7. The Tunnel #3
“Everyone except this one student,” Simone says.
She takes in Mr. James’s appearance. He’s somewhere in his early sixties, white, a bit overweight, with a military buzz cut and striking blue eyes.
He has a gruffness about him, an indifference and authority that make him attractive.
Simone’s not sure why she’s surprised. Everyone at Tiffin is good-looking; it’s like some kind of requirement.
Can Simone charm him? “You’re the head of security, right?”
Mr. James stares at her. “I haven’t seen her, sweetheart.”
Calling Simone “sweetheart” is inappropriate. Would he call a male teacher “sweetheart”?
But Simone doesn’t have time to be offended. “I’m going to check the Sink.”
Mr. James laughs. “The Sink is all locked up. She’s not there.”
Fuuuuck! Simone thinks. “Okay, then she really is lost.”
Mr. James runs a shovel-sized hand over his square head. “She’ll turn up,” he says. He winks at Simone—again, so inappropriate—and zips off down the path.
Simone turns to watch him go. It is literally that dude’s job to help and… he just doesn’t care. Simone is appalled by his lack of concern. Or should she be heartened? She’ll turn up.
Simone has no choice now but to return to the dance and tell Audre that Charley is missing. She’ll report the interaction with Mr. James as well, though who is she kidding: Men like Mr. James are never held accountable. He’s worked here 114 years and knows all the school’s dirty little secrets.
As Simone pivots to head back to the Teddy, something catches her eye.
There’s a set of cement stairs that leads down into what must be the basement of Classic South, and Simone can see that the basement door is ajar.
She stands at the top of the stairs and peers down—definitely ajar.
She feels like Nancy fucking Drew, although the very last thing she wants to do right now is play girl detective and descend into the scary basement. She should go get Audre.
But instead, Simone turns on her phone’s flashlight and stomps down the stairs, fueled by annoyance at Mr. James and by her desire to find Charley.
(She is Charley’s dorm parent. Even though she was tasked with chaperoning the dance and can’t be two places at once, she somehow knows Charley’s disappearance will be perceived as her fault.)
She yanks the door open and steps into the basement. It’s cavernous and dark, filled with furniture, extra beds and desks. The furnace hums; she sees the hot water tanks and other inner workings of a large residential hall that she can’t identify.
“Charley?” she says. She wanders to the far corner of the basement where there’s a door.
A door that leads where? she wonders. This is Edgar Allan Poe shit.
She tries the knob, and although it sticks a bit, she’s able to pull it open—and she’s faced with another set of stairs that leads farther underground.
She hears voices. Or is she imagining things?
“Charley?” she says. “Charley, are you down there?”
Silence.
When the chapel bells chime nine, the music in the first-floor bathroom abruptly stops.
Thank god, Charley thinks. The past hour has consisted of incessant screeching.
Take one with my phone, take one with mine.
Charley can envision the girls forming different configurations, and she laughs when she overhears Olivia H-T ask to take a pic of just her and Davi, and Davi says, “I don’t think that’s necessary.
” (Charley is reluctant to admit it because she hates going along with the group mentality, but Davi is kind of cool.)
The girls on her floor have now spent more time getting ready for First Dance than they’ll spend at the actual dance. What a waste of time.
Charley hears the front door slam shut, and she peeks around her window shade to see the neon river flowing up toward the Teddy. Do I wish I was with them? I do not.
And yet… she can’t stop herself from picking up the dress Davi left on her bed.
It’s hideous for sure, but even so, Charley tries it on.
It’s as snug as a wetsuit, and Charley turns in the mirror.
She takes off her glasses and undoes her braids, which leaves her hair in kinky waves.
She considers going into the bathroom and using Olivia H-T’s makeup—Olivia is Tiffin’s answer to Sephora—but Charley would need a YouTube video.
She hasn’t worn makeup since her ballet recital in fourth grade.
Just as she’s thinking it might be amusing to shock the hell out of everyone by showing up at the dance, she hears something hit her window.
It sounds like a pebble. Random? Oh, she hopes so.
But then there’s another strike, more forceful.
Then a voice. Hey. Charley returns to the window and peers behind the shade.
It’s East.
“Let me in,” he says, pointing to the front door.
Charley imagines her mother getting a call from the school alerting her that Charley has sneaked a boy in.
(Her mother would be thrilled.) Everyone is at First Dance; no one will be back in the dorm for at least another hour.
But she can’t let East see her like this.
She shucks off the dress and pulls on her jeans and the red-and-navy rugby shirt that used to belong to her father.
Replaces her glasses. Then she hurries to the foyer and peeks out in both directions before letting East inside.
Without an invitation, he strides down the hall toward her room.
“Why aren’t you at the dance?” he asks.
“Why aren’t you at the dance?” Charley tries to keep her voice chill even though she’s completely shook.
“I have to maintain a certain mystique,” he says. “I can’t be hanging around with the hoi polloi.”
Hoi polloi? Charley thinks. East isn’t stupid, and yet she’s pretty sure he’s going to fail history, which is the one class they have together. He doesn’t do any of the reading. Like, none of it.
“Well, I didn’t come to Tiffin to dance,” Charley says. They’ve reached the door to Charley’s room, but East strides right past it and heads around the corner toward the stairs.
“Come with me,” he says. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to check out.”
“Do I need shoes?”
“You need shoes.”
Charley ducks into her room and slips on her Top-Siders. She looks at the book splayed open on her bed. Has Tom Ripley been a bad influence? Is she just going to follow East into the unknown… and probably end up Honor Boarded and right back at home with her mother and Joey?
No! she thinks. But her feet don’t have any sense of their own. She goes after him.
He leads her out the back of the dorm to a set of concrete steps that leads to a subterranean door.
The basement, great, this is so against the rules there probably isn’t even a category for it in The Bridle.
And yet, when East yanks the door open, Charley follows.
He’s been here for two years, she’s brand-new; if she gets caught, she’ll claim ignorance.
They walk through a dank, cavernous room filled with excess furniture to another door that leads even deeper into the bowels of the building.
Charley balks. “What is this?”
“Just follow me,” East says. “My dad was in charge of the renovations on campus, and when I looked at the as-built, I noticed a tunnel that connects the dorms with a secret room or something in the middle. I thought about it all summer; I just needed the right opportunity to investigate. And this, Charles, is that opportunity.”
“It’s Charlotte,” she says.
“I know, Charles, I’m just playing. Now, let’s go.”
When a boy like East gives you a nickname, Charley thinks, it’s basically impossible to refuse him. She follows him down a set of rickety wooden stairs. The door closes behind them, and Charley fears she’s descending to her doom.
“So if you’re not at Tiffin to dance, why are you here?” East asks.
“To get an education.”
He laughs. “I’m not Ms. Robinson, you can tell me the truth.”
Weirdly, she believes him. “My father died,” she says. “He was having shoulder surgery and he just… never came out of the anesthesia.” She swallows. “He was my favorite person in the world.”
East stops on the stairs and turns to her. “I’m sorry. That blows, bruh. So, you came here because home had, like, too many memories?”
“I came because my mother started dating this guy who worked at her landscaping company,” she says. “Then she married him. Then… some other shit happened. I applied here in May, and they miraculously had an opening.”
“Yeah,” East says. “Because of Cinnamon.” He pauses. “You know about that, right?”
“I do,” Charley says, although she didn’t know about Cinnamon when she accepted the spot. She wasn’t sure why she’d been admitted so late in the year, and as a junior. She supposes she believed it was because she was such an exceptional candidate that Tiffin couldn’t refuse.
But this past week during Chapel, Charley opened the Book of Common Prayer and a program for a memorial service fell out.
Charley studied the front—a picture of a girl with long auburn hair and freckles, holding a guitar—and noted the name, Cinnamon Peters, and the dates, February 21, 2009–May 12, 2025.
The back pages of the program had other pictures of Cinnamon—with Dub Austin at some kind of formal dance, onstage as Sandy in Grease, sitting next to Mr. Chuy on the piano bench during the Monday night sing-alongs, in the Grille with Davi, drinking milkshakes.
Apparently, Cinnamon Peters had died while she was a student at Tiffin.
Charley wondered what happened… until she saw the words written at the bottom of the back page: If you or someone you know is in emotional distress and considering…
Charley got a chill. Cinnamon Peters had died by suicide. A second later, it clicked: Charley had been admitted to replace Cinnamon.
“She was friends with Davi?” Charley asks.