by Sara Wolf
Except right now, at this very moment, there’s nothing. My brain’s an empty echo chamber with nothing in it. No screaming terror, no prickling unease, no baseless but utter conviction that Hot Dude is going to hurt me. Just nothing where something huge should be.
He’s the first.
The first new person I’ve felt okay touching in…well. Forever.
“Oh shit.” I jump out of his arms. “I’m so fuckin’ sor -” Normal people think swearing’s nasty, right? “Sorry. You - I - I’m not-comatose right now. Haha. So. I owe you.”
The guy straightens, and my dumbass mouth takes that as a cue to motor up.
“I’m, uhm, Lilith. And I’m not normally this clumsy,” I laugh like a nervous hyena. “Promise.”
He bends down and comes up with my glasses, offering them with a soft smile, but I might as well be looking into the full brilliance of the sun. His silver eyes crinkle in the corners.
“Be careful. I might not be there to catch you, next time.”
I reach out to grab my glasses from his slender, pale fingers. My sweaty palms must slime his because he pulls away the second they’re passed over, leaving me with shame and the faint scent of fresh mint and rain on a hot sidewalk. He walks up the stairs, past Lionel, and disappears with the click of a door.
Holy shit.
Lionel calls down to me from a few stairs up; “Are you okay, Lilith?”
“No,” I moan, clinging to the railing to keep my trembling body upright. “Did you know I’m stupid?”
“You’re not stupid,” Lionel assures me.
“I failed basic algebra.”
“Some people are not good at certain things,” He agrees sagely.
“One plus one equals two,” I groan. “But zero plus hot does not equal talk.”
I manage to make it to the third floor; the hallway with its fancy lights shaped like shells and plush carpets stretching long between the rows of doors, but I barely notice any of it. Lady Luck usually just wangs full juicy diapers at me, and I can duck those, but now I’m in charge of cleaning her personal outhouse, apparently! How dare she give me the hottest guy I’ve ever seen - pretty much the only guy I’ve ever thought was wildly attractive - and then make me a gibbering fool in front of him? Bonus; I’m not even afraid of him touching me. Not even a little.
He’s hot, nice, and one of a kind.
“I don’t even like people,” I go limp with defeat, my converse’d toes dragging on the carpet. “Did you know that? They breathe too loud and get snobby about music and say stupid shit like ‘as long as they aren’t gay in front of me, I’m cool with it’. I’ve never had a single crush, ever. Not even in elementary school when getting fake-married with Ring-Pops was a big deal. Crushes don’t happen to me! I crush myself! With guilt!”
“I’m sure you’ve liked someone.”
“One middle school confession and a risqué dream during high school English doesn’t count, Lionel,” I whine. “Why didn’t you tell me there were people like that here? I would’ve worn eyeliner, at least.”
“He was very handsome,” Lionel agrees mildly. “Ah, here we are; room 322.”
He wafts an electronic key over the lock, and the hefty door clicks open. My exhausted eyes barely parse the small bathroom or the huge floor-to-ceiling window covered in lace. I flop down on the fluffy twin bed.
“Can you take me back to the airport?” I ask, my face half-mashed in a heavenly pillow.
“Why?” Lionel inquires lightly, opening the curtains. I beat my legs impetuously.
“I wanna go home. Where the people are ugly like me.”
I hear him laugh, feel the cool, gentle embrace of the duvet as he covers me with it. That’s fine. Fabric touching me, not him.
“Here -” He winds the old-fashioned clock on the bedside table. “I’ll set it for six-thirty, so you can be ready by seven for breakfast. It’s a buffet, so there’s no formal table etiquette, and you can be a little late. Lunch is informal, too, but dinner is quite the opposite. The professors will be sitting with you and teaching you table etiquette.”
“Pissssss,” I moan at the idea of multiple fork sizes.
“Your uniform’s on the dresser. Remember; button the shirt from the bottom. I know it’s hard when you’re half-asleep, but going from the bottom makes it easier.”
I grace him with an eloquent grunt.
“I’ll write down my number. Call me if you need anything, alright? I’ll be staying down in the village with the other drivers, but I can be here in ten minutes -”
“Lionel,” I mutter.
“Hm?”
I look at him with the last scrap of my energy, one eye sleepily glaring at him from over the pillow.
“If Will hurts my mom, I’ll have to hurt him.”
There’s a beat. The birds chirp outside. Lionel’s nod of agreement is hesitant, small, but there. It’s the last thing I see before exhaustion knocks me over the head and drags me off to dreamland.
6
The Beginning (Or, How a boy prepares for a battle he can’t win)
At seventeen and one month old, Alistair Strickland has a well-established routine at the Institut Le Silvere.
Mornings are for the rooftop of Knight Belmont - he’s the only one other than the cleaners with a key. They keep the herbs up here for the kitchens, and he sits on a bench flanked by spines of rosemary and the scent of the black coffee in his hands. He’s been up here since one in the morning - he comes here when sleep is elusive, which is usually. Rafe likes to joke that’s why he’s so grumpy all the time. He thinks Rafe likes his jokes too much.
He thinks the night has too many shadows.
Alistair watches the sun rise, slow and fragile and pink. He wonders if anyone will try him, today. He scoffs into his coffee; of course they will. He’s the only thing standing between them and a riotously good time in this secluded boarding school their parents have sent them to. Freedom is the headiest drug. Not that he’d know.
The sunrise paints the scar tissue under his shirt collar pink.
He looks out at the campus and tries not to linger his gaze too long on the deep woods that border it. It’s been years, but still, it echoes.
Magic.
Children see and hear things that aren’t there. They have imaginations. Their brains aren’t fully formed. Everyone has childhood stories, like he does, of seeing people made of shadow. Impossible things.
He shakes his head and instead wonders productively. He wonders if his sister Rose is alright. Children make things up, but she’s the exception. She’s only staying with that woman in the Brussels house for six months out of the year - Father got half-custody after Alistair left. Still, he wonders and worries. Six months is too many. He checks his phone; she hasn’t texted, so she’s fine. For now. He looks down into the black pool of his coffee, brings it to his mouth, and instantly feels the old fear well up, like branches scratching at a window. The feeling of foam at his mouth, the feeling of his every muscle seizing up, his small body trapped - unresponsive - in that huge white bed for months on end.
Munchausen by proxy, he’d heard the lawyers murmur to his grandmother in the dead of night, when they thought he was asleep. When he couldn’t sleep in the hospital, even if he wanted to.
‘No one’s here’, he tells himself. ‘No one has touched this coffee. It’s safe’.
But what if? She could’ve paid someone. What if the grinder wasn’t cleaned thoroughly? What if someone laced the coffee filters? It’d be easy enough - most central nervous system poisons are white powders in stable form, and all filters are white. Easily hidden, easily dusted. He could’ve overlooked it -
The door to the roof opens behind him and instantly he leaps to his feet, heart hammering in his ears. His fingers slip the coffee cup, the porcelain shattering and the liquid glinting on marble. A short girl with a white-blonde bob approaches, her footsteps nigh-silent and her uniform well-pressed. Maria.
“I thought I told you not
to bother me up here,” Alistair snarls.
“Urgent,” She says, voice emotionless and flat. Maria is the epitome of speak little, hear everything. He claws himself back to normal, trying to breathe slow.
“Then it better be good.”
She nods. “New sixth-year student. From America.”
“Family?”
“Unknown.”
“So they’re scholarship.”
“No,” She corrects. “Paid.”
Alistair’s dark brow quirks up. It’s one word, but it means many. Paid people aren’t new here; their brothers and mothers and great-great-great-grandfathers have gone to Silvere. You don’t come in during sixth year out of the blue - you get put on the waiting list by your parents when you’re born, and you leap at the slightest fourth year spot. You’re screened and magnanimously gifted a spot. Silvere is a destination, not a school. It’s planned for. Random transfer students are an unheard-of delicacy. What was Grandmother thinking, letting such a person in? And from the States, no less. Very few old families there.
He watches the groundskeepers move about the campus in their early morning rounds of watering the flowers and bushes. One of them in particular catches his eye - hiding surreptitiously behind a gardening shack. With a red-haired girl. In a uniform. Kissing.
Alistair is disappointed, but not surprised. People don’t surprise him, anymore. He’s thought of everything they could possibly do. He’s ready for anything they’ll do. Everything.
Worry worry worry.
He cracks his knuckles one-by-one. “Let’s be sure to give our new student a welcome show, shall we?”
Maria nods, silently. He swings his uniform blazer over his shoulders by two careless fingers, and follows her down the stairs.
Alistair Strickland has a routine at Silvere. And this transfer student has ruined it.
If he’d stayed and listened a moment longer, he might’ve heard the forest whisper to him; this is the beginning of the end.
If he stayed on that rooftop one moment longer, he would’ve seen the shadow shaped like a man flickering in the deep woods.
7
The Fight (Or, How dangerous first impressions are in the right hands of the wrong people)
If mornings are the Hydra, then I’m Hercules; constantly chopping the heads off in the hopes they stop happening.
“Fuck,” I look in the mirror over the fancy sink in my bathroom, the sun nearly blinding me as I beat my skull with my hairbrush. “Stop. Saying. Fuck. You’re in Europe now. Be classy.”
I pause, strike a pose with the hairbrush like it’s a mic, and say with the most luxurious accent I can manage;
“Fucké.”
The mirror does not appreciate me nearly as much as I appreciate me. My dark circles are huge, but they’ll just have to deal, because TSA (The Suckiest Assholes) confiscated my concealer. At the very least, my ages-old chunky black glasses take the attention away. I smooth my ragged blonde bob down and inspect my uniform. Tie - tied. Calf socks - yanked up. Blazer with the lion-shield embroidered insignia - on. Buttons - all. Skirt - maybe consider asking for pants. I pull the hem as low as it’ll go, and slip on my converse.
“Okay, Lilith,” I hover my hand above the doorknob. “You definitely don’t look like you, but that’s fine. This isn’t about you. This is about Mom. She’s the real video game. You’re just the DLC.”
Anything becomes easy to swallow if you chop it up into small enough pieces. Like steak. Or in this case, my own inflated sense of teenage pride. So what if I walk out of this room and people don’t like me? I’m not here for them. I’m here for Mom. One foot at a time. That’s all I can do, now. Ruby’s not here. Mom’s not here. It’s just me. It’s just seven months.
I rub my left knee one last time - the scar thin and pale and the muscle beneath it aching. It healed as quickly as any broken bone does for a kid, but I’ve learned sometimes a wound goes deeper than bone. Even after ten years it lingers in weird ways. If the air’s too cold it starts to hurt real bad beneath the kneecap, in the flesh of it. Not bad enough I can’t walk, but just bad enough to make moving torturous. Summer’s fine. It’s just winter and late fall, and the occasional chilly days in spring. I have a warming brace for it, but I super did not wanna wear it on my very first day. It’s my scar. My problem. My past - not anyone else’s. And in my experience, wearing a brace is an open invitation for people to ask too many of the worst sorts of questions.
I stuff the book Von Arx gave me and my notebook into my backpack, and walk out. I immediately come face-to-face with another girl coming out of her room at the same time. She’s got a gorgeous mane of sleek black braids, each bookended by a bright pink rubber band. She sees me and the smile that blooms on her dark cheeks is cherubic.
“Guete morge,” She says.
“G-Guten morge?” I try.
“Oh,” She switches into perfect English. “Are you the American? They said you were moving in this week.”
“What gave it away - the fact I almost said ‘gluten morning’?”
The girl laughs. “Gluten morning is great. But that’s only for days when you’re planning to have waffles.”
“Which is every day,” I say. “If I can get away with it.”
“Obviously,” She nods in very faux-serious agreement, and then smiles. “I really hate the whole last-name thing everyone does here, so; I’m Ana.”
“Oh. Uh. I’m Lilith.”
We walk together down the hall - filling the space with an awkward, super-forced conversation that gets easier as we go. She’s from São Paulo, her parents are the Brazilian ambassadors to the UN, and when I ask how many languages she knows she says Portuguese, French, German and English. Fluently. I tell her I’m from California and all I know how to speak is English, the In-n-Out menu, and a side of Internet Keysmash.
“Asdfjkl should totally be a word,” She insists as we walk down the spiral staircase. Other girls start flooding in around us from their rooms, and I try not to notice how slender and fashionable they are.
“What would it mean, though?” I ask.
“It’s the noise you make when you’re so excited you can’t form a coherent thought.”
“You’re just describing my default state of being, now.”
Ana giggles. “Okay, that settles it; you and I have to eat together. Is that cool?”
I breathe a sigh. “You sparing me from total social isolation is very cool, actually. Thanks.”
The hall soon overflows with girls, all of them in the same uniform. Bags and shoes seem to be the one thing the dress code lets us decide, thank jeegus, because I’m not ready to part with my ratty converse just yet. Some girls choose sensible backpacks, others opt for fancy Hermes handbags that look like they can barely carry a nail clipper. Some choose beachy blown-out waves that look like they were done at a salon, others have silky masses of perfect curls, and a few, like me, don’t bother with anything but a ponytail or a braid. But every single one of us is half-awake - yawning and blinking blearily in the light filtering in from the chateau’s windows.
“There’s a lot of stylish people here, huh?” I mutter. Next to me, Ana nods.
“I like to joke with Papa that this place is more of a display case than a school. The most expensive brand names, the latest phones - for some people here, that’s all they care about.”
“And what about the rest?” I ask.
“For the rest of us, this is our proving ground.”
“That’s…definitely not ominous,” I mutter under my breath.
Ana doesn’t say anything more on it, and she and I are steadily carried along by the throng of sleepy girls. We make it out of the dorm and into the sunlit green of the morning campus. It looks even bigger and more impressive in the morning light than it did yesterday.
“God, the air is so fresh here,” I breathe deep. “I hate it.”
“We’re pretty high up. You’ll get used to it.” Ana laughs and points into the distance. “In case
you haven’t looked at a map already, this is the Knight Lyon building. That building on the other end is the Knight Belmont building, the second dorm.”
“It’s all co-ed, right?”
“Yeah. Just don’t get caught in the east side of either dorm - that’s the boy’s side.”
“Considering I don’t have a compass on me…” I trail off.
“The east side walls are painted green. The west side is lavender.”
“Ugh,” I groan. “Strict gender barriers are so boring.”
Ana laughs. “Agreed. Still, you’re not supposed to go over to the opposite side. Especially not at night.”
“But, people do, of course.”
“Oh all the time,” She nods furiously, braids clinking.
“Do they ever get expelled?”
Ana purses her lips. “Sometimes? That’s for drug stuff, usually. If you get caught hooking up you get suspended for a week or two and then come back like nothing happened. So most people do it in the rose garden, instead.”
I choke on my spit. “S-Sorry?”
She points to the massive hedge maze down the hill from the school bursting with red and white and yellow roses. I raise a brow.
“And they say romance is dead. Don’t people get expelled?”
“Expelling isn’t much of a thing,” She continues without missing a beat. “Von Arx is strict, but she’s averse to pissing off the parents too much.”
‘Pissing off the parents?’ I mouth. Ana sees it, and giggles.
“Didn’t anyone tell you? We’re all very important here.” She points over our heads at a braided blonde girl. “Daughter of the French Minister of Culture. And her -” She points again to a girl with a helmet of short, slicked black hair. “Daughter of the president of the African National Congress in South Africa.” She points again, to a girl wearing a long scarf. “Her dad’s a Saudi prince.”
