Ninth House

⁵ Winter

The sky was already fading into gray when Alex finally made it back to Old Campus. She’d stopped at the Hutch to shower with verbena soap beneath a hanging censer filled with cedar and palo santo—the only things that would counter the stink of the Veil.

She had spent so little time in Lethe places by herself. She had always been with Darlington, and she still expected to see him tucked into the window seat with a book, expected to hear him grumble that she’d used all of the hot water. He’d suggested leaving clothes there and at Il Bastone, but Alex already had so little to wear that she couldn’t afford to stash an extra pair of jeans and one of her two bras somewhere other than her ugly school-issue dresser. So when she stepped out of the bathroom into the narrow dressing room, she had to opt for Lethe House sweats—the Lethe spirit hound embroidered at the left breast and right hip, a symbol meaningless to anyone but society members. Darlington’s own clothes still hung there—a Barbour jacket, a striped Davenport College scarf, fresh jeans neatly folded and creased, perfectly broken-in engineer boots, and a pair of Sperry Top-Siders just waiting for Darlington to slip into them. She’d never seen him wear them, but maybe you had to have a pair in case your preppy card got pulled.

Alex left a green desk lamp burning at the Hutch. Dawes wouldn’t like it, but she couldn’t quite bear to leave the rooms in darkness.

She was unlocking the door to the Vanderbilt entryway when a text arrived from Dean Sandow: Have confabbed w Centurion. Rest easy.

She wanted to throw her phone across the courtyard. Rest easy? If Sandow intended to handle the murder directly, why had she wasted her time—and her coin of compulsion—visiting the crime scene? She knew the dean didn’t trust her. Why would he? He’d probably been up with a cup of chamomile tea when he got the news of Tara’s death, his big dog asleep on his feet, waiting by the phone to make sure nothing went horribly wrong at the prognostication and Alex didn’t humiliate herself or Lethe. Of course he wouldn’t want her anywhere near a murder.

Rest easy. Everything else went unsaid: I don’t expect you to handle this. No one expects you to handle this. No one expects you to do anything but keep from drawing unwanted attention until we get Darlington back.

If they could find him. If they could somehow bring him home from whatever dark place he’d gone. In less than a week they’d attempt the new-moon rite. Alex didn’t understand the specifics, only that Dean Sandow believed it would work and that, until it did, her job was to make sure that no one asked too many questions about Lethe’s missing golden boy. At least now she didn’t have a homicide to worry about or a grumpy detective to deal with.

When she entered the common room to find Mercy already awake, Alex was glad she’d stopped to shower and change. She had thought college dorms would be like hotels, long hallways pocked with bedrooms, but Vanderbilt felt more like an old-fashioned apartment building, full of tinny music, people humming and laughing as they went in and out of the shared bathrooms, the slamming of doors echoing up and down the central staircase. The squat she’d shared with Len and Hellie and Betcha and the others had been noisy, but its sighs and moans had been different, defeated, like a dying body.

“You’re awake,” Alex said.

Mercy glanced up from her copy of To the Lighthouse, its pages thick with pastel sticky notes. Her hair was in an elaborate braid, and instead of bundling up in their ratty afghan, she’d thrown a silk robe patterned with blue hyacinths over her jeans. “Did you even come home last night?”

Alex took a chance. “Yeah. You were already snoring. I just got up to get a run in.”

“You went to the gym? Are the showers even open this early?”

“For crew and stuff.” Alex wasn’t actually sure this was true, but she knew Mercy cared less about sports than just about anything. Besides, Alex didn’t own running shoes or a sports bra, and Mercy never asked about that. People didn’t go looking for lies that didn’t have a reason, and why would anyone lie about going for a morning run?

“Psychos.” Mercy tossed a stapled stack of pages at Alex, who caught them but couldn’t quite bring herself to look. Her Milton essay. Mercy had offered to give it a read. Alex could already see the red pen all over it.

“How was it?” she asked, shuffling into their bedroom.

“Not terrible.”

“But not good,” Alex muttered as she entered their tiny cave of a room and stripped out of her sweats. Mercy had covered her side of the wall in posters, family photos, ticket stubs from Broadway shows, a poem written in Chinese characters that Mercy said her parents made her memorize for dinner parties when she was a kid but that she’d fallen in love with, a series of Alexander McQueen sketches, a starburst of red envelopes. Alex knew it was partially an act, a construction of the person Mercy wanted to be at Yale, but every item, every object connected her to something. Alex felt like someone had come along early and snipped all of her threads. Her grandmother had been her closest link to any kind of real past, but Estrea Stern had died when Alex was nine. And Mira Stern had grieved her but she’d had no interest in her mother’s stories or songs, the way she cooked or prayed. She called herself an explorer—homeopathy, allopathy, healing gemstones, Kryon, spirit science, three months when she’d put spirulina in everything—each embraced with the same fierce optimism, dragging Alex along from one silver bullet to the next. As for Alex’s father, Mira was hazy on the details, hazier when pushed. He was a question mark, Alex’s phantom half. All she knew was that he loved the ocean, that he was a Gemini, and that he was brown—Mira couldn’t tell her if he was Dominican or Guatemalan or Puerto Rican, but she did know he was Aquarius rising with his moon in Scorpio. Or something. Alex could never remember.

She’d brought few objects from home. She hadn’t wanted to return to Ground Zero to pick up any of her old stuff, and the belongings in her mother’s apartment were little-girl things—plastic ponies, rosettes made of colored ribbons, bubble-gum-scented erasers. In the end, she’d packed a hunk of smoky quartz that her mother had given her, her grandmother’s nearly illegible recipe cards, an earring tree she’d had since she was eight, and a retro map of California, which she hung next to Mercy’s poster of Coco Chanel. “I know she was a fascist,” Mercy had said. “But I can’t quit her.”

Dean Sandow had suggested Alex purchase a few sketchbooks and charcoal too, and she’d dutifully placed them atop her half-empty dresser as cover.

Alex had tried to choose the easiest subjects possible—English lit, her Spanish requirement, an introductory sociology course, painting. She’d thought at least English would be easy because she liked to read. Even when things had been really bad in school, she’d still been able to fake her way through those classes. But this English was an entirely different language. She’d gotten a D on her first paper, with a note that said, This is a book report. It had been just like high school except she’d actually been trying.

“I love you, but this essay is a mess,” said Mercy from the common room. “It would probably be better if you spent less time working out and more time working.” No shit, thought Alex. Mercy was going to be in for a real surprise if she ever asked Alex to jog somewhere or lift something heavy. “We can go through it over breakfast.”

All Alex wanted was sleep, but going back to bed didn’t seem to be the thing people did after a run, and Mercy had done her the courtesy of editing her awful English paper, so she definitely needed to say yes to breakfast. Lethe had provided Alex with a tutor, an American Studies grad student named Angus who spent most of their weekly sessions bent over Alex’s work, snorting in exasperation and shaking his head like a horse plagued by flies. Mercy wasn’t exactly gentle, but she was a lot more patient.

Alex yanked on jeans and a T-shirt, then the black cashmere sweater she’d prized so much when she’d picked it out at Target. It was only when she’d seen Lauren’s lush lavender pullover and foolishly asked, “What is this made of?” that she’d understood there were as many kinds of cashmere as there were of cush, and that her own sad sweater pulled from the sale rack was strictly stems and seeds. At least it was warm.

She gave her coat another spray of cedar oil in case any Veil stink lingered, hefted up her bag, hesitated. She opened her dresser drawer and dug around in the back until she found the little bottle of what looked like ordinary eye drops. Before she could think too much about it, she tilted her head back and squeezed two drops of basso belladonna into each eye. It was a stimulant, a strong one, a bit like magical Adderall. The crash was brutal, but there was no way Alex was going to make it through the morning without a little help. The old boys of Lethe had all kept diaries of their time in the society, and they had plenty of tricks they used to cut corners. Alex had discovered this one after Darlington was gone.

Back into the morning cold with Mercy beside her. Alex always liked the walk from Old Campus to the JE dining hall, but the quad looked less beautiful with a gray day on it. At night, the grubby packs of snow gleamed vague and white, but now they were grimy and brown at the edges, heaps of dirty sheets ready for the wash. Harkness Tower loomed over it all like a melting candle, its chimes sounding the hour.

It had taken Alex a few weeks to realize why Yale looked wrong to her. It was the complete lack of glamour. In L.A., even in the Valley, even on its worst days, the city had style. Even Alex’s mother in her purple eye shadow and chunks of turquoise, even their dumpy apartment with its shawls over the lamps, even her no-money friends, gathered at backyard barbecues, recovering from the night before, girls in tight shorts, midriffs bare, long hair swinging to the small of the back, boys with shaved heads or silky topknots or thick dreads. Everything, everybody, had a look.

But here the colors seemed to blur. There was a kind of uniform—jocks in backward baseball caps and long loose shorts they wore regardless of the chill, keys on lanyards that they swung like dandies; girls in jeans and quilted jackets; theater kids with crests of sink-dyed Kool-Aid-colored hair. Your clothes, your car, the music pumping from it, were supposed to tell people who you were. Here it was like someone had filed down all of the serial numbers, wiped away the fingerprints. Who are you? Alex would sometimes think, looking at another girl in a navy peacoat, pale face like a waning moon beneath a wool cap, ponytail lying like a dead animal over her shoulder. Who are you?

Mercy was an exception. She favored wild florals paired with a seemingly endless parade of eyeglasses that she wore on glittery strings around her neck and that Alex had yet to see her use. Today she’d opted for a brocade coat embroidered with poinsettias that made her look like the world’s youngest eccentric grandma. When Alex had raised her brows, Mercy had just said, “I like loud.”

They entered the Jonathan Edwards common room, warm air closing over them in a gust. Winter light slatted over the leather couches in watery squares—all of it a coy, falsely humble prelude to the soaring rafters and stone alcoves of the dining hall.

Beside her, Mercy laughed. “I only see you smile like that when we’re going to eat.”

It was true. If Beinecke was Darlington’s temple, then the dining hall was where Alex worshipped daily. At the squat in Van Nuys, they’d lived on Taco Bell and Subway when they were flush, cereal—sometimes dry, sometimes soaked in soda if she got desperate—when they were broke. She’d steal a bag of hot dog buns whenever they were invited to barbecues at Eitan’s place so they had something to put peanut butter on, and once she’d tried to eat Loki’s dry kibble, but her teeth couldn’t manage it. Even when she’d lived with her mom, it had been all frozen food, boil-in-a-bag rice dishes, then weird shakes and nutrition bars after Mira got suckered into selling Herbalife. Alex had brought protein pudding mix to school for weeks.

The idea that there could be hot food just waiting for her three times a day was still shocking. But it made no difference what she ate or how much of it; it was as if her body, starved for so long, was ravenous now. Every hour her stomach would growl, chiming like the Harkness bells. Alex always took two sandwiches with her for the day and a stack of chocolate chip cookies wrapped in a napkin. The supply of food in her backpack was like a security blanket. If this all ended, if it all got taken away, she wouldn’t go hungry for at least a couple of days.

“It’s a good thing you work out so much,” Mercy noted as Alex shoveled granola into her mouth. Except, of course, she didn’t and eventually her metabolism would stop cooperating, but she just didn’t care. “Do you think it’s too much to wear a skirt to Omega Meltdown tomorrow night?”

“You’re still committed to this frat thing?” Omega Meltdown was part of Mercy’s Five Party Plan to get her and Alex to be more social.

“Some of us don’t have a hot cousin to take us interesting places, so until I’m offered a higher caliber of party, yes. This isn’t high school. We don’t have to be the losers waiting to get invited out. I’ve wasted too many good outfits on you.”

“Okay, I’ll wear a skirt if you wear a skirt,” Alex said. “Also… I’m going to need to borrow a skirt.” No one dressed up for frat parties, but if Mercy wanted to look cute for a bunch of guys in hazmat suits, then that was what they would do. “You should wear those boots you have with all the laces. I’m going back for seconds.”

The basso belladonna kicked in just as she was stacking peanut butter pancakes onto her tray, and she drew in a sharp breath as she came wide awake. It felt a little like someone cracking an ice-cold egg on the nape of your neck. Of course, it was at that moment that Professor Belbalm waved her over from her table below the leaded windows in the corner of the dining room, her sleek white hair gleaming like a seal’s head breaching a wave.

“Fuck,” Alex said under her breath, and then cringed when Belbalm’s mouth quirked as if she’d heard her.

“Gimme a minute,” she told Mercy, and set down her tray at their table.

Marguerite Belbalm was French but spoke flawless English. Her hair was snow white and fell in a smooth, severe bob that looked like it had been carved from bone and set carefully on her head like a helmet, so little did it move. She wore asymmetrical black garments that hung in supremely chic folds, and she had a stillness that made Alex twitch. Alex had been in awe of her from the first glimpse of her slender, immaculate form at the Jonathan Edwards orientation, since the first whiff of her peppery perfume. She was a women’s studies professor, the head of JE College, and one of the youngest people to ever achieve tenure. Alex didn’t know exactly what tenure implied or if “young” meant thirty or forty or fifty. Belbalm might have been any of those, depending on the light. Right now, with the basso belladonna in Alex’s system, Belbalm looked a dewy thirty and the light pinging off her white hair glittered like tiny shooting stars.

“Hi,” Alex said, hovering behind one of the wooden chairs.

“Alexandra,” Belbalm said, resting her chin on her folded hands. She always got Alex’s name wrong, and Alex never corrected her. Admitting her name was Galaxy to this woman was unthinkable. “I know you’re breakfasting with your friend, but I need to steal you away.” Breakfasting had to be the classiest verb Alex had ever heard. Right up there with summering. “You have a moment?” Her questions never sounded like questions. “You’ll come to the office, yes? So that we can talk.”

“Of course.” Alex said, when what she really wanted to ask was, Am I in trouble? When Alex was put on academic probation at the end of her first semester, Belbalm had given her the news sitting in her elegantly appointed office, three of Alex’s papers laid out before her: one on The Right Stuff, for her sociology class on organizational disasters; one on Elizabeth Bishop’s “Late Air,” a poem she’d chosen for its meager length, only to realize she had nothing to say about it and couldn’t even use up space with nice long quotes; and one for her class on Swift, which she’d thought would be fun because of Gulliver’s Travels. As it turned out, the Gulliver’s Travels she’d read had been for children and nothing like the impenetrable original.

At the time, Belbalm had smoothed her hand over the typed pages and gently said that Alex should have disclosed her learning disability. “You’re dyslexic, yes?”

“Yes,” Alex had lied, because she needed some reason for how very far behind everyone else she was. Alex had the sense she should be ashamed of failing to correct Belbalm, but she’d take all the help she could get.

So now what? They were too early in the semester for Alex to have screwed up all over again.

Belbalm winked and gave Alex’s hand a squeeze. “It’s nothing terrible. You needn’t look quite so much like you’re ready to flee.” Her fingers were cool and bony, hard as marble; a single large stone glinted dark gray on her ring finger. Alex knew she was staring, but the drug in her system had made the ring a mountain, an altar, a planet in orbit. “I prefer singular pieces,” Belbalm said. “Simplicity, hmm?”

Alex nodded, tearing her eyes away. She was wearing a pair of three-sets-for-five-dollars earrings that she’d boosted from the racks at Claire’s in the Fashion Square Mall. Simplicity.

“Come,” Belbalm said, rising and waving one elegant hand.

“Let me just get my bag,” said Alex. She returned to Mercy and jammed a pancake into her mouth, chewing frantically.

“Did you see this?” Mercy said, turning her phone to Alex. “Some New Haven girl got killed last night. In front of Payne Whitney. You must have walked right by the crime scene this morning!”

“Damn,” said Alex, casting cursory eyes over the screen of Mercy’s phone. “I saw the lights. I just thought there was a car accident.”

“So scary. She was only nineteen.” Mercy rubbed her arms. “What does La Belle Belbalm want? I thought we were going to edit your paper.”

The world glittered. She felt awake, able to do anything. Mercy was being generous and Alex wanted to work with her before the buzz began to fade, but there was nothing she could do about it.

“Belbalm has time now and I need to talk to her about my schedule. I’ll meet you back in the room?”

That bitch can lie like she’s breathing, Len had once said of Alex. He’d said a lot of things before he died.

Alex trailed the professor out of the dining hall and across the courtyard to her office. She felt shitty leaving Mercy behind. Mercy was from a wealthy suburb of Chicago. Her parents were both professors, and she’d written some kind of crazy paper that had impressed even Darlington. She and Alex had nothing in common. But they’d both been the kid with nobody to sit next to in the cafeteria and Mercy hadn’t laughed when Alex had mispronounced Goethe. Around her and Lauren, it was easier to pretend to be the person she was supposed to be here. Still, if La Belle Belbalm demanded your presence, you didn’t argue.

Belbalm had two assistants, who rotated at the desk outside of her office. This morning it was the very peppy, very pretty Colin Khatri. He was a member of Scroll and Key and some kind of chem prodigy.

“Alex!” he exclaimed, like she was a much anticipated guest at a party.

Colin’s enthusiasm always seemed genuine, but sometimes its sheer wattage made her want to do something abruptly violent like put a pencil through his palm. Belbalm just draped her elegant coat on the rack and beckoned Alex into her sanctum.

“Tea, Colin?” Belbalm inquired.

“Of course,” he said, beaming less like an assistant than an acolyte.

“Thank you, love.”

Coat, mouthed Colin. Alex shucked off her jacket. She’d once asked Colin what Belbalm knew about the societies. “Nothing,” he’d said. “She thinks it’s all old-boy elitist bullshit.”

She wasn’t wrong. Alex had wondered what was so special about the seniors selected by the societies every year. She’d thought there must be something magical about them. But they were just favorites—legacies, high achievers, charisma queens, the editor of the Daily News, the quarterback for the football team, some kid who had staged a particularly edgy production of Equus that no one wanted to see. People who would go on to run hedge funds and start-ups and get executive producer credits.

Alex followed Belbalm inside, letting the calm of the office settle over her. The books lining the shelves, the carefully curated objects from Belbalm’s travels—a blown-glass decanter that bulged like the body of a jellyfish, some kind of antique mirror, the herbs flowering on the window ledge in white ceramic containers like bits of geometric sculpture. Even the sunlight seemed more gentle here.

Alex took a deep breath.

“Too much perfume?” Belbalm asked with a smile.

“No!” Alex said loudly. “It’s great.”

Belbalm dropped gracefully into the chair behind her desk and gestured for Alex to seat herself on the green velvet couch across from her.

“Le Parfum de Thérèse,” Belbalm said. “Edmond Roudnitska. He was one of the great noses of the twentieth century and he designed this fragrance for his wife. Only she was allowed to wear it. Romantic, no?”

“Then—”

“How do I come to wear it? Well, they both died and there was money to be made, so Frédéric Malle put it on the market for us peasants to buy.”

Peasant was a word poor people didn’t use. Just like classy was a word that classy people didn’t use. But Belbalm smiled in a way that included Alex, so Alex smiled back in a way she hoped was just as knowing.

Colin appeared, balancing a tray laden with a tea set the color of red clay, and placed it on the edge of the desk. “Anything else?” he asked hopefully.

Belbalm shooed him away. “Go do important things.” She poured out the tea and offered a cup to Alex. “Help yourself to cream and sugar if you like. Or there’s fresh mint.” She rose and broke a small sprig from the herbs on the sill.

“Mint please,” Alex said, taking the sprig and echoing Belbalm’s movements: crushing the leaves, dropping them into her own cup.

Belbalm sat back, took a sip. Alex did the same, then hid a flinch when it burned her tongue.

“I take it you heard the news about that poor girl?”

“Tara?”

Belbalm’s slender brows rose. “Yes, Tara Hutchins. Did you know her?”

“No,” Alex said, annoyed at her own stupidity. “I was just reading about her.”

“A terrible thing. I will say a more terrible thing and admit that I’m grateful she was not a student. It does not diminish the loss in any way, of course.”

“Of course.” But Alex was fairly sure Belbalm was saying exactly that.

“Alex, what do you want from Yale?”

Money. Alex knew Marguerite Belbalm would find such an answer hopelessly crude. When did you first see them? Darlington had asked. Maybe all rich people asked the wrong questions. For people like Alex, it would never be what do you want. It was always just how much can you get? Enough to survive? Enough to help her take care of her mother when shit fell apart the way it always, always did?

Alex said nothing and Belbalm tried again. “Why come here and not to an art school?” Lethe had mocked up paintings for her, created a false trail of successes and glowing recommendations to excuse her academic lapses.

“I’m good, but I’m not good enough to make it.” It was true. Magic could create competent painters, proficient musicians, but not genius. She had added art electives to her class schedule because it was expected, and they’d proven the easiest part of her academic life. Because it wasn’t her hand that moved the brush. When she remembered to pick up the sketchbooks Sandow had suggested she buy, it was like letting a trivet skate over a Ouija board, though the images that emerged came from somewhere inside her—Betcha half naked and drinking from a hole; Hellie in profile, the wings of a monarch butterfly pushing from her back.

“I will not accuse you of false humility. I trust you to know your own talents.” Belbalm took another sip of her tea. “The world is quite hard on artists who are good but not truly great. So. You wish what? Stability? A steady job?”

“Yes,” Alex said, and despite her best intentions the word emerged with a petulant edge.

“You mistake me, Alexandra. There is no crime in wanting these things. Only people who have never lived without comfort deride it as bourgeois.” She winked. “The purest Marxists are always men. Calamity comes too easily to women. Our lives can come apart in a single gesture, a rogue wave. And money? Money is the rock we cling to when the current would seize us.”

“Yes,” said Alex, leaning forward. This was what Alex’s mother had never managed to grasp. Mira loved art and truth and freedom. She didn’t want to be a part of the machine. But the machine didn’t care. The machine went on grinding and catching her up in its gears.

Belbalm set her cup in its saucer. “So once you have money, once you can stop clinging to the rock and can climb atop it, what will you build there? When you stand upon the rock, what will you preach?”

Alex felt all of the interest go out of her. Was she really supposed to have something to say, some wisdom to impart? Stay in school? Don’t do drugs? Don’t fuck the wrong guys? Don’t let the wrong guys fuck with you? Be nice to your parents even if they don’t deserve it, because they can afford to take you to the dentist? Dream smaller? Don’t let the girl you love die?

The silence stretched. Alex gazed at the mint leaves floating in her tea.

“Well,” said Professor Belbalm on a sigh. “I ask you these things because I don’t know how else to motivate you, Alex. Do you wonder why I care?”

Alex hadn’t, actually. She’d just assumed Belbalm took her job as the head of JE seriously, that she looked out for all of the students under her care. But she nodded anyway.

“We all began somewhere, Alex. So many of these children have had too much handed to them. They’ve forgotten how to reach. You are hungry and I respect hunger.” She tapped her desk with two fingers. “But hungry for what? You’re improving; I see that. You’ve gotten some help, I think, and that’s good. You’re clearly a smart girl. The academic probation is worrisome, but what worries me more is that the classes you’re choosing show no real pattern of interest other than ease. You cannot simply get by here.”

Can and will, thought Alex. But all she said was, “I’m sorry.” She meant it. Belbalm was looking for some secret potential to unlock and Alex was going to disappoint her.

Belbalm waved away the apology. “Think about what you want, Alex. It may not be something you can find here. But if it is, I will do what I can to help you stay.”

This was what Alex wanted, the perfect peace of this office, the gentle light through the windows, the mint and basil and marjoram growing in lacy clusters.

“Have you given any thought to your summer plans?” asked Belbalm. “Would you consider staying here? Coming to work for me?”

Alex’s head snapped up. “What could I possibly do for you?”

Belbalm laughed. “Do you think Isabel and Colin are performing complicated tasks? They maintain my calendar, do my filing, organize my life so I don’t have to. I have no doubt you could manage it. There’s a summer composition program that I think might get your writing where it needs to be to continue here. You could begin to think about what you might consider as a career path. I don’t want to see you left behind, Alex.”

A summer to catch up, to catch my breath. Alex was good at odds. She’d had to be. Before you walked into a deal, you had to know if you would walk out. And she knew the chance that she could bob and weave her way through four years of Yale was unlikely. With Darlington around, it had been different. His help had given her an edge, made this life manageable, possible. But Darlington was gone, who knew for how long, and she was so damn tired of treading water.

Belbalm was offering her three months to breathe, to recover, make a plan, gather her resources, to become a real Yale student, not just someone playing the part on Lethe’s dime.

“How would that work?” Alex asked. She wanted to set down her cup, but her hand was shaking badly enough she was afraid it would clatter.

“Show me you can continue to improve. Finish the year strong. And the next time I ask you what you want, I expect an answer. You know about my salon? I had one last night but I’ll have another next week. You can start by attending.”

“I can do that,” she said, though she wasn’t at all sure she could. “I can do that. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me, Alex.” Belbalm looked at her over the red rim of her teacup. “Just do the work.”

Alex felt light as she drifted out of the office and waved to Colin. She found herself in the silence of the courtyard. It was like this sometimes—all of the doors would close, no one passing through on their way to class or a meal, all the windows shut tight against the cold, and you’d be left in a pocket of silence. Alex let it pool around her, imagined that the buildings surrounding her had been abandoned.

What would the campus be like in the summer? Quiet like this? Humid and unpopulated, a city under glass. Alex had spent her winter break holed up at Il Bastone, watching movies on the laptop Lethe had bought for her, afraid Dawes would appear. She’d skyped with her mom and only ventured out for pizza and noodles. Even the Grays had vanished, as if without the students’ excitement and anxiety, they had nothing to draw them to campus.

Alex thought of the stillness, the late mornings that summer might bring. She could sit behind that desk where Colin and Isabel sat, brew tea, update the JE website, do whatever had to be done. She could pick her courses, ones that had syllabi that didn’t change much. She could do the reading ahead of time, take the composition course so she wouldn’t have to lean on Mercy so much anymore—assuming Mercy wanted to room with her next year.

Next year. Magical words. Belbalm had built Alex a bridge to a possible future. She just had to cross it. Alex’s mother would be disappointed when she didn’t go home to California… Or would she? Maybe it was easier this way. When Alex had told her mother she was going to Yale, Mira had looked at her with such sadness that it had taken Alex a long moment to understand her mother thought she was high. Guiltily, Alex snapped a picture of the empty courtyard and texted it to her mom. Cold morning! Meaningless, but evidence that she was okay and here, proof of life.

She popped into the bathroom before she headed to class, ran her fingers through her hair. She and Hellie had loved wearing makeup, spending their rare bits of spare cash on glitter eyeliner and lip gloss. She missed it sometimes. Here, makeup meant something different; it sent a signal of effort that was unacceptable.

Alex endured an hour of Spanish II—dull but manageable because all it required of her was memorization. Everyone was chattering about Tara Hutchins, though no one called her by name. She was the dead girl, the murder victim, the townie who got stabbed. People were talking about crisis lines and emergency therapy for anyone triggered by the event. The TA who led her Spanish class reminded them to use the campus walking service after dark. I was right near there. I was there like an hour before it happened. I walk by there every day. Alex heard the same things repeated again and again. There was worry, some embarrassment—another bit of proof that, no matter how many chain stores moved in, New Haven would never be Cambridge. But no one seemed truly afraid. Because Tara wasn’t one of you, Alex thought, as she packed up her bag. You all still feel safe.

Alex had two hours free after class and she meant to spend them hidden away in her dorm room, eating her pilfered sand-wiches and writing her report for Sandow, then sleeping through the basso belladonna crash before she went to her English lecture.

Instead, she found her feet carrying her back to Payne Whitney. The intersection was no longer blocked off and the crowds were gone, but police tape still surrounded the triangular swath of barren ground across the street from the gym. The students who passed cast furtive glances at the scene and hurried along, as if mortified to be seen gawking at something so lurid in the cold gray sunlight. A police cruiser was parked half on the sidewalk, and a news van sat across the street.

She had to imagine Dean Sandow and the rest of the Yale administration were having plenty of harried meetings about damage control this morning. Alex hadn’t understood the distinctions between Yale and Princeton and Harvard and the cities they occupied. They were all the same impossible place in the same imaginary town. But it was clear from the way that Lauren and Mercy laughed about New Haven that the city and its university were considered a little less Ivy than the others. A murder that close to campus, even if the victim hadn’t been a student, couldn’t be good PR.

Alex wondered if she was looking at the place where Tara had been murdered or if her body had simply been dumped in front of the gym. She should have asked the coroner while he was compelled. But she had to imagine it was the former. If you wanted to get rid of a body, you didn’t drop it in the middle of a busy intersection.

An image of Hellie’s shoe, that pink jelly sandal slipping from her painted toes, flashed through Alex’s mind. Hellie’s feet had been wide, the toes crammed together, the skin thick and callused—the only unbeautiful part of her.

What am I doing here? Alex didn’t want to get any closer to where the body had been. It was the boyfriend. That’s what the coroner had told her. He was a dealer. They’d gotten into some kind of argument. The wounds had been extreme, but if he’d been high, who knew what might have been going on in his head?

Still, there was something bothering her about the scene. Last night she’d approached from Grove Street, but now she was on the other side of the intersection, directly across from the Baker Hall dorms and the empty, icy ground where Tara had been found. From this angle there was something familiar about the way it all looked—the two streets, the stakes driven into the earth where Tara had died or been abandoned. Was it just seeing it in the daylight without the crowds that made it seem different? A false sense of déjà vu? Or maybe the basso belladonna was playing tricks on her as it left her system? The Lethe journals were full of warnings on just how powerful it was.

Alex thought of Hellie’s shoe hanging for a brief moment from her toe, then dropping to the apartment floor with a thunk. Len turned to Alex, struggling with the weight of Hellie’s limp body, his hands cupped beneath her armpits. Betcha had Hellie’s knees tucked against his hip as if they were swing dancing. “Come on,” Len said. “Open the door, Alex. Let us out.”

Let us out.

She shook the memory away and glanced at the cluster of Grays in front of the gym. There were less of them today and their mood—if they’d ever really had a mood—had returned to normal. The Bridegroom was still there, though. Despite her best attempts to ignore him, the ghost was hard to miss—crisp trousers, shiny shoes, a handsome face like something out of an old movie, big dark eyes and black hair swept back from his brow in a soft wave, the effect spoiled only by the big bloody pockmark of a gunshot wound to his chest.

He was an actual haunter, a Gray who could pass through the layers of the Veil and make his presence felt, rattling windshields and setting off car alarms in the parking garage that stood where his family’s carriage factory had once been—and where he’d killed his fiancée and then himself. It was a favorite stop on ghost tours of New England. Alex didn’t let her gaze linger, but from the corner of her eye she saw him drift away from the group, sauntering toward her.

Time to get gone. She didn’t want the interest of Grays, particularly Grays who could take any kind of real physical form. She turned her back on him and hurried toward the heart of campus.

By the time she got back to Vanderbilt, the crash had hold of her. She felt weak, exhausted, as if she’d just emerged from a week of the worst flu of her life. Her report for Sandow could wait. She didn’t have much to say anyway. She would sleep. Maybe she would dream of summer. She could still smell crushed mint on her fingers.

She closed her eyes and saw Hellie’s face, her pale brows bleached by the sun, vomit clinging to her lip. It was Tara Hutchins’s fault. Blondes always made Alex think of Hellie. But why had the crime scene looked so familiar? What had she seen in that forlorn patch of dead earth bracketed by the flow of traffic?

Nothing. She’d just had too many late nights, too much Darlington whispering in her ear. Tara was nothing like Hellie. She was like a bad knockoff, generic to Hellie’s name brand.

No, said a voice in her head—and it was Hellie, standing on a skateboard, rocking back and forth on those wide feet, her balance impeccable. Her skin was ashen. Her bikini top was spattered with clumps of her last meal. She’s me. She’s you without a second chance.

Alex fought her way back from the tide of sleep. The room was dark, little light filtering in from the single narrow window.

Hellie was long gone and so were the people who had hurt her. But someone had hurt Tara Hutchins too. Someone who hadn’t been punished. Not yet.

Leave it to Detective Turner. That was what the survivor said. Rest easy. Let it go. Focus on your grades. Think of the summer. Alex could see the bridge that Belbalm had built. She just had to cross it.

Alex reached into her dresser for the basso belladonna drops. One more afternoon. She could give Tara Hutchins that much before she buried her for good and moved on. The way she’d buried Hellie.