4
“Let’s burn it,” Vi said. “Cleansing fire.”
Stevie, sitting on the floor of her room, back against the wall, was cried out. Raw. Once she’d left the common room and everyone
heard yelling coming from hers, the party had rapidly dispersed. It took a half hour for Janelle to coax Stevie into opening
her door. Janelle and Vi spent the better part of the next half hour working through what had just happened on the phone,
while feeding Stevie cake and cups of hot tea.
It was only then that Janelle extracted the box from under the blanket. She arranged the coat flat on the bed. Stevie turned
her face away from it. She didn’t want to see the body.
“Did he message you?” Janelle asked.
Stevie shook her head.
“So he just sent the coat, no comment?”
“Looks like it,” Stevie croaked.
“What the hell does that mean?” Vi asked. “What’s he doing?”
Stevie knew what it meant. David had gotten this coat for Stevie.
Well, he got it for himself to wear to attract her attention.
It was a sexy coat. You can get sexy coats for a few grand if you have a rich asshole dad and don’t mind using said dad’s credit card so you look amazing.
He wanted to look amazing for her, for Stevie Bell. To this end, he succeeded.
You only like me for my coat, he’d said in London.
A joke, of course. She’d replied in kind.
Yup. It’s a long game I’m playing to get that coat.
Sending her the coat was him saying, “Here’s what you wanted.”
“Can I just say how much I hate him?” Janelle said. “Can I really say it now? Can I go into detail? Because I have lists.
I have spreadsheets.”
“I know,” Stevie said, curling into herself. “You never liked him.”
“Because he’s like this.” Janelle thrust her hand toward the coat. “This is who he is. Somehow he managed to mess with your birthday even though he’s thousands of miles away. It’s his fucking superpower.”
“Fire,” Vi said again. “We’ll take it out into the woods. Or the sunken garden. We could make a ritual. Destroy it under the
moon.”
Janelle picked up the coat and examined it, testing the solidity of the button stitches, the condition of the lining, checking
the pockets for trash and holes. Vi inched closer to Stevie and put an arm around her shoulders.
“So what are you going to do if you don’t go home?” they asked.
It was a good question. She sipped her now lukewarm tea and tried to see her immediate future.
“Stay here, I guess,” she said.
Said out loud, it was grim. Alone on murder mountain with security. She’d been here before when the student body left, but
as part of a group. She had never faced Ellingham and the mountain alone. The prospect suddenly swelled in front of her—a
consuming shadow. Hollowness.
“That doesn’t sound like a great option,” Janelle said as she continued her forensic study of the coat.
The immediate future was truly bleak. Just Stevie, maybe Pix, maybe Larry, sitting alone in the drafty grandeur of the Great
House foyer, listening to the wind blow and watching videos on her phone, ticking the hours away. . . .
“I can call my parents,” Janelle said.
“I could ask mine too,” Vi said. “You should come with one of us.”
“No,” Stevie said. “I don’t . . . It would be too much. I just need to think. And I need to do something with that.”
She flicked her hand, indicating the coat, which Janelle had refolded.
“I’m telling you,” Vi said. “Fire. What about the cupola? We could put it in a trash can. We’ll write a ceremony.”
“It’s too nice of a coat for that,” Janelle said. “This is a Burberry. You could sell it. You’d get a couple hundred for it
for sure. Let me see what these are going for.”
Janelle got out her phone to consult her favorite consignment shop while Vi looked up at Stevie through their massive glasses.
“Maybe he was trying to be nice,” they said softly. “I mean, Janelle’s right. It is a nice coat.”
Stevie put her head down on her tucked-up knees. The medication was kicking in. She was calm. Exhausted. She felt her eyes
closing. She was shutting down.
“There’s one on here for five hundred,” Janelle said as she scrolled on her phone. “In very good condition. I can clean it
and tighten the loose buttons. I’ll make it pristine. Is that okay? You should get some sleep. You look really tired.”
Stevie nodded dully as her friends helped her into bed and removed the coat and box.
The next morning, Janelle was sitting at the common room table with a wide smile and her tablet at the ready.
“We have solutions,” she said. “First, I think we can get seven hundred for the coat. Also . . .”
She passed over her tablet, where a page from the New York Public Library’s exhibits tab was open:
All the President’s Men: Research in Action.
Few films have captured the essence of research quite as vividly or dramatically as All the President’s Men.
From the stunning scenes in the Library of Congress to the collection and shaping of factual narrative to the work of confirming sources—this was the film that made an on-screen portrayal of journalistic investigation as gripping as any car chase.
See original notebooks, walk through a timeline of events, watch rare footage. From December 1– March 25.
“Okay?” Stevie said, handing back the tablet.
“You have to take a retest for modern politics on Watergate. So if you’re not going home, go to New York with Nate and go
to this. That way neither of you is alone and you don’t fail.”
The prospect of New York City, heretofore unconsidered, rose up from the ether—a menagerie of glowing spires and noise, bagels
and coffee, yellow cabs, people wearing large, fancy coats and being fashionable while crossing streets. She had never been
to New York. It had never felt entirely real. But if Nate was going it had to exist. And it was the opposite of being on the
mountain. It would be loud and bright and full.
“What if Nate says I can’t come with him?” Stevie said.
“He’ll let you,” Janelle said. “Of course he’ll let you. Talk to him today.”
Janelle had done some good thinking on this and applied her planning skills.
And honestly, the plan had merit. Stevie turned it over in her mind as she walked to her Spanish test to discuss the fish.
She surprised herself by how much she remembered, and managed a decent B-level performance, which she was absolutely prepared to accept.
She lingered in front of Genius (the most aspirational of the Ellingham building names), where Nate had a one-on-one with Professor McHenry on classic fantasy fiction.
He looked about as close to cheerful as he had in weeks when he emerged and found Stevie sitting on the planter by the door.
“I guess it went well,” she observed.
“I mean, it was okay.”
“Classic fantasy? You could jump that hurdle with both your feet tied together. While carrying a piano.”
Nate squinted skeptically as Stevie hooked him by the arm and guided him to the dining hall.
“So . . .” she began. “New York.”
“What about it?”
Even though this was Nate—her friend, the one she had been through so much with—Stevie hesitated before asking her question.
Something was different. And it was recent. It wasn’t anything to do with Nate coming out to Stevie as asexual. That had happened
in England and things had been fine since. Stevie had kept that to herself, as he had asked. No. This brittle evasiveness
had started in the last week and peaked a bit when New York came up.
The sheep watched them go, silently.
“It’s just . . . I broke up with my parents.”
“Wait.” Nate’s shoulders sagged under his coat. “What do you mean you broke up with your parents?”
“I’m not going home for the break. I can’t do it anymore.
I don’t know what they want from me. So I need to do things for myself.
There’s a Watergate thing at the New York Public Library that I can go to so I can pass my history retest. I need to pass.
I need to get to college and go on with my life. . . .”
Nate had figured out what was about to be asked of him and his neck disappeared fully into his coat.
“It’s . . . not my apartment. The publisher is lending it to me. It’s . . .”
“It’s fine,” Stevie said quickly. “Don’t worry about it. Really. I get it.”
She meant to sound sincere, like it was fine, but it came out crackly and pathetic. That was it, her whole plan— the one she’d
only had for an hour or so but had put all her hopes into—was destroyed. Nate could not save her. She would be alone. She
would be in the cold and the dark with no one, and David would be with someone else, and the world was collapsing into a single
point again.
“I . . . I have to get to . . . I’ll see you at dinner.”
“Stevie . . .” Nate’s eyes were wide, full of horror.
“It’s fine. I’ll see you later.”
She managed to make it into one of the copses of trees before bursting into tears by a statue of a woman extending a bow and arrow toward the sky.
She sat on the hard ground while it all washed over her.
However low this all got, every once in a while a new hole would open under her and there she was again, falling into its depths.
No bottom in sight. Just an inevitable splat, and who would even care.
What would it matter? So she solved some old murders.
Some new murders too. She didn’t save anyone.
She just picked up the pieces and held them out and explained it all.
Her friends, they would go on and make and do things.
Janelle and Vi would fall into each other more and more.
Nate was secure in himself, even if it took him a long time to write a book.
And David would move on to someone else, someone less weird, someone prettier with a better life. Someone real.
Her phone buzzed. Her eyes were too watery to read her messages at first, so she rubbed them hard.
I talked to my editor. It’s fine for you to come. My flight tomorrow is at 2 and it looks like it has some seats left.
The warmth came back over her body. This pain was madness—showers then sun. She stopped falling, found a dining hall napkin
in her bag to blow her nose into, and got on the airline website to cancel her flight to Pittsburgh and secure a seat on Nate’s
flight to New York City, unblinkingly paying the two hundred dollars in change fees.
She returned to Minerva, red-eyed but steady, and went right to Janelle’s room and knocked on the door.
“I’m going with Nate,” she said as Janelle looked up from the circuit board she was working on for one of her midterms. “And
I’ve made another decision—I want the coat. He sent it to me, so it’s my two-thousand-dollar coat now.”
“This,” Janelle said with a smile, “is what I’ve been waiting for. Finally. It’s over.”