Chapter 13
AT THE TOP OF HER tower, Dez presses her forehead to the cold cast-iron window. It’s dark outside, but she can still see the flashing lights on the tri, the paramedics’ rushed motions as they—
Are they loading someone onto a gurney?
It’s hard to see. It’s started to snow again, hard, the blizzard cloaking the dark scene in virgin powder.
It’s not the best day to have discovered she thinks in images, because right now they’re avalanching her, a rotating montage of horrors, writ large and grotesque.
Mo.
The masked gunman.
His eye.
Now whatever—whoever—crashed out there, too.
She doesn’t want to go inside her suite, but where else will she go?
She hears Simon’s violin playing a Beethoven song she recognizes. Opus 132 in A-minor, one of the few CDs her mother owned and used to play for Dez and Mo in the car as kids when they were fighting.
Dez has held it mostly together today, hour after humiliating hour, but she can’t do it anymore. She turns the doorknob, finds it open, and staggers inside.
She sees only Simon’s feet, propped up on the back of their white couch.
“How’s your foxy mentor?” he calls, putting down his violin.
“Simon—”
When Dez can’t make herself say more, Simon’s head pops up from the couch. At the sight of her, he springs up off the couch. “Hey. You good?”
“No,” she whispers.
Simon takes Dez by the elbow and guides her to the couch.
“You look like you’re about to drop,” he says.
Dez does, onto the couch.
“Um.” Simon sounds nervous. “This calls for … what? What do we need?” She hears him moving toward the kitchenette, talking to himself as he riffles through the few cupboards. “We have no food, so my notorious Nachos and Sympathy are out. But we do have gin. Can you work with gin, Dez?”
Dez can’t answer. She’s thinking about the thing that fell out of the sky. Simon returns and sits down next to her holding two shot glasses and a bottle.
“We could also …” he says, tossing his head. “My mother used to slap me when I’d get like this after church. Sometimes it helped.”
“Gin,” she says into the couch.
She hears him pour the shots. She sits up and forces herself to face her roommate, to look him in the eyes. They hardly know each other.
“Simon?” Dez brings her knees to her chest. “Something extremely fucked up just happened.”
“I gathered from the extremely fucked-up PA announcement,” he says, but his tone is less confident, less jokey. “And Yael said they’re canceling our introduction to the Vault tonight. Do you know what it’s about?”
“Where’s Yael?” Dez asks. She’d rather only tell the story once.
“She just stepped out,” Simon says.
Yael’s bedroom door swings open, and the woman bounds into the common room, smoothing a hand over her high bun.
Her roommate eyes the gin and clucks her tongue. “You assholes started without me?”
“Didn’t you just leave?” Simon asks Yael, pointing, confused, at the front door.
“Yeah, well, I’m back.” Yael grabs a shot glass, downs its contents, gags, and flops onto the white leather chair across from them.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” Simon says. “Cuz Dez just got here … so when did you—”
Yael shrugs and looks annoyed. “Whatever, you were probably jerking off, creep.”
Simon’s gaze travels to Yael’s open bedroom door. Dez follows his eyes, where a cold grip of air reaches toward them. Dez notices Yael’s thick purple drapes swaying in the evening breeze. Who leaves their window open in a blizzard?
“Don’t worry about it,” Yael says, addressing them both. She leans forward in the chair and clasps her hands. “Look, I have some difficult news.”
“I do too,” Dez says, sitting up.
“I’ll go first,” Yael interrupts her. “Dez, I need you to focus. This is important.” She pours another shot of gin. “Today we lost a troubled soul.”
Dez stares at Yael. Surely her roommate isn’t talking about what Dez just heard outside—
“This isn’t Acheron’s first incident of suicide,” Yael says somberly. “This is a stressful place, and some people can’t handle it.”
“Who?” Simon asks.
“A former student,” Yael says, glancing at Dez. “Apparently, he jumped from the roof of Enoch.”
“That’s why all the last-years were called down for a meeting?” Simon says.
“What’s he talking about?” Dez asks.
“She got this voice memo,” Simon explains: “‘All last-years report immediately to the secret lair’ or whatever.”
“Thanks, Simon. I’ll take it from here.” Yael runs her finger around the rim of her shot glass.
“Director Moriah called the last-years together so she could break the news. Since we knew the deceased personally. She asked us not to share it with the first-years, as the faculty plans to tell you tomorrow, but I believe in full transparency. And I thought you’d like to know. ”
“No,” Dez says with cold clarity.
“No what?” Yael says, brows arched.
“I was out there. I was on the tri with Rafe. The sound we heard. It was like something dropped from the clouds. It didn’t sound like someone leaping off a roof.”
“Have you ever heard someone leap off a roof, Dez?” Yael says.
Dez’s gaze locks on Yael’s. “What was his name?”
Yael swallows. “Charles Costella. You wouldn’t have met him.
He was my year, but unfortunately, at the end of last term, he didn’t advance.
Everyone assumed he’d left with the other Honorable Mentions.
Which is why it’s so upsetting to imagine him lurking around here until now, waiting for the first day of classes to make a statement. He must have been in such pain.”
“This doesn’t sound right,” Dez says.
“Of course it’s not right,” Yael says. “A young man, one of our own, is dead.”
“Did you see the body?” Dez asks.
Yael sits up straight. “I just heard all of this, from Dr. Moriah.”
Dez thinks of the red-lipped woman with the venom in her eyes, and the white snake wrapped around her neck. “Then the director is lying.”
Yael narrows her eyes. “I’m going to do you the great favor of not telling anyone you just said that.”
“Have a sip, Dez,” Simon says, sliding her a shot glass. He wiggles his right hand a little. “Or we could try the slap?”
“Who drinks room-temperature gin, Simon?” Yael says angrily, stalking toward the kitchen. “I’m getting ice.”
When there’s enough distance between them, Simon mouths to Dez: “Dude?”
“They’re covering up something,” Dez whispers. “And I need to know what.”
“Dez,” he whispers back, sounding kind but worried, the way she used to talk to Mo.
“It just seems like there are better ways to spend your time than taking on the truly terrifying Acheron administration. Like perhaps getting settled into the cutthroat new graduate program you just got admitted to?”
“I want to talk to Rafe.”
Yael reenters the living room, carrying a bucket of ice and a tray of martini fixings. Simon pops an olive in his mouth.
“For your information, Rafe shares my position, and the director’s position,” Yael says. “He was with me just now at the meeting.” She gives the silver cocktail tumbler a shake, then strains the liquor into her glass. “It’s going to be lonely to die on this hill, Desdemona.”
A knock sounds at the door, and Simon moves to the peephole.
“Dez?” he calls. She hears his violin play “The Imperial March” from Star Wars, Darth Vader’s theme song.
She looks at him. What?
“You have a visitor,” Simon says, then opens the door to let Rafe in.