Chapter 1 #2
Lucy smoothed the poster. Rollins had looked idyllic in the brochures, of course: hiking trails full of steep hills and clear waterfalls, lush gothic architecture, gushing testimonials from the student population of ambitious misfits.
But it was the moment she saw it as a cold, impersonal dot on Google Maps that made her realize it was where she was meant to be.
It wasn’t as far as she could get from Jacksonville, distance-wise.
But it was far from civilization. As far as she could imagine from the life she’d lived until then.
That isolation didn’t suit everyone, though.
She knew, from all her late nights reading everything she could find about the school, that the first-year dropout rate was unusually high.
The student newspaper frequently published lengthy interviews with the campus mental health team, or homesickness-busting tips.
Even the very bus shelter she was standing in had at least two posters reminding her to practice mindfulness.
Lucy’s hand lingered on the missing poster for a moment.
Her grandmother had always taught her to imagine stress like the pressure gauges they sold at their family’s hardware store: You equalize, or you explode.
Little escapes, she’d said. That’s the key.
You’ve gotta come up for air every so often, or you drown.
So she was great at little escapes. Long sprawls under the stars.
Dancing at clubs that had been lenient with her fake ID.
Stick-and-poke asterisk tattoos with dubious symbolic significance.
It was a fine-tuned equation. Take on pressure, let off steam.
Find an equilibrium until the bigger release could come.
Poor Sadie. Rollins was Lucy’s goal. Her big release.
If Sadie hadn’t wanted to be there—Lucy could only imagine how claustrophobic the sprawling campus could become.
It was difficult, under the poster’s crinkled stare, to imagine anything but the worst. But hopefully Sadie just needed a little escape of her own.
Hopefully she’d reach out when she was ready.
The campus shuttle rumbled up to the shelter. Lucy checked her destination one last time before she climbed aboard, and Sadie’s black-and-white face whipped out of view as the bus pulled out into the loop road.
Falls Quad was a cluster of junior and senior dorms along the opposite edge of campus.
Lucy had her phone out to check the suite number as she stepped onto the wet grass.
Though, as it turned out, she didn’t need to.
A few feet away, there were people spilling through an open door into the quad, laughing almost too hard to stand up straight.
Behind them, the heavy bass beats of “Tainted Love” thumped like a heart.
It was extremely clear where the party was.
And if it hadn’t been, the sign out front reading ALL ARE WELCOME! GET IN HERE!! would have given it away.
As Lucy crossed the lawn, she could see curtains fluttering in the other dorms. She couldn’t tell if the eyes beyond were curious or glaring, but either way, she waved sheepishly and kept walking.
She grew up in a tightly packed housing complex.
She’d been the one glaring on the other side of the window her fair share of times.
She sidled around a group in the doorway. They barely shifted to let her pass—a curtain of body heat closed around her as she disappeared into the suite.
The way ahead was lit by two rotating globe lanterns with aqua light and star-shaped cutouts, and the galaxies spun across the walls as Lucy made her way deeper. The swirls of light glanced across dancing figures, the effect twisting the room like curtains in a gale.
Lucy didn’t notice that one of those figures had broken away to bound toward her until there was an arm slung around the back of her neck.
“There’s my girl!” someone hollered in her ear. “Ready to start your Rollins life off right?”
Lucy huffed a startled laugh, and staggered around to face junior Natalie Baker, the party’s host. She was beaming at her like they’d known each other for years, instead of for roughly thirty cumulative minutes.
Though Lucy could already tell that that was probably just how Natalie was with everyone.
She’d first crossed paths with Natalie the day before, when Natalie gave Lucy’s orientation group a library tour.
They’d only exchanged a few words then, but Lucy had been able to see immediately why she’d been tapped to lead tours—she had an enviably smooth way of keeping a conversation going, even to a group too shy to laugh at most of her jokes.
She had hennaed burgundy hair and a perpetually all-knowing grin, and she was built just like Lucy, short with rounded hips and a soft, prominent stomach.
She’d been wearing the kind of rib-knit bodycon dress that Lucy’s mother would have told her wasn’t suited for a pear shape, and she made it look confident and effortless.
So much so that Lucy had realized, with a jolt, that she could dress however she wanted now.
In any case, Natalie had stood out to Lucy. And apparently, Lucy had stood out to Natalie, too. Enough that Natalie had recognized her when they’d crossed paths at the campus pool earlier.
Lucy had been on her way to swim a few laps, blow off some steam, when a text from her mother buzzed in. Lucy understood that they were fighting, of course. Jillian had made that quite clear. But she hadn’t expected the kind of low blow that had popped up on her phone screen this afternoon.
Then she’d looked up from that text and seen Natalie’s smiling face waving her down. She’d burst into tears on the spot.
Which was probably what Natalie was thinking about now as she gave Lucy a once-over. Lucy grimaced, and strained to pitch her voice over the music. “I’m sorry again for earlier!”
Natalie vigorously shook her head. A few strands of hair got caught in her glow-in-the-dark lipstick. “I love a good cry!” she bellowed. “Wish my skin looked as good afterward as yours does! I’d have been pink and blotchy all day!”
Lucy laughed through the twist of embarrassment.
But embarrassment didn’t seem like an emotion Natalie Baker spent much time entertaining.
Back at the pool, she’d sat Lucy down on one of the hard-backed plastic chairs, gotten her a glass of water, and let her cry it out.
And when Lucy managed a few wobbly excuses about “family drama,” she didn’t pry.
Instead, she’d gently put both of her hands on both of Lucy’s. I don’t know you, she’d said. And please tell me to fuck off if I’m overstepping. But you strike me as…someone who has not enjoyed herself recently.
So there Lucy was, at the first campus rager of the year. Ready for one last little release so that the Big Release could begin in earnest.
But before that. “Hey,” she said, “I saw a ‘missing’ poster at the shuttle stop?”
“Oh, shit, that.” Natalie squeezed her arm. “Sorry, that’s pretty jarring, right? That’s why they warn you about the dropout rate during orientation week! Not everyone’s a good fit for the mountain!”
“Yeah,” Lucy said. It was the same thing she’d thought, after all. But still. “It’s not common, though, right?”
“Oh God, no!” Natalie said. “When people go, they go home! Or to like, LA or New York or something! But all the more reason not to let things get to you in a place like this, right? When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you, and all that.”
Lucy laughed, and allowed her unease to be mollified. It was hard to dwell on much of anything in the face of someone who could quote Nietzsche in glow-in-the-dark lipstick. “True enough!” she said. “I’d love a drink.”
“There’s a table to your right!” Natalie planted a neon-pink kiss on Lucy’s cheek. “And then I’d better see you dancing!”
Lucy shouted her thanks. When she rubbed the lipstick from her cheek, it came away as a smear of light against her hand.
She weaved her way across the room, dodging elbows here and there, and she watched the whirlwind of outfits go by as she scanned the wall for the drinks table.
The dress code was delightfully non-uniform: There were some dressed in light summer-wear like Lucy, a cluster of goths jingling cheerily as they danced, and at least two people in full-latex clubwear.
The girl Lucy had to weave around when she reached the drinks table was wearing a T-shirt with a sequined rendition of a movie poster for The Exorcist.
Sequin Girl, it seemed, had been waiting for someone to cross into her orbit—she happily spun to Lucy as she scoured the table for a single seltzer, chatting as though it didn’t bother her that Lucy’s answers were barely audible over the bass beat.
Lucy noted, with a poorly suppressed smile, that it seemed to be a Rollins-wide habit to ask about someone’s major before getting their name.
“No major yet!” Lucy said. “I’m actually a first-year.” At Sequin Girl’s raised eyebrow, she reluctantly, for ease of explanation, used her least favorite euphemism. “Nontraditional student. I worked for a couple years after high school.”
“Oh!” Sequin Girl beamed brighter than her shirt. “You’re going to love it here. They let you study whatever you want, as long as you have a good plan.”
“Really!” Lucy said. “What’s your major, then?”
“Theater and anthro!” Sequin Girl said. “I’m working on my joint thesis now. I already know what I’m going to title it. ‘Playing Dead: A Comparative Study of Theatricality in Modern Death Rituals.’”
Lucy cackled. Sequin Girl’s obvious delight was infectious. “That fucking rules!”
“You think so?” Sequin Girl turned a little, swatting in the direction of another girl with her back turned to them. The girl, deep in conversation with the barely visible outline of a man, didn’t seem to notice. “Alicia thinks I shouldn’t use a pun! She says it’s disrespectful to the dead!”
“I’ve planned two Catholic funerals,” Lucy said with a demonstrative shrug. “There’s no getting through one of those without some disrespect to the dead!”
Sequin Girl’s eyes glittered as brightly as her T-shirt. Holding out her phone, she asked, “Could I interview you? I don’t have any Catholics yet!”
Lucy dutifully typed her number into the phone. She didn’t plan to talk about all that very much, not here. But she could make an exception for science. “Hey, have you seen any seltzers?”
“I saw a case in the kitchen!” Sequin Girl said. “That’s smart. Go slow and all that.”
“I’m allergic to alcohol!” Lucy said.
“Ohhh,” Sequin Girl said. “Sorry for that loss too, then.” Lucy threw her head back and laughed again as she pushed through the crowd to find the kitchen.
If there was one thing Lucy had learned about Rollins already, it was that people like Sequin Girl were far from a rarity.
The students here had interests that Lucy couldn’t have dreamed up if she tried—and even after a few days at Rollins, she wasn’t yet tired of hearing of them.
Quite the opposite, actually. It made her happy, listening to them gush, watching the moment the fire hit their eyes.
It was too bad Whitney had decided she was some sort of troglodyte.
It would have made Lucy happy to hear about her thesis, too.
It was fun. But it was also valuable information.
Lucy had no idea what her major was going to be.
Hadn’t even considered it until she was well into packing to leave.
There’d never been enough oxygen in Lucy’s home to keep a fire going.
She’d only ever wanted one thing—and getting to Rollins had been the full extent of her plan.
The acoustics of these old buildings are strange, Lucy thought as she slipped into the kitchen.
The music should have been just as loud in the kitchen, but everything went muffled when she rounded the corner, like she’d dunked her head underwater.
The aqua stars from the globe lamp skimmed the backs of her ankles as she crossed the threshold. Then she left them behind altogether.
The overhead fluorescents were switched off in favor of a small, yellow-tinged light over the stove.
There was just one person in the kitchen with her, standing at the sink with his back turned to the rest of the room.
Against his broad outline, Lucy could see the edge of the box of seltzers.
She murmured an apology as she slid alongside him.
He was quiet as Lucy worked a lukewarm can out of the box. Quiet enough that she laughed and said, “Pretty loud in there.”
She cracked the seltzer open and took a sip. Somewhere in that moment, she saw his mouth move. But whatever he said was lost in the swish of raspberry-lime bubbles against her jaw. “Sorry,” she said. “What?”
He turned, and for the first time, she saw his face. She would never remember how he looked at her in that moment. Only that it was the last thing she remembered seeing.
“Hold still,” he said. And then nothing.