by Anna Birch
I separate the cards into three piles, restack them, then draw the first card off the top.
A knight carries her helmet under her arm, and she wears a wreath in her hair. Her horse has flowers woven into her mane, and there are flowers hanging from the banners behind her, too—six banners, to be specific, because in tarot the number of things always matters.
Six of Wands.
Traditionally, this card represents success: the valiant knight, riding in from war to celebrate victory. It’s not just any old victory, either, because other cards carry the same meaning, too: It’s a public victory. The banners, the flowers in the knight’s hair, all of it was set in place by other people. It would be easy to try to assume the universe is whispering the secrets of the future in my ear, but I know better.
The Six of Wands card isn’t a promise that I’ll win the scholarship.
It’s Harry Potter’s Mirror of Erised: It’s showing me what I want—the thing I’m bleeding myself dry for. I’ve been so distracted by my personal life, and this little ritual only confirms what a part of me has recognized all along: It’s time to be who I’m meant to be, do what I’m supposed to do, and take what the world is offering to get where I need to go.
I shake myself free of thoughts of Rhodes and Alice and Sarah.
Everything else and everyone else are just distractions.
I’m ready.
The Capstone Award show is in two days, and I’m going to finish my project tonight.
Under normal circumstances, I would shuffle my cards back together and tuck them back into my bag. Tonight feels different, though—I want the knight’s protection, and even if I know it’s just a tiny piece of mass-printed cardstock, leaving the Six of Wands card out while I work feels significant.
The studio is chilly. It’s hard to tug on fingerless gloves with half-numb hands, but it’s even harder to operate an X-Acto knife when you can barely feel the tips of your fingers. I flip on the space heater en route to the locker wall, and even though the room fills with the scent of gas, it’ll be another hour at least before it’s warm enough to take my gloves back off again.
The studio door flies open with enough force that drywall crumbles against the brunt of the doorknob. The SLAM-SMASH-CRUNCH rattles the windows, reverberates through my bones, and stops my heart.
First thought: Sarah and Kiersten are here.
They have a hatchet, and it has a standing date with the back of my head.
I KNEW IT.
Second thought: If it’s Sarah and Kiersten, they’re literally the worst murderers in modern history. They didn’t even bother to sneak up on me, and I’m in the back of a room filled with chairs, sharp objects, and heavy projectiles. Even as inexperienced in murder as they are, they both have the basic intelligence to sneak up on someone first.
I don’t remember clutching my chest, but my sweatshirt is crumpled when I let go to rake my hair out of my face. There are no approaching steps ringing off the linoleum floors.
Slowly, very slowly, I turn to face the door.
I know the silhouette standing in the door, even if I can’t make out her face. I’d know her willowy limbs, her sloping shoulders, and her giant, messy topknot anywhere.
First thought: A flower is blooming in my chest.
Or maybe my ribs are a birdcage, and my spirit is made of robins.
Second thought: Oh.
Shit.
She knows and it’s over.
“I just left a meeting with Bootsie Prudhomme.” Rhodes’s hands are shaking when she reaches out for the door to slam it back into the casing behind her. “And judging by the confused look on your face, you have no idea who that is. The new chairwoman for the Capstone Award, Iliana.”
She crosses her arms, glaring at me as if this is supposed to mean something.
This was my worst nightmare.
Not Sarah and Kiersten with a hatchet, but even worse: That Rhodes would figure out that I’m Cheshire before I’ve had a chance to tell her myself. But that doesn’t seem like that’s what this is at all, and I can’t wrap my head around it.
“What happened to the other lady?”
Impatience flickers across Rhodes’s features, then her face pinches into an ugly scowl.
“You are such a bitch, Iliana Vrionides!” Her voice rings out against the windows. “I don’t understand why you’re constantly trying to ruin my life!”
“Excuse me?” I don’t need the space heater anymore. I snatch off one glove at a time and stuff them into the pocket of my hoodie. “You think I’m trying to ruin your life? You were the one that cost me my scholarship—”
The words are hollow.
I’ve been thinking like this for so long, it flies from me unchecked. I regret it the moment it flies out of my mouth—instead of bringing Rhodes closer, I know I’m only pushing her further away.
Rhodes recoils, clutching her chest.
“That wasn’t my—I didn’t mean—Jesus God, Iliana, all of this is because of the ACAD scholarship?” Her laugh lacks humor. “You can’t just take away my opportunities because you lost one of yours. This scholarship is a zero-sum game, but life isn’t—and this is super effing shitty, even for you.”
One word at a time, I process what she’s saying.
You. Can’t. Take. Away. My. Opportunities.
The other Capstone Award lady is gone, and she’s been replaced.
Something happened, and Rhodes thinks it’s because of me.
“What are you talking about?”
“Are you really going to make me give you the play-by-play?” Rhodes presses the heel of her palm against one eye, and her chin quivers. Alice—Rhodes—hates it when people see her cry, but I can’t look away. “Isn’t it enough for you to know I’m out?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Rhodes watches me in silence.
She closes the distance between us in a handful of long, sweeping strides—one moment she’s standing in the doorway and the next, her breath ruffles my hair.
I flinch.
She doesn’t hit me, though: She simply lifts my chin so I have no other choice but to look her in the eyes. Her skin against mine, even in this small way, stands my arm hair on end.
Everything in her is burning: her eyes, her face, her spirit.
I have no idea what she sees when she’s looking at me. I don’t know what she’s looking for, but she’s showing me things I know she’d never want anyone to witness: the way she pants through each breath, the shake in her hands, the intensity of her gaze—all of it tells me that Rhodes—Alice—is vulnerable. Afraid.
Something shifts; there’s a crackle in the air and everything feels different.
I reach up between us—for what purpose, I have no idea—and Rhodes’s eyes widen, just a little. She lets go and takes two giant steps backward.
“Why do we keep doing this to each other?” I ask.
Rhodes shakes her head.
She turns her back to me. Her reflection in the window reveals her hands bunched back up against her face, presumably to catch more tears she doesn’t want me to see.
“I don’t know why anyone else would have ratted on me—or my mom, I guess—to the board,” she says. “It seemed so, I don’t know. Neat. Tidy. Like poetic justice or something.”
I’m glad my back is to her—I don’t want her to see my face right now, all screwed up and screaming concern.
I feel sick even considering the fact that someone was working very hard to sabotage her—even if a few short months ago, that person could have easily been me.
I want to ask a thousand questions—what was said in the meeting? What was Bootsie’s phrasing? What exactly did her mom do? But I’m afraid that something even as simple as seeking out details could be the thing that sends her scurrying away.
I want her to be close to me, so I choose my next words carefully.
“Life is rarely ever poetic,” I say. “No, I wanted to beat you fair and
square—I won’t ever know I’m the best if I’m not up against you.”
Rhodes watches me for a long moment before she speaks again. “Thanks, I think.”
“I wouldn’t have ever done that to you, not in a million years. Honest.” It’s easier to fumble with the padlock in front of me, long forgotten in whatever this moment is evolving into. No matter how many times I punch my number into the mechanical dials, I can’t get it to unlock. “I’ve … lost everything. I, er, I don’t mean to say that, uh, like a jab, but—”
“No, I get it.” Rhodes’s voice is soft. “That night was horrible for all of us.”
“I know it wasn’t your fault,” I say. “I’ve been really unfair.”
Behind me, a chair screeches against the linoleum. One shoe sole, then another, squeaks on the surface of one of the tables. “My dad called SCAD for you, when it happened.”
Another pang of guilt. I turn to face her, finally.
Mom’s words the other night ring in my ear: “You do everything you can to make things right.”
I now know through Alice that she’d done everything she could to make things right with me. This is so much more than even she ever disclosed to me.
“No one ever told me that.”
“It went pretty much how our lawyer told us it would: That the school wouldn’t talk to us about what happened that night for, like, five different reasons. That they’d already informed the runner-up for the scholarship and there was nothing they could do.”
“Rules are rules,” I say, echoing the words of my own lawyer—my older brother. “So, what are you going to do now, about the Capstone?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess I have to rethink some things.”
“That’s not always a bad thing.”
I’ve had to rethink some things, too.
“What are you doing here? We don’t have anything due until next week.”
“I haven’t touched my Capstone project since we returned from Nashville.” Now is as good a time as any to drag everything back out. I turn and fiddle with the padlock to my work locker again, slap the side a few times, then punch the number in for what feels like the thousandth time.
With another jiggle and a smack, it finally springs free.
There is resistance when I pull the locker door open.
A POP and a splatter-gush rings in my ears, and my eyes burn with something that washes the world in painful, burning black.
“Oh—” Rhodes’s voice is behind me.
I don’t know if she’s inches or miles away.
A fresh wave of nausea spills over with each beat of my heart.
Gentle hands rest on my shoulders, then the small of my back.
“Oh, oh, oh—” Her tone is completely piteous. “Iliana, this is bad—”
“This burns! Help!” I swipe at my face with my hands, but whatever it is only spreads.
“Oh! Right! I’m sorry—”
I’m being shuttled somewhere.
“Uh—I’m reading the directions on the eyewash station—” Rhodes’s breath is quick in my ear, and she smells like fabric softener and warm skin. She bends me forward with splayed fingers between my shoulder blades, and before long, cool eye solution splashes into my hot, aching eyes.
I should be worried about whether I’ll ever see again, but—like a love-sick puppy—I can’t think further than the warm, bare hand caressing the back of my neck.
CHAPTER 24
RHODES
Username: n/a
The studio is a disaster.
It takes thirty minutes to wash the printmaking ink from Iliana’s eyes, and another hour to get it out of her hair and off her skin. No less than fifty tiny paper rectangles are strewn about, crinkled and fragile, across the top of the wide studio tables. The ink completely soaked them, warping the delicate paper-cuts into a thousand organic, three-dimensional shapes. She’s been cutting them in both red and black paper, and the effect from where I stand reminds me of autumn leaves on a sidewalk: One gust of wind, or even a breath of air, could send them scattering everywhere.
Iliana sits on the other side of the table from me, with her bottom perched up on the back of the chair and her feet in the seat. Her cheeks are freckled from eighteen Alabama summers, and her toenails are painted a shade of navy blue so dark it could almost be called black.
She hasn’t cried yet. I’ve wanted to cry for the past hour and a half, and it didn’t even happen to me.
Iliana’s Capstone project is destroyed.
I don’t like the idea of using the word sabotaged—at the end of the day it seems indecent to automatically assume this wasn’t an accident somehow—but sabotage is exactly what this is.
Someone knows Iliana’s mettle.
It’s something I’ve known since day one—and realistically, it’s something I’ve hated about her—that clearly someone else is becoming savvy to: Iliana Vrionides is a force to be reckoned with.
She’ll be the one to beat at the Capstone Award in two days, and clearly somebody is trying to cut a path for themselves early.
The thought sickens me.
I don’t know if I’ve ever actually seen Iliana cry before, now that I think about it. Instead, she sits with her elbows resting on her knees and her chin in her palms, and she stares at the table in a sort of complete and utter silence I’ve only ever wished from her.
It’s like looking at a snail without its shell—
No.
I’ve had these kinds of thoughts about Iliana for so long, they’ve rutted paths into my mind.
I lapse into them, and I don’t know how to stop anymore. She doesn’t deserve this, now that she stands to lose everything for a second time.
“What are you going to do?” It’s a simple question, but it’s a start.
“You know,” Iliana says after a long moment, with her eyes dropped to the front of my shirt, “most people see Lewis Carroll’s work as being silly, but a lot of it is also political satire.”
All I can do is stare at her. “That’s what you’re thinking about right now? My sweatshirt?”
“Your sweatshirt.” She shrugs. “My tarot cards. It all comes back to Alice.”
As far as she knows, I’ve fallen victim to Alice in Wonderland’s whimsy like everyone else. Bunnies with monocles are universally cute, as are girls in pinafores next to teetering stacks of teacups, but this is usually as far as people’s fascination with the stories go.
“I’ve never been interested in discourse, though,” I say. “Like, okay. Carroll never actually said it was political himself, so all we can really do is accept it at face value and enjoy it for what it is: stories he told his boss’s daughter about a fictional little girl named Alice.” I drop into the chair next to her and crack my knuckles one at a time. “There are other theories, too—that they, like, satirize mathematical society drama in the late nineteenth century because Carroll was a mathematician. That it was—I don’t know—word vomit from Carroll’s subconscious after his dad died. Just because a bunch of literary snobs came up with all of this doesn’t mean it isn’t just fan theory.”
“When isn’t art political, though?” Iliana nudges one of the cards on the table with a bare toe. “When isn’t it puked up from our subconscious? Even if he hadn’t intended it as a criticism of the British government, or the math nerds where he taught at Christ Church, or whatever, that doesn’t mean those things weren’t on his mind when he was writing them.”
“What’s Carroll’s real name?” I ask, entirely out of the blue. I want to settle this with myself, once and for all—I want to know whether Iliana cares about Alice as much as she wants people to believe she does.
“Really? Is this some kind of fandom litmus test?” She drops her nasally, pitchy tone almost an entire octave to mimic mine. “‘You’re a real fan? Name five of their albums.’”
“I don’t sound like that. Maybe.”
She pulls a face. I laugh.
This is a version of Il
iana that I don’t know: Quiet. Pensive. We’ve never been this close before, and before now, I’ve never actually just looked at her. Tonight, with the glow of the lights from the parking lot through the windows as the sun is setting, she could be Gentileschi’s Judith, or Bathsheba, or maybe Esther: Her mouth is soft, her face round. Her hair begs for freedom from the tie that binds it in place.
She’s turned her attention to the mess in front of us, and I don’t think she’s going to answer my question at first—or maybe she doesn’t know the answer at all. Maybe she’s not even thinking about Alice anymore. Should she be?
With a puff of air, I could blow her away.
“I don’t really have any options anymore, do I?” She shakes her head.
“You…” I swallow. She’s hurting, but I feel this in the depths of my soul. “You always have options.”
“Well, you aren’t technically wrong. I can only think of two: Either start over on the cards or withdraw from the Capstone.”
“I could help you.” It falls out of me, too fast to catch. “Let me help you, Iliana.”
She looks at me for a moment. “I don’t understand why you suddenly care about my problems.”
“I know what the Capstone ladies like. Maybe—” I don’t have the answer myself. Not really. “Maybe I just … You already lost out once. Somebody wants us out of the running, and you still have a chance. I don’t.”
“You think this is all the same person? The same thing?”
“I haven’t really thought about it before now,” I say, “but it makes sense, right? If you didn’t rat me out, and I didn’t break into your locker, who would have done this to us?”
A shadow darkens her features—creases her brows, worries her jaw—and she turns her head to look out the window.
“I don’t know,” she finally says.
I don’t believe her.
People like Iliana have enemies in spades.
It just doesn’t make any sense who would have any problem with the two of us.
CHAPTER 25
ILIANA
Username: Curious-in-Cheshire