Page 1 of Cruel Rite

Chapter 1: The Roll

Two hundred students cross this quad without slowing down, and I’m the only one who stops to watch a man’s hand get broken.

Everything I own is in the two bags I’m carrying and there is no address behind me to carry them back to. I stop anyway.

Not broken. Bent. There’s a difference—I priced insurance claims for a dental office for four years, and a bent hand costs less than a broken one, and I hate that this is where my brain goes first. He’s on his knees on the gravel outside a grey stone building with a tower on the corner, cradling his right hand against his chest at an angle a hand does not make on its own, and a second man is standing over him. Not touching him. Coat on in September heat that’s already sweated through my shirt at the collar. He says something. One sentence, maybe less—I’m too far to hear it, but I can read the shape of it in his shoulders, the way you can read weather in a sky before the first drop lands. The kneeling man nods like he’s agreeing to a schedule and not a threat, and the standing one turns and walks back inside like he’s finished a phone call.

Nobody around them so much as breaks stride. Gravel underfoot sounds different from the paved path I just came off—looser, louder, every footstep announcing itself—and two hundred people are walking on it at once and not one of them is announcing anything. That’s the part I can’t get past. Not the hand. The quiet arithmetic of everyone deciding, all at the same time, not to see it.

Two duffel bags, and nowhere to set them down. Four shirts. A winter coat in the wrong season. A black hardcover ledger with a rubber band around it. My mother’s watch on my wrist, face turned inward. That’s the whole inventory, and I know the number of items in it, and I could not raise the bus fare back to Rutland if the lease there were still in my name, which it isn’t.

My uncle bought this year for me the way you’d buy a used car you didn’t test-drive. I’m walking onto the lot not knowing yet what I’ll owe him for the privilege. Only that I will. Nobody in my family has ever handed me anything that didn’t come itemized eventually, and I’m standing on this gravel already owing for the standing.

So I count instead of watching the kneeling man get walked off the gravel by somebody who doesn’t touch him either. Twelve. Fifteen. I lose the number and start again. Counting is what I do with my hands when the rest of me wants to run, and my hands are full.

I price the coat next. A coat is easier than a debt. Cashmere, maybe—the drape is wrong for anything cheaper. Wrong season, worn anyway, which means either he doesn’t feel the heat or he wants people to see that he doesn’t.

That coat costs more than what’s zipped into both of my bags combined. I’ve just done that math about a stranger’s violence the same way I’d do it about a couch left out for the taking. Assess it. Place a number on it. Move on.

I catch myself doing it and I don’t stop. Stopping would mean admitting I don’t know how else to look at anything anymore.

“Don’t look—okay, you’re looking.”

The girl who says this has arrived from nowhere in the last ninety seconds, talking the whole time, and I get the impression she’d have kept talking if I’d walked into traffic. Small, quick, a shaved undercut she’s clearly done herself, wire glasses pushed up with a knuckle. She’s wearing the black everyone else on this quad is wearing except hers is under a hoodie that has definitely never been ironed.

“That’s Corvane,” she says, in the exact tone you’d use to say it might rain later. “Don’t stare, he’ll clock it. He’s already clocking it.”

I look anyway.

Across the whole width of the quad, past the kneeling man being helped up by someone quieter than a friend, the one in the coat has stopped in the doorway. He isn’t looking at the man he just finished with.

He’s looking at me.

One full second. Maybe two. Longer than a stranger holds a stranger’s eyes on a crowded quad for any reason that isn’t deliberate. My chest does something small and involuntary and I don’t examine it. Then he goes inside.

I make myself stop feeling it before I’ve finished feeling it.

“I’m Junie,” the girl says, sticking out a hand I don’t have a free one for. “Marsh. Room 214, Wren House, which is where you’re headed if you’re the transfer they told me about, and you are, aren’t you, because nobody else arrives carrying their whole life like that.” She doesn’t wait for confirmation.

“Adjusted,” I say, because that’s the word forming in my head, and I want to hear if she’ll take it back.

She doesn’t. “It’s a word,” she says, unbothered, and takes the strap of my heavier bag before I can stop her, and starts walking, and I have no choice but to follow her across the exact gravel where a debt was just collected in broad daylight in front of a captive audience that didn’t consider it worth watching.

Wren House smells like radiator dust and somebody’s drugstore shampoo three doors down, and the room is smaller than the one I had in Rutland, but it has two beds, two desks, and a window that opens four inches, which I check before I do anything else, because knowing your exits is free. There’s a whiteboard on the door with somebody else’s handwriting still ghosted under a bad eraser job, and string lights looped over a curtain rod nobody bothered to take down.

I put my mother’s watch on the desk, face turned inward, and then pick it up again because the desk isn’t mine yet, not really, and strap it back on my wrist.

Junie is still talking. She’s been talking since the quad, and I’ve stopped trying to keep up in real time and started sorting it into a file instead, the way I’d sort receipts—a habit older than this campus, older than this state. “Okay, quick version, because you’re going to hear it wrong from six different people otherwise and I’d rather you heard it wrong from me first. Four houses. Corvane, that’s the one you saw on the steps—Italian, oldest money on the headland, meanest, and they know it. Ashgrove’s the Russians, up at Kholm House on the north edge, newest of the four by about seventy years and everybody makes sure they never forget it. Sable Cross is the Irish, down at Saint Bride’s by the chapel. And Meridian’s the money people—banks, lawyers, the ones who actually move it instead of just having it. That’s mine, for what it’s worth. They took me for what I can do with a spreadsheet, not for who my dad is. My dad drives a delivery route in Baltimore and has never once been north of Providence.” She says this like it’s funny, and I think it probably is, to her. “Everybody here’s somebody’s kid except me. You’ll figure out fast who’s whose. It’s basically the only class you actually need to pass.”

I unpack my two bags onto a shelf that has clearly been used by six other people who left string lights and a whiteboard behind, and I price the room while I do it—the mattress, thin; the desk, real wood, older than the building probably, worth more than anything else in it; the four inches of window, worth exactly what it lets in, which right now is heat and the smell of cut grass and, faintly, somebody’s speaker three rooms down. My mother’s coat comes out first, before anything else, wrong season, packed anyway, and I hang it at the front of the closet and run my thumb the length of the reseamed lining, flat, once, unhurried, without thinking about why I’m doing it or what it is I’m checking for.

“—and here’s the thing nobody tells you,” Junie’s saying, from somewhere behind me, cross-legged on her own bed now, chewing the cap off a pen she’ll lose by Thursday, “is that it’s not, like, secret. Everybody knows. It’s on the tour, basically. It’s just that the college’s whole personality is pretending the tour didn’t happen.”

“What happens,” I say, not turning around, “to a Corvane pledge who doesn’t pay what he owes.”

She doesn’t even blink at the specificity of it, and that’s worse than if she had. “That,” she says, cheerfully, pointing vaguely toward the window, toward the quad beyond it, “is what happens. That was probably a payment plan, honestly. If it was serious they wouldn’t have done it where people could see.”

That’s the part that sits wrong in me. Not that it happened. That it happened where two hundred people could watch and not one of them slowed down, because slowing down would have been the strange thing to do.