“How was work?” Anna asked.
Tess groaned and threw an arm over her eyes. “You’ll never guess what happened. That request, the big one. It wasn’t from Dr. Birch. Apparently, the bastard has a son.”
“Eliot,” Anna said automatically.
“You know him?”
Anna rolled her eyes. “Tess, there are only like fifty people in each grade. Everyone knows everyone. And everyone especially knows Eliot Birch.”
Tess turned this over in her mind. If Anna knew Eliot, then she probably knew if he was a total prick. “What do you think of him?” she asked.
Anna cast her a glance. “He’s too pretty for his own good,” she said. Tess thought of his dark brown eyes, his sharp cheekbones, his curly hair; she couldn’t disagree. “But nice. He keeps to himself. I can’t say for sure that I know anyone who is friends with him, but enough people are friendly.”
That didn’t entirely align with the version of him that Tess had seen, but then again, didn’t Dr. Birch himself come off as charming, too? Maybe they were both nice on the outside and terrible, rotten people on the inside. “There’s also the fact he requested all those grimoires.”
Anna snorted. “Maybe he’s trying to cast a spell on you. A luuuurrrrvveeeee spell.”
Tess rolled up to hit Anna with one of the couch pillows. “Bullshit,” she said. “He’s probably trying to grow enchanted weed in a dorm room.”
“Or,” Anna said, raising the other pillow to block Tess’s, “he’s trying to curse his father. Apparently, they don’t get along too well.”
The way she said it was enough to stop Tess. There was that glimmer in his eye earlier, when he was talking about Dr. Birch, when he asked why Tess didn’t like him. As if he had enough resentment on his own.
“What are the rumors?” Tess asked.
Anna shrugged. “It’s impossible to get them straight. Like I said, he keeps to himself. But he goes to England a lot. Like a lot a lot. Henri Bleauchard—one of the seniors—told my chem partner that his mom is dying, and she’s still there.”
A rush of unwelcome sympathy hit Tess square in the stomach. Okay, so maybe she didn’t know enough to hate him. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. But he was still trying to blackmail her. Maybe. Probably. Family aside, Eliot himself was proving to be a questionable sort of person.
“Well,” Tess said, getting up. She should practice, even if she didn’t want to. “If I start having really, really bad luck, we know who to blame.”
Anna snorted. “And if you bang him, I expect a full report.”
Blood rushed to her cheeks, and she managed to hit Anna one last time with the pillow before she retreated to her room.
She had just started to run the bow over her cello when her phone buzzed on top of her desk. Tess debated ignoring it. It could’ve been any number of people: her mother or father, calling to run through scripted responses; Regina, asking her to cover a shift; Anna, calling from the living room. But it also could be Nat.
And because it could’ve been Nat, Tess set her cello down. Even though she needed to practice. Even though she was exhausted. Even though she couldn’t imagine dredging up the mental capacity necessary to hold a coherent conversation.
And it was worth it, because it was Nat, after all.
“Hey,” Tess said, falling back into her desk chair.
“Tessy,” Nat said, and even though she was thirteen now, the way her voice sounded when she said it always reminded Tess of her younger sister as a small child. In the background, she could hear the chatter and squeals of some of the other girls who’d stayed behind for the summer. Nat must’ve been in the common room of the dormitory.
“What’s up?”
“I have a proposition.” This was always how Nat started conversations. She could never say exactly what she meant without an introduction.
“Go for it,” Tess said, because the second thing about talking to Nat was that she had to be urged forward.
“I want to go home,” Nat said, “and I hate it here.”
Tess snorted. She wasn’t expecting that, not from Nat. It wasn’t Pittsburgh Nat hated. It was that she hadn’t been given the choice to be here, couldn’t choose to be somewhere else, and didn’t understand the choice in the first place. She couldn’t.
Nat didn’t hate Falk, either. Above all things, she was happy here. She had to be happy here.
“We can’t exactly go home,” Tess said, feeling the repetition of the phrase on her lips.
“Hear me out,” Nat said. Tess could just imagine her curled up in the corner of the common room, angled away from the other girls. “We take a bus back. It’ll be what, like four hours? And then we surprise Mom and Dad, and they can’t send us away.”
Nat was right, in a way. Mom and Dad wouldn’t send them back here to Mathilde, but that was mostly because Mom and Dad hadn’t sent them here in the first place. But responsibility weighed heavily in Tess’s chest.
“You know that won’t work,” Tess lied. She wished she could protect Nat from everything, but she couldn’t. At least, for now, she could protect Nat from the truth. “Next summer, we can spend it at home again. Okay?”
Nat’s sigh was withering and betrayed. Of course she’d expected Tess to agree, to go along with it. This was one thing Tess couldn’t explain, one reason she couldn’t give in: Nat loved their parents to a fault.
“Please?” Nat tried.
“I’m sorry,” Tess said.
The line went dead without Nat saying goodbye. Tess wasn’t sure she could blame her.
Everything was too quiet and her body ached and all she wanted to do was curl up and sleep. But she had to make the best of being here, and the guilt of running away like a child was beginning to seep into her veins, just like it did every time she spoke to her sister. There was only one way to dissolve completely, to stop being Theresa Matheson, displaced and angry, and become nothing more than the space between her hands, the emotion in her heart, Tess to her very core.
She settled her cello between her legs and began to play. And still, she was distracted in a way she usually wasn’t. All she could think about was Nat, over and over: I hate it here. I hate it here. I hate it here.
You can’t hate it here, Tess thought, a little desperately. She remembered what it was like in that odd month of time when they were at the same school in Gettysburg. A montage of Nat’s misery: tear tracks and faked stomachaches to miss school; jibes from upperclassmen bullies and dropping grades and excuses.
No, Nat didn’t hate Falk. She was happy here. She was thriving here. Back to being her smart, happy self.
Things hadn’t always been this hard. This tense. And if she was being fair—though Tess didn’t generally feel fair these days—it wasn’t entirely within her parents’ control.
Like so many other teachers across the state, across the country, Tess’s mom was laid off. Which would’ve been fine if Tess’s dad hadn’t been secretly throwing money at his failing business for the better part of the four years the stationery store was open, if the family wasn’t already at the edge of bankruptcy.
The savings account. The business account. The girls’ college funds. All of it was gone, put into rent and renovations and stock that never even left the shelves.
When Matheson Stationery opened, Tess thought it was the best day of her life. She saw her father accomplishing his lifelong dream, and she swore then she wouldn’t give up until she accomplished hers too.
It was a stroke of bad luck that Tess uncovered her father’s debts herself. A few days after Tess’s mother had lost her job, Tess went into a joint account to pay fees for music camp, which she deposited her gig money into.
The account was empty.
Though they managed to keep it from Nat, Tess was there for the big blowup between her parents. The argument went on for days and days, escalating when the notice from the bank came: they were at risk of having the house foreclosed upon. Nat was pulled out of private school to sa
ve money and unceremoniously dumped into Tess’s school.
While her parents argued one night, Tess ran out of the house. She could barely breathe, her chest was so tight with anxiety. Her college fund was drained, but she had a full scholarship to performing arts school. If she persisted, she’d get a good scholarship to college too. She was good enough. Hell, she was the best in the state.
But there was Nat.
Nat, who was the smartest kid Tess knew. Nat, who after only a few weeks was struggling terribly at her new school. She was skipping meals and slamming her door and shutting Tess out, and she could not let it go on for years and years.
It wasn’t that there was anything inherently wrong with public school. The greatest flaw was in its funding, or lack thereof. The teachers and administration tried their best but there were no resources: no money for extracurriculars, nothing for new books, barely enough to keep the building safe.
Truly, it wasn’t about the school. Attending Falk was a means to an end: above all, Tess needed to get Nat out of this house. She would protect her at all costs, even if that meant protecting Nat from their own parents.
With shaking hands, Tess had pulled out her phone and called Aunt Mathilde.
“Oh, Theresa,” Mathilde said breathily into the phone. “I haven’t heard from you in ages. How are you doing?”
Tess squeezed her eyes shut. This will be the worst part, she thought. Just get through this, and you can get through the rest. “Hey, Aunt Mathilde. So I’ve been thinking a lot about, uh, your offers. To try to get Nat into Falk.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Tess wasn’t making it up: Mathilde had been talking for years about the school, how great accommodations were, how well Tess and Nat would do.
“Well,” Mathilde said uncertainly, “I think … I think they’re past the time to consider new students. Definitely not for this year, and I think next year might be full as well. And then there’s the problem that they don’t take on seniors … But of course, I could speak to the board. You have great talent, Theresa, and I’m certain someone would like to see you join our student body.”
Tess’s heart plummeted. She had somewhere to go already. “I’m fine. I’m just asking for Nat.”
Another long silence. “They’re very selective. I’m sure Nat is brilliant, but if she doesn’t have anything to set her apart from other applicants, I’m not sure I can get her a place in general, let alone in odd timing.”
“Can you talk to them?” Tess asked. “I mean, it’s around spring break, right? Maybe we could—”
“It’ll be difficult,” Mathilde said.
Difficult. But she hadn’t said impossible. “Please,” Tess asked, leaning back against the wall, staring up at the stars. It smelled of rain. Distantly, she could still hear her parents shouting.
“I’ll do my best.”
The answer came the following day. Tess’s phone rang as she was leaving her lesson with Alejandra, and she ducked into a side hallway before her mom could see her. With shaking hands, Tess opened the phone. “Hi, Aunt Mathilde.”
“Theresa,” Mathilde said, and her voice was weighted with sympathy. “I’m sorry. But the board does not see a reason to admit Natalie, especially so late in the semester. There was some interest in you, of course, given your talents. You’d be accepted, despite the lateness in the year. But smart girls are everywhere. I’m sure Natalie will be fine if …”
She kept going, talking about how Nat would do well anyway, how she’d be the top of her class, how her parents had been saving for ages to get her through college.
But Mathilde did not see the way Nat had changed in the last month since changing schools. It was like something just … switched off inside her. She spent long hours in her room. And twice in the last few weeks, Tess saw yellow slips tucked into Nat’s bag and knew what they meant: her sister had failed something.
That had never happened before.
And Mathilde didn’t know the money was gone.
Tess slid down the wall, knees tucked against her chest. The admissions letter to school was tucked in her cello case. Nat did not have a similar future.
Tess would be good at cello no matter where she went. It would be hard, of course; hard to keep practicing through school; hard to be competitive if she wasn’t going to performing arts school; hard to keep up and even harder to set herself apart.
But she’d do it for Nat. She’d put it on the line.
“What if we were a package deal?” Tess blurted. “Nat and me. I’ll go and add to the student body or whatever, as long as Nat gets a spot, too.”
Mathilde hesitated. “I’ll run it by the board. They were certainly interested in you. But Theresa … I’m not sure about funding, especially this late in the year …”
“I’ll figure it out,” Tess said hastily. Already, she was calculating in her head.
The second call came later that evening, when Tess was doing dishes. This was the arrangement Mathilde had fought for: Full scholarship for Nat, who was too young for a work study. Half scholarship for Tess and a job at Jessop to cover room and board. It left a few thousand in the air, but Tess had done the math and figured she could cover it with a few gigs and another job.
She had then called the Boston Academy of Arts to decline her place at the school. Every word tasted bitter in her mouth.
For Nat, she reminded herself. For Nat.
When she proposed the plan to her parents, she was already packed. She hadn’t told them about the money still needed for her tuition, or how miserable she was to give up what she’d worked so hard for.
All she could see was the pain in her father’s eyes as it set in all over again that he’d gotten the one thing he wanted, and let it break him. Let it break his family.
In her tiny room at Falk, Tess closed her eyes and drew her bow over the strings. She was not a failure, not now, and she refused to be one. She’d cling onto any success she could grab. She’d grit her teeth until they shattered.
nine
Eliot
OVER THE SUMMER, JESSOP WAS CLOSED ON WEEKENDS, BUT that didn’t stop Eliot. It never had.
He used his father’s passcode to key into the English building, and then into Jessop itself. He could’ve used magic to get in, maybe, but magic was always risky and fiddly when used on technology.
He loved the nighttime library. It was formidable in daylight, but at night, the shadows made everything mysterious and claustrophobic. The tall windows of the reading room were shuttered and locked for the night, but nobody bothered to close the shutters on the windows past the third floor, so thin light streamed down to the reading room floor.
He closed the doors behind him and just breathed for a moment. When he was little, his mother was finishing her education at Oxford. Those were the years his father taught in France and was rarely home to bother them. If Eliot promised to be quiet, she took him with her to the library. They would sit at the long tables, and he’d watch her read or scribble magic words on scrap paper. Jessop reminded him of that, sharpening his homesickness from a dull ache to a jagged point.
He followed his usual ritual. Eliot checked all the magazines in the back racks to see if any interested him; they didn’t. He thumbed his way through the volumes of encyclopedias in the reading room to see if any were out of place. The blame didn’t fall on Tess, possibly, but many times, they were out of order during the school year and that bothered him. It wasn’t hard to organize things alphabetically and keep them that way.
Once the encyclopedias were sorted, he did his final—and most forbidden—rite, before going to his office. He keyed into the offices and made his way back to the stacks.
As usual, Mathilde’s office was locked, as were the entrances to the stacks. And all the keys were in here, but inaccessible behind Mathilde’s office door.
It was hopelessly frustrating, Eliot thought, to be standing in this room, only a couple of floors above the grimoires, and to be unable to ac
cess them.
He left the offices and shut the door behind him. It clicked locked automatically. Once, during his freshman year, just after he’d stolen his father’s passcode, he’d been caught in Jessop by an aging security guard named Brooks. Eliot had bought him lunch, though, and continued to eat lunch with him a few times a month, so nobody ever came if Eliot tripped an errant alarm during his nightly roamings.
But Brooks couldn’t get him into the stacks.
Eliot trudged up the stairs to his office. At least he had books in here. As he pulled one off the carrel, he saw fingerprints in the dust on the cover and imagined Tess’s hands pulling it off of a shelf. She had small hands with short, slender fingers. He’d caught himself staring while she was at work, marveling that she could carry three cups at once with those small fingers.
He was still uncomfortable about running into Tess at Emiliano’s, both because he knew he’d acted poorly and out of character and because it removed the sanctity of the place. Eliot went there most Fridays with Henri, a French student from down the hall who also wasn’t fond of talking to other people. But now that Eliot knew Tess haunted Emiliano’s in addition to Jessop, his two favorite places, the prospects of him being comfortable there dwindled.
It was an odd coincidence he’d run into her, though he couldn’t yet decide if it was fortuitous or not. He had wanted to catch Tess outside of Jessop, away from Mathilde’s ears, but his half-baked plans to do that involved hanging around the lobby of the English building to catch her before or after a shift, which did feel stalkerish. He couldn’t tell if their unplanned meeting at Emiliano’s was more stalkerish, but he hadn’t planned on approaching her until his feet were carrying him across the restaurant’s dining room and then there he was, sputtering while she glared up at him.
Eliot stopped himself. Why was he thinking of Tess? She was nothing to him, and a dark part of him knew he’d forced her hand. She was only helping him because she thought he’d tell his father or Mathilde about the notes, but there was no way he would do that. He’d already gotten rid of the notes, except for one, because he liked the curve of her f’s.
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