I woke to a rattling at my open window. I was still in bed. It felt like days had passed, but it was only the next morning. The sun was creeping its way up, burning orange at the edges. My head was buzzing and the light was confusing, but most confusing of all was the noise at my window. It was a person. Before I knew it, that person was crawling off the fire escape and into my room.
She jostled into me. “Move.” There wasn’t room for the both of us in the bed, so I found myself sprawled on the small patch of floor, gazing up at where she’d planted herself by my pillow.
“Where are you— What are you—” My words were chopped up in my mouth. They kept getting stuck or lost altogether.
My mind struck a match inside me, then sucked it dark fast. For a moment, I couldn’t remember much of anything.
Then her name came to me. It was Monet, the girl who lived downstairs, in the room directly below my room. I was in Catherine House; I wasn’t home. I remembered everything.
She was wearing her dark clothes from the night before, but the shirt was wrinkled and smeared, and her pants were rolled to the knees. Her feet were dirty, her legs streaked in dried mud. Her hair was her regular short-chopped style, no sign of a wig. In a trick of the light, she’d become so unreal she turned practically translucent.
But she was genuinely here.
I was trying to tell her she had the wrong room, but it wasn’t working. She was curling into my sheets and balling up her body to go to sleep. She had my pillow crunched into her face.
“Monet,” I said, nudging at her. “You can’t stay here.”
My own head was pounding. I very much needed to close my eyes and lie down.
“Hey,” I said.
I pulled on her arm, her leg, her other leg. Her limbs were heavy. She’d closed her eyes, and mascara streaks made delicate butterfly lines all down her cheeks. Her smudged mouth opened, and a small drop of drool slipped out onto my pillowcase, glistening.
“I think you’re confused.” I kept trying. “You’re in the wrong room.”
No response. When I nudged her one more time, she simply sighed.
It was almost officially morning—the sun rising and blazing between buildings told me—and a strange girl had taken over my bed. Surely no one else was awake in the house to help me deal with this.
I sat for a while in the small space, considered compacting my body into one of the dusty, puffy chairs in the common area, or admitting I was awake and getting into the shower before anyone else did.
I went to the bathroom, took my time, splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth, and came back, but she was still there.
Then I noticed how she was curled up so carefully at the head of the bed, her knees tucked in, leaving the whole lower half of the mattress empty, almost on purpose.
I took the bottom end, that small area of space between her body and the wall, and I said aloud, “Okay . . . I’m going back to sleep now,” as if that might rouse her, but it didn’t. She wasn’t budging.
She’d stretched out her leg a few inches, and now one of her bare toes was touching my bare arm. I peeled open an eye to see if she was still there, and she was. She’d opened an eye to check to see if I was there, too.
Caught, we both snapped our eyes closed at the same time.
━━━━━
When I woke for the second time that morning, the sun was in my face and the bed was empty except for me.
Still, I sensed I wasn’t alone in the room and rolled over. She was standing beside the bed. I covered myself as best I could in case she was looking. She was.
“Hey,” she said from above. “Morning.”
She eyed my exposed legs, and then her eyes traveled upward, to the rest of me, and I remembered what I was wearing. I’d never taken the dress off before falling asleep, and now it was rumpled and wrecked, one of the shoulder straps knotted, the hem torn in the front. I was starting to say I was sorry, but she caught me and spoke first.
“Looked good on you. Maybe a tad too long, but the colors were perfect. Anyway, I don’t need it back. What am I going to do with it now? You keep it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But what are you doing in here? And couldn’t you use a door?” I pointed to the ordinary door that led to the common area, not the one I didn’t want to think about, right there behind the bed.
“I was passing by and thought I’d stop in,” she said, indicating the wide-open window with the black-barred fire escape attached. I assumed she was joking, but I didn’t ask. She said it as if I didn’t understand the simplest of things—that the Earth wasn’t flat, that rocks weren’t for eating—and she couldn’t bear having to explain. She turned and resumed whatever she’d been doing while I was unconscious, which I guess was poking through the few things I’d put out on my desk. My phone (blank as a brick, without a single notification). My key ring with the two keys. My wallet (cash and useless ATM card only, no credit cards—I watched her confirm).
“Um,” I said tentatively. I didn’t have the words. I sat up. I couldn’t really stand, because the room was so small and she was in the way. “Are you leaving?”
“I didn’t think this is how our first real conversation would go, Bina,” she said. “I thought we’d be past this by now.”
That quieted me. We didn’t exchange a spoken word at the party, but we did have a connection. I couldn’t deny that.
She was still going through my things. Checking my desk drawer. My pants pocket. Inside the toes of my shoes. She hovered over me, her dirty feet all over my floor, her hands slipping into the drawers of my dresser, where I’d dumped the balled items of clothing my mother had chosen. She felt around beneath them, then, satisfied, closed the last drawer. All that was left was my suitcase.
Her back was to me when she spoke. “I wasn’t named for the painter, you know. The man.”
“You weren’t?”
“I was named for my great-aunt, twice removed. Want to know something about her? She was a revolutionary. She gave up all creature comforts to fight for the voiceless, the suffering, the powerless. Last my family heard, she studied up on her Spanish and joined an armed leftist group in the jungle, fighting for the people. She had many lovers in the forest and would send us back locks of their hair in envelopes with dried leaves and flower petals. Never signed her name, but of course we knew they were from her. She died in a great battle, and they carried her body through the trees to the river, and then they let it float back to civilization covered in flowers so someone would find her and fly her home.” She said all this and stopped, waiting for my reaction.
“She did what?” I said, trying to piece it together. I couldn’t help but be impressed. I knew how to recognize a great liar, could even taste that tanginess in my own mouth. I suspected she liked to put a thing out into the air only to see if it would sound true or flutter down to the ground and die. I admired her talent, because I couldn’t tell, not entirely.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Are you asking me what I am?”
I didn’t think I was, but I flushed that she’d called me on it. I knew I looked Jewish—I’d always known, from the way people would say certain things in front of me, then add as an afterthought, Oh, that’s just a joke, you know we don’t mean you, right? But it was a rude thing to wonder about a person. She was right. When it came to her, I’d turned rude and curious about all the things.
“Some parts of my family are from Iran, some from France, Italy, Cuba, you name it. Plus, I have three Australian cousins. But to answer your question, Colorado. Where I’m from, the mountains are taller than you could even imagine and we have gangs of wild horses roaming around in our backyards. The air’s so thin up there not everyone can breathe it. But that’s just an address. Really, I’m from everywhere. I’m a part of the whole world. I’m the future, really, because one day everyone’s going to look like me.” The cowlick in her hair was quivering as she spoke, and her eyes were bright and her arms were gesticulating and bare. I couldn’t tear my eyes away—at least I didn’t want to.
I was beginning to suspect she’d invented absolutely all of it. How glorious.
“How about you?” she said. “Where are you from?”
I hesitated and got ready for what might come. But when I opened my mouth, nothing near worthy spilled out. “The Hudson Valley,” I said, so simply. “A town up there. You wouldn’t know it.”
“Why would you tell me that?” she snapped. Disappointment in her voice, even disdain. “Anyway, that’s how I got my name. How’d you get yours?”
The problem was, I couldn’t meet her eyes and lie. “My mom. She found it—Sabina—in a baby name book. She liked the way it sounded. That’s all.”
She sighed, deeply, as if she knew what I was capable of and that now, here, in the face of a master, I’d choked. “You really need to come up with some better stories,” she said.
She’d poked around in my suitcase—it was empty, every pocket and flap. She was now at the closet, noting the few items, the collection of empty hangers. I had no interesting or revealing secrets, at least not where she could find them.
“Did you come in with the rest of us last night?” I asked.
“Didn’t you see me behind you?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you see me slip in right after you did and close the gate?”
I tried to think. “I mean, I don’t remember. I wasn’t feeling too good last night. So you stayed out? All night? Where’d you go?”
“You didn’t hear me say that,” she said.
She stood there with the most unreadable face I could imagine, and I hadn’t been able to read her this whole time. It seemed like a mask on a stick, one made with cardboard and two pinholes for eyes poked out, held over her real face.
“You don’t have to tell me.” I could piece it together on my own. The dirt on her feet gave her away—she must have spent the night in the garden. Was she teasing about being right behind me and missing curfew?
I noticed that she was leaning her weight against the wall, as if spying all through my things had worn her out and she needed to rest now, to take a moment. Her breathing was kind of labored, too, though the air in the room was perfectly okay. Maybe this was why she wouldn’t leave.
“It’s your first morning, so I’ll tell you something,” she said. “You’ll miss the good breakfast if you sleep too long. All that’ll be left is the cereal and the bread. They take away the toaster, and they stop serving eggs. But sure, take your time if all you want is cornflakes and dry toast.” She made no move for the door herself.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, and she had to move away, closer to the door. Yet she didn’t make any effort to open it. Was there something she wanted from me? And would I have minded so much if she stayed?
“You still have an hour,” she said. “I’m only telling you for tomorrow.”
“Oh.”
“Then again, who knows if you’ll be here tomorrow.”
“What do you mean? I just got here. I rented the room for the whole month.”
“So you’re staying?”
“I’m staying.”
“Even though you’re the one who woke Catherine up? And you don’t know what she wants from you?” She was trying to scare me away. Ever since she ran into me on the street and toppled my suitcase, she’d been trying to get rid of me.
“What does she want from me?” I asked. Everything that happened after I stepped up to the portrait and put my finger to the glass the evening before had a different kind of light to it. I could hardly face it in my memory.
My mouth went dry, even drier than it was. In the back of my throat, there was a taste that was gritty, like a faint coating of dirt.
“I’m messing with you, Bina. I know you’re not leaving. I was only wondering if you knew.” I was noticing how drained she appeared, her light-brown skin more tepid than I remembered, as if she’d spent the whole night sipping drain cleaner and was mildly poisoned by sunup. Hungover like I was, that’s all.
“I signed the lease,” I said stupidly.
“And the vow,” she added sadly. “We all put our names to that.” She said it, but it wasn’t like she followed the rules. I already knew of a couple she’d broken.
She leaned forward, changing the subject. “I have something for you . . . Do you want it?”
“Sure,” I said, confused.
“That’s why I came up here. To give it to you. It’s yours. Now where did I leave it? Oh, right. Out there.”
I peeked out at the fire escape. I didn’t believe that this was the reason she’d climbed into my window at three or four in the morning, or whatever time it had been, but now I was curious.
“What, you’re not afraid to climb out there, are you?” she asked.
Even back home, where the cliffs met the night and my friends—before I lost them—liked to touch their toes to the vacant air at the mouth of the ravine, I stayed back, on solid ground. Even then, I kept myself apart from them, so apart that when I needed someone to have my back, no one was left. “I’m not so much a fan of heights.”
“Good to know. Don’t worry, I won’t make you climb the ladder. You’ll find what I brought you on the windowsill. Outside. You’ll just have to reach out there to get it.”
I slipped my hand out and patted around on the ledge. All the while, my eyes were locked on hers as if she could keep me from falling.
When I found it and pulled it in, even she seemed surprised. “There was a good chance it could have dropped in the wind and gotten lost forever,” she said. “I don’t think Catherine would have liked that, do you?”
I couldn’t be sure if she was joking.
In the palm of my hand was the silver comb from the display table downstairs. The same comb I’d left as an offering in the garden. She’d known somehow that I hadn’t wanted to give it up.
It had felt delicious to take it, that sense of sneaking something that didn’t belong to me and making it mine. I’d had it snug and cold at my waistline until it warmed to the temperature of my skin. But I’d thought I’d lost it forever. Like the opal.
I stiffened. The comb wasn’t really what I wanted anymore.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “I thought you’d like it back. Even if you shouldn’t have it in the first place.”
“Thank you.” It was in my hands, and the sharp teeth and the smooth, shiny surface reminded me why I took it, but it wasn’t enough.
“Remember the vow?”
“You know I remember the vow. You just said we all signed it.”
“Then you’ll remember what’s squeezed in there between curfews and hot plates. No theft. Theft is cause for eviction. Now, I think it means stealing from other girls, because who here wants one of those grimy old teacups downstairs? But still. You should watch yourself.” She knew, as much as I knew, that there would be a next time. That this was habit and I’d only just begun.
“It’s not like you follow the rules yourself.” I pantomimed a swift inhale of a tightly rolled joint and then waved the smoke away.
“Touché.”
She heaved herself up off the wall. For someone who’d scaled the fire escape to get up here, it seemed to take a lot of effort. She went for the door.
“Wait. Don’t go yet. I want to ask you . . .”
“Ask me what? All the questions you couldn’t ask last night?”
I nodded.
“All the questions you don’t even know you should be asking?”
A chill crept along my arms, though the morning heat was already rising.
“Sometimes a person can’t tell you what you already know,” she said. “Sometimes you have to see it for yourself. Then you’ll believe.”
She must have meant the figure on the rooftop, that outline created out of blue light. A single flash that disappeared. I should have been scared to think of it, wanting to run from this place. But I was more curious than afraid.
“Why did Ms. Ballantine want Catherine de Barra to wake up?”
She laughed. I liked her laugh. “If you were sleeping for over a hundred years, wouldn’t you want somebody to wake you up already? I’d figure you’d be so hungry.” She said this so matter-of-fact.
I shrugged. It was a silly answer to the wrong question.
“How did she die? I heard some of the stories . . .”
“If you’re so interested in all of that, you should ask Gretchen. She sleeps with that diary she found. I’m shocked she hasn’t eaten the pages out of it yet so no one else can read it. But do you want to know what I heard?”
I nodded.
“You want to know what people said back then? What was in the newspapers?”
The creeping sensation was now up my back. Behind me was the door in the wall—I was abruptly aware of it, and then it was all I could think about, the fact that I was right up against the extra, unwanted door.
“It all starts with a terrible boyfriend . . .”
“It does?”
“Obviously,” she said, as if the story couldn’t begin any other way. In fact, that was how my mother’s story had started, which made me want to listen all the more. “He wanted to keep her, and he wanted everything she had all to himself. So he thought he’d come here and curse her. That way, she’d do whatever he said. Right? He knew she liked presents, that she collected things from all over the world that her father brought her. She had her collections in every room, on every shelf and table, some even showing from the windows, so he had to bring her something really different. Special, even.”
Though her complexion was still pallid, her eyes shone. Maybe she was making this all up. Maybe. I didn’t care.
“A black opal,” she said. I kept myself so still. “Very rare. But he was such a dumb dolt of a thing and believed what people told him, that it was evil, cursed after a countess in Prague died while wearing it and someone stole it off the gnarled finger of her cold corpse. What he didn’t know was that this opal was really good luck. It saved that countess, helped her escape and run away to whole new lands, safe and apart from him forever. She lived a long, happy life because of it. So when he gave it to Catherine meaning to trap her? Didn’t work. She didn’t want him, she couldn’t be bought. She left him downstairs and told him not to dare follow her, but he did. He started chasing. So she ran up all five flights to the roof, and—” She whistled as if to create a gust of wind. Her hand formed the shape of a bird, and it flew.
“That’s impossible,” I said. “There’s no way to reach the roof from in here, is there?”
“No.” Monet cocked her head at me. “There isn’t. But I haven’t even gotten to the weird part.”
“You haven’t?”
She smiled. “So she fell, or she jumped, or maybe he pushed her—nobody knows for sure, and it was this giant question mark for a long time. But the biggest question mark of all was what happened to her body.”
She waited for me to react, or to guess.
“They never found it. The story goes, she went over the edge of the roof—and disappeared into thin air.”
I scoffed. It was a quick reaction, like nervous laughter, but Monet didn’t blink.
“So she never landed?” I asked.
A single shake of her head.
“So no one knows what happened to her,” I said. “If she died, or escaped?”
It was only a story. A story that ended right where she’d left it. In the air. In the night. The way she was staring at me made me feel like I was in a police lineup, and she was on the other side of the one-way glass, trying to determine if I’d done the crime.
“I’m deciding if I should trust you,” she said. “Should I?”
“You can trust me.”
“Can I? I barely know you.”
“You can,” I insisted.
“Tell me why you’re here then, out of the blue. Tell me the truth.”
I didn’t know why I longed for her trust so badly. This whole time, I’d been wanting her to get off my bed, give me back my pillow, leave my room, and whenever she was about to take off, I wanted her to stay a few more minutes, I wanted in.
“The real reason?” I said. “The real truth?”
She waited.
“There was a fight.” Even speaking of it trampled me over inside. “With my mom.”
“She didn’t beat you, did she?” She traced a circle around her eye. “Because we should call child services.”
“I’m not a child, I’m practically almost eighteen.”
She heard that and smirked. The boardinghouse didn’t rent rooms to anyone underage, not technically.
“I mean, I am eighteen now.”
“Right, of course you are,” she said. “Go on.”
“The fight happened after. I was going to leave before that, anyway, when my mom kicked me out. She heard a rumor about me, and she didn’t even ask me if it was the truth.”
“Like she kicked you out on the street?”
“No, she wanted me to stay with some friends of hers. For a month.” Saying it aloud turned it flimsy. My whole reason for being here could be swept out the fifth-floor window, and me with it, down into the gutter.
“So did you tell her the truth?” she asked.
I shook my head. I’d wanted her to know it, innately, the way a mother should know.
Monet was leaning against the bare brick wall. She could have said so many things, and yet she didn’t, and I was grateful.
“You know how it is,” I said. I shrugged and glanced at my blank, dark phone. I wondered if I should call my mother.
“The thing is, I don’t. Know what you mean. I don’t even have a mom.”
“Oh god, I’m so sorry.” Had she hinted at a tragedy, and had I missed it? Didn’t she mention a mother and father and great-aunt and cousins, a whole family?
She stretched, getting a kink out of her neck as if she’d slept funny. She did look so tired. “She took off. The last time I saw her I was maybe eight or nine? She got this urgent overseas call in the middle of the night and hopped a helicopter. I was at the window, and she waved. Then she flew off into the clouds. She was heading west, for the Pacific. I haven’t seen her since.”
I didn’t know how to respond.
“I figure she’s CIA. She could be watching me from the window across the way as we speak.”
The lie had flown from her lips like the helicopter, and as a kindness to her, I accepted it without a word.
“Man, you’ll believe anything I say. Maybe she lives in Ohio or Idaho somewhere and drives a Toyota, works in real estate, does yoga on Wednesdays.”
“Does she?” I said quietly. My mother drove a Toyota. She worked in a real-estate office, as the office manager. She did yoga on Mondays and Thursdays, and sometimes Sundays, in the afternoons, if she was up for it.
Monet shook her head.
I changed the subject, as swiftly as if I’d run the light in my mom’s borrowed Toyota when I’d been drinking and swerved to take a turn so fast that I hit a tremendous oak, centuries old, impassable. The oak had no give, but the Toyota crumpled. That wasn’t a story I was going to tell Monet.
“Thanks for the comb. And thanks for not telling anyone I took it.”
“I would never,” she said. “And I decided. Right now. I’m going to trust you. I’ll keep your secret, if you do something for me.”
She trusted me. My eyes lifted to meet hers. “Of course,” I said, probably too fast. But I meant it.
“Let me see it.”
“Let you see what?”
“You have it. I can almost smell it in the room, but I can’t find it anywhere. All I want is to see it, to be sure. Where’d you hide Catherine’s ring?”
I blinked, and so did she, and an awareness shot back and forth between us. I didn’t think of it that way—as belonging to Catherine—or even as something to be worn on a hand, because I hadn’t let myself do it yet.
Also, she was wrong. I’d had it in my fist the night before, and then my hand was empty. I’d lost it, the way I may have lost my mother.
“It’s like that, is it?” She turned toward the common room. “Don’t forget, breakfast starts soon. Get there early. I need to sleep this off.” She said this without a glance back, and slipped out for good this time, through the door.
━━━━━
Catherine House served one meal a day to its residents. Down a series of hallways, short and swiftly turning, dead-ended and short-stopped, the floors covered in peeling linoleum, there was the dining room. I followed the instructions from the day before: Walk through the kitchen antechamber and write your request for eggs or omelets, if you wanted any, on the sheet of butcher paper on the counter by the door. No one was there to see what I wrote, but I left my name, Bina, and my preference, scrambled, and the number, 2.
I waited, to say good morning or thanks for personally making me some scrambled eggs, but the view into the kitchen showed only a cast-iron pan on a cold burner, empty, and a carton of eggs, half-full, on the cutting board. “Hello?” I called.
No one came out, so I pushed through the swinging door to enter the adjoining dining room.
The linoleum stopped here, and creaky hardwood floors took over. My first step inside the room announced me with a high-pitched shriek. I’d hit an extra-creaky spot. At this, four heads lifted. Gretchen and Harper and two other girls were at the very end of the long dining room table, as far from me as they could get, and my entrance had interrupted their conversation. The surface of the table between me and them was practically oceanic. I turned, awkward, making the floor groan again, and searched for something to drink. They went back to talking as if I weren’t even there.
It wasn’t what I expected, after the night we went through and what we’d witnessed. I thought I remembered Harper’s arm slung over my shoulder, Gretchen whispering in my ear, some girls whose names I didn’t catch—bonded moments that made me so sure we’d be friends in the light of morning. Now I was stung by their lack of greeting. Ashamed.
Set up on two smaller tables by the door were the cold food items to choose from: yogurt, cereal, fruit, a few pastries. Next to a stack of bread was a toaster, and a stick for retrieving toast when it got stuck. Pitchers of juice and water sweated on the sideboard, goblets arranged in rows beside them.
I set my bread to toast and filled a bright-green goblet with orange juice. I took a seat in the chair at the end of the table, as far as possible from the others.
Their voices were hushed, but the ceiling in this room was high and some of the sounds carried. “What did she look like? Are you sure it was her?” I heard one of the girls whose name I couldn’t recall say. I heard an attempt at describing the blue light on the roof, and I heard Gretchen say she knew, positively and without a doubt, that it was the founder of this house herself, if not in the flesh then in some other form, trying to communicate with us.
A cold breeze at my back made me jump in my chair and I almost knocked over my goblet. A shadowy arm swiftly slipped a plate before me. It gleamed with fluffy yellow eggs, a bloom of a flower for garnish, and a delicate sculpture made of an artistically carved orange slice, the most elegantly prepared breakfast I’d ever seen.
I must have stared at the plate a moment too long, because when I turned around to say thank you, whoever had served me was gone. They must have been fast. The door to the kitchen wasn’t even swinging.
I scooped up some eggs and lifted my fork, and it was near an inch from my mouth when a quiver of movement made me lean in closer.
The eggs were squirming on the fork.
The entire pile on my plate moved and crawled over itself. The yellow was alarming and leaking ooze. Whatever had come from the kitchen was horribly still alive, not meant to be eaten, as if someone were trying to trick me, or feed me poison.
I dropped the fork and shoved the plate away into the middle of the grand table. The plate knocked over a saltshaker—heavy, bronze—and the booming sound as it toppled and spilled made the other girls glance over at me, curious.
I waited for a scream of reaction when one of them caught what was writhing on the plate, but nothing. None of them seemed to see what I did.
“Aren’t you going to eat that?” Harper said.
“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” another girl said, smiling, as if reciting something she’d heard from a regressive TV commercial from the ’50s. Her hair was sculpted into a blond helmet with the ends flipped up. She must have spent an hour under a hair dryer getting it to perform.
Their eyes bored into me, much like the rows of black-and-white eyes on the stairwell walls. In fact, it was hard to tell the difference. The back of my head began to pulse.
“You can have it if you want,” I told Harper. “Anyone who wants it can have it.”
I was feeling so hot. I remembered my toast and went to get it from the toaster. It was cold and hard, but inanimate, like Styrofoam. I dropped it on my plate; no butter or jelly could save it.
When I glanced at the eggs again, nothing was wrong. Nothing was moving, and the cheerful flower embellishment was bright purple. Harper smiled at me, and so did the girl with the hair flip. Gretchen was stone-faced. The fourth girl scrunched her face in concern.
“Is she okay? She’s not eating.”
“Maybe she’s hungover.”
“She should really eat her breakfast.”
“Whoa, check her out, she’s turned green.”
“What did you say?” I heard. All four were watching me. Gretchen was the one who’d spoken. She was pointing at me with a lifted fork.
“I didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re Becca, right?” one of the girls said.
“No, no, her name’s Bina,” Gretchen said. “Remember?”
“It never happened until she got here,” another said, plain as fact.
“That’s true,” Harper said, cocking her head to the side. “None of us saw Catherine before, until you got here.”
I couldn’t read their expressions. I sensed they blamed me, thought I orchestrated it somehow, whatever had gone on in the perplexing dark, high over our heads and in our hearts, our stomachs, our minds. At least in mine. I couldn’t sense if this was a terrible thing worthy of punishment, or if they liked it and welcomed me all the more.
“You need to come out with us tonight,” Harper said. “We’re going to see if Catherine comes back and—”
Gretchen slapped her arm. “Not yet,” she said. “Not here.”
Harper blushed and lowered her eyes.
But I’d lost the opal, if I’d even had it at all. My memory, when I tried to turn to it, puckered into a small black hole. The opal wasn’t anywhere in my room when I’d searched for it after Monet left. Nowhere. And whatever I believed about what happened in the dark the night before, whatever I thought I saw and made everyone else see—it was connected to that stone I knew I’d held in my hand as certainly as I knew it was buried, unreachable, under a patio more than a hundred miles away.
Gretchen had her arms folded across her chest in a gesture of menace. “Aren’t you going to eat something?” she said.
Before I could answer or try to take a bite of toast, Anjali miraculously came rushing in, jumbling with noise, making the floorboards shriek all over again. “I overslept!” she announced. “I can’t believe I missed my chance at eggs.” She poured herself some cereal and turned to face the table. “Hi, Ana Sofía! Hi, Gretchen! Hi, Muriel! Hi, Harper!” The shift in mood was dizzying. Then she saw me. “Bina,” she said, her voice more contained. “Hi.”
Anjali could have taken a seat anywhere at that giant table, but when she’d finished assembling her breakfast, she sat catty-corner to me, our elbows practically touching. I was grateful, though not sure why she’d chosen that chair. “Hey, are you going to eat those?”
I shook my head as she pulled my plate of untouched food toward her.
“Perfect,” she said. “So . . .” There was an awkward moment, grapefruit bit stabbed on the end of her fork. “How are you feeling? Any better?” Her cheery tone seemed forced, as if someone was watching us. In fact, they all were.
I kept my voice low. “Better, I guess.” She must have been the person who took care of me last night. In fact, I was sure she was. She may have even put some fresh bacitracin on my lip.
“That’s good. You must have had a lot to drink, huh?”
I couldn’t remember, but it didn’t sound unlike me.
“Anyway, glad to see you’re okay.” Something in her eyes—a flicker there—indicated she may have wanted to say something else, but she did not. Maybe she’d seen Monet slipping out my door when the sun was up, and that made her wary. Maybe she still held a grudge about when I’d stopped her from opening the small door. I saw the mark of my grip on her wrists. The bruises were purple now. Not pretty like the flower on each of our plates, more like my eye. I felt like a monster, which was a familiar feeling.
Anjali started eating as the others finished up.
I decided to say something. “I’m so sorry about yesterday, in my room . . . You know, after you left, I opened that door—”
“No, no, stop,” she said, jabbing the words in. “Stop talking.”
“What?”
She was eyeing the girls across the dining room as they gathered their dishes to leave.
Once we were alone, she lowered her hand. “I don’t want to know anything about it,” she said. “Please don’t tell me. I didn’t stay out in the garden, but I heard about last night. It’s happening again, and I don’t want to be a part of it.”
“What did you hear? What’s happening? They said nobody saw Catherine until last night.”
“Why didn’t you tell me who your mother was? It happened eighteen years ago, when she was here. That’s what I heard.”
Some girls pushed through the swinging door and entered—also late. I noticed that not one of them was Monet. She’d been so intent on me making it to breakfast, yet never showed for it herself. Instead she’d needed to sleep in, as if she’d spent the whole night out dancing in the chaos of the city I hadn’t had a chance to witness yet.
While the others were busy at the sideboard, banging around as they poured themselves juice, Anjali leaned in.
“Listen,” she hissed. “I took it from you for safekeeping, but I don’t want it in my room. I don’t even know how you got your hands on it, but you can’t be dropping it on the stairs—anyone could have found it. Even Monet.”
My face must have gone gray. It was in her eyes, plain as if she’d said it from her mouth. She was talking about the opal. It was real—not a dream.
“Your door was locked, but I left it there, outside your room.”
I was so relieved I could hardly speak. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ve got to go.” I stood up and pushed back my chair, making a screech. I hadn’t eaten anything, but I also wasn’t the least bit hungry. I rushed through the swinging door into the empty antechamber that connected to the kitchen. My name and order for eggs was crossed out on the butcher paper, dirty dishes and green goblets stacked on top. The kitchen was still empty. The faucet in the industrial sink was running, but no one was there.
━━━━━
As Anjali had promised, something was waiting by my door. It was wrapped in a T-shirt, folded, refolded, burrowed inside. The opal ring was cool, its surface smooth, the band thin and silver. If I’d dropped it somehow while climbing all the stairs last night, the stone didn’t chip, it didn’t break. It was perfect, the way it had been on my mother’s younger hand.
With it was a note in neat, curled handwriting, unsigned.
Get me out of here.
It made no sense. I’d thought Anjali was happy here. I’d thought every girl was. Had she even written it?
Something made me search the empty common room. The area was dim, dusty, and crawling with the gnarled shadows of the bra tree and the wobbly lampshades. A stack of shoes had spilled all along one wall, creating a dark lake. No one was up here with me, though a prickly whisper in the back of my head asked, was I sure?
I carefully shredded the note and disposed of it down the toilet. Not everyone wanted to be here. Not everyone considered this a safe place. Anjali wanted to go, but I’d only just arrived. I wanted to stay. Still, when I went back to my room to get dressed for the day, I locked the door.