Voice Like a Hyacinth: A Novel

1 WE WHO DRANK FROM THE GLASS

We’d go anywhere if it meant we’d be together.

We talked about ourselves by saying we , our , ours .

Our favorite song.

Our spot outside of town.

Our parties, our birthdays, our dinners.

We went to the woods.

We built a fire.

We were together.

We got too drunk.

We picked each other up.

We slept in the same bed a hundred times—when it snowed, when we were scared, when we were excited.

We had dreams about each other.

We danced in dorm rooms, egged each other on.

We took night walks.

We ate fries on the grass of Main Lawn and warned skateboarders about the crack in the path before it could send them sprawling.

We walked that huge fallen tree until it finally snapped over the creek, dropped us ankle-deep in wildlife and algae.

We braided each other’s hair.

We told each other how beautiful we looked.

We talked about loving each other, and loving other people, and loving all the ways we showed it.

We got too drunk again.

We picked each other up.

We picked apples.

We picked flowers.

We watched TV together.

We fell asleep together.

We drove together.

We hung out of the sunroof and the windows.

We cooked meals, together, all our favorites at once, and we ate and we laughed and we promised to do it again, the next day and the next, until “together” was an assumption instead of a hope.

Back then, no one ever liked to spend much time with the five of us because there was always a sixth entity taking up any empty space—a shape crafted by our embodied history, all the inside jokes and references and memories and characters we built out of years of friendship become sentient.

We filled every room until we made it our room.

We named it together and we left it too crowded.

No one else could squeeze in.

No one else could speak the language.

We created a lexicon worth living in.

Japanese Breakfast and Solange, dating apps projected on the television screen, Ouija boards, jam jars decorated with nail polish, fingernails slick with oil paint, Richard Siken poems, Carmen Maria Machado essays, Exquisite Corpse drawn in Finch’s sketchbook, Club Penguin and Phase 10, Strawberitas and girl blunts packed with lavender and rose petals, zines about queer horror movies, boy drag crafted with mascara mustaches, the time Amrita accidentally did the splits on Main Lawn, the time we got kicked off the swing set by the police, the time Saz fell asleep on top of a half-eaten bar of chocolate and woke up with it smeared in her hair.

Rhinestones stuck to our cheeks with lash glue.

The mouse in the kitchen Caroline caught with a bag of tortillas.

Finch’s fire escape and the way morning smelled in the winter and the cling of cold metal through denim.

Waxing moons and tarot decks.

Saz’s locket with Fiona Apple on one side of the heart and Kate Bush on the other, the kissing sound she made when she snapped it shut.

Green eyeshadow, hand-me-downs, Jennifer’s Body , cinnamon brooms bundled with ribbon.

Sauvignon blanc and the trip to the shore where we had to pull over and let Caroline throw up outside of a Taco Bell.

Amrita’s broken watch.

Finch’s lack of rhythm, Saz’s lack of tune.

Wearing each other’s clothes, sharing toothpaste, splitting everything we ate.

The time I scraped my knees on a hike and we laughed for hours, Caroline telling me I looked butch like that, with the stripped hem of her T-shirt bandaging each bloody knee.

The thrifted denim jacket hanging in Amrita’s closet with our initials embroidered inside of its sleeve.

My bed smelling like Caroline.

Caroline smelling like Saz.

Saz smelling like her incessantly burning incense, the rich, herb-y cling of it in her hair.

“Short Skirt Long Jacket” by Cake, turned up as loud as it could go in Saz’s car.

Over the Garden Wall every Halloween.

But I’m a Cheerleader and Big Fish and Stand by Me and all the Hunger Games movies.

The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli and the field trip we took to see it.

Cy Twombly’s Leda and the Swan .

Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta, Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze, Artemisia Gentileschi, Helen Frankenthaler, Jenna Gribbon, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, Faith Ringgold, Gluck, Mickalene Thomas, Sally Mann, Amy Sherald.

The quiet night we ate dinner together with the back door open and watched the sun set over our studio.

Plastic Beach and that one pink Devendra Banhart album.

The best champagne Saz’s parents’ credit card could buy.

Sappho’s fragments, and the way Maggie Nelson wrote about blue.

A pile of Doc Martens by the door.

The way Caroline’s voice changed when her grandma called.

The photo of Saz as a kid with a stuffed Winnie the Pooh in her arms that I kept pinned to a board above my desk—how small and hopeful she looked there, black hair cut to her chin and her smile smeared with ice cream.

Finch’s love for card games, and the time she bought us visors for a poker game that barely lasted thirty minutes.

The visor so cute atop Amrita’s head as she shotgunned a beer, casting her foamy smile with a green glow.

The way Saz cried each summer when classes ended, when we left each other behind, when I lost part of myself until the fall gave it back to me again.

The spring break none of us left.

That last good thing we promised one another.

All the things that made us an us . All the things that made us real to each other. All the things that made it impossible to forget and move on, even after we lost it, even when we knew the end to come.

Against our insistence, there was an expiration date attached to our obsession that came assigned on the day we met.

Regardless, I treated our time at Rotham like it would continue forever, the coming months and days and minutes cupped like water in my hands in a never-ending faucet flow. Still—reality was inevitable. We made a pact not to lose ourselves. We promised to find each other in any future. Friends drift apart, my dad liked to remind me. Plans change, and people move on.

It was our senior thesis year. I was living in a delusion that did not yet have the capability to embarrass me.

If I closed my eyes hard enough to coax stars, I could summon it, that piece of Indiana where plains gave way to ceaseless woods that gave way to town, the wasteland of our hearts where Rotham burned alive. Summer’s end meant the days were still hot, but the ground was carpeted with sycamore leaves. Campus glowed, morning sun bright on the Chapel’s spire. I could see it all from the steps of the Manor: Lysander Gate and the path that led to the garden and the pond, Tuck House, Banemast, Slatter Hall, and Main Lawn. Eleanor Ohmend Grainer Arts Hall, Grainer to the rest of us, rose mythic at the end of the promenade. It was taller than the other buildings—its shadow shrouded them into silhouettes, and the windows lining our thesis studio were black. Asters and hydrangeas bloomed along the edges of brick paths. Pawpaw trees dropped wet fruit to the grass. Light beamed on the pond and cooked algae into a fetid mess. The world smelled like awakening.

I’d grown up somewhere I once thought lusher, where the mountains were old and knowing. Indiana seemed like such a dead world—before I came to Rotham, I imagined it to be an expanse of overgrown wheatgrass, the beige of a parched death. Tractors and town halls and minivans and maize. And it was, but it was also ours. That distinction alone had the power to make it beautiful.

My parents didn’t understand what the draw was, and high school counselors gave my application a wide berth. They didn’t know what to do with The Rotham School printed across the header and the black-and-white crest punctuating it—a medieval lantern surrounded by a laurel wreath and speckled with stars, murky where the printer’s ink smeared. But extensive Google searches and a Reddit deep dive had promised me that Rotham was where every real artist went to hone their craft. I didn’t have to funnel my money into a precocious city and entrench myself in that culture. I could go to a place where art was revered as sacred. Where we sequestered ourselves like monastics in search of elevated belief. Where ritual still held meaning, and self-betterment could bloom out of sacrifice.

Campus hummed with the energy of our final move-in. Sticky heat clung to my upper lip and the hair along my forearms. My dad held one end of an air conditioner, and I struggled beneath the other, teeth clenched at the weight as we tried to shuffle toward the Manor’s door without one of us being crushed.

“Jo!” Saz called from the entryway. The massive doorframe dwarfed her beaming face. “It’s amazing!”

She looked gauzy as a flower after rain in her frothy pink dress. Her hair fell in dark sheets around her shoulders, longer than the last time I’d seen her. I wanted to hug her to me, but my arms were already occupied, so as we crab-crawled through the open door, I pressed my sweaty cheek against hers and felt her kiss the air beside my ear. She shut the door behind us, talking the whole way about the house.

“You won’t believe it,” she chattered. “There are three fucking floors. I mean, sorry, Mr. Kozak.”

We shuffled through the kitchen and up a flight of stairs, Saz shouting from below to direct us to my room on the third floor. We were only halfway down the hall when I heard the moment Amrita spotted me, her bare feet pattering against wood. I had to twist to find her. Humidity turned her hair into a cloud. She was wearing a shirt that had been mine a few years ago, until we both decided it looked better on her. Amrita wound an arm around my waist and squeezed until I laughed. I could feel my dad’s impatience in fevered puffs of air across the AC unit.

“Mmm, missed you so much,” Amrita sighed against my shoulder. “You smell like coffee.”

“A little help, Joanna,” my dad said, strained. Sweat made red tracks along his hairline. Amrita’s grasp fell away and we climbed again.

At the apex of the Manor, my room was a box with a sloped ceiling. It was barely big enough to spread my arms out and spin in a circle. But across the undressed bed and past the windowpane I could see greenery. Students milled along the promenade. Grainer sat perfect at the end of it all.

My dad set the air conditioner on my desk with a huff and pressed the back of his hand to his forehead. “Go find your mom,” he ordered, pulling the instruction manual from his pants pocket. “I’ll take care of this.”

I obeyed and slipped back into the hall. Crumbling brick lined the walls, cool to the touch and pale with age, like the house had been built out of the ruins of some legendary castle.

The Manor was a privilege—every year groups of seniors applied and hoped to be picked. It was an old Colonial made to house four students, so we’d deemed it impossible for our five until right before the end of junior year, when Finch decided she wanted her own place. She claimed the rest of us would only be a house full of distractions with too many dishes to do. So we’d applied: me, Amrita, Saz, and Caroline, expecting the worst, awaiting an email that would tell us we’d be fractured across campus housing. But our names had been drawn. Proof that maybe our chosen family meant something, after all.

I padded down the stairs, the banister beneath my hand shining oily and rich. Voices rose and fell, Saz’s glittery posh accent and Amrita’s vibratory lull. I paused and waited for Caroline. A small part of me still expected to hear Finch too. But she had always been the kind of girl to place the ocean between us, with only her hands and her will to hold the water in place.

On the second floor, Saz’s room was a wreck. Her tarot deck had fallen to the floor, and cards fluttered everywhere. The Wheel of Fortune lay beside my foot. Her bedspread sat in a heap on the floor among teetering piles of clothes, pink against yellow against orange against blue. Along with the vibrant abstract paintings that characterized Saz covering every available surface, it was like looking at the sun. They were massive displays of frenzied brushwork and half-formed words; there were snippets from conversations we’d had, lines from her favorite poems, whole pages of books painstakingly copied by hand and overlaid with fat strokes of paint. Each one layered color on color on color with the same frenetic energy I’d come to associate with Saz.

I looked for her among the chaos and came up empty, but found Amrita crouching in the doorway of the room to the right. She glanced up and brightened in that warm, private way of hers. She’d swept her hair back with a claw clip. Loose dark waves hung in her eyes.

“You’re down here with Saz?” I craned over her head, resting my fingertips on her shoulder as I looked around the room. She’d already made the crisp bed—white sheets and white duvet and white pillows.

She leaned into my thigh as she undid the zipper on a suitcase and said, “Weird, right?” Her clothes hung neatly in the wardrobe; dark dresses lined up beside tailored shirts in a stream of blacks and whites and pale blues. Amrita had always been that way—muted, subtle, the same since the first day we’d been placed together in our freshman dorm by Rotham admissions. She was such a contrast to the art she made that people were always surprised to learn that her paintings belonged to her; they were watercolors rich with folkloric imagery, like pages torn from an illuminated manuscript. A folder of them sat on her desk. Each meticulously sized and trimmed piece of watercolor paper had its own perfectly ordered arrangement.

“Does that mean Caroline is upstairs with me?” I asked.

“Yeah, her name was assigned on the door when we got here,” Amrita answered. We’d shared a room for three years before now. I knew Amrita better than anyone I’d ever met, closer than a sister, half of myself. The thought of living even a floor above her felt like moving to another country.

“Weird,” I said, echoing her earlier statement.

Downstairs sat the kitchen—this would be my life now, step after step after step—and beside it a living area completed by the tattered couch that Amrita and I had in our room last year. Saz had already covered it with throw blankets and perched beside my mom.

“Unpacked?” Mom asked, smiling tersely.

I returned her smile weakly, and felt more than saw Saz scan my expression, her eyes hot on my cheek. Sometimes I regretted letting them all know me so well—it made concealing feelings nearly impossible.

My mom rose from the sofa and hooked her bag over her shoulder. “I’m going to find your dad,” she said. “It was good to see you again, Sarah.”

“Likewise, Mrs. Kozak,” Saz answered brightly. She patted the seat beside her, and I sank into it as my mom disappeared up the stairs. Saz leaned close as she whispered, “She always calls me Sarah , with an accent and everything. Oh, and she asked again if you were dating any of us.”

I laughed and thumped her knee with mine. “Yeah right, welcome to Orgy Manor.”

Saz grinned. “I kind of like the sound of that.”

“We can charge for admission,” I suggested.

“Phones confiscated at the door and no photos allowed,” she added, nodding.

“What aren’t we photographing?” Amrita asked, sidestepping a box of vinyl records.

“The house-wide orgy we’re planning on having,” Saz said, right as the front door swung open and let Caroline in.

If I could look back on that moment now, even knowing all the ways that we might suffer, I’d still light up at the sight of her. I’d still be in awe of her, of all of them, of how they brightened every room they entered and made it somewhere I thought I could spend the rest of my life in.

Caroline elbowed the door all the way open, arms heavy with her bags and a smile brilliant on her face. “I love to see all my women in one place,” she said.

Saz leapt off the couch and swept her close. We flocked and crowded. When it was my turn for a hug, I breathed in her perfume—spicy and familiar.

Unlike Amrita, Caroline Aster was the kind of girl who matched her paintings. She was golden. Her hair fell straight and smooth down her back, the color of sun-bleached grain, her waist pinching into long legs, eyes bright like jewels set in her white face. She looked like her mother—though the similarities stopped there, as her beautiful mother was neither clever nor funny—but Caroline would have killed me if I’d compared the two of them. She had more than a few inches on me—I loved to look up into the halo of her.

She emanated the same luminant quality that her artwork did—consumed by glow and shine like the warm-toned metallic pigments she favored, with an erratic nature to match the often dreamy, surreal, and abstracted landscapes she’d taken to in the past year. Looking at her was like looking at a Hilma af Klint. All symbol and shape and symmetry.

“Anyone want to give me a hand?” Caroline asked.

I bent to grab one of her bags as Saz got the other.

“You’re on the third floor,” Saz said to Caroline. “It’s a workout.”

“It’s not so bad,” I tried.

Saz heaved a dramatic sigh and put on a high, nasally voice. “I’m Jo Kozak, and nothing bothers me. You could stick a palette knife in my hand and I wouldn’t even flinch. I climb twenty flights of stairs every day, and I do it all with a bag of rocks tied to each ankle. Let me play a sad song for you on the world’s smallest—”

Immediately offended, I said, “That’s not what I sound like. Is it?”

“Nah, you have a sexy voice,” Caroline declared, looping her arm through mine and kissing the top of my head. “You sound like you’re a member of a carpenter’s union.”

My face went hot. “I still don’t think that’s a compliment.”

“We’re heading out, Joanna,” my dad called from the top of the stairs. I yanked my arm from Caroline’s too quickly, cheeks flushing deeper as I fought not to acknowledge her confused stare.

I followed my parents out of the Manor’s front door and closed it behind me. The three of us waited on the curb beside my dad’s truck.

“Don’t forget to wish Caleb a happy birthday,” my mom said as we puttered around goodbyes. “Your brother is driving home for the weekend, and he’ll want to hear from you.”

“I know, I’ll call,” I said.

They shared a look. I shifted uneasily. My mom turned back to me, eyes landing on my chin. My dad gave me a tight hug. “I’ll be in the truck,” he said.

“Thanks for moving me in,” I continued when my mom made no move to leave.

“Listen, Joanna,” she said. She had that squinty expression she usually got when she thought she was giving me sage advice, a wrinkle forming between her brows. It was one I’d noticed myself occasionally adopting when I felt scrutinized. “You know that we only want the best for you.”

“Cool,” I said, “me too.”

“Are you sure you’re making the right decisions? You’re already on a risky career path, and living in this house seems like it’s going to be ... full of distractions.”

Sweat prickled along my hairline. I hated that she’d used the same word Finch had.

“They’re my friends, and they’re painters too. We learn from each other,” I said.

Her frown deepened. “What about when this year ends? What are you going to do with your future?”

“We need to head out if we’re going to beat traffic,” my dad called from the window.

I nodded thankfully in his direction. “I’ll be fine. Thanks again for moving me in.”

She started to protest, but I gave her a quick, tight hug and stepped back. “I’ll call. Don’t worry about it.”

Her expression was drawn and doubtful. I watched as she climbed into the passenger seat and shut the door hard behind her. The truck pulled away, and I kept waving until they could no longer see me.

I paused before the Manor and tried to untwist the knot she’d put in my stomach, waving to a few other fine arts majors as they walked by. Past the Manor stood Grainer and the tall iron fence that wrapped around campus. Past the fence waited the woods. Past the woods there were only occasional farmhouses and fields of corn. Rotham isolated you from all other aspects of life. You created nothing but your body of work. You gave it everything you had, your blood and life and the salt your body left behind in the aftermath.

And if you were lucky, you came home to people doing the exact same thing—like I did at the Manor, stepping in the front door again to find candles already lit in the living room and tea steeping beside the stove—and you knew that there was never anything else you could have needed. It was all waiting right in front of you.

“Hi again,” Amrita said, smile haloed with joy. She sat at the dining table with a cardigan pulled around her shoulders despite the heat pushing past the windows. With her knees drawn to her chin, she looked as small as a child. “Welcome home.”

I took the hand she offered, and I joined her at the table to wait for the others.