“You in college, kid?” the cab driver asked.
“No,” Eliot said, and the answering silence was so awful and interrogative and American that Eliot cleared his throat and said, “I’m going to be a senior in high school. I go to Falk.”
“Ah, Falk,” the cabbie said, immediately disinterested. And Eliot couldn’t blame him. Falk kids weren’t from around here, as was clear as day from Eliot’s accent. They came, they stayed for four years or until they failed out, they terrorized the city with their wealth and temerity, and they left.
Eliot leaned his head against the window and waited for the river to turn into Forbes and Oakland. Or for the cab to crash and deposit them both into the Monongahela.
He didn’t feel any sense of homecoming as the cab pulled around Jessop and Eliot unloaded his bags. There was dull resentment and a tinge of hatred directed towards his father. No peace. No relief, even though he’d spent the last twelve hours traveling and this was his first time on steady ground with the promise of food, shelter, and Wi-Fi.
He tipped the cabbie more than he should’ve, both because he had the money and because the cabbie knew he had the money and didn’t expect Eliot to use it.
Eliot stowed his suitcase under a stairway—nobody was going to steal it, not in the English building, and especially not in the English building during the summer—and started towards Jessop. When he was halfway down the hall, a girl dashed out of the library, eyes on her watch, and stalked off down the stairs.
He stopped. Watched her go.
It wasn’t peculiar to see a girl in Jessop—after all, this was a school, and girls did go here. But it was unusual to see a girl he didn’t recognize.
Eliot had been going to Falk ever since he was a freshman; ever since he’d become less of a son and more of a bargaining tool. He knew every person from every class from the time he was fourteen until now. There were no strangers at Falk—but there she was. He watched her blond ponytail swing against her back as she ducked out the door and disappeared.
He didn’t know what to make of this. The girl was as unfamiliar as contentment, as unwelcome as a gunshot, and made him feel even more unbalanced.
If he could just get his hands on a book and his mind out of the present, he’d feel more cemented. Rubbing his temples, Eliot went into Jessop. He did know the girl behind the circulation desk, which was a welcome reassurance that he hadn’t been transported into an alternate universe. Her name was Rebecca or Rylie or something like that. She looked up when he came in.
“Hi,” she said, recognition lighting in her eyes. “Can I help you?”
Eliot shifted, unable to shake the sense of being a little unmoored, a little uneasy, as if the entire library had shifted and resettled in the week he’d been away. He wished his eye would stop twitching. “Do you have the offices assigned yet? For seniors?”
“Uh, yeah.” She slid down the desk and pulled out a clipboard. Eliot withered a little when he saw she wasn’t in her school uniform. It wasn’t that he cared what she wore, but it was another one of those little shifts that made this library unfamiliar. During the school year, everyone was so tidy: khaki pants and plaid skirts and pressed white shirts and sweaters and ties. He’d blend in, even in the non-uniform black jeans and shirt and cardigan he wore on the plane. But now he was overdressed in his own territory, a remnant from a not-so-distant past in the face of the girl’s modernity.
“You’re 354,” the girl said. She pulled a key out of one of the desk drawers, double-checked the number on it, and slid it over to him.
The key was heavy, solid, real. If only he felt the same way. “Do you know if my books are already upstairs? I requested some while I was away.”
The girl blinked at him, and for one stomach-flipping moment, he wondered if his requests hadn’t gone through. The sooner he could get to work, the sooner he’d feel better.
“One sec.” She grabbed a legal pad and squinted down at it. “Tess has some notes about a lot of faculty requests …” She trailed off, looking him over. Maybe even daring him to correct her.
Trying to remain smooth, Eliot said, “That’s me. I have faculty permissions for the summer.” It was a simplification. Students were only allowed to take out fifteen books at a time, but faculty had unlimited access. It had only taken a quick talk with the IT team and some gentle bribing to get the faculty permissions added to his computing account. Not that anyone needed to know that.
She seemed satisfied with his answer. After all, why would she doubt him? “Fair enough. Tess is halfway through pulling them. They’re in the cage.”
The locked cage he had no access to. All of this would be so much easier if he could pull his own books, but not even his father’s passcode or the IT team could get him into the stacks, which required a real key. And there was no way he’d convince the half-mummified pissant of a librarian, Ms. Matheson, to let him go off on his own.
“Is there any way I can get them tomorrow morning?” Eliot asked, keeping his voice smooth and neutral. He forced his eyes to relax, forced his lips into a smile. If there was anything of his father’s he needed to use, it was his charm.
It worked. The girl smiled back. “Yeah, of course. I can finish those today and have them in your office before I leave.”
“Thank you,” Eliot said, feeling his smile relax into a real grin. It meant he couldn’t start any of his work today, but maybe it would be best to go home and sleep off the jet lag and try to remember what contentment here was like.
And the conversation yielded another victory: the identity of the girl from the stairs. It only made sense that the girl he saw on the stairs was Tess. It didn’t erase the oddity of not knowing her, but at least he had a name to put to the face, and that made him feel like his kingdom was once more within his control.
Eliot retrieved his suitcase and left Jessop’s cool darkness behind. The streets were still sunny and awful, but he had a plan now. He’d call his mother—maybe call his mother, considering she might’ve been sleeping—and eat something that wasn’t served on an airplane, and then he’d ignore his phone when his father remembered Eliot was back on this side of the Atlantic.
And tomorrow, the fun would begin.
As Eliot walked to Dithridge, he turned over his requests in his head. They’d been unconventional, to the say the least; grimoires and books of magical history, things that other students would probably sneer at. And it was lucky he had the cover of a senior project—he was Eliot Birch. No matter what he wrote about, one of the English teachers would be happy to supervise. He could take all his work and turn it into something academic and worthy of study.
None of them needed to know that Eliot was not conducting his project for academic purposes, nor that this was a ritual of self-discovery. As he walked, Eliot ran through words, tasting the magic of them on his tongue: ita mnitim jusre, a spell for minor healing; kirra istra moine qua, one for basic tidying; mannitua critem mag, for a clearer head. Nothing happened with the words alone, but the shape of them was a comfort.
It was one thing to read about witchcraft. Learning to use it properly was another thing entirely. And this time, Eliot was on his own.
three
Tess
“THIS TASTES LIKE FEET. IS IT SUPPOSED TO TASTE LIKE FEET?”
The spoon hovering in front of Tess’s nose did vaguely smell like feet. She glanced at Anna Liu, her roommate and closest friend, on the other side of the spoon.
“Believe it or not, footy soup is not the first thing I want to put in my mouth after work.”
“Sorry,” Anna said, pulling the spoon back and giving it an experimental lick. Her lips quirked into a frown. “We’re all out of dick.”
Tess rolled her eyes and pushed past her into the living room. The scent of whatever Anna was cooking had permeated the entire dorm. It only smelled marginally better than Tess, who’d spent the last six hours at Emiliano’s. There was a dining hall, open during regular hours for anyone left on campus, but i
t kind of sucked. Tess would have to risk the soup if she was hungry.
She threw herself down on the couch. In her room, her cello called to her, half-unpacked across her bed where she’d abandoned it. There was a concerto she needed to record, and she had to email her cello instructor, Alejandra, and the program director of the camp she usually attended over the summer to explain why she wouldn’t be going this year. There were a dozen other emails to send, Sorry I can’t attends and I’m afraid I won’t be able to play fors, things she’d been gradually canceling since she moved across the state months ago.
She also needed to call her parents, even though she dreaded the tense, silent, blame-filled conversations.
Asked: “Did Aunt Mathilde give you and your sister grocery money for the month?”
Unspoken: We’ll do our best to help, but we barely have enough for the bills.
Asked: “Did you talk to your sister today? Can you ask her to call us?”
Unspoken: It’s killing us to have you both so far away for so long. If this was up to us, we wouldn’t have chosen it. We would’ve figured something out.
Asked: “Have you had time to practice?”
Unspoken: I’m sorry. I love you. This isn’t what we wanted for you.
“You okay, buddy?” Anna asked, crashing down on the cushion next to her.
“Fine,” Tess said, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. She could fall asleep right here, shoes on her feet and apron still double-knotted around her waist.
“Anything happen at work?”
Tess opened one eye. “I’m going to kill Dr. Birch,” she announced. “He requested 147 books. I spent all morning in the stacks, and I only got through half.”
“Make Regina do it.”
“You know as well as I do that Regina doesn’t do anything.”
“Back to the first plan, then. Kill him.”
“I’m strongly considering it.”
“Well, it certainly wouldn’t make the school any more of a hellscape,” Anna said. The couch creaked as she got up and padded back to the kitchen. “Oh, hey. Package came. It’s on the table.”
If Tess didn’t get up, she was going to fall asleep like this, and there was far too much work to be done tonight to let that happen. She heaved herself up, ignoring the ache in her feet, and shuffled to the kitchen table.
The package was nondescript: a plain brown box the size of a toaster, the only label handwritten in gray ink. She picked it up immediately when she saw the return address was to the Matheson Pen Company. Her father. She hated how it made her stomach lurch with equal measures of anger and hope. Tess tore off the tape to reveal two bottles of ink and a slim navy box nestled among the bubble wrap.
She pulled out each item and set it on the table. Two inks, azure and deep amethyst. Inside the navy case was a new pen and a note from her father.
Tess,
I had a canceled order and thought you’d like the colors. Let me know what you think of the pen. New model. Nib feels dry to me. Xoxo,
Dad
The letter was written on paper she recognized from the short-lived and disastrous Matheson Stationery, a brick-and-mortar extension of the pen company. Even the faintest reminder of the shop made her immediately angry. Tess crumpled the note into a ball and tossed it into the trash.
It was more likely that there was no canceled order, that her father had merely been thinking of her and put this together himself. Maybe it was a sign that he was trying. Which … okay but it didn’t count for much.
Tess Matheson had sprouted out of a childhood drenched with ink.
Her father, owner of the Matheson Pen Company, taught her from an early age how to change nibs and fill cartridges until both of their hands seemed to be permanently lined with a rainbow of pigment. Her mother, a teacher, corrected papers in careful red and slashed through incorrectly spelled words with bold purple. Tess was watered by fuchsia and turquoise, nurtured by emerald and onyx.
Ink was malleable. It did what it was told, unless there was too much of it and it bled through the paper. But Tess was too good, by now, to let it bleed.
Unlike the internet, information on paper wasn’t forever. It could be burned, consumed, never seen again. Love letters could be forgotten. Secrets could be destroyed. Stains could be scrubbed away. Ink was not forever.
And neither were businesses, apparently.
But unfortunately for her parents, Tess’s grudges outlasted ink. She frowned and shoved the samples back in with the bubble wrap.
“Pretty,” Anna remarked, looking over Tess’s shoulder. Another relic of Falk, Anna would never fit into the scattered and messy life of the Matheson’s farmhouse. She was too perfect, too polished, too real instead of a smudged mixed of uncertainties. Anna reached down and touched the nib of the fountain pen. “Seems sharp. Could be a secret weapon. Birch would never see it coming.”
The idea satisfied Tess for only a moment. “I don’t think Aunt Mathilde would be too fond of me shanking someone in the library. Especially not Dr. Birch.”
Anna shrugged. “She’ll never know if you hide the body well.”
Tess rubbed her eyes. “Maybe,” she said, and she was so, so tired of it all.
“What did he request, anyway? It’s not like Jessop has math books.”
Tess wrinkled her nose. That was another oddity. Dr. Birch had a special focus on astrophysics or something else Tess herself could never bring herself to care about. “Occult books, actually. Grimoires.”
Anna snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Despite the dozen times she’d washed her hands since leaving Jessop, Tess could still feel the dust of the books pressed into the lines of her palms.
“Maybe he’s trying to put a spell on you. On us. To rid the world of scholarship students for good.”
Tess rolled her eyes. “He’s such an entitled dickhead.” She could spend all night here with Anna, complaining about Dr. Birch, but her cello called to her from her room, no matter how exhausted she was. “I’m going to go practice. Let me know if it’s too loud.”
She gathered her stuff and went to her room. Tess had an odd, fierce love for the upperclassmen dorms at Falk. They were set in converted rowhouses, with each floor housing two suites and a dorm sister. Anna and Tess technically shared the suite with two other girls, but since it was summer, their rooms were deserted and their doors were locked. Even the dorm sisters, as the college students who were paid to supervise the girls were called, were more relaxed than Tess had expected—and fairly nonexistent during the break, though she wasn’t sure if that was a result of loosened school policy or because the girl who was supposed to be watching over their accommodations was more interested in bar-hopping than checking in on the few residents who stayed for the summer.
When they first arrived, Tess was worried she and Nat would be sent to Mathilde’s home in Squirrel Hill, but her great aunt decided they would adjust better to Falk if they lived in the dormitories.
Living in the dorms had the added, unexpected perk of Anna. Tess and Anna were too self-contained on their own; they never would’ve gotten up the nerve to talk to one another and become friends if they hadn’t been forced into a living situation.
Tess loved the muffled noises of the other girls in the dorms during the school year, and the odd quiet during the summer. She even loved her bedroom, though it was more of a broom closet, with space for a bed and wardrobe and very little else.
The room looked even smaller due to the fact it was cluttered with assorted pens and inks, sheaves of sheet music, clothes, and books. Luckily, growing up the way she had, Tess wasn’t bothered by untidiness. She was most comfortable in a stable state of clutter.
Alone, she sat on her bed and flipped the new pen over and over in her hands. Tess rarely allowed herself to feel homesick. It was a weakness she couldn’t afford, not with everything else she was trying to keep in check. Besides, homesick wasn’t the best word for what she felt. She could go home,
probably, but it wouldn’t be the same.
It wasn’t just home she missed. It was a mix of things: trusting her parents; practicing her cello whenever she wanted; not worrying about money; being able to breathe without feeling like the walls were falling in on her.
She flopped back and closed her eyes. There, on the slippery underside of her thoughts, was the ever-running mantra. Jessop at 10:00, sleep, cello, concerto for this weekend, but Jessop in the morning and Emiliano’s. Work, sleep, did you talk to Nat?, sleep, don’t sleep, you need to practice, you need to practice, you need to practice.
Sleep.
Don’t sleep.
Don’t think of home, don’t think of home, don’t think of home.
You’ll never become anything if you just lay there, if you don’t practice.
You’ll never become anything.
Tess opened her eyes and glanced at her clock. It was late, both too late and not late enough to make excuses. Though every muscle ached, she got up and retrieved her cello. As the rest of the city quieted down and settled into sleep, Tess pushed aside her crowding thoughts, raised her bow, and began to play.
Nothing, she thought with each down-bow. You will become nothing. With every up-bow, she tried to fight it, tried to remind herself how far she had come and how far she could go. But in the end, it was nothing, nothing, nothing, until every stroke dissolved into discord.
four
Tess
THURSDAY WAS REGINA‘S DAY TO OPEN THE LIBRARY ALONE, so Tess went in at 10:00. She would’ve killed for five more minutes of sleep, and the sky outside was just as gray as her mood. To make matters worse, Regina started talking as soon as Tess was through the doors of the library.
It wasn’t that she hated Regina. Tess’s feelings towards Regina were similar to her feelings towards small dogs. Both were fine enough, but rather useless, and made far too much noise.
The Devil Makes Three Page 2