Alex set aside the aluminum container of cold falafel from Mamoun’s, wiped her hands
on her Lethe House sweats. She limped to the bathroom, popped open the bottle of zolpidem, and tucked one beneath her tongue. She cupped her hand beneath the faucet, watched the water pour over her fingers, listened to the grim sucking sound from the mouth of the drain. Standards for candidates have been relaxed in two circumstances.
For the first time in weeks, she looked at the girl in the water-speckled mirror, watched
as that bruised girl lifted her tank top, the cotton stained yellow with pus. The wound in
Alex’s side was a deep divot, crusted black. The bite had left a visible curve that she knew
would heal badly, if it healed at all. Her map had been changed. Her coastline altered.
Mors irrumat omnia. Death fucks us all.
Alex touched her fingers gently to the hot red skin surrounding the teeth marks. The wound was getting infected. She felt some kind of concern, her mind nudging her toward
self-preservation, but the idea of picking up the phone, getting a ride to the undergrad
health center—the sequence of actions each new action would incite—was overwhelming, and the warm, dull throb of her body setting fire to itself had become almost
companionable. Maybe she’d get a fever, start hallucinating.
She eyed the thrust of her ribs, the blue veins like downed power lines beneath her fading bruises. Her lips were feathered with chapped skin. She thought of her name inked
into the margins of the pamphlet—the third circumstance.
“Results were decidedly mixed,” she said, startled by the husky rattle of her voice. She
laughed and the drain seemed to chuckle with her. Maybe she already had a fever.
In the fluorescent glare of the bathroom lights, she gripped the edges of the bite in her
side and dug her fingers into it, pinching the flesh around her stitches until the pain dropped over her like a mantle, the blackout coming on in a welcome rush.
That was in the spring. But the trouble had begun on a night in the full dark of winter,
when Tara Hutchins died and Alex still thought she might get away with everything.
Skull and Bones, oldest of the landed societies, first of the eight Houses of the Veil, founded in 1832. The Bonesmen can boast more presidents, publishers,
captains of industry, and cabinet members than any other society (for a full
list of its alumni, please see Appendix C), and perhaps “boast” is the right
word. The Bonesmen are aware of their influence and expect the deference
of Lethe delegates. They would do well to remember their own motto: Rich
or poor, all are equal in death. Conduct yourself with the discretion and diplomacy warranted by your office and association with Lethe, but
remember always that our duty is not to prop up the vanity of Yale’s best
and brightest but to stand between the living and the dead.
—from The Life of Lethe: Procedures and
Protocols of the Ninth House
The Bonesmen fancy themselves titans among pissants, and ain’t that a bite.
But who am I to quibble when the drinks are stiff and the girls are pretty?
—Lethe Days Diary of George Petit
( Saybrook College ’56)
1
Winter
Alex hurried across the wide, alien plane of Beinecke Plaza, boots thudding over flat squares of clean concrete. The giant cube of the rare-books collection seemed to float above its lower story. During the day its panels glowed amber, a burnished golden hive, less a library than a temple. At night it just looked like a tomb. This part of campus didn’t quite fit with the rest of Yale—no gray stone or Gothic arches, no rebellious little outcroppings of red-brick buildings, which Darlington had explained were not actually Colonial but only meant to look that way. He’d explained the reasons for the way Beinecke had been built, the way it was supposed to mirror and slot into this corner of the
campus architecture, but it still felt like a seventies sci-fi movie to her, like the students should all be wearing unitards or too-short tunics, drinking something called the Extract,
eating food in pellets. Even the big metal sculpture that she now knew was by Alexander