Days at Catherine operated by a clockwork of meals. Tea trays arrived at gray daybreak, then, precisely two hours later, the halls served breakfast in their morning rooms. The dusty windows in Molina’s morning room faced west, so the sunlight shone sideways on the spread of eggs, gray biscuits, half-peeled oranges, and pitchers of Five Alive and seltzer. The halls served afternoon tea in their respective parlors, too. Afternoon tea, the Blue Book explained, was a cherished time of rest, a break between classes for a drink, a snack, and some warm conversation amid our busy days. I liked napping in the parlor during tea, but I didn’t like the cookies. Every time I ate them, my stomach filled with unsettled dread.
Lunch and dinner were served in the Harrington great hall. The meals there were kingly, rich and hideous, and not very filling. We spent hours listlessly picking at game hens with fatty skin, boiled hams braised in wine, consommés and onion soups and eggs poached in sour cream sauce. The fruits and vegetables were shrunken and strange. Our digestion was always upset.
The only day we didn’t eat dinner together was Friday. Or rather, the rest of the house ate dinner then, but first-years weren’t invited. I didn’t know why. We ate as many cookies as we could during tea and went to bed with throbbing stomachs.
Days became weeks. Night fell earlier and earlier. A chill entered the house and didn’t leave. Wind beat at the windows, whistled through the stone bricks, and sneaked under doorways. Radiators let out pools of dank heat that never spread far enough. I bundled myself in the itchy wool sweaters I found in my wardrobe. They made me feel sweaty but somehow still cold. My bones were cold. My brain was cold. I had a new schedule for the semester—Art History Introduction I, Calculus II, Marriage and the American Family, Ancient Philosophy—but I rarely went to class. I stayed in bed. I slept for hours.
Outside, the yard browned and died.
When I wasn’t in bed, I wandered the Harrington library, the hub of the house’s academic wheel. The library’s stained-glass doors opened into a three-story kaleidoscope crammed with desks and noise and books, professors arguing with crying boys, girls napping on couches. Past the front desk, where student workers gossiped as they organized course packets, were shelves upon shelves of books. They almost hid the winding staircase to the second floor. On the second floor stood more shelves of books, along with the house’s only computer lab: ten machines lined up in a dull, low-lit row. I browsed the Encarta Encyclopedia there. It had a good article about Aztec sacrifices. Most of the computers were damaged; some wouldn’t turn on at all. None had access to the Web.
On the third floor, behind one of the bookcases, I found a forgotten reading room, a tiny alcove with one green lamp and a dusty, sunken blue couch. A print of a dark man driving a chariot hung on the wall. He was wielding a bolt of lightning and baring his teeth. His skin glistened with sweat.
I lay on the couch and closed my eyes. I touched myself, dreaming of him and me and a fragrant garden.
When I opened my eyes, I was still in the house.
* * *
That winter I was sleeping with a girl I’d met in the bathroom outside my philosophy class. Mandy had ferociously straight, long black hair and tiny teeth. We had little in common, but we didn’t talk much. I would go over to her room at night when I couldn’t sleep. The smell of her deodorant, a stifling, woody, churchy scent, darkened my mind so I couldn’t think of anything else.
One night, I ran my hand over Mandy’s back. The moon had slipped from behind a cloud. In its white light, I saw she had a scar, a long pale scratch from the top of her shoulder down her spine.
I felt, in that moment, that I saw Mandy clearly for the first time. Usually when I came to her room I was drunk. But I was sober enough now to notice her bitten nails, her pin-straight eyelashes, and her scar.
Mandy turned to me. Her eyes, in the moonlight, were shiny and fierce.
“Don’t,” she hissed.
I dropped my hand from her back.
There was a silence. Mandy opened her mouth, then closed it again, as if she realized she should say something more but didn’t know what. She lay back in the bed. Our bodies weren’t touching.
“It wasn’t her fault, you know,” Mandy finally said. “It was mine, too. We both hurt each other.”
I don’t think I had fully realized it until right then: I wasn’t the only one at Catherine on the run. None of my classmates spoke of their pasts, but I sensed them—all their misshapen histories—at dinner, as they chewed their carrot salads in silence, or when their voices laughed too loudly at a stupid joke, or later, in the many feverish hours they spent studying in the library. Everyone here was here desperately. All of us, for one reason or another, had nowhere else to go.
So, here we were. Christmas must have come and gone. First-years whispered about what we might be doing if we were home: trimming trees, lighting chapel candles, getting drunk with cousins, sledding down silvery hills. Some tried to make phone calls home, but Yaya had been right, none of us had earned nearly enough points. So Christmas was gone, and New Year’s, and nothing happened.
Nothing ever happened at Catherine.
Mornings, after I peed and brushed my teeth, I grasped the sink. I stared into the mirror.
Days. I could see them all, all the days, reflecting into each other forever. Mirrors repeating against mirrors.
Baby had passed Chemistry I, but now she had Chemistry II, which was even harder. Sometimes when I walked by the lab I heard her class chanting like an order of monks or sketching diagram after diagram in tense silence. At night, in our room, Baby paced and muttered formulas to herself. She didn’t eat. She left flash cards in her bed, by the bathtub, under the dresser. She cried more.
Baby did have a way of calming herself down, I learned. She picked Master Locks. She’d brought a whole stash of them and a lock-picking kit in a little leather pouch. When she was stuck on one of her worksheet problems, she’d spread them out on her desk and pick them one by one. When a lock finally popped open, she didn’t smile. She just set it aside and moved on to the next.
“Who taught you how to do that?” I asked once while I watched her. I had been trying to do my calculus homework, but all of my answers were checking out wrong.
Baby worked for a while longer, fingers twisted around the lock, before she said, “My sister.”
“Your sister knew how to pick locks?”
“My sister knew how to do everything.” She had a proud lift to her chin.
I imagined her sister’s car crash, sometimes. Shattered glass, thrilling heat.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said.
I went outside. I walked in circles around the brown yard. I picked up a stick and put it down again. The sun disappeared behind the trees. I went back inside.
* * *
I watched the first snowfall of the season from my couch in the library. The skylight had been opalescent gray all morning. By afternoon, the first flakes fell. They multiplied like a cancer on the glass, shrouding the light. Soon the whole window was dead white.
I arrived back at our bedroom to find Baby standing by the window, watching the snow with her arms folded. She was wearing our formal uniform of black tights and a black dress that fell stiff to her knobby knees.
“The winter festival,” she said when she saw my confusion at her outfit. “Did you—did you really forget?”
Yes, I had forgotten about the festival. We’d received a notice about it on one of last week’s morning tea trays. I hadn’t understood whether it was in celebration of the solstice or the new year or some obscure midwinter holiday.
“Well, get dressed,” Baby said. “And in something appropriate, please. We are going to be late.”
After the library, the Harrington great hall was the most expansive room in the house. Long oak tables ran from wall to wall, and the high-pitched, barrel-vaulted ceiling echoed with the noise of crazy laughter, feverish conversation, and chair legs scraping against stone. One wall was an open bank of windows that looked out onto the yard; the others were hung with faded tapestries of Roman myths. The tapestries fluoresced with turquoise and magenta light from the stained-glass clerestory. The professors and administrators sat on a raised dais in the back of the room. Behind the dais hung another tapestry, this one woven with the cryptic patterns and figures that formed the Catherine House insignia.
Baby and I squeezed our way to the table with the other Molina students, all in similar black formal dress. I sat down and spread my napkin on my lap. I poured myself a glass of wine.
Baby was staring at me, sharp-eyed.
“Yes, sweetie?” I said as I poured.
“You have a bruise on your throat,” she said.
I touched my neck. It was probably from Mandy. I’d gone to her room the night before.
As I sipped my wine, I looked for Viktória at the professors’ table. She always sat in the center, and there she was now, head turned in conversation. Her profile was vase-like, elegant and strange. It was hard to tell her age; her hair was streaked with gray, but thick and long, and her skin was unwrinkled, but thin, almost spectral. Her white chiffon shirt was so sheer I could see the outlines of her breasts. She wasn’t wearing a bra.
“Vanilla pudding,” said Theo Williams, another Molina first-year, as he slid into the seat beside mine and plucked up the menu card. “My favorite.”
I glanced over his shoulder at the menu. It described a four-course meal of desserts. To start, vanilla pudding, then cream cheese pie, then a selection of Jell-Os, a palate cleanser before the final course of white cake. I could see the cake now on the service table. It was tall and proud as a bride, encrusted with thick icing and dripping with fondant lace.
Baby looked like she was going to be sick.
“Dessert for dinner?” said Nick, across the table. “Oh, good. All we need are some martinis and passive-aggressive quips and it’ll be just like home. My mother would be so proud.”
“Would she?” Theo said. “Would she really be proud of her little Nicky boy?”
“Of course she would. She loves me so. I’m her greatest investment.”
“Man, what about last night?” Theo said.
Nick tucked his napkin into his collar. “What about last night?”
“When you were throwing up in the fireplace?” Theo said. “Would she have been proud of you then?”
“Oh yes.” Nick straightened the napkin. “That’s a Townsend signature move, really.”
Theo grinned. “Fucking doofus.”
Theo Williams and Nick Townsend had formed an instant, easy friendship. They didn’t look a thing alike: Theo was a shortish, scrawny black kid with shaggy hair and an eager energy, while Nick had the broad shoulders, princely blond curls, and beautiful manners of someone who’d gone to expensive private schools and summered on various shores. But they were both the kind of boys who felt at home everywhere. Nothing ever bothered them. When a pipe burst in the second-floor hallway, or last month when bad chicken cassoulet left the whole house with food poisoning—every misfortune just made them laugh.
“Ugh, is that what I saw in the fireplace this morning?” Yaya said, wrinkling her nose. She slid into the seat next to Theo’s. “You are foul.”
“Mad you weren’t invited to the party?” Theo said.
“That was not a party,” Yaya said. “And those girls were skanks.”
“Takes one to know one,” Theo said.
She gave him a wedgie. He cursed and grabbed his crotch.
A hush fell over the hall. Our attention shifted to the administrators’ dais. Viktória was standing.
“Welcome to our winter festival,” she said.
She smiled over the assembly.
“I am so pleased to gather with you all on this cold evening,” she continued. “Here at Catherine, we’ve always believed in the power of rhythm. The rhythm of the day—classes and teas, work and sleep. The rhythm of the seasons. The rhythm of our voices and hearts. These rhythms bind us to ourselves, to each other, and to our environments. And these festival nights, the nights when we take a special moment to drink and eat and laugh together in celebration of these vital rhythms—well, they have always been my favorite nights in this house.”
She was looking down at her hands. Her face barely moved as she spoke.
“Tonight, we celebrate the precious quiet of wintertime,” she said. “And how lovely is this time of silence and work and anticipation and decay?” She looked up. “Here at Catherine, we know not to fear death. Because even in death, there is life. Death is not the black night, but its white moon. The honeyed egg of rebirth.”
Her voice was low. She had a slight unplaceable accent.
“So please,” she said, “let us praise tonight, this room, and each other. Let us feast and be glad in the darkest of times.”
She raised her glass.
“To winter,” she said, “and to tonight.”
We sipped.
As she sat down, M. Neptune, the director of the new materials concentration, placed his hand on her arm. I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell from her expression that he was whispering in her ear.
“At least it was a short speech,” Yaya said as the aides distributed tureens of vanilla pudding. She spooned some onto her plate.
“Short now,” Theo said. “But wait until our coming in. That’s when things get crazy.”
“Our—coming in?” Baby whispered.
“Yeah. It’s . . . I don’t know. Something we do in a couple of weeks.”
“Why hasn’t Kimmy told us about it?”
“Kimmy doesn’t tell us anything,” Yaya said, stirring at her pudding with a disconsolate frown. Something seemed to have upset her. “No one tells us shit.”
Baby wasn’t eating her pudding, either. I touched her shoulder.
“Well,” Theo said, soft enough that we all had to lean in to listen, “according to Crystal—”
“Hold up,” Yaya said. “Who’s Crystal?”
“One of the skanks,” Nick whispered.
Theo gave him the finger. “According to Crystal, our coming in is in a couple of weeks, in, like, the middle of the night. She made it sound like some kind of ceremony. And apparently it’s what separates us from the upperclassman. After it happens, we’ll start going to sessions.”
“Sessions?” Yaya said.
“Friday-night dinners.”
“So it’s an initiation ceremony,” Nick said.
“An initiation ceremony?” Yaya said, raising her eyebrow. “We’ve been here four months. Isn’t it a little late for that?”
Theo shrugged. “Crystal wouldn’t tell me anything else.”
We all looked at each other. None of us smiled.
Baby pressed her palms tight against the table. She looked like she was going to be sick.
The pudding tureens were whisked away.
* * *
That winter, I would find myself staring at something—a bottle of shampoo maybe, or a crisp stack of T-shirts, or, through a cracked door, two aides laughing as they waxed a classroom floor—and it would hit me: I was inside. The shampoo, the T-shirts, and the aides’ murmurs were all secret, private things. I was inside. And the rest of the world was out.
The outside world had always had a vulgar curiosity about Catherine. Every few months some magazine published a “Catherine CULT: EXPOSED!!” editorial or a conspiracy theorist on TV raved about how the Catherine graduate network controlled Chinese money market rates. I didn’t remember the details of their speculation. Why would I? I didn’t think any of it was true. And even when I’d applied, I was sure I’d never be accepted.
Now that I was here, I wished I remembered the specifics. What was Catherine’s secret?
“There is no secret,” Henry Vu said over a lunch of radishes and salmon salad sandwiches. Henry, a nebbish Ashley first-year, had slunk to our table for the day. He blew his nose into a napkin. “It’s only a school,” he mumbled as he finished, wiping away the snot. “The only reason our graduates are so impressive is because they worked extraordinarily hard to get into Catherine, they worked hard while they were here, and they worked hard afterward. Catherine is . . . secluded, yes, but it’s not like we’re stuck in this house forever. We do graduate eventually. Professors publish from their research here and aides come and go. This isn’t, like, Area 51. Tabloids want some—some sexy story of what goes on here, but the truth is we’re just studying. A lot. That’s it.”
“Nah, that’s not it,” Anna Montgomery said. I liked Anna. She was a frank, casual girl, sunny-blond and muscular. She looked like she spent her summers hiking mountains and building boats with her dad. She was leaning back in her chair now, balancing on its two back legs with boyish ease. “No way is this a normal school. Sure, aides come and go, but have you ever seen of one of them give an interview? I bet they sign ironclad confidentiality agreements. And yeah, Catherine kids graduate and go on to live successful, normal, happy lives. But in those successful, normal, happy lives . . . none of them ever talks about what actually happens in the house. I mean, did you see Gardner on Barbara Walters? He wouldn’t shut up about the Norfolk disaster or Rengate, but as soon as she started going for his college years, zilch. That’s nuts.”
Henry shrugged, poking at a radish. “It’s a different kind of school, sure. Obviously, with all the, um, racial diversity, the progressive admission systems. And the syncretic curriculum. This is what happens when a school is founded by Transcendentalists instead of Puritans. You end up with a very special student body, and an administration that likes getting those very special students stupidly, transcendentally drunk. But really, the house and its history, it isn’t some big secret. You could read about it in any book on higher education in America. Yes, Catherine is a somewhat radical school. But it’s just a school.”
“Maybe,” Anna said. “But remember how the grads spoke about the house during our admissions interviews? The way our graduates feel about Catherine, and the way we’ll feel someday—the way some of us feel already . . .” Anna stopped. She chewed on the inside of her cheek, thoughtful. “Listen,” she finally said, “we don’t have a football team. We don’t have any grad schools, so most of our research is pretty pedestrian. This place is gorgeous, but the admins obviously care more about luring us here with free tuition than keeping up the house—did you hear there was another leak in the Ashley parlor? We don’t have old colonial history like Harvard or Yale. And even if we did, like you said, we’re not supposed to fetishize the past or whatever. We don’t even invite our graduates back for reunions or anything. Really, we have no idea why we do half the meals and festivals and other shit we do. But doesn’t it seem like everyone who goes to Catherine leaves . . . just . . . in love with this house?” Anna shrugged. “I don’t know. But you don’t know, either. There’s something here. Some special kind of power.”
Henry’s face twisted in a delicate sneer. “Everyone’s sentimental about their college years,” he said. “The ‘shortest, gladdest years of life.’ There’s nothing special about that.”
Anna took a bite of her sandwich. “We’re not mentioning the obvious thing,” she said with her mouth full.
“What’s that?”
She nodded at the students clustered on the other side of the hall.
I’d already come to recognize the new materials concentrators. There were only about twenty of them; Baby was right to say that it was Catherine’s most exclusive course of studies. The concentrators stuck to their own, as if by spending so much time together in the lab they forgot how to socialize with anyone else. They wandered the halls in a hollow-eyed pack, whispering as they rushed between classes and labs and huddling together at their own table in the great hall. That’s where they were now, murmuring over something I couldn’t make out. I craned to look. It was a toy, a blue wooden spinning top.
“If you want to study new materials, if you don’t think the whole thing’s a joke, you come to Catherine,” Anna said. “That’s why I’m here. That’s why a lot of us are here.”
“Are you applying?” I said. “To the concentration?”
Anna looked at me as if she had only just realized I existed. She was braiding her hair into a thick plait. “Well, yeah. I could study, like, American literature or whatever at a much easier school. One where I could go to the movies or call my parents on the phone. But ever since I was a little kid, and I saw those videos from the Shiner report . . . I knew it couldn’t have all been faked. And I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Plasm. That’s the magic ingredient. That’s what makes Catherine special.” She nodded at Henry. “It’s like you said, Catherine was founded by Transcendentalists, not Puritans. This school has always been about plasm study, even if we were calling it something else back then—pneuma or chi or telesma or whatever. Cosmo-electric energy. And maybe nobody was taking us seriously back then, and certainly no one takes us seriously now. But if you do believe in the future, in future materials, this is where you belong.”
Henry was still poking at a radish.
I stood up.
Anna turned to look at me. “What’s up?” she said.
“I,” I said, “am going to calculus.”
As I left, I glanced over at the new materials concentrators. They weren’t more attractive than everyone else; their eyes were shadowed with fatigue and their hair was greasy. But there was something powerful and electric in the way they hunched together. They were laughing now at some joke I couldn’t hear from our side of the room. The top lay forgotten on its side.
Could my stiff little Baby really become one of them someday? One of those powerful, electric boys and girls?
I’d heard the concentration was so selective that they usually chose only two or three students per class. So there should be about five of them at that table, not twenty. And some looked older than twenty-two.
I remembered, suddenly, a nine o’clock news story from months or years ago. Parents claiming Catherine had kidnapped their children, teary-eyed mothers pleading, begging someone to care. Catherine was supposed to be a three-year school. But those families said their children were never coming home. I guessed they must have been in the new materials program.
Plasm had never interested me much. I knew that it was once thought to be a revolutionary discovery, some incredible future of materials, chemistry, life, whatever. But it all seemed so vague. Was plasm even visible? Was plasm anything? It’d been years since Catherine released the Shiner report, though, like Anna, I remembered watching the footage during a TV special. I remembered the demonstrator’s careful hands as she pressed the thermometer-like pins along the shattered porcelain vase; I remembered the porcelain’s spectral hushing noise as it fused itself back together.
But that was years ago. Since then, there had been some scandal about M. Shiner and his research, something that put the whole project into question. I wasn’t sure what it was about. All I knew was that the Shiner report was now considered a joke, and Catherine was supposed to have stopped its experimental program. I’d heard other research clinics had tried to reproduce his results, and none were successful. Whatever magic material Catherine had discovered was gone. If it had ever been here at all.
I grabbed a plum from the dessert service on my way to Calculus II. I ate it in class as the professor wrote out differential equations on the chalkboard. The sound of his chalk clicking sounded like soothing rain. I laid my head down and closed my eyes.
* * *
It was too early in the morning. I clenched my hands against my head. The hallway throbbed with professors scuffling in from the snow, shuffling between offices with mugs of tea. Everything smelled like mildew. I hadn’t slept. I was still drunk.
“Ines,” M. Owens said.
I looked up. He was standing over me with a steaming teacup, his lips twisted into an elegant frown. He was a gray, aristocratically ugly man with thick, jowly cheeks and pinkish eyes that turned down at the corners. He always looked a bit morose.
“Hello,” I said.
“Please,” he said, “come in.”
I stood, knees creaking. I swayed.
“Are you feeling all right?” he said as he set down his tea. Most professors didn’t get their own offices, but advisors were afforded special privileges. The luxury suited him. He’d lined his windowsill with three snowy white orchids and covered the floor with an Oriental rug that must have been plush at one time but was now threadbare in patches.
“Never better,” I said, sitting in a drab crimson velveteen armchair. “I like your tie.”
He glanced down at the tie. It was navy and patterned with tiny flamingos. “Thank you. My wife gave it to me.”
I curled up my legs. “You must have a nice wife.”
“I think so, yes.”
“I bet she cooks you nice soups. Like minestrone.”
“Corn chowder, generally.”
I could imagine her. She was an art teacher, probably, with skinny arms, a braying laugh, sandy graying hair tied under a kerchief. The kind of woman who did jigsaw puzzles and watched Jeopardy! and took their chocolate Lab for twilight walks on the beach, and, every morning, sat down with a cup of coffee and wrote M. Owens a letter.
I knew faculty jobs at Catherine were coveted positions. And they were usually just two-year terms. But I couldn’t imagine being a grown-up and choosing this life.
I leaned my head in my hand and stared at his tie. “I like flamingos.”
M. Owens sipped his tea as he pulled a file from the stack on his desk and flipped it opened. He spent a long time on the page, eyes sliding down the sheet, then back up again, finger pressed against his lip.
I rubbed my temple.
“Ines,” he said, after spending what felt like an eternity paging through the rest of the file.
“Yes?”
“My dear . . . what happened?”
I shifted in my seat. “What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? Well, let’s see.” He flipped back. “You had a very interesting high school transcript. Not perfect, and I see your grades took quite a dip senior year, but still interesting, promising. I can certainly see why M. González recommended you. Your project essays, your interviews . . .” He flipped through more pages. “All lovely, really, very lovely. But now. You failed two classes last semester, and barely passed the others. And judging by your midterm reports, this semester will be even worse. So, Ines, please.” He looked up. “What happened?”
I couldn’t answer. My brain was swimming.
M. González. Not “mister.” That meant he’d attended Catherine himself, maybe even been a teacher here. I hadn’t realized, though now it seemed obvious. His creativity and genius for chemistry, his fierce concern over everything and everyone, even me. The way the other teachers always spoke of him with either savage jealousy or strange, extraordinary reverence. Of course he’d gone to Catherine.
Why had he never mentioned it? Or had he, and I’d forgotten? No, I would have remembered if he’d shared something so personal. He enjoyed talking about his travels and nights out dancing, but always skirted over anything intimate and specific. Once, walking past the teachers’ lounge, I’d overheard someone say that his mother had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but he’d never mentioned it to me. Were his years at Catherine as private as that?
And why had Mr. González recommended me? I couldn’t imagine. He probably regretted it now. As soon as he’d opened his condo door to find me there, after that night in the hotel—when he looked me up and down and saw me, really saw me, for the first time—he must have realized what a mistake he’d made.
At least he hadn’t told Catherine what I’d done.
M. Owens leaned back in his chair. “What do you want out of this experience?” he said. “Out of being here, at Catherine?”
A freezing rain pittered against M. Owens’s window. He stared at me with his hands folded.
“We see this often,” he finally said. “When young adults are so isolated, so removed from their parents, friends, and communities. It is a change. A total structural change. Of course that has its effects. We do expect some growing pains.” He tapped my transcript. “But this . . .” He shook his head. “This is a truly disappointing performance.”
I scratched my knee. He was still staring at me.
“You are antisocial,” he said.
I nodded.
“You are unproductive.”
“Yes.”
“And you are lazy. Do you disagree?”
“Yes. I mean, no. I don’t disagree.”
He swirled his tea.
“You could do well here, Ines,” M. Owens said. “You must know that, somewhere deep inside. You applied, didn’t you? You wrote the project essays, you sat in hour after hour of interviews, you told us your whole life story, however reluctantly. And you were accepted. And you came. You could do well here. But to succeed at Catherine you’re going to have to do more than pass through the gate.”
He had stopped swirling his tea.
“You must choose Catherine,” he said. “Not just once, but every day. Choose to be here. Choose to study. To make friends. To succeed. To wake up every day and be alive, and go to work. It’s not an easy thing to do. It can be very hard. But you can do it. I know you can.” He leaned forward, eyes unblinking. “The question is, do you want to? Or do you want to spend the next three years stupid and drunk?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He closed the file. “Well, I can tell you, at this rate you won’t make it to three years. In case it’s not obvious, dear, if you don’t do any work, you won’t be staying here. In fact, if you fail two more classes, you’ll be asked to leave the school.”
My throat squeezed.
“Ines,” he was saying.
“What?” I breathed.
“I was saying, Ines, if you don’t want to be here—”
“I can’t leave,” I said.
He stopped talking. He was staring at me again. I couldn’t read his expression.
“I can’t,” I said again.
He leaned forward.
“All right,” he said, lower now. “This is what you’re going to do. For the rest of the semester, show up to your classes. That is all you have to do: show up. And show up to finals, too. Write something in the test packet. Anything. You’ve no great mind, but it’s enough. If you are there, just there, you will pass. I promise. And next semester, with a fresh start, we will work on changing your attitude in a meaningful way. But for now, please, show up. Can you do that for me?”
“For you, M. Owens? Anything.”
He leaned back again. “I like you, Ines.”
“I like you, too, M. Owens.”
He was watching me closely.
“Everyone likes you, I bet,” he said. “Everyone likes bored, pretty girls. Your classmates and your teachers, I’m sure they all look at you and see”—he waved a hand, smiling a little—“whichever fearless hero used to drive them wild. The new girl who ignored them, the most gorgeous golden boy. You are attractive because you can be anyone or anything . . . because you are nothing. You are empty. Or at least, you want to be empty.” He touched the paper again. “That’s what this transcript says. You are trying to disappear, whish, into smoke. And if you’re not careful, you will succeed.”
I was picking at my fingernail.
“I want to see you become something, Ines,” he said. “I want to see you graduate.”
I had never really considered graduating. I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“Ines,” he whispered.
“Yes?”
“You’re a good girl,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong with you. You’re fine.”
I nodded. I nodded again. I rubbed at my eye.
M. Owens looked down at the transcript. “Now, concentration. In your application, you showed promise in physics and chemistry, but you aren’t taking any now. Do you have any interest in plasm?”
“No.”
“History?” He raised an eyebrow. “Literature?”
Literature was M. Owens’s specialty. He was teaching a seminar on the Victorian Romantics this semester. “I tried to register for your seminar but didn’t make the lottery,” I said, which was true. “I was heartbroken.”
He smiled. “I’ll make sure you get in next semester. I’ll discuss it with your grade dean. Which is who?”
“M. David.”
“Ah yes. All right. But for concentration? What do you want to do?”
I kept picking at my fingernail.
Empty. That’s what M. Owens had called me.
In my art history class, we were studying Old Masters still-life paintings. Woven baskets crowded with pears, peaches, and duck eggs, shadowed memento mori, crystal vases with grayish glows and luminescent beads of condensation. Those vases weren’t empty, but full, wildly full, of peonies and roses, tulips and bluebells. The flowers reminded me of the fairy bride’s bouquet from my book.
“I liked the art history survey,” I said. I didn’t recognize my voice; it sounded almost shy.
“History of art. A beautiful discipline.” He closed the folder and pulled out a concentration application form. “You won’t be officially accepted until next summer, but it shouldn’t be a problem.” He started filling out the form. “Isn’t your coming in soon?”
“Next week, I think. That’s what I’ve heard.”
“Are you excited?”
“No.”
“Scared?”
“No. Why, should I be? Is it scary?”
He shrugged. “There are worse things.” He signed the application with a flourish.
* * *
I opened my eyes to a harsh February morning. Wind shuddered the windows. I crawled out of bed and pulled a sweater off the floor.
Something was different about the tea tray today. I stared at it as I dragged the scratchy knit over my ribs. There was the kettle, the coffee, the packets of tea. But there were no snacks, no cookies. Had Baby eaten them all?
It didn’t matter. I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t even go to lunch that day, or tea. I only went to Ancient Philosophy class, then to Calculus II. I even tried taking notes, though I didn’t recognize half the symbols on the board. Since meeting with M. Owens, I was trying to be good.
But as I walked into the great hall for dinner that evening, a third-year student aide touched my elbow.
“Hey,” she said, “you’re not getting dinner tonight.”
Her lips were set in a stubborn frown. She had a hole in her eyebrow where a ring must have been once.
“Yes, I am eating dinner,” I said.
She shook her head.
I looked over her shoulder. Students sat around the Molina table, hunched over their pale salads—was that endive?—but, I realized, none of them were first-years. In fact, I didn’t see any first-years here at all.
“But I’m hungry,” I said.
Her hand hadn’t left my elbow. She squeezed it now.
“It’s going to be fine,” she whispered.
Her eyes, staring at me, were wide and watery pink. Was she about to cry?
“You’ll see,” she said. “It’s going to be so great.”
I turned. I walked back through the halls to our bedroom.
It couldn’t have been past six o’clock, but our room was full of shadows. I turned on my bedside lamp, then turned it off again. I got under the covers. I hugged my empty stomach.
The great hall had been serving flounder last night. It wasn’t very good, but I would’ve eaten more if I had known it would be my last meal.
I slipped in and out of dreams. Baby came into the room eventually. There she was, swaying in front of me. Was she sleepwalking? Was she a ghost?
No, she was in her bed. I was asleep. We were both asleep.
Someone knocked on the door.
I sat up. Baby sat up, too. We stared at each other.
I opened the door to M. David, our grade dean, clasping his hands behind his back and rocking back and forth on his heels. He looked neat, tailored, and alert.
“Please,” he said, “get dressed and join us in the parlor.”
“I’m already dressed.”
He glanced down at the jeans I had slept in.
“Just meet us in the parlor,” he said. “In ten minutes.”
The parlor, when we shuffled into it, was filled with Molina first-years. They leaned on walls and lounged over chairs, stifling yawns with the backs of their hands. No one was talking.
“What time is it?” a boy mumbled. He stood with his hands tucked into his armpits, eyes sleepy and dark.
We glanced at one another, but no one answered. The parlor didn’t have a clock and M. David had disappeared. It was still black night outside.
“Man, I would murder for a big bowl of real Texas chili,” Yaya said. She was perched on the arm of a sofa. “Real good chili, hot, with cornbread and butter. Or, no—a cheeseburger.”
“Oh,” a girl said, laying a hand on Yaya’s arm. “Yes.”
M. David appeared again. Then he led us in a drowsy, shuffling mass down one hall and up another, down a stairway, and then farther, down another. We must have been in some Harrington sub-basement when we arrived at a long, dim hallway wallpapered in cerulean faux-silk. The hallway led to two white doors with golden handles.
Most of the rooms at Catherine didn’t have locks. But this one had not just a lock, but a black box—a keycard reader—that beamed a steady red light.
Baby slipped her hand into mine as M. David drew an ID from his breast pocket. He waved it in front of the lock.
The doors opened onto a ballroom. Oak parquet flooring, warped and pocked by the years, swept up to a stage framed by olive-brown velvet curtains. The walls recessed into alcoves decorated with flaking plaster sculptures of dolphins, lobsters, and crabs. Three chandeliers dripped from the ceiling, buzzing with electric light.
The Harrington and Ashley first-years had already arrived and were pulling green exercise mats from piles in the center of the room. Apparently by some instruction, they were arranging them in a giant circle.
The room had no windows. We were underground.
“Please,” said a voice rising over the noise of our shuffling, “try not to sit next to your roommates or closest friends. We want you all to get to know each other better.”
The voice was Viktória’s. She stood with balletic grace in a raw silk dress, legs crossed at the ankles. Her eyes drifted over the crowd of students.
She murmured something to M. Neptune, the director of the new materials concentration. He, too, watched us curiously, a notebook and pen folded in his hands. He nodded at what Viktória said, then waved and winked at someone he recognized across the room. M. Neptune was shorter than Viktória, and he was not a handsome man; his eyes were too small, his hairline receding into a witchy peak. But there was something charismatic about his face. It was hard to look away from him.
Baby turned to me with panic in her eyes.
“Don’t listen to them,” I said as I grabbed a mat. “Sit next to me.”
Baby and I sat cross-legged on our mats. Altogether, our class must have been around a hundred people. We couldn’t manage a perfect circle, but we tried. We made a lot of mumbling and squeaking noise as we settled. Then we were silent.
I glanced around. Now that we were seated, I could see that it wasn’t only first-years here in the ballroom. A few upperclassmen waited by the stage, along with a handful of aides. I counted seven upperclassmen in total. And they weren’t just any upperclassmen; they were all new materials concentrators.
They were watching us. I couldn’t read their expressions, but I recognized the cool comfort of their bodies as they lounged against the stage. They didn’t seem bothered by all of the first-years staring at them. They were relaxed. They were waiting.
Baby didn’t even try to hide her ogling. Her eyes on the concentrators were wide and bright with desire.
Viktória walked to the middle of the circle.
“Welcome,” she said, “to Catherine.” She gave a little smile. “I know you’ve all been through a lot to come here. To come inside.”
She turned to look around the circle. Her eyes were soft.
“The path into Catherine is not an easy one,” Viktória continued. “You’ve had to be intelligent. You’ve had to be creative. You’ve had to work hard—very hard. But you’ve done it. You are here.”
M. Neptune was seated in one of the alcoves now, notebook closed in his lap. He was watching her.
Viktória folded her arms behind her back.
“I respect you enough to be honest,” she said. “These three years will not be easy. You will need to be more intelligent, more creative, and harder-working than ever before. There will be times when you will question whether you truly belong here, in this house. You will wonder, Am I strong enough? Am I good enough?” She turned. “There’s no way to predict when these questions might come to you. It could happen while taking a particularly difficult test, or during your forums, or at a party with friends. Or it could come to you in this room, tonight.”
She turned.
“Because this is the truth: To be unsure here is to belong. To be unsure but present and eager and open to a heroic new past, future, and today—this is the Catherine project. This is how we research the most profound relationships between our bodies, minds, and worlds. The unsure place is where you are now and where you are meant to be.” She smiled. “This is your new home. And I am happy—so happy—to be here with you, at the end of one stage of your life and the beginning of a wonderful new one.”
The boy next to me was crying.
“You have suffered to come to this point. Suffered through high school”—a few small giggles—“and through teachers, friends, and family who weren’t supportive of all the things you are. People who hurt you. And you have suffered through your own selves—your own critical eyes, your own standards, your own minds. Your spirits are beautiful, but they are not easy.
“But tonight,” she said, “we will say goodbye to your pasts and enter into a new house. The house of your eternal future.”
By the end of the sentence, she spoke so softly it was almost a whisper.
I coughed.
“So,” she said. “Let us begin.”
The aides over by the stage had arranged trays of plates and cups. At Viktória’s nod, they began circulating among us. When one arrived at where Baby and I sat, I saw that the plates held little round white cakes and green clay cups filled with wine.
I took two cakes and swallowed them whole, even though I didn’t feel hungry anymore. The cakes didn’t taste like anything except almost sweet, like honey. The wine was even sweeter.
I was in the middle of swallowing when Baby whispered, “Ines.”
I turned, wiping my mouth.
One of the new materials concentrators, a willowy girl with a long black braid, had appeared at the side of the boy next to me. She also held a tray, like the others. But instead of cakes or wine, her tray held a set of plasm pins.
I had never seen the pins this close before. And something about how slender they were, and how dark, made me feel like I still couldn’t see them clearly. I only saw that they were lined up in order of size, and that the digital readers on their ends were all unlit at the moment. At the other end of each pin was a tiny flat pad.
I bent toward the tray for a closer look. I wished I remembered more from that special about the Shiner report, but it was so long ago. I’d been too young to understand the science. I’d thought it was a hoax.
The boy waited, cross-legged and blank-faced, as the concentrator ran her hands over the pins and selected one. She fitted the flat pad to the boy’s skull, then curved the body against his head. I hadn’t realized the metal was flexible.
The concentrator did something to the pin I couldn’t see. The pin beeped as its reader lit up.
I had been watching her so closely I didn’t realize a different concentrator stood behind me until he tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up into a face full of fervid acne.
“Turn,” the boy said.
I did. I could see Baby watching me out of the corner of her eye.
Wasn’t Catherine supposed to have stopped experimenting? Should this be happening? Did the pins even do anything, really? The doctor hadn’t answered me when I’d asked.
I looked all around, but no one was objecting.
“Lie down,” the concentrator said.
I did. He lifted up my shirt. I could feel him fit the pins on either side of my belly button. I had braced myself for some kind of cold pricking sensation, but they were the same temperature as my skin. As he pressed them into place, I felt something warm shift beneath my skin, and then a hazy sense of relief. The feeling sparked a sudden and specific young memory of peeing in the ocean.
I started to smell something faint, warm, and animal, almost like milk.
“Turn,” he said again.
I turned.
He pushed through my hair to touch my skull. He fit a pin to the skin there. One pin, then another, and another.
I closed my eyes.
When the concentrator was gone, I opened my eyes again. All the other students were lying, like I was, with the pins buried along their hair and beneath their clothes. We looked like little aliens.
I touched Baby’s hand. “Hey,” I said.
She turned to me. The pins flashed.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “This’ll be fun.”
She nodded. Her eyes were blank, her lips set anxiously tight.
The chandeliers had been turned down, almost off.
Many minutes passed before Viktória said, “Breathe in.”
I breathed in.
“Out.”
I breathed out.
As the minutes passed, any curiosity I had sank into boredom. I breathed, in and out, until I wished I weren’t breathing. I wished I were up in the library reading my Betty and Veronica comics.
But then, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to stand and leave the ballroom. It seemed I might never leave. Something was weighing me down.
“In,” Viktória said, “and out.”
Darkness moved behind my eyelids. My breath rose through my stomach, through my throat, out, then back in. Pressure squeezed my skull.
In, and out.
I don’t know if I slept, or if my eyes were open or closed, or how much time passed. It could have been minutes, hours, or years. My body floated away from me but I was still here. We were all here.
That’s what Viktória was saying. “You are in the house.”
Her voice was low, so low it almost felt like it was coming from my own mind.
“You are in the house and the house is in the woods. The woods are in the house. The stairs are in the house. Down the stairs is the hallway, and at the end of the hallway is the ballroom. You are in the ballroom. The ballroom is in the house. You are in the house and the house is in you.”
Her voice was slow and rhythmic as a prayer.
How had I ever felt sleepy? Every part of my body was turned on to everyone and anyone, all of us here together, in the ballroom. This ballroom in the house.
I could feel myself. Yes—really feel myself, like I hadn’t in a long time.
I was here.
I blinked.
I lifted my hands and put them down again. I couldn’t look at them. I couldn’t.
How could M. Owens have said nothing was wrong with me? How could I have almost believed him?
The walls of the ballroom were closing around my head. The room was growing dark. I was thrusting forward—
I was crashing into the hotel room. I was slumping down. I was staring into a face.
“The house is the woods,” Viktória said. “You are in the woods.”
I tried to turn my head but couldn’t. Vomit rose up in my throat. I was choking.
A girl said, “I am in the house.” Her voice seemed to come from the ceiling.
“But before, you were somewhere else,” Viktória said. “Where?”
“In a white house at the end of a street,” the girl said. “We moved in last year, my mom and me. It was a big house. Too big. All the rooms had carpets. My mom vacuumed every day. I hated the sound of the vacuum.”
One of my pins had come loose. The pad had fallen from my skull. I touched my hand to the space where it used to be.
I rubbed my eyes. I felt as if I were emerging from a daydream. I wasn’t choking anymore, and I couldn’t see anything except the ballroom.
“You were in the house,” Viktória was still saying, “and what was in you?”
“The sad thing,” the girl said. “I was sad. I was sad like the vacuum was sad. I was sad, and I couldn’t stop being sad.”
“Yes,” Viktória said. “The sadness was inside.”
I lowered my hand from the loose pin. I blinked again.
I said nothing as I felt my heartbeat slow.
“Does anyone else,” Viktória was saying, “have bad things inside?”
I could hear the aides shuffle among our bodies. Pins beeped as the concentrators made small adjustments.
I felt a flash of panic. They were going to realize that one of my pins had fallen loose. They were going to bring me deeper into the dark daydream.
One of the concentrators stepped over my head. I looked up. It was the same boy with the acne.
He frowned as he glanced over the detached pin. But as he bent to fix it, his eyes flashed onto mine.
Please, I mouthed, don’t.
His face was impassive.
I didn’t know why he listened to me, but he did. He stood and let his hands fall. His footsteps echoed as he walked away.
I breathed.
The room was becoming clearer.
“My parents didn’t want me to go here, to Catherine,” a boy was saying in a lisping voice. “They wanted me close to home. But every other school was so expensive. My dad said we could have made it work, but I knew he was lying. Catherine was my only chance. My only chance to be everything they want me to be.” His voice wavered. “But I don’t want to be here, so far away. I miss my parents. I miss my church. I was in a group there. I miss hanging out with them after school, with my friends. I miss TV. And—what if my mom gets sick again? What if it comes back? And I don’t even know?”
Viktória slowly paced the room.
“I understand,” she said. “Yes. Fear. We have fear inside. But that is not you anymore. You don’t have to be afraid. Your future is here, in this house. You are here. You are in the house.”
“In the house,” we said.
“In the house, down the hall.”
“In the house,” we said, “down the hall.”
The stories drifted, and my mind drifted, too. Until Baby was the one speaking.
“Last year,” Baby said, “I was at the Macy’s parade. I went there alone. I had—we’d gone to New York to visit my aunt for Thanksgiving. Her apartment was ugly and hot, and all my cousins hate me. So I went to the parade. And next to me, there was this pretty little girl. She had the longest pretty curls, really nice brown, chocolate-brown. And pretty eyes, and dimples. She was sitting on her dad’s shoulders and she was laughing. And—I hated her.”
Baby’s voice was stronger now.
“I hated her. I really did. I hated her so much it hurt. I could see how nice her life would be. She was going to be invited to sleepovers and pizza parties. She was going to go on dates with pretty boys. She would have nice, pretty children. And then she would die, and she would be happy. She would be happy. And I was angry—so angry I cried—at the parade, because that will never be me. I will never be someone happy. Because I am someone alone. That’s what I thought.”
Her voice was strong, though softer now.
“But now I see I’m not alone. Because here, in the house, I have everything. I have teachers who care about me. I have books. I have the lab. I’m still not pretty or sweet—but I don’t care. Because I have work to do. There can be something good in me. Something mine.”
“You can be good,” Viktória said. “In the house.”
“In the house,” Baby said, and we all echoed, “In the house.”
“In the house, downstairs, down the hall, in the ballroom.”
I could see Viktória more clearly now. She stepped around us as she spoke.
I touched my throat and felt the vomit still there, rising in waves as if pumped by my heart.
The chandeliers hummed.
“You are in the house and the house is in today,” Viktória said. “Today is not a moment. Today is not a point. Today is an infinite area. Today is forever. Everything that has happened and that will ever happen is now. Everything that has been and will be is here. And everything is good. Everything is fine.”
I closed my eyes again.
“You are not sad. You are not afraid. You are not hateful. Because you are here. You are here. You are inside. And you are ready.”
Some of the students’ eyes were open, others closed. But all of their faces were slack with pleasure.
“You are here,” Viktória said.
No, I thought lightly. I’m not here. You can’t catch me. I’m too gone.
Footsteps echoed near my head.
“You are in,” Viktória said. “And doesn’t it feel good?”
I turned to the sound of her voice.
The eye contact hit me with a shock. Viktória was watching me with a slight smile. Her eyes drifted to my skull.
She knew I hadn’t fixed the pin.