Cruel Rite

Chapter 1 The Roll

Two hundred students cross this quad without slowing down, and I’m the only one who stops to watch a man’s hand get broken.

Everything I own is in the two bags I’m carrying and there is no address behind me to carry them back to. I stop anyway.

Not broken. Bent. There’s a difference—I priced insurance claims for a dental office for four years, and a bent hand costs less than a broken one, and I hate that this is where my brain goes first. He’s on his knees on the gravel outside a grey stone building with a tower on the corner, cradling his right hand against his chest at an angle a hand does not make on its own, and a second man is standing over him.

Not touching him. Coat on in September heat that’s already sweated through my shirt at the collar.

He says something. One sentence, maybe less—I’m too far to hear it, but I can read the shape of it in his shoulders, the way you can read weather in a sky before the first drop lands.

The kneeling man nods like he’s agreeing to a schedule and not a threat, and the standing one turns and walks back inside like he’s finished a phone call.

Nobody around them so much as breaks stride.

Gravel underfoot sounds different from the paved path I just came off—looser, louder, every footstep announcing itself—and two hundred people are walking on it at once and not one of them is announcing anything.

That’s the part I can’t get past. Not the hand.

The quiet arithmetic of everyone deciding, all at the same time, not to see it.

Two duffel bags, and nowhere to set them down.

Four shirts. A winter coat in the wrong season.

A black hardcover ledger with a rubber band around it.

My mother’s watch on my wrist, face turned inward.

That’s the whole inventory, and I know the number of items in it, and I could not raise the bus fare back to Rutland if the lease there were still in my name, which it isn’t.

My uncle bought this year for me the way you’d buy a used car you didn’t test-drive.

I’m walking onto the lot not knowing yet what I’ll owe him for the privilege.

Only that I will. Nobody in my family has ever handed me anything that didn’t come itemized eventually, and I’m standing on this gravel already owing for the standing.

So I count instead of watching the kneeling man get walked off the gravel by somebody who doesn’t touch him either. Twelve. Fifteen. I lose the number and start again. Counting is what I do with my hands when the rest of me wants to run, and my hands are full.

I price the coat next. A coat is easier than a debt. Cashmere, maybe—the drape is wrong for anything cheaper. Wrong season, worn anyway, which means either he doesn’t feel the heat or he wants people to see that he doesn’t.

That coat costs more than what’s zipped into both of my bags combined. I’ve just done that math about a stranger’s violence the same way I’d do it about a couch left out for the taking. Assess it. Place a number on it. Move on.

I catch myself doing it and I don’t stop. Stopping would mean admitting I don’t know how else to look at anything anymore.

“Don’t look—okay, you’re looking.”

The girl who says this has arrived from nowhere in the last ninety seconds, talking the whole time, and I get the impression she’d have kept talking if I’d walked into traffic.

Small, quick, a shaved undercut she’s clearly done herself, wire glasses pushed up with a knuckle.

She’s wearing the black everyone else on this quad is wearing except hers is under a hoodie that has definitely never been ironed.

“That’s Corvane,” she says, in the exact tone you’d use to say it might rain later. “Don’t stare, he’ll clock it. He’s already clocking it.”

I look anyway.

Across the whole width of the quad, past the kneeling man being helped up by someone quieter than a friend, the one in the coat has stopped in the doorway. He isn’t looking at the man he just finished with.

He’s looking at me.

One full second. Maybe two. Longer than a stranger holds a stranger’s eyes on a crowded quad for any reason that isn’t deliberate. My chest does something small and involuntary and I don’t examine it. Then he goes inside.

I make myself stop feeling it before I’ve finished feeling it.

“I’m Junie,” the girl says, sticking out a hand I don’t have a free one for.

“Marsh. Room 214, Wren House, which is where you’re headed if you’re the transfer they told me about, and you are, aren’t you, because nobody else arrives carrying their whole life like that. ” She doesn’t wait for confirmation.

“Adjusted,” I say, because that’s the word forming in my head, and I want to hear if she’ll take it back.

She doesn’t. “It’s a word,” she says, unbothered, and takes the strap of my heavier bag before I can stop her, and starts walking, and I have no choice but to follow her across the exact gravel where a debt was just collected in broad daylight in front of a captive audience that didn’t consider it worth watching.

Wren House smells like radiator dust and somebody’s drugstore shampoo three doors down, and the room is smaller than the one I had in Rutland, but it has two beds, two desks, and a window that opens four inches, which I check before I do anything else, because knowing your exits is free.

There’s a whiteboard on the door with somebody else’s handwriting still ghosted under a bad eraser job, and string lights looped over a curtain rod nobody bothered to take down.

I put my mother’s watch on the desk, face turned inward, and then pick it up again because the desk isn’t mine yet, not really, and strap it back on my wrist.

Junie is still talking. She’s been talking since the quad, and I’ve stopped trying to keep up in real time and started sorting it into a file instead, the way I’d sort receipts—a habit older than this campus, older than this state.

“Okay, quick version, because you’re going to hear it wrong from six different people otherwise and I’d rather you heard it wrong from me first. Four houses.

Corvane, that’s the one you saw on the steps—Italian, oldest money on the headland, meanest, and they know it.

Ashgrove’s the Russians, up at Kholm House on the north edge, newest of the four by about seventy years and everybody makes sure they never forget it.

Sable Cross is the Irish, down at Saint Bride’s by the chapel.

And Meridian’s the money people—banks, lawyers, the ones who actually move it instead of just having it.

That’s mine, for what it’s worth. They took me for what I can do with a spreadsheet, not for who my dad is.

My dad drives a delivery route in Baltimore and has never once been north of Providence.

” She says this like it’s funny, and I think it probably is, to her.

“Everybody here’s somebody’s kid except me.

You’ll figure out fast who’s whose. It’s basically the only class you actually need to pass. ”

I unpack my two bags onto a shelf that has clearly been used by six other people who left string lights and a whiteboard behind, and I price the room while I do it—the mattress, thin; the desk, real wood, older than the building probably, worth more than anything else in it; the four inches of window, worth exactly what it lets in, which right now is heat and the smell of cut grass and, faintly, somebody’s speaker three rooms down.

My mother’s coat comes out first, before anything else, wrong season, packed anyway, and I hang it at the front of the closet and run my thumb the length of the reseamed lining, flat, once, unhurried, without thinking about why I’m doing it or what it is I’m checking for.

“—and here’s the thing nobody tells you,” Junie’s saying, from somewhere behind me, cross-legged on her own bed now, chewing the cap off a pen she’ll lose by Thursday, “is that it’s not, like, secret.

Everybody knows. It’s on the tour, basically.

It’s just that the college’s whole personality is pretending the tour didn’t happen. ”

“What happens,” I say, not turning around, “to a Corvane pledge who doesn’t pay what he owes.”

She doesn’t even blink at the specificity of it, and that’s worse than if she had.

“That,” she says, cheerfully, pointing vaguely toward the window, toward the quad beyond it, “is what happens. That was probably a payment plan, honestly. If it was serious they wouldn’t have done it where people could see. ”

That’s the part that sits wrong in me. Not that it happened. That it happened where two hundred people could watch and not one of them slowed down, because slowing down would have been the strange thing to do.

I finish hanging the coat, cross to the door with my folder of registration paperwork under my arm, and then—for no reason I could put into a sentence if you asked me—I go back and touch the lining again.

Same thumb, same length, same pressure. I don’t think a word while I do it.

I just do it, the way you check a stove is off twice even after you’ve checked it once, and then I leave for the registrar’s office before Junie can start a new sentence.

The registrar’s office is two rooms off the entrance hall of the administration building, with a counter, a wooden bench worn shiny down the middle, and a clock that’s the only thing making noise in the building.

I sit on the bench for four minutes before anyone calls me up, and I spend them doing the thing I always do while I wait—pricing the room.

The counter’s oak, old, the varnish worn through in a strip where two centuries of forearms have rested on it.

The clock is older than the counter. Nothing in this room was bought in my lifetime.

The clerk behind the counter is maybe sixty, unhurried, reading glasses on a cord, and he doesn’t look at me the way the man in the coat did. He looks at me the way you look at a form.

“Ferrante,” he says, checking a list, and slides a single sheet across the counter before I’ve said a word. A pen is already sitting on top of it, uncapped, angled toward me like he set it there for someone else and forgot to take it back.

I start reading before I pick it up.

It’s not what I expected. I expected housing, meal plan, the usual first-week nothing.

What’s on the page is a balance. A figure. A name—my name, Ferrante, entered under an account I’ve never seen and never opened, dated as of today.

My hands go cold. Actually cold, fingertips first, the way they did exactly one other time in my life. I read it again, out loud this time, low, because that’s what I do when I’m frightened and need to hear the words land the way they’re supposed to land.

They land the same way twice.

I run it anyway, because running it is the only thing I know how to do with a number.

Against the checking account, which earned four dollars of interest last year and I remember the four dollars.

Against the envelope in the back cover of the ledger.

Against the folded bills in the toe of a boot in the bag I haven’t unpacked yet.

Three places. I know all three totals without going to look, the way other people know their own phone number, and there is no order I can put them in that gets within shouting distance of the figure on this page.

“This isn’t right,” I say. “This isn’t—I didn’t sign anything. I don’t know what this is.”

“It’s the roll entry,” the clerk says, reaching for the next folder in his stack without looking up. “Acknowledgment of balance. Standard for anyone with a family account on file.”

“I don’t have a family account.”

“You do now.” He says it the way he’d say it’s Tuesday.

I don’t sign it. I set the pen back down where I found it and push the sheet an inch across the counter, which is the only kind of no I have available to me right now, and I wait for him to tell me what happens next, because there’s always a next, there’s always a form after the form.

“Doesn’t matter if you sign it,” he says, already looking at his next piece of paper. Not cruel. Not even unkind. Just a man for whom this is a form and nothing else. “It’s already on the roll.”

He leaves the pen exactly where it is, cap off, angled toward a hand that isn’t coming for it, and goes back to his own work like the conversation ended several sentences ago from his side of the counter.

The sheet stays where I pushed it. My name across the top of it, spelled right. Today’s date beside it in his handwriting, and the figure under both.

Behind me the clock makes its one sound, and the clerk looks past my shoulder at the bench and says, “Next.”