There are fifty applicants in total. We’re herded into tiny groups of ten, and on the morning of the test, each group is shoved into a room and given a writing prompt.

Mine is simple, almost insultingly so: Write about your summer.

The answer I come up with isn’t so effortless. It takes me half the allotted time just to scribble one sentence. My seashell bracelet glints like a mocking reminder as I finally press my pen to the page.

This summer, I confronted myself.

And I hated her.

I studied her.

I learned what made her act the way she did.

It’s not complex: she’s a scared little girl in grown-up skin.

All she wants is to feel something: powerful, terrible. Anything.

But hunting for it doesn’t mean she has to scream. She could listen…

To powerful words written in ink and stories no one else was meant to hear.

She can learn to speak in ways that actually mean something. To whisper loud enough to be impossible to ignore.

She can learn to trust…

And I think I could love her, that crazy bitch.

I think I could.

Even if her heart is already broken.

Thorny doesn’t pick me up on the final day of the entrance exam. It feels off but not completely unexpected, if I’m honest with myself. He’ll probably send Elaine to get me, with some half-assed lie.

Though who knows? Maybe this time, he won’t even bother with the lie.

Regardless, I wait at his old writing spot while balancing a notebook on my knee. Pen in hand, I try to imagine what might capture the attention of James Thorne.

The heat?

The harried-looking professor sulking off to work in the summer?

Or maybe it’s the expression on the hopeful faces of the other applicants. It certainly catches mine. They radiate fear mixed with anticipation. Who knows what they wrote about or what might separate the winning ten essays from the rest.

They say art is subjective; I guess that’s true. Some tiny nuances in day-to-day life might go unnoticed by some and yet be impossible to be ignored by others.

Like the pair of officers dressed in uniform who make their way across the park. They’re hunting for someone, muttering amongst themselves. Upon spotting me, one of them looks down at a slip of paper in his hand and then back again. I bristle uncomfortably as he comes closer.

“Are you Maryanne Mayweather?” he asks.

When I nod, the other one approaches me as well. Together, they stand there, their expressions like matching blank stares worn by action figures. Their presence isn’t a soothing one. I don’t think it’s meant to be. It is clear they serve just one purpose in life: to deliver bad news in monotone voices.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us,” they tell me in somber tones. The rest of what they say I catch only in snippets. Pieces of information my brain struggles to string together as my notebook slips from my grasp and lands open at my feet.

Only one phrase actually registers in the end.

Thorny won’t be coming for me any time soon.

His wife is dead.