“Thereyou are.” Tai appeared, beaming, her eyes bright with obvious drunkenness. She wore a colorful medal that, upon closer inspection, appeared to be several beer-bottle caps welded together. Her car keys dangled from a finger. “You need to drive us home, because I amfuuuuuuucked upppppp.” Her grin dimmed into more of a puzzled curve. “Am I interrupting something?”
“No,” Ellory said quickly. “Of course not. Are you ready togo now?”
“Areyou?”
Ellory glanced at Hudson. He was still leaning against the desk, but now he was staring out the window as if to let them have some privacy. If Hudson had been about to give her an explanation less shocking than the initial invitation, the moment had clearly passed. She wasn’t sure therewasan explanation less shocking than the initial invitation. She was afraid that if she lingered, he would realize the absurdity of extending her this opportunity and snatch it back.
She cleared her throat. “Yeah, I’m ready.” And then, to him: “I’ll go. But if this is some sort of prank—”
“I’ll text you the details. Give me your phone.”
Ellory held out her hand. With another puff of amusement, Hudson handed his over. His background was blank, factory settings, but when she inputted her number, sent herself a text, and closed it up, she saw that his lock screen was Luke Fox in the Batwing suit. She didn’t comment, even though she desperately wanted to smile.
“All right, Flip Cup Queen,” she said, stepping forward so Tai could throw an arm around her shoulders. “Let’s get you back to Moneta without your residents seeing.”
“I’m an adult,” Tai sniffed. “Please don’t let me puke in my car. I just cleaned it.”
“I’ll pull over.”
Ellory could feel the prickling weight of Hudson’s gaze as she shuffle-dragged Tai to the stairs, but she forced herself not to look back.
***
Instead of returning to her room after putting Tai to bed, Ellory camped out on the floor in case she was needed. She’d forced Tai to down an entire bottle of water before falling asleep, and now her friend snored on her side from between the pillow barricades Ellory had erected to keep her from rolling onto her back. There was a bottle of ibuprofen on Tai’s side table. The trash bin had been emptied and placed by the bed in case she couldn’t make it to the bathroom. She was sleeping deeply, but Ellory found it hard to do the same.
Adrenaline chased away her exhaustion. She replayed her interaction with Hudson a thousand different ways. It was an oddity in a month of oddities, and she couldn’t shake it off as easily as the others.
Ellory was familiar with déjà vu in the same way most people were: it was a French loanword, a cliché, something children picked up from pop culture to describe a universal feeling. She had been on campus since the last week of August, and instead of a fleeting moment once or twice in her life, déjà vu had become a presence as constant as her shadow. And every time she tried to rationalize it, to ignore it, it returned more insidiously than before.
Then there were the things she couldn’t explain: the way her surroundings had twice blurred around her like watercolors, the discordant giggling that appeared to have no source, the soccer ball that had dropped to the ground in front of her when all science, all logic, indicated it would’ve slammed into her face. Reality always seemed to reaffirm itself afterward:Of course, this is Riverside Campus. Of course, I was panicked and seeing things in the gloom. Of course, that strong wind was capable of stopping a ball in its tracks.When she thought about it,reallythought about it, she was uncomfortably unsure if these were her own desperate excuses orthe placating hand of something she couldn’t remember once her breathing calmed and her world made sense again.
Maybe she had always been haunted, and her body was begging her to finallydosomething about it.
After a long stretch of time spent staring at the same crack in the ceiling, Ellory reached for her laptop. She had no idea what she expected to find, but some of the tension sloughed from her shoulders when she opened a blank Word document.
Riverside Campus. Miss Claudette. Teeming shadows. TheWarren Communiqué. Encyclopedia Brown. Everything poured out until she had a chaotic wall of disjointed sentences, a bullet point list of weirdness in Times New Roman twelve-point font. Then she wasted a half hour adjusting the borders of the document, adding and formatting the dictionary definition of déjà vu, and organizing the information under headings, afraid to look directly at what she’d written.
But she was too well trained from her long days and longer nights in Newspaper Club. Her mind began to see patterns in the fractured memories, ghostly illusions, and visceral dread that swept over her in those moments. If places she’d never been and conversations she’d never had felt familiar, therehadto be a reason, even if that reason was that she was under so much stress from the workload that she was starting to crack.
Aunt Carol had once said that déjà vu was past lives reasserting themselves. “I read on Facebook the other day—don’t make that face; it wasn’t that anti-vaxxer or flat-earther crap—but apparently Plato said that human beings used to be androgynous. Zeus thought we were too powerful like that, so he split us in half, and now we spend our lives searching for our missing piece. Our soulmates.”
She’d taken another sip of brandy and continued: “It’sheteronormative bullshit,butthere’s something to the concept of people who feel like you knew them in another life. Maybe you did. Our brains can store only so many memories, and we’re already losing the earliest ones fromthislife before we’re even halfway through it. Who’s to say this is the only life we’ve ever had?”
Feeling silly, Ellory plugged her own name into Google, pulled up her genetic-testing results, and fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole for a page that felt a little too close to home. But if she’d had a past life, it didn’t reveal itself to her before the sun crept over the horizon.
There was something here. She knew there was, even if it wasn’t coming together as quickly as she’d hoped. She saved the document and emailed it to herself as a backup. Her eyes felt strained, and her temples pounded in a searing ache.
Yet she also felt accomplished. Like she was off to a strong start. Like she had more control.
Maybe she couldn’t secure her own invitation to Professor Colt’s mysterious salons, and maybe college had been an impossibility without the sudden benevolence of total strangers. Maybe she hadn’t scored as high as she’d wanted on her con. law quiz, and maybe she couldn’t handle a simple conversation about school without fleeing. But her instincts were still sharp enough to find a narrative where others might have seen nothing, and that was enough.
She slid her laptop back into her bag, her fingers catching on the flyer. For once, it didn’t cause a pit to grow in her stomach. Instead, she traced its edges lovingly, a reassuring touch from one friend to another. She didn’t need theWarren Communiqué. She was starring in her own story, weird and frustrating though it might be. Figuring out what was going on with her life suddenly felt more pressing than interviewing locals about neighborhood crimes or her fellow classmates about curriculum changes.
Above her, Tai snorted herself awake with “Buh? Oh, god. Oh, fuck.”
“The trash is to your left,” Ellory said. “Ibuprofen is to your right.”
“Fuck.”
