Ellory had been to Bancroft twice since she’d moved to campus. Tai liked to watch the soccer team play, especially in the humid summer days when the players would wrap their practice jerseys around their waists and let the sun turn their sweaty torsos gold and pink. But that was mostly because Tai’s partner, Cody, had decided to play for the men’s team. Cody waved when they saw Ellory, and Ellory waved back, admiring their new haircut: shaved on one side, flowing down to their chin in a wave of amber on the other. They were near the middle of the group, keeping pace but not showing off like Hudson Graves, even though, at well over six feet, theycouldhave. Ellory knew a bit of what that was like—that innate fear of calling attention to herself in a place where it was safer to blend in.
“Hey, Morgan.”
Oh no.
“Hello, Graves,” she said evenly as he jogged toward her. “Keep a distance, please. I can smell you from here.”
Behind him, Cody slowed, their eyebrows two thick lines of concern. Even if sheweren’tcomplaining to Tai all the time, Ellory’s war with Hudson was infamous enough that Cody was probably considering whether to intervene.
Hudson stopped a few feet away, close enough that she could see the perspiration collecting at his temples but far enough that at least four people could link arms between them. She couldn’t actually smell him, but she was sure he stank with the fetor of athleticism. His eyes were mockingbird black. His skin was golden brown in the caress of sunlight. His rose-pink lips held the raw ingredients of a smirk without quite finishing the recipe.
A bead of sweat traced the curve of his cheek, dripped onto his sloped shoulder, and disappeared into the fabric of his jersey. Ellory swallowed sharply.
Hudson tilted his head. “Did you hear there’s going to be a pop quiz in con. law tomorrow?”
“What?” Surprise yanked the words from her dry throat. “How would you even know about a pop quiz?”
“Italked to the TA, but it’s all over class.”
Ellory bit the inside of her cheek to keep from saying something she’d regret. After the first day, she’d been afraid to talk to the rest of her classmates in case they were all members of Hudson’s fan club. Her classmates seemed equally content to never speak to her. Occasionally, she checked the student message boards where they submitted assignments, but there was no casual chatter on there. Just CAN I GET AN EXTENSION and WHEN IS THIS DUE AGAIN and DOES ANYONE HAVE THE NOTES ON GIDEON V. WAINWRIGHT?
“Why are you even telling me this?” she asked around a thoughtful sip of her iced vanilla latte. Today she’d tried the oat milk that everyone was going wild for; so far, she was unimpressed. “If I fail, you have another opportunity to gloat.”
Hudson snorted. “I don’t want to be better than you because I have information you don’t, Morgan. I want to be better than you because I’m obviously better than you.” He began to jog backward, and—annoyingly—he didn’t even trip. “Anyway, you have the information now. Study or don’t study. It’s up to you.”
Ellory hated that he was right, that their petty academic rivalry meant nothing if they weren’t on an even playing field. Hated that heknewthat, believed that, which made her grudgingly respect him. She also hated the way his black shorts clung to his powerful thighs, and yes, she’d definitely been standing here for too long.
“Think fast, Graves!”
He thought fast, twisting out of the way of the soccer ball thathad been hurled at him. It zipped toward Ellory’s head, and she locked up like a deer in headlights, too surprised to move.Move, damn it. MOVE.
A blinding flash swallowed the world.
Her skin went hot and then cold and then hot again, and sound swung back in like a punch: The shouting team running across the field toward her. The distant babble of the Connecticut River indifferently flowing southward to the Long Island Sound. The wind rustling every leaf on the surrounding trees until they loosened and joined the rising piles on the quad. Hudson was in the same place, but everyone else stopped abruptly to murmur among themselves, their gazes on her feet. Ellory glanced down, expecting to see her ankle boots and a pile of shit between them.
Instead, she was standing in a circle of dead soil.
The path that looped around Bancroft Field was a dirt trail, dark brown and packed tight. Now it was the color of wet sand, dusty and cracked. Fissures spider-webbed out from beneath her feet and stretched toward the grass before stopping mere inches from touching the vibrant green. It was like a target of ruptures, and she was the bull’s-eye.
Between the field and the cracks, the soccer ball rested. She hadn’t even seen it drop.
“Are you all right, Ellory?” called Cody. Like everyone else, they stared at the soccer ball like it was possessed. “I thought—well, I’m glad it didn’t hit you.”
“Autumn winds,” Ellory heard herself say, and it was automatic, easy, like she’d said the words a thousand times before. Her hand wanted to fly to her throat, as if that would help her figure out whose script she was performing, but shestill couldn’t move. Only her lips remembered how, her mind steady in the certainty that thiswasn’t the first time she’d made these excuses. “Weird.”
One of the team members—Novak, perhaps—chuckled. “One time, I swear the wind yanked my backpack halfway across the quad while I was napping.”
“Oh, please,” said another. “You’re so fucking scrawny, you probably got dragged away from it.”
“Who are you callingscrawny?”
The two began to play wrestle, and whatever spell had fallen over them all was broken. Someone, the captain probably, shouted at everyone to get back to their drills. Cody fetched the ball with the kind of friendly wave that promised a full interrogation later. The team jogged away to launch into their next round of exercises, leaving Hudson and Ellory behind in a ringing silence.
There was a wrinkle between Hudson’s eyebrows, but even after he stopped staring at the ground, his gaze settled anywherebuton her. “I’m glad you’re all right, Morgan,” he said to a point over her shoulder. “Be careful when—just. Be careful.”
Then he was gone before she could question his sudden and unprecedented concern for her welfare. Ellory stepped gingerly from the center of the blast radius, half expecting the cracks in the dirt to follow her. Instead, they remained as a monument to where she’d once stood, a serrated circle of death.
This time, she wasn’t seeing things. Everyone else had seen it, too.
