But if the tattoo was a sign that she was losing her mind, Ellory was sure Stasie would tell her.
It helped to have other things to distract her. At Professor Colt’s house, the cloud of conversation—increasingly inappropriate the more wine was consumed—had faded into background noise as Ellory had studied Hudson Graves. After stopping her from disappearing into the night, he went out of his way to avoid being near her, even if it meant talking to Greer while his entire body stayed tight with the obvious desire to tell her to shut up. Ellory drank and spoke little, trying to pierce his head with her gaze and read his confounding thoughts. She had spent more time with him tonight than in the last three months, and she had never felt less like she understood him.
“Did you forget how to get dressed,” Stasie asked, “or is this you coming on to me?”
Ellory realized she was standing in front of her bed, still wearing nothing but a pair of pajama bottoms. She’d gotten her head through her threadbare band T-shirt, but then she’d stopped there, lost in her own thoughts, her lower back and stomach bared to the room. Over her shoulder, Stasie was reclining with her phone in hand, a smirk on her face that suggested she wanted to laugh at her own joke but couldn’t allow herself to be that uncool.
“Can I ask you something?” Ellory asked once she was fully dressed. Stasie didn’t look at her, but she also didn’t say no. That would have to be good enough. “Have you ever noticed that I have a tattoo?”
“No, but I’m not surprised. Aren’t you from Queens?”
Stasie saidQueensthe way some people might saymaximum security prison.
“What does that—anyway, it’s on the back of my neck. You’ve never seen it?”
At this, Stasie finally looked up. Her threaded honey-brown eyebrows drew together. “You don’t have a tattoo on the back of your neck.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you really don’t.” Stasie wrinkled her pert nose. “Or are you trying to tell me that you got one tonight?”
“No, I—no.” Ellory bit back the story of her night, well aware that it would only make Stasie’s nose wrinkle deeper until it concaved back into her skull. “It’s right here. Come and look.”
Instead of providing an argument or a snide remark, Stasie came to her side. They were the same height, so Ellory stooped a little to make it easier for Stasie to examine her neck. Her hands clenched and unclenched, brimming with restless energy. But Stasie was silent as one second turned into ten and ten into twenty.
Finally, Stasie said, “There’s nothing there.Like I said.”
Ellory turned to see that her roommate had brought her phone with her, and she was already texting—likely telling her friends about the latest weird thing Ellory had done. She frowned, wondering if Stasie had evenlookedor had simply stood there long enough to seem like she had.
She nodded toward Stasie’s phone. “Show me.”
“Okaaaaaay.”
Ellory’s heart dropped as she stared at the subsequent photo, and then it began to beat at a dangerous speed. Because Stasie was right. There was no longer a tattoo on the back of her neck. Unblemished skin stared back at her, slightly lighter than the brown of the rest of her body, framed by curls barely held out of the shot by her fingers. Stasie had taken four bright pictures, and not a single one of them showed the tattoo.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Ellory said, digging around for her own phone. “I justsaw—”
Nothing. The photos she had taken were still on her phone, different angles and lighting as she contorted herself in that mirror-lined hallway, but, where they had once shown a tattoo Ellory didn’t recall getting, they now proved…nothing. Because her skin was blank in them, too, and Stasie was staring at her like she might call the Student Health Center herself, and Ellory’s heart was thumping in her chest like a drum.
Her fingers touched the back of her neck where the tattoo was. Where the tattoo had been. Where the tattoo was no longer.
Rem?mber.
Remember what?
“If you’re done being weird,” said Stasie, retreating to her bed, “can you find somewhere else to be? My friends are coming over.”
“It’s one in the morning.”
“Please don’t make it my problem that you don’t have friends.”
“It’sonein themorning.”
Stasie rolled her eyes and returned to texting. Ellory realized her hand was shaking around her phone and tossed it back on the mattress. She had seen the tattoo. She was sure she had. First in the mirror and then in the photos she’d studied in Professor Colt’s front yard. She was sure of it. She wassure.
Yet her instinct was to doubt herself. What if it had been stress? What if it had been a strange angle? What if it had been a defect in the lens?
But, a stubborn voice roared from within her, how many things could she write off as the product of an overactive imagination? She had a document full of the unexplained, a month’s worth of haunting inconsistencies, and still she doubted herself. She had worked since the moment she’d gotten her driver’s license, sometimes three jobs at a time. She had crafted a well-researched nutritional guide for Aunt Carol after her first stroke, learned to cook heart-healthy meals, memorized medication times and dosages, filled out hospital forms, and done her homework by her aunt’s bedside. She had been an honors student, an AP student, a fucking valedictorian with near-perfect SAT scores.
