Ninth House

¹⁶ Winter

Lauren had given Mercy an Ambien and put her to bed. Alex stayed with her, dozing in the darkened room, waking in the late evening to Mercy’s snuffling tears.

“The video is gone,” Alex told her, reaching down to clasp her hand.

“I don’t believe you. It can’t just be gone.”

“If it was going to break it would have broken.”

“Maybe he wants to hold it over my head so that I come back and… do things.”

“It’s gone,” said Alex. There was no real way of knowing if Mike’s ritual had worked. The Full Cup was meant to build momentum, not drain it, but she had to hope.

“Why would he pick me?” Mercy asked again and again, searching for logic, for some equation that would make this all add up to something she’d said or done. “He could have any girl he wanted. Why would he do that to me?”

Because he doesn’t want girls that want him. Because he grew weary of desire and developed a taste for causing shame. Alex didn’t know what lived in boys like Blake. Beautiful boys who should be happy, who wanted for nothing but still found things to take.

When night fell, she climbed down from her bunk and pulled on a sweater and jeans.

“Come to dinner,” she begged Mercy, squatting by their beds to turn on a lamp. Mercy’s face was puffy from crying. Her hair gleamed in a black slash against the pillow. She had the same thick, dark, impossible-to-curl hair as Alex.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Mercy, you have to eat.”

Mercy buried her face in her pillow. “I can’t.”

“Mercy.” Alex shook her shoulder. “Mercy, you’re not dropping out of school over this.”

“I never said I was.”

“You don’t have to say it. I know you’re thinking it.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I do,” said Alex. “I had something like this happen to me back in California. When I was younger.”

“And it all blew over?”

“No, it sucked. And I kind of let it wreck my life.”

“You seem all right.”

“I’m not. But I feel all right when I’m here with you and Lauren, so no one gets to take that away.”

Mercy wiped her hand across her nose. “So this is all about you?”

Alex smiled. “Exactly.”

“If anyone says anything—”

“If anyone even looks at you wrong, I’ll take his eye out with a fork.”

Mercy put on jeans and a high-necked sweater to cover her hickeys, the outfit so restrained she almost looked like a stranger. She splashed water on her face and dabbed concealer under her eyes. She still looked pale and her eyes were red, but no one looked great on a Sunday night in the dead of a New Haven winter.

Alex and Lauren bracketed her, looping their arms through hers as they entered the dining hall. It was noisy as always, filled with the clink of dishes and the warm rise and fall of conversation, but there were no hiccups in the tide of sound as they entered. Maybe, just maybe, Mike and Manuscript had succeeded.

They were seated with their trays, Mercy pushing listlessly at her fried cod as Alex guiltily bit into her second cheeseburger, when the laughter started. It was a particular kind of laughter Alex recognized—sneering, too bright, cut short by a hand placed to a mouth in false embarrassment. Lauren went utterly still. Mercy shrank deep into the neck of her sweater, her whole body shaking. Alex tensed, waiting.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Lauren.

But Evan Wiley swooped down into the seat beside her. “Oh my God, I am dying.”

“It’s okay,” Lauren said to Mercy, and then muttered angrily, “What is your problem?”

“I knew Blake was gross, but I didn’t know he was that gross.”

Lauren’s phone buzzed, then Alex’s. But no one was looking at Mercy; people were just shrieking and gagging at their tables, faces glued to their own screens.

“Just look,” said Mercy, her face in her hands. “Tell me.”

Lauren took a deep breath and picked up her phone. She frowned.

“Gross,” she gasped.

“I know,” said Evan.

There on the screen was Blake Keely, bent over a filthy toilet. Alex felt the snake inside her unwind, warm and gratified, as if it had found the perfect sunbaked rock to warm its belly.

“Are you serious?” Blake said, giggling in exactly the same wild, high-pitched way he had when he’d said, Look at all that bush!

“Okay, okay,” he went on in the video. “You’re so crazy!” But whoever he was talking to couldn’t be seen.

“No,” said Lauren.

“Oh my God,” said Mercy.

“I know,” repeated Evan.

And as they watched, Blake Keely dipped his cupped hand into the clogged toilet, scooped up a handful of shit, and took a big bite.

He chewed and swallowed, still giggling, and then, brown smearing his even white teeth and caking his lips, Blake looked at whoever was holding the camera and gave his famous, lazy, shit-eating smile.

Alex’s phone buzzed again. Awolowo.

WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU.

Alex kept her reply simple: xoxoxo

You had no right. I trusted you.

We all make mistakes.

Mike wasn’t going to complain to Sandow. He’d have to explain that his delegation had somehow let the secret to Merity slip free and that he’d handed Alex a dose of Starpower. Alex had used Blake’s own phone to send the new video to all of his contacts, and no one at Omega knew her name.

“Alex,” whispered Lauren. “What is this?”

Around them, the dining hall had exploded into pockets of heated conversation, people cackling and pushing their food away in disgust, others demanding to know what was happening. Evan had already moved on to the next table. But Lauren and Mercy were staring at Alex, quiet, their phones placed facedown on the table.

“How did you do it?” asked Lauren.

“Do what?”

“You said you would fix it,” Mercy said. She tapped her phone. “So?”

“So,” said Alex.

The silence eddied around them for a long moment.

Then Mercy dragged her finger over the table and said, “You know how people say two wrongs don’t make a right?”

“Yeah.”

Mercy pulled Alex’s plate toward her and took a huge bite of her remaining cheeseburger. “They’re full of shit.”