Baby

After I was released from the tower, I behaved myself. I took cold baths every morning, right after tea with Baby, and dressed in clean clothes. I combed my hair and brushed my teeth. I showed up to class with freshly sharpened pencils and sat at the front of the room. I took notes. I stayed awake. I went to the library and checked out books. I read them, mostly.

But at night, as I lay in bed listening to Baby snore, I was suddenly there again. In the tower. In the dark.

My brain seized. I clutched my stomach.

I lunged to turn on my lamp, then blinked fast at the sudden light. I tried to breathe.

Two moths had slipped through our open window. They quivered now around the lamp.

I waited for my breathing to slow.

The concentrator had told me the truth; I hadn’t been brainwashed. I still felt like myself, whatever that meant. And I could still remember the hotel and my life before Catherine. But that life seemed much further away than before, like something that had happened a long time ago in some unimportant world. Yes, I had gotten into trouble. Enough trouble that I couldn’t go home without having to answer some ugly questions. Yes, I hadn’t been able to stop what happened to that girl. I had run away.

But where had I run to? Where was I now?

I clutched the bed.

I had failed one class last semester: Electricities, of course. I had passed all the others, though. I wasn’t expelled, but I was still on academic probation. If I failed a single class this semester, I was out.

I couldn’t let that happen. I had to keep going.

Delirious spring blurred into heady, verdant summer. The fig trees’ leaves shrouded our bedroom windows. The grass on the yard turned electric-green and grew anxious with the noise of bees and mosquitoes. Clouds of gnats brooded over the weeds.

I spent hours that summer in the garden, behind the brick wall on the west side of the yard. The garden was a darling little fantasy of a place furnished with rows of vegetables and herbs, a stone fountain, tangling rosebushes, and a hill of bluebells. That hill was where graduations were held. The garden reminded me of the illustration from my old book. When the roses bloomed in June, their humid, ancient perfume flustered me. It made me feel like I was going insane.

I used to think of Catherine as a dead place. In those first months, as I passed through gray libraries, parlors, and ballrooms, followed brown hallways into brown courtyards, and fell asleep, drunk and cold, in claw-foot tubs, I felt like a ghost wandering through a dream. But in the velvety summer nights, the house felt vital, like something alive. More than alive; it was mutating.

At first it was strange to take classes in the summer, but the three-year curriculum demanded it. I was taking a class called American Photography that semester. My favorite spread in the textbook was a series of snapshots taken at parties in New York apartments during the 1980s. I spent hours one Friday studying each photo in turn. Slutty, glittery men and women, their eyes glassy with drugs and sex, laughed as they kissed each other. Lipstick smeared across their faces. They danced until they blurred.

I was so lost in the photos that I was late to that night’s session. When I arrived, the chanting had already begun. Viktória stood by the windows in a white dress. The great hall reverberated with her voice and the echoed response.

I slipped into a chair next to a tiny freckled girl. I folded my hands.

I am in the house, I said. My hands are on the table. The house is in the woods.

*  *  *

My brain slumped, drunk. Machine noise, steel drilling against steel, reverberated through my teeth. The noise stopped, then started again. I pulled the pillow over my head. I dreamed that a mad scientist was boring into my skull.

When I woke up, it was midmorning and I wasn’t home. I was in Ashley, in some girl’s room. I could hear her moaning in the bathroom. She’d invited me over to study for our Japanese Prints midterm. She’d brought the flash cards and I’d brought the wine.

“Are you okay?” I called to her.

She burped.

I crawled over to the window, the blanket still pulled over my head.

We were in the Ashley tower, looking over the yard. I hadn’t dreamed the noise; a Ferris wheel had been constructed on the grass. It loomed, inhuman and sinister as a spaceship, over a neon-blue high striker, cornhole game, and tug-of-war rope. A bouncy castle swayed in the breeze. On the far side of the yard, aides were setting up grills and picnic blankets. The trees’ trunks were wrapped in blue and yellow ribbons.

The Founders’ Festival. I’d almost forgotten.

I got dressed and slipped downstairs.

Out on the yard, I stared up at the Ferris wheel. It was huge and silent, blinking slow in the dense, muggy atmosphere.

“Baby,” I called. I could see her in the distance, hugging her elbows as she watched the cotton candy machine churn.

“Hello, dear,” I said as I approached her. “Did your midterms go okay?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Did you want cotton candy?”

The machine whirred like an engine. An aide twisted a pile of the pink stuff onto a paper cone. Baby eyed the cone without expression. “No,” she said.

I laced my arm through hers.

“I’m happy to see you,” I said.

She let me hold her arm.

A five-man brass band was arranging itself on a makeshift stage, unfolding chairs and pulling horns out of cases. As I watched them, I felt myself move closer, as if drawn by some thrilling perfume. They weren’t Catherine students. They wore suits and ties and whispered to one another as they eyed us. Sweat dampened their armpits.

Yaya and Anna stood watching them, too, giggling.

“Aren’t they dreamy?” Yaya said as we came near. “Guess Viktória decided we should get some real entertainment for our precious founders. Whoever they were.”

“Do you think the band will be let inside?” I said. “In the house?”

“Ha,” Yaya said. “I’d like to see one of them try. Viktória will have them peeing in the bushes.” She peered at Baby over the top of her peppermint-pink plastic sunglasses. “Girl, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Baby said.

“Your eyes are red.”

“I’m tired.”

The tuba player, all skinny arms and wiry dreadlocks, glanced around with nervous energy as he adjusted the instrument over his shoulder. His eyes flickered over the yard, the house, and us, the goggling kids shifting around him. He wouldn’t meet any of our eyes. When some second-year playing cornhole gave a triumphant shriek, he jumped, startled by the sound.

What did we look like to him? Scrawny, shaggy-haired, furry-legged beasts? Lunatics in matching outfits?

The tuba player wasn’t a lunatic. He was perfectly normal. He probably lived in a condo in Scranton, maybe, or Allentown, one with wall-to-wall carpeting and vertical blinds. He bought his toothpaste and dish soap at a drugstore. He had a pet dog, a mutt, and a girlfriend, maybe. He took her to breakfast at Denny’s. She ordered a Belgian waffle with bacon. He got the Grand Slam.

Tomorrow morning, at Denny’s, he would tell his girlfriend about the famous Catherine House. He would say it didn’t seem so haunted, really. Or maybe he would bend in and whisper that it was just as strange as the stories said.

“The Ferris wheel’s starting,” Yaya said. “Wanna go?”

“No,” I said.

“Come with me.”

“I’m not going up there.”

“Are you afraid of heights?”

“Look at that thing. Who installed it? It could fall to pieces right when we’re at the top. You don’t know. It’s not safe.”

“Oh my God, this is adorable,” Yaya said. “I thought you were fearless.”

We went into the bouncy castle instead. Baby disappeared back into the house while Yaya, Anna, and I crawled one by one into the orange dream. Nick appeared with cups of wine and we tried to drink, woozy and wobbling, but kept falling down.

“This is delicious,” Anna said, licking her lips as she crouched in one of the corners. She was wearing her new Pearl Jam tour T-shirt, the only commissary clothing I’d ever seen her excited about. She’d spent all her points on it. “Wine is amazing. I almost forgot.”

“Cheers,” Yaya said, “to you finally escaping that awful concentration.”

“You’re not applying for plasm anymore?” I said.

“Nope. It was going to kill me.” Anna said it with indifference. “Theo’s still applying, though. Baby is, too, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

Nick stood up. He bounced. We all rebounded. Yaya’s sunglasses went flying off her nose.

“Do you know . . .” I said. “The new materials concentrators—when do they get passes to the umbrella room?”

“The what?” Anna handed Yaya’s sunglasses back to her.

“The room in the hallway with the umbrella wallpaper. Not the regular plasm lab, the one downstairs in the Ashley basement, I think. It’s locked with a keypad.”

“Oh, that’s M. Neptune’s lab. Only M. Neptune’s students get to work in there. Even if you’re in the concentration, you have to be working with him specially to get in.”

Nick flopped on the floor. We all bounced again. “This is amazing,” he declared. “I’m going to live here.”

“Does that make you a bouncy king?” Yaya said.

“Yes,” he said. “Bouncy king of the bouncy castle.”

“What kind of work does he do?” I said. “M. Neptune?”

“Some kind of specialized plasm research, I guess. Who knows?” Anna swirled her cup of wine with a shrug. “None of us are ever going to find out.”

There was a testy edge to her voice now. Her cheeks were flushed.

Yaya straddled Nick. She kissed him on the mouth.

*  *  *

The day our midterm grades were posted, I stayed out late with a boy. By the time I stopped by the registrar’s office, it was four in the morning.

I found my envelope in the bin outside the office and pulled out my grade sheet. I scanned the numbers.

Most of my classes were fine. Not great, but fine. Except for Japanese Prints. Japanese Prints I might fail.

I closed the sheet. I’d memorized the difference between the Katsukawa school and Kaigetsudō school and that was pretty much it. I had to do better.

I walked back to my room, my hands in my pockets. As I made my way through the house, I listened for the construction workers pounding at the baths in the Harrington basement. I’d heard rumors about the baths for months; apparently Catherine’s founders had built an expansive, luxurious complex of underground pools under the house when the school was first established. The baths had been closed for years, but over the past few weeks workers had been coming every morning and leaving every night. Though I heard the workers, I never saw them. I don’t think they ever saw us, either.

I opened the door to our room expecting Baby to be asleep. She was still up, sitting straight-backed at her desk.

“Hello, Ines,” she said without turning.

She was fully dressed, with shoes on and hair pulled into a tight French braid. The room smelled like soap bubbles. She had just taken a bath.

I shoved my grades in my pocket as I walked over to her desk. She was folding a piece of paper, running her fingers along the fold to tighten the crease.

“What’s that?” I said.

“A horse.”

“Origami?”

She nodded, flipping the paper over. “I used to do it more. I don’t know why I stopped.”

I sat on my bed. Both of our desk lamps were on. The night outside was shapeless with the dark and our translucent shadows on the window.

Baby flipped the paper and made another crease.

“Do you want a banana?” she said. She gestured to the bunch on her desk. “I took them from tea. I don’t know why I thought I could eat them all. They’ll go bad soon. I don’t want them—to go bad.”

“Sure.”

She broke one off. I opened my hands, gesturing for her to toss it over, but she only stared. I got up and took it from her hands.

She watched blankly as I peeled the banana.

“I’m going to the tower,” she said.

I swallowed my bite of banana.

“Are you surprised?” She wasn’t meeting my eye.

“A little.”

“I cheated on my chemistry test.”

I put the banana down. I moved to sit on her bed.

“I knew I was going to fail,” she said. “I didn’t have time to study after biology—and I was supposed to take biology last semester, you know. If I had taken more advanced classes in high school, I wouldn’t have had to take Biology III and Chemistry III at the same time, and my midterms wouldn’t have coincided like this. Anyway. I was in M. Tran’s office asking for clarification about one of the labs. I knew he was administering the chemistry midterm, too. And when he went down the hall to get his notes, I thought he might have copies of the test right there in his drawer. And he did. So I took one.”

She placed the origami horse on the desk.

“When M. Tran told me to stay after class today, I wasn’t even surprised. I knew I was going to get caught. And you know what? I’m glad. I’m glad they caught me.” She wiped her nose, though she didn’t seem to be crying. “I’ve been doing those interviews for the concentration, you know? And the professors ask more and more questions, watch me closer and closer, and—I have no idea what they’re looking for. But whatever it is, I don’t have it. I’m not smart enough. I’m not strong enough. I don’t have anything special, and I don’t want anything. I don’t even want to die.”

“Lie down with me,” I said.

Baby didn’t look up as she crawled into bed with me. I wrapped my arms around her.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said.

“Yes. It is. I’m not even so upset, really. Viktória . . .” Baby cleared her throat, her voice stronger at the mention of Viktória’s name. “Viktória and I, we’re going to have a nice long talk before I go into the tower. Can you believe that? Just me and her. You’re not the only one she cares about, you know. She—sees me, too.”

I ran my hand over her shoulder.

“I have this dream,” Baby whispered. “It’s not that I’m a different person or that I’m gone, exactly. I’m still here. But I’m not myself. I’m full of light, only light, shining forever. I don’t feel any more pain. All I am is beautiful.”

I wished I could see her eyes, but she lay facing the wall.

“I thought plasm was that light. I believed in it. But I’m not sure anymore.” Baby shifted in the bed. “I’m messed up,” she said. “I told you. So they’re sending me to the tower to fix me.”

“When are you going?” I said.

“Tomorrow morning. Well, today now. Seven o’clock.”

“For how long?”

“Two weeks.”

My throat clenched. I held her tighter. Two weeks, fourteen days and fourteen nights, in that blank, empty room.

“It’s not so bad,” I said. “It’s a little vacation, really. And you’ll feel so much better when you get out. You’ll feel brand-new.”

“Yes,” she said. “I think so. I wish I weren’t missing forums. But I think this is the right thing.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“No, you won’t. You’ll have the bathroom to yourself.” She shifted in the bed. “You’ll love it.”

I ran a hand over her forehead. I closed my eyes.

“You should,” Baby whispered. “You should believe in it.”

“Believe in what?”

But she didn’t answer. She was falling asleep. So was I.

When I opened my eyes, the sun was shining across our floorboards. I was still in Baby’s bed, but Baby was gone.

I sat up, rubbed my face. My mouth was mucked up with sleep.

*  *  *

Baby went into the tower in the beginning of July, the first day of forums. Forums were a series of presentations from the second-years that were supposed to synthesize their previous years of study and outline their plans for third-year tutorials, our final projects. The presentations were directed toward their professors and advisors, but the larger Catherine community was invited to attend as our schedules permitted.

I sometimes skipped classes to go to forums. They were held in the Harrington auditorium, one of the coolest rooms in the house during the summer months, and snacks were usually provided. I would sit in the back of the room so I was closest to the platters of melon balls and mint iced tea. The tea tasted lavishly sweet and cool.

The presentations varied. Some were creative, like preparatory outlines for scripts or stories, or analyses of Latin texts, or dissections of particular critical approaches to early twentieth century American literature. Others were more research-based, presenting new histories of various mathematical proofs or color theorems. But no matter the topic, the questions from the professors were ferocious. A student would barely begin to speak before the interrogators set in. This approach has already been challenged in recent years. How do you plan to differentiate your work from what has already been done? How can we extend this model in a meaningful way? Are you taking this work seriously? Students would step down from the stage red-faced and shaking. One girl, after discussing her work on Vodon folk myths, sobbed with pleasure when her advisor only commented that her ideas seemed “adequate enough.”

Viktória usually arrived late. Her heels would click over the parquet floor as she slid into the seat beside M. Neptune. Then she watched in perfect stillness, face impassive and chin in her hand, saying nothing. At the end of each presentation, she jotted a note on her pad of paper, her tiny gold wristwatch glinting.

“But you’ve misunderstood,” a professor said. It was the final day of forums. The presenter, a chubby redheaded girl with huge watery eyes, had spent the past twenty minutes on Alexander Rodchenko’s design for a Soviet workers’ club, and something she said seemed to have offended her advisor. “It is not just a propaganda machine. His space, this club—it is a utopia. A new world, beautiful. Do you not see?”

The girl nodded. Her chin trembled.

“Painful,” Yaya whispered as she laid down a card. We were in the back of the auditorium, playing Go Fish. “Just let the poor girl go home and cry.”

A new materials concentrator went next. I recognized him as the same acne-faced boy who had tried to pin me during our coming in ceremony.

As he introduced himself to the auditorium—his name was Burt—two aides wheeled a wooden stand and cart onto the stage. I couldn’t see what was on the cart, but rafts of heavy fabric hung from the stand’s posts. It took a moment for me to recognize the fabric as the remains of a ripped and faded tapestry.

Burt turned his back to us and faced the cart. I heard the clink of metal instruments. Plasm pins.

Yaya poked me. “Any queens?”

“No,” I said. “Go fish.”

“You are such a fucking liar.”

“Shh.” A third-year turned to glare at us.

“Over these past semesters,” Burt was saying, “my new materials classes have focused on plasm theory, research, and analysis using data from the, um, the valid past experiments, with the assumption that this data is still relevant.” He cleared his voice and spoke louder. “But this is not necessarily the case. Some of these experiments were performed twenty years ago. The experiments did produce fantastic results in object, body, and psychosexual healing—or mending‚ to use the proper term.” He inclined his head. “But we must move forward with the assumption that today’s even more rigorous methodologies, more . . . more careful science can produce results that are just as fantastic. If we re-create some of these original plasm experiments, if we attempt to once again understand plasm directly, not through theory but through its use, through observed results—”

“Burt, my friend,” M. Neptune said. He was tapping his pen against the armrest he shared with Viktória. “Come on. You’re telling us things we already know, and being way too vague besides. Say what you really mean, and be precise. What are the parameters of your tutorial, specifically?”

Burt flushed. “I want to . . . I will reperform one of M. Shiner’s early experiments, the mending of the tapestry. I will mend three of the early tapestries in Catherine’s collection using plasm manipulation. I’ve already been working on this one.” He gestured to the fabric hanging from the stand. “M. Donna says I would need to complete two more and do a write-up to meet the project requirements.”

“Great,” M. Neptune said. He jotted down a note. “But really, when you submit your proposal, remember to be specific. You’re one of the few new materials concentrators submitting an experimental research project. You’re going to have to be totally clear about the limitations here. I don’t need to explain why that’s important.”

For a moment Burt looked like he was about to retort. But he just pressed his lips together and nodded.

An aide turned off the lights, and the auditorium filled with gray shadow.

Burt stepped in front of the tapestry. He seemed to be pressing the pins onto the fabric one by one along the rip, as if he were sewing. The tapestry lifted and dropped.

Then he stepped away. And the tapestry kept going, lifting along the rip, sewing itself together.

Burt spoke as he worked, applying more pins and adjusting them on the fabric—something about pattern sensing and temperature corrections. But I couldn’t hear him. I was watching the tapestry come together.

“Hey,” Yaya was whispering. “Ines. Any kings?”

So far I could only see the top of the image. It was the hand of a Roman god, lifting a silver cup.

“Ines.” Yaya snapped her fingers in front of my nose.

I looked back down at my cards. I had three kings.

“No,” I said. “Go fish.”

*  *  *

I did miss Baby while she was in the tower. Those July nights were cloyingly hot, and I didn’t sleep well without her. I would sprawl across my bedcovers breathing out of my mouth and staring at her desk, wishing she were there. I missed her noises and smells: her sniffles and pencil scratchings, her cinnamon toothpaste and almond hair cream. I just missed her. I hated being alone.

I hoped the tower would be good for her, though. If the plasm pins could sew the tapestry back together, maybe they could do the same for Baby’s heart and brain—fix them so she felt better. I didn’t understand what the tower had done to me. But whatever it was, I hoped it would help Baby.

The days were even hotter than the nights. The house wasn’t well ventilated. By late afternoon, the classrooms were so humid and fetid they made me feel drunk. I watched sweat gleam on the back of students’ necks as their drowsy heads bobbed. The parlors, with their heavy curtains drawn to keep out the sun, grew colorless and dim. The halls smelled like sweat, sunscreen, and like Catherine, a woody, dead-rose perfume that stifled my nose and mouth.

When I wasn’t in class or hunched over a computer in the lab, I was out on the yard. I brought my books, as if I were studying, and lay dead on the grass. I pulled my T-shirt up over my stomach. I closed my eyes.

We spent evenings after dinner out on the yard, too, drinking iced tea mixed with moonshine. We did our homework and gossiped. As the nights grew later, we whispered about the outside world.

“I hope the Bulls are having a good season,” Henry said. “I miss them, the Bulls. Isn’t that stupid?”

“Do you know what I miss?” I said. “Sour Patch Kids. I could eat a whole bag of Sour Patch Kids right now.”

Henry turned to me. “I never thought of you as someone who’d like candy.”

“I like candy.”

“I miss my brother,” Anna said.

I took a sip of my moonshine tea.

She blinked drunkenly. I brushed her hair from her face.

One endless Thursday afternoon, I wandered into Theo’s room alone. I didn’t know what made me do it except that his door was the only one open in the hushed hallway; everyone was in class, like I should have been, and tea was still hours away.

I pressed his door open farther. No, he wasn’t home. His room was silent and tidy as ever, his bed crisply made and books neatly arranged. Today he had a plate of shortbread cookies on his desk. He always seemed to have some snack there.

I walked to his window and peered down at the Molina courtyard. I liked viewing the courtyard from different angles. It made me feel like I was someone completely different, seeing things in a completely different way. Theo’s window was obscured by the leaves of a fig tree. I could barely make out the benches, painted tiles, and stone fountain.

As I turned from the window, a flash of color caught my eye. Something slipped behind the radiator. I fished it out.

It was a photograph. A stiff, older black woman sitting on a pink couch, her shoulders strained in a way that made me think she was in pain. The coffee table in front of her was cluttered with tea candles, Minnie Mouse figurines, a wobbling stack of cassettes, a dirty cereal bowl and spoon. Her face was tough, her eyes wide and frank in a way I instantly recognized. She must have been related to Theo. His grandmother, probably.

And there he was, in the background, in graying socks, frying something up on a creaky old stove. He was sticking out his tongue and winking at the camera. His legs were knob-kneed and skinny.

I stared at the photograph for a long time before slipping it back behind the radiator.

The summer drawled on.

There was a hole in my bedroom window screen. Every night I was startled awake by a sudden horrible mosquito drone by my skull. By morning, everything itched. I scratched until I was red and puffy all over.

I did catch a mosquito, once. I was alone, lying awake in the pale morning light, and saw it land on the wall by my bed. It stood, legs arched, so silent and still, waiting. I smacked it dead.

*  *  *

Baby died on the hottest day of the summer, a day so hot the third-years upstairs decided they couldn’t take it anymore; they were going to break into the baths. Yaya overheard their plan: The rooms, down in the Harrington basement, were still roped off, but apparently the pools had been filled and chlorinated days ago. The administration was waiting for some final inspection, but the construction workers were gone. No one was watching.

After dinner, Yaya and I crept together through the halls. We went down the stairs, through a snaking shadowed hall, slipped beneath a construction rope, and opened the door to the baths.

I felt I had crept into a mountain, into some dank palace grotto built by gnomes. The low ceilings were ribbed with hundreds of tiles that arched over a grand green expanse of pool and, on the other side of the room, a steam bath. Naked students splashed in the water, laughing and kissing and drifting around one another with wine bottles held aloft. The air was heavy with humidity and the overwhelming smell of chlorine.

I peeled off my T-shirt and jeans and slipped into the pool. At first the water shocked my bare skin. But soon it felt luxuriously smooth and cool.

I leaned back and closed my eyes. I floated.

Someone tapped my shoulder. I opened my eyes. Yaya gestured her bottle of wine to me.

Hours later, I walked alone back to Molina, my brain dully buzzing. Through the fog, I heard voices echo from down the hall.

I turned into the parlor.

Our grade dean, M. David, stood there with Anna and one of our few international students, a tiny strawberry-curled girl named Paola. A lamp was on, its yellow glow weak in the dawning daylight. Anna and Paola must have been up all night studying. Their Modern Philosophy books and notes were strewn across the table, the notes now forgotten. Paola was holding her hand pressed against her mouth. M. David, dressed in a full suit, stood with his arms folded tight to his chest.

The three of them turned to me as I came in.

M. David glanced at his watch. “It’s four-thirty in the morning,” he said. “You should go back to sleep.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” I said.

Anna said, “You have to tell her.”

M. David shot Anna a glare. She didn’t flinch. Her eyes were shining and her hair was frizzed up at the crown. She looked too tired and sad to be intimidated.

“She was her roommate,” Anna whispered.

“What happened,” I said, “to Baby?”

M. David sighed.

“We planned to talk to you all in the morning,” he finally said. “I didn’t mean to run into . . . I didn’t want any of you to find out like this.”

He dropped his arms.

“Barbara has passed away,” he said. “Her—she was found in the tower yesterday.”

Birds were chittering in the fig trees outside.

“I don’t understand,” Paola gasped. Her face was wet with tears. “She was in the tower. She should have been safe, no?”

“When someone chooses to go,” M. David said slowly, “nothing can be done to stop them.”

“She murdered herself.” Paola hiccupped a sob.

“He’s not going to tell us,” Anna said. She wasn’t crying. Her voice was steady and low. “He’s not going to tell us anything.” She looked at M. David. “You fucked up.”

“Miss Montgomery,” M. David snapped. “The circumstances of Barbara’s death are a private matter—”

“This isn’t private, this is a school—” Anna began, but M. David continued, louder:

“I do wish the news hadn’t come out like this, but now that it has, I hope you will respect Barbara’s family’s wishes during this difficult time and refrain from such prurient speculation.”

Anna’s cheeks were still flushed, but she didn’t look angry. She looked hurt.

“Ines,” M. David said, turning to me. “We will want to meet with you tomorrow.” He blinked three times. “I can only imagine this will be quite disruptive for the Molina community, for you especially. I imagine . . . you must have been quite close.”

He blinked again.

“Yes,” I said.

M. David kept talking. He said something about counseling sessions, a memorial, gathering her things. I didn’t hear most of it. I just watched his face as I waited for him to finish.

When he did, I went to the bathroom. I peed. Then I went back to the room I had shared with Baby.

Her bed was made, its pale coverlet stark in the now-brilliant dawn. Her papers were still there, arranged in neat piles. Her shoes were lined up by the door. Her closet was closed. The only thing out of place was her brush, out on her desk. A tangle of dark, intimate hair was still there, caught in its plastic bristles.

*  *  *

One of the images we had to memorize for my American Photography course was a print of a young boy astride a stallion in a desert landscape. The boy’s mouth was set in a determined frown, his arm tense with power as it grasped the rein. The sunset behind him was wild and courageous. A simple portrait of the heroic American West.

But as I’d stared at the portrait, I’d noticed something: The boy’s other hand, the one not holding the rein, rested on his thigh. It seemed he hadn’t known what to do with it. He was picking at his cuticle. He was just a boy.

Cameras were forbidden at Catherine. At first I thought this was to maintain the house’s privacy and isolation; the administration wouldn’t have wanted the New York Times style section running some silly snapshot of our great hall or auditorium. Now I saw it was more than that. Photographs, in their honesty, would have captured the house’s specifics—the peeling wallpaper and dirty wineglasses—but missed the smell of the garden in June. Photographs would flatten it all into real, dull detail, and Catherine didn’t want detail. Catherine wanted glamour.

I wished I had a picture of Baby, though, the way Theo had one of his grandmother. Maybe one of her examining Billie Jean, peering at him in that shrewd way of hers, poking at his tentacle. Or her studying in bed, feet propped up on the headboard. I didn’t care what she was doing as long as there was something that was real about it, something I didn’t quite expect. Maybe the shape of her nose had been different than I thought, or she had flexed her toes in a way I didn’t remember.

Because Baby had been bigger than me. She wasn’t mine. She wasn’t anyone’s.

Days passed and people said nice things about her. She was such a good student and friend; what a pity it was that her life ended so tragically, so soon. And I, too, crafted my own story of her short life and death, the sad plot points that led to this somehow self-evident end.

But that wasn’t right. Her life wasn’t a story, and it didn’t have to end this way. She was a girl. She was real. It was true.

*  *  *

Baby’s memorial was held on Friday in the Molina parlor. All of the Molina first-years were there, leaning against walls and squeezing four to a sofa. A few of her professors came, too, and students from other halls, some upperclassmen. Some of them I didn’t even recognize.

Why were they here? They hadn’t known Baby. No one knew Baby.

I didn’t sit with anyone. I stood by the door, hugging my stomach.

Lukewarm cups of tea and plates of cookies drifted around the room. Porcelain clinked.

Paola was sitting on the floor, leaning forward with an eager tilt. She wiped her face with a crumpled tissue. Her mouth was buckled in a silent sob. Her eyes roved the room before squeezing out a few more tears.

A plate of pastries arrived in front of me. I picked an empire biscuit with a glacé cherry.

The vase on the mantel held a bouquet of long-stemmed lilies. The bruised blooms drooped with the heat. Their extravagant fragrance intoxicated me.

Viktória sat in one of the armchairs, legs crossed, hair brushed behind her ears. Her face, so exposed, looked frank and drawn. Something was different about her eyes today. Whatever it was, she seemed younger.

She had been staring down at a slip of paper on her lap, idly turning her ring around her finger. Now she laid the paper on the side table and looked up. The parlor quieted.

“We’re here today,” Viktória said, “to honor the memory of Barbara Pearce—Baby—our dear child.”

Viktória wasn’t wearing mascara. That’s what was different. Her eyes looked tired, naked.

Paola sniffled theatrically.

Someone tried to pass me a teacup, except I was still holding the biscuit. I hadn’t eaten any of it. I set it down to take the teacup. “Thank you,” I said.

“Baby represented the best of Catherine,” Viktória said. “She was creative, diligent, and rapaciously intelligent. She was a beloved classmate and friend. Her professors, two of whom will speak today, were endlessly impressed by her thoughtful scholarship and dedication to her work. She had big dreams. She aspired to devote her life to the study of new materials, of plasm. She wanted to stand on the frontier of our future world, to pioneer new ways of relating to our bodies, our minds, and our environments. There is no doubt in my mind that she could have done it. I truly believe she had the heart and the intellect to change the course of history. But every girl, every boy, every woman and man, everyone has a private struggle that is sometimes too much to bear. Baby hurt. And so now . . . we hurt.”

Viktória touched her heart. Her nails were unpolished.

“We hurt,” she said, “because we miss her. This is understandable, of course. But it is not necessary. Because Baby doesn’t hurt anymore. She is home now, truly home. Yes, in some ways she is gone. But she is also everywhere. She is in our windows and trees and walls. She is with us in the library, and in the dining halls as we eat our desserts. She is everywhere in this house, in everything. I believe that. I do.”

Viktória’s fingers clutched at her heart, eyes lowered.

“I can feel her,” she whispered. “Here.” She opened her eyes. “Can’t you?”

I looked down at the cup. The tea had been over-steeped. It was so dark it looked almost like blood.

*  *  *

I spent the last stunningly hot days before finals alone in the library. I wrote long lists of artists, stared at textbook images of photographs, and memorized dates. Lewis Hine, 1910. Frederick Sommer, 1943. I wiped sweat off my neck. I rewrote my class notes for Japanese Prints and German again and again. When I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, I napped on the library floor, underneath a desk. Then I crawled right back out and opened my books again. I studied until I was stupid.

After lurching through finals, I returned to what had once been our shared bedroom for the first time in days.

Baby’s bed was stripped bare, her desk emptied. Her dresser had been cleaned out. Everything of hers was gone.

I sat on my bed.

How could Viktória feel Baby here?

None of us at Catherine had seen her body before it was taken away. Did her parents get to see her one last time? Did they arrange for an open casket? Her family must have organized a funeral. One in a nice church, with a sermon and singing and a reception in the basement serving fruit punch, pound cake, and macaroni and cheese. All of her family and friends and old teachers would be there, remembering what she was like when she was a cheery little girl. They would touch her hand as they bent over the casket to say goodbye.

At lunch and dinner, I heard students whispering, wondering what had really happened to Baby. If she killed herself in the tower, how had she done it? Did she hang herself with a bedsheet? Someone’s cousin knew a boy who had hanged himself with a bedsheet. It could be done.

I didn’t care. I knew that however it happened, it was Baby’s choice. That was all that mattered. Baby had given everything to Catherine. She believed in Catherine. When I remembered the joy in her eyes as she chanted during sessions, I couldn’t help but think that in the end—the very end—she was happy and full of light.

I picked up my grades from the registrar’s office on a bright blue August day. I found my envelope in the bin, slid out the sheet, and unfolded the letter. I scanned the page.

A B+ in American Photography, two Cs, and a D. The D was in Japanese Prints, of course. And below that, an official confirmation of my acceptance into the concentration in history of art.

I’d passed. I was no longer on academic probation. I was officially here at Catherine for two more years.

The envelope included a list of everyone in our class along with their concentration. Yaya had been accepted into mathematics. Diego was in history of art with me, and Anna in chemistry. Theo was the only one of us accepted to the new materials concentration.

Baby wasn’t listed at all.

I folded up the sheet.

I didn’t take my usual walk to the great hall that day. Instead, I turned to pass by the parlor where the black girls held their salon. The door was closed, but when I bent close I could smell their honey-rose hair creams, hear their secret laughter.

I stared at the door for a while, and then kept going.

In the great hall, at lunch, I saw my friends gathered in our usual corner of the Molina table. Anna waved to me. She was wearing her Pearl Jam T-shirt. I felt a surge of affection for her right then, but didn’t feel like talking to anyone. I pretended I didn’t see her. I grabbed two big handfuls of blueberries from the dessert service before leaving.

I ate the blueberries as I walked to the parlor. Their juice stained the tips of my fingers.

Two more years.

I sat in the window seat. I leaned against the glass.

Today was graduation day for the third-years. The ceremony was private but I knew it took place in the garden, in the bluebell field. The third-years would wear the yellow and blue sashes I had seen hanging in the laundry. Daisy garlands would circle their heads. After the ceremony, they would dance all night.

Over the past semesters, I had watched the house as if through glass. I was never really here. I wasn’t anywhere. But Baby, my mean, precious Baby—Baby had been here. According to Viktória, she was here still.

Don’t worry, I whispered to Baby. I’m here too. I’m staying with you.

I sucked on a blueberry and fell asleep slumped by the window. When I woke up, it was time for dinner.