Page 2 of Cruel Rite

I finish hanging the coat, cross to the door with my folder of registration paperwork under my arm, and then—for no reason I could put into a sentence if you asked me—I go back and touch the lining again. Same thumb, same length, same pressure. I don’t think a word while I do it. I just do it, the way you check a stove is off twice even after you’ve checked it once, and then I leave for the registrar’s office before Junie can start a new sentence.

The registrar’s office is two rooms off the entrance hall of the administration building, with a counter, a wooden bench worn shiny down the middle, and a clock that’s the only thing making noise in the building. I sit on the bench for four minutes before anyone calls me up, and I spend them doing the thing I always do while I wait—pricing the room. The counter’s oak, old, the varnish worn through in a strip where two centuries of forearms have rested on it. The clock is older than the counter. Nothing in this room was bought in my lifetime.

The clerk behind the counter is maybe sixty, unhurried, reading glasses on a cord, and he doesn’t look at me the way the man in the coat did. He looks at me the way you look at a form.

“Ferrante,” he says, checking a list, and slides a single sheet across the counter before I’ve said a word. A pen is already sitting on top of it, uncapped, angled toward me like he set it there for someone else and forgot to take it back.

I start reading before I pick it up.

It’s not what I expected. I expected housing, meal plan, the usual first-week nothing.

What’s on the page is a balance. A figure. A name—my name, Ferrante, entered under an account I’ve never seen and never opened, dated as of today.

My hands go cold. Actually cold, fingertips first, the way they did exactly one other time in my life. I read it again, out loud this time, low, because that’s what I do when I’m frightened and need to hear the words land the way they’re supposed to land.

They land the same way twice.

I run it anyway, because running it is the only thing I know how to do with a number. Against the checking account, which earned four dollars of interest last year and I remember the four dollars. Against the envelope in the back cover of the ledger. Against the folded bills in the toe of a boot in the bag I haven’t unpacked yet. Three places. I know all three totals without going to look, the way other people know their own phone number, and there is no order I can put them in that gets within shouting distance of the figure on this page.

“This isn’t right,” I say. “This isn’t—I didn’t sign anything. I don’t know what this is.”

“It’s the roll entry,” the clerk says, reaching for the next folder in his stack without looking up. “Acknowledgment of balance. Standard for anyone with a family account on file.”

“I don’t have a family account.”

“You do now.” He says it the way he’d say it’s Tuesday.

I don’t sign it. I set the pen back down where I found it and push the sheet an inch across the counter, which is the only kind of no I have available to me right now, and I wait for him to tell me what happens next, because there’s always a next, there’s always a form after the form.

“Doesn’t matter if you sign it,” he says, already looking at his next piece of paper. Not cruel. Not even unkind. Just a man for whom this is a form and nothing else. “It’s already on the roll.”

He leaves the pen exactly where it is, cap off, angled toward a hand that isn’t coming for it, and goes back to his own work like the conversation ended several sentences ago from his side of the counter.

The sheet stays where I pushed it. My name across the top of it, spelled right. Today’s date beside it in his handwriting, and the figure under both.

Behind me the clock makes its one sound, and the clerk looks past my shoulder at the bench and says, “Next.”

Chapter 2: The Second Debt

The clerk says next and somebody else’s name gets called and I am still standing at the counter doing arithmetic that will not resolve.

I run the figure against the checking account. Against the envelope in the back cover of the ledger. Against the boot. I have run these same three numbers so many times in my life that I don’t need paper for it, and paper wouldn’t help—paper is the problem, paper is the thing sitting an inch from my hand with my name spelled right across the top of it, and no order I put the three numbers in gets anywhere near what’s written there. I do it a fourth time anyway. Not because a fourth time will produce a different total. Because doing the math is a task, and a task is a place to put my hands while the rest of me works out what to do with the fact that the number doesn’t move no matter who runs it.

I recognize the shape of this. I recognized it the second I read the figure the first time and didn’t let myself think it, and I let myself think it now: a number too big for the room, set down by someone who already knows whether I’ll sign, and it not mattering either way. I was sixteen the last time somebody put this shape in front of me. There was a kitchen table involved that time, and a man I didn’t know, and an envelope, and my mother asleep down the hall. This time there’s a pen with the cap off and a clerk who has already moved on to the next folder.

The bus from Ashfen leaves at 6:40 in the morning. I have cash on me for the fare—I checked that before I checked anything else in this building, because knowing your exits is free. If I’m on it tomorrow, I lose the room, I lose the year, I lose whatever thread in my father’s last two years might still be lying around this headland waiting to be pulled. What I don’t lose is the debt. It doesn’t leave with me. It’s entered, dated, on a roll in a jurisdiction that doesn’t have police to complain to, and every hour I’m not here is an hour my uncle gets to decide what a fled niece is worth to him.

Or I stay. I stay inside the family that owned my father for nineteen years and got him shot for it, in a place where a man’s hand got bent sideways this afternoon and two hundred people kept walking. I stay and I use the year for the one thing it’s actually good for: finding out what happened to him, and getting this number struck or paid before March closes the account for good.

There isn’t a third option that isn’t a fantasy. I’ve never had the luxury of a third option.

I take the black ledger out of my bag—rubber band, hardcover, the only thing I own that isn’t clothing or a coat—and I write today’s date in it, and under it I write the figure from the sheet, and this time I write it under my own name instead of my father’s, because as of an hour ago that’s whose name it’s actually on. Then in the margin, small, I write two words: not priced yet.

Not unpayable. Not a loss I’m writing off. Unfinished. That’s the whole difference, and it’s the only kind of hope I let myself keep in writing.

I put the ledger back in my bag and go find room 214, because Junie is somewhere on this campus being Junie at somebody, and the coat lining isn’t going to open itself.

The room is empty when I get there, door shut behind me, and the first thing I do—before the bags are even set down properly—is go to the closet and take my mother’s coat off its hanger.