I SIT THROUGH Russian lit, barely listening. The text from the unknown number still glares from my phone screen. The bruise at my back makes it hard to find a comfortable way to sit, and my arm throbs, as if the pain has been awakened again. Staring at The Brothers Karamazov without comprehending a word, I wonder wildly if it will ever heal or if it will always hurt. A thing like that shouldn’t heal cleanly beneath the skin, unseen. It should make its presence known.
You aren’t going to tell anyone, are you?
They all said those words. Dylan, voice sickly sweet as I breathed in ragged, whining gasps. Luke, expression teetering between pale panic and indignant rage and finally shuttered indifference.
My mother, leaving for the airport, fretful.
You know what I’ll do to you.
You know what would happen.
You know this is his last chance.
No one can know that Luke broke his probation by hanging out with Dylan, and so no one can know what happened to me.
Class is over. I don’t think I’ve said one word the entire time. Not good. Loud gets you noticed but so does quiet. The key is to be middling at everything. Good enough; never great. I have to pay more attention.
Have you seen her yet? the text asks as I check the time.
Seen who? I ask. Who is this?
There’s no answer.
I find Mrs. Clarke in her office. She’s wearing reading glasses and hmming over a stack of forms, which she shuffles out of the way when I come in.
“Eden. What can I do for you?” she asks, all brisk and professional.
I think of water stains on floorboards, obscured ink on rippled pages, phantom rain against the windows. “I was wondering about my luggage?” I ask, my voice lifting up at the end in that way my father hates. It makes me sound like a teenage girl, he’d say, smirking.
“Oh dear. Is it still not in your rooms? I did confirm it was picked up. I’ll have to chase it up myself. You’re in uniform, so I assume you have enough clothes for the day, at least?”
“I borrowed some of Aubrey’s things,” I say.
Her face freezes, and an uneasy expression flickers over it before she clears her throat. “I see. Well, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. It’s not as if she needs the uniforms, anyway.”
“You’re sure she’s not coming back?” I ask. “Was the accident that bad?”
She fiddles with her reading glasses. “She’s recovering well. But after a scare like that, you can imagine that she wants to be with her family—and they want her close by as well.”
I can imagine it, sure. Envy it a little. But home has never been my refuge.
“If you have the time, perhaps I can take you to meet Delphine now,” Mrs. Clarke says. “And I can clear out Aubrey’s things while I’m there.”
Mrs. Clarke explains the procedures for visiting Delphine as we walk. It’s pretty much the same as the entrance to Abigail House, except that you have to change into specially provided scrubs and put your hair up in a plastic shower cap, and first you have to towel yourself down completely, even if you’re totally dry already.
“Make sure you get the soles of your feet,” Mrs. Clarke reminds me.
The scrubs are, perhaps predictably, Atwood maroon. They turn us shapeless and blocky, and the booties we have to wear make our steps unbearably loud, rasping and crinkling as we walk.
The door at the top of the stairs stays shut the whole time we’re changing. Mrs. Clarke knocks twice before entering the code and pushing open the door.
The first thing I notice isn’t the expensive furniture or the lush, soft rug beneath my feet. It’s the air. The air inside Abigail House is dry, but upstairs it’s stripped of any hint of moisture. The faint whirring I took for air conditioning is, I realize, a combination of AC and built-in dehumidifiers and air purifiers, bulky appliances with complex digital displays.
Delphine is at a desk in the main room, her back to us as she types on a laptop.
“Delphine, dear. Can we say hello?” Mrs. Clarke calls.
Delphine keeps writing for several seconds without responding. Then she pushes her laptop back an inch, stands, and walks out to us. She’s wearing an Atwood uniform, which I suppose shouldn’t surprise me. She’s a student, after all. But I didn’t expect the dress code to apply, given that she never leaves her rooms.
She folds her hands behind her. Her hair is in a single braid, tied with a maroon ribbon to match her jacket. She stands with one ankle crossed behind the other, her head tilted slightly—everything about her clothes and her stance and her appearance makes her seem much younger than she actually is. But I can see the sharp and canny edge to her gaze.
“Hello,” Delphine says shyly, looking up at me through her lashes. “I’m Delphine.”
She’s pretending, and the secret between us feels like sugar dissolving on my tongue, sweet and insubstantial. I’m not supposed to lie to Delphine, but apparently Mrs. Clarke is fair game. “My name’s Eden. Nice to meet you,” I say, extending my hand.
“We try to avoid physical contact unless it’s strictly necessary,” Mrs. Clarke says. I drop my hand. “Better safe than sorry.”
“When infant monkeys are deprived of touch, they become completely psychotic,” Delphine says mildly. “They don’t even do those experiments anymore. Too unethical.”
Mrs. Clarke doesn’t seem to know how to respond. “Well,” she says, putting her hands together. “Why don’t I let the two of you get to know each other a bit? I’ll go gather up Aubrey’s things. And I’ll make sure to send over a couple of spare uniforms in your size and whatever else I can scrounge up, until we find your luggage.”
She heads downstairs, leaving us alone. Delphine’s stance changes subtly as soon as she’s gone. Her shoulders relax, her gaze grows more direct.
“So,” I say awkwardly. “How’s the first day of classes going?”
“You don’t have to do that,” Delphine says. Her voice still has a softness, like morning fog, but with Mrs. Clarke gone, it takes on a quality that makes you wonder what might be hiding in the mist.
“Do what?” I ask.
“Small talk. I told you, we don’t have to be friends.”
“Small talk isn’t for friends, it’s for everyone else,” I say. “Besides, I like small talk. It’s an easy way to get people talking about themselves. And when people are answering questions, they’re not asking them.”
“You don’t like answering questions?” she asks. She leans back against the doorframe, her fingertips hooked around the edges of the trim.
“I don’t like lying,” I say. “Answering questions means I have to do more of it.” I told her I would tell her the truth, and now I am. It’s a heady feeling. I feel almost drunk.
I have to stop.
“What do you lie about?” she asks. Every word she speaks is precise, enunciated perfectly. There is something about her that I cannot look away from—this strange tension between her delicateness and something dark and deep beneath.
“Lots of things,” I say. “What do you lie about?”
She considers me, chin tilted up. “I lie about almost everything,” she confesses. “How I’m doing. If I’m happy. What I’m thinking about. Sometimes I lie so that my mother won’t worry, and sometimes I lie because I like to pretend my life is something different. Sometimes I lie because I like lying, or to practice. I lie about everything and I lie about nothing at all, just for fun. Your turn.”
She said it so plainly. She didn’t promise not to lie to me, I realize, but why would she tell me all of that if she was planning to?
“What do you lie about?” she presses.
“No,” I say. I shake my head. “I told you I would tell you the truth, but that doesn’t mean I’ll tell you everything.”
“Okay,” she says. I was worried she’d be upset, but she accepts this, an understandable limit on our arrangement. She’s quiet; the room is quiet, except for the humming of the machines that keep the air pure and dry and cool. She doesn’t seem to have the same urge as most people to fill up a silence with chatter.
“Is this what we do?” I ask, looking around the room. The walls are stark white; black-and-white photographs of buildings are the only decoration. “Just sit up here and talk? What do you do for fun?” She must be bored out of her skull, trapped up here by herself every day.
“Read, mostly,” she says. “Or hang out with Aubrey. Or snoop.”
“Snoop? How do you manage that from here?” I ask.
She waves me toward the office. I follow, curious and a bit apprehensive, as she goes over to the laptop. She sits down and pulls up a private browser window. A few keystrokes later, AtChat appears on the screen.
“I looked for you on AtChat. Your profile is totally blank,” I say. Then I realize that she isn’t logged in as Delphine Fournier but as someone named Jane Crowley—an administrator account.
“Who’s Jane Crowley?” I ask.
“I think she’s tech support at FellTech,” she says.
It’s the company that makes AtChat. The owner is a legacy, so the school gets a special deal on everything.
“And how do you have her log-in?”
“She came up here to set up my computer and stuff,” Delphine says. “I watched her type it in.”
“So that’s what you mean by ‘snoop’? You look at people’s AtChat pages?”
Delphine clicks through to a profile. On the admin account, there are buttons I’ve never seen before. Journal, one reads.
“Whoa, hold on. Is that the private journal?” I ask.
She nods and clicks. It’s Jennifer Danforth’s profile, and the most recent entry in her journal is all about losing her virginity over the summer to the neighbor’s hot college-aged son. I look away before I get more than the gist of it, cheeks heating up, but Delphine doesn’t seem fazed.
They encourage us to keep those journals. Your private thoughts, all in one place. “The teachers all have access to this?” I demand.
“Not all the teachers. Senior staff,” Delphine replies, backing out of the journal. She looks up at me, untroubled. “And Jane Crowley.”
“And Jane Crowley,” I echo weakly.
“Everything. Private chat logs. Personal files.”
I think of parties that have been busted, contraband confiscated. At least one mental breakdown that no one noticed until suddenly the boy was being sent to in-patient treatment. Did he post something in his journal?
I feel foolish for ever having believed it was private.
“It doesn’t work for everyone. I think they have to have permission from parents for minors, and it stops working when people turn eighteen,” Delphine says. She’s navigating to another profile. Aubrey’s. She opens the journal, but it’s empty. She lets out a sigh. “I know she never uses it, but . . .”
“Have you heard from her?” I ask. I think of the diary downstairs. Maybe I should say something. But until I understand what those fragmented words mean, I’m not sure telling Delphine about them is the right move. She knows, it said.
Delphine shakes her head. “I’ve been trying to reach her, but she doesn’t respond. I keep thinking she’s dead and no one wants to break it to me.”
“She’s not dead,” I say with more confidence than I feel. They wouldn’t lie about that, would they? A new thought strikes me. “Have you looked at my profile?”
“I’ve looked at everyone’s profile. I have a lot of time on my hands,” Delphine says without a hint of embarrassment. “I probably know more about your classmates than you do.”
“What do you think you know about me?” I ask, trying to keep my rising anger in check. Who does she think she is, prying into our lives? Who do our teachers think they are, pretending we have a shred of privacy?
“You don’t use AtChat very much, so I don’t know as much about you as I do about other people,” Delphine says. She opens up a photo I’m tagged in. Me, Ruth, Zoya, and Veronica, Ruth beaming as she holds up a track medal, the rest of us giddy. “These three girls are your friends. You only ever show up in photos with at least one of them, and almost all of your comments are on their posts. You like other people’s posts a lot, but you don’t comment. You never post anything while you’re at home. I like your comics.”
“What?” I ask, startled at the seeming non sequitur.
“Grave Belles,” she says, and my stomach twists. “You uploaded a few pages to your private journal freshman year. It’s cool. Are you still working on it?”
“Yeah,” I say, voice hoarse. “You saw those?” I’ve never shown them to anyone.
“You’re angry.” Her brow furrows.
“It’s a pretty serious violation of privacy, don’t you think?” I choke out. “If I wanted people to see those, I would have shown them.”
Her eyes are huge and dark and still. “You feel like someone saw what they shouldn’t have, but it isn’t true. I’m no one. I don’t talk to anyone. There’s no one I could tell. I would just get in trouble,” she says, like this makes all the sense in the world. She turns away from me, back to the screen. “I wouldn’t tell, anyway. I keep everyone’s secrets.”
With a few quick keystrokes, she logs out and shuts the computer. Her fingertips run along the seam, and she stares down at it for a moment. Then she looks back up at me.
“I won’t look at your profile anymore. Since we know each other now. And since you aren’t going to lie to me.”
I have no idea what to say to her. Her eyes are pale blue, but the pupils are large, and the darkness in them reflects my own shadowed figure back at me. I am struck again by what a contradiction she is—naive and canny, delicate and dangerous. Dangerous? The word springs to my mind, and I can’t explain it or dismiss it.
She knows, the words in the journal say. Have you seen her yet? the text asks.
Mrs. Clarke is calling. I excuse myself, and Delphine doesn’t say a word as I go. Mrs. Clarke is in the hall. In her arms are Aubrey’s neatly folded clothes, gathered into a laundry basket. “Was this everything?” she asks.
I think of the red diary, still in the bedside table. “Yes,” I say. “That’s everything.”