Ellsbeth
On some level, she couldn’t blame him for pulling away after the disaster back in his office.
It was a miracle, really, that she had still had the compounding clay in her backpack.
She had frozen the moment she saw Mary-Abigail pale as a ghost in the doorway, but when the wash of adrenaline allowed her to move again, she had sprung into action.
Mary-Abigail didn’t stop walking. In fact, she slightly hastened her pace.
With nothing pressing academically, she could focus all of her attention on investigating Banestooth, something that had the added benefit of distracting her from Rawlins.
“I am a member. It’s one of those for-life things.”
“Sure.”
“And yeah,” Curt said. “I don’t see why not. I’m not meeting with Gallway about my thesis until three.”
Curt walked fast. Ellsbeth followed close as he led the two of them across campus to an espresso bar that Ellsbeth expressly avoided because they charged eight dollars for a latte that tasted like stomach acid, and their only pastries were expired-looking gluten-free muffins sitting behind smudged glass.
Curt ordered a double shot. Ellsbeth ordered a single and paid for both of them.
“Congrats on winning the Taylor Prize, by the way,” she said as they sat down.
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, that. The money is nice but getting the prize itself feels like luck of the draw. You know how those things are.”
“I doubt that,” Ellsbeth said. “Your energy amplification stuff is supposed to be amazing.”
Curt brushed her off with his hand and took another sip of espresso. “So,” he said, “why the interest in Banestooth?”
“Well, my apartment is also on Governor, down the street,” Ellsbeth said.
Curt’s eyes drifted behind her, and she scrambled to find a halfway-convincing lie.
“And I was thinking of trying to write an article about the benefits of community when it comes to the mental health of young adults. Is there any chance I could…tour the place? Talk to some current or former members?”
Curt took a slurping sip of his espresso. “Oh that’s going to be a no-go unfortunately.”
“I really do just want to talk. It can be off the record, or—”
“Sorry, Ellie.” No one called her Ellie. Ever. “The whole point of Banestooth is that it’s a secret society. No guests, no visitors, definitely no interviews.”
“No visitors? I see people having parties there all the time.”
“Only in the foyer. First floor. Rest of the house is strictly forbidden for non-members. Including bedrooms, which, trust me, causes some distress among the new Initiates. Every class has one dude who thinks he can get away with it. Takes a girl upstairs after a party, and then gets kicked out.”
“The girl gets kicked out?” Ellsbeth asked.
“No, the guy. Of Banestooth.”
“That’s how strict you are?”
“Oh yeah. Part of the whole cloak-and-dagger thing. It’s how we maintain an air of secrecy and discipline.
There’s, like, a classic story they tell incoming freshmen about a new Initiate trying to impress a girl by bringing her down to the basement.
They say he got them down three stairs before he was caught and kicked out and his former peers made his life so miserable that he dropped out of Newlyn altogether and transferred to a state school. ”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you like being a part of it when you were an undergrad?” Ellsbeth asked.
Curt smiled and waggled his finger. “Oh, are you trying to interview me now? Yes, I liked it. Met some of my best friends. Great social connections. All that classic junk.”
“But you’re not telling me anything else.”
“To be honest, there’s not much else to tell. It’s probably pretty close to whatever you’re imagining. But no. I’m not.” He ran his hand through his hair with absentminded confidence. “So this mental-health thing you’re doing…it’s because of your sister, right?”
“Oh,” Ellsbeth said, a little taken aback by his abruptness. “Yeah. Sort of.”
“A journal will love that. Add a little addendum to the front with a bit about how your sister killed herself and so this is so personal to you or whatever, and you’ll be able to publish it wherever you want,” Curt continued, seemingly enjoying giving Ellsbeth professional advice.
“People love tragedy porn. Just find something to make it personal. Like, talking about Banestooth is fine, but she was a girl so she was never going to be a member. You should find some way to make it about her.”
“Well, I’m not sure Newlyn has a Nora Ephron Club, but if they do, I’m sure she was a member there.”
Curt clapped his hands once and laughed. “Oh, shit, right. She was obsessed with When Harry Met Sally. She tried to get me to watch it, like, five different times.”
Ellsbeth sat up straighter. “Wait. You knew her?”
The music in the coffee shop hung between them for a beat while Curt blinked. “Oh, yeah. I met her a few times. She was sweet. Funny.”
“You said you didn’t know her. At Gracie’s party.” Ellsbeth could hear all of the warmth draining out of her voice, her tone becoming icy and robotic.
Curt didn’t seem to notice. He shrugged. “I forgot the name. And then by the time I realized who it was—well, I wasn’t just going to come up to you and be like, Hey, turns out I did hang out with your dead sister once or twice.”
Ellsbeth shifted her weight in her seat.
The coffee had left an unpleasant film on her tongue.
That Curt had known her sister, this boy in front of her, that he had met her, felt impossibly strange.
Like a dream in which your second-grade teacher meets Celine Dion.
Had Curt lied to her? Or had Bertie just been one of a number of interchangeable freshman girls to him, bright-eyed girls who showed up to Banestooth parties wearing tiny dresses and borrowed shoes, hoping to find someone to make them feel special?
“So how’s your thesis going?” Curt said. “Rawlins is your adviser, right?”
At the sound of Rawlins’s name, Ellsbeth felt the immediate and unexpected sensation of a splinter being lodged in her chest. He still hadn’t texted her, which she justified to herself as his independent streak reasserting itself as he busied himself getting ready for a conference.
But there had been something strange in his manner the last time she saw him, a hardness that she hadn’t recognized before.
If she didn’t know better, she would have thought he was angry with her, even though the change had occurred sometime overnight while she was asleep.
“Yeah,” Ellsbeth said, trying to keep her voice light. “Although I actually should get back to work on it. You’re outdoing everyone else in the department—we have to try to keep up!”
Curt gave her a little salute and turned his attention toward the attractive barista with a nose piercing and thick winged eyeliner.
If she took the most effective route from the coffee shop back to her apartment, she would crest a hill where Rawlins’s home would be visible.
But Ellsbeth stuffed her hat onto her head and instead turned back toward campus, taking a slightly longer, meandering path.
She told herself she needed time to think.
She hadn’t expected Curt to be forthcoming with any of Banestooth’s secrets, but he had revealed something essential despite himself.
He had told her that Banestooth had a basement.
She had seen the blueprint of the building in the school’s library archive search: no basement. They had hidden their true floor plan from the university, which meant there was something they were hiding. Now she just needed to get in and find whatever it was.
She had considered that she might just obscurate Curt and get him to escort her inside, but if all guests were forbidden, she would inevitably run into problems. It’s not as if she could obscurate a whole house—there was no way to obscurate beyond touching one individual at any one time.
But even if she could, the fundamental principles of what obscuration accomplished would begin to fray the more people were involved.
The brain was an incredible object, capable of filling in blank spaces in order to stitch the world into logical sense.
After an obscuration ritual, the object should never have known they were manipulated; they should believe that they made the choices they were compelled to make, and their mind would either justify it or skim over thinking about it like a deliveryman skipping a door.
But multiple people being obscurated at once could talk to one another.
Their brains would each have found a unique way of processing what happened.
And if the rule against visitors at Banestooth was that well established, Ellsbeth couldn’t imagine a scenario in which a dozen or so Banestooth members would be unable to figure out that something had happened to them if they all had the hazy memory of a girl being permitted to wander their upper floors.
Obscurating a large group might be an interesting intellectual challenge (could the ritual be transmitted through the air? Or through sound instead of touch?), but it wouldn’t help her get inside Banestooth.
She walked past the faculty center and instinctively turned to see if Rawlins was visible inside through the window.
He wasn’t. She wished he had texted, just so that she would have been able to text him about her idea for the academic possibility of group obscuration.
It was exactly the type of esoteric, ultimately meaningless conversation he would have loved, and she could imagine talking about it with him, half naked, her hand roaming through his hair so vividly it was almost a memory.
He would get excited at some point and jump up, wearing just his boxer-briefs, to write a formula on the pad of paper he kept by his bedside or to pull a book from high on a shelf somewhere, exposing the hair under his arms as he reached.
She checked her phone again, for the third time in as many minutes. No messages.