Chapter 2
TWO
GWENNA
For the rest of the morning, I hide.
No lunch—that’d require seeing people.
No dorm—ditto.
Instead, I lay low in the library, a stone building that’s as stately as the chapel but not as dangerous , and go down to the very deepest basement level I can find—B2, way below where most people even bother to venture.
I find an alcove with a table, very much out of sight, where I can sit with my legs clasped to my chest and my forehead on my knees.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
I feel the heat of my breathing flare over my skin and think about etymology.
In Latin, the word anima means both breath and soul. Or, technically speaking, not soul precisely—not something that’s immortal and outlasts your mortal body—but life force .
The thing that separates you from being dead.
And as long as you have that, you have something.
Don’t go where you’re not invited.
Duly noted. Message received.
At ten of one, I head to my assigned classroom, a cold cell of a place in Stuart Hall, dragging my suitcase along.
Post-panic-attack, post-confrontation with a sword-carrying Greek God of a man, and without anything in my stomach, I’m hardly in an ideal state to take a test, but fortunately, that’s been the case for most of my life, and my grades have never suffered.
Possibly the only thing that hasn’t. Give Gwenna a test, and she will pass it.
Latin is fairly trivial: vocabulary, grammar questions, and a sight translation from a section of Cicero’s In Catilinam that I haven’t read before, but pick up well enough.
French is barely a problem. Calculus, a little less so, especially because I’m not allowed a calculator, but that’s a class I intend to knock out as quickly as possible, so a lower ranking would do me a favor.
All the while, I’m keenly aware I’m being watched.
The proctor they managed to find for me—presumably some TA, a hulking figure with sandy red bedhead and what appears to be a hangover—stares me down like I’m suspicious.
Yet when I turn in my sheaf of papers, he barely looks me in the eye, and that’s just as well, because by the time I’m out of there, I’m ready to collapse.
It’s around 4 p.m. and I haven’t even been to my dorm room yet.
The campus isn’t big, so it doesn’t take me long to find my assigned hall, Broceliande—a bit of a ridiculous name, but presumably some donor who wrote a check large enough to merit a nameplate.
The front door is unlocked, making my first key superfluous.
I’m on the third floor, a girls-only floor, Room 326, tucked in the back.
Some doors are propped open, snatches of study groups or music floating out, the occasional student slipping out to fill a water bottle or head to the library, but mostly quiet, stately, relaxing.
Even the promise of what is sure to be a thin plastic dorm mattress sounds like a relief.
I fit my key into the brass lock of 326 and turn, and find myself staring into a pair of honey-brown eyes in a confused expression.
“Well, hello there,” says a husky female voice .
I blink, trying to process.
“H-hi,” I stammer. Roommate, of course. College roommates. Those are things, Gwenna. BE NORMAL.
The girl staring back at me is around my age, slightly taller, with endless waves of golden blonde hair and lips held in a slight pout. She’s gorgeous and not entirely happy to see me.
“Hello,” she says again. “And you’re…”
“Gwenna?” I say like it’s a question, and feel immediately stupid. “This is my room. We’re roommates.” I look down at my dorm assignment, at the name I had not really bothered to register before. “You’re Morgan.”
She blinks, tips her head. “I know who I am. I’m just wondering…” She chews her lip and casts around the room.
So do I, for the first time.
It’s bigger than I had been anticipating, with arched windows that let in plenty of light and a glimpse of the quad, a small ensuite bathroom, and a set of furniture—bed, desk—neatly tucked on either side.
Except that one bed is absolutely covered in…
stuff : clothes, books, makeup, apparatuses, and all sorts of decorative trinkets I can’t even place—vases, dried flowers, long strings of beads, scarves.
The other bed—Morgan’s bed, presumably—is outfitted with plush purple and pink bedding.
A moon-shaped lamp hangs above it, suspended from something that I can’t see, and glowing almost like the actual moon itself.
She taps her chin. “There’s been some confusion over rooming here at Shiz,” she murmurs.
“What?” Oh God, is she a musical theater person? I don’t think I’ll survive that. “Were you assigned a single?”
“No.” She shrugs. “I saw there was a name, but you didn’t show up for three weeks, so…” She gestures airily at what I now know to be my bed, covered in her things. “I just took over. I thought I had lucked out and maybe you, I don’t know, transferred or joined a cult or something. Ha. ”
I clutch the handle of my suitcase a little, and as if she notices, Morgan peers around me like she’s expecting there to be more stuff.
“I’m sorry. I’m so rude. Morgan. Le Fay.” She extends a hand with extraordinarily long fingernails painted a deep, almost blood-colored purple. “A pleasure to meet you.”
“Gwenna,” I say.
“I’ll get…all this out of your way,” she says, although not without a hint of reluctance in her voice. I want to apologize, even though it’s not my fault. She did see that I was on her registration. She shouldn’t have expected a room to herself.
But then again, I guess someone not showing up for three weeks does sort of imply that they’re…not going to show up. And while I hate to judge based on appearances, Morgan does look like the sort of person who’s used to getting her own way.
Great.
She unceremoniously arm-sweeps the pile of things into an empty laundry basket and kick-pushes it into the corner of the room.
“Deal with that later,” she says, tossing her hair. “So, what are you studying?”
Same thing as everyone? I think. “First-year stuff,” I say.
Morgan gives a light snort. “Sure,” she says, “but eventually you want to study…?”
This is awfully interrogatory for get-to-know-your-roommate chatter. I let go of my suitcase, still standing in the doorway.
“Twelfth-century French religious writings,” I say, “with an emphasis on the Cathar heresy and the religious experiences of women.”
It’s good to practice saying it out loud like it’s something normal, and here at Caliburn, it’s at least more normal than anywhere else. I have no idea what Morgan will make of it, but to my surprise, she nods approvingly .
“Fascinating,” she says, and sounds like she means it. “I’m studying Renaissance demonology myself, some Italian folk magic, that sort of thing.” She flicks her fingers through the air. “I imagine we’ll be in a lot of classes together.”
I can’t tell from her tone if that’s a good or a bad thing, and I really just want to lie down, which seems like a fading possibility the more we talk. I push my suitcase toward my bed, stupidly not sure if I should start unpacking or make more conversation.
But it doesn’t matter, because we’re interrupted.
“Morgan, I need to?—”
The door swings open, and I find myself staring into the same golden-brown eyes.
“To learn to knock?” Morgan finishes for him, tilting her head.
“I did knock,” he mumbles, eyes still fixed on me.
“Knocking as you open the door is not the same thing. It’s like signaling when you’re halfway into a merge on the highway.” Morgan flops into her chair and eyes him. “What do you want?”
He straightens his shoulders, which almost span the entire door frame. I decide now is a great time to deal with my suitcase and conveniently not engage with him or her.
“Just…ah, you know,” I hear him say hesitantly as I drag my suitcase to the foot of my bed. “Coming by to pick up?—”
“Right, right, right,” Morgan says. She puts a hand in the air to silence him and rummages around on her desk with the other one, opening a series of tiny drawers and flicking through various boxes until she locates what she’s looking for—a small drawstring pouch, which she cocks back like a missile. “Think fast.”
She throws it, and he snatches it from the air without even blinking.
I let out an inadvertent grunt, tugging on the handle of the suitcase and realizing the literal lift it will be to get it onto this bed. It maybe was ridiculous to try and cram my entire life in here .
But then again, my entire life isn’t much. It’s just heavy.
“Pay me whenever,” she says. “You always do.”
“I…” He clears his throat, visibly uncomfortable that I’m still here. “Thank you,” he intones.
I focus all of my concentration on not eavesdropping, or at least not looking like I’m eavesdropping, because it’s clear to me that my new roommate may be the campus weed dealer and may have some kind of situationship with this unfriendly, sword-wielding, six-foot-five golden boy who wants me anywhere but near him.
The perfect storm of a roommate match. If she snores, I’ll have a full bingo card and a miserable first semester.
No. No. Not thinking like that. Everything’s going to be fine.
I tug at the suitcase one more time and manage to get it halfway onto the mattress before a corner slips off the bed. It lurches for the floor, and I lurch with it, but it doesn’t hit.
Not because I catch it.
Because he does.
With one arm.
Wordless, he hoists it the rest of the way to the bed and lies it perfectly flat on the mattress. Like it weighs nothing. Like it should not have been any kind of struggle, even though his arms are twice as thick as mine and his hands could fit around my waist.
“Thank you,” I mutter. His response is to nod, and jerk his hand away swiftly and precisely, like he’ll get an acid burn if he brushes my skin.
I get it, okay? No need to be theatrical.
“Well,” Morgan says, winding a strand of hair around her finger. “I’d love to chat,” she says in a tone that implies she’d love to do anything but, “but my new roommate here needs to get settled, so… ”
“Of course.” He clasps his hands at the small of his back and nods again. “Thank you.”
The door clicks briskly, and his footsteps echo behind it.
I blink at my suitcase, at my roommate, at how for the last few minutes, the utter confusion of who these people are and what they’re doing has successfully distracted me from thinking about myself.
Morgan continues twisting her hair, staring up at the ceiling and humming something.
“That’s Kingston,” she says. “And yes, he absolutely has a stick up his ass. But he won’t be around much.”
“Oh,” I respond. I didn’t ask, but okay. No mention of whatever was in the drawstring bag. Fair—she doesn’t know if I’m a narc.
And…
Goddammit. And, now that she’s broken the seal, I have to ask. I’m itchy with not knowing, to the point where I’m willing to make thrice as much conversation as I ordinarily would.
“And Kingston is your…”
What she says next is not what I’m expecting.
“Stepbrother.”
“ Oh .” I don’t mean to react or sound so surprised. I tug down the sleeves of my cardigan. “That’s—I didn’t?—”
“Didn’t what?” Her gaze whips around to me, as if she can swivel her head like an owl.
“Didn’t…anything. Nothing.” Like it’s my fault the term is…rhetorically loaded? Besides, I was not imagining that hair flip. I may be dead inside, but I can still recognize the movements of a girl being flirty.
“Well, whatever you’re not thinking, stop thinking it.” Her voice is eerily cool and even as she studies her nails, then flicks her eyes back up to me. “Although, for your information, King’s like a monk, anyway. ”
I didn’t ask. But I nod.
Morgan, though, is not done. She’s considering. Gears turning. When she speaks again, her words are like spiked honey: sweetness concealing the burn of arsenic.
“I certainly hope this isn’t going to be the kind of situation where we need ground rules, roomie .” She laces the final word with an expert dose of passive aggression, her pouting lips curling into a slow, measured smile. “Will it?”
Fuck. I don’t want to be doing this. I want to be under my weighted blanket, listening to binaural beats and Hildegard von Bingen music and dissociating myself to sleep.
I want to be brewing tea and wrapping myself in a scarf and heading to the library so I can enjoy every luscious aspect of this college and its campus, finally.
I want to be focusing, regrouping, armoring up for the battle for normalcy that will be this semester.
But I guess the battle’s started. With a sneak attack, here on home turf.
So I exhale hard. Wave the white flag.
I surrender to normalcy. Please don’t hate me. Please let me be.
“No,” I say, and I mean it.
Morgan’s mouth curves, but there’s no smile in her voice. “Good.”