Everly
There's a cat in this house, and the cat is how I know when to move.
Fat gray thing, torn ear, belongs to nobody, answers to nobody, feeds everything it sees straight back to Wheeler, same as the raven on the landing, same as the fox that owns the parlor.
The animals are how he watches me. I have no mark on the back of my hand; he can't tether a girl who won't hold still, so instead he keeps eyes in the wallpaper. Fine. Eyes have schedules.
The cat works the ground-floor corridor in the mornings, sunning itself by the radiator like it's getting paid, and for one hour—nine to ten, when Wheeler takes the upper-year grad students down to the parlor and the whole third floor goes quiet as a held breath—it isn't watching the back stair.
So I take the back stair.
"Morning," I tell the raven on my way past the landing. It rotates one glass eye to find me and says nothing, which is more honest than most of the people in this house. "Don't wait up."
I live here now. Weeks of it: the term settling in around me, September gone, October coming down cold on the quad and the last leaves letting go outside the landing window.
Long enough that the house's schedule is mine now too, learned the way you learn a bus route.
That's the part that still puts a cold little hook under my ribs every time I climb these stairs—this beautiful, watchful, wrong Victorian pile is home now, by Catalina's decree, and the third floor of my own home is the one place in it I'm not allowed to go.
Which, if you've met me, is the surest way to make me go there.
The third-floor hall smells like cold stone and old varnish.
My flats make no sound. I keep a count running in my head—how long the cat's been off the stair, how long that leaves me—the way I used to count the gaps between Atlas's lightning and the thunder in a Missouri motel.
At the right door I put two fingers flat against the wood until my pulse stops slamming, and then I let myself in.
Wheeler's study is a sales pitch with shelves, the kind of room built to make a girl want this whole world before anybody mentions the price. God help me, for about four seconds it works on me too.
Dark shelves floor to ceiling, half the books clasped shut with iron—old hasps gone the color of dried blood, the kind of lock you only put on a book that's worried about who'll open it.
A row of amber jars at eye level with small curled shapes suspended in them.
I decide they're pickled ginger. They are not pickled ginger.
A chair by the window worth more than my Honda, a globe, a brass instrument I have no name for, and under all of it, faint at the back of my throat, the flat penny taste I've learned to dread.
Metal on my tongue. Blood magic, recent, done in this room and not cleaned up, because why would you clean up a smell only one unmarked girl in the whole school can taste?
Lucky me.
Dust on everything. Gray and even—across the desk, the shelf-lips, the arm of that gorgeous chair. Everywhere except the door handle, which is bright brass worn shiny by a hand that closes on it daily. So is the lip of the desk drawer. So is one clean oval on the desktop, notebook-sized.
One room in this hush of a house gets opened, and opened a lot, and the man who opens it wipes nothing else because the dust is the costume. Nobody comes up here, says the dust. Nothing happens here. Subtle, Wheeler.
I clock the time. Nine-oh-six. The session runs the hour. I give myself forty minutes, not a second more, and I start where the dust isn't.
The notebook's on the desk. Battered leather, fat with use, the strap gone slack.
I don't read it first. I get my phone out, brace my elbows on the desk edge to stop my hands shaking, and I photograph it shut, then open it and shoot it page by page, corner to corner, the way Felix taught me on the road without ever once admitting he was teaching me anything.
Take the picture before you read it, he said, somewhere around Tulsa, shuffling.
You always read it wrong the first time. The picture doesn't.
He was right. Of course he was. I read it wrong the first time.
And he can't be here to tell me so. None of them can.
That's the trap I live inside now: Callum, Atlas, Ren, Felix, every one of them with a mark on the back of his hand that catches fire if he comes within a stone's throw of this house outside the nine-o'clock hour. They'd burn for this room. Literally.
So it's me, alone, on the wrong floor of my own home with a stolen hour and a phone full of evidence, because I'm the only one of us the leash forgot to hold.
Catalina meant it as a punishment, keeping them away from me.
She forgot that it also means I go where they can't. Small victories. I'll take them where I find them.
The first time through, it's just a beautiful, terrible thing.
Wheeler writes edge to edge in a cramped slanting hand, ink only, no pencil, like a man who has never once doubted a word he set down.
The margins are alive with drawings, and—here's the part that turns my stomach before I even get to the words—he's good. Good enough that I want to look.
A sketch of the expensive chair, except in the drawing it has straps the real chair doesn't, which means he either added them or takes them off between guests.
The brass instrument, exploded into parts, labeled in Latin I can half-follow from family trivia night.
Vena. Radix. The vessel. The root. And lower, smaller, half-hidden behind an arrow pointing off the page: a cage.
Domed. Covered. One line for the bars beneath the cloth.
Cool. Normal. Love that for me.
I keep turning, and on the fourth page the drawings stop being the point and the columns start, and that's when I read it right.
It's a tally. Three columns, dated week over week in that even hand. First column, names. Second, what he takes—a little mark like a dropped stitch, sometimes once, sometimes a whole crowded row. Third, what's left.
What he draws. What he draws it from. What each one keeps after.
I read down the third column and my body goes cold a full second before my brain catches up to tell it why.
The numbers fall. Not all at once. That's the part that climbs into my chest and sits there, the patience of it.
Name by name, week by week, the third column gets smaller.
Somebody walks in full and walks out a little less, comes back the next week a little less than that, and Wheeler writes it down each time like a man tracking a debt he fully intends to collect.
A little less. A little less. His hand never wavers. Never crosses a thing out. Because to Wheeler this isn't cruelty—it's bookkeeping, and it's the steadiest handwriting I've ever seen.
He has a heading on that second column. I almost don't parse it, it's set down so calm.
Yield. That's his word. Not taken. Not drained.
Yield, like a harvest, like a field doing what a field is for, the word a man reaches for when he's decided, all the way down, that the thing in the chair was grown for him.
There's a name for the hour these people spend up here, too. I've seen it on the little cards in the brass door-frames downstairs. Graduate Independent Study. Independent. Sure. As if anyone in that chair got a say in it.
Forty minutes. I've got thirty-one left and I'm shaking, so I do the thing I do. Breathe. Chin up. Keep going.
I almost miss her, because I know her by the wrong name.
I'm hunting the names column for anyone I can put a face to—anyone who'll make this real instead of a horror I get to hold at arm's length—when one snags. E. Halstone. And it takes me a stupid second, because in my head she isn't E. Halstone, graduate cohort. In my head she's the girl who hums.
Enya. She hums while the kettle heats in the shared kitchen, always the same few notes, the front edge of a song she never quite gets to.
My second night in this house I came back hollowed-out and found a cup of tea outside my door, gone cold, no note.
I never asked. She never said. Next morning she just hummed at me over the toaster and that was the entire conversation, and it was kinder than anything anyone else in this place had managed all week.
E. Halstone.
I find her in the dates. I make myself read across.
Her numbers fall fastest of anyone's.
Not the slow patient slope of the others—hers drop in long ugly steps, week to week, like whatever he's pulling comes up easier in her, like she's got more to give and he's found that out and helped himself.
Name. Yield. Keeping. And in that third column, next to the girl who leaves cold tea outside the doors of strangers, the number's so far down from where it started that I have to flatten my hand on the desk and wait for the room to quit tilting.
It stops being a tally. It becomes Enya. A cold cup of tea and a song that never gets where it's going.
I take the picture. My hands aren't doing a single thing I tell them, but the picture doesn't care if I'm steady. That's the whole point of the picture.
I've been not-looking at the corner of the room the entire time, and we both know it.
I knew the cage was there before I walked in—I drew it behind my own eyes the second I saw it in his margin.
Domed, covered, a cloth thrown over the top the way you cover a thing that sleeps.
Or a thing you'd rather not watch while you work.
It sits between two shelves where the light gives up, and I've kept it in the corner of my eye for twenty minutes like a spider I don't want crossing the floor toward me.
Something inside it is breathing.
I hear it now that I've stopped turning pages and the room's gone quiet enough—a slow draw, a slow release, under the cloth.
Even. Wrong, somehow, in a way I taste before I can name: the penny on my tongue goes thick and old, older than Wheeler's leftover blood-work, older than anything that should be on the third floor of a school.
First I square the desk, because I'm not an amateur about the parts I can control.
Strap back around the notebook, set on its clean oval exactly where it sat, dust left alone, bright handle left bright—Wheeler has to keep believing nobody comes up here, and I need him to be wrong.
Tracks covered. I should go. The cat won't hold the stairs forever.
I don't go.
I cross to the corner before I decide to. Of course I do. That's the whole problem with me, the thing Catalina's counting on, the thing that gets me killed someday: I cannot leave a wrong thing alone.
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've seen them. 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 out wrong.
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.
Hard study 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 their independent 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.