“I’m really sorry,” she said. “About your aunt. And you. With the fire. Are you . . . okay?”
The words tumbled out of her mouth clunkily, like wooden blocks.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’m sore. I have a few burns, but they aren’t too bad. My throat hurt a lot at first, but that’s getting better too. I’m supposed to rest this week, so I’ll be your neighbor who lies around a lot. I get to live here, at least until the end of the semester. Then the university should be able to get me a place on campus. They’re waiving my room and board, and they’re letting me keep the tuition discount, which is nice. And in the meantime, I get to live in a place that is super cool that I’ve always wanted to see. I’m actually kind of making out. . . .”
He pulled off the coat and placed it carefully on the bed.
“That didn’t come out right,” he said. “Nothing comes out right. I sound like an asshole.”
“It’s fine,” Stevie said, shaking her head.
“No, it’s not. . . .” Hunter sat on the edge of his new bed and looked around at the spare, empty room. “I didn’t know my aunt very well. I didn’t . . . like living there? It was dirty and it smelled bad, and I couldn’t help her. I was thinking about going home. The tuition discount wasn’t worth it. Obviously, what happened was horrible, but I can’t act like we were close. Just so you know, this is where I’m at.”
This was the kind of sentiment that Stevie could understand completely.
“You’ll like it here,” she said. “Pix is nice.”
“She’s an archaeologist?”
“And anthropologist. She collects teeth.”
“Who doesn’t?” he said.
“And Nate is a writer, and Janelle makes machines. She’s doing a demonstration tonight. You should come.”
“I’m staying here,” he said. “I don’t go here. I don’t know if I’m supposed to go to stuff.”
“You can definitely come,” she said. “See something normal for once.”
“For once?”
That was probably an odd thing to say. But this was Ellingham, after all.
“Sure,” he said. “Okay. Might as well meet my new housemates and their machines.”
He smiled at her, and for a moment, Stevie felt like maybe life here could be normal. A balanced, happy guy with reasonable reactions to things—that could make for a nice change. Maybe this was the moment everything would change for her. Maybe now the school year was beginning in earnest.
That was perhaps burdening the moment with more expectation than it could bear, but, Stevie figured, something about this year had to give.
It was a good turnout in the art barn.
Along with Stevie, Vi, Nate, and Hunter, a solid group of around thirty students had shown up to watch, which was impressive, considering that was about 30 percent of Ellingham’s student body. Ellingham was the kind of place where, if your classmate was going to an engineering competition, a certain number of people would stop composing music, writing books, singing operas, and doing advanced mathematics to come have a look.
Kaz was there, of course. As the head of the student union, he offered his support to every project and smiled his astonishing smile, the one like an open-plan kitchen full of white cabinets from a home improvement show.
(After months of being here, Stevie had little idea of what the student union did or even if it was a real thing. This either said something about the student union or about Stevie. She suspected it was both. She had been similarly clueless about the student council in her old school. She knew that elections had taken place and that the winners were four people with good hair. Their campaign promises had something to do with recycling, parking, and vending machines. They got an exemption from daytime phone jail because of their positions; Stevie sometimes saw them walking the halls at a good clip, typing importantly into their phones. Nothing ever changed with the parking or recycling or vending machines, so it seemed like the student elections were a popularity contest draped with the thinnest veil of legitimacy. Perhaps Stevie was just suspicious of politics in general because of her parents. It was an aspect of her own psychological makeup she would explore at some other time, when she had figured out all her anxiety triggers and when she wasn’t trying to solve multiple murders. People have limits.)
Maris stretched out on the floor, deep in conversation with Dash. She was, Stevie noticed, fluttering her eyelashes in Kaz’s direction. Next to them was Suda from Stevie’s anatomy class, wearing a brilliant blue hijab. Mudge was also there, leaning into the corner of the room.
“This is the kind of stuff you guys do?” Hunter said, looking around at the pipes and dishes and tables. “I mean, my high school was fine, but it wasn’t like this.”
“Neither was mine,” Stevie said.
“This is your school.”
“My old one,” she said, a little more sharply than she intended. “I mean, before. I guess there was stuff, but I didn’t know about it. I didn’t . . . go to things.”
“You must have done something right,” he replied. “You ended up here.”
This was not a thought Stevie had ever assembled for herself.
When she thought of old Stevie, the one in Pittsburgh, she had two separate ideas that never met up. The first Stevie was antisocial and underachieving. She didn’t participate in any clubs, except for one semester in freshman year when she joined glee club and didn’t sing. She did not like her own voice, so she mouthed the words. She joined glee club only because of the general pressure to have something to put on an application someday. She didn’t do sports; she didn’t play an instrument. She could perhaps have joined a publication, but yearbook was about knowing people, and the magazine was about poetry, so both of those were out. She went to one meeting for the newspaper to see if that would work, but it was less about hard-hitting investigative journalism and more about going to sporting events and writing about how many balls went where and who put the balls there. No club seemed to suit her, so it was twelve weeks of pretending to sing along to a melody of Disney songs until her spirit broke and her parents gave her a long lecture about how she was letting them down. That Stevie was the worst.
And yet, there was another, bigger Stevie. This Stevie spent her time online reading everything about murder. She studied criminology textbooks. She believed, really believed, that she could solve the crime of the century. And she had.
Stevie had never put these Stevies together to assemble a portrait of herself—her choices had not been failures. They had been choices. It was all one Stevie, and that Stevie was worthwhile.
All of this information entered her head at once. Hunter was still looking at her. She became aware that her mouth was hanging open a little bit, as if this profound fusion of identities wanted to make itself known to the world for the first time. She could be like other people—like Janelle, who made things and had interests and also had a relationship with Vi that was romantic and real. Maybe Stevie could be a real person too. Maybe she could express herself and this new, fully aware Stevie could be born, right now.
“Whatever,” she heard herself saying in a low voice. “I mean, yeah.”