by Eva Chase
Unless they’d vanished like the relics of my brother’s existence back home had, along with everyone’s memories of him.
I didn’t let myself dwell on that last possibility. My phone’s light skimmed over the hearth and the seating area around it. Nothing there looked like it contained any storage. I walked along the walls, touching the paneling, just in case.
A couple of the bookshelves at the other end of the room had cabinet doors on their bottom halves. I opened those with a glimmer of hope and found nothing but more books. With a grimace, I pulled out a couple of volumes.
They were both bound in old, pungent leather, as were many of the volumes on the shelves above. The others were covered in aged cloth. The pages I opened shone yellow with age. The copyrights showed they’d been printed in the 1920s or before, all of them more than ninety years old. I couldn’t spot a single newer book on any of the shelves.
The dean was a collector, I guessed. His personal library covered a wide variety of subjects, from educational strategies to legal history to poetry, but there wasn’t going to be any information about Cade in there.
That just left the desk. Come on, come on, I thought at it as I tugged open one drawer and another.
The first one I checked held only a small, black bottle and blank paper that looked nearly as old as the stuff in the books. I held the bottle up to the light and realized it was ink. Okay… When I unscrewed the lid and swirled it around, the stuff inside didn’t move. It was totally dry. Time for the dean to switch to pens, obviously.
The contents of the other drawers included a box of cigars, a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, a wool scarf that’d gotten tatty, and a leather notebook that gave me another spark of hope. That spark dimmed when I opened it to find page after page of a shorthand notation I couldn’t decipher. From the fading of the ink, it looked like all this writing had been done well before Cade’s time here anyway.
Surely the school didn’t operate without student records of any kind? I still hadn’t seen any computers that might have held digital files either. How did they even find out about people like Cade and Ryo to offer them scholarships? Maybe there was a separate room just for records in the building somewhere…
I was just shutting the last drawer on the desk when footsteps rasped against the floor outside. My heart lurched. I darted around the desk, meaning to wait by the door to listen for when the passerby had moved on, but they were coming straight to me. The knob turned.
There wasn’t really anywhere to hide where I could count on going undiscovered, and it’d look a hell of a lot worse if I made it clear I knew I was doing something shady. I stepped closer to the sofa and bent over it just as the door opened.
I straightened up with a little jump as if startled. Dean Wainhouse peered at me and flicked on the light. “Miss Corbyn. What are you doing in here?”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, channeling my nerves into awkwardness. I motioned toward the sitting area. “I couldn’t find something I brought with me, and I got the idea I might have left it in here when I was first talking to you, so I came down to check… The door wasn’t locked. I didn’t want to bother anyone.”
I couldn’t tell from the dean’s steady gaze whether he believed me or not. “I would prefer if you have inquiries regarding this room that you wait until proper office hours,” he said. “Did you find your item?”
“No. I guess it’s just lost.”
“Let me know what it is, and I’ll keep an eye out.”
Oh. Er. “It was just a pen,” I said, grasping for the first thing that popped into my head that I could conceivably have misplaced. “A pretty one with this silver vine pattern on it, kind of like my tattoo.” I pulled my sleeve up high enough to show what I meant. “One of my friends gave it to me. If you do find it, that would be great!”
“I’ll let you know if I do. You’d better get back to your bed now.”
Those last words came out in a subtly commanding tone that didn’t leave any room for argument. I gave a little laugh and hurried past him into the foyer with another mumbled apology.
It felt too risky to poke around anymore tonight now that he was up and knew I’d been roaming around too. I meant to at least scan the halls as I went up for a door I hadn’t gone past yet that might hold those elusive records, but by the time I’d climbed the first couple of steps, a dull ache had formed behind the bridge of my nose. As I continued on, the headache spread behind my eyes and through my skull with a throbbing pressure.
The pain radiated sharper until I could hardly concentrate on setting one foot in front of the other. At the top of the staircase, I had to stop for a moment, clutching the second floor railing and squeezing my eyes shut, before I could even keep walking. When I stumbled into my bedroom, the headache was full-out blaring, drowning out any thought other than seeking relief.
I flopped down on my bed, and before I’d even pulled my sheet over me, my mind escaped into the blackness of sleep.
Chapter Eight
Ryo
Jenson Wynter and I had never been anything like friends, but I hadn’t realized he was a total asshat until this past week. My usual approach to student life was to keep my head low and my nose clean so I could drift along without drama, but whatever gods that existed hadn’t blessed me with infinite patience. When I caught his voice carrying out of the first-floor sitting room in that snarky tone he only took on with one person, I stopped in my tracks and strode over to the doorway.
Sure enough, there he was dusting the side tables while Trix whisked her broom across the floor, her back to him and her shoulders tensed. Of course the powers that be would have stuck them on cleaning duty together. Roseborne’s staff were by far the biggest asshats in the place.
“If you can’t handle the reality,” Jenson started up again, and I barged between them, turning to face him with a Try me look. He was a tall guy, nearly six inches on me I’d bet, but whip thin whereas I actually bothered to work out now and then. If he ever pissed me off enough that we had to come to blows, I’d put the money on me.
“Why don’t you shut your mouth for once?” I said. “Or maybe forever, if you can’t tell when your comments aren’t wanted?”
Jenson’s eyes narrowed at me, but his stance stiffened at the same time. “I can say whatever I want,” he retorted. “Who asked for your opinion?”
“You did, by making such a production that anyone walking by can hear you.” I motioned toward Trix. “She’s here. She’s going to stay as long as she feels like it. Work out your daddy issues some other way, all right?”
His jaw tightened. It was something of a low blow, derived from a piece he’d delivered in Composition class last year. I didn’t generally rub that kind of stuff in. But if he was going to harass Trix every moment she existed in his presence, he deserved it.
“It’s okay,” Trix said in her unflappable way, chucking the results of her sweeping from the pan into a garbage can. “I can ignore him. He’s not the first loser I’ve ever had shoot their mouth off at me.”
“We’ve got enough crap to deal with around here without him adding to it.”
“And I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you that I’m trying to cut through the crap?” Jenson said in a barbed tone. If he was trying to get at something in particular, the point went straight over my head.
“You’re doing a shitty job of it then,” I replied, and turned my back on him too to focus on Trix. “Are you finished with your chores for this shift?”
“I think so. Just got to put the broom away.”
“I’ll keep you company.”
We walked past Jenson to the hall without another glance his way. He muttered something under his breath that from his tone was probably obscene. Water off my back, dude. As if I cared what some slick and smirking white-boy ass thought about me.
He couldn’t tell me anything worse than I already told myself on a regular basis.
“I really was okay,” Trix said as we made for the h
ousecleaning supply room. “He’s irritating, but it’s not like he’s going to do any serious damage with all his hassling.”
“So, more like a mosquito than a bear on the scale of creatures you’d rather not deal with?” I suggested.
The half-hearted joke won me Trix’s rare laugh. She leaned the broom against the wall inside the closet. “Yeah, that’s a reasonable assessment.”
I wanted to ask what sort of presence she’d label me as in the range of possible animals—or whatever other metaphors she felt like using—but I wasn’t going to go all needy on her. That wasn’t the idea at all. Just take it easy, enjoy her company and make mine as enjoyable as possible in return, and welcome the fact that I got this extra brightness in my life after all. The real mystery was how I’d gotten lucky enough to end up with even this much.
Trix glanced across the hall as she shut the closet, and her smile fell. Her gaze lingered on the line of portraits on the opposite wall. She was thinking about her brother, no doubt—frustrated that she hadn’t unraveled more of whatever she imagined that mystery to be.
A pang shot through my chest. She cared so much that she’d come all this way to try to help him, not even knowing what kind of a mess she might get herself into. I wasn’t sure she ever realized how impressive that devotion was. Who in my life had I ever sacrificed half that much for?
It was better not to answer that question.
Better to distract her from those worries too. As much as I’d found I loved seeing how resolve could cast a steely glint across Trix’s face, taking her from pretty to outright gorgeous in an instant, it was a dead end. I couldn’t tell her that, and if I’d tried to I knew she’d have refused to give up anyway, so the least I could do was give her other, more pleasant things to occupy herself with.
I glanced farther down the hall, and inspiration lit. “Breakfast was worse than usual today, wasn’t it?” I remarked. It had been an incredibly grainy attempt at oatmeal with only pebble-hard raisins to add a little sweetness.
The face Trix pulled told me how much she agreed. “I’ve had worse,” she said. “But not by much.”
I grinned. “Here, it’s an hour or so before anyone goes on lunch duty. Let’s see if we can scrounge up something halfway tasty with the ingredients on hand.”
She arched a skeptical eyebrow at me, but I’d caught her attention. She followed me over to the kitchen, where the boiled oatmeal smell still hung in the air alongside the ever-present rose perfume.
I wasn’t sure exactly how the staff arranged our cooking supplies. A truck came by with a delivery every weekend, but I never saw the workers speak to anyone here. Even when I’d tried a, “Hey, man,” to the guy who’d been hefting the boxes over to the kitchen, he’d walked right by me without a twitch of his eyes, like a freaking zombie. I guessed I should be glad they’d never tried to eat our brains.
The food they brought generally appeared to be picked with about as much care as the undead would have brought to the task. If an item could be stale, it would be. The leafy vegetables were always wilting, the fruits bruised or under-ripe. Anything that came in a can would be the cheapest possible brand, mostly ones I’d never even heard of, and the flavor reflected the quality.
But—most of the time—the goal wasn’t to outright poison us, and our ruling asshats did have some sense of variety, so each delivery came with one or two gems that I’d probably only have considered baseline quality if it wasn’t in comparison to the rest. There were packets of old but useable spices at the back of one of the pantry shelves. I didn’t risk them when I was on official cooking duty, but just for me, I didn’t mind experimenting.
“Let’s see.” I riffled through the pantry shelves and settled on a loaf of white bread—definitely stale, but edible—and the packet of cinnamon. From the industrial-sized fridge, I retrieved a couple of spare eggs and a gnarled orange.
Trix watched with a mix of curiosity and amusement. “What are you going to do with all that?”
“Improvise,” I said. “It’s not going to be a feast, exactly, but better than most of what our classmates are going to feed us. Cut the orange into quarters for me?”
As she gamely hacked away at the fruit, I cracked the eggs and whipped them up with a fork, since whisks were not a thing this kitchen had ever heard of. I sprinkled in a little cinnamon and then squeezed whatever juice I could out of the orange quarters Trix had cut. The citrus scent rose up to push back the oatmeal awfulness.
That tang with its hint of cinnamon brought back the memories of my mother’s pancakes. It’d been years since I’d gotten to eat one of those, but the flavor was fresh enough in my mind that my mouth watered in an instant.
This concoction wasn’t going to come close to touching those, but I’d do my best with what I had.
“Oh!” Trix said when I got out a few slices of the bread. “French toast. I didn’t know orange juice went in that.”
“It can, if you like things that taste good,” I told her with a smile.
The egg mixture soaked into the bread, I hoped solving the worst of the dryness and overriding the stale flavor. I stuck a blob of margarine on a frying pan and tossed the saturated slices on as soon as it’d melted. The sizzling sent a sharper waft of that mouth-watering scent into the air.
“So, you’re a chef in your spare time?” Trix asked, leaning back against the counter.
I let myself admire the lean lines of her arms, which her sleeves bared to the elbows, and the sleek curves that filled out her wiry frame. “Not really. I don’t even like cooking all that much. But I do like food. When I get desperate for something I’m not going to have to choke down…” I motioned to the frying pan.
“Well, I approve of that impulse.” She leaned over to sniff the pan. “How do you know when they’re done?”
“When they haven’t started smoking yet,” I said. “A mistake I’ll admit I’ve made at least a few times. My real talent is finding the usefulness in discarded things.”
I plucked up the pieces of orange peel to demonstrate. With a few cuts of the knife, a twist here and a wiggle there, I’d fit them together into a crafted flower as vibrant as Trix’s hair. She accepted it, the corners of her lips quirking upward. “So, you’re an artist.”
“I’m not sure I’d go that far.” Especially after I’d let any kind of practice slide those last few years in the world outside. It wasn’t as if I got much chance to do anything but fiddle around a bit here at Roseborne. What I’d really loved out there was finding some old piece of furniture someone had set out in the trash—a side table or an ottoman or a little bookshelf—that I could drag home, sand down, and refinish into something Mom would exclaim over. At least, I’d loved that while I still had the capacity to care.
Willing away those thoughts of the past, I flipped the slices. Victory! The cooked side was a near-perfect golden brown. By the time I’d grabbed a couple of plates, the toast was ready to come off.
It wasn’t the prettiest meal I’d ever seen served, dribbles of egg worming along the edges of the toast and the cinnamon dust clustered together in patches here and there, but fuck, even without syrup, it tasted a million times better than this morning’s oatmeal. I might not have been able to fully appreciate the flavors seeping over my tongue, but they brought enough pleasure that the dullness inside me couldn’t fully mute it. I gulped down my first slice in a matter of seconds and was licking my fingers before I’d even quite processed it was done.
The second one I dug into more slowly so I could savor the bites, dredging every bit of satisfaction I could through the numbness that attempted to siphon it away. The slice still disappeared down my throat way too quickly.
Trix polished off the last few bites of her serving with a happy sigh that sent a quiver of stifled anticipation straight to my groin. She looked at her plate as if feeling betrayed that it hadn’t replenished itself. “Yeah, I needed that.” Her light green eyes lifted to meet mine. “Thank you. You really didn’t have to—
you don’t have to do anything for me, you know.”
I waved her comment off. “If I had to, I probably wouldn’t want to. But I don’t and I do.”
She gave me a searching look that penetrated down to my bones. I thought of all the things I could have told her now, all the things I couldn’t, and all the reasons I wouldn’t have wanted to do either anyway. But there was a part of me that still ached to take her hand and say, “Look, this is how it is.”
She deserved that, but she deserved so much that I couldn’t give her. What would I really be offering but pain for her and a little absolution for myself?
I kept my mouth shut.
“Why me?” she said. “Why any of this? You only just met me.”
What was in it for me, she was really asking. That question I could answer almost completely honestly.
I sidled a little closer to her at the counter where we’d been eating, holding her gaze. “I like you. Does there need to be more to it than that? I knew I liked you the moment I saw you walk in here the other day. There aren’t a whole lot of things I like in this place, so I figure I might as well make the most of what I do.”
Her eyes darkened, and she ducked her head. Her voice came out quiet. “You wouldn’t say that if you really knew me—everything about me.”
What secret was she always holding back? I couldn’t bring myself to care. Because this was true too:
“It can’t be anything worse than what I know about myself. And no matter what it is, I also know you’re stubborn and loyal, and you don’t let anyone get in the way of doing what you believe is right, and I haven’t met many people who can say that either. I’m not asking for your hand in marriage, Trix. I just want to be around you as long as you’re getting something out of being around me, for however long you end up staying here.”