Lucy Easting, once again, took a slightly incorrect step. Her new roommate hadn’t yet requested that Lucy avoid every one of the particularly noisy floorboards in their ancient dorm room. But judging by the way she arched her shoulders like an unhappy cat, it would, at the very least, be a future suggestion.
“Sorry,” Lucy said.
Whitney Fielding took a carefully controlled breath. “It’s fine,” she said.
Lucy focused on the task at hand. She had to laugh. There she was, standing in her college dorm, the very first place she had ever lived without her mother. And yet getting ready for a night out still had the same furtive feeling as it had on nights when she literally had to sneak out under Jillian’s nose.
But Lucy kept the smile on her face, even as she caught the wrinkle in Whitney’s brow deepening. She had a plan. A whole host of plans, in fact—and staying civil with Whitney for the next ten months and change was one of them. Which meant that if Whitney was trying to cook up some Noble Academic vs. Frivolous Party Girl dichotomy, it was going to fall to Lucy to gracefully sidestep it.
Whitney kept her back turned, facing her computer. “You’re not coming back late, right?” she asked. “I’m a light sleeper.”
Lucy tied off the bust of her sunshine-yellow romper, then moved the important things from her purse to a small, light wristlet. Lipstick, pepper spray, keys. Insurance card and ID, because even if she and Whitney were in the midst of a cold war, she was still Jillian’s daughter. In the Easting house, whenever you stepped out the front door, you always made the basic preparations to be hit by a bus.
“I’ll be quiet,” Lucy said, not committing either way. She could respect Whitney’s laser focus on her thesis, even if it seemed a bit early in the year to be so intense about it. But her arrival at Rollins University was the result of five years of working, careful planning, and an explosive, bridge-burning exit from the place she’d called home her entire life. She wasn’t looking to reinstate a curfew her first week of college.
It had been a tremendous relief for Lucy to hear that she was being placed in a senior dorm. At twenty-three years old, she had little to no chance to blend in with the freshmen.
And Whitney didn’t seem to care that she was two years younger than Lucy. If anything, she seemed to think that she was the older of the two, saddled with some callow, directionless youth.
“If you want my advice,” Whitney said, “you should let your first few weeks here set the tone. Do you really want your college career to be about your social life?”
“I don’t have any pre-reading for my classes,” Lucy said, which felt like a nicer answer thanYeah, a little. Classes also wouldn’t start for another two days. Though that didn’t feel like the kind of argument Whitney would be sympathetic to.
Whitney glanced over her shoulder, a rare departure from her screen, and gave Lucy a rather pointed once-over. On one hand, after a five-year taste of grim adulthood, it was a novelty to be treated like a rebelling teen. On the other hand, Lucy had wavy pale blond hair that fluffed in the humidity, and was perhaps at its peak fluffiness on this late-summer Tennessee night. Her voice was a little high and a little loud in a way she knew sounded affected, though it wasn’t. She had a stick-and-poke tattoo of an asterisk on her wrist, something her high school classmate had given her at a graduation party while tipsily monologuing that it symbolized her as a “work in progress.” She recognized the look of someone who wasn’t taking her seriously.
“If you wait for someone to tell you how to prepare, you’re already behind,” Whitney finally said. “Like they tell you in college coaching.”
Lucy paused in the middle of zipping up her wristlet. “There’s coaching?”
Whitney’s mouth thinned, as if unsurprised that Lucy didn’t know there was coaching. “Just be careful,” she said. “It’s a big campus. You can get turned around at night.”
Lucy zipped her wristlet the rest of the way and accepted the kindness. Rollins itself was about as small a world as one could get at a university. The grounds, spread across a plateau on the Tennessee side of the Appalachians, may have been sprawling, but the community was tight-knit and self-contained. Lucy had to take a plane, two buses, and a college-provided shuttle to get here. That shuttle went down to the nearest town a couple times a week, and on a regular schedule on weekends. Otherwise, the students, faculty, and staff never seemed to look far beyond the boundaries of campus.
But the nights were dark up there on the mountain. The woods surrounding the Rollins grounds stretched for miles. Jillian’s fears had always revolved around cities and civilization—never the wilderness. Though, as she looked out the window in that moment, Lucy had a feeling her mother would find more than a few things to fear out there in the trees.
And speak of the devil. When Lucy picked up her phone, there was a new text from her mother on the screen.
Can we please talk?
Lucy allowed herself one short, painful breath. One last quick squeeze of filial duty. Then she slid her phone into her pocket. She hadn’t been the one who decided they weren’t talking.
“Good luck with your writing,” she said to Whitney, who had already turned back to her laptop screen.
“I don’t need luck,” Whitney said airily. “I have an outline.”
Lucy opened the door and stepped into the fluorescent-lit corridors of Quincey Hall. The hinge creaked behind her. The stairwell glowed ahead. Jillian’s wheel silently, feverishly spun.
And beyond all of it, the night waited.
Lucy had never known how deep night could get until she came to Rollins. The dark was so complete, up there on the mountain: a thick country dark, heavy with mosquitoes and cicadas and a wind that never stopped fluttering. There were plenty of lampposts to guide the way, of course. But they never seemed to stretch very far down the path.
She had never seen real mountains before coming to Rollins. Had never been farther north than South Carolina, really. But her orientation leader had taken great pains to remind them all that when they walked the rocky trails surrounding campus, they were standing on something ancient. It had seemed like a weird digression in their course catalog tutorial, but she understood it now. These woods were prehistoric. And when it was this quiet, she felt it.
As she neared the bus shelter for the campus shuttle stop, she sidestepped what appeared to be a pile of leaves—only to realize with a jolt that it was a crumpled, dead rabbit. She looked away quickly from its matted fur, dotted red at its throat, and swallowed a wave of nausea before she tucked herself into the bus shelter. They’d been assured that any animals on campus would be much more scared of the students than the students were of them. She chose to believe that was true.
Falls Quad was nearly a mile walk from Lucy’s dorm. She wouldn’t have minded—after five years of standing at a cash register by day and emceeingWheel of Fortunemarathons with her grandfather by night, she was looking forward to seeing actual scenery again, even if that scenery did hold the occasional dead rabbit. But tonight, at least, she’d take Whitney’s advice to heart.
A gust of wind rattled a line of flyers taped to the plexiglass, and Lucy absently read them as they settled. Most of them were the same neon-pink poster with bold black lettering.Pallas 87.1, they read.Independent campus radio for thenocturnalamong us. Airs nightly, 9 p.m.–2 a.m.Which was a nice idea—kind of cool and old-fashioned, like a cassette mixtape. Although much like a cassette mixtape, Lucy wasn’t surehowanyone actually listened to radio anymore.
