18 PRACTICE, PRACTICE, CRAFTED PRACTICE
18
P RACTICE , P RACTICE , C RAFTED P RACTICE
Now that a Survey decision had been made, I set my alarm to go off before sunrise. Finch hardly stopped by the Manor anymore—she mostly circulated between Grainer, the library, and her apartment in Tuck House. Amrita kept her headphones on most of the time. She filled sketchbook after sketchbook with cramped drawings. Saz avoided the topic of Solo altogether and spent long nights in the studio working on a piece that took up an entire wall. She refused to let the rest of us see it. She claimed we could look when it was ready, but I was afraid that she was embarrassed to be left out, and hesitant to be perceived again.
And against Moody’s clear instruction, Caroline occasionally slept on a cot in her white cubicle, though there wasn’t much remaining white space to speak of. Anywhere that didn’t hold a painting had been covered with magazine clippings from Artforum or Hyperallergic , collages and sketches, color palettes and reference photos. Her scribblings butted up against reproductions of paintings torn from the expensive coffee-table books Caroline ordered in droves—abstractions by Helen Frankenthaler, Renaissance depictions of the Pietà , and Jean Broc’s dramatic and intimate The Death of Hyacinthos , in which a mournful Apollo cradled the slack dead body of his lover.
Sometimes we gathered in Banemast for dinner, though Caroline rarely stayed for longer than twenty minutes. She sat as far away from Finch as she could get and picked at her fingernails the whole time. Amrita’s brow took on a permanent furrow of concern. Saz poked at her food while her phone buzzed with notifications—Instagram comments, package delivery notifications, dating app matches.
Our five had always established that Solo would not affect our friendships. Now I felt we’d been fractured—Finch, Caroline, Amrita, and I on one side, and Saz on the other without a direction to walk in.
I wanted to go back to our summer, back to a time before Solo had to be addressed. I was so afraid to be the last one missing them—terrified that I might be the only one who remembered who we had been and the pacts we made. If they forgot me, how could I show my face? How could I deal with the idea that maybe I loved them more than they loved me, that this mattered most to me, that they were okay with letting it dissolve?
I wanted to be free of all that fear. I followed routine and I went to the studio. I put the feeling in a painting, so something else could carry it for a while.
Moody had just left my studio for the last chat of the day when Saz appeared in the doorway. There was blue paint all over her dress, as if she’d been drenched in water. She gestured to my headphones. I slid them off. “Do you always have to wear those things? Don’t you ever just sit alone with your thoughts?”
“I don’t hate myself enough to do that,” I answered, hooking the headphones around my neck. Tinny music played below my ears. “What’s up?”
“We should have a movie night.”
I blinked back at her. “Tonight? All of us?”
“No, Jo, next year.”
I didn’t dignify that one with a direct answer. “It’s Thursday. We have critique tomorrow.”
“So what? It’s not like we haven’t done it before.”
The reminder felt pointed—a callback to who we’d always been. The smile on her face was hesitant, as if afraid I might actually turn her down.
I shifted on my stool. The painting before me was still wet. It was a landscape depicting the line of trees beyond Rotham, with the five of us sketched out between the trunks like iterations of Mother Crone and a shadow figure haunting us in the back. Moody had called it “phantasmal and unsettling,” though she had appeared uneasy to say so. I couldn’t get any of their faces right. I’d painted over each one what felt like a hundred times. The only thing that did feel right was the shadow figure—a perfect blur of deep green radiating out into gold.
“Have you asked everyone else?” I prompted, testing the waters.
“’Course. Even Finch said yes.”
My heart loosened. “Whatever, I get it, ask me last.”
Saz’s smile melted into a grin. I was so happy to have put that look on her face, so delighted to watch her light up with feeling for the first time in what felt like forever.
We all met in the Manor after dinner and showers, wet hair plastered to the nape of my neck where it nearly froze in thick tendrils. The radiators were acting up and left the house colder than normal, so we made a nest of blankets on the living room floor. Saz coaxed a fire to life in the hearth. Finch settled onto the sofa beside Amrita, looking deliciously soft in her hoodie and sweatpants, haphazardly rinsed off eye makeup clinging to her waterline. Caroline sprawled out on her stomach to watch Sigourney Weaver grace the screen as Alien began. Saz sat beside me, our backs against the couch, my torso framed by Amrita’s legs. Finch’s knee brushed my left shoulder. I could have turned my head and kissed it.
It almost felt normal, all of us in that room, bundled close to each other with the lights off and another movie starred on the list beside the TV. Popcorn in a bowl. Beer bottles and hot toddies warring for space on our limited table surfaces. A candle burning somewhere, Saz’s doing—cinnamon and vetiver and clove. Amrita made a comment about Sigourney’s hair on the screen and how she thought mine might hold a curl like it, then scrunched her fingers through the wet ends. Finch stretched a foot out as her arms rose above her head, catlike and elongated, and the end of her socked foot bumped into Caroline’s thigh.
Caroline jerked away as if burned. They gave each other sharp looks, Caroline’s halfway to a sneer. Saz paused the movie and the room erupted in complaints.
“This has gone on for way too long,” Saz declared. “You two are pissing me off. Squash whatever beef you have, now.”
Caroline rolled over and sat up. “She burned my fucking painting,” she said immediately.
“You cannot possibly still be hung up on that. Why would I burn it? What proof do you have?” Finch leaned closer to Caroline. Their eyes bored into each other. “Go ahead, tell me. I’d love to know.”
“You went out to smoke just before my critique.”
Finch scoffed. “Okay, and? So did Cameron, and Thea, and Yejun. We were back and forth all day. It’s Survey, it’s hectic.”
“You’re the only one who has a reason to sabotage me like that,” Caroline snapped.
Finch’s face was full of barely restrained grief. “Are you serious? You could say the same thing about Saz. Everyone in our class wanted a spot in the top five.”
“I would never!” Saz said, horrified.
Finch gestured in Saz’s direction, as if to say see? “Caroline, I’m sorry someone burned your painting. I really am. But if you think that I’m the kind of person who’s capable of that, then I don’t know what you’ve possibly seen in me as your friend. Obviously, I want to Solo. All of us did at one point or another, and still do. But we’d never do something like that. Not to each other.” She pointed a finger at Caroline. “I love you, you bitch. Don’t make me out to be someone I’m not.”
Caroline hesitated. The TV’s glow painted her like a ghost. Amrita said, “Are you good now? Is it squashed?”
“Fine,” Caroline answered. She wouldn’t quite meet Finch’s eyes. “But that doesn’t help me know who burned my painting.”
“It was probably Cameron,” I supplied, trying to mediate. “He hates our guts. I wouldn’t put it past him, especially on the day of Survey.”
Caroline nodded, but her apprehension lingered. Finch waved at the screen. “Can I put the movie back on? I need to see my xenomorph girl.”
Saz shivered beside me as the movie started playing again. I squeezed her arm. “Cold?” I asked, and she nodded, resting her temple against my shoulder. Her half-shut eyes made me emotional. I felt halfway responsible for that subdued look on her face, the absence of her usual fire—I felt I always would, with the knowledge that I had claimed a Solo spot that potentially could have been hers. So I said, “I can grab you a sweatshirt.”
“Pipe down, front row,” Finch demanded as Saz started to protest, but I was already getting to my feet. “Jo, come on, we are not pausing again!”
“I’ll be right back!” I called as I jogged up the stairs to the second floor. Saz’s door sat ajar. Her duvet was bunched up in a ball, sheets ruffled beneath it. A hoodie hung from the back of her desk chair. I grabbed it and turned to go but paused when I saw the familiar edge of a book poking out of the mess of papers on her desk.
Tugging it free revealed the cover of ANTHROPOMANCY . The pages were marked with tabs and slips of paper in different pastel shades. I flipped through. I landed on an early page with a tasseled bookmark. The image spanning it was the sprawled figure of a body, splayed like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man with his arms and legs at perfect angles. I skimmed the text beside it, lines highlighted and annotated in Saz’s delicate hand throughout: Modern divination practices redefine the sacrifice by substituting bodily material of any kind in the representation of a human being and reading from the interior, finding the heavens reflected in the meat of the body.
I read the passages once, twice, three times. I thought about Saz on her knees in front of the toilet, Amrita holding her hair back and saying, “I thought you said you found the ritual on Reddit?” and Saz skirting her question. But why? What was so wrong with the ritual originating from ANTHROPOMANCY ? If the spell had come from some new age forum, then maybe its seriousness could be played off. But the sight of those words in print— divination and sacrifice —made our actions feel less capable of dismissal.
I turned from Saz’s room with the book tucked against my chest and her hoodie flung over my arm. I brought the sweater to her as intended—but first, I hid that leather-bound tome beneath my mattress, where I could learn exactly what we had done.
Work was a slog, but I couldn’t afford not to go—the job at the library supplemented my paints and canvas, and I still hoped to finish a few more pieces before Solo came around. Finch left our shift early with a headache, so I spent most of the evening on my own in the equipment room. The overhead lights buzzed all night. The archive desk closed around dinnertime and left me as the only one in the basement, just a few feet from the empty glass case where the Boar King’s suit had once hung. I was simultaneously nervous to be left there alone and relieved that Kirsten was finally gone—I knew she’d been interviewing the sculpture majors who curated the display case in search of the one who’d removed Kolesnik’s costume without results, and I was afraid that she’d remember Finch and I had keys of our own. She asked me once if I’d noticed anything strange before the costume disappeared. I, truthfully, answered no, and then tried to keep myself scarce to avoid catching her attention again.
With the realization that our ritual could have come from ANTHROPOMANCY , I’d been racking my brain all day about the box where Finch had found it. Who donated it? Was there anything truly powerful about it, or was I too willing to prefer the pagan above all else if it meant retaining some fraction of my mind?
Closing was the worst part. Half the lights shut off automatically in the library’s basement, and most of the time the librarians who worked upstairs at the front desk forgot I was down there if I didn’t get up and wave my arms around. Sometimes they’d shut down too early and jump a foot in the air when I had to call down the hall, reminding them I was still at work for another hour.
That night I locked everything just after nine. The hallways glistened red as the exit signs beamed on. The only sounds were the clink of my keys clipped to my hip and the swishing of my jeans when I walked. I turned from the equipment room and faced the hall, that display case forever illuminated by the hot gold of the puck lights.
Someone stood behind the glass.
Maybe they’d replaced the Boar King’s suit while I was working, hoping to display new work and disguise the empty space. I hesitated by the equipment room’s door. I’d have to walk past the case to leave. The library basement smelled wet and alive, like digging up dirt with your hands, earth clinging beneath your fingernails.
“I’m still here,” I called out foolishly, as if that might summon something to save me. But my voice was so small in that hallway. The red light flickered. The figure in the case was still enough to convince me of its inanimateness, of my safety. I took a few hurried steps forward until I was only feet away from it. And then it groaned.
The sound was muffled behind the case. The creature keeled forward, nose pressed up against the glass, steam billowing out from where the snout left a wet print. Closer now, I could see it was the same nightmare that had claimed Kolesnik’s seat in Survey. Animal eyes peered back at me, slit pupils rolling, each breath casting a new damp circle around the nose.
Its strangled plea disintegrated behind the barrier between us. The hands— hands was a generous word, my mind trying to make up for what I was looking at—scrabbled against the case, the figure slumping as if shot and trying to keep itself upright. There was an undulating desperation in its eyes. I got the sense that it was asking me for something. Like I might be capable of putting it out of its misery.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I don’t know what you want me to do.”
It reared its head back. The horns jutting from its snout curled up and over the nostrils. The eyes gave another terrifying roll, and it crashed its head into the glass.
I flinched, hands coming up to block my face. But the case just released a low creak as the head ricocheted off the barrier with a slick thud. The creature’s chest heaved, panting like a bull preparing to gore its way to the end.
The words coming out of my mouth were closer to desperate begging, “ Please stop ” spiraling past my lips in a repetitive mess as I slowly backed away. It slammed its head against the case again, and then again, and then again, until a splinter jutted away from the point of impact. The crack woke something in me. I stumbled backward and took off at a run toward the stairs.
Another slam. Another. Another. Another. Another. Then the resounding shatter of the glass case filled the room, shards twinkling to the floor behind me as the creature released a wail that followed me all the way up the stairs.
I didn’t look back, not even when one of the janitors on the library’s main floor called out and asked if I was alright. I just ran as fast as I could, slamming a shoulder against one of the main doors and exploding out into the night. Outside was so bitterly cold that it hurt to inhale. I focused on that stinging pain, the way it tore me up each time my lungs expanded. There were two possibilities behind me—either what I witnessed was real and there was now a creature loose in the library archives, or I had just hallucinated the Boar King’s skin becoming animate and would return to find the display case the same as it had always been. Neither idea was comforting.
I stayed like that, hunched over with my hands on my knees, the path a steadying force beneath me. My feet begged to run again. To go wherever they would carry me. When I finally lifted my head and straightened, a ghost breezed down the promenade to the enormous doors of Slatter Hall.
No, not a ghost. Caroline, the pale sheen of her hair like a gibbous moon in the dark. I watched her heave the door open and slip inside of Slatter as it closed behind her without a sound.
How was I supposed to know what was real when no one witnessed what I had? How, when it seemed no one ever would? Maybe Caroline’s apparition was just another specter, trying to lure me somewhere where it could finish me off. Whatever I had wronged with Kolesnik’s sacrifice seemed intent on ruining me. I was losing to the invisible.
Still—if that was really Caroline, then I couldn’t go home without knowing she was okay. I jogged down the promenade, sneakers crunching over dead leaves and ice. There was no moon overhead. Campus was desolate, everyone already in bed or hiding from the cold.
Slatter was silent. I hadn’t been inside the building since Kolesnik’s death. I started up the stairs, then glanced over my shoulder as if expecting the creature to have followed me. The idea didn’t seem so nonsensical anymore—every shadow had the potential to stand up.
She wasn’t in the main entryway where the walls were lined with the ornate benches we’d waited on before Kolesnik’s class—now they were mournfully empty, like pews in an abandoned church. The lights were mostly off save for a few of the classrooms and the motion-activated overheads in each hall. Pipes clanked distantly. A door creaked open.
I went toward the sound, trying to keep to the shadows. It felt pathetic to sneak after her like that. But Caroline had been so secretive. I could see it in the way she moved, in the little time she spent at home, in the haunting paintings she created and then scrapped again and again. There had been a shift. Whatever trust she once held in us had stretched thin.
Somehow, I’d known where she would go. The door to Kolesnik’s old classroom hung ajar, and the desk lamp glowed past it. I peered into the sliver of space between the door and the jamb, feeling like a ridiculous recreation of that day when I’d first seen him put his hands on Caroline.
She stood before his desk and stared at the empty chair, one finger dragging over the oiled wood. She pulled her hand away and looked at it, rubbed dust between her index and thumb. Caroline’s eyes were mostly sclera, the irises pale, head tilted down and lashes painted against her brow. Her jacket hung around her like a shroud. The light made her an indistinct ghoul. Her lips parted—I almost expected her to talk to herself, the feverish rambling I’d listened to on the other side of our shared bedroom wall for weeks—but she just dusted her hands off on her pants.
The light dulled as Caroline circled the desk. She stopped in front of it and started ripping open drawers. Each one gave a vicious rattle. Slatter was likely empty, but she wasn’t moving like she cared. Drawers flung open and slammed shut again and again as she hunted. When she came up empty, she let out a frustrated huff.
“You might as well come in,” Caroline snapped. She didn’t turn to the door when she said it, just kept rifling through a drawer, pens and paperclips rustling under her touch. I straightened and pushed the door the rest of the way open, blushing. “What do you want, Jo?”
To apologize, to ask her what she was doing, to tell her to come home with me and leave whatever this was behind. To tell her what I had seen. For her to tell me everything was going to be okay, that I was salvageable and hers.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Oh, just fine.” She tore a drawer out of the desk and upended it onto the floor. Pens went spinning across the floorboards, pins and rubber bands and paperclips raining after them, half-used notepads fluttering like clipped birds. I watched them fall, something seizing in my chest—once, Saz made a sculpture with rubber bands and spent a semester hunting for them everywhere. They became a priceless commodity to me; I hadn’t yet been able to turn that magpie sense off.
“You don’t seem fine,” I said, mouth dry.
“What would you know about fine and not fine ?” Now she looked at me, really looked. “You’re hanging on by a thread. Don’t shake your head at me. I know you. You’re hiding something, I can see it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumbled.
Caroline scoffed and kicked a pen away. It rolled to the other side of the room as she dropped into a crouch behind the desk and began digging in Kolesnik’s trash can. It must have been empty—she let out a furious growl.
“You just going to stand there, or are you going to help me?” she asked, her voice muffled beneath the desk.
I stepped farther into the classroom. Inside, it had the stale, sleepy smell of a space that hadn’t seen life in a while. The chairs and desks were the same as they’d been on that last day of class, half-empty tissue box sitting on the edge of his table, chair rolled away to let Caroline under it.
“I can’t help if I don’t know what you’re doing,” I said.
“I’m fixing it,” she said. “I’m repairing the ritual.” Her head popped up from behind the desk again—just her exposed brow, the faint divot in her forehead where a scar remained from a childhood accident.
“Caroline,” I started.
She rose to her knees. “Everything was going great until that farmer fucked with our Boar King scarecrow. Now my painting is ruined, and Moody won’t stop chewing me out in our one-on-ones, and I swear that I can hear—I mean, I keep seeing—” Caroline hesitated. “I’m just not sleeping well,” she said finally, “and I know you aren’t either. I can hear you watching movies on your laptop through the wall all night.”
“So what?” I asked. “You’re here to curse Kolesnik again? He’s already dead. What more can we do?”
“Exactly. He’s dead. We killed him and earned that power. The ritual is just ... out of alignment. I’m going to find something new to put inside a recreated Boar King suit, and I’m going to fix it up and make it right.”
I didn’t know what to say. The Caroline in front of me warred with everything I thought to be true about the one I knew—a pragmatic girl, skeptical and smart, sensible to a fault unless she believed it might piss her mother off. Sure, she’d been game for the ritual, but so had the rest of us, albeit reluctantly. I wanted to ask her why she believed it was real, if something had been following her too, if she was afraid to turn out the lights at night, if she could hear it breathing in the room with her. But they were dangerous questions to pose; acknowledgment felt like giving those horrors solidity.
“Say whatever you want,” Caroline urged when I’d been quiet for too long, her head thrown back to face me and the shadow of the desk bisecting her expression into snarling halves. “Call me hysterical.”
I swallowed around the sting in my throat. “I wouldn’t.”
That made her smile. A real smile, one I hadn’t seen in a long time, small but bright. “I’m sorry, Jo,” she said. “I know you wouldn’t.”
She rose and gave the mess she’d made a cursory glance. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Custodians must have already given this place a once-over. I was hoping to find another tissue or his hair or something, considering how intent St. Roche is on making everything he touched a fucking memorial.” Her voice dropped an octave, into a private, nervous lull. “I just want everything to work out.”
That made two of us. I wanted to retrace my steps to a different time, a different body, the world before we’d let it wreck us.
“You’re on the list for a potential Solo,” I reassured. “You’ve put in the hours, and they loved your Survey. You’re going to blow them out of the water.”
Caroline pulled her coat tighter around her. She looked peaky and too thin, the circles beneath her eyes deepening in that lamplight as she shrugged.
“It doesn’t matter,” she murmured again. “Let’s go home before the rest of them send out a search party to find us.”
I didn’t push it. I just let her lead the way.