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Whatever grand plans Anna Huff had for wallowing in her trauma and lovesickness—spending her days curled into a ball and eschewing personal hygiene—were thwarted by the punishing regimen of fair Druskin Academy. Classes went till 6pm every night. Saturdays featured a cruel slate of additional morning classes. Every otherwise open crevice of time was stuffed full with work and sports and more work.
The schedule provided an occasionally effective diversion from her misery, but that didn’t lessen how crushing the workload was in its own right. Even the kindly Mr. Nolan regularly assigned 200 pages a night, and they weren’t easy pages. Her first diving meet wouldn’t be for another four months but her coach, a white-haired bastard named Mister Willamy, had them in the well for seventy-five minutes a day right from the start. The satisfying bounce of the springboard under her feet was the only good part of those seventy-five minutes. For simulated meets, Willamy appointed himself judge and dished out merciless, unfair scores that had Anna and the rest of the team cursing his arbitrary judgment under their breath. He also had the team do interval sprints every day around the dirt track inside Druskin Cage, a decrepit brick fieldhouse choked with dust kicked up from athletes constantly running laps. Anna would end those laps caked in gray dirt, grit seeping into her mouth.
Oh, but that wasn’t the end of practice. Hardly. After running came strengthening. After strengthening came calisthenics, including Dying Cockroaches: a ten-part leg lift sequence that Willamy had cribbed from an amateur militia training video he found online. After calisthenics came balance: Willamy would force them to stand on one leg for minutes at a time and stare at a small X he had marked on the wall of the cage. You couldn’t look away from the X or else Willamy would force you to run suicides. Anna hated that X. She was getting really sick of Xs marked in places. If they ever tested her on what that X looked like, she would have grudgingly aced it.
When Willamy’s back was turned, she would let her eyes wander around the cage, keeping her head perfectly still but focusing on anything else could find, even lines in the dirt. Sometimes she would steal a quick glance at cute girls who were still doing laps, but they weren’t Lara. No one was Lara. Only Lara would do. This longing would always be with her. She could tell. She knew it would be her eternal companion if Lara couldn’t be.
After balance came stretching. Endless stretching. Willamy would have all the divers hold a split for minutes at a time, until Anna could feel her groin muscles about to pull off the bone. If anyone broke into a giggle, more suicides. She hated suicides.
Piano lessons occupied just two hours a week, but they always seemed to come when Anna could least afford to sequester herself inside the Music Center. Even getting ready in the morning was a chore because of Druskin’s antiquated dress code. Boys had to wear a coat and tie. Girls had to abide by a far more detailed section of the code that demanded “non-revealing, appropriate attire.” Skirts had to run past your fingertips. Straps had to be more than two fingers wide. Tights were mandatory and awful. One girl had already violated the dress code by having the gall to try to pass off leggings under her skirt. She was immediately remanded to Vick’s office. Anna shuddered to think about what awaited that poor girl in Vick’s basement. Kids who were neither male nor female had to get special permission for their own set of dress guidelines and for residence in unisex housing. Druskin, being Druskin, made the application process for those privileges its own taxing courseload.
Anna was forced to return to Vick’s awful house every Wednesday night. Same time. Same dress. Same wormhole. Same kettle bell. Same Brendan McClear acting as toady. Same horrible, burning result. There were new flavors of pain to the experience every time she stepped forward, but in the end the wormhole still spat her out right where she was. If this bothered Vick, he didn’t show it. He would simply ask her once more to recite his poisonous name, and then he would send her back into the crush of Druskin as if nothing had happened.
There was barely time to eat. Anna would make sloppy PB&J sandwiches at Main Street Dining Hall and then smash them into her mouth on the go. This conveniently absolved her of finding people in the dining hall to sit with, but that bit of antisocial maneuvering came in handy given that Main Street sucked. A full quadrant of that dining hall was perpetually occupied by the football team loudly talking shit to one another and adhering to an all-steak diet. One afternoon, she was walking out of the hall when she spotted some other kid peeling an orange and tearing it carefully so that it was in the shape of a man, with the central column of its pith sticking out like a penis. She shuddered and doubled her walking speed out of there.
She finally found her precious energy drinks at the school Grill, refilling her dorm room fridge over and over with cans of the stuff and snacking on Grill owner Cecilia’s black beans-and-rice every afternoon. She racked up a tab that had a piqued Sandy angrily texting her in all caps. Every day, Anna had enough sugar and caffeine coursing through her body to power a city block.
And then there was the walking. So much walking. Robbed of the ability to port, Anna felt every tedious step from the dorm to the academic buildings to the dining halls to the gym, the last of which was a mile away from everything. Before Druskin, Anna saved the bulk of her walking for new, exciting places. London! Paris! Phuket! Miami. She had forgotten how boring it was to tread the same ground over and over again. The soles of her mary janes were coming unglued and flapping around. Her cheap New Day tights kept slipping down and bunching all over, greasing her poor feet with sweat. She had never been forced to carry books so thick (and dull).
Everyone, save for Bamert and Burton, continued to ignore her. Everyone had to ignore everyone anyway because they were just as put-upon. Unlike the inside of a wormhole, there was no manipulating time and space at Druskin. Those were definite entities here, and they were relentless. She did her best to look glum, wanting everyone to see that she was lovesick without having to announce it, but all of the evil stares from classmates she had gotten along the quad paths for a few days had given way to general indifference. She was nobody.
Worst of all, she had virtually no time to break out of school. The coursework was making her smarter, and the walking and endless diving practices were making her fit. Yet it all felt like a grand distraction from the real work that she wanted to do. For the three weeks she was locked down by Vick’s imposed restrictions, she was forced to check into Sewell at 8:30pm and remain there for the rest of the night in her half-deserted room, with cursory web access and a pile of work that only grew in size the more she hacked away at it.
Even when she procrastinated, she couldn’t bring herself to do it productively. Instead, she would daydream about shoving Vick into a wood chipper, or she would run down to Mrs. Ludwig’s apartment for a free macaroon, or she would check in on (stalk) Lara through Lara’s WorldGram account.
She didn’t formally follow Lara. She was content just to lurk, forced to accept that she had been demoted from Lara Kirsch’s real life back to being just another weirdo ogling pictures of her online. There was Lara at the Arctic Riot festival. There was Lara partying on a very large boat with a gaggle of unimaginatively named DJs. There was Lara scoring a table at Arsen Lang’s newest restaurant, accompanied by an unidentified guy. Who’s he? Why’s she running with that dipshit? She comforted herself by assuming Lara didn’t really like the guy. She assumed it over and over until, in her mind, it was outright fact. After all, he didn’t get a bracelet.
She also caught a photo of Lara in Sassari, Sardinia. Anna knew Sassari. Sarah took her to Sassari two years earlier because it had become a popular meeting ground for lesbian women, many of them ten to twenty years older than Anna at the time. With porting, like-minded people tended to cluster themselves in various locales, a trend that was bordering on self-segregation. It seemed like a good idea for Anna to give Sassari a shot. But with its gleaming piazzas packed with festive women and old Sardinian Catholics loudly protesting the now-consistent presence of those women in their town, the town proved more overwhelming than Anna could absorb at fifteen. She may have had something in common with those tourists, but they were tourists all the same. She quickly ported off of Sardinia with Sarah and didn’t have the nerve to give it another chance.
Now here was Lara in the Piazza d'Italia, posing for a selfie with another woman, a few years older: pecking that woman on the lips and tagging her post with #NewWorldPrideDay and #LoveIsLove. Maybe she was kissing that woman out of support, maybe out of passion, maybe both. Either way, Anna wanted to clock that woman right in the jaw. First, she’d chase down Sarah’s killer. Then this jackass. The woman only appeared in that one post on Lara’s feed, but that was one too many. She probably had a dumb name, too: Cantaloupe or something.
Hands off, Cantaloupe.
Anna logged all of Lara’s new locations in her Notes app while re-reading the Post-it Lara had left behind over and over. Roomie. Sometimes Lara would go for days without posting to WorldGram, hiding out in some undisclosed location. Anna wondered where she was. She pictured Lara all over: serenely wading through the Lily Beach shallows in a white one-piece, smoking dope with her legs dangling off the Cliffs of Moher, dancing with the street crowds in Rio. She pictured Lara visibly aching for the one person she wanted to dance with the most, and maybe marshaling a few rogue PortSys employees to gather up every last scrap of info about Sarah Huff? Anytime Anna tried to put Lara out of mind and focus on work, there she was again. She remained undaunted in seeing her once more. Impatient, too. In bed at night, she would whisper Lara’s name to herself as an invocation. Lara, Lara, Lara.
But if Lara Kirsch was sad about being pulled out of Druskin, there was scant evidence of it on her WorldGram. She looked free. Alive. There was one photo of Lara in Barbados wearing a fedora with the caption, “These are waking dreams.” Another post was actually branded content, complete with a #ShareSpace hashtag. Anna had “Really, Lara?” typed out in the windowpane of the comments for that one, but never hit PORT. If Lara wanted to be corny, that was her right. Anna wished she could be that corny herself, frankly. To be corny, you needed to be happy, or at least pleasantly deluded with false hopes.
Help me learn to be happy, Lara. Please cure me of this stupid brain.
Yes, Lara Kirsch felt betrayed by Anna the last time they spoke, but that only helped fuel any number of redemption fantasies in Anna’s brain. Lara wanted to be wrong about Anna. Yes, that was it. And if she really does think you betrayed her and can’t get over it, then she really, really cares about you.
Anna stared at the photos of Lara for minutes at a time before closing them. There was one photo of Lara at a cocktail party where she was wearing a short, fringed dress, like a flapper. Anna noted the black fringes gently brushing across Lara’s smooth, unblemished thighs. Whenever she saw fringes dangling from anything else after that, she’d think of Lara in that dress—a faint crease of muscle running down the outside of her legs—and that made Anna want to bite through a knuckle. Random men and women would propose to Lara in comments of her WorldGram and Anna vowed to hunt them all down.
She had to ration the photos carefully, to keep from becoming obsessed and to wean herself from that seductive ache that came every time she glanced at her old roommate. It was addictive, that pain. The way it tortured Anna’s mind and whispered to her that Lara hungered for her equally.
To distract herself, she’d go over to the GizPo comment section and do some shitposting: writing up opinions she knew would cause a fuss. “Actually, lemonade taste like shit,” etc. Anna was only seventeen but she already knew that people online were just stock characters: influencers, wingnuts, lecturers, dorks, trolls, etc. It never got old setting off digital bombs that sent all those stock characters into endless beefs.
I trust my soul. Anna replayed the line over and over again in her head, then she’d look at Lara’s picture and the phrase would vibrate. It would swell and take on bright neon colors. That’s why she needed a hit of acid to balance the sweetness: either by lightly trolling the GizPo commenters or opening up a new tab and reading everything she possibly could about Emilia Kirsch and the corporate empire she lorded over alongside Jason Kirsch, Lara’s considerably older half-brother. Best to temper her fixations just a bit. This was all very healthy. Definitely.
Finally, after nearly a month, Anna was freed from ‘stricts and allowed to roam the campus at night again. Bamert could hardly contain his excitement at the news. Before Nolan’s class, he jabbed an elbow into her side and declared, “We are celebrating tonight. At Kirkland! I’ll provide libations.”
“I don’t drink,” Anna reminded him.
“Again, that’s of no concern to me. You will be there at 9pm. Burton will join us and show you what we’ve been working on.”
“Hey! I have tambourine tonight!” Burton said.
“Not anymore,” Bamert told him. “Shake your little idiot drum another time. This is a goddamn rager, son.”
Kirkland was a house of fifteen rowdy boys located across from the gym down a relatively quiet stretch of Elliot Street. When Anna walked in after diving practice, there was a white greaseboard in the common room that had, “Tyler, your sister called. She’s pregnant” scrawled across it in green dry erase marker.
The whole house smelled like feet. In the corner of the common room was a hamster cage with a single, malnourished rodent huddled in the corner, a big K shaved into its fur. Anna walked over to the cage and felt around for the little ball bearing inside the hamster’s water bottle. The ball had gotten stuck, so she poked at it until it came dislodged and the little hamster could finally get fresh water to drink.
She went over to Coach Bergerini’s door and gave a knock. He opened the door in nothing but tighty whities.
“Yeah?”
Anna held out her permission slip. “I’m here to visit Bamert.”
“Yeah yeah, go ahead.” He didn’t even bother to look at the slip before shutting the door.
She climbed the stairs warily and passed a half-dozen doors blaring a half-dozen strains of obnoxious music. From behind Room 6, she heard a boy mashing buttons and screaming out “OH HO HO HO YOU JUST GOT FUCKING WRECKED!” Finally, she knocked on Room 12, even though the door was already cracked.
“Entrée!”
The foot smell was worse in Bamert’s room, like he was pickling his own in white vinegar. She nearly choked.
“Bamert, this room smells awful.”
“I can fix that.”
He lit a cinnamon candle and now the room smelled like cinnamon and feet. He took out a tin of Kodiak and stuffed half of it into his cheek, then kicked back on a futon couch that sat half a foot above the floor. He was still in his suit: jet black with fire-breathing dragons all over. There was a giant wooden spool in the center of the room that served as a coffee table, with a bunch of cowboy boot-shaped shot glasses and a single Clemson football helmet resting on top. In Room 12, Bamert served Merle Haggard two ways: through his wireless speaker and on a poster that covered the entire back wall. He had also run a length of twine from one end of the ceiling to another and hung a full country ham from it: salted and preserved in a stockinette and already cultivating a sickly mold around its dark pink flesh. It was too much odor for too small of a space.
“Should I leave the door cracked?” Anna asked. Druskin policy stated that girls could have visitations with boys and vice versa after 7pm so long as the door stayed ajar and three feet were kept on the floor at all times. The rumor around Sewell, which Anna read about in the Shit Memoirs, was that Jubilee circumvented the latter rule by having sex with her boyfriend in the closet.
“You can close the door,” Bamert told her. “Bergerini doesn’t care. It’s the only perk of sharing a house with a hockey coach and half his Neanderthal roster.”
“What if I need actual air to breathe?”
“You can have air or you can have privacy, but you can’t have both.”
She shut the door and then pointed to the floor below, whispering, “Bergerini answered the door in his underwear!”
“Believe me, that’s outright formalwear for him. His girlfriend is still in college, you know.”
“What?! But he’s, like, 40!”
“Judging by the sounds they make down there, I don’t think the age discrepancy bothers them in the slightest.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“It’s legal, though. Funny what’s legal and what isn’t.”
“There’s a hamster dying in your common room.”
“Yeah. Technically it’s Moriarty’s, because he bought it and named it Fucko. But I’m the only one who bothers to feed the poor creature.”
He pulled out a handle of spiced rum.
“Where on earth did you get that?” she asked.
“The answer to that, dear Anna, is so obvious that you’ll want to smash your face in with a textbook.”
“That’s how I feel all the time anyway.”
“Want a drink?”
“I just got off of ‘stricts, so no. Besides, I don’t wanna throw up and then have to report to diving practice with a hangover tomorrow.”
“I don’t know how you do that diving business,” Bamert told her. “Too high over water for my comfort, yessir.”
They heard the doorknob rattle and Anna grew horrified Bergerini would be on the other side, fully naked and angry. Instead, it was Burton, carrying a small black instrument case. The second Burton saw the handle of spiced rum, his shoulders slumped.
“How are we gonna get anything done if you’re drinking that?” he asked Bamert.
“We’re not.”
Burton snuffed out the noxiously sweet candle. Then he lit a bare match and the smell of the room grew nearly tolerable. He and Anna sat down on Bamert’s cot, which was piled high with canvas army blankets. Bamert mixed himself a rum and Coke in a single, dirty Solo cup. He raised his cocktail to Anna and Burton.
“To Clemson. May they win the CFBCSA National Championship at the WallTech Seoul Bowl yet again.”
“Why do you like Clemson so much?” Anna asked him.
“Well, my granddaddy went there, and my daddy did too. One day I’ll go there.”
“I thought you didn’t like your dad.”
“Can’t stand the man.”
“Then why do you like Clemson if he likes it?”
“Beats me. Anyway, contraband,” Bamert declared triumphantly. “Tonight we celebrate your ever so slight liberation, dear Anna. But also, we can finally show you what Burton has been working on.” He nodded to Burton. “Show her.”
“Show her what?” Burton asked.
“The things!”
“You didn’t say to bring them.”
“I said we’d show her what we’d been working on. You came all this way from Gould House and you didn’t bring the damn things?”
“I have a picture on my pNote of them,” Burton offered.
“Oh god dammit. Where’s the drama in that, I ask you?”
“What the hell are you two talking about?” Anna asked.
Burton took out his Druskin-issued tablet and showed her a photo of half a dozen white transponder bracelets scattered on his desk.
Anna gasped. “How did you get those?”
This was Bamert’s cue. He stood up from the futon, hopped onto the wooden spool, which openly groaned at having to support his considerable mass, and sang out:
“Dayyyyyyyyyyyyy stuuuuuuuudents!”
“BAMBAM!” came a voice from the room next door, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
Bamert ignored the order. “Day students, Anna Huff! Day students. Kids whose folks live within twenty miles of campus. They walk through Druskin Gate in the morning, and they walk right back out at night. They’re not allowed to port directly onto campus every day, because security! Savor that irony, my dear. Baste it with its own juices. These day students, they’re like mules: beautiful, workmanlike mules.”
“You know a day student?” Anna asked him.
Bamert pointed at Burton. “Not me. Him.”
“I may have met a girl,” Burton confessed, playing with the sleeves of his tweed jacket to distract himself.
“You got a girlfriend?” Anna asked him.
“You know, I wouldn’t consider her a ‘girlfriend’ necessarily.”
“She’s smitten,” Bamert said. “She’ll ford raging rivers for him. I have no idea why, but girls fawn over this man. They find him mature.”
“I am mature.”
“Well, most grown adults I know are annoying, so yes, I could see someone accidentally conflating those two qualities. These girls see our boy complaining for nut milk in the dining hall and they think he’s cosmopolitan. It’s astounding, Anna Huff. Our little mule ported to Vancouver for Burton, hit up a pop-up market, and found a bunch of those little Blackheel anklets on sale for nothing at all.”
“What about the rum?” Anna asked Bamert.
“Oh, I just stole that out of Bergerini’s closet while he was at practice. He has cases of the shit.”
“Will you sit back down already?” Burton asked. “You’re drunk.”
“I don’t get drunk. And why should I get down?” Bamert asked. “Technically, there are still at least three feet on my floor!”
“You’re making me nervous. You’re gonna fall and die, and then Anna will rat me out for it.”
That was the wrong thing for Burton to say. Anna stood up in front of him and glowered, her skin knuckle-white all over.
“What’d you say about me?”
“I’m sorry,” Burton said. “That was in poor taste.”
“Hoooooooo, Burton. She’s gonna fuck you up now, and with a quickness.”
“Everyone thinks I’m a rat and I’m not,” Anna said. “I’ve had to walk the quad every day with people looking at me like I’m the scum of the earth, and so I really don’t appreciate it coming from either of you two.”
“I said I’m sorry, all right? I get how much it sucks,” Burton said.
“No, I don’t think you do. Not even close.”
“All right, maybe I don’t,” he admitted. “But what exactly happened in that office, anyway?”
Anna went from white to red. There was Vick’s hateful face again, his snarl so permanent it may as well have been chiseled into rock. She hated that she knew that face so vividly. Sometimes she would see Vick’s face right before taking off from the springboard in diving practice and she would skip a rotation just so she could get into the water faster, to clean the image away. Then Willamy would ream her out for poor execution. Everywhere she turned, there was an angry face awaiting her.
Tell them what happens in Vick’s basement. Tell them what a sick asshole he is.
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Anna finally told them. “I can’t even think about Vick without going into panic attacks, so please don’t ask.”
Burton relented. “I didn’t mean to.”
“No one ever means to.”
“Okay,” Burton said, about to change the subject. “Why don’t we talk about the anklets, then? The problem remains that you’d have to sort out how to clone these anklets and have them transmitting our biodata to the narcs in Student Services while you’d be busy porting somewhere else. And then you have to figure out how to port.”
“Can your new girlfriend sneak in a phone?” Anna asked Burton.
“She’s NOT my girlfriend, and the answer to that is no. They still make you drop your phone into the day student bin.”
“Can we visit your girl... your friend’s... house?”
“Vick turns down those requests all the time. He hates day students in general anyway, because they don’t pay the full tuition. That’s why only, like, a dozen of them get admitted every year. He thinks their folks are all faking New Hampshire residency to get the deal.”
“God, he’s such a bastard,” Anna said.
“He’s no gentleman,” Bamert said. “He’s a craven, vile coward. We should steal his phone.”
“What are you, suicidal?” Anna asked.
“Occasionally.”
“Actually,” said Burton. “There’s a germ of an idea there.”
“It’s a stupid idea,” Anna said. “What, you steal his phone? Then he reports it stolen and it goes dead. What’s the point of that?”
“Not the whole phone,” Burton said, “But the battery. I’ve seen his phone. He walks around with it on a clip because he’s such a big dork. He’s one of the only faculty members on campus who can keep a phone on his person whenever he wants, and he doesn’t have a PortPhone7 or an 8 like cool people do. He’s a cheapskate. He has a Worm 4e. It’s a piece of shit! You could crack it open and grab the battery out of it easily. That’s the only part of a phone that would set off security at Druskin Gate.”
Anna’s eyes widened. “So you could actually do it.”
“In theory, yeah,” said Burton. “All you’d need is his battery. It’s compressed antihydrogen. You can’t trace it, and you sure as heck can’t deactivate it. You bring the other parts of a phone through the gate, put it all together, and then you have a working PortPhone. You’d need a data plan, though.”
“I think I could get one,” Anna told him. “I would need a VPN to set up a dummy account for it, and I would need money.”
“I HAVE MONEY!” Bamert screamed. “Old money is the best money. God, this plan is so perfect, and so naughty. Let’s dance right into it.” He took a big swig of his lukewarm mixed drink. “This could absolutely work, and even if it fails, it’ll be a complete blast. Now, when do we steal his phone?”
“Oh I’m not gonna help steal it,” Burton said.
The other two cried out WHAT?! loud enough to earn another “SHUT THE FUCK UP” from next door.
“Shut the fuck up yourself, Dippy Dog!” Bamert shouted back. Then he fumed at Burton, “What do you mean, you’re not gonna help steal it? You had Cindy bring in the anklets!”
“Her name is Alyssa, and what she did for me was perfectly legal. You’re suggesting that I help you steal Vick’s PortPhone, which is not.”
“You just sat here with us and figured out how we’d do it!”
“I never said anything about WE. I was explaining how you might do it. I have no interest in getting booted from here, Bamert.”
Bamert held out his hands, each palm large enough to hold a watermelon. “You see these hands, do you not? You are enthusiastically pleading to catch these hands right now.”
“Bamert, nothing you do to me could be worse than what my parents have already done.” Burton tugged at his shirt collar and there was a small, button-shaped scar protruding out, precisely the diameter of a cigarette. “I’m on a full ride here. I get booted, and then I go back to them, which means I run away and end up like all the other port runaways. Not all of us can afford your level of disdain, do you understand?”
Anna had never seen Bamert chastened until that moment. He got off the stool and sank back into the dirty futon. Then he grabbed an empty Snapple bottle and drooled down a line of dip spit that seemed to have the tensile strength of a circus tightrope. The saliva broke, then made a little lasso and settled down on his lapel, where it sat upright for a few seconds before settling down into a permanent stain.
“You’re right,” Bamert finally said. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”
“Why do you even wanna break out of here?” Burton asked him.
“You know me, I get bored. And this place is too orderly. Everything is too clean. All the kids go to class on time. There’s no mess. And New England sucks. It’s a flavorless region. I need a taste of chaos or else I’ll go mad here.”
“I’ll steal Vick’s phone,” Anna said. Both boys quickly forgot what they were fighting about. “I got no problem with that.”
“Are you sure?” Bamert asked.
“I’m not gonna make Burton steal it, and there’s nothing you can do quietly. That leaves me. Burton, can you show me how to take out the battery?”
“Yeah. In fact, I have an even shrewder idea for what to do once you get it.”
“Our girl is so brave,” Bamert said proudly. “Gets smacked down at the big boss level and wants to go right back at it! Unreal. You’re the real dash of pepper, my dear.”
He took another swig of his drink, only this time the spiced rum didn’t sit right. Anna could see it: that moment when drunk people realize they’ve taken it one drink too far. Bamert’s eyes seized up and his whiskers went limp. His face turned gray. He let out a small hiccup that acted as a warning sign to the other two. He held his breath, terrified of how the next taste of air might make him feel.
“If you’ll excuse me.”
He broke into a run out the door. They could hear him projectile vomiting into the sink even though the bathroom was at the opposite end of the hall.
Burton stood up and grabbed his tambourine case. “Check, please.”
“Does he do this every night?” Anna asked.
“He wouldn’t be Bamert if he didn’t. I’ll walk you back.”
They paused in the Kirkland common room to feed poor Fucko the hamster, then made their way across South Campus, along the perfectly manicured trees with spotless dedication bricks, past the cube-shaped edifice of Helton Library, where half the student body willingly hotboxed themselves every night to cram for tests in monk-like silence for hours on end.
She paused outside Helton for a second and took in the air. The walking was still a drag, but Anna was already learning that the best parts of Druskin came in between being wherever you were supposed to be. All the stolen places and moments, those were the true gems. These were the dark parts of Druskin. September here was truly perfect. Even a cynic like Anna would have been a fool to deny it. It felt like living in a world that had been set designed. The air tasted better than anything on the menu at Main Street.
“I hate that library,” Anna told Burton.
“You should. The architect who designed it had three families on three continents, and each family had no clue the other two families existed. I’d tell you to read all about it but the school strangely has no biographical volumes on him in the library that he designed.”
“Funny, that.”
“Yeah. Listen, Anna.”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry. What I said tonight, I was out of line.”
“It’s all right.”
“You sure you wanna go through with this? I know what an awful start this has been for you, but you’re full ride like I am.”
“How do you know that?” she asked Burton.
“Because I can hear your shoes coming from two blocks away.”
Oh God, another thing for people to gawk at. “I keep meaning to go to George & Phillips to replace them, but there just hasn’t been time.”
“It’s very easy to get caught up in Bamert’s Bamert-ness, you know? But as much as this place sucks, it’s valuable to you and me, right? It means more to us than it ever could to Bamert, or even to Lara.”
“I know.”
“But you still wanna break out. Why? You worked hard to get in here. Why risk all that, and why risk it so soon?”
She clutched at the shoulder strap of her back pack. Pulled it close, nuzzling against it.
“Everyone else gets away with everything,” she told him. “Why can’t I?”
“You know why.”
“Yeah well I’m not just gonna sit here and accept that.”
“You’re not gonna like me saying this,” Burton told her, “but you should forget Lara. There’s no shortage of rich girls here to chase after.”
“That’s not my angle,” she insisted.
He took a step back. “I swear I wasn’t implying that.”
“She’s not just a rich girl and I’m not just a sucker with a crush. Plus I have other people I’d like to find, and deans I’d like to ruin, and that’s all gonna be a valuable learning experience on its own, Burton. I promise you that.”
“Deans? You mean Vick.”
“Of course I mean Vick.”
“Why do you go to his house every Wednesday?”
“How do you know I go there?”
“I saw you walk in once.”
“He makes me go.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Jesus.”
“I don’t even know if I can tell you that I can’t tell you, do you understand? Keep your trap shut about it, especially to Bamert.”
“I will.”
She walked away, covering her paces all the way back to Sewell, past chatty seniors and quiet couples on their way to the chapel to hold hands for Evening Prayer. She reached the dorm and began the trudge up to Room 24. The stairwell existed inside its own cruel dimension, growing skyward and adding on extra floors in accordance with her level of exhaustion.
When she finally reached her room and cracked the door, she realized that she wasn’t alone.