Page 5 of Prince of the Sun

Cara and I sit on opposite sides of academia: Cara, numbers. Me, words. Cara, the antisocial computer scientist. Me, theequally antisocial linguist. Cara codes fluently in Java, C++, Python, Swift, Ruby, and several other languages I’ve never heard of. I speak English, Danish, Spanish, Mandarin, and four dialects of Elvish—Lukkarin, Maevish, and two sub-types of the latter. Cara could bring a small government to its knees with nothing more than a few keystrokes. I can curse in thirty-two languages.

Merde,no?

Cara takes a long drag of her coffee. Milky-caramel liquid bubbles up around the ice cubes. “You’re an odd one, Kallister,” she says, then throws up a salute. “See you at lunch.”

I let out a long breath. This is why I like Cara. She doesn’t ask too many questions.

Frankly, I couldn’t have anyonebuta non-prier for a roommate. Not when I regularly come home at 2 a.m. covered in dirt. Not when someone else might pester me as to why.

Cara and I have an understanding. She doesn’t ask about my past; I don’t ask about hers. She doesn’t ask what I do during my late nights out; I don’t ask what she does on that seemingly innocuous laptop of hers. On the rare nights we’re both in the dorm room with nothing to do, we split a bottle of wine and watch reality shows on the ancient TV we bought at the freshman yard sale last year. We argue over the contestants, who we think should end up with whom, the secrets they’re so obviously keeping… but never discuss our own.

It’s exactly how I like it.

As I watch Cara walk toward the front doors to Quincy House, I let my mind wander back to that day in the parking lot. To the days and weeks and months afterward.

I don’t remember most of the week that followed the attack. There are flashes. Seemingly random moments that have been seared into my memory: Michael’s empty, unmade bed; a reheated slice of hot dish on a round white plate, leftuntouched; my mother leaning over the counter at the police station, mascara streaks down her face as she pleaded with the receptionist for answers.

We never did get any.

And the pain. I remember the pain. It was a physical thing—a crushing, a pulverizing, an agonizing, mottled wrench in my chest. For three days straight, I did nothing but cry. In my bed. In the shower. In the car with my mom on the way to the police station. Even when the crying began to ebb, the pain didn’t. It stayed, slowly digging me apart from the inside out. My limbs felt so weak, like the loss of half our family had taken the strength from my muscles with it.

It was too much. I kept waiting for it to get better, but it never did. And just as it reached a peak, just when I thought my mind might literally break from the sorrow, everything just… stopped.

I remember that morning so clearly. It’s my first true, cohesive memory, after the incident. I woke in my own bed, pillow crusty from a week’s worth of snot and tears. The sun was out. It cast a long, melancholy streak across the foot of my bed. There was that blissful half-second of amnesia, where I was still just a regular girl waking in her childhood home, her parents in the kitchen downstairs, her brother asleep across the hallway.

And then I remembered.

I remembered, and I braced myself for the pain. For the wave of crushing sorrow.

But it never came.

I sat there for ten seconds. Twenty. My whole body was limp. I looked inside myself and I found nothing. No sadness. No anger. No pain. No happiness or contentment, either, but I didn’t care. I welcomed the emptiness.Relishedit.

I swung my feet out of bed, feeling nothing. I trudged down the stairs, feeling nothing. And when I walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge, I stared at its contents and felt nothing.No hunger whatsoever.

The emptying out of my emotional tank came just in time. That week, we were going to memorialize Dad and Michael, and I don’t think I could even have made it to the funeral home if I’d been in the state I was the week before.

First came the wake. Then the funeral. Then a constant stream of uncles and cousins and friends flowing through our tiny St. Paul bungalow. Even a few girls from school attended—friends who would soon fade from my life, as I faded from the world. We clustered together on the staircase in my front hall, the girls forming a jagged circle with me at the center, as if they could somehow shield me from my loss.

Every event included food. Canapes and finger sandwiches at the wake. Cold dips and cups of fruit after the funeral. And, of course, an endless stream of casseroles and tater tot hotdishes, towers of melted cheese and plastic wrap that swayed precariously in our fridge, threatening to topple over every time we opened the door.

I touched none of it. I couldn’t. Every time I brought a cucumber sandwich or pineapple cube up to my lips, all I saw was the parking lot. Two blurry, faceless creatures. A spear through my father and brother, their souls leaking out onto the pavement. And me, frozen. Doing nothing. Not running. Not yelling for help. Not saving them. Not saving them. Not saving them.

I dumped the pineapple cubes straight into the garbage.

During those first few weeks, the only thing I allowed myself to consume was a box of expired graham crackers I found at the very back of the cupboard. When I nibbled at their edges, they tasted more like sandpaper than food.

I didn’t go back to school right away. No one expected me to—not my teachers, not my classmates, not even my mom. I spent my afternoons drifting from room to room, picking up booksand putting them down without even cracking their spines.

This ritual continued for several days. It might have gone on forever, had I not eventually tuggedAdvanced Spanish Translationoff a dusty basement shelf. Of all the books I’d held in the previous week, this was the only one that caught my interest. There was something about its cheerful green cover, the stock images of children climbing mountains and exploring ceramic-tiled plazas. I didn’t know where it had come from. A relic from one of my parents’ midlife crises, maybe.

This, the dusty old book seemed to say.This is your escape. I am your escape.

I’d always had a natural gift for language. I grew up speaking both English and Danish, thanks to my mother, who grew up in Copenhagen. I taught myself Maevish and Lukkarin not long thereafter, though I wasn’t doing it to impress anybody; it just sort of happened. I was obsessed with the elves. Enamored with them. I spent most of my free time watching YouTube videos about their culture, some of which were in English, some of which were in their native tongues.

“It’s remarkable,” I overheard my first-grade teacher whisper to my mom when they thought I wasn’t listening. “The way Quinn absorbs languages, she’s like a human sponge.”

That day, I spent hours flipping throughAdvanced Spanish Translation’s pages. Despite its title, I wasn’t reading to learn translation. I wasn’t memorizing nouns and adjectives, pasting Spanish words beside their English equivalents. I’d started Spanish the year before and had already picked up an impressive collection of vocabulary since then.