by Sara Wolf
“He doesn’t eat in front of others, and he doesn’t eat food he hasn’t prepared. The psychologists call it a defense mechanism. There. Does that satisfy you?”
Her voice sounds as painful as licking a metal pole in winter feels. Poison? It sounds so 17th century, so outdated, so surreal.
“Who would wanna -”
“The powerful have many enemies.” Von Arx cuts me off simply.
“But you said it’s a family matter. Someone in your family poisoned -”
A loud thud makes me jump as she shuts the book she was writing in with vicious force.
“You will not burden him or I with this line of questioning any longer. Is that clear?”
“Y-Yeah. Sure. You got it.”
I think back to the scar he showed me on his chest, the way he seemed so convinced his mother would do something to Rose if she found out about her maybe-ESP. I could be jumping to wild-ass conclusions, but…it couldn’t’ve been his mom. Couldn’t be, right? No mom would be that shitty. No mom would try to kill their kid. I mean, you hear it on the news sometimes, but it doesn’t really hit home as real. Why would she even want to kill her own son? Maybe I’m just projecting. Their family’s Belgian nobility, or whatever. A jealous uncle, or an aunt who wants money. That’s way more plausible. Doesn’t mean it’s any less shitty. I almost start to feel bad for him again.
Seven months. That’s all I’m here for.
“So, uh.” I start. “About my notebook -”
Von Arx speaks without looking up from her computer. “As headmistress of the most selective boarding school in all Europe, Miss Pierce, I’m sure you can understand that I’m quite a busy woman.”
“I get that. But you can just give me the notebook, and I’ll get out of your hair. Great hair, by the way.” There’s an awkward pause. “What conditioner do you use?”
“Do you know why I love plants, Miss Pierce?”
“Because they don’t talk back?”
“I love them because they are still things in a very busy world,” She says. “Their trunks are still. Their stems only ever move when they are blown by the wind, or parted by human hand. They have the wisdom to remain quiet, inert, when the entire universe bustles and seethes around them. Plants are the closest thing there will ever be on this planet to true peace.”
She pushes her rolling chair back elegantly, resting her elbow on the windowsill and stroking the uber-lettuce daintily. Happily. She never smiles at me, but she does at Lionel, her plants, Alistair - three things she loves. Obviously. She glides back to the desk, her fancy ink pen scratching across paper as she signs something with flourish.
“I regret to inform you your notebook belongs to me now.”
I blink. “But…my mom gave it to me -”
“And I am confiscating it, which, if you read the rulebook, you’d know means I may dispose of it at my discretion.” She smiles up at me with all her impeccably straight teeth. “If you’d like, we could take the matter to a small claims court, but I’ll do you the service of projecting your loss ahead of time - William Cunningham’s solicitors are good, certainly, but I make it a point to employ the best in the world.”
Court? For a little ol’ notebook? She and Alistair are so damn protective of Rose’s drawing. Wait, no - Von Arx just hates me, doesn’t she? She thinks she can just steamroll over me like I’m nothing. Because I am, to her. Bad grades, worse permanent record. I’m only here because of William’s money. It’s not even about the notebook anymore. This is a matter of pride - a war of wills. I bristle down to my toes.
“You can’t do this.”
“I can. And I do. But I take no pleasure in it,” She says coldly. “Now, if you’d please; the door is over there.”
Two can play her solitaire game. I know now. Or at least, I think I know. The missing poster, the Julien she talked about. They’re the same. It’s worth a gamble, at least. I shove my hand in my bag and rummage, pulling out the rulebook. I slide the missing poster out from between its pages and slap it on the desk.
“How about a trade, then?”
She doesn’t even look up from her screen. I clear my throat.
“I think you’ll be interested in this -”
“I doubt it.” She cuts.
I unfold the poster, and when she sees what’s inside her whole face goes slack. All her queenly coolness evaporates, and what’s left is a thunderstruck old woman. Her bejeweled hand darts out for the poster, but I’m faster - I grab it and lightly shake it between two fingers.
“This belongs to you, doesn’t it?”
“Where did you find that?” She demands.
“It was chilling in the rulebook you gave me. I thought it was just trash. But seeing how carefully preserved it is, I’d say that’s not true at all, huh?”
Von Arx’s veiny fist almost imperceptibly tightens on the desk’s surface. I was right - this thing means something to her. But why? Part of me wants to see her crack. And part of me just wants to know the answer.
“His name is Julien, isn’t it?” I prod.
Von Arx goes still, like a deer in the headlights. Like the deer on her desk, frozen and made into art.
“Is?” She murmurs. “No. His name was Julien. And he was my son.”
Instantly, the arrogance I built up taunting her feels cheap, brittle, and it comes crashing down like a castle of glass toothpicks. Her son. Alistair’s uncle.
Her son went missing all those years ago?
“In the end, even a mother’s love was not enough to save him from fate.” Von Arx’s eyes hollowly watch the space over my shoulder. Her eyebrows knit, as if what she’s recalling hurts somewhere I can’t see.
“Did he get…kidnapped, or something?” I try softly.
“He was not the first,” Von Arx ignores me. “And he will not be the last.” She suddenly snaps out of it, fox-eyes focusing on me. “But that’s neither here nor there. You should be in class, not listening to an old woman wax about a past she cannot change. Leave the paper and go.”
She stands, rifles around in her drawer, and then pulls out my notebook. She offers it in one hand, and I take it and put it in my bag. Kidnap is heavy, serious shit - shit that’s definitely too heavy for a Thursday morning. I take it and put my backpack on and stand up, tracing the missing poster one last time. My finger stops on the blank space made by wear and time.
“Julien Strickland,” I mutter. “So that’s what belongs here.”
There’s a sound like stale, crackling bread against my ears, and black rubble suddenly spills across the poster, like someone’s tipped over a glass of black sand. Shiny dark shards, and a single tiny, perfect ruby spinning as it comes to rest against my nail.
“You -” Von Arx’s voice cuts out. My eyes slide up to her, but she’s not looking at me. She’s focused down and to my left. On the deer statue.
Or…what used to be the deer statue.
The whole statue is just gone. All that’s left of it now is its wooden stand, and a pile of black glass shards, so fine it had to have been smashed with enormous force. Who did this? Von Arx - did she break her own piece of art? She doesn’t have a hammer in her hand. Was it just old, and I was unlucky enough to be here when it finally crumbled?
I look up expecting fury in the headmistress’s eyes, but it’s not there. She’s not angry. Her quivering gaze is something I see in the mirror every day.
She’s afraid.
“You…” Her voice comes out raspy. “It’s you.”
“I swear I didn’t touch it,” I blurt. “I don’t - ”
In a superfast second a woman of her age shouldn’t be capable of she rounds the desk, her eyes lucid and slightly glazed as she grabs my wrist.
“It’s you he wants. Not Alistair. Not any of the other students. You.”
I try to shake her off, but her grip is so unbelievably strong. Her eyes roam over me hungrily, happily?, but then she sees the bandage around my palm and her expression crumples to anger. White-hot fur
y.
“You -” She chokes. “Alistair had one the same. You didn’t - You didn’t make a ridiculous blood promise! Not on the grounds. Not with him!”
“I -”
Her manicured nails grip like talons in the meat of my shoulders as she shakes me, my teeth vibrating in my skull as she screams. Screams. The utterly cool and composed woman I saw on my first day screams her fucking head off, the sound ricocheting off the marble walls.
“You didn’t! Tell me you didn’t give my grandson your blood, putain!!!”
My heart hammers, my thoughts hammering louder. Is she nuts? Was she secretly batshit nuts this whole time?
“Get your hands off me!” I shriek loud to startle her, get some advantage. Any advantage. But she doesn’t budge, her fingers like ice. The secretary has to be hearing this, right? So why hasn’t she barged in to see what’s wrong? Von Arx stares into me with undiluted fucking hate. Even the plants in the room seem to quiver with malice, petals looming huge and too-colorful. The sunset orchid looks too red. Too red and it’s the panic, I know, but I swear I see one of the flower’s overflowing roots twitch in my direction.
I suck in air and bellow with all my might; “LET. ME. GO!”
Von Arx’s cruel-mad eyes, locked voraciously on mine until now, suddenly widen. She drops me like she’s touched hot iron, frantic wisps of her hair coming lose from its strict bun. I pull away and grab my backpack, fleeing for the door.
“Go, then!” She shrieks, her howling following me the whole way out of the building; “You’ve destroyed everything! All my work, all my effort! You’ve destroyed my grandson when I have done everything to protect him!”
I don’t even stop to look at the secretary, my converse beating hard on the marble until finally, finally, grass.
Von Arx’s words don’t follow me outside.
But what does is the sound of sobbing - of pure gray grief - pouring out of the second story window, the one with perfect lettuce plants on the sill.
23
The Story (Or, How you waited so long, alone, for no one to save you)
It’s entirely possible Von Arx was just having a really, really bad day. When I have shit days I too lose all sense of reason and start accusing people of destroying my grandsons.
Today was just a bad day for her.
That’s what I’d like to believe. ‘Having a bad day’ is much easier to digest than ‘screaming like you’ve been stabbed with a nonsense knife just because one of your fancy desk statues broke’.
Except her voice was pretty calm after the statue broke. She even looked a little happy. It was only once she saw my blood promise wound that she went apeshit. She saw Alistair with the same bandage - she must’ve put two and two together. She’s headmistress, so it makes sense she knows about blood promises if they’re actually a thing here at Silvere. But that doesn’t explain why she’s so mad we made one. It’s just blood! It grows back! It’s just two teenagers, one of them being a dramatic little shit overprotective of his possibly-extraterrestrial baby sister and the other party going along with it because she’s desperate for Just One Relationship From His Not-Friend, Pretty Please™.
I should write the whole thing off as Von Arx having a bad day, but I can’t. She was too loud, too furious. Too real. I spend all of first period (Economics again) staring at the flickering kanji-laced hologram in the middle of the table, her words echoing in my head.
‘It’s you he wants. Not Alistair. Not the other students. You.’
Who in the beef stew hell is ‘he’? For some reason, the image of that statue pops up in my head. The Nightrose - rearing up, his black antlers proud and his eyes gleaming crimson.
The classroom’s dreamy-warm with the October sun, but I shiver anyway.
Next to me, Trevino raises her hand to answer a question. Flawlessly, of course. Professor Guillard smiles at her and swans on in his lecture about Silk Road taxation methods. I put on my best not-chicken-scratch handwriting and doodle on a corner of my worksheet before I slide it under her sharp elbow.
‘Hey, smarty-pants. What’s the deal with blood promises round these parts?’
Trevino narrows her eyes down at the question, and then…completely ignores it. I take this as a sign she desperately wants me to try harder. I sneak my pen under her arm and add a dozen smiley faces to the paper. She looks down at it for a charitable beat, and then up at me. She stares - two violet-blue sapphires piercing into my soul - and says nothing. She goes right back to being a genius and I have to wait an agonizing ten minutes before the bell rings and I can ask her the question out-loud. I approach her in the hall with a swift bit of skipping.
“Hi!”
Trevino turns and looks me dead in the eyes. “Don’t.”
I spin on my heel. “Understandable. Have a nice day.” I immediately remember what I’m here for and whirl around again. “Actually, I need to ask you something.”
Trevino invites me to speak by walking in the other direction down a long hall of super old paintings. I bounce after her breathlessly.
“I get that you asked me to leave you alone just now, but you’re one of only four people I know in this Rembrandt-coated hell and I have questions.”
She looks up at the paintings flashing by. “These are Ruebens.”
“Haha! Nice try. I might look stupid, but even I know sandwiches can’t hold paintbrushes.”
Trevino groans and massages her delicate forehead. “Were you born without a sense of shame? Or just an inability to understand social cues?”
“Both!”
She lets out a labored sigh. “If I pay you, will you leave me alone?”
“You’re a scholarship kid, though. Can you even afford me?” I tap my chin. “I’m surprised you haven’t already told me what your parents do. Everyone else around here leads with that.”
“I don’t tell personal details to not-friends. And we are assuredly not friends,” Trevino says coolly.
“God no,” I agree. “But we can be information-exchanging enemies. If you want. If you’re, like, comfortable with that.”
“I’m not.”
“Oh. Well, I am!”
“What - ” She spins around, sheet of brunette hair flying like a shampoo advertisement. “ - on God’s green earth do you want from me?”
“Answers.”
“You’ll have to settle for ten francs and a middle finger.”
“Deal.” I take the holographic bill she drops in my hands between her middle and index finger. “Do you always bribe your way out of uncomfortable situations?”
She quirks a brow. “Something wrong with that?”
“No. It’s weird though. If you’re poor and you wanna get away from someone you usually just gotta book it in the other direction as fast as you can.”
“Oh, I assure you,” Trevino speeds up her pace. “I’m employing both methods.”
“It’s just one little question!” I whine as I sprint to catch up with her. We’re nearly the same height, but genetics gave me the long torso and her the long legs and she’s kicking my ass with them.
“It’s a pointless question -” She corrects. “ - about fairytales and superstition, and I don’t have time for that nonsense. I’m here to get into Cambridge Law, not to be your witch’s almanac.”
“If you tell me, I’ll leave you alone. Forever.”
Her indigo eyes spark as she turns. “Forever-ever?”
“Super forever.”
Trevino folds her arms over her chest. “The locals in the village believe the campus is cursed.”
“Like, Defense Against the Dark Arts cursed, or Blair Witch cursed?”
“This place used to be a pagan ritual site; war rituals, fertility rituals. Sacrificing goats, sheep, possibly humans. The people thought spirits of nature lived here, and that they had to be appeased with blood.”
“Spirits.” I deadpan.
“You might know them by the name ‘fairies’.”
“No way.”
“Yes, way,” She sighs. “The legend goes if you spill blood on the campus, then it belongs to the fairies. Which means if you make a blood promise, then it belongs to them, and they’ll punish you for breaking it.”
“With what?”
“Plague. Crop failure. General death. It ranges.”
“What about, like, period blood?”
Trevino blinks at me a thousand times in one second.
“Not using it for a blood promise, because ew! I’m just asking do all my tampons here belong to the fairies or not, which I’m pretty sure is a reasonable thing to wonder at this point!”
She looks up at the ceiling as if asking the big man in the sky for help.
“I’m just saying! Something to think about! Anyway all this blood stuff’s bullshit, right? Just a story.”
She regains herself. “I’m not here to tell you if fairytales are real or not. Your mother should’ve done that years ago.”
“Fine, fine!” I grumble. “You’ve done your part. And now I’ll do mine by fucking off.”
She immediately starts to walk away, her long hair swishing, but my mouth blurts on auto-pilot.
“Von Arx got mad at me for making a blood promise with Alistair.”
“What happened to ‘super forever’?” Trevino quips.
“Von Arx seems to think blood promises are real,” I press. “At least, real enough to have consequences. Like, bad ones.”
“And? She’s entitled to her belief. It’s no business of mine, or yours.”
“It is if she flips out at me for them! A-And what if they actually do? Have consequences?”
There’s a hefty silence woven between the spear-shafts of sunlight in the hall. Trevino’s eyes dart to my bandaged hand.
“You think fairies will come down from their glittery mushroom realm to punish you for pricking your thumb and making a promise?”
Mushroom realm. There are mushrooms here, on campus, in a perfect circle. A fairy ring, Alistair said. But that’s - no. C’mon Lilith. It’s impossible. I go red at the gills.
“Just…what if there’s a kernel of truth? That’s where folklore comes from a lot of the time; bits of actual truth. Right?”