Chapter 28
DEZ MAKES IT BACK TO her suite, punch drunk and horny as hell.
She needs a nap to sleep off the Soma, to release the sexual frustration Rafe has stuck her with four times now. But when she unlocks her door, she’s startled by a round of applause.
“You pulled one out!” Yael says.
Is she talking about Dez’s film, or the orgasm she just stole like a bad penny from Rafe’s pants? Dez feels so tired. The Soma’s inching its way through her system. “How’d you know?”
“Everyone knows,” Simon says, busting out his violin now to play “Livin’ Thing” by ELO. “Because they just announced the honorees of the midterm gala! They’re celebrating all the first-years who’ve completed their assignment.”
“I heard about that,” Dez says.
“And tomorrow,” Simon says, “we get to make arrangements to go home over break.”
Dez entertains this thought for a moment—not the reality of her home, but another version of it where Mo never got burned and Dez isn’t suspected of armed robbery and worse.
A version where she gets three days in Death Valley, and her mom takes off work, and Silas swings by unannounced like he used to, and they all go out to dinner.
Where she and Mo stay up all night watching Step Brothers and talking.
Where she shows him Lazarus in person, rather than having to have it delivered by Rafe.
Dez wonders if he’s actually keeping his end of the bargain. She doesn’t know whether to feel grateful or envious that Rafe might be with Mo right now.
“That’s great,” she breathes to Simon. “I can’t wait.”
“Party starts at eight, Dez,” Yael says, running her eyes over Dez’s haggard all-nighter aesthetic. She can tell Yael doesn’t think there are enough hours in the day for Dez to make herself presentable.
“What kind of party is it?” Dez asks. She’s not entirely up for another round of debauchery at Villains, not after the vanished night she spent in the Vault. Not after the spell Rafe’s making her come put her under. She’d just love to crawl into bed and fall asleep for a very long time.
“Part celebration, part initiation,” Yael says. “There’s a showcase of your work; then Moriah says a few words.”
“I was up all night,” Dez protests. “I drank a Soma—”
“Don’t even think about bailing,” Yael says, then brightens. “Okay! I’ve gotta go help set up. Your dress is in your room. Black tie!”
“Is that a joke?” Dez says.
“Jet sent me a tux,” Simon confirms.
“See you losers tonight,” Yael calls over her shoulder as she floats down the stairs. “Don’t be late!”
At eight o’clock, Dez and Simon enter the Vault. He’s all cleaned up in his tailored tux. The dress that Rafe picked out for her is gorgeous, sexy—a slinky, backless black silk slip dress with lace details at the neckline and a flutter hem. It fits her like his hands do: perfectly.
The Vault is transformed, the open atrium in its center adorned with twinkle lights and towering gold vases exploding with white orchids. “Fly Me to the Moon” plays from a DJ booth on the far side of the Vault.
“Is it just me, or does this feel like a trap?” Dez shouts to Simon as a server approaches them with a tray of fizzing champagne flutes.
“Feels like we fell into an oligarch’s wedding,” Simon says as they clink glasses. “But at least there’s booze.”
Dez reaches forward, where another server passes by with hors d’oeuvres. “And caviar,” she adds with her mouth full.
“So, how’d your final cut turn out?” Simon asks, chewing his second blini.
Dez can’t help it, she grins. She’s thinking of Mo’s film, not the one she was assigned. She’s proud of it.
“That good?”
“Simon, how many scripts did you end up writing so far this term?”
He tosses his head. “Something like a hundred and fifty.”
Dez almost spits out her champagne. “But the last time we talked, you said it’d be more like ten or twenty.”
He lifts a shoulder. “I got in a flow. Things moved fast.”
“How exactly did you get in that kind of flow?”
“All month I’ve just been sitting in my darkened Lens, listening to recordings from my subjects’ lives.”
“Really,” Dez says, “like a diary?”
“Like a diary, on audiobook,” Simon says. “You’d think it’d get boring, but it doesn’t. Anyway, recently, I started to sort of … open myself, to drift more into their voices. Something shifted. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
Dez thinks she understands what he means. Something similar had happened to her today with the clouds in Lazarus, though on a smaller scale. She’ll have a long way to go to catch up to where Simon’s at the rest of the term, but Dez doesn’t want to think about that yet.
Simon’s gaze is drifting past her, where the dance floor’s getting crowded.
“My goal tonight is to give Esther something to masturbate to when she goes home over break,” he says, making Dez crack up inside. “What’s your goal?”
Dez’s goal for the past month had been to finish Lazarus and get it to her brother. Now that she’s done, she feels adrift. Should she have a goal outside her work?
She looks around the room. In their skin-baring formal attire, Dez recognizes body parts of some of the last-years she’d seen publicly fucking at Villains on a couple of occasions.
So far tonight, everyone’s keeping it in their pants, but barely.
Dez gets the feeling things will loosen into depravity once everyone’s had a few drinks.
“Let’s dance,” Simon says, his eyes on the dance floor where Dez notices Esther raving sweetly alone.
She lets Simon pull her into the fray of dancing bodies.
The song blasting through the speakers is a remix of “I Don’t Care” by Charli XCX, and before she knows it, Dez is swilling the rest of her champagne and jumping up and down, bouncing off Simon, bouncing off Esther, bouncing off last-years whose names she doesn’t know.
She closes her eyes and lets the music and the champagne buzz and the sweet scent of the orchids everywhere dissolve her shame, her anxiety, her frustration—until she doesn’t feel it anymore.
This is just a party. She can just have fun.
When the song fades into INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart,” Dez opens her eyes, reluctant to stop jumping. She catches Simon gingerly wrapping his arms around Esther’s waist for a slow dance. Then she feels a hand around her own.
“Hello, Dez,” the low voice says.
Her arms slip around his neck before her eyes register it’s Rafe. He looks incredible in his tuxedo, his golden scarf subtly visible under his jacket. How easily their bodies lock into place. How hard he makes everything else.
“Did you do it? Did you get my film to Mo?”
“I delivered it, yes.”
She wasn’t expecting him back so soon. She wonders how he got there. Did he fly in the obsidian jet, the way he’d brought her here?
“How is he?”
“I couldn’t stay, but I made sure he had it. He’s probably watching it right now.”
Dez closes her eyes and exhales. Mo will understand now where Dez went, why she left.
“Will you dance with me?” Rafe says.
“One dance,” she warns, pressing her pointer finger into his sternum.
“I’ll take what I can get.”
“I’m still mad at you.”
“Oh, Dez,” he says, sounding sadder than she expects. Why? She was only joking with him. Half joking.
“Four times, Rafe. It’s getting absurd.”
He looks into her eyes, brushes the hair back from her face. “I want you to get what you want.”
She’s never seen him look so grave. She touches the side of his face. “Hey. You okay?”
“Sure. Of course.”
She wonders if something’s going on with Mo, but Rafe would tell her if he had news. Before she can press further, every wall around them is lit up simultaneously by multiple projector screens.
The whole vast chamber has turned into a giant screening room, a Lens big enough to surround the entire student body.
“Watch,” Rafe murmurs, his fingers moving softly up and down her back. “I think you’re going to like this.”
Two of the Vault’s towering walls show enlarged pages of screenplays, and a series of voice-overs read lines of text aloud.
He loves me …
I messed up …
It’s cancer …
I got accepted …
We married …
She betrayed me …
It’s over …
I’m in love …
Goose bumps rise on Dez’s arms. These are script excerpts, samples of what the scribes have been writing this term. These are the voices Simon and the others spent hours listening for, opening themselves to, then re-creating.
Around her, all the students—even the jaded last-years—look up, absorbed by the spectacle, pointing at script excerpts, laughing at some, cringing and clutching their hearts at others.
In the center of the dance floor, still in Rafe’s arms, Dez looks up in wonder as the remaining two walls in the Vault begin to show montages of movie scenes. These scenes must all come from films made by Visionaries, like Dez.
Scenes of babies being born. Children learning to plié at the barre. A woman weeping in a stairwell. A team of fifty face-painted adults losing in a tug-of-war game. A man looking in the mirror, brutally slapping his own face.
Bombs detonating buildings.
Protestors blocking streets.
A fire that looks like a tornado ravaging a neighborhood.
A dandelion being blown into the wind.
The images speed up, take on an almost psychedelic swirl as people make love in cars, in beds, in opera boxes, and laundry rooms. Hailstorms and hearses and horses.
Families at dinner tables. Families shouting and slamming doors.
Families posing for photographs at beaches and mountains and monuments.
And then—
Dez sees herself up on the screen. Sitting on the hood of her car with Moses the day he got his tattoo. She takes up half the giant screen directly in front of her. It’s the last scene of Lazarus, the closing shot, ending with the clouds reflecting in her eyes.
“That’s my film,” she says to Rafe nervously. Her secret film. “What’s it doing in this showcase?”
“It’s all right now, Dez. It’s beautiful.”
Her eyes are still on her cinematic eyes, fading on the screen. “I miss him.” She swallows. “I wish I could see him over break.”
“Can I give you some advice?” Rafe says slowly. She looks at him. His eyes soften at the corners as he says, “Be here, now. The night is young. And tomorrow doesn’t even exist.”
Held in the trance of his gaze, her fingers brush Rafe’s gently. Desire throbs within her and the song comes to an end too soon. From the DJ booth, Jet speaks into a microphone:
“Find a seat, party people, and give it up for Director Moriah!”