Shortly afterward, Hudson Graves answered a different question, expounding on his theories regarding why the American constitution was one of the hardest to update in the world.
She brought up six Supreme Court cases that had changed the interpretation of the same line in the constitution. He countered with the fact that the SCOTUS’s power of judicial review was created throughMarbury v. Madison, not the constitution, so wasn’t it unconstitutional that the court had changed the interpretation at all?
The class fell away. The students disappeared. The professormight as well have never shown up. There was only her and Hudson Graves and an hour-and-fifteen-minute-long chess match that never reached a checkmate.
Ellory left that class without a backward glance, her blood pumping and her enmity secured. And twice a week, for an hour and fifteen minutes, Hudson Graves had found new ways to rub it in her face that she was falling further and further behind.
Now he was harassing freshmen in the very library where she was studying. Though she was glad the dumpster fire that he called a personality was willing to burn people other than her, she didn’t want to be in the blast radius. As the simpering students drew him into quiet conversation, Ellory packed up her things and found her umbrella.
The elevator spat her out into the street-level atrium, with its white stone floor, painted dome, and circular skylight. Rose-tipped clouds spanned the vibrant celestial mural that decorated the ceiling. Rain clattered against the glass, the real clouds a hazy purple gray that threatened lightning. Though it was early afternoon, the only light came from the lanterns in the wall sconces, electric in power but ancient in appearance. In her experience, most universities loved three things: money, tradition, and aesthetics.
“Morgan.”
Ellory’s shoulders tensed. She fiddled with her umbrella, desperate to get it open even though she was still several yards from the front doors.
“I know you hear me.”
“Isn’t it a little hubristic of you to study in the library named after you?” she muttered.
Hudson Graves caught up with her easily. He was only fourinches taller than her, but those inches were mostly in leg, and his waterproof Timberlands gave him an added boost. Ellory didn’t embarrass herself by trying to run, but her fingers dug into the folds of her umbrella.
“Isn’t it a little masochistic of you,” he drawled, “to study in the library named after me?”
His peacoat was open, flapping around his body like the wings of a bird in flight. Beneath, he wore a beige cable-knit sweater over a powder-blue button-down fastened all the way up his neck. The leather-bound book was gone, replaced by a smaller volume that he carried at his side, tucked against his black jeans.
This one he held out to her with an infuriating smirk. “However, I imagine you’ll find it difficult to study at all without this.”
It was her constitutional law textbook. Ellory’s face flamed. She snatched it back, half expecting him to turn this into an adolescent game of keep-away to drag out her humiliation. His fingers brushed the inside of her wrist during the handoff, but he didn’t call attention to it, and neither did she. Her skin tingling, she eased the book into her satchel, a thrifted steel-gray messenger bag covered in pins and patches that looked so silly next to his Montblanc sling. One pin read, MAYBE TOMORROW, SATAN. Hudson quirked an eyebrow at the sight of it.
“Well,” she said before he could comment. “I’d love to stay and chat, but I’d rather sit on a cactus than look at you, so—bye.”
The rain came down in sheets, wind tearing at the trees that lined the cobblestone square around the library. A sudden gust tried to suck her umbrella inside out, but she pushed her head closer to the nylon fabric and pressed on. Water welled from between the stones, turning the square into a muddy creek, levels perilously rising. Footsteps splashed behind her. Ellory swore under her breath,unsurprised to see Hudson Graves haunting her trail. His umbrella was black, and the white glow of his phone screen washed out his face until it looked like a skull, all sharp, gaunt angles and deep, dark eye sockets.
Behind him, Graves Library lurked, its limestone facade bathed in the golden light of the windows. Built in the style of the Barrière d’Enfer—the neoclassical tollhouses that marked the entrance to the Catacombs of Paris—the stone arch of the building entrance seemed, for a moment, like the gaping maw of some primordial creature sucking all the air out of the courtyard.
Then she blinked, and the library was just a library, the man just a man.
And she was tired of both of them.
Though her residence hall was to the left, Ellory cut a right on Powell Street. Moneta Hall also happened to be near the student parking lot, and she would much rather take the long way around than risk Hudson bumping into her with more unsolicited advice and unwanted commentary.
Without the trees to act as cover, the wind howled like a dying animal. Her heart kept time with the rain:pitter-pat,pitter-pat,pitter-pat. People clustered beneath the overhang next to the bus stop. Ellory thought she recognized one woman from her criminology class, but to take a hand off her umbrella even long enough to wave would be to lose it to the elements.
Everything looked different in the gray. As she walked the Loop, which was what students called the half-moon stretch of Archive Lane that cut around the back of Graves Square, the landmarks were slick and shadowed, her view hindered by the incessant rain. She should have waited in the lobby, Hudson or no Hudson. He had to walk no farther than the student parking lot down the street,where he’d take his fancy car to his fancy off-campus housing, while Ellory was stuck hoofing it through torrential rains to get back to the freshman dorms, where her eighteen-year-old roommate was probably streaming some incomprehensible reality show and wrinkling her nose at the amount of mixed-berry yogurt Ellory had managed to pack into the minifridge.
Stop letting him get to you when he’s not even here.
Rain splattered the side of Ellory’s face and dripped from the tight coils of her hair. She swore again, adjusting her umbrella to protect her twist out, and walked even faster. But instead of Ellory arriving at Moneta Hall in ten minutes, fifteen elapsed without any sign of the dorm. By the twenty-minute mark, she’d passed empty quads broken up by the occasional copse of trees, but she saw no road markers or statues, no other students or parked cars, no Warren buses or security booths. The storm had, if possible, gotten worse. Her phone said 5:00 p.m., but the sky said midnight. The clouds were so thick that she couldn’t see the outline of the sun. Lightning cracked without thunder, the only illumination on a path whose streetlights had yet to turn on.
She stopped at an intersection. Was she even still on campus?
A passing car barely avoided splashing her with the grime of a puddle beyond the sidewalk. She jumped anyway, losing her grip on her umbrella. Water soaked into her hair, into her forest-green hoodie, into her newly polished thrifted high-tops. Her slate-gray messenger bag turned a deep charcoal. A single raindrop trailed down the face of her MAYBE TOMORROW, SATAN pin. Poetic fucking cinema.
Ellory fished her umbrella out of the sewer water and blinked the rain out of her eyes. But even after she dragged her damp sleeve over her damp face, clearing her vision enough to bring theworld back into focus, she recognized nothing about this area. She had walked this campus from end to end that summer, refusing to broadcast her freshman status by lumbering around with a map in hand, and before this moment, she would have claimed there was no part of Warren she couldn’t navigate. Twenty minutes was not enough to leave school grounds. Twenty minutes was not enough to lose landmarks. Twenty minutes was not enough to make her so disoriented that her surroundings ebbed and flowed as if she were caught in a riptide.
She wiped her eyes again, as if that would somehow cause her to wake up at Moneta Hall. Instead, thunder clapped above her and shadows reigned around her and brackish water rose below her—tiny natural disasters that shot her anxiety to new heights.
This wasn’t possible. This wasn’tpossible.
