129. Lily
LILY
It was all happening too fast. She was spending too much time in meetings, in classrooms for lessons she didn’t need, and not enough time outside in the sun, on the quad, in the orchard.
Classes ended; finals and festivities began.
Seb and Tori turned in their mundane theses, and their magical ones.
Asher, who was presenting his combined thesis at the Midsummer Revue, had locked himself in Sibelius, day and night.
Lily had brought him lunch one afternoon and found him dead asleep in a nest of cables and computers, pedals and projectors.
An envelope came for Seb, and the three of them met him on the quad, peering over his shoulder as he ripped it open with shaking hands, even though it was absurdly large to be anything but an acceptance.
When he cried, Lily was pretty sure it was relief.
When she cried, it was something very different.
She gave him a quick peck of congratulations, summoning enthusiasm, before sprinting away, claiming a meeting.
She didn’t stop running until she got to the woods and hunkered down in the hollow of her favorite tree.
Clutching her knees, she sobbed as the knife twisted, fishing around in her guts for all her most sensitive tissue.
It was all so terribly real, so terribly surreal.
Sebastian loved her, but he wasn’t going to die with her.
He was going to Oxford, and he was going to be brilliant.
He was going to get the fresh start that he’d craved since last summer.
He would be able to just be himself—sensitive, smart, so much softer than anyone knew—and they would throw themselves at his feet.
She was going to meetings, in large part to plan for her death, though no one said it aloud, to make sure everything would be sorted, and her mother would be comfortable and taken care of.
Seb was making plans for his future. She knew he would start looking for flats right away.
The more romantically shabby the better.
Lily was so, so angry. She vacillated wildly between emotions moment to moment, swinging from joy to rage as she laugh-snorted at something Tori said and then remembered this might be one of the last times she got to.
She stood up, the bitterness pouring off her in thick black waves that even she could see.
You’re cursed, you’re cursed, you’re cursed.
Around her the air shimmered like a mirage. Ferns and fronds started curling back on themselves, shrinking from invisible fire. Songbirds went silent.
“Lily?”
She jerked. Chant stood not far from her, on one of the poorly maintained trails that wound through the woods on the other side of the river.
She didn’t recognize him for a moment without his glasses, in a technical tank top with reflective stripes, and running shoes in a truly alarming shade of neon green. All the anger sucked back inside her.
“P-professor?”
She blinked, her cheeks flaming, as Chant quickly leapt over a fallen log and then nimbly crossed the stream.
“I know this land is technically yours, but I must caution you against burning it down,” he said lightly.
He sighed as he took in her splotchy face, her trembling fists. Her bangs were stuck to her forehead, and there was leaf matter on the back of her T-shirt.
“I didn’t know you run,” she said stupidly.
“Running is putting it strongly,” he corrected. “I sometimes jog, and with great vitriol.” His smart watch beeped at him, and he slapped it quiet.
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Needs must. Aging gracefully, and all that.”
She opened her mouth to say he was aging fine and closed it.
“I would ask why you’re trying to burn down the woods, but I can think of a few good reasons.”
She was quiet for a moment, listening to the breeze rustle through the trees. “Seb got into Oxford.”
“I heard.”
Lily’s voice choked out of her. “He’s going to Oxford, and he’s going to meet someone, and he’s going to live this whole life and eventually he’ll forget about me and—” The tears strangled her voice. She was so fucking sick of crying.
“Oh, Lily, no.”
He placed his hand on her shoulder, and she was too crushed by it all to care that he was her professor, and that he was sweaty, and that this was terribly inappropriate, but she collapsed toward him, burying her head in his chest, as he patted her back.
“It’s not going to be like that,” Chant said fiercely, sounding a little choked up himself.
“How do you know?” It came out nearly unintelligible through the snot, and it took Chant a little while to decipher it.
He guided her to sitting back against the tree, as she blew her nose in the hem of her T-shirt.
“Because I’ve gotten to know both of you very well this year—mostly against my will—and if you think that Sebastian is going to just…move on and forget about you any time, any year soon, you’re much less intelligent than I gave you credit for.”
He said it to make her laugh, and it worked.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she sniffed. “That he’ll be miserable? I don’t want him to be miserable.”
“I know. I know.” He sighed and rubbed a circle on her back as she hunched over. “You’ve both changed, but he’s…”
“Sea change,” she said, remembering The Tempest.
“Yes.” Chant laughed. “That. He’ll be alright.”
“How are you so certain?”
He gave her a curious look then. “Have you looked at his paper? The one I asked you to write?”
Lily grimaced. She hadn’t turned hers in yet. She’d been staring at a blank page for a week.
“He wrote me a novel, Lily. Well,” he corrected. “More of a novella. Over a hundred pages. About what he’s learned. About alchemy, about living, from you.”
She stared. A hundred pages? She could barely comprehend writing the fifteen she was required for the psych final that she didn’t have to take. She added that to what he’d already written for his theses. Both of them were overlong already.
“An Opus,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he agreed. “An Opus. Perhaps you should ask him if you can read it.”