WE’RE THE FIRST ones to get to the dorms. Zoya goes into hostess mode, and by the time Ruth arrives, I have a cup of tea and a plate of beautiful little shortbread cookies made by Zoya’s tiny Russian grandmother.
“Well, this year is going to suck,” Ruth declares, dropping onto the couch next to me. She snags a pair of cookies and nibbles at the edge of one with a deep, contented sigh. She strictly limits her sugar during the school year for training purposes, but there are exceptions for Tiny Russian Grandma Cookies.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I just overcommitted,” Ruth says.
“A shock,” Zoya notes, folding her long limbs into a cross-legged sit on the floor and setting her own cup of tea delicately on the edge of the coffee table. “Who knew that trying to become a doctor and go to the Olympics at the same time would be challenging.”
“Yeah, I know,” Ruth says. She sounds defeated, and that isn’t like her. Ruth is driven—the most driven person I know. She’s only ever seen too much as a challenge to be overcome, but as she slowly nibbles away at the shortbread, her gaze is unfocused and weary.
“Do you still want to do both?” I ask. “It is a lot. You’re basically superhuman for even trying.”
She bites her lip. “I got a B in Chemistry last semester. I brought it up to an A minus with some extra work over the summer, but I had to scramble.”
“A B is perfectly respectable,” Zoya says. She’s right, of course, but it’s not up to Ruth’s own standards for herself. Not with applications due soon and her GPA on the line. She looks at me, and I give a little nod to show I understand.
“I’m not sure I actually have the time and the sheer physical energy to manage both, short of bending the space-time continuum,” Ruth goes on. “Getting that B made me panic, and then I realized that if I have to pick one, it’d be the academics and medicine. And then I started to think, do I even want to go to the Olympics?”
I tilt my head in surprise. The Olympics have been all she’s talked about since we were twelve and she realized there was more to the Olympics than being a pint-sized gymnast. She could be big, strong, and a champion, and she’s been driving toward that goal ever since. “Do you want to stop competing?” I ask.
“No, I don’t think so,” she says. “But going to the Olympics basically means giving up a normal life for a long time. The training, the money, the politics . . . I don’t know if I’m up for that just to say I did it.”
“You don’t need an external marker of success to prove that you’re a badass,” I say.
“Are your parents going to be disappointed?” Zoya asks.
“I imagine they’ll be relieved,” I say, and Ruth nods.
“They’ve always been worried I’m pushing myself too hard,” she says. “ ‘There’s a line between overachieving and working yourself to the bone, and you crossed it in fifth grade!’ ” she says in an exaggerated rumble that I imagine is supposed to be her father’s voice.
“At least they’ve always known that if they tried to slow you down, you’d only push harder,” I point out. “You’re like a cat. It has to be your idea.”
“Ouch. Stop knowing me so well. It’s hurtful,” Ruth says.
I stick my tongue out at her, and she puts a hand on my knee for a brief moment, affectionate. My heart gives only a tiny squeeze. I am very nearly over Ruth Hwang.
It feels good being back. But I keep wondering what Delphine is doing, all alone in Abigail House.
“Hey, losers,” Veronica says, practically dancing through the door, her face aglow. “Did I miss anything?”
“Just Ruth destroying our fundamental understanding of her life goals,” Zoya said.
“Also Tiny Russian Grandma Cookies,” Ruth says, pointing.
“Sweet,” Veronica says, plopping down on the couch beside me. “And what?”
“Ruth has decided not to pursue Olympic glory, but reside with us mere mortals,” I explain.
“Excuse me? And I’m only hearing about this now?” Veronica asks, genuine surprise mixed with exaggerated offense.
“To be fair, I’m just hearing about it now myself,” Ruth says.
Veronica fixes Zoya with a look. “You’d better not tell me you’ve decided to only dress in sweats or something.”
Zoya laughs. “You’re safe, I promise.”
“How is the fashion stuff going?” I ask, casually as I can. I’ve been worried about Zoya this summer. Her usual flowery captions have shrunk down to the emoji-only level, and her photos have been of cute dogs and flowers, with only a few of her usual fashion shots.
Zoya sighs. “It’s complicated.”
“I noticed you haven’t been posting much on Instagram,” I say.
She makes a face. “Yeah, I’m having kind of a weird relationship with it right now. I still love making clothes, but I’ve never been totally comfortable being my own model. It’s like . . .” She trails off.
“Like it’s about you instead of the clothes?” I guess, and she makes a sound of agreement.
“Your DMs have to be a nightmare, too,” Veronica notes.
Zoya gives a full-body shudder. “A wretched hive of scum and villainy,” she declares, putting up a hand. “It used to be fun, you know? Then it started to be about getting noticed and getting likes and getting sponsors and it’s this whole little business empire, but why? I’ve never wanted to run a business. I suck at it. And I’m seventeen, I should not know this much about taxes.” She waves a hand. “Anyway, that’s way too much about me.”
“I miss hearing about you. All of you,” I say, and I’m taken aback by the raw note of longing in my voice.
Zoya gives me a look that simmers with surprise, but Veronica just pops another cookie in her mouth.
“In that case, can it be my turn to make it all about me for a hot minute?” Veronica asks.
“Please. All this introspection is giving me acne,” Ruth says, and Zoya gives a nod of permission.
Veronica launches into an explanation of why she was late, which involves an extra meeting with her painting mentor—who is apparently the coolest and most brilliant woman to ever grace the earth. She lights up as she talks, gesturing wildly. It’s good to see her so happy. She worked her ass off last year to land the mentorship. I curl into the corner of the couch, arms wrapped around a throw pillow, and just listen.
Rain hits the window with sudden force. I jump in my seat. I can see the drops against the window. Real rain, not . . . not whatever it’s been at Abigail House. No need to freak out.
I try to focus on what Veronica is saying. The rain picks up. It seems to fill my hearing. Beneath it is another sound—the wind? No, a voice. A whisper.
They took her.
The words are as clear as if they were whispered in my ear. My breath catches. My eyes fix on the window.
Veronica pauses midsentence, looking over at me.
“Eden? Everything okay?” she asks.
For a dizzying moment, it’s like I’ve never seen any of them before. Then their names slide back into my mind and I shiver. “I’m fine,” I croak.
“You sure? It is your turn to share your big life crisis,” Veronica says.
I shake my head. I can’t tell them. I’ve never told my friends anything about Luke and home. There is a clear, bright line between Atwood and the real world. If I tell them, it frays. Blurs. Breaks. The Eden who is here is not the Eden who’s had a dead bolt on her bedroom door since elementary school.
But she has followed me here, that other Eden. The Eden who goes to sleep afraid. The Eden with anger like acid eating away at her slowly from the inside out. I have carried her wounds with me here, and they refuse to heal.
“Hey, Eden,” Veronica says, and she reaches out toward me, hand closing over my arm, and in that instant, I am the wrong girl entirely, in the wrong place, and I jerk away from her with a sound in the back of my throat that is almost a snarl. Veronica stares at me, hurt and mystified.
“I’m sorry,” I stammer. I’m here, I remind myself. I’m safe. Except Atwood doesn’t feel very safe anymore. “Let’s just do the debrief.”
Veronica looks skeptical, but she doesn’t press.
I try to settle into the rhythm of conversation again, laugh along at Veronica’s tale of accidentally stealing a moped in Rome and Zoya’s comedy of errors trying to get from Europe, where her diplomat mother is currently assigned, to the US. I keep bracing myself for the moment when I’ll have to lie. But Zoya is the one to ask, “What did you get up to this summer?” and I shrug and say, “I just bummed around at home.”
And that’s it. The conversation moves on; everyone is eager to get in another story. Part of me longs for them to ask more. To insist. Confession builds like a pressure in my throat, but as I grow quieter, shrinking against the cushions, no one seems to notice.
Their faces shine when they talk about the classes they’re taking, the schools they’re applying to. I haven’t thought beyond the end of the year because I can’t bear to. I’m losing Atwood.
I’ve maybe lost Atwood already.
With each minute the distance between us seems to grow. Already I’m realizing I have to ask them to explain things that they’ve clearly talked about, tell me things I’ve missed. I thought that I could leave the summer behind. But the memories are as vivid as the room around me, the pain in my arm an unshakable reminder of what happened. I can still smell it—the stink on my clothes when I stripped them off at the end of the night. I can still taste the scorch of cheap alcohol, which I refused at first, before I realized it made the hours more tolerable. I can feel the weight of his arm across my shoulders, and when Veronica casually leans over, arm across the back of the couch, I lurch to my feet.
The conversation grinds to a halt. The others look at me, curious and concerned.
“Eden?” Veronica says.
“Sorry. I’m not feeling well,” I say. Now that I’m on my feet, I feel trapped, panicky. I need to get out of here.
“We haven’t gotten to the good stuff,” Ruth says.
“I know. I’m sorry. We can catch up this weekend or something? I’m feeling really gross,” I say. I want to run. I don’t know why this is happening now. Why these memories have woken inside my body so suddenly, so strongly.
“Do you want us to walk you back to Abigail House?” Zoya asks.
I shake my head quickly. “No, stay. Have fun. I’ll see you tomorrow,” I insist. I don’t give them the chance to object. I grab my bag and head for the exit.
The first part of the summer was normal. Lonely but normal. I haven’t attended school locally since fifth grade, so I don’t really have any friends back home. I spent my time chatting online or working on Grave Belles, redrawing the early pages now that my art has improved so much, revising some things I changed in the story. Then my parents took off—Mom on a business trip, Dad off fishing to prove his manhood to his outdoorsy father.
Luke was staying in the pool house. We’d managed to avoid each other most of the summer. He seemed to be doing better. I was glad—but it didn’t mean I was suddenly filled with sisterly affection for the brother who’d once put all my books in the bath and filled it up because of some minor slight.
When I heard someone rattling around in the cupboards downstairs, I assumed it was him, but when I went down, Dylan was there instead, standing in the kitchen holding a box of crackers, crumbs scattered over the counter.
“Hey, Princess.”
I knew Dylan, of course. He was Luke’s friend; eventually, we realized he was Luke’s dealer, too. He was a big white guy with a thick chest and huge arms. He would be handsome if it weren’t for the ugly expression he always had on his face, superior and sneering. He always had girls hanging around. Not now, though. Now it was just him, in my kitchen, exactly where he wasn’t supposed to be. Because Luke was on probation after being caught breaking into a gas station, wasted and high, and attacking the cop who came to arrest him.
If Luke was anything but rich and white, my parents would be paying for a casket, not the best defense attorney in the state. As it was, he hadn’t been charged with the assault and had just been given probation for the break-in. But if he violated it, he went to jail, and the assault charges would be filed. The terms of his probation required that he not associate with known criminals, including a whole list of his friends.
Dylan was at the top of that list.
“You can’t be here,” I said stupidly, staring at him.
“It’s cool. Luke invited me,” he said.
“He’s not allowed to be around you,” I shot back. “I’m calling my mom.” I turned to head back upstairs.
Before I even heard him move, he had spun me around and shoved me up against the wall. His hand was on my chest, his fingers almost at my throat. It didn’t hurt, really. It was more the weight of him, the instant understanding that I was trapped, and that whatever happened next, it was entirely up to him.
“So here’s what we’re going to do,” he said cheerfully.
That was the first day. The last day didn’t really come until I stepped out of the cab and saw Veronica striding toward me.
Or maybe it hadn’t come at all.
I am alone now comes the whisper in the rain, and the words write themselves on my bones.
When I get inside, I rush my way through changing. I pause in the hallway, listening for Delphine’s footsteps, but the upstairs is silent.
I climb into bed, prop my arm up, and fall asleep to the sound of the rain.
I wake to darkness. I’m staring at the ceiling. My limbs feel leaden, paralyzed. I can’t move. I try to speak, but I can’t. My mouth is locked shut, my words dying in my throat.
At the edge of my vision stands a dark figure. Fear jolts through me, sudden and total. I can’t turn my head, but I make out stringy wet hair dripping onto the floorboards. She’s steeped in shadow. I can’t make out the details, only the shape of her.
The floorboards creak. She comes closer.
I shut my eyes. I can’t even whimper. I can feel her—the cold of her against my skin. I can hear the dripping water, and then guh, guh, guh, the wet choking.
I can’t scream. Can’t move. The only decision I can make is to look, and so I squeeze my eyes shut against the sight of her.
The bed creaks. A cold presence hovers over me. Cold water drips onto my cheeks in an unsteady rhythm.
Guh, guh, guh, comes the awful choking sound. Frozen fingertips brush across my arm—
I sit up with a cry of alarm, my heart hammering.
The room is empty. I press a hand to my cheeks. They’re wet, and for a moment, fresh panic surges, but then I realize—I’m crying.
There is no ghost. I am alone and I am unharmed, except for the pain in my arm, suddenly sharp, worse than it has been in days. I must have rolled over on it in my sleep. The dripping of water—it’s the rain against the window.
That’s all.
“Eden?” Delphine calls. A knock sounds from the hall. “Eden, are you okay?”
I stumble from my bed and into the hallway, my arm held close against my side. The lights upstairs are on, spilling down to illuminate Delphine, who stands on the other side of the door.
“I’m fine,” I tell her.
“You yelled.”
“I had a bad dream or something,” I say. “It was like I couldn’t move. There was someone standing over me.”
Delphine nods, concerned but calm. “Sounds like sleep paralysis. Aubrey used to get that. It feels like you’re awake, but you aren’t. You’re sort of dreaming and awake at the same time. It’s supposed to be terrifying, but it isn’t real. You’re awake now. You’re okay.”
Her tone is soothing, almost melodic, and I realize it’s intentional. She’s talking me down. There’s such an exquisite kindness in her voice that it’s easy to believe her.
Sleep paralysis. It fits. I close my eyes, trying to ignore the pain in my arm. My brain summoned up the specter of the Drowning Girl because I’d been thinking of her. It makes perfect sense. “I’m sorry I woke you,” I say.
“You don’t need to apologize. I wasn’t sleeping.”
“Insomnia?”
“Some nights I can tell I’m going to have nightmares,” Delphine says. She rests her fingertips against the glass, her eyes fixed on them.
“I don’t think I want to go back to sleep either,” I confess. I sit against the wall and sink down until I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor. I cradle my arm in my lap.
Delphine looks down at me a moment. Then, without a word, she sits as well. I hear her settling against the wall right on the other side of the door.
“What do you dream about?” I ask. Focusing on Delphine makes it easier to breathe steadily. To tell myself the pain will fade and the sun will rise and all of this will be over.
“Drowning,” Delphine says. A sharp hiss slips between my teeth. She doesn’t know what happened all those years ago, but some part of her must remember. “It’s always the same. I’m falling, and then I hit the water. I try to get free, but I’m being pulled under. I don’t mean to gasp, but I do, and the water fills my lungs. But I’m still alive when I hit the rocks. It hurts. It always hurts.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, because I can’t think of what else I could offer.
“Do you have nightmares?” Delphine asks, as if eager to shift the attention away from herself.
“Other than this one?” I ask. She makes a soft noise of affirmation. I wet my lips. “I’ve been having this dream lately. There’s a room. The lights are bright, and there are people talking, but I can’t understand what they’re saying. I stand up and walk away, but when I get outside, there’s nothing there. The world is just a black, scorched husk. And I keep walking, on and on and on, hoping to find someone. Just one person. But there’s no one. And no matter how far I go, when I look back, I can see the room I left. The whole world is dark except for that room, and it’s bright, and I can see everything in it perfectly, even though it’s far away.”
“Why don’t you want to go back?” Delphine asks.
Because it isn’t just any room. It’s the pool house. It’s Dylan and Luke and the bright little pills on the glass table. “Something happened to me,” I say. I shouldn’t tell her. I know I shouldn’t, but the pull of confession is hard to resist.
“Is that how you hurt your arm?”
“You can tell?” I thought I was doing a decent job of hiding it.
“Did someone hurt you?” she says instead of answering.
I open my mouth to lie. But then I remember my promise. “I’ll tell you, but you can’t tell anyone,” I say.
“Okay.”
The plainness of her words is hiding something. It isn’t deception, exactly. It’s more like ice over the water. You might see the whole surface and never guess how deep the water is below or how swift the current. But I want to test those waters. Perhaps it will be worth it to fall through them, to find what lies beneath.
“How did you hurt your arm?” Delphine asks. Softly, deliberately. Not a demand but an invitation—permission.
“Someone twisted it,” I say. Someone. A word of hesitation. Someone could be anyone, faceless, nameless.
“Was it an accident?” she asks.
“No.”
Silence. I can feel her fitting this piece of information into the rest of the puzzle of me, but I find, oddly, that I don’t mind.
“What happened?” Delphine asks.
I make a noise in the back of my throat, remembering. “My brother, Luke. He’s out on probation. Part of that is he’s not supposed to be around his old friends. But this guy Dylan, he was at our house. I found out. Dylan . . . Dylan made sure I couldn’t tell.” I don’t say anything about the pills, the photos, the blurred hours.
“By hurting you.”
I rub the back of my neck. I grope for words, not wanting to lie, not ready to tell the truth. “It’s my fault, really. It was stupid. It was the day before my parents got home. All I had to do was shut up, but I told Dylan . . . Actually, I don’t even remember what I said. I’m not sure I know what I was saying in the first place,” I say, staring at the sharp wedge of light the window throws against the wall. I try to speak the words, to explain what happened next. But they don’t come. “I think it’s broken.”
Saying it out loud, I have to admit it’s true. A sprain wouldn’t still be hurting like this. There’s a crack in the bone, a fault, a fracture.
“Why haven’t you told anyone?”
“My parents asked me not to,” I say. Then, quickly, “I didn’t tell them how badly it was hurt. My arm, I mean. I told them I didn’t need to go to a doctor. And Luke—if anyone found out Dylan was even there, it would be . . .” I trail off. She hasn’t said a word, and yet I’m scrambling to defend my parents. “It’s his last chance.”
“I see.” Her voice is so quiet, I almost can’t make it out.
“You must think my family is horrible,” I say. “But it’s more complicated than that. Other families would have given up on Luke. My parents put everything into getting him diagnosed, getting him treated.”
“What does he have?” she asks.
It’s not that simple, I could tell her. The diagnosis is a line you draw around a set of behaviors to give them a shape. A dozen doctors have drawn a dozen shapes. Their names have changed as he’s aged, doctors have disagreed, my parents have rejected the ones they don’t like and shopped around for others. It’s never clear if they’re looking for an explanation or an excuse for the things he’s done.
“Basically, he hates authority, and he doesn’t form bonds with people. He can’t regulate his anger, and he perceives pretty much any kind of criticism as a threat. Sometimes he has sudden rages. Other times he does something to you, and it’s because of something you said six months ago that you forgot about, but he’s been holding on to it this entire time because he keeps this exhaustive list of every bad thing anyone’s ever done to him.”
“That sounds hard to live with,” she says carefully, and I squeeze my eyes shut to keep from crying.
“I was five when my parents started having me lock my door from the inside at night,” I say. “He’d get angry and go after whatever he knew would make my parents upset, and that was me. We couldn’t have pets. I couldn’t have friends over.”
“That’s why you came here?” Delphine asks.
“There was a point where I realized that if they had to spend their time protecting me, they wouldn’t have time to help him,” I say. “It was better if I went away.”
“So they got rid of you.” She says it so bluntly, factually, but it’s like a fist to my stomach.
“No. It was my idea,” I insist. Atwood has always been mine—my refuge, my choice. “And it worked. Luke got better. He worked really, really fucking hard at it, and he learned how to control himself and follow rules and he got clean. And then a year ago, it all fell apart.” It happened so fast. Luke met Dylan at a party and something about the older man clicked with him. He wanted to impress him, wanted Dylan to like him in a way he’d never wanted with anyone in his whole life.
He had worked so hard to live with the hell that was his own mind, to choose his own path. Then Dylan whispered in his ear, and in less than a month, everything was in ruins.
“Do you love your brother?” Delphine asks.
I don’t answer. I don’t know if I know the answer. “He can be really sweet sometimes. He’s not an evil person. He’s always been amazing at picking gifts out for people. And some days, good days, he would work so hard to make me laugh. And he can be really protective. He never lets anyone pick on me. He’d hurt me, but he never let anyone else touch me.”
Until this summer.
And that’s the worst part. Not the sudden pain in my arm or the hand pressing against the side of my face, pushing it into the carpet, but the days before, the long hours of Luke sitting placidly in his chair, chuckling in amusement when I slurred my words.
“I had a brother, you know,” Delphine says. “A twin. He didn’t develop properly. By the time I was born, they knew he had died.”
“That’s horrible,” I say. “Your poor mother.”
“Sometimes I think that’s why she’s done all of this. She started out by losing one of us, and she’ll do anything to keep from losing the other,” Delphine says. “So I can’t die. She’d be all alone, and all of this would be for nothing.” I hear her shift, her head resting against the door. We are invisible to each other, yet almost touching.
“That’s not the only reason not to die,” I say, but she doesn’t answer.
“Tell me something nice,” Delphine says instead.
“Nice? Like, your hair is really pretty?” I ask, and she gives a little laugh.
“No. Something that makes you feel good. Something true that isn’t awful.”
I think for a minute. “This is silly. But where I grew up, there aren’t any fireflies. I used to see them in movies and read about them in books, but I guess I sort of thought they were a literary device? But then my first year here, the very last day before my best friend left for home, we were sitting in the woods talking to each other, and these little lights started popping up. I didn’t even know what they were at first. And it was like magic. The kind of magic I’d stopped believing in a long time ago. For a few minutes, there was something brand-new in the world, and it lit up the dark.”
Veronica, who never missed an opportunity to tease me, let me have my wonder. We held hands as the stars rose up from the forest floor, the universe turned upside down just for us.
“Is that what you meant?” I ask Delphine.
“That’s exactly what I meant,” she says, and I can hear her smile in the words. It sends a strange, quick feeling through me to know that I made her happy, even for a moment.
“What about you? What makes you happy?” I ask.
“It’s stupid,” she says.
“Mine is bugs with glowing butts. What could be stupider than that?” I ask.
“Flowers,” she says. “I miss flowers. We used to have this massive garden, and I would sit out by the flowers and watch the bees bounce around between them. The dahlias were my favorites.”
“That’s not stupid at all,” I tell her.
She lets out a soft hum of sound. “I think I’m going to go to bed now,” she says. Her voice is tender, raw. I feel bruised, and I marvel at how such small truths can be so hard to share.
We stand and look at each other through the glass. Her breath traces the faintest fog in front of her.
“You can tell me anything, you know,” she says. “You can tell me anything and I won’t tell a soul.”
“Weren’t you just saying that you lie all the time?” I ask her, almost teasingly. “Why should I believe you now?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” she says. I can’t look away from her. With the light shining from behind, her face is in shadow. Her hair has come loose from its braid, leaving red wisps around her cheeks. “Goodnight, Eden.”
Her steps carry her up the stairs with the quick, tense grace of a deer.
I look after her until the door shuts, cutting off the light. I don’t know what to make of Delphine Fournier. Maybe that’s inevitable—she’s bound to be a little strange. But I didn’t expect her to be so easy to talk to, and I didn’t expect the way she has of listening—like she’s intently focused on understanding every word you’re saying. On understanding you.
I didn’t expect that I would want someone to understand me that way.
I turn away from the door. There are no exterior windows off the hall, and without the light spilling down from Delphine’s rooms, it’s pitch-black. I drop against the wall for the light switch and flick it on.
Bare, wet footprints stretch between the front door and my room. I creep over, heart hammering in my chest. The prints aren’t just damp. Water has pooled in them and spattered around in drops and small puddles.
It was raining when I came in, and I hadn’t showered. Could I have tracked this water in?
I hold my foot up against one of the prints. My feet are at least a full size smaller. And there’s something strange about the right foot—it’s bent inward, and the inside of the ball of the foot hasn’t left a mark, like whoever it was had to put their weight on the edge of their foot.
I follow the prints to my room. Through the door I know I left locked.
All the way to the edge of my bed.