Her only response was to turn up her nose and roll down the window. A torrid heat fell in through the crack, stung with exhaust. Up ahead, the light turned green. As Thomas accelerated through the intersection, Vivienne’s window slid perfunctorily shut. The temperature in the car went ice-cold. With a glower, she cracked the window a second time. Again, Thomas shut it.
“It’s too hot,” he said as they drew to a stop at another light.
He was right, it was. And yet she didn’t want to concede. Not to him. He kept his eyes trained on the road ahead, and she was met with the terrible urge to make a scene. Giving in to the impulse, she threw open the door and lunged out into the intersection. Cars barreled past in the perpendicular lane, whipping the pink petal of her skirt skyward.
Behind her, the car lurched instantly into park. Vivienne wrenched open the front passenger door and dropped into the air-conditioned seat to find Thomas already halfway out the adjacent door. She set to buckling herself in as he sank wordlessly back into his seat. Several cars behind them, an impatient trucker let out a prolonged honk.
Pale with fury, Thomas put the car into drive. His knuckles were white against the steering wheel. In the engine quiet, she swore she could hear his molars grinding to dust.
You said to sit in the front, she signed.Didn’t you?
His head turned on a swivel, his eyes wide. Satisfaction crackled through her at the look on his face. He masked his surprise quickly, accelerating into the oncoming turn.
“Next time you pull something like that,” he said, “I’m turning on the child lock.”
•••
Stone College was sparse and colorless, its campus sprawled throughout the city proper. From the start, Vivienne’s mother had hated the thought of her daughter enrolling in something so pedestrian as community college. Her peers had all applied and been accepted to places with pedigrees. Harvard and Stanford. Yale and Princeton and MIT. Vivienne, meanwhile, hadn’t applied anywhere at all. She’d let the admission deadlines come and go. She hadn’t written any inspiring personal statements or gone to any evaluative interviews. What would she have written? What could she have said?
I am not my own, and here is why.
Her mother had been mortified. Philip, relieved.
He preferred to keep her close to home.
Stone was perfect. The school’s conservatory offered an eight-week intensive dance study, complete with ample studio time and a final solo performance to be featured in the end-of-summer showcase.
It scratched an itch. It kept her limber, gave her something to do with her days. Best of all—and most importantly—it made an excellent cover. As an added bonus, the low cost of enrollment meant Philip hadn’t even noticed when he paid double the tuition.
Vivienne stood beneath the sun-swept beams of the atelier and faced the mirror, careful to keep her eyes trained on the dead space just above her head. Careful not to look at the creature in the glass.
Outside, Thomas waited in the lobby where she’d left him, thumbing idly through his textbook. She moved through her warm-up and did her level best not to give any thought to him at all. It was harder than she’d expected. Her focus kept sliding to the crack in the door. From this angle, she could just make out the hard slice of his jaw, his figure in profile.
It wasn’t just mortifying, the way he’d found her that morning—it was dangerous. What would have happened if he’d come upon her talking in her sleep, her voice ground like glass, her words steeped in poison?
She didn’t want to think about that.
She didn’t want to think about the last person who’d heard her—didn’t want to remember Mikhail dying on the side of the road, or the way she’d babbled the same thing over and over, once it no longer mattered:Misha, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault. I’m sorry.
One hand on the bar, she moved into a battement, fluttering her foot in rapid succession. Ignoring the way the body in the mirror swirled along with her, a half step behind, a smile on its face.
The first hour was very nearly over when her phone lit up with a buzz.
Right on time.
Reed Connolly was a lot of things—most of which drove her up the wall—but he was never late. She plucked her phone out of the pink crush of her bag and opened the message.
Reed
I’m outside.
An icy spate of something unidentifiable threaded through her. She slid her phone into the waistband of her skirt and changed back into her sneakers, her eye on the lobby. Thomas remained engrossed in his reading, his thumb tapping out a silent beat against the page. Not for the first time that morning, she thought about how much easier this would be if he were gone. He wasn’t Mikhail. He didn’t understand what was at stake.
If she had her way, he never would.
When at last she slipped out the door, it wasn’t into the lobby where Thomas waited. It was, instead, into the empty northern hall. A boy hovered by the wide revolving door, a leather portfolio tucked under one arm.
“You can’t just text me an order and expect me to drop everything,” said Reed Connolly, sounding predictably irate.
