2
On the morning of her eighteenth birthday, Stevie woke with her phone buzzing under her head. She hadn’t managed to get it
back to that tiny altar of disaster full of used tissues, cords, and unread mystery novels that was supposed to be a bedside
stand. She had once again fallen asleep staring at David’s feed and a dozen articles about what to do after you break up with
someone. The suggestions were offensively sensible: journal, exercise, talk to someone, meditate, do deep breathing, give it time . . .
Her parents were calling. She pushed the phone to the floor, into the puddle of yesterday’s hoodie. It was too early for an
argument, and it would be an argument, because Stevie and her parents had no other kind of interaction. They could be talking
about the fact that grass was green and would somehow devolve into some kind of madness about how you couldn’t call things
green anymore because someone might get offended. There were no safe topics; reality was a roulette wheel and Stevie lost in every
spin.
Stevie took a long shower, got dressed, and came into the common room, where Janelle was sitting at their farm table with a laptop, a planner, and two textbooks open in front of her as she picked at an apple and oat muffin.
Though it was set up to house six students, only three currently lived in Minerva House—Nate, Janelle, and Stevie. This was
because Ellingham tended to let you stay in your room for both years if you were happy there. The three of them had decided
to stay, even though two of their fellow student residents had died last year. David had been the sixth inhabitant and he
had graduated. Ellingham wasn’t putting anyone new in the murder dorm. Best to let it air out for a while.
So they lived a cozier and stranger existence than most others in the Ellingham houses. The only other resident was their
faculty house adviser Dr. Nell Pixwell, who had an upstairs apartment over the common room and kitchen. It was quieter than
it had been last year without David’s footsteps overhead or Ellie Walker playing her saxophone badly in the first-floor bathtub.
Colder. This despite the fact that the showers were hotter because they only used half the hot water. They rarely took the
time to light a fire in the fireplace.
Janelle looked up at Stevie with a wide smile and the searching caution of a bomb-disposal team member entering a room full
of unmarked packages. Stevie had seen a lot of those looks over the last few weeks.
“Happy birthday!” Janelle said, standing up to give Stevie a hug.
Janelle was wearing jeans and a yellow sweater—one of her favorites—along with her lemon earrings, a necklace with a small lemon pendant, and a scarf with a lemon print on blue around her hair.
Lemons were Janelle’s lucky object. Stevie had no doubt she was wearing her lemon socks, and possibly lemon underwear.
There was a flat and distinctly book-shaped package on the table, wrapped in fuchsia paper decorated in silver cobwebs. Janelle
pushed it toward Stevie, who unwrapped it to reveal a slim volume with a burgundy-red cover. The words THE EVIDENCE were written
on the front in type script.
“It’s a little on the nose,” Janelle said, “but I liked it. I feel like you need a nice journal, and this paper is great.
There’s no bleed.”
There was a joke in there about the evidence book not bleeding, but Stevie didn’t feel like making it. It was a beautiful
book journal, the pages a faint creamy color, a good size, but . . .
Janelle was the queen of gifts. She had built tiny robots and drones for lesser occasions than Stevie’s eighteenth birthday,
so a journal was a little . . .
Not that Stevie wanted or expected more. It was just subdued for Janelle.
“I love it,” Stevie said, wrapping Janelle in a hug.
“I know you don’t journal journal, but you should try it,” Janelle said. “It opens up your brain. I do the thing where I let myself write anything
for five minutes in the morning, and it’s so helpful. It lets you dump out whatever’s in your head, and sometimes you find
ideas.”
Ah. That was it. Dump out what’s in your head. Janelle was trying to give Stevie therapy.
“What do you have today?” Janelle asked, sitting back down as Stevie got some coffee from the kitchen.
“No exams today. Chem lab stuff. And something for Spanish for tomorrow.”
“I have a physics exam in an hour,” Janelle said, with a touch of excitement in her voice. Janelle approached a physics exam
the way a runner might approach a race—carbed up, bouncing on her toes, wondering if she was going to make the best time.
She was going to win the exam.
There was a creak on the circular stairs in the hall. Nate came down, hair still wet and flattened to his head, his jeans
saggy and his gray sweater swamping his frame.
“Hey,” he mumbled, going past them into the kitchen.
“Hey?” Janelle said. “Try again.”
“What . . . oh.” Nate poked his head out of the kitchen. “Happy birthday.”
Stevie raised her mug in acknowledgment. Nate ducked back inside and emerged with his insulated mug full of coffee and a muffin
in his hand.
“Gotta go,” he said. “I have American lit this morning.”
“Hey,” Janelle said as Nate pulled his coat from one of the pegs by the door, “when you’re in New York . . . there’s a store
in the garment district that sells deadstock fabric—”
“Can you ask me this later?” he said, closing the door heavily behind him.
“Yeah, that’s getting old,” Janelle said, looking after him.
“What is?”
Janelle looked at Stevie expectantly.
“Nate. With the attitude. What’s with him?”
Stevie hadn’t been paying attention to Nate’s moods.
He had been a bit more squirrelly than normal, but not in the usual way of hiding out and not wanting to talk about the writing that he hadn’t done for the book he was always not writing.
Nate’s entire time at Ellingham had been spent trying to finish the sequel to his book, the one he wrote largely for himself when he was thirteen and fourteen.
It had been published and was popular, and since that point, he had been on the run from himself, constantly in a state of deadline and despair and confusion.
That was a large part of his charm and Stevie loved him for it.
But he was acting a bit off. He hadn’t waited for her after she’d bombed her exam yesterday. He normally wouldn’t have done
that. Nate liked hearing about terrible things. He was good when things were bad.
“I don’t even know why he’s going to New York for the break,” Janelle went on. “Why go be alone in New York and write when
you could go home and write?”
Stevie’s phone rang again. She squeezed it until she put the call into a sleeper hold and it passed out and went to voicemail.
“I’d rather go to New York than go home,” Stevie said.
“I guess,” Janelle conceded, visibly saddened by what Stevie had said. It would have been unthinkable for Janelle not to see
her family at the holidays. The Franklins celebrated.
There were decoration traditions, and cooking traditions, organized photos in matching pajamas.
They had a cookie schedule. Stevie didn’t know what that meant, but she knew a cookie schedule could only be a good thing.
The Franklins liked each other and did these things willingly.
Stevie loved her parents and her parents loved her—but she was pretty sure they didn’t like her, and in her heart, she knew she didn’t like them.
Liking can be so much harder than love.
Stevie was on autopilot throughout the day, half-assing her way through rehearsing a scene for Spanish that she hadn’t memorized
and a chemistry lab that involved calculating apparatus uncertainties that she didn’t understand. These things she would pass,
though without glory. She took her strange walk around the campus while listening to a recording of the convoluted dialogue
her group had written. It involved four teenagers who were obsessed with the eleven varieties of sardines available at La
Nueva Viga market in Mexico City: “En este mercado, tienen once tipos diferentes de sardinas.” And then that the fish heads were being saved for croquettes: “?Mira! ?Están guardando las cabezas de pescado para las croquetas!” Stevie was just about to ask to hold a large mackerel
when she heard someone calling her name.
Vi Harper-Tomo came bustling over, wrapped in a massive purple puffer coat. Vi was Janelle’s partner. The two had locked eyes
on arrival at Ellingham and had never blinked since. Stevie switched off the dialogue, mid-fish.
“I lost my Japanese notebook and I think it’s at Minerva,” they said. “Can you let me in? I need it or I’m fucked.”
Stevie’s phone rang again. She was up to eight missed calls. She pushed it down deeper in her pocket.
“Sure,” Stevie said.
“How’s it going?” Vi asked as the two of them cut across the green, past the sheep, in the looming shadow of the Great House.
“I blew my modern American politics exam. Big explosion. You could see it from space.”
“Shit.”
The phone immediately started ringing again. Stevie tried to suffocate it by shifting her bag over her side pocket and pressing
into it with her elbow.
“You want to get that?” Vi asked.
“No. It’s my parents. They keep calling me today. It’s just . . . my birthday.”
“Oh my God.” Vi stopped in their tracks and looked up in horror. “Happy birthday! Holy shit. I’m so sorry. I was thinking
about my notebook and I saw you . . .”
“It’s fine,” Stevie said.
“It’s not.” Vi clutched at their glasses in shame. “Oh my God . . .”
“Vi, it’s really fine,” Stevie said, walking on. The cold snapped at her eyes, making them water. Now it seemed like she was
crying. Perfect.
Stevie tapped her pass on the Minerva door sensor. The common room lights were off, but there was a fire burning for a change.
It hit her a second before it happened. Oh. Of course.
The lights flicked on.
“Surprise!”