For just a moment, she thinks she catches him looking over her shoulder, where the frozen fish mouth holds her pill bottle. The eye.
“I’ll do it,” Dez says.
“Fantastic,” he says, making a note. “And think about learning Sumerian? That club is wild. So close to the source.”
“Sure,” she says. “Hey, Jet, do you know what kinmedai is?”
Jet reaches over her shoulder, pats the mouth of the fish carcass, his fingers only millimeters from her pill bottle. “I guess you’re making something special.”
“Rae!” Lebevre barks, barging into the freezer. He pushes past Jet and grabs the sheet pan holding the fish carcass and Dez’s eye out from behind her. “Do youlikeyour fingertips, Rae?”
“I’ll put you down for Eye for an Eye,” Jet says as Dez hurries after Lebevre.
“Dr. Lebevre,” she calls. “Chef, wait! Before you—”
But by the time she catches up with him, he’s at the stovetop, dumping the entire fish carcass into a huge pot of simmering stock. Dez watches its open mouth sink just beneath the surface.
And then her pill bottle bobs up.
She doesn’t think. She plunges her fingers into the bubbling soup. The pain stays outside her until the bottle’s in her grip. Then she shrieks from the searing heat and pulls out her awful treasure, swiftly cradling the bottle under her left arm.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Lebevre demands. But he’s too focused on what she’s done to his soup to notice her squeezing the blazing pill bottle under her armpit.
“My grandmother gave me some cooking lessons, too,” Dez says, gasping at her throbbing fingers. “She said the secret ingredient is pain.”
Lebevre looks at Dez as if he’s considering which knife from his selection would best slice off her fingertips. Then, unexpectedly, he laughs. Deep in his belly, like Dez knows what she’s talking about, like she didn’t just make that shit up.
Maybe he’s wasted. Maybe, for once, she’s lucky. But for whatever reason, Lebevre plunges his own hand into the soup. “Grandmothers!” he hoots. “Fuck, that’s hot!”
As he wrings his hand out, Dez staggers backward, toward the kitchen’s side door. She stumbles outside by the dumpsters and plunges her fist into the snow. She thinks of Mo, how much worse his burns are than this, and she bears it. Her thumb and forefinger are bright red, but they’ll heal. Her hands shake as she takes out the prescription bottle. It’s slightly deformed into the shape of her grip from its moment in the boiling water, but the cap still comesoff, and the eye inside still has its vile integrity. She holds it in her quaking palm, stares into its iris, almost black. Then she packs the bottle with ice, puts the eye inside, and closes the cap, placing it back in her pocket.
From now on, she’ll keep it with her. Always. Until the moment she needs it, until the moment the eye means the difference between imprisonment and freedom.
“WELCOME, HAPPY COUPLING! WELCOME, HAPPYcoupling!” Jet Connelly greets the line of first-year students with a flight attendant’s grin as they board the ski lift behind the dining hall after lunch. “Welcome!” he says when Dez and Simon lumber clumsily to the front of the line. “You look like you need help!”
Dez eyes the revolving metal chair her ass is somehow supposed to land on. She eyes her awkwardly angled white skis, their blackAlogo cut through with a graphic of a snake, which the emo last-year outside the ski shop had to show her how to attach to her boots. She eyes the glove she’s wearing over the fingers she stuck in Lebevre’s boiling stock, over the bandage and the salve she found in the kitchen’s first aid kit. She eyes the soaring white mountain, lit by LED floodlights, which she’s about to ascend, and then … what? Ski down?
How in the hell?
“I’m from the desert. I have no idea what I’m doing,” Dez confesses as Jet takes her by the arm and pulls her over to the loading zone. Above her, the whir of the bull wheel fills her with anxiety. The ski lift scares her. Everything about this venture seems insanely irresponsible.
“Don’t worry,” Jet says, his blue and black eyes twinkling, “everyone else picked this up lightning fast.”
“How reassuring,” Simon mutters to Dez as Jet recedes, and the chair approaches from behind, swooping them up with a kick that makes Dez yelp. Now Simon’s lowering the safety bar, and they’re rising through the dark afternoon, heading for a summit she can’t yet see through the clouds.
Pine trees recede below them. Silvery mountains stretch out east and west. The stars blink on over their heads. And for a moment, it’s simply, unexpectedly beautiful.
Then Dez remembers she’s going to have to get off this thing at some point and actually ski.
“What happens at the top?” she asks Simon. “What’s this coupling ritual about?”
“Now who’s interested in the literature?” Simon teases her. “The coupling ritual pairs each first-year with a last-year. Apparently, it’s Acheron’s oldest tradition.”
“And what do we do with this last-year?”
“They’ll be our mentor for the rest of the term. They show us the ropes, like a big brother in a fraternity. I foresee hazing.”
“Is it just me,” Dez says, as a wide, wet snowflake strikes between her eyes, “or does ‘coupling’ make it sound sexual?”
