Chapter 5 #2
Grace looked up at him, cheeks coloring under his gaze. “Yeah.” She unconsciously squared her shoulders to him, offered a small smile reserved only for someone like Max.
It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed Max’s effect on people.
All of a sudden, I felt a little like the Dani to Max’s Maya.
For the most part, I was perfectly content to sit in the background, happily typing up my notes and research, looking up calculations or referencing textbooks, while he drank the attention awarded the two of us like nectar.
After our first paper on Object Theory came out, something we’d worked on together, our peers at the conference circuit turned to him first with their questions.
And I was happy to let him talk to them, let him explain our methods, and have them all gush at his brilliance—our brilliance.
Besides, I would’ve butchered it anyway, bumbled through awkwardly, and said all the wrong things.
I’d been grateful for him, really. If not for Max, I don’t think our research would’ve gotten anywhere near the attention it did.
Still, sometimes I did wish I was more like him, bobbing happily through life, lifted by other people’s smiles instead of their bewildered looks.
I did sometimes wish that when people saw us, they would say, Look, it’s Cella and Max!
instead of Look, there’s Max! Oh hey, Cella, didn’t see you there.
I wondered if Dani had ever felt the same.
“Maya kind of did whatever Maya wanted to do, and everyone else was just along for the ride,” Grace said.
I cleared my throat. “Do you think Maya loved her?” I directed the question at Grace, but my eyes had drifted to Max.
Grace stared at her fingernails, picking at flaking remnants of peachy pink.
“To be honest, I think she took Dani for granted a little. Kissed her at parties and when she was drunk for attention and stuff. They were always breaking up and then getting back together again. I don’t know if Maya was really as comfortable as Dani with having a girlfriend.
A lot of her friends were in sororities, and I just kind of got the feeling that maybe she didn’t think they’d accept her if she was actually serious about Dani.
I don’t know. But even when Maya came in sobbing after having messed around with some jerky guy, Dani was always there.
She worshipped her. But did Maya love her back? Maya was … well, Maya was Maya.”
Her voice had begun to shake. It must have been hard to admit these things about her friend.
My heart went out to her. I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t know how.
With my luck, I was more likely to say the wrong thing and make her feel worse, so I stayed quiet.
Max was the one with the charm. I had observation.
“I think she loved her,” she said carefully, “in the only way she knew how.”
Max’s gaze met mine and held it like an anchor.
A lesson better learned sooner rather than later, I thought. Sometimes the most someone could give you wasn’t enough, and you had a choice. Make yourself small to accept that love, pretend it was all you needed, or realize you were worth far more and leave to find it.
Max typed a note on his phone. “And what about Dr. Strauss? Was there ever anything to suggest Dani and he had a relationship outside your everyday one between student and professor?”
She shook her head. “She never mentioned anything, but you can’t really ignore his reputation, can you? I wouldn’t be surprised if he tried.”
I knew of his reputation from when I was a student, of the handsome twenty-nine-year-old professor with a voracious sexual appetite.
Word was he’d slept with a large number of the staff and more than a few students.
He cut quite the controversial figure on campus.
He had a lot of supporters, was even on the council.
* And there were plenty of stories of him going above and beyond for his students, reaching out to colleagues in the field for internships or job placements, hosting networking events, finding scholarships and grants for his students.
But he had his critics, too. There were rumors that he engaged in sex Magic (which I had strong doubts even existed), that his preferred spot for trysts was right there in his office.
I’d even heard that he could get broody and morose, that if you rejected his advances, he’d fail you.
But rumors had a tendency to run wild in a place like this, and I thought it best to not put too much stock in them.
Max appeared to think a little differently. “Yeah, I know about him alright.” He looked at me and pointedly raised his eyebrows as if making sure I was hearing this. Subtle.
“What about Maya’s objects?” I asked Grace.
We learn in Object Study that you can uncover more about a person in the three things they hold most dear than in a decade’s worth of knowing them. People had so many walls they put up, but they couldn’t hide their objects, or what those objects revealed about them.
“One was her phone, but besides that, I’m not sure even she knew. She took the Meditation 101 class,* but you know how tough that sort of stuff is. Especially for someone like Maya, always bouncing off the walls.”
We had Maya’s phone, but with her dead, it hummed dully, the last dregs of Magic fading from it even now.
“There’s this, too,” Grace said, pulling a pink bound notebook from a box next to the bed. “I just found it going through my stuff from the move. They must have packed it by mistake. It’s Maya’s.”
Max and I both perked up.
It seemed to be a planner. Inside were birthdays to remember, Maya’s parents’ anniversary. Meetings with her advisor, and different teachers, Lisa’s 21st!!!!, Homecoming. Then, two days before her death, there was a note:
Mtg with RO. LAST TIME.
“Last time” was underlined three times.
I flipped through the pages, going back several months. There were maybe four or five entries involving RO: Coffee with RO, Drinks with RO. And, once, Dinner with RO.
“Who’s RO?” I asked Grace.
Grace lifted an eyebrow, confused. “No idea.”
“I see,” he said. “Thank you, Grace. This has been really helpful.”
“I hope you …” Her mouth twisted, fingers knotting together. “I hope you find out who did this.”
Afterward, Max and I went to the vending machine in the courtyard behind Ludlow House. He shook up a bag of gummy worms and offered it to me.
“What do you make of all this?” Max asked. “Not exactly something that falls in our usual purview, murder investigation and all.”
I took a handful of worms for myself, but it wasn’t the candy going sour in my mouth. I looked again at the single photo of Dani on Maya’s page. Together for two years, and that was all she got.
“All these people at this school, and not a single one of them liked her, except for the girl she killed. They’re all ready to burn her at the stake, and they didn’t even know her.”
“You can hardly blame them,” he said, throwing a handful of candies into his mouth. “She killed their friend.”
“Yeah, but none of them are even giving her the benefit of the doubt. They’re not even stopping for a second to think maybe none of this was her fault. Especially if she was hexed.”
Maya had been robbed of the rest of her life, and that was a wrong and terrible thing.
But no one we spoke to spared a shred of sympathy for Danica.
I just couldn’t stop thinking that if Maya was alive, she’d want people to help the girl she loved.
Try to figure out where it all went wrong in the first place.
“Or maybe you’re ignoring the possibility that she did kill Maya in cold blood,” Max said quietly.
I whipped my head up. A sheen of sweat covered his throat. “You can’t honestly believe that.”
His eyebrow lifted. “Can’t I?”
“Please tell me your explanation, then, for why she’s speaking in tongues and scaring the crap out of Maritza.”
As I looked at him, his sea-blue eyes burrowing into mine, the realization dropped like a stone in my stomach.
“You think it’s an act?”
“I think that if I killed my girlfriend on a college campus and I didn’t want to go to jail, I’d think of something fast. And that something might be to pretend it wasn’t me who did it at all.”
I thought back to Grace’s words. She had us all fooled.
But then there was Dani. Her blond hair, limp around her face. Her eyes, so unnaturally dark. And the feeling in that room, like sinking thirty feet underwater. “You didn’t see her, Max. You didn’t feel the energy in that room. I mean, they called a priest.”
I shook my head. “You can’t fake that. She’s not acting of her own free will. Someone did this to her.”
We sat on a concrete bench beneath a mesquite tree, and sunlight filtered onto my hand through the fernlike leaves. A warm wind blew from over the canyon, swirling up red dirt into a miniature dust devil.
The inescapable smell of burning rubber crept under my nose. Everywhere I looked I saw the polka-dotted bra, the pink fingernails tapping on a phone, and every time I closed my eyes, I heard her screams. I shut my eyes tight, forcing the memory down.
Max looked at me. “Then who? And what kind of spell could do something like that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Hexes are tricky. Difficult to pull off, difficult to keep someone hexed for that long. Whoever it is, whatever it is, is powerful.”
He looked down at his phone. “I say we talk to this advisor of hers, Dr. Strauss. Six of her eight classes were with him. Maybe he knows if someone had a problem with her. Maybe someone was harassing her?”
“Good a place as any.”