The Circle

by Val St. Crowe

  I read it. Sloppy seconds from a sloppy drunk. He’d tagged Tyler and Oliver on the post. “He said something about sloppy seconds before. You know, I’ve heard that phrase a zillion times, but I’m only now realizing what it actually means.”

  He made a face.

  “I really hope it’s not Enid,” I said.

  He clicked over to another program, and there was the video. The still image beneath the play icon was blurry and grainy. It was hard to establish what was going on. “You all right?”

  I nodded. “Let’s watch this.”

  He hit play.

  The video was short. It wasn’t in focus, and it was only brutal rhythmic movement, unidentifiable fleshy body parts against each other. In the background, some slurring male voice was muttering, “Bitches got to stop passing out in your bed, amiright?”

  That was it.

  I furrowed my brow. “Play it again.”

  Lev obliged me.

  “How does anyone even know what’s going on in that video?” I said. “It could be anything. It’s not even obviously sex.”

  “Well, the comment,” said Lev.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But there’s no way to know who that is. Who either of those people are.”

  “True,” he said.

  “And if it is her, I don’t know if it means anything.”

  “Well, if it is her, this is the night she called you. And now, she’s very possibly unconscious and being assaulted. And no one ever saw her again.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Look, there’s a thing tonight,” he said. “Start of the school year bash at the Black Circle house. It’s a tradition. They do it every year. Everyone goes.”

  “I can’t believe the Black Circle would throw a party for the plebeians,” I said.

  He laughed. “Yeah, well, they like to have people to lord it over. Besides, they do usually chose one or two first years to tap. They need to see everyone to make that decision. Anyway, it would be a chance for us to get into the house, look around, maybe find clues. I might be able to talk to Ryan.”

  I grimaced. “I’m only agreeing to your having anything to do with that jerk because he’s our man inside. You should totally lose him like a, I don’t know, thing that you lose.”

  “It’s not like he’s my boyfriend or something. We hook up occasionally, that’s it.”

  “Yeah, he uses you,” I said.

  “I use him too.”

  I shrugged. “If you say so. What time is this party tonight?”

  “If we get there any earlier than 9:30, we’re going to look like idiots.”

  “So, 10:00?”

  “Yup,” he said. “Sounds good. I’ll come over later and help you decide what to wear.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Thanks, but seriously—”

  “Suther.” He put a finger in my face. “You need me.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Later, wearing a pair of jeans that Lev had insisted needed artful rips (which meant they had to be washed and dried in the laundry room to get the proper frayed look) and a black shirt with a deep V-neck that I usually wore with a camisole under, we were at the party. I felt like the V-neck was pointless, given my twelve-year-old figure, as Phist had pointed out earlier. It was great that he’d been checking me out. I couldn’t have cleavage even if I tried. In fact, the only thing the shirt was really exposing was my rib cage, which was a bit more prominent than I liked.

  Had I eaten today?

  I’d definitely done lunch. I remembered lunch, but dinner? I felt like the clothing fiasco had distracted me. I didn’t know what it was about grief, but it seemed to consume my hunger. I hadn’t felt normal since Enid died.

  The Black Circle house was on the outskirts of campus, tucked at the end of a street, swathed in tall, gnarled trees. It was three stories tall with pillared posts holding up its wraparound porch. The windows were narrow and the light streaming out of them into the late summer night seemed oddly eerie. I looked up at the place, and it made me feel unsettled.

  I didn’t want to go in.

  But we did, and there were snacks, so I ate something. I wasn’t hungry, but I figured I should get my strength up. I really needed to do better about this. My flashpiece meant that every time I used magic, it came out of me and I needed to eat to fuel that. Come to think of it, that was another damned reason I was so thin. I stuffed my face with corn chips and guacamole.

  Lev left me alone to go find Ryan. He said that Ryan might be more likely to talk to him if they were one on one.

  I was still busy with the guac, so I let him go.

  Lev was going to text me whenever he knew something.

  The party itself was like something out of one of those old teen movies. Rooms and rooms of people talking and drinking and dancing. There were more people here than even went to the school, so I wasn’t sure where they’d all come from. Some of them must be humans, but I couldn’t tell the difference just by looking at them.

  The interior of the Black Circle house was all dark wooden trim around the windows and tops of the ceiling, all of it elaborately carved into ornate designs. The rooms were small, the way they are in old buildings, and the walls were thick. The walls were painted deep reds or deep greens, making the small rooms seem even smaller. I felt as though I was moving from one dark cave to another, squirming between bodies.

  Because after I’d eaten enough guacamole to make a person sick, I decided to walk around.

  I went through the entire first floor, and I didn’t see anyone I knew. Maybe a few other students I vaguely recognized, but mostly people I’d never seen before.

  Eventually, I went back to the main room, where a staircase wound up to the upper levels, and I climbed upstairs.

  Maybe upstairs was off limits or something, because there was no one up there. There was a long empty hallway, a silvery chandelier above, illuminating the darkly painted walls, and all the doors were closed.

  I eased my way over the hardwood floor, wondering which door I should try.

  I pushed open the first one I came to.

  It opened onto a bedroom. There was a bed in the middle, queen-sized, unmade, black silk sheets slithering onto the floor.

  It was empty.

  I cocked my head, scrutinizing the sheets. In that video, I had been able to see the sheets, but I was pretty sure they’d been red. But they looked like the same style of silky sheets as these.

  Voices.

  I could hear the sounds of the party downstairs, of course, but these voices were closer.

  Hopefully, they’d walk by, but in case they didn’t, I ducked into the open closet, pushing aside jeans on hangers and a leather jacket.

  As luck would have it, the door to the room opened, and two people came in.

  Great.

  It was Phist and Tess.

  She shut the door behind them and leaned against it, hugging herself. She looked upset.

  Phist crossed the room and began pawing through one of the drawers of the dresser in the room, which had already been open. “Pretty sure that I have…” He tugged out a carton of cigarettes. “There.” He tossed them to Tess.

  She caught them awkwardly. Then she turned them over in her hands. Her lower lip was trembling.

  “Hey,” said Phist.

  She looked up at him.

  “Fuck him,” said Phist.

  Her face twisted, and a tear slid out of her eye, down her cheek. She wiped it away, sniffed hard, and looked up at the ceiling.

  “I mean it,” said Phist. “You know he just winds you up because he knows he can.”

  She nodded. “I do. I know.”

  “So, you give him those, tell him to fuck himself, and go have fun. Make him jealous, you know?”

  She laughed. “He doesn’t care what I do. You know that.”

  Phist scratched his jaw. “Maybe not. But all the more reason to say fuck him. He treats you like shit, and you can’t deny it.”

  She swallowed. “You’
re different than the rest of them.”

  Phist grimaced. “Come on, take that back. You know I’m not.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Open the door,” he said. “You want to make him jealous?”

  “Stop it,” she said.

  “We could go downstairs,” he said. “You could sit on my lap and—”

  “Phist.” She shook her head.

  He shoved his hands in his pockets and stared down at his feet. “Don’t tell anyone you got those from me, okay? And, you know, don’t come crying to me the next time you forget whatever he wanted from you.” His voice grew hard on the second sentence.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t. We can all pretend we’re monsters. It’s fine.” She turned and yanked the door open.

  “We are monsters,” said Phist. “In this world, you’re either predator or prey. I know which I’d rather be.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him. “How’d it go with that girl? You get into her pants?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The first year you wanted my help with,” she said. “The one we were fucking with?”

  “You think I was trying to get in her pants?” Phist made a face. “Would that have worked on you? If a guy showed up with another girl and started making out with her?”

  She shrugged. “Probably.”

  He laughed under his breath. “She’s Enid’s sister, you didn’t know that?”

  “Oh, that’s Enid’s sister.” Tess bit down on her lip. “Shit. So, what did you want with her?”

  “I was trying to… I don’t know… scare her off. If she and Enid were in on it together, I thought that maybe I’d nip that in the bud. But, uh, I don’t think she knows anything about what Enid was up to.”

  “Okay,” said Tess. “Well, I guess that’s good.” She shook her head at Phist. “Next time you want to scare a girl off, maybe consult someone on a slightly better strategy, huh?” She held up the carton of cigarettes. “Thanks for these.” And then she was out of the room.

  Phist watched her go.

  He turned around, sinking both of his hands into his hair and shut his eyes. “Great idea, Blake. Not suspicious at all,” he muttered. He kicked at his bed, muttering some unintelligible words that had the cadence of swear words. Then he left the room too.

  I waited and waited until I was sure the coast was clear, and then I hurried back into the hallway. I texted Lev. Where are you?

  He didn’t respond.

  * * *

  It was an hour before I finally got anything back from Lev, during which I searched the entire house, top to bottom. There was no one else upstairs, no one at all, but I did think that I found the room where the video had been made, and I also was pretty sure it was Grayson’s room, judging from the fact that his books were piled on the desk.

  But finding the room didn’t help very much.

  I went up to the third floor, which appeared to be the girls’ rooms, because they had makeup sitting out on their dressers and dresses in the closets.

  I found an empty room, where the bed had been stripped and everything had been taken out. There weren’t even any clothes in the closet, just bare hangers. In the corner of the closet, though, something glittered, and I picked it up.

  A flashpiece, identical to the one that I wore in my ear.

  I closed my hand around it.

  This was Enid’s. This had been her room. She had lived here. She had been part of the Black Circle, and I couldn’t understand any of it.

  I remembered when Enid and I had gotten the flashpieces. We’d discovered our magical abilities around the same time in our lives, during puberty, which Enid had started before me, being older. Suddenly, there were accidents around her all the time, things falling over, appliances catching fire, that sort of thing. No one paid it any mind until it started happening to me too.

  That’s when Enid started making contacts with people she’d found online in underground message boards. Anyone else would think they were crazy, people who were too sucked into a fantasy world to know reality from their own imaginations, but they were the only people who could explain what had happened to us.

  We met up with a woman at a Starbucks in our town. She gave us the flashpieces, but she never told us her name. She had been kicked out of the occultist community. She told us it was a corrupt place, that everyone there was concerned only with power, and that the strong fed on the weak.

  She told us we’d be better off to stay clear, but that the flashpieces would help us control our power, modulate it, channel it, and that we should practice some basic defense spells, which she’d given us.

  As time went on, Enid uncovered more and more information about the magical community. She’d discovered what had happened to our parents. She’d learned about the ins and outs of Hellespointe, the structure of the leadership, everything. And the more that she learned, the more that we both agreed that the woman at Starbucks had been right.

  It was a corrupt, dangerous world.

  We wanted nothing to do with it.

  I whispered down to the flashpiece. “What happened, Enid? Why did you change your mind? Why did you come here?”

  My phone beeped.

  I dug it out. A text from Lev. Sorry was busy. Im downstairs in the kitchen.

  Be right there, I texted back. I put the flashpiece in my pocket and headed downstairs to find him.

  He was leaning against the counter, drinking a beer and looking pleased with himself. His eyeliner was smudged.

  “Do I want to know what you and Ryan were up to?”

  “I got information,” he said, “so don’t give me shit. Say thank you.”

  “I saw something weird, too,” I said. “Phist having this conversation with Tess. You made it seem like they were all in some kind of weird polygamous relationship.”

  “I think you mean polyamorous,” said Lev. “Polygamy is one guy and a bunch of girls. Polyamory is, like, you know, a bunch of people of various genders.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “It sounded to me like Tess has a boyfriend, but they’re not really exclusive to each other. Like, it’s okay if she’s with other guys. He doesn’t care. But she wants him to care.”

  Lev shrugged. “I guess that makes sense.”

  “Who do you think that would be?”

  “Phist,” said Lev.

  “No, because they were talking about someone else,” I said.

  A shrill voice cut through the air, coming from another room. “Heads up! Dr. Abbadon.”

  Lev immediately shoved his beer behind a bag of chips and stood up straight.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “I’m only a second year,” said Lev. “I’m not legal either.”

  “Right,” I said. “What is Dr. Abbadon doing here?” I remembered who Dr. Abbadon was. I’d seen him on campus before, and he was the token attractive professor. He was youngish, maybe early thirties, and he had heart-shaped lips, a baby face.

  Right then, he poked his head into the kitchen. “Hi there!”

  “Hi!” said Lev, his cheeriness rising to meet Dr. Abbadon’s tone.

  “No one’s getting raped or drugged or hazed or bullied in here, right?” He winked at us.

  “Nope,” said Lev.

  “You,” said Dr. Abbadon to me. “Young lady, this guy bothering you?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s…” I shook my head. “I’m fine.”

  “Excellent.” He saluted us. “Carry on.” He started to leave and then turned back. “Either of you have a cigarette?”

  “Uh, no,” said Lev. “We don’t smoke.”

  “Too bad.” Dr. Abbadon gave us a boyish smile and then walked out of the kitchen.

  I peered after him. “That was weird.”

  “Abbadon’s the faculty sponsor for the Black Circle,” said Lev. “After the thing with the video, he comes through the parties and checks things out. Not that it matters, considering he’s never there for the unofficial stuff,
like the fights, and it’s not as if walking through a party twice a night stops anything from happening, but it’s a gesture, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Better than nothing, maybe.”

  “Anyway, you were saying?” said Lev.

  “I don’t even remember,” I said. “Um…” I rubbed my forehead. “So, anyway, Phist was, like, nice to Tess. And she said that he was different than the others, and then he got all weird about it and started being a jerk to her. He said, ‘In this world, you’re predator or prey. I know which one I want to be.’”

  “Huh,” said Lev.

  “And then he… I don’t know, he seemed mad at himself,” I said. “I wouldn’t have expected him to be that way. What does anyone know about him? Like, who are his parents? Everyone in the Acclasia has ties to the Black Circle, right?”

  “Lots of times, yeah,” said Lev. “But Phist is a scholarship case.”

  “Really? He’s nobody?”

  “Probably got human parents,” said Lev. It happened sometimes. Recessive genes from witches or warlocks sowing wild oats back in the day had gotten into the gene pool. Two humans with no powers had ancestors who were magical and boom.

  “I didn’t even know there were scholarships to Hellespointe,” I said.

  “I don’t think they’re easy to get,” said Lev. “But at the same time, everyone recognizes that an untrained magical being out there in the world is dangerous for everyone. No one in the occultist community wants us exposed.”

  “Right,” I said. “I guess I get that.” I furrowed my brow. “So, how’d he get into the Black Circle, then?”

  “I don’t totally know. He was in it when I arrived, but from what I understand, he clawed his way in and took over. Like it was his personal mission to rule the school.”

  “Huh,” I said. “That’s very interesting.”

  Lev chuckled, pulling his beer back out.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “You, trying to come up with reasons to justify how Hellbent Academy’s resident psycho gets you hot.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “I am not hot for him. He killed my sister.” Of course, I would be lying if I said that I was completely sure of that now. Who was this other guy that Tess was connected to? Why was it that Phist had asked Grayson if he should fight and mentioned that Ryan wanted him to? If Phist was the leader, wouldn’t he order everyone around and have the pick of the best girls? And if he wasn’t the leader, maybe someone else had decided to kill Enid.