32 EVERY LAST ONE A TEMPLE
That night they held a vigil outside of Grainer. Caroline’s parents stood entangled beside St. Roche. Her mother wept loudly and profusely. The detective and officer were half-obscured by the crowd of Rotham students and faculty, but my eyes kept snaring on them anyway. The pile of grocery store flowers and photos of Caroline had grown. Candles kept snuffing out. The wreckage rose high above us, Grainer roped off and blackened, the top three floors entirely gone save for some of the staircase’s skeleton. St. Roche’s megaphone blared across campus.
“THIS HAS BEEN A YEAR MARKED BY TRAGEDY,” she boomed. “A TERRIBLE TIME IN ROTHAM HISTORY. TONIGHT, WE MOURN THE LIFE OF AN INCREDIBLE STUDENT AND A brILLIANT MIND, ROTHAM’S VERY BEST, CAROLINE ASTER.”
“She would have died if she saw they used that picture,” Saz said past her tears, gesturing at a photo of Caroline sitting on Main Lawn with her head tossed back in a laugh, some more of the high-quality promotional shots Rotham had used for catalogs.
“Poor choice of words, Saz,” Amrita muttered.
“She meant, Caroline would have died again ,” Finch said.
I elbowed her. She refused to look at me. Her chin was angled high, cheeks pink with the cold, hair mostly hidden beneath a baseball hat. I couldn’t tell if her lashes were damp from the misty rain or from emotion.
Saz was holding Amrita’s hand. I heard her say something like, When can we go home? to Amrita but never caught the answer.
“Are you really going to ignore me?” I whispered to Finch.
Finch kept her eyes trained on St. Roche. We were a few rows back from the front—Phoebe, of all people, had arrived before us. I saw Thea to her right. Then, a few rows down, Mars and Cameron. I couldn’t spot Veda or Yejun, but I imagined they were somewhere among the crowd; it seemed that every Rotham student had come out for the gruesome spectacle. I wondered what they had done when they learned their work was gone. Which of us they blamed—our remaining four, or Caroline’s immortalized memory.
I was full of hate with nowhere to put it. St. Roche continued to spout meaningless adjectives about who Caroline had been while her mother cried and her father remained rigid, his silver hair wet with rain and the high collar of a coat brushing his jaw. I wanted to seize St. Roche and shut her up. I wanted to tell Caroline’s parents all the ways they’d driven her to this frenzied point, wanted to raise Kolesnik from the dead again and spit in his face for Caroline’s sake. I longed to hit a past version of myself for thinking our theses were worth it in the first place, to shake Finch until she had to look me in the eyes and say something, until she could no longer blame me for all the ways we had failed one another.
But I remained frozen in place. The cold climbed down into my bones. Someone began to wail, someone who wasn’t one of us or Caroline’s parents—and I thought about Caroline at the Masquerade Grotesque, disgust in her voice as she said, “ Someone’s crying ?”
By the time the crowd disbanded, it was just the four of us and the administration. St. Roche led the Asters away. I could feel eyes on me—I was afraid to look up, terrified that they might belong to the detective. Instead, I stared at the devotionals: a trove of gifts and paintings and sculptures and printed photos. It was like an installation, an art project someone had been assigned, homework left outside too long and sodden with storm.
Finch left first. Finally, Amrita turned and called for us to follow.
I wanted to go back in time. It was all I could think about. I want to go back. Give her back to me. I want her to live.
Those words, said aloud, could have been a spell. I could dig my thumbnail into that old, healed wound on my hand and rip it open again. I could bite down on my cheek until I drew blood. I could spit three times onto the promenade, tear out a hank of my hair, pluck eyelashes from their raw lids. There was possibility in ritual. The hopeless idea of forever.
But I kept my mouth shut and followed them home.
The sound of slowly ascending footsteps came later than we expected. I was on my side in Amrita’s bed with my head in her lap, terrified to be alone on the third floor again, listening to the stairs creak in frozen fear. I closed my eyes as if sightlessness might help me believe that there was no creature lurking beyond Amrita’s door, that it was just Caroline’s parents on their way to empty her room. But both ideas were almost equally terrifying.
I shifted, and Amrita stilled me with a hand on my shoulder.
“The detective said to give them space,” she whispered.
How much space could there be? I already felt as if Caroline were drifting away from us, miles between her and me. But maybe we’d been that way since the beginning of this terrible year. Maybe we’d never had a chance.
“Do you love me?” I asked Amrita, tugging at the strings of her hoodie.
“Of course.”
“Will you love me forever? Even if I’m worse one day?”
Amrita smiled. “Even then.”
“Would you find me in the next life?”
Her palm was hot against my scalp as she leaned closer. “Anywhere,” she said. “Anytime.”
I could smell her shampoo and her toothpaste. A gold bracelet slid down her brown wrist. There was a cut on her thumb—a spot where she had nicked herself at some forgotten point, likely with her X-Acto. It was a wonder to see that mar and know that it would heal. That a wound could be a wound.
“Go to sleep,” she murmured. “I’ll still be here when you wake up.”
She brushed that hand over my hair again, soothing me.
“I miss her,” I said finally, and I felt her startle; she was probably thinking I’d fallen asleep.
I waited. But Amrita didn’t say anything. The only sounds were the floor shifting over our heads as the Asters carted the remnants of Caroline away from us, and Amrita’s low, ragged inhale as she tried her hardest not to cry.