I sat up in my chair. “No.”
“He hasn’t been in his room in a while,” Nick mumbled. He was munching on a pear, the only one of us who seemed to have recovered from the party in good spirits.
“He’s probably been in the lab,” Diego said. “You know their hours are insane.”
Nick shrugged. He licked pear juice from his palm.
But Theo usually stopped at his room between classes. And I hadn’t seen him there in days.
I stood up.
“Ines,” Anna said, “where are you going?” But I was already pushing my way out of the parlor.
I went to Theo’s room first. I knocked before opening the door, though I knew he wouldn’t answer.
His bed was unmade and a half-full cup of tea sat on his desk, as if he’d dashed off to class in a hurry. But his books were all there, strewn across the floor. In his closet, I saw he was running low on clothes. He hadn’t picked up his laundry, which he should have done yesterday.
I rifled through his dresser. The keycard wasn’t there. So he could be in the lab. Or it could be in his pocket, and he could be anywhere.
My heart was beating fast as I left his room.
Down in the courtyard, the rain had stopped, but the leaves, tiles, and branches were still wet, their colors hyper-vibrant. I hugged my elbows as I walked over the slick stones onto the yard.
Theo was missing. He wasn’t in my room. He wasn’t in the courtyard, on the bench underneath the fig tree where he liked to study. He wasn’t in the hallway, whistling his way to class. He wasn’t in the Molina library, the Ashley library, the Harrington library. He wasn’t in the garden. He wasn’t here by the fountain.
I sat on the fountain bench.
Could I remember the last time I’d seen him? Yes. He was down on the yard and I was up above. I was leaving my Islamic Art class in the Ashley tower. As I’d packed up my books, I turned to the window and saw him on the bright grass below. He was wearing the blue nylon rain jacket he’d been loving lately. He was waving to someone—Nick, maybe?—and shouting something cheery, something like, Wait, wait, I’m coming. Then he was jogging to catch up. Then he was gone.
Now the sun was setting. Purple evening descended over the house.
I got up. I went across the yard to the professors’ tower. I made my way through the halls to M. Donna’s door.
“Come in,” she said at my knock.
M. Donna was sitting at her desk, head bent over a page of tiny notes. She didn’t look up as I entered.
“Hi, M. Donna,” I said. “How are you doing today?”
She barely glanced away from her notes. “Hello, Ines,” she muttered. “I’m fine, how are you?”
“I’m wonderful.” I tapped my fingers against the doorjamb. “Can I ask, have you seen Theo lately?”
Now she looked straight at me, lowering her hands as she eyed me up and down.
“Theo Williams?” she said. She leaned back in her chair. “Why do you ask?”
“He’s my partner on a project,” I lied. “For Intro to Phonetics. It’s due next week. But I haven’t seen him for a couple days. You’re his tutorial advisor, right? Do you know if he’s been in the lab?”
M. Donna tapped her pen against the page. “Ah,” she said.
I sat down. I crossed my legs.
M. Donna cleared her throat. Then she said, “Ines, Theo is in the Restoration Center. You know that.”
She was still tapping her pen against the page.
“But he’s a perfect student,” I finally said. “He’s perfect. Why—why is he in the tower?”
“No one’s perfect, Ines,” M. Donna snipped. “And the Center isn’t a place of punishment, but improvement, which every student can use. You know that, too.”
“What did he do?” I said.
“The affairs of other students are no business of your own,” she said.
“You have to tell me.”
She stood up.
“No,” she said, “I don’t. This is a matter between Theo and the administration. I can only recommend you speak with your Phonetics professor about arranging for a new project partner.”
She gestured to the door.
*
I was taking a Greek art seminar that semester with a new materials concentrator, a black-haired boy with a pale, oblong, aristocratic face. His features were handsome from the front, but in profile you could see that he had an ugly overbite. Theo hated him. I didn’t know why, but I could imagine. His name was George.
That afternoon, after class, I asked George if he wanted to cram for the midterm with me. He looked me over with a prissy smirk before responding, “Sure, whyever not?”
I met up with him after dinner in one of the Ashley libraries, a cramped, crooked, dusty room with blackwood walls and a low ceiling painted bronze. Tonight, the only other person there was a chubby first-year girl, napping over her notes. She drooled onto the pages.
I’d brought a jug of beer some Molina second-years had brewed. I sat close to George. As he flipped through our textbook rambling on about the texts, I made sure his glass was never empty. I watched the foam pop and fizzle. I didn’t like looking at the sculptures, the ones photocopied into the texts. I didn’t like their white, frozen faces.
It was going to be an easy midterm. The vocabulary list was short, and we only had to memorize the dates within one hundred years. George sighed every time I asked him a question. He didn’t think I was very smart. That was what I wanted.
“What’s contrapposto again?” I said.
“An asymmetrical pose,” he said slowly, “with the weight on just one leg. A dynamic position. Makes the figure look both powerful and relaxed.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.” I poured him more beer.
“What’s really cool,” he said, pushing his glasses up on his nose, “is seeing the same pose appear thousands of years later, in American Western film. Think John Wayne entering the saloon, leaning back on one leg. It’s that same pose. Comfortable power. You know, the ideal man.”
“Wow,” I said. “Yeah.”
His lip curled into a smirk.
“No,” I said. “Really. You’re right. That is cool.”
I poured him more to drink. I swiped a lick of foam from his glass and sucked it off my finger.
I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he drank.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
“Naturally.”
“You’re in the new materials concentration, right? You know Theo Williams?”
“Sure.” George ran a hand through his hair. “You guys are dating, aren’t you?”
“We used to. Not anymore.” I rested my chin in my hand. “Anyway. He’s in the tower, right?”
George took another big sip of the beer.
“Why?” I said.
He licked his lips. “Why, what?”
“Why is Theo in the tower?”
George hesitated. He glanced at me, then away. “Why do you care?” he said.
“I’m just curious.”
“How curious are you?”
I ran a hand along his thigh.
“Tell me,” I said.
He looked up.
“I’ll fuck you,” I said, “if you tell me.”
He sneered. “You’ll fuck anyone.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “I usually only fuck people I like.”
“Well, you must like an awful lot of people.”
“I don’t like you.”
He lifted his chin and assessed me with his glacial blue eyes.
“You’re really pretty, you know,” he said. “Even with your weird teeth.” He narrowed his eyes. “Well, maybe not pretty, exactly. But there’s something about you.”
He took a sip of his drink.
“You’re right,” he muttered. “No one likes me. I thought this school would be different. But nothing’s ever different, really.” He glanced back at me. “You wouldn’t understand.”
&
nbsp; “No one likes you because you’re a snob,” I said.
“You think so?”
“Yes. You could have friends. If you really wanted them.”
The napping girl snorted in her sleep.
George twisted his pencil between his fingers. His expression turned dark.
“George,” I said.
He looked up again.
“Tell me,” I whispered.
He kept twisting his pencil. “I don’t even work with M. Neptune,” he said. “What makes you think I know what’s going on with Theo?”
“Do you?”
He gave a dramatic shrug. But after glancing at me one more time, he sighed and said, “Theo went into M. Neptune’s lab outside of project work hours. That alone is a huge transgression. But he also, well. He released one of their test subjects.”
“A test subject?”
“Yes. A rabbit.” He was sneering again and talking slower, as if relishing the moment. “He took it out of the lab and set it loose out on the yard. Don’t know why, really. Pretty dumb move for someone who’s supposed to be such a genius.”
A memory flashed of Amy’s fur, gray as the moon in the night, as I set her down on the grass, kissed her head one last time, and hoped, really hoped, that she would be fine.
I didn’t know why I had done it. I just couldn’t put her back in the cage.
“But that doesn’t sound so bad,” I said. “It was only a rabbit.”
“Sure. And they found it on the yard the next day. But it could have been much worse. I mean, it wasn’t just any rabbit.” George spoke even slower now. “It was a test subject. The department doesn’t exactly want to lose those. Honestly, Theo fucked up. He should have been thrown in the tower weeks ago, but M. Neptune is so blind when it comes to his little wunderkind. Well, he used to be. I guess he’s come to his senses now.”
George took another sip.
“All right,” I said. “But if it didn’t happen during lab hours and no one was there, how did they know it was Theo?”
“The security footage showed him there.”
I breathed out. “Really?”
“Sure. We all saw it. Looked just like him.” He wiped the corner of his mouth. “And anyway, they looked at the log from the night and his keycard had swiped into the lab.”
“The keys are different from each other?”
George glanced at me. “Of course they are. Anyway. Altogether, a pretty big series of mistakes.” He was definitely enjoying the story now. “They’ll probably throw him out of the concentration. If not out of Catherine.”
I looked down at the page. An ancient Greek statue stood alone in a marble room. The god’s lifeless eyes gazed back at me.
*
I lay on my stomach on the floor of the music room, staring at one of the legs of a rococo armchair. I focused. This close, the leg’s wood grain came into such detail that it abstracted. It didn’t look like anything.
Theo was in the tower. Theo was gone.
“You’re shaking,” Ursula said. “You better hold still if you don’t want me screwing this up.”
I braced my arm against the rug. Pain pulsed through my shoulder.
When Yaya had heard there was a Molina first-year giving tattoos, she had immediately gotten herself on the wait list, and put mine and Anna’s names on there, too. She hadn’t bothered to ask if we wanted in. We did. And of course we had to get the same tattoo, the Catherine House insignia. In exchange for the tattoos, Yaya gave Ursula the faux-mink coat, the one she had worn all our first year. It made me sad to think of her giving it up. Yaya didn’t care.
Ursula had frowned as she bent over each of their shoulders, examining the skin with a sharp eye, then sighing. She tucked her long, stiff black hair behind her ears. Her hands moved with reverent care over her kit of needles, colored ink bottles, a blue BIC lighter, and a hand towel embroidered with tiny strawberries. She ran the needle through the lighter’s flame before crouching over Yaya, then Anna. She didn’t talk and didn’t smile. She just slowly pricked.
Now, lying on the rug with my arm outstretched, I could see Ursula’s black eyes and stern brow, her deep widow’s peak. I could feel her breath on the back of my neck.
Stay here, I wanted to say. Keep touching me and make it hurt. Make me forget.
But I couldn’t forget. Because Theo was gone.
Anna stood before me. From here, I could see only her fuzzy blond ankles and bare feet, facing away from the mirror. She was probably craning to see her tattoo.
“Anna,” I said.
“Mmm?”
“Is it pretty?”
The feet turned. I felt her consider me.
“My tattoo,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Gorgeous.”
I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth. The pain in my shoulder blazed.
It felt like hours passed before Ursula finally said, “Done.”
My knees creaked as I stood.
I twisted my neck to look over my shoulder into the mirror. The tattoo really was gorgeous: a little Catherine insignia, its tiny swoops and scrolls all flushed with blood.
“Thank you,” I said to Ursula.
She nodded. She wiped her needle on a towel.
I lingered behind Anna and Yaya on our walk to dinner. Their shadows grew long as they skipped over the yard, holding hands and laughing. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. A bandage swathed each of their left shoulders, just as one did mine.
Another shadow moved ahead of us, near the door to Harrington. I thought for a moment it might be someone waving to us, but it was only a trick of the light.
Theo had been in the tower for a week now, but I still saw him everywhere. I would be on my way to the bathroom and hear his footsteps behind me, but when I turned, it was only some first-year scurrying toward the commissary. A face in the great hall was him until it came into focus. Shadows through classroom windows were his until they weren’t.
Theo was gone. And it was my fault he was in the tower, that his life was ruined, that things would never be the same between us. Mine. I was the one who had ruined everything. Of course I was.
Before Baby, I had never missed anyone. I didn’t think I even understood the idea of missing a person or a thing or a place. But now I missed Baby, and Theo. And I missed me, too. I missed me, here at home.
“Ines,” Yaya shouted. She was waving for me, holding open the door. A clover-scented breeze stirred the grass.
*
Daphne sat typing at her desk, lips pursed in peevish concentration as her fingers clattered over the keys. Every few minutes she cast a glare my way. Her hair was brushed into a pouf on top of her head, and she wore a bright red dress with a ruffled collar.
“You look very pretty today, Daphne,” I said.
She glared at me again.
The clock ticked. I hugged my knees.
The door to Viktória’s office creaked open, and I sat up straighter. But it was only M. Linus, the hunched gray professor I’d had for my Monuments and Memorials seminar. He slumped toward Daphne and murmured, “I’m on the calendar for next week, too, yes? Because—” before he saw me waiting.
“Oh,” he said, “hello, Ines. Lovely, lovely to see you. Ah.” He glanced at Daphne, then back at me. “Do you have an appointment with Viktória?”
“Yes,” I said.
“No,” Daphne said sharply, “she doesn’t, and Viktória has meetings all afternoon, but she won’t leave.”
“I need to talk to Viktória,” I said.
M. Linus glanced from one to the other of us, then bowed at Daphne again. “Thursday, yes?”
She penciled in the appointment. M. Linus slunk out without meeting my eye.
“Please,” Daphne snapped at me, “try to sit with some decorum.”
I put my feet on the floor. I was wearing the denim skirt Yaya had given to me last summer, one steamy July day on the dock. She had plucked it from a storage box, held it up to my legs, and said
it would look so perfect. It would make my legs look so amazing.
“Really,” Daphne said, “I don’t know how long she will be.”
“I can wait,” I said.
The clock ticked. I needed to concentrate. I closed my eyes.
I am in the house. I am in Viktória’s office. The computer is on the desk. The daisies are in the vase. The clock is ticking. It is three-twelve p.m. I am here.
Please. Please. Let me believe in this house. Let me stay.
Please. Please keep me here.
A loud laugh rang out in the hall. Then M. Neptune walked in, guiding a woman, the new English professor, by the small of her back.
“Oh, hello, Ines,” the professor murmured. She looked me up and down as she slipped a sunny strand of hair behind her ear. “Oh, do you have an appointment with Viktória? Are we early?”
“She doesn’t have an appointment,” Daphne snapped.
M. Neptune turned to me, smiling. I don’t think he had ever looked at me directly before. The power of his stare made my stomach twist.
“Hi,” he said. “Ines.”
“I need to talk to Viktória.”
He gestured toward the professor at his side. “We have some schedules to go over with her. Can it wait?”
“You can go first,” I said. “I’ll speak to her after.”
M. Neptune’s eyes were so black I couldn’t see his pupils.
M. Neptune touched the professor’s elbow and muttered something in her ear. She nodded. Then he brightened as he turned back to me.
“Want to come to my office?” he said.
“I need to talk to Viktória.”
He touched my shoulder. “It’s just down this hall.”
Daphne’s face twisted as he led me out.
The furniture in M. Neptune’s office was more modern than any I had seen at Catherine. His chair was made of ergonomic, adjustable vinyl mesh and his broad steel desk shone like an engine. Everything smelled leathery and expensive.
“Want a chocolate?” M. Neptune said, pushing a tray toward me. “They’re from Ecuador.”
I sat in an amoeba-shaped armchair. “No.”
“Water?” He gestured toward a pitcher.
“No,” I said again, then changed my mind and poured myself a glass.
“So,” M. Neptune said, folding his hands over his stomach and rocking slightly in his chair. “What is it that you need to talk to Viktória about?”
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