Three feet. Two. The breathing changes when I reach it, catches and holds, like it knows exactly what I am and exactly what I'm about to do. The girl who rolled up to this school with a Tupperware of cookies and a full tank of optimism is still in me somewhere, and she already has both hands fisted in the hem of the cloth.
I lift it.
***-
The cloth is on the floor and I'm standing by the desk and I have no idea how I got back here.
My heart's slamming like I ran up six flights. My hand is closed hard around nothing. There's a taste draining off the back of my tongue—penny, old, going even as I reach for it—and a space scooped out of me the exact shape of the last few minutes. I look at the cage. Covered again. Breathing its slow even breath, innocent as a footstool. I crossed to it. I know I crossed to it. I lifted the?—
Lifted the what?
It's gone. Whatever was under that cloth, whatever I saw, my mind closes over the spot and comes back with smooth nothing, a tongue working the gap where a tooth used to be, finding only the clean strange edge of the hole. I don't remember covering it back up. I don't remember crossing the room. My phone says minutes I can't account for, not many, enough, and my hands won't quite obey when I go to check it.
Get out, Everly.
I go. I don't fix a thing on the way—some earlier version of me already squared the desk and covered our tracks, and I have to take her word for it, because I wasn't there for it. I take the back stair fast, rattled all the way down, shaking over something I can't name because I'm missing the piece that would do the naming.
***-
I'm down the back stair and out into the cold gold of the quad before the bells ring the hour, and the fat gray cat is already drifting back toward the doors like it's clocking in, and I keep walking. Chin up, shoulders back, a girl with nowhere to be. Nothing happening here.
Here's what I can't put down. The thing that walks the whole green with me.
I'veseenthem. The grad students, coming out of those hours. I've passed them in the downstairs hall and on the path and I already half-noticed and told myself a nice little lie about it: how they come outwrong.
Hands not steady on the rail. Eyes that don't track when you nod, that slide right off you and keep going, like the nod showed up a half-second too late to land. The careful blank walk of somebody who just lost an hour and is counting backward, quietly, trying to find it. The grad student at the kitchen sink my first night, hand shaking on the glass, climbing the stairs like he kept losing his place. Enya over the coffee carafe, the sentence going out of her mouth before she could finish it. I had names for all of that, and not one of them was true.
I told myself it was the work. This place takes everything you've got and then some; I learned that my first week. Hardstudy hollows people out. Of course they come out gray. That's just the price of being chosen, I told myself, and I kept walking, because it was easier to swallow the lie the house tells than to taste the penny and follow it up the back stair.
I can't tell myself that anymore. Because twenty minutes ago, on the third floor of my own house, I lost time I cannot find. I crossed to that cage and I lifted the cloth and then I was at the desk with my heart going and a hole where the looking should be, the exact blank walk I've watched a dozen grad students do on their way out of theirindependent study.One minute up there did a small version to me of whatever it's been doing to all of them.
But I've read the third column now. I've watched the keeping fall, name over name, a little less each time. I've seen Enya's drop the fastest of all of them—the girl who hums, the girl who left me tea.
It isn't the work.
It was never the work.
7
FELIX
The trick to looking like you're doing nothing is to do a great deal of it, very visibly, in the wrong direction.
So I'm at the long table in the front parlor of Long Shot Mansion with my sleeves pushed up and a game laid out that nobody asked for, dealing hands to four empty chairs and losing all of them on purpose. The freshmen drifting through think I've got a method. There is no method. There is a boy who got up at dawn and couldn't sit still, who needed his hands occupied so the rest of him would stop trying to walk next door, and who knows that a Tumult house is the one place on this campus where a man behaving like the inside of a slot machine draws not one second glance.
Chaos student. Chaos behavior. The cover is perfect because it isn't a cover. It's just me, turned up loud enough to hide in.
Long Shot was built by gamblers and it has never let anyone forget it. The plaster ceilings sag with old water stains shaped like nothing you'd want to read, the chandeliers are missing half their crystal, and somebody a century ago laid the parlor floor in a spiral of inlaid wood so that a marble set down anywhere on it rolls, eventually, to the center.
The house was raised on the principle that the center always collects what you drop. I have spent two years pretending that doesn't unsettle me.
The cards keep moving. They always do. I've stopped hearing the sound of them the way you stop hearing your own breathing, which is to say I only notice when they stop, and they haven't stopped, not this morning, because the morning won't let me get still enough for that.
The odds have gotten specific lately. That's the part I haven't said to anyone.
For a long time it was weather. A pressure in my chest, a needle that wouldn't settle, a sense of which way a thing was most likely to fall before it fell. Useful and vague, the gift of a man who can read a table. But somewhere in the last two weeks the futures stopped being weather and started being photographs, and all of the photographs are of her. The sight quit showing me which way the weather would break and started showing me Everly dying—the same girl, a dozen different endings, every one a future it swears is coming unless I find the play that bends it.
In one of them, she goes down a staircase that ends in nothing—it just stops, mid-flight, the way a sentence stops when the speaker dies—and splits her head open on the stone at the bottom. I have seen the exact gray of the stone.
