by Eva Chase
I poured the contents of the first tube into the second, dropped in the chunk and shook until it dissolved, added the third liquid, and finally dumped in the powder. As I swiveled the tube, the last addition turned the solution cloudy and a deeper blue.
My gut clenched despite myself. I glanced at the clock, kept swirling the mixture as the second hand ticked toward the top, and then gulped the stuff down.
Today’s surprise burned down my throat and left a bitter aftertaste on my tongue. I didn’t need to see the future to know this round would be an unpleasant one. Each stage was worse than the last.
Sweat was pouring off the forehead of the guy at my right now. He groaned with a choked hitch as if he could barely work the sound from his throat. His face was turning a purplish red. I braced myself, my stomach already starting to churn. The professor fluffed her black-and-white streaked curls.
“Don’t forget to note down all your observations at the five-minute mark,” she said in her sharply bright voice.
Or as close to the five-minute mark as we could manage amid the agony. I reached for my pencil anyway, as if holding onto it could ward off the worst of the potion’s effects. Not for the first time, I thanked what gods there were that Trix hadn’t ended up sharing this class with me yet. This was not how I ever wanted her to see me.
It wasn’t so much the embarrassment of losing bodily control in itself. The thing I hated most about this class, even more than Archery where we literally let loose arrows at each other that I could attribute a few scars to, was how familiar it felt. The queasiness, the shakes, the frantic itching that some of the solutions provoked. The panicked impression that my innards would devour themselves. Now it was because of the substance I’d ingested. Before, the symptoms had risen up when I went too long without replenishing my high with my drug of choice.
I’d been through a full withdrawal during my first few weeks here. These sessions just extended that experience, sending me back over and over to the pains of that awful stretch of time and the similar, if shorter, horrible moments that had come before it back home.
Despite the number of ingredients, the impact of today’s offering was relatively simple. A burning ache split through the queasiness in my stomach. I only had a fraction of a second to register the shift inside me before I was throwing myself toward the sink, spewing a soupy-sour mess into the stainless steel basin. With each involuntary retch, the ache inside seared sharper and deeper, like someone was slicing me open with a razor blade while I puked.
Dizziness swam over my mind. I nearly slipped off my stool. My gut was still heaving, though, a thin dribble of spittle emerging from my exhausted throat. I held there, only half on my seat, clutching the faucet until I was sure I’d expelled everything that was going to come out.
The hiss of the water was almost soothing. I rinsed the sink automatically, scooped up a little water to wash out my mouth as well as I could, and settled back onto my stool. The razor was still carving its way through my abdomen. The dizziness had shifted into a splinter of a headache right through the center of my forehead. I closed my eyes for a second, found that only amplified the pain, and forced myself to retrieve the pencil that had rolled across the table when I’d dropped it.
Did anyone bother to read the notes we jotted down about how sick we’d felt, even Marsden? I was pretty sure the point wasn’t for the professors to evaluate our experiences but to make us relive them a second time, dwelling on the exact awfulness of the sensations so we could describe them accurately. Twice the torture for the same effort.
Being one of the oldest students here meant I took my turn toward the end. It was only ten minutes later that Marsden waved for us to leave, and my stomach was still aching and my head throbbing mildly. And lucky me, I had a counseling session in a few hours… after lunch, which at this moment I had even less interest in than usual.
Even in the middle of my discomfort, I couldn’t stop my eyes from automatically scanning the second-floor hall to see if Trix happened to be around. The pleasure of her company wouldn’t wipe away the pain, but at least talking with her would distract me from it.
No such luck. I stopped to lean against the railing overlooking the staircase, peering down there just in case, and one of my Tolerance classmates came up beside me.
“Still hung up on our valiant white knight, Shibata?” he said with an unrestrained sneer.
I didn’t think the guy was more than eighteen, probably plucked straight out of high school. I couldn’t remember his name—Andy? Zander? Something like that. He couldn’t have been around for more than a few months before Trix had made her first arrival, but apparently he thought that gave him enough seniority to take deep offense to her presence.
Most caustic people could be diffused if you simply didn’t care enough to give them a real reaction. I offered a half-hearted shrug. “What’s it to you who I hang out with?”
He snorted. “It’s pathetic, that’s all. She’s off in her delusional loop thinking she’s going to save this brother of hers and whoever else here, and you go trotting after her like a sad little puppy every time.”
With an attitude like that, it wasn’t hard to figure out how he might have ended up at Roseborne. He was obviously still in the blame-everyone-around-me stage of recognizing his failings.
“If you don’t like watching, there are plenty of other places to look,” I said mildly, and ambled off before he could berate me any more.
A lot of the jerks who ended up here were bullies in one way or another. They’d gotten off on making people feel small in the real world, and they tried to set up the same dynamic at the college. From what I’d seen, that was the type who sputtered out of existence the soonest.
Roseborne punished defiance and rewarded penitence. Nothing you did would grant you a free pass, but if you could recognize how you’d gotten yourself into this mess, you at least got a bit more time to appreciate the few enjoyable shards left in this charade of an existence.
Thankfully, by the time lunch hour rolled around, the effects of Tolerance class had completely faded away. I plowed through the alternately wilted and stringy chicken Caesar salad with as little attention to my taste buds as I could manage and then fiddled with the cheap fork until I’d managed to twist it into the figure of a snail. Trix might like that. I slipped it into my pocket as I headed out. If she’d ducked in to grab some food, she’d left again so quickly I hadn’t seen her.
Not that we’d have had much time together anyway. I turned my reluctant feet toward the counseling room.
What reminder would I get today of what a fuckup I’d been? You could never know for sure, only that whatever the room showed you, it was pretty much guaranteed to get under your skin. I waited in the hall for a few minutes until the door swung open and a guy walked out with his shoulders hunched and his face wan. The session hadn’t gone easy on him.
I took a deep breath and stepped into the small white room. As usual, it was empty other than the plain wooden chair in the center of the room. I flopped down into it and braced myself for the show to start.
The images swam into focus across the walls slowly, wavering back and forth. It took a moment before I recognized my parents’ bedroom back home. The walls of the counseling room split between different angles with erratic jerks: groping under the bed, pawing through the closet, yanking open drawer after drawer on the maple dresser. My stomach twisted with a nausea that nothing I drank in Tolerance could ever compete with.
“Where is it?” a voice muttered as if from all around me. My voice, ragged with desperation. “There’s got to be something. Come on, come on.”
The images spun, and suddenly my parents were looming over me—in the kitchen, with more sunlight than I’d seen in years streaming through the broad windows behind them. I couldn’t take any pleasure in that when their expressions were so pained. My mother had lowered her head, her fingers tangled in her amber-brown waves as she let out soft little sobs. My father’s mouth was
pressed flat. He ran his hand over his face and into the smooth black hair I’d inherited from him.
“My grandmother brought that jewelry box with her from Kyoto. All she wanted was for it to stay in the family. How could you not even think about the rest of us?”
My hands shifted in my lap of their own accord, remembering the intricate details of the carved wood, the delicate lines of paint. Sold to a pawnshop for no more than a tenth of what it’d probably been worth, and that wasn’t even including the personal significance.
My great-grandmother had died just a year before I’d pawned off her heirloom. I hadn’t been thinking, not really, not about anything but getting the fix I was dying for—and, if I’d been capable of admitting it back then, dying because of.
I’ll get it back, I wanted to tell him. Maybe I had even told him that in the moment—I couldn’t remember. Chances were I’d either been high or jonesing to get there. By that point, the spaces in between those states had gotten awfully short.
It’d be gone now anyway. That’d been almost four years ago. Four fucking years.
“We just want to help you, Ryo,” my mother said in a rasp that spoke of held-back tears. “We just want you back the way you were. If you’d just let us—”
“If you want to help me, then leave me the fuck alone!” nineteen-year-old me shouted back, and swiped a plate off the counter so it shattered on the floor for effect, just because I could. Because the last thing I’d wanted to hear was their concern when everything I did just cut them deeper.
The walls blinked into another moment, I couldn’t have said how many months later. A punch thrown at my father’s face; a jet of red blood streaming from his nose. My mother’s weeping carrying from behind their closed bedroom door.
Blink. My little brother was staring at me shocked and betrayed as I clutched the video game system he’d saved up for in my hands. “What are you doing, Ryo?”
I closed my eyes and covered them for good measure. The sounds just got louder, penetrating straight through my brain.
This was my penitence. This was what I deserved. To own up to what a shitty excuse for a human being I’d been, over and over and over again. No matter how much I accepted it, no matter how many confessions I made in Composition or potions I drank in Tolerance, I’d never really make up for it.
All I could do that mattered even a little was lift Trix up rather than drag her down like I had so many of the other people I’d loved.
Chapter Seven
Trix
The pickings in the kitchen were pretty slim, but I managed to roll up some sliced ham and a few not-too-wilted pieces of lettuce in a pita to make a passable wrap. Elias’s comment about bringing Cade food had stuck with me.
I hadn’t let myself think about how he was sustaining himself out there in the forest. With the monstrous teeth and jaws he had most of the time now, I guessed he hunted down meals like any animal predator would. How could that do anything but make him feel less human by the day?
The staff apparently didn’t care if we poked around in the kitchen after hours. No one showed up to question my presence there. I guessed they’d never hassled Elias either, or he’d have mentioned that.
I found a produce bag to hold the offering and tucked that into my purse. Then I headed out into the night.
The first time I’d gone wandering into the woods by moonlight, before I’d known Cade was living out there, the shifting shadows and the eerie quiet had stirred up memories not from my times on campus but from my life before that. Uneasy memories. The times I’d ventured into the forest since then, I’d been so focused on my purpose that either there hadn’t been room in my head for those fragments to rise up or I simply hadn’t noticed them.
Now, as I walked toward the area where I’d found Cade before, pieces of that past jostled loose to join the anxious questions about the present that were already swimming through my mind. In the creak of a branch, I heard a foster mother’s footsteps on the basement stairs, coming down to drag me out of bed and yell at me about whatever she thought I’d done wrong this time. The faint brush of the breeze over my skin brought back the leering gaze of my first foster father. The hoarse call of a distant bird reminded me of the Monroes’ raucous laughter at the thought that I’d ever make anything useful of myself.
I didn’t want to think about any of those times, any of those people. I’d gotten through all the shit the families I’d been placed with—and the one I’d been born into—had thrown at me, partly with Cade’s help. Dwelling on it didn’t help anyone, least of all him.
But that was how the whole school operated, wasn’t it? Every class, every assignment, designed to draw out the worst parts of your history. Maybe I should be glad that most of the material Roseborne had to work with cast me as the victim, because remembering times when I’d hurt someone else would have felt even worse.
Even as that thought passed through my head, my phone’s light glanced off a mica-laced rock. The sparkle hit my eyes like the glint of broken glass, and my lungs seized up. I inhaled sharply and shoved that memory away as hard as I could.
Focus on finding Cade. Focus on figuring out how to break the spell this place had cast over him and everyone else. That was the best atonement I could offer.
The sense of being chased by my past had made me walk faster. I reached the heart of the woods a little before the half hour. I hesitated in the same small patch of open ground—so small that calling it a clearing would have seemed ridiculous—and looked around.
Would Cade even be human yet? How would he react to me while he was in his monstrous form? The first time I’d seen him, when Ryo had brought me out here, he’d sprang at me, knocked me down and pinned me with those heavy paws. Now, maybe he’d have a more concrete understanding of who I was and that I was really here. Or maybe whatever he’d heard of my confession would bring out more aggressive urges than before. He didn’t want me around him when he wasn’t himself—that much he’d made incredibly clear.
He used to get like that sometimes when I’d witnessed him laying into one friend or another who’d pissed him off, when the harshness of his words during that moment had been enough to leave me briefly unsteady around him in the aftermath. Of course he’d noticed. You don’t want to be around someone like me, he’d say, turning away from me. It’s okay—you don’t have to pretend.
That had always been enough to shake me out of my discomfort. I knew the real him, after all. I’d assure him over and over that I loved him all the same, and he’d come back and tuck me close. I guess it takes one screw-up to really care about another, huh?
But this—the creature he became, the awful magic that bound him so tightly… It was a hell of a lot more than a quick outburst of temper. It wasn’t him at all, but something Roseborne had inflicted on him. I didn’t know what I could say that would convince him it was okay with me, because it wasn’t, even if that wasn’t his fault.
I stayed in place, picking at a loose thread on my purse strap, until the clock reached twelve thirty. “Cade?” I called out. I had told him I’d come back. He’d have believed that, wouldn’t he, however much comfort the promise had given him?
Almost immediately, the sound of footsteps reached my ears. My brother moved through the trees to meet me, his stride more purposeful than it’d been the last two times. More sure of what he could expect from me. Good. I wanted him to know he could count on me now, even if I’d screwed so much up before.
“Trix,” he said, his crooked grin softened by relief, and I couldn’t stop the smile that sprang to my face in return, even though there wasn’t much to smile about in this awful situation.
“I told you I’d come,” I said, and fished the wrap out of my purse. “And I brought you something to eat. Elias said he’s done that sometimes. I’m sorry I didn’t think of it before.”
Cade’s expression flickered at the mention of his previous benefactor, but the hint of emotion left his face so quickly I couldn’t tell how he act
ually felt. He took the food from me eagerly enough and dug into the pita with an enthusiastic bite.
I wasn’t going to ask him about his usual eating habits, but the subject I was planning on bringing up wasn’t exactly a fun one either. I grappled with the words for several seconds while he ate before deciding on the right ones.
“I’m trying to understand how everything works here so that I can figure out ways to disrupt that. One of the things I keep wondering about is how the school or the staff here pick new students to begin with. We were living two states away. How did they even know you exist?”
Cade paused halfway through the wrap with a frown. “I don’t know. They’ve never explained—that’s not the kind of question they’d want to answer. No one I talked to back when I still hung out at the school seemed to be sure either.”
“Do you remember anything strange or just different that happened in the week or two before you got the scholarship letter?”
If thinking back to that time—to the freedom he’d had and the violence he’d succumbed to within that freedom—bothered him, he didn’t show it. He took another bite and chewed thoughtfully. “Definitely nothing outright strange. I’d remember that. The only thing I can think of that changed around then was there was a new girl who came around to a couple of get-togethers with a bunch of my friends. I don’t know if you met her.” He paused, and his gray eyes darkened. “I hardly talked to her, but I think she was there when I caught Richie saying shit about Sylvie.”
Which was the reason he’d assumed Richie had been behind the prankish accident that had led to her death. The reason he’d wailed on him the way he had. My stomach knotted. “Did you get into a fight with him there?”
“I gave him hell, and there might have been a little scuffle. I wasn’t really sure until I looked through what he’d been posting online and all that afterward.”
But he’d been wrong in that certainty. The impulse to remind him of that caught in my throat.