Mary-Abigail Pinkney thrust a cup into Ellsbeth’s hand. “Drink,” she said in her southern drawl, and when Ellsbeth took a sip, Mary-Abigail nodded in approval. “Good girl.” Ellsbeth tried to recall what Mary-Abigail was focused on. Translations? She knew she’d done a master’s already, at Vanderbilt.
“What is it?”
“Don’t worry,” Mary-Abigail said, her straight white teeth Day-Glo bright in the dim evening light. “It’s just a whiskey Coke.”
The drink was stronger than Ellsbeth had anticipated. Before her glass was half empty she and Mary-Abigail were both on the couch with Curt, listening to his faux-modesty about his recent fellowship.
“Really, it’s just a publication game,” he said. “My essay on energy amplification got intoCambridge Review,and the MacGregor people eat that shit up.”
Sora blew a thin cloud of smoke from between her red lips. “As if you needed the funding. Didn’t your dad, like, donate a building here when you were an undergraduate? And you were in the Banestooth Club, right? I heard that to join they make you buy a first-class ticket to Paris and then burn it just to show you don’t need money.”
Curt rolled his eyes. “That’s a rumor. And the building was a tax break. And don’t pretend you’re here representing the proletariat when your dad owns half of Seoul.”
“Stepdad.”
“Oh, my sincerest apologies.”
“Wait,” Ellsbeth said. “You went to undergrad here? At Newlyn?”
Curt turned to her, his beer half raised. “Yeah, why?”
Sora smirked. “Didn’t you know he was punched by the Banestooth Club? He only talks about it constantly?”
Of course he was, Ellsbeth thought. She often saw those undergraduate boys congratulating one another on their existence as theyentered and exited the three-story brick clubhouse at the end of her street. The most exclusive fraternity on campus, which boasted as alumni a handful of senators, a president, and half the subjects of any given issue ofFortune.
“How old are you? Did you take time off to study for the Arcanus?” Ellsbeth asked.
Curt smiled at Ellsbeth then, all charm, and from the other side of the room, Ellsbeth could sense Priya clocking it, eyeing them both from the kitchen island. “I’m twenty-two,” he said. “Took the Arcanus my senior year.” He grinned. “Too young for you? Too old?”
“No,” Ellsbeth said, trying to prevent the flush crawling up her neck. She wasn’t attracted to Curt, with his perfectly combed blond hair and polo shirt layered under a quarter-zip sweatshirt. But even as there was something in his energy that made her feel as though his attention on her was a prank, that a vat of pig’s blood was bound to spill from the ceiling at any moment, there was also something undeniable about his fundamental attractiveness in the abstract, the masculine contours of his low, prominent brows and square jaw. “I was wondering if you maybe knew my sister. She was only here for one semester, though, and you were probably already a senior.”
“Oh,” Curt said, already losing interest, his eyes circling back toward Sora and the black tattoos that crawled up her arm. “What’s her name?”
“Bertie—uh, Roberta Storer.”
“Sorry,” Curt said. He shrugged absently. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
Sora extinguished her cigarette in the ashtray, and Ellsbeth realized from the smell that there was something more than tobacco rolled into it. “Why did she only go here for a semester?” she asked. Ellsbeth was surprised that she had been listening at all.
“Oh,” Ellsbeth said. “She died.”
That unleashed a deep, sympathetic moan from Mary-Abigail, whose southern manners manifested in comforting gestures of condolences, as if Ellsbeth had lost her sister mere moments ago.
The change in energy summoned Gracie, a cigarette and a champagne flute both balanced in one hand. “So how’d she die?” She dropped down next to Curt and wrapped an arm around his neck. “Sorry, is that rude?”
“No, it’s fine. She…” Ellsbeth paused here, and let the simplest version of the story come out. “Committed suicide.”
Gracie deposited her cigarette neatly between her lips. “Jesus Christ,” she said, and then she faced Curt. “And you didn’t hear about that when you were here?”
“Oh, shit,” Curt said. “Yeah, that does sort of sound familiar. I didn’t realize that was your sister. Fuck. I’m sorry.”
Ellsbeth felt the room’s eyes on her, the combination of pity and the prurient, vampiric fascination that surrounded tragedy. “It’s okay,” she said quickly, hoping to get off the subject. “My parents didn’t want to make it a big story. It wasn’t really a scandal or anything.”
“God, yeah,” Gracie said. “I guess if it’s not the dean’s son burning down half of Pembroke dorm and killing his entire suite, it’s not a real Newlyn scandal.”
Ellsbeth sat forward. “Do you mean Maxwell Keene? He wasDean Lennox’sson?”
“Uh, yeah,” Gracie said, “You didn’t know that? But obviously he died and killed, like, a bunch of kids by accident, so no wonder she doesn’t like to talk about it. Probably because she gave him special treatment. Otherwise why would an undergraduate have been actuallydoingarcane mechanicals in the first place?”
