work.”

Portia erupted into laughter. “No, not according to the stories. Like I said, she apparently worked like a thing possessed. And we have to imagine Sisyphus happy. Otherwise. it’d all be a bit depressing.”

“Which confirms what I suspected, unfortunately,” I said, patting the portrait like it was a stag’s flank.

It hadn’t been obvious at first but when I moved, the light shimmered on patterns in the background: lines scratched onto the black, like tally marks, like wounds gouged into the wood by someone’s desperate clawing. “She was made to work for exposure—”

“Please! Recognition amid her peers and her betters.”

“A corpse by any other name. You can’t fill your stomach with praise. I’d bet you money she asked for compensation and then they said no, but you can have the privilege of doing the work. And this portrait was her protest. Gods, I’d be pissed. Wouldn’t you?”

“For a little while. In my experience, though, that kind of anger is unsustainable. After a while, it simply burns itself out and you’re left instead with”—Portia cocked her head one way and then the other, two distinctly staccato motions, insect-like in their abruptness—“the hope it’ll end soon, and if not soon then at least as painlessly as possible. ”

I glanced at the painting again and then at Portia, smiling calmly, her expression abstract, the slight curious glint in her eyes at odds with her words.

Her tone too, which while it wasn’t blasé seemed preternaturally mild.

Scholarly, almost. Like everything she said was someone else’s nightmare, alien to her own experience.

A case study, an old story to peel open and dissect in case a way to avoid a similar fate was engraved in the entrails.

“Might as well go down biting if it comes to that,” I said.

“Easier said than done.”

“Do I want to ask?”

Some trick of the light and the paint on the walls sheened her eyes with a bruised-plum purple with an oil-slick iridescence like a crystal had shattered there in her pupils. Her smile was calm, dreamy almost. “Oh, mostly definitely not.”

A chill snaked down my back. There was a road I could take the conversation down. I could see it and the dark, lonely place where it ended, but as mesmerizing as Portia was, I didn’t like anyone enough to visit them there. I already had too much baggage of my own.

“Anyway,” I said, wedging a smile between my lips. “Why are you here? If you’re not a teacher, what did they get you for?”

“I’m a teaching assistant,” said Portia, her response jarring in its sudden cheer.

All traces of her earlier despondence evaporated as she spoke, her expression and tone sunny as a summer afternoon.

“Hellebore doesn’t believe in scholarships, unfortunately.

So I provide the faculty with help and they give me room and board as I labor to finish my PhD. ”

“You do a lot of kidnapping for them?”

“I help the faculty,” said Portia without apology, winking, the little gesture so charming I almost forgave her complicity in the system. Almost but not quite. “Student enrollment is someone else’s business.”

I was back to distrusting her and everything around me, the nascent rapport gone—things for which I was grateful.

Easier this than that bone-deep, marrow-level need to impress her, to want her near, to want her to smile at me and to count her freckles like I was a poet and she a muse.

Easier this suspicion than want. Safer too. I learned that early on.

If she took any notice of my suspicion, Portia said nothing.

Instead, she began to walk again, chattering in a very ambassadorial manner.

I listened and nodded and exclaimed at the appropriate intervals, my responses as sincere as her confidential smiles, which is to say not at all.

Everything she said sounded like paper-thin fiction: Portia allegedly had spent three years in Hellebore, graduating before going abroad (she wouldn’t elaborate on what abroad meant, but that was hardly a surprise) to spend three more years in training with her sisters of the Raw Grail (the name caught like a splinter; I filed it away for future contemplation) before coming back to the school to pursue her post-graduate work.

“I thought it was an institute,” I said. “Not a university.”