Ellsbeth
“Sorry,” Oscar said as soon as they settled into their seats. “This place got amazing reviews. I didn’t expect it to be so loud.”
“I’ve been trying to build up the courage to talk to you,” Oscar had confessed over oat milk flat whites.
“But I didn’t want to be that creepy guy who bothers a girl on her run, you know?
Like, call campus security or whatever. A girl is allowed to work out in public without a guy making it all about him. ”
“So,” Oscar said, elbows perched on the table, gnawing on the toothpick that came in his drink, “what made you want to study arcane mechanicals?”
When the ritual had worked, the sensation had been like nothing she had ever experienced, nothing she could have prepared herself for.
How much of the lightheaded thrill had been due to the success itself, her pride at getting firsthand evidence that her research and her instincts had led to this, a miracle of the arcane, in a single weekend?
How much had been the effect of the ritual itself, the strange strangle on her nervous system paralyzing her limbs and leaving her muscles numb and heavy?
And how much had been Professor Rawlins standing so close to her that she could smell his aftershave, see the texture on his skin, his long almost feminine eyelashes, and the way he was clenching his jaw?
I want to sleep with my professor. She was embarrassed even as she thought it.
It was a cliché out of tawdry pornography, evoking too-short tartan skirts and too-tight button-down blouses over ample breasts.
It was wrong, it was regressive, it was dangerous, and it was impossible: Professor Rawlins was not the type to risk his professional career for a brief dalliance, and even if he was, Ellsbeth was certain there was a younger, lither, glossier student that would have a hold on his attention.
And then there was the ritual itself, the tingling warmth that had come when he had been standing before her while her hands were bound.
It was just a test, it was arcane mechanicals, there was nothing kinky about it.
And yet in that moment, she understood why fuzzy handcuffs were a mainstay of cheap motel ephemera—what a rush to imagine that she could be standing there, helpless and bound, while someone like him wanted her.
He had felt it, too. She knew he had. But it was impossible to talk about without incriminating them both, without risking the future of her thesis.
My thesis that now has a functional ritual.
She was so close to getting everything she needed.
She had already unlocked writ magic. It would only be a matter of time before she would have the tools to get at the truth of what had happened to Bertie.
“Oh,” Ellsbeth said after too long a pause.
“It’s sort of the only thing I ever loved.
It’s like…physics, if you added poetry. Arcane mechanicals has rules, like science, but it’s sort of closer to cooking, if that makes sense.
No matter how much you learn, there are still mysteries that you’ll never fully be able to understand.
There are infinite factors that can affect a ritual.
I think that’s why I like it. With most science, the goal is finding a concrete answer.
With the arcane, you’re always looking for new questions. ”
“Wow,” Oscar laughed. “That’s a really good answer. When people ask me why I want to be a doctor, I say it’s because I passed orgo and it seemed like a good way to help people.”
“Well, it is,” Ellsbeth said. “The problem with arcane mechanicals is it’s a pretty…dusty, isolated field these days. Being a doctor, you know you’re actually doing good in the world. Making people’s lives better.”
“I guess,” Oscar said. “Although I’m not looking forward to my loans coming due when med school is over.”
“Do you know what kind of doctor you want to be?”
“I still have time to decide, obviously, but I think pediatric oncology.”
“Oh, my god,” Ellsbeth said just as their salads arrived. “So you’re a saint. You’re, like, actually just a very good person.”
“No, god no,” Oscar said. “I just want to do my best to help people through tough times.”
“Do you foster amputee kittens, too? Volunteer at soup kitchens?”
“Well, yes to the soup kitchen, actually, but it’s a program through the medical school. You should come sometime! We all go to the big church downtown on Saturdays. It’s fun.”
Ellsbeth fake-tutted. “But no kitten fostering. That’s strike one, Oscar.”
“I’m allergic.”
“And that’s strike two.”
Oscar smiled, but Ellsbeth wasn’t sure if it was because he was nervous or because he understood her sarcasm.
The conversation wasn’t difficult—they chatted about the television show everyone was watching, and the movies coming out this summer they were looking forward to—but Ellsbeth found herself feeling as though she was playing a part, reciting lines in the role of “polite, winsome date.” Did he feel it, too, the artifice in the way they said phrases like, “It’s going to be nice on campus once the weather becomes a little cooler”?
It was more than just tentative first-date banter; it was like they were aliens in an improv scene pretending to be normal human beings.
Or maybe Ellsbeth was the alien, only able to relate to this perfectly nice, normal boy through a pane of glass.
Maybe, Ellsbeth thought, some people are just content.
Able to exist frictionlessly in a world that makes sense, cheerfully building a life one socially acceptable brick at a time.
Oscar parked his car outside her apartment to walk Ellsbeth to her door. “This was really nice,” he said when they reached her stoop, slumping his shoulders to shield her from the wind. “I’m glad we did this.”
“Me too,” she said.
“Hey, maybe we could do it again sometime,” Oscar said. “Catch a movie or something.”
“Yeah, for sure,” Ellsbeth said before she could think about the words.
“Definitely before I leave for Thanksgiving. I’m going back a few days early. My family always does a Turkey Trot the morning of. It’s a whole thing.”
“That’s almost cartoonishly adorable.”
“You should come to New Hampshire!” Oscar said. “I mean, obviously not this year, that’s weird, we just went out. But if you wanted. My parents would be thrilled to have someone to weigh in on the pumpkin-versus-cherry-pie debate. It’s been a dead heat for years.”
“That’s really, really nice,” she said. “But I’m going to be in the throes of working on my thesis, so I’m just going to stay on campus. Bring some pie back for me.”
Oscar cleared his throat and shimmied a hand into the pocket of his pants.
He gazed at her, thoughtfully, through eyelashes so pale they were almost translucent.
“I really want to kiss you right now,” he said, and all Ellsbeth could think at that moment was Why?
And perhaps an even harder question: Why don’t I want to kiss him?
Ellsbeth could see herself through his eyes, how he must see her: a Newlyn graduate student who wears cardigans, the type of girl you can take to microbreweries and picnics before introducing her to his bread-with-the-crust-on New Hampshire family.
But that wasn’t who she was. She could play the part—maybe for years.
She could be a girlfriend, a fiancée, even a wife eventually.
She could see a frictionless future play in which she became the thing that Oscar imagined her to be, in which his sheer normalcy communicated something to the world about her because she existed in his orbit: She was chosen by him, and so she was normal, too.
Not the broken girl whose sister had died, who had seen it in a ritual, who had spent the previous night with her hand between her legs under her duvet imagining her professor tying her hands behind her back.
Oscar leaned in to kiss her then, a kiss somehow both wet and with no tongue at all. It felt like nothing, a purely mechanical exercise, almost scientific. Interesting, Ellsbeth thought. She pulled away. “You are a great guy,” she said. “I just think maybe I see you more as a friend.”
Oscar rolled his eyes. “I have friends,” he scoffed, wiping his lip with the back of his hand. It was the first time all night a sharpness had crept into his tone. “But yeah, sure. Fine.”
They had split the dinner bill after all, but Ellsbeth still thanked him anyway before she turned the key in her lock, and listened to his car rev and drive down the street.
If Bertie were here, she would have thought Ellsbeth was crazy.
“You went out with a cute future doctor who actually liked you and rejected him…why?” The urge to call Bertie was so strong it felt like a compulsion, and Ellsbeth found that she had pulled out her phone and opened it to where her sister’s name still lingered on her short Favorite Contacts list. Right after Bertie had died, Ellsbeth called the number habitually, almost ritualistically.
Bertie had not recorded an outgoing message, it was just mechanical instructions to leave a message at the tone, but still, Ellsbeth called and called again.
Sometimes she left a message, pretending her sister was still alive, and that she would be listening to Ellsbeth’s complaints about grad school applications or landlords who wouldn’t fix leaky sinks.
Sometimes Ellsbeth hung up as soon as the ringing stopped.
She dreaded the thought that one day the phone line would be disconnected, or the number would be given to a stranger, and gradually the habit stopped, around the time Ellsbeth stopped instinctually expecting Bertie to pick up.