Chapter 11
“WELCOME, HAPPY COUPLING! WELCOME, HAPPY coupling!” Jet Connelly greets the line of first-year students with a flight attendant’s grin as they board the ski lift behind the dining hall after lunch.
“Welcome!” he says when Dez and Simon lumber clumsily to the front of the line. “You look like you need help!”
Dez eyes the revolving metal chair her ass is somehow supposed to land on.
She eyes her awkwardly angled white skis, their black A logo cut through with a graphic of a snake, which the emo last-year outside the ski shop had to show her how to attach to her boots.
She eyes the glove she’s wearing over the fingers she stuck in Lebevre’s boiling stock, over the bandage and the salve she found in the kitchen’s first aid kit.
She eyes the soaring white mountain, lit by LED floodlights, which she’s about to ascend, and then … what? Ski down?
How in the hell?
“I’m from the desert. I have no idea what I’m doing,” Dez confesses as Jet takes her by the arm and pulls her over to the loading zone. Above her, the whir of the bull wheel fills her with anxiety. The ski lift scares her. Everything about this venture seems insanely irresponsible.
“Don’t worry,” Jet says, his blue and black eyes twinkling, “everyone else picked this up lightning fast.”
“How reassuring,” Simon mutters to Dez as Jet recedes, and the chair approaches from behind, swooping them up with a kick that makes Dez yelp. Now Simon’s lowering the safety bar, and they’re rising through the dark afternoon, heading for a summit she can’t yet see through the clouds.
Pine trees recede below them. Silvery mountains stretch out east and west. The stars blink on over their heads. And for a moment, it’s simply, unexpectedly beautiful.
Then Dez remembers she’s going to have to get off this thing at some point and actually ski.
“What happens at the top?” she asks Simon. “What’s this coupling ritual about?”
“Now who’s interested in the literature?” Simon teases her. “The coupling ritual pairs each first-year with a last-year. Apparently, it’s Acheron’s oldest tradition.”
“And what do we do with this last-year?”
“They’ll be our mentor for the rest of the term. They show us the ropes, like a big brother in a fraternity. I foresee hazing.”
“Is it just me,” Dez says, as a wide, wet snowflake strikes between her eyes, “or does ‘coupling’ make it sound sexual?”
“Haze-fucking,” Simon says, considering it. “In that case, who’s your favorite? Imagine Jet in the heat of the moment—those eyes? I wouldn’t kick him out of bed.”
“Anyone but Rafe,” Dez says. “If I have to spend a whole term working underneath him, one of us won’t make it out alive.”
“Could be hot,” Simon says.
Dez rolls her eyes but not before she gets a flash of Rafe moving over her in bed. It could be hot. If he weren’t so arrogant. She clears her throat. “Have you ever skied, Simon?”
“Once I went to Breckenridge with my ex-girlfriend’s church.”
“Is it hard?”
“Nah. You mostly let gravity do the work.” He points at the slope under their dangling skis. “Speaking of …”
Below them, six last-years appear on the mountain in matching red ski suits.
Around each of their necks are golden scarves that match the one Yael wore in their suite.
They ski in triangle formation, their swinging hips and pumping arms perfectly synchronized.
From the chairs in front of and behind Dez, first-years whoop and cheer them on.
They’re too high up for Dez to see if Rafe is among the skiers.
Halfway up the mountain, the opening piano chords to “Nightswimming” by R.E.M.
fill the air, and though they’ve never participated in anything like this before, Dez and Simon and all the first-years on the lift around them somehow know to change the opening word of the song from “nightswimming” to “night-skiing.” They sing along, and Dez wonders if this is a part of the ritual, if students sing this every year.
Before the song ends, the ski lift empties them atop a slope so steep Dez thinks it’s inverted. She reaches for Simon’s arm, her chest constricting, but Simon’s spotted Esther and has already slid past Dez to chat her up.
“There’s absolutely no way,” Dez murmurs to herself, peering over the edge. Wind rips snow from the mountain like sheets from a concert pianist’s music stand.
“Actually,” a voice says behind her, “there is one way.”
When Dez turns to see Rafe in a formfitting red ski suit, the motherfucker actually winks.
“Down,” he says, lowering his voice so only she can hear.
Dez gulps, and not just because she’s scared. The way Rafe talks sometimes, his voice lights a fire in her core. He’s wearing one of the golden scarves, too.
“Where’s the bunny slope?” she asks. “This one’s too big for me.”
“That’s the mentality I’m so going to enjoy erasing,” Rafe says. He takes Dez by the shoulders and turns her back toward the outrageously sheer slope. “Skiing is like flying. All you have to do is”—now he takes Dez’s arms and spreads them out like wings—“believe.”
Dez drops her arms. “I need to talk to you.”
“About last night? How much fun you had?”
Where to start with this prick? She looks out at the overcast sky, clouds glowing from the obscured moon. Then down at the slope where a long white seam appears suddenly in the snow. Her eyes widen as she stares.
It’s eight feet long, several inches thick, and it vibrates, migrating upward, toward the summit.
Toward Dez.
“What is that?” she says, edging backward against Rafe.
“Someone important,” Rafe says, all teasing vanished from his voice. “Stand up straight.”
Dez does as the long white seam reaches the summit at an astonishing speed, then stops and rolls itself into a ball, like the base layer of a snowman. It’s alive. It’s uncoiling, snow falling away, to reveal—
An albino cobra, its hood spread, the fruit strip of its tongue darting at the crowd of frozen students on the summit.
“Hello, Dr. Moriah,” Rafe says, and for a moment Dez thinks he’s talking to the snake.
Then the cobra slithers past her, approaching another set of skis.
Dez’s eyes follows them up to a frigidly beautiful middle-aged woman with a white bob, white ski suit, and painted red lips standing suddenly behind them on the mountain.
The snake slithers up the woman’s body, curls itself around her neck, and blinks at Dez with all the warmth of a stoplight camera.
“The director of Acheron,” Rafe says to Dez under his breath. “Dean Moriah. And her cobra, Hannah.”
“You haven’t been coupled yet,” Dr. Moriah says, scowling into Dez’s soul.
Dez has no idea what coupling entails, but she doesn’t like the passive construction of the director’s words. It sounds like something that’s supposed to happen to Dez, whether she wants it or not.
“Well?” Moriah says. “Am I correct?”
“Yes,” Dez says. “I—I’m still a solo artist.”
“THEN LEAVE!” Moriah thunders at Rafe.
“Catch you on the flip side.” He grins at Dez, then glides to the edge before practically leaping off the slope and vanishing into thin air.
“First-years, line up!” the director shouts. “In alphabetical order, according to your middle names.”
This is the strangest command Dez has ever heard. Her middle name is Ruth, and she doesn’t have a clue what anyone else’s is. Which must be the point. To pull this off, the first-years will have to become better acquainted.
She starts with Simon. “What’s yours?”
“It’s Cherokee, don’t laugh.”
“I won’t,” Dez says.
“My full name is Simon Afraid of Choosing Nelson.”
“‘Afraid of Choosing’? You’ve been this way since birth?”
“White people,” Simon snickers, and shakes his head. “My middle name is Joe.”
Dez laughs for the first time since she’s been at Acheron, for the first time since she hurt her brother. And all around her, as Dr. Moriah eyes them like a cat watching an aquarium, first-years introduce themselves, eyes gleaming, cracking up, awkward in their Acheron skis.
“Faster!” Moriah shouts, and the students begin to align.
“Someone told me you’re Ruth,” a cute first-year guy with an English accent says to Dez. “Since I’m Rowan—that is, Paul Rowan Wilkes—I think we’re in sequence.”
“We must be,” Dez says, and falls into line next to him.
“I heard you’re a Visionary?” Paul Rowan Wilkes says. “I’m a Scribe.”
“Have you gotten to see the Vault yet?” Dez asks. “Where we work?”
“No one has. Not until tonight. But the suspense is killing me.”
Dez nods, agreeing. And if this were all that coupling was, just a little flirty icebreaker on a fourteener in the freezing cold, she could handle it. But the look in the eyes of the terrifying snake lady overseeing them tells Dez something more’s on the horizon.
Moriah stalks the lined-up first-years like a drill sergeant on the first day of basic training. “How much can you bench-press?” she asks Simon.
“About a hundred?” he says, clearly never having bench-pressed in his life.
Moriah narrows her eyes in disbelief before passing on to another student in line.
“Describe your gag reflex.”
“Pretty good?” the woman says.
Moriah stops in front of Paul Rowan. “Do you tend to be the dumper or the dumpee?”
“I’ve been in a long-distance relationship with my girlfriend for six—”
“Enough,” Moriah cuts him off with a slice of her hand. She looks at Dez. Her eyes are slits as she asks, “Do you have great tolerance for pain?”
Dez swallows, her burned hand still aching, wondering what these questions have to do with getting paired with a mentor at Acheron. “Sometimes I think I do. Not that I want to test it.”
The director’s eyebrows rise. The snake flashes her tongue.
“Some things,” Moriah says, “cannot be avoided.” She claps her hands loudly, making half the first-years jump.