I went in through the front doors, past Admissions and the Bursar’s, their frosted windows darkened this late. Up a flight of stairs to the still buzzing Senior Commons, where I was permitted at last. But I didn’t linger, heading down an empty hallway toward the locked Faculty Lounge.
I knocked three times, Sebastian cracked the door, and I slipped through.
We folded into each other, a seamless fit, like the teeth of a zipper. I breathed in his heat, the scents of whiskey and brush-fire smoke. The familiar feel of his Oxford shirt, one that I’d worn freshman year.
Sebastian still felt new in my arms—almost my height, muscles honed by fighting and climbing. His body was like mine in all the ways that Hiromi’s had been a contrast.
When he felt my tears, he pulled away. “Smoke getting to you?”
“Sometimes it just happens.”
He stared into my eyes, like Frankie when I was bluffing. “I never thought I’d see you cry.”
“It’s pathetic,” I said.
“No, Jess. It’s what I always hoped—that you weren’t like them.”
“Them?You were one of us. A prodigy.”
“At hiding,” he said. “I missed my sister every day. I thought maybe you were hiding something too.”
“But then you found out different.” A wave hit me—the kind of pain Cyrus’s butterfly clips could never have prepared me for. “For me, Peter was a triumph.”
I couldn’t hold his gaze.
The lounge was full of leather chairs, couches, a grand piano, its curved wing splayed open. We could only meet in places like this: darkened, locked, ours alone. The pottery classrooms, the storage closets in the experimental theater, the library stacks after midnight.
Sebastian and I had wordlessly agreed to stay a secret. I was a danger to him, my mask slipping every day. He’d been hiding his whole life. I was a beginner.
But the risk was worth it. I took his hand, pulling him toward the leather armchair in the darkest corner.
His feet stayed planted. “Do you have your family phone?”
“No.” I didn’t want our little blue dots to intersect too much.
“Good. I’m taking you to another mysterious location.”
A tremor went through me—that drive to Jersey in darkness.
“Poor choice of words.” Sebastian held me closer. “There are some people you need to meet.”
Sebastian led me awayfrom the exit stairs, along a stretch of empty offices, their glass-fronted doors labeled Purchasing, Transportation, Facilities. Reminders that Helshire had a logistical side: payrolls, power bills, walls to paint.
The hallway ended at a door marked Storage. He took a loose key from his pocket and fitted it uncertainly.
“Are we burgling?” I whispered.
“Not burglary. Rebellion.” The door opened.
A crowded darkness, stacks of folding tables, bed frames, and the old roller desks that you only saw in Main. We moved carefully, Sebastian feeling his way to another door in the corner.
No signage. A different key.
It opened on another world.
The large room was appointed with red velvet chairs and couches, antimacassars tasseled with gold. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases full of old volumes with knobbled spines, like leather vertebrae.
As Sebastian secured the door behind us, I took in the tapestries—a tall ship docking at Pearl Street Pier, the Mortons’ arrival in the New World. The signing of the Treaty of Alinagar, the Seths in the shadows. The Wolvaardts’ first incorporation outside of Holland, the Fort de Goede Hoop in Cape Town.
