Chapter 17 #2
Nellie's dorm is on the second floor of Caillot House, which is the witches' only building on the north end of campus—a former Greek revival mansion the academy bought a hundred years ago when the local family ran out of cousins.
Three floors. White columns. Wisteria climbing the porch in a way that looks like an accident and isn't. I've walked past Caillot a dozen times but I've never been inside.
Nellie is waiting on the porch when I come up the path. She's in cutoff jeans and an oversized t-shirt that says LSU AGRICULTURAL CENTER, her curls piled on top of her head with what looks like a chopstick, and she's barefoot on the slightly stripped wood.
"Took you long enough."
"It's a fifteen-minute walk."
"You took twenty."
"I had things to think about."
"No more thinking now that you’re here. We don't allow it."
Corvin is twenty paces behind me on the path.
He stops at the edge of the lawn. Nellie waves him off without looking, the way she'd shoo a dog she happened to like, and the gesture is so casual and assumed that I see the corner of Corvin's mouth tighten before he settles into his standard waiting posture against the trunk of a magnolia.
"Come on." Nellie reaches for my left hand. "I want you to meet everybody."
The inside of Caillot smells like nag champa and laundry detergent and something herbal.
There's a foyer with a wide curving staircase, and a common room off to the right with mismatched couches and a fireplace, and a coffee station along one wall that suggests a culture of people who study late and recover with caffeine. My kind of people.
Two witches I've never met are at the coffee station and they look up when we come in. They smile at Nellie. They look at me a beat longer than they look at her. Then they smile at me too.
"Hi," I say, automatic, and we're past them and up the stairs.
Nellie's room is at the end of the second-floor hall. The door is half open. She kicks it the rest of the way.
"Behold."
The door opens into the suite's common room.
It's a big square space carved out of what must have been the upper parlor of the original house, with a fireplace on one wall and four doors set into the others—one bedroom for each of them.
There's a low couch and two armchairs gathered around a coffee table covered in books and tea mugs, a kitchenette tucked into the far corner, a record player on a side table, and the kind of well-loved clutter that neither Nellie nor her roommates apologize for.
Posters and string lights. A wall of dried herbs in glass jars hanging by twine over the kitchenette.
A tarot deck face-down on the coffee table, mid-spread.
A pair of running shoes kicked off by the door I almost trip over.
Three people are in the room. They all look up at once.
"Everybody," Nellie says, "Cal."
She points her arms at me as if presenting me.
A round of hellos.
"Cal, the inhabitants. Marguerite—Margo—second-year, healing track, she'll fix your problems and your blood sugar simultaneously.
" A woman tucked into one end of the couch with an anatomy textbook open on her lap, glasses, a high bun, lifts a hand from her book, smiles, goes back to reading.
"Tess. Third-year, water magic, what you've heard about her is mostly true. "
"Mostly?" The woman folded sideways in the armchair lifts her teacup at me. She's in a tank top and sweatpants and her dark hair is in two French braids that look defensive. Her grin is enormous.
"Mostly. And Shandy. Third-year, divination. Don't let her touch the cards yet, she's been waiting."
The third witch is on the rug in front of the coffee table, cross-legged, the tarot spread laid out in front of her.
She gathers the cards together without looking and looks up at me with an expression that's careful and warm at the same time.
She has fair skin and pale-blonde hair cut short around her ears and grey eyes that look at me the way a person looks at the answer to a question she's been holding for a long time.
"Hi, Cal."
"Hi."
"It's nice to meet you in person."
In person. I file that one and put it away. I have a hundred questions about what Shandy may or may not have been Seeing in those cards, and exactly zero of them are first-meeting questions.
"What are we drinking?" Nellie says.
"Cider," Margo calls without looking up. "Already poured. On the counter."
"You're the best person in this dorm."
"I'm the best person in this building."
"That's also accurate."
I sit on the other end of the couch from Margo because Nellie is patting the cushion at her, and somebody—Tess, I think—passes me a glass of the cider, and I take a sip on autopilot before I remember I'm not drinking anything tonight.
I drink it anyway. It's sparkling and tart and there's rosemary in it, and the bubble of it on my tongue startles me.
"It's just cider," Tess says, watching me. "Nellie said no fun for you tonight."
"I appreciate the no fun,” I say as I take another sip.
"I know you do. It's annoying. We respect it," Nellie assures me. She rolls her eyes so hard I think she might get a headache.
I almost laugh.
I'm in a room with four women who aren't paid to be near me.
God, what a depressing fucking thought. I shove it back down before it can do anything to my psyche.
"How was class?" Nellie asks.
"Midus is annoyed I'm not yet hitting people."
Tess snorts into her teacup. Margo, without looking up from her textbook, hums her agreement.
"Midus gets annoyed about a lot of things," Nellie says, tucking one foot under the throw blanket. "It's his core personality trait."
"He told me as soon as my arm clears the sleeve he's going to run drills with me himself."
"Oh, no."
"Oh, yes." I nod, scrunching my face into a frown.
"Cal." Nellie's eyes go wide. "That's genuinely terrifying."
"I know."
A beat. She bumps her knee against mine.
"You'll survive."
"Probably. Hopefully."
"Mostly," Tess says, cheerfully, lifting her teacup at me from the armchair like she's toasting my impending injury. The grin is enormous. "She'll survive mostly… Probably."
Margo turns a page. "Tess."
"What? I'm being supportive."
"You're being unhelpful."
Tess settles deeper into the chair, satisfied. "It's a brand."
I swallow my smile and take a sip of my cider.
Nellie shoves a throw pillow at me and I lean back into the couch cushions.
Shandy is still on the rug, the cards spread out in front of her in a loose semicircle.
She's just listening. I have the distinct sense that I'm being felt out but that she would never say that out loud. It doesn’t feel like judgment–just a getting-to-know-you type of caution.
Hours pass. I don't notice them passing.
Margo finishes her chapter, closes her book, and produces a plate of grapes she has, at some earlier point, cut into halves.
"They were too big," she says, by way of preemptive explanation, setting the plate on the coffee table.
"Margo, we are adults," Nellie says, holding back a giggle.
"You're a healing track student in training," Tess says from the armchair, tossing back one of her thick braids, "and you cut grapes into halves for adults?"
"I cut grapes into halves for anyone. Choking is a leading cause of accidental death in—"
"Margo," Shandy sing-songs like a reminder. Like they’ve had this conversation before. Many times.
"I'm not finishing the statistic." Margo throws her hand up in surrender.
"Thank you."
Tess produces, from somewhere, a small speaker, and a playlist starts up that's mostly Stevie Nicks and the occasional Patsy Cline. Shandy hums along to Landslide without looking up. Her voice is unexpectedly low and good. In some parts it even gives me chills.
Eventually Shandy gathers her cards back together and reshelves them on the side table but stays cross-legged on the rug, propping her chin on her fist.
Tess says something I half-catch—something dry about Midus and his clipboard—and Nellie laughs into the throw blanket and I am, somehow, laughing too. The laugh surprises me.
It surprises the room.
Tess catches it and grins like she's won a game I didn't know was happening.
We keep talking. The fae girl in Tess's seminar who falls asleep in lecture, who Tess has decided is her project.
Shandy's recurring dream about a kitchen she doesn't recognize—butter-yellow walls, a window over the sink, a porcelain teapot she has never seen before in waking life.
Margo's mother in Lafayette who has called twice this week to remind her about All Hallows' weekend, because it's family tradition and there will be hell to pay if she misses it.
I don't talk much. I sip my cider. I let the room talk over and around me, and it doesn't feel the way I always thought a room talking over and around me would feel.
It feels nice. Like I can just exist in the margins and soak up girl time.
Around nine, Margo claims the armchair Tess vacated, settles in with her textbook, and Tess wanders off to her own room to take the phone call she's been putting off.
Shandy stretches out on the rug with a book.
It's just me and Nellie on the couch under a throw blanket that smells like Nellie's perfume.
Nellie tucks her feet under mine.
"OK," she says.
"Ok what?
"You know what."
I shake my head. "Nell, I really don't."
"Last night."
I look at the ceiling and try to stay calm, but even my magic knows where this is going and does a little flare behind my sternum.
"You wandered off into the trees with that vamp like you were sleepwalking, Cal. And you came back wiping your face."
"I wasn't sleepwalking."
Nell shoots me a murderous look. "I'm drawing on every reserve of patience my mother gave me right now."
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling. I know I’m being an asshole but I really can’t help it. I don’t know how much I’m ready to share about Kage.
I try anyway. "I went to talk to him."
"Mm-hm…” drags it out like she wants me to continue.