“Mi seh yuh fi gwaan home,” Miss Claudette repeated, turning away.
Ellory went home. She stepped through the door and right into her panicked parents’ arms, confused but delighted by the attention. Only later did she find out that the corner shop had caught fire shortly after she’d left.
Only later did she find out that Miss Claudette had been inside.
When she told her parents that she’d seen the old woman, even spoken to her, they had said the same thing she told herself now:Hallucinations, delusions, paralogia.Ellory learned to rationalize and ignore those moments when the world seemed to stretch beyond the boundaries of what was real, into a liminal space where she could see a dead woman in the street or hear phantom giggles on the wind. Eventually, they’d gotten fewer and further between.
So why was it happening again now?
Her hands tightened around her bag, pressed it to her chest. Her heart rattled around her chest cavity. Her cold limbs dripped colder water down her skin and over her ruined umbrella. She pressed her eyes shut. This wasn’t real. Thiswasn’treal. This wasn’treal. Maybe she’d fallen asleep in the library. Maybe she’d slipped on a puddle in the courtyard and was unconscious on the stones where Hudson Graves no doubt would have left her. Maybe—
She peeked through her damp lashes. Her eyes flew open.
She…she knew this place.
Ellory was standing in the same tree-lined area, in the same storm that had so disoriented her, in the same darkness that hadbreathed and breathed around her, but sheknewthis place. Without a thought, her feet strolled confidently across the road, took a left, and kept going. She didn’t check her phone again. She didn’t need to. This strange déjà vu made connections snap into place like a rubber band.
She knew that if she walked five more blocks and took another left, she would come across Moneta Hall, shining bright against the gloomy evening. She knew that, if she went right instead, she would eventually hit Bancroft Field, where the soccer and lacrosse teams performed some kind of athletic alchemy that kept the school board happy. And she knew that this, right here, was Riverside Campus, where the neoclassical architecture of every carefully crafted academic building yielded to the parts of nature that weren’t cleared to build Warren University, beginning with a footbridge that led across a pond and into a wooded area popular among on- and off-campus hikers. She knew that because she’d been here before; of course she had; this was where they’d—
No memory rushed to explain the sudden familiarity. Not even when she made the turn and realized she was correct.
There was Moneta, a ten-story building with large white pillars, a sloping, temple-style roof, and pale aloe-green walls that looked more like seaweed in the darkness. Her keys were so slick that she had to swipe the fob twice before the keypad let her drip inside. Her roommate, Stasie O’Connor (of the Irish royal house of O’Conor, at least according to the crest on the wall above her bed), was present but alone, watching a video while painting her toenails. Her only comment on Ellory’s appearance was curt: “Keep all that on your side of the room.”
But even after Ellory dumped her possessions on the windowsill to dry despite Stasie’s judgmental nose crinkle, even after Ellory tooksuch a long time in the communal bathrooms that someone knocked on the wall beside her curtain to make sure she was alive, even after she detangled and twisted her freshly washed hair over the course of an entire comedy special before tucking it under a satin bonnet, she still felt a chill. Her ears rang with adrenaline, and behind her eyes, she could see those trees that clawed at the sky in a darkness too all-encompassing to have happened anywhere on Warren’s campus.
You were seeing things. It’s a typical panic response. Once you calmed down, your brain reminded you of what you’d forgotten.
Stale air and rotting wood.
High-pitched giggling and low metallic trills.
Rainwater so cold, it froze her down to her marrow.
You were seeing things. Sometimes, you see things. That doesn’t make them real.
It took Ellory a long time to fall asleep.
***
It rained for three more days before the sun got out on parole. From the moment Ellory tied her apron on to the moment she yawned back to her dorm, Powers That Bean filled with students who bought a single chocolate croissant and then parked at a table by an outlet for six hours to stay out of the rain. Others loitered by the doors and walls, pretending to be waiting for friends until the manager forced them out into the deluge. Mopping the floor became an exercise in frustration as new packs of customers tracked mud and grass inside, and though they grimaced and whispered, “Sorry,” when they saw the mess, not a single one left a tip.
Iced coffee sales remained steady. There was no weather that iced coffee didn’t improve.
After her shift, Ellory took a walk in the restored sunlight, her drink in hand. The soccer team had claimed Bancroft, which she knew only because Hudson Graves was among them. Ellory refused to do anything more physically strenuous than squeeze into a packed train car on the N during rush hour, so athletes were an alien breed to her. They ran the length of the field (why?) back and forth, again and again (why?), shouting insults and encouragement to one another:
“Pick up the pace, Mendoza!”
“Looking sharp, Novak!”
“Wilson, you’re falling behind!”
“Go! Go! Go! Go!”
No one jeered Hudson Graves, who was ahead of the pack of sweaty, grunting people by at least three yards. His long brown legs ate up the field with every stride, his moss-green jersey clinging to his muscled body. When she didn’t actually have to talk to him, Ellory could admit to herself that Hudson Graves had a certain allure. He was clearly in his element, and that confidence translated to his elegant gait and focused mien. If he was even panting, she couldn’t tell from here.
She needed to keep walking before he saw her and mistook her interest for something else. But she was rooted to the spot.
Luckily, Ellory wasn’t the only one who couldn’t take her eyes off him. On the other side of the field was a small crowd, also wearing jerseys, staring at Hudson like he was a two-for-one sale. Ellory had heard that the football and basketball teams were forever trying to recruit him, but this was the first time she’d actually seen their starving gazes in person. Maybe they meant it to be flattering, but it was dehumanizing, these covetous sentries longing for what they had been told repeatedly they could not have.
