What would the campus be like in the summer? Quiet like this? Humid and
unpopulated, a city under glass. Alex had spent her winter break holed up at Il Bastone,
watching movies on the laptop Lethe had bought for her, afraid Dawes would appear.
She’d skyped with her mom and only ventured out for pizza and noodles. Even the Grays
had vanished, as if without the students’ excitement and anxiety, they had nothing to draw
them to campus.
Alex thought of the stillness, the late mornings that summer might bring. She could sit
behind that desk where Colin and Isabel sat, brew tea, update the JE website, do whatever
had to be done. She could pick her courses, ones that had syllabi that didn’t change much.
She could do the reading ahead of time, take the composition course so she wouldn’t have
to lean on Mercy so much anymore—assuming Mercy wanted to room with her next year.
Next year. Magical words. Belbalm had built Alex a bridge to a possible future. She just had to cross it. Alex’s mother would be disappointed when she didn’t go home to California … Or would she? Maybe it was easier this way. When Alex had told her mother
she was going to Yale, Mira had looked at her with such sadness that it had taken Alex a
long moment to understand her mother thought she was high. Guiltily, Alex snapped a picture of the empty courtyard and texted it to her mom. Cold morning! Meaningless, but evidence that she was okay and here, proof of life.
She popped into the bathroom before she headed to class, ran her fingers through her
hair. She and Hellie had loved wearing makeup, spending their rare bits of spare cash on
glitter eyeliner and lip gloss. She missed it sometimes. Here, makeup meant something different; it sent a signal of effort that was unacceptable.
Alex endured an hour of Spanish II—dull but manageable because all it required of her
was memorization. Everyone was chattering about Tara Hutchins, though no one called her by name. She was the dead girl, the murder victim, the townie who got stabbed.
People were talking about crisis lines and emergency therapy for anyone triggered by the
event. The TA who led her Spanish class reminded them to use the campus walking service after dark. I was right near there. I was there like an hour before it happened. I walk by there every day. Alex heard the same things repeated again and again. There was worry, some embarrassment—another bit of proof that, no matter how many chain stores
moved in, New Haven would never be Cambridge. But no one seemed truly afraid.
Because Tara wasn’t one of you, Alex thought, as she packed up her bag. You all still feel safe.
Alex had two hours free after class and she meant to spend them hidden away in her dorm room, eating her pilfered sand-wiches and writing her report for Sandow, then sleeping through the basso belladonna crash before she went to her English lecture.
Instead, she found her feet carrying her back to Payne Whitney. The intersection was no longer blocked off and the crowds were gone, but police tape still surrounded the triangular swath of barren ground across the street from the gym. The students who passed
cast furtive glances at the scene and hurried along, as if mortified to be seen gawking at
something so lurid in the cold gray sunlight. A police cruiser was parked half on the sidewalk, and a news van sat across the street.
She had to imagine Dean Sandow and the rest of the Yale administration were having
plenty of harried meetings about damage control this morning. Alex hadn’t understood the
distinctions between Yale and Princeton and Harvard and the cities they occupied. They were all the same impossible place in the same imaginary town. But it was clear from the
way that Lauren and Mercy laughed about New Haven that the city and its university were
considered a little less Ivy than the others. A murder that close to campus, even if the victim hadn’t been a student, couldn’t be good PR.
Alex wondered if she was looking at the place where Tara had been murdered or if her
body had simply been dumped in front of the gym. She should have asked the coroner while he was compelled. But she had to imagine it was the former. If you wanted to get rid