Chapter Fourteen #2
“I am partying as we speak,” I point out through clenched teeth.
“All I mean is—”
Mirabel bursts through the swarming dancers, on a wave of auto-tuned shouts, into the hall. She’s wearing a metallic shift. Gloss shines on her mouth. When she sees me with Griffin, she sighs as if I cause her unbearable world-weariness.
“You okay?” Griffin asks her, sliding me an I told you so look. As if Mirabel disliking me—Mirabel, who seems annoyed by humanity at large—proves I’m an all-work-no-play uptight bitch.
I should laugh it off. But by the time I left Saint Cat’s, none of my classmates were talking to me.
Anna Mayer and I had attended every one of each other’s birthdays since kindergarten, and she dumped me like a leaky trash bag.
If Bree hadn’t wanted to roll up to this party three deep, maybe she and Candace would still be giving me the cold shoulder.
“She’s clearly not.” My voice comes out like broken glass. “I’ll leave you two alone.”
“Norah, wait,” Griffin says.
I bolt for the stairwell. Behind me, Griffin and Mirabel trade strained words, but the musical soup spilling into the hall drowns them out. It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to hear them. I don’t care what either of them has to say.
***
Weeks pass. The sweltering heat fades to pleasant warmth while yellow and orange leaves stipple the green trees. Students stick decals of ghosts and spiders to their dorm windows; Halloweeny critters leer at me from mullioned glass as I cross the quad between classes.
The sun rises later every day. My morning sessions with Vik now take place entirely in the misty dark, stars, moon, and phones our only lights.
Ever since we leagued, channeling has become a breeze for us.
No more panics. So Vik focuses on carefully demonstrating how to expand an occlusion to protect another person.
“Occlusions hide futures,” he says. “But futures… They’re everywhere.
They’re connected. You can’t hide them all.
The trick is to keep your occlusion slow, steady, and local—just big enough to protect the people you need to.
And, you know. Blind the people you need to.
If you go too big, you burn out faster, and your occlusion crumbles. ”
Of course, I go too big and burn out too fast. When I expand my occlusion to protect Vik, it explodes like a smoke bomb, blanketing the clearing but blowing away in a few short minutes.
My predictable flaws rankle me, but they don’t worry me much. My team doesn’t want me as main navigator for the second trial; I’ll only need to channel, not occlude.
I don’t explain this to Vik. He would ask why. And I don’t want to tell him. Somewhere along the line, I started wanting his good opinion.
That worries me.
One random morning in mid-October, when he’s reminding me to control my breath, he touches his flat abdomen and places his big, warm hand an inch from my stomach.
He says something about “the diaphragm,” but I mostly miss it.
My heart’s freaking out in my chest, like a kitten struggling to escape a too tight grip.
That evening, Bree convinces Candace and me to ditch nav practice. Instead, we’ll study in the library for our next AP Statistics test. (We’re in different sections, but every Academy kid takes statistics. The subject’s too relevant to nav for Dr. Langmore to let us shirk it.)
By the time we start across the quad, the sun has plunged below the Academy’s towers, staining the horizon blood orange. Overhead the sky is a dreamy violet. Bree stares upward with obvious pleasure as she walks.
“What did Dr. Langmore want to talk to you about, Bree?” Candace asks suddenly.
“Dr. Langmore wanted to talk to you?” I echo.
Catastrophizing ticker tape unrolls in my head: Bree Allen expelled! Team Eight in tatters!
Bree pulls her eyes from the sky. “Hmm? Yeah. She pulled me aside when we were leaving clinic. Told me to drop by her office hours so we could talk about my research interests.”
Candace’s eyebrows shift quizzically. “Since when does Dr. Langmore have office hours? The woman doesn’t scream ‘Please come to me with your problems.’ I heard she only plays favorites with students whose parents can fork over big donations.”
“She has reasons,” I say, remembering our conversation during my detention.
Bree nods. “She can be really nice. She asked if I’d made friends. I told her I barely have time to talk to anyone outside my trial team, and she smiled like she thought my joke was funny. I wasn’t joking, but still. She even asked how my family was doing.”
“How is your family doing?” Candace asks delicately.
Bree laughs a little, pained. “Kayla’s stayed in her program, but…Mom’s had to pick up a couple extra shifts to pay for Kayla’s latest speeding ticket.”
“Extra shifts?” Candace says. “For a speeding ticket?”
“Kayla was thirty-seven over. In a school zone. The judge fined her eight hundred and seventy-five dollars.”
“Shit,” I say before I can help myself.
Candace’s face does that thing it does whenever Bree or I mention money issues.
Her expression blanks out: You can’t drop the cash and make it go away?
Then her forehead tenses as she consciously works through what $875 might mean to a single mom on a nursing assistant salary who also pays Portland rent.
Finally, she frowns and touches Bree’s shoulder.
Bree shoots her a soft glance. “Thanks. But honestly, it can’t be my problem right now. Right now, my problem is sampling distributions. Let’s focus on hitting the books.”
From the outside, the library’s a dead ringer for a medieval French cathedral, right down to the pointy stone tower that probably requires special terminology to describe (like chevet).
But inside, the atrium is antiseptic, with bone-white marble floors, AC on blast—and glass walls, so you can spy on all the stressed-out students hunched over their laptops.
I hate the glass walls, the whole panopticon vibe. When people ask me why I almost never study here, that’s one reason I give them.
But the real reason I avoid the library—that’s on the right as we cross the atrium.
The entrance to the Highwall Archive has the only opaque walls on the whole first floor. More bone-white marble. I force myself not to stare, but the corniced door with its badge lock and gold plaque pulls at my attention.
“Want to try a second-floor study room?” Bree says. “This part of the library makes me feel like a crabby crab in a fishbowl.”
“Sounds good,” Candace says. “You all right, Norah? You’ve…stopped breathing.”
I force myself to breathe. To smile. “Second-floor sampling distributions, here we come.”
We’re on track for the Archive. We’ll walk through that corniced door.
I’m fine. I’m alive.
For now. For now. For now.