by E. E. Holmes
“I’ll see you back in the room later, Karen,” Lizzy said, a laugh in her voice.
“Huh?”
“Have fun,” she whispered, arching an eyebrow at me and winking.
“What are you talking ab—”
But she had already disappeared through the door and I turned to find Mike almost offensively close to me.
“Alone at last,” he said with that too-wide grin.
I smiled weakly. “Ha.”
“Shall we?” He offered me his arm, which I stared at like I’d never seen an arm before. After a few seconds of silence, he shrugged, still grinning, and gestured up a tree-lined path to the left. “Your first class is just up here. So, pre-law, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said, tucking my map back into my bag and attempting to engage properly. “I find legal studies fascinating.”
“It’s a great profession. So many possibilities. I’m pre-med myself,” he said in what could only be described, even charitably, as a self-satisfied tone.
“Oh, that’s… that’s wonderful. Very, um… selfless,” I said, scrambling to find the response he seemed to be fishing for.
“Self had nothing to do with it,” Mike said with an offhand chuckle “My father is head of cardiology at MGH. My grandfather was head of general surgery at New York Presbyterian. I didn’t choose medicine so much as medicine chose me.”
“Mm-hmm.” It was a ridiculous cliché, and yet, in a way, I could relate, given my Durupinen history, though I could hardly tell Mike that.
“I’ve never minded, though. There’s room to make your own way in medicine. Harvard Medical’s really the only choice for med school, of course, but after that, I can branch out anywhere, find my own calling.”
“Of course, you’ve got to get into Harvard Medical first,” I said. “It’s very competitive.”
“Not for a third-generation legacy, it’s not,” Mike replied with an almost salacious wink.
For the second time that morning, I found myself incapable of returning a smile, though this time nerves had nothing to do with it.
We arrived outside the building where my “Ethics and Public Policy” class met and came to a sudden stop. Unsure what to do, I stuck out my hand again.
“A pleasure to meet you, Mike. Thanks for the tour,” I said, trying to sound genial.
He took my hand but did not shake it. He held it instead, and leaned in a little closer. “This tour was just an excuse, you know,” he said quietly.
“An excuse for… what?” I asked, feeling my hand begin to sweat. I wanted to pull it from his grip but was afraid to be rude.
“To meet you both. Talk with you. My mother said you were charming, but…” he let out a low whistle that made my skin crawl.
“Your mother? I’m sorry, do I know your mother?” I asked, flustered.
“She met you at the Chilton Club Charity Auction last year,” Mike replied, looking mildly surprised that I didn’t remember. “She and your mother are on the board together. You didn’t recognize my name?”
Something clicked, and a spark of anger ignited somewhere deep in my chest. My mother. Of course.
“Anyway, after spending the morning together, I quite agree with your mother. It couldn’t be plainer we’d make an excellent pair, which I’m sure will only become clearer after dinner on Friday night.”
“Dinner? Friday night?”
“Yes. I’ve already got a reservation at my family’s table at The Palm. Your mother’s suggestion. I’ll pick you up at your dorm around 6 o’clock?”
The conversation was charging ahead of me as I struggled to keep up.
“You… made a reservation for dinner before you’d even met me?” I asked blankly.
“Well, of course. I mean, I knew I’d be bound to hit it off with one of you. As I said, your mother and my mother are—”
The spark caught flame now.
“You made a reservation for dinner before you decided which twin you would be bringing with you?” I asked through clenched teeth.
Mike scented danger, bless him. His smile slipped a little. “Well, I thought—”
“You thought you’d take the Ballard girls out for a little test drive around the campus and see which one you liked better before honoring her with an invitation to dinner you’d already assumed she’d accept?” I asked. My voice was rising now, but I didn’t care.
“I didn’t realize—”
“You didn’t realize what? That I was a human being? That I have free will? That I might have something resembling an opinion about being trotted around like a show dog by a guy who lets his mother pick his dates the way other mothers pick out their sons’ clothes?”
Mike’s ridiculous grin faded completely. “Well. It looks like I picked the wrong twin, didn’t I?”
“No, you picked the right one, trust me,” I said with a snort of derisive laughter. “I’m simply going to walk away from you now. If you’d tried this with Elizabeth, she’d have left you bloodied on the pavement. Thanks for the tour, Mike, but you’d better cancel that reservation, unless you want to eat alone. At least your sense of entitlement will have a seat all to itself.”
And leaving him spluttering on the sidewalk, I charged through the front doors, determined to leave my fears about Harvard, much like Mike’s pride, in shreds on the classroom floor.
§
Two hours later, I burst into our dorm room like a tornado.
“I hate you!” I announced to Lizzy, flinging my bag onto my bed.
“No, you don’t,” she replied, not even looking up from the battered copy of Pride and Prejudice she was reading for the five hundredth time. “You love me. But I can see how you might get those two emotions confused. When it comes right down to it, they’re sometimes indistinguishable.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” I shouted.
Lizzy shrugged. “Maybe not to you.”
“You knew, didn’t you? You knew he was going to corner me like that.”
“I recognized him from one of Mum’s charity things,” Lizzy admitted, and then, seeing the confused expression on my face, clarified. “We didn’t actually meet him in person. His mother had pictures she was flashing around and I was roped into ooh-ing and ahh-ing over his sailing exploits for at least an hour.”
“Why didn’t you warn me?” I asked.
“Because I thought it might just be a coincidence,” Lizzy replied. “After all, the ivy leagues are swarming with country club spawn, aren’t they? It’s a pretty small fishbowl Mum floats around in. Anyway, once he started throwing himself shamelessly at us, I figured it out. I thought for sure you’d caught on too, but apparently you were too busy trying to commit the entire campus to memory. Did he actually ask you out?” A grin spread over her face, and I knew she already knew the answer.
“No, he didn’t ask me out. He told me what a great time we were going to have on the date he’d already planned. It was a simple case of ‘insert less hostile twin here.’ He’s lucky I didn’t smack him.”
“Aw, come on, let’s be fair. It wasn’t Mike’s fault,” Lizzy said, finally deigning to put the book down. “If anyone needs a good smack, it’s Mum.”
“She can’t keep doing this. She just can’t keep doing this,” I sighed, flopping down onto my bed, all my anger deflating into despair.
“She can and she will,” Lizzy said. “I’ve gotta say, I expected a bit more subtlety on her part. I mean, come on. The first guy we meet on the very first day? What is he, a future Senator?”
“Doctor,” I said dully. “Third generation Harvard Medical School, or so he seems confident enough to announce two years before he can apply.” I turned to look at Lizzy, whose face was now a storm cloud. “It’s only going to get worse, you know.”
Without a word, Lizzy stormed across the room, picked up the cordless telephone from its cradle on the desk and dialed furiously.
“Lizzy, what are you—” I began, but she held up a hand to silence me, and we both waited
for someone to pick up on the other end of the phone. When they finally did, Lizzy jabbed her finger at the speakerphone button, so that I could hear both sides of the conversation.
“Tracker office,” came a bored voice from the other end.
“Trina, is that you?” Lizzy asked.
The voice brightened. “Yeah. Elizabeth? I thought it might be you, from the area code. What’s going on?”
Trina had been a year ahead of us at Fairhaven. She’d been taken on as an assistant in the Tracker office over the summer, hoping to get hired as a full-time Tracker once she’d gotten some experience.
“I need your help,” Lizzy said. “It’s my mum.”
Trina groaned sympathetically. “What’s she done now?”
“It’s the scouting, Trina. It’s absolutely out of control. She’s driving us mad.”
Trina laughed. “I’m not surprised. She calls here at least once a week. How many has she flung at you so far, then?”
“Too many,” Lizzy replied. “Look, I’m more worried about who she’s going to throw at us next. Can you do some digging around? Get me a list?”
Trina hesitated, then spoke in a voice so low I had to lean in to hear her. “I… I’m not sure that’s something I can…”
“Oh, come on, Trina, you owe me a favor and you know it,” Lizzy pressed. “Who covered for you that night in the library with—”
“Okay, okay! Blimey, is that what you call never talking about it again?” Trina hissed, and Lizzy’s face broke into a satisfied smile. She winked at me.
“So, come on, then,” Lizzy went on, sensing weakness and going in for the kill. “I’m not asking for files or anything. Just some names, so Karen and I can prepare ourselves. We’re getting ambushed over here, and it’s only going to get worse as she gets more desperate.”
“Why don’t you just go on a date or two?” Trina suggested. “It might calm your mother down if she thinks you’re playing along.”
“No.”
“They can’t all be bad!”
“They can if my mother’s approved them!” Lizzy cried. “My mother would marry me off to a crash test dummy with a trust fund if she thought it would improve her social standing. Please, Trina. I’m not above begging, but it would be great if you didn’t make me.”
“All right, all right, give me the day, I’ll find something,” Trina snapped.
“Thanks, Trin, you’re the best,” Lizzy said.
Trina’s reply was less of an answer than it was a mumbled string of curse words before the line went dead. Lizzy looked up at me with a grim smile on her face.
“There. That’s probably the best we can do for now.”
“Mum will be furious with me when she finds out about Mike. And you know she will find out.”
“She probably already knows,” Lizzy said with a snort. “Mike’s probably already gone crying to Mumsie.”
I groaned. “Like this wasn’t going to be hard enough, being here.”
“Forget about all that. How did your first class go,” Lizzie asked, sliding onto the bed and curling up next to me. I put my head on her shoulder and sighed, feeling a tiny bit of the tension leave my body.
“It was really good, actually. Ethics and Public Policy. It’s going to be fascinating.”
Lizzy laughed. “You have the quaintest ideas about what’s fascinating.”
I shrugged, ignoring her. “How about you?”
“Victorian British literature seminar. The professor is going to hate me.”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t they all?”
Lizzy laughed. “Usually.”
“You know what bothered me the most about that Mike kid?” I asked suddenly.
“What?”
“We got here exactly the same way he did. No wonder he thought I’d lap up his dinner invitation—we both walked up the same red carpet to get here, didn’t we? I really, really hate that.”
“It’s not about how we got here. Damn how we got here,” Lizzy said, squeezing my arm. “It’s all about what we do next. We’re not under her roof anymore, Karen.”
“We’ll always be under her roof. She just keeps expanding it to hover over wherever we happen to be.”
“That’s because she’s panicking,” Lizzy said. “She can feel us prying ourselves out of her grip, and she can’t stand it. It’s why she’s been so insufferable lately.”
I laughed. “Lately? Lately?”
“Oh, you know what I mean. Even more insufferable than usual. She can feel us slipping away, and so she’s holding on tighter. But we’re almost there, Karen, I promise.”
“If you say so.”
“I do say so. And we both know I’m always right,” Lizzy said, kissing me on the cheek and rolling away off my bed. She stood up, took one look out of her window, and groaned. “Oh, no.”
“What is it, now?” I asked.
“It’s that spirit. The one from the alleyway.”
I hopped off my bed and went to stand behind Lizzy. If I hadn’t been expecting to see her, she would have scared the daylights out of me. The figure of a young woman, her morose expression half-hidden behind long, straight, damp hair that clung to her face. She was dressed, as she had been every time we’d seen her, in a ribbed yellow turtleneck, a wide belt, and white bell-bottomed pants. Her lips were swollen and bruised, and the side of her head was matted with blood.
“Thank God for Wards,” Lizzy whispered, her whole body shivering, and I knew she was remembering the first time we’d seen the spirit, crouching in the shadows of a brick alleyway between two stores in Harvard Square. Or rather, I had seen it. Lizzy had felt it before anything else.
We’d been exploring the area around the campus, checking out the shops and restaurants. Liam had just vanished around the corner to feed the parking meter when suddenly, in the middle of a debate about where we should go for lunch, Lizzy gave a shuddering gasp and burst into hysterical sobs.
For one insane moment, I thought she was actually that upset about my refusal to try a pizza joint we’d just walked past, and then it clicked. There was a spirit nearby, and we had walked straight into a wall of disembodied emotions that Lizzy hadn’t expected.
I stared wildly around for the source of the aura while Lizzy tried desperately to calm herself. I spotted the spirit within seconds, her form faintly luminous against the grimy bricks of the alley walls. As though I had shouted her name, whatever it may have been, the spirit’s head snapped up and locked eyes with me.
I was no Empath, but the wave of terror, sadness and rage that washed over me almost took my breath away. Some spirits were like that—hitting you like a freight train upon first contact, unlike the gentle prickling sensations that announced when other, more settled spirits were nearby. It was tied directly, in most cases, to the nature of their passing, and it took only a single glance to see that this spirit had suffered things no human soul should be put through. And now she was dragging Lizzy straight down into the yawning abyss of it all.
I threw myself between them, even though I knew logically that physical barriers meant little, but it worked. I watched as the spirit’s eyes lit up with understanding, as she realized there were two people who could see her, two people who might offer some kind of remedy for her torment. And in the moment it took for her to connect with me, Lizzy’s breath eased up behind me. I heard her murmuring something, felt a tingling rush, a gathering of energy…
Whoosh. The spirit disappeared from the alleyway with an almost violent speed and with her, the heavy cloud of her sorrow lifted, too. It was like watching the sun explode through cloud cover with the force of a bomb. I spun around, expecting to see Liam running up behind us, but the street beyond us was empty with the exception of a few curious pedestrians. I grabbed Elizabeth by the shoulders and steered her down the sidewalk, away from the murmurs and prying eyes of onlookers.
“Are you okay?” I whispered as we walked. “What happened? Did… Did you…?”
“Expelled her. I exp
elled her,” Elizabeth gasped, still swiping at the tears that continued to stream down her face.
“You can’t be serious?!”
But her tearstained face, as she raised it to look at me, had broken into a triumphant smile. “I did it. I actually did it.”
I threw myself onto her in a hug that almost knocked us both to the ground, but I didn’t care. I’d known Lizzy had been practicing Expulsion, had even had success at it in controlled settings, but as far as I knew, she’d never been able to do it while in the throes of such a powerful emotional takeover.
But her elation had been short-lived. The spirit, now that it had found us, had appeared numerous times, even within the boundaries of the campus. Between Liam, Lizzy, and myself, we had surreptitiously Warded half the buildings on campus so that Lizzy could function, but the process had only made the spirit more insistent. Now she hovered just outside our bedroom window, and I could practically feel the waves of her despair slamming like storm-driven waves against the glass.
“We’ve got to try to Cross her,” I said, staring out at the figure, hovering silently like a ghastly hummingbird just beyond the boundary of the Ward.
“I know. But she’s gone mad with grief over what’s happened to her. I’ll never be able to get through a Crossing if she’s emotionally accosting me,” Lizzy replied.
“Well, back to the library tomorrow night then, huh?” I said, rubbing Lizzy’s arm as she continued to stare at the spirit. “We’re bound to find out who she is eventually. If we have a name, we’ll have more options to keep her contained until we can get her Crossed.”