“A journal will love that. Add a little addendum to the front with a bit about how your sister killed herself and so this isso personal to youor whatever, and you’ll be able to publish it wherever you want,” Curt continued, seemingly enjoying giving Ellsbeth professional advice. “People love tragedy porn. Just find something to make it personal. Like, talking about Banestooth is fine, but she was a girl so she was never going to be a member. You should find some way to make it about her.”
“Well, I’m not sure Newlyn has a Nora Ephron Club, but if they do, I’m sure she was a member there.”
Curt clapped his hands once and laughed. “Oh, shit, right. She was obsessed withWhen Harry Met Sally.She tried to get me to watch it, like, five different times.”
Ellsbeth sat up straighter. “Wait. You knew her?”
The music in the coffee shop hung between them for a beat while Curt blinked. “Oh, yeah. I met her a few times. She was sweet. Funny.”
“You said you didn’t know her. At Gracie’s party.” Ellsbeth could hear all of the warmth draining out of her voice, her tone becoming icy and robotic.
Curt didn’t seem to notice. He shrugged. “I forgot the name. And then by the time I realized who it was—well, I wasn’t just going to come up to you and be like,Hey, turns out I did hang out with your dead sister once or twice.”
Ellsbeth shifted her weight in her seat. The coffee had left an unpleasant film on her tongue. ThatCurthad known her sister, this boy in front of her, that he had met her, felt impossibly strange. Like a dream in which your second-grade teacher meets Celine Dion. Had Curt lied to her? Or had Bertie just been one of a number of interchangeable freshman girls to him, bright-eyed girls who showed up to Banestooth parties wearing tiny dresses and borrowed shoes, hoping to find someone to make them feel special?
“So how’s your thesis going?” Curt said. “Rawlins is your adviser, right?”
At the sound of Rawlins’s name, Ellsbeth felt the immediate and unexpected sensation of a splinter being lodged in her chest. He still hadn’t texted her, which she justified to herself as his independent streak reasserting itself as he busied himself getting ready for a conference. But there had been something strange in his manner the last time she saw him, a hardness that she hadn’t recognized before. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought he was angry with her, even though the change had occurred sometime overnight while she was asleep.
“Yeah,” Ellsbeth said, trying to keep her voice light. “Although I actually should get back to work on it. You’re outdoing everyone else in the department—we have to try to keep up!”
Curt gave her a little salute and turned his attention toward the attractive barista with a nose piercing and thick winged eyeliner.
If she took the most effective route from the coffee shop back to her apartment, she would crest a hill where Rawlins’s home would be visible. But Ellsbeth stuffed her hat onto her head and instead turned back toward campus, taking a slightly longer, meandering path. She told herself she needed time to think.
She hadn’t expected Curt to be forthcoming with any of Banestooth’s secrets, but he had revealed something essential despite himself.
He had told her that Banestooth had a basement.
She had seen the blueprint of the building in the school’s library archive search:no basement.They had hidden their true floor plan from the university, which meant there was something they were hiding. Now she just needed to get in and find whatever it was.
She had considered that she might just obscurate Curt and get him to escort her inside, but if all guests were forbidden, she would inevitably run into problems. It’s not as if she could obscurate a whole house—there was no way to obscurate beyond touching one individual at any one time. But even if she could, the fundamental principles of what obscuration accomplished would begin to fray the more people were involved.
The brain was an incredible object, capable of filling in blank spaces in order to stitch the world into logical sense. After an obscuration ritual, the object should never have known they were manipulated; they should believe thattheymade the choices they were compelled to make, and their mind would either justify it or skim over thinking about it like a deliveryman skipping a door. But multiple people being obscurated at once could talk to one another. Their brains would each have found a unique way of processing what happened. And if the rule against visitors at Banestooth was that well established, Ellsbeth couldn’t imagine a scenario in which a dozen or so Banestooth members would be unable to figure out that something had happened to them if they all had the hazy memory of a girl being permitted to wander their upper floors.
Obscurating a large group might be an interesting intellectual challenge (could the ritual be transmitted through the air? Or through sound instead of touch?), but it wouldn’t help her get inside Banestooth.
She walked past the faculty center and instinctively turned to see if Rawlins was visible inside through the window. He wasn’t. She wished he had texted, just so that she would have been able to text him about her idea for the academic possibility of group obscuration. It was exactly the type of esoteric, ultimately meaningless conversation he would have loved, and she could imagine talking about it with him, half naked, her hand roaming through his hair so vividly it was almost a memory. He would get excited at some point and jump up, wearing just his boxer-briefs, to write a formula on the pad of paper he kept by his bedside or to pull a book from high on a shelf somewhere, exposing the hair under his arms as he reached.
She checked her phone again, for the third time in as many minutes. No messages.
Maybe the simplest answer was the truest one: He had always wanted the two of them to be no-commitment, just sex and work. He had told her explicitly he didn’t want them to be in a relationship. She had promised him she wouldn’t fall in love. She had been the one to convince him to be with her in the first place, by making that promise. It was no wonder he was distant and pulling away. She had lured him in and then broken her word. Any text she sent to him now would befurther reinforcing that she was needy, that she was desperate, that she loved him when she’d said all she wanted was for the two of them to get into bed.
She could suppress these feelings, she thought, as she walked past the red-brick administration building, too impatient to stay on the proper walking path and letting her footsteps fall heavy in the snow-covered grass instead. She could box them up neatly and put them away. She could turn Rawlins into an anecdote, a life story to make her more interesting and glamorous at book clubs in her thirties—the professor she had once had kinky sex with, a narrative that made her more worldly and him vaguely pathetic in equal measure. In the story she would tell about it later, love had never been a consideration.
Ellsbeth distracted herself by making a plan to infiltrate Banestooth. Obscuration wouldn’t work, but it also wouldn’t be necessary. Not every problem required complicated and illegal arcane mechanicals; she had been so impressed with pulling it off in the first place, her instinct had been like using a power drill when a tiny screwdriver would do. What she needed was fairly straightforward: an invisibility ritual, and probably a ward in case they had any protective magic on the house. Invisibility spells were easy, the type of thing professors did on the first day of undergraduate lectures in order to impress impressionable eighteen-year-olds. Making the invisibility last longer than thirty seconds was slightly trickier, but not impossible, as was creating a ritual strong enough so that the invisibility would still be reflected in photos and video recordings.
Even as Ellsbeth built the invisibility ritual and a plan to infiltrate Banestooth in her mind, she couldn’t quiet the nagging part of her brain that still wanted to find an excuse to talk to Rawlins. Maybe she would try to figure out a way to size up obscuration after all. Something clever and impressive she could email; after all, he was still her adviser. If she had an academic inquiry tangentially related to her thesis, there was no reason she shouldn’t be able to reach out. A small part of her burned with pride at the thought that she could send him a completed ritual and force him to reckon with what she was able to accomplish without him involved.
She picked up everything she needed from the mini-mart near her apartment. She already had a small store of arcane elementals, but forthe invisibility, she needed sodium borate and glucose. She picked up a small, leaking box of borax from the narrow aisle containing laundry detergents, and grabbed a large bag of stale gummy bears on the way to the cashier.
“Big night?” the cashier asked, not lookingup.
“Mmmm,” Ellsbeth replied.
The invisibility ritual was prepared within twenty minutes on her kitchen floor—melting the gummy bears into the final formula would increase its strength, strong enough to defy even a motion detector, and a tablespoon of borax would extend the ritual’s duration. She calculated that she would have about a full hour—any longer and the invisibility itself would be unstable, cycling in and out of focus. Easy.
But Rawlins still hadn’t texted, and so Ellsbeth began working on her idea for a new obscuration ritual alone.
