shown Alex how to snap zip ties and it only took her two tries to get herself free, quietly
open the back door, and vanish between two apartment buildings before the meatheads in
the front seat realized she was gone. She walked seven miles to where Len was working at
Baskin-Robbins. After his shift, they put Alex’s blistered feet in a tub of bubble gum ice
cream and got high and had sex on the storeroom floor.
She worked at a TGI Fridays, then a Mexican restaurant that scraped the beans off the customers’ plates and reused them every night, then a laser tag place, and a Mail Boxes Etc. One afternoon when she was standing at the shipping desk, a pretty girl with chestnut
curls came in with her mother and a stack of manila envelopes. It took Alex a solid minute
to realize it was Meagan. Standing there in her maroon apron, watching Meagan chat with
the other clerk, Alex had the sudden sensation that she was among the Quiet Ones, that she had died in that bathroom all of those years ago, and that people had been looking straight through her ever since. She’d just been too high to notice. Then Meagan glanced
over her shoulder and the skittery, tense look in her eye had been enough for Alex to come
back to her body. You see me, she thought. You wish you didn’t, but you do.
The years slid by. Sometimes Alex would put her head up, think about staying sober,
think about a book or school or her mom. She’d fall into a fantasy of clean sheets and someone to tuck her in at night. Then she’d catch a glimpse of a biker, the skin scraped from the side of his face, the pulp beneath studded with gravel, or an old woman with her
housecoat half open, standing unnoticed in front of the window of an electronics store, and
she’d go back under. If she couldn’t see them, somehow they couldn’t see her.
She’d gone on that way until Hellie—golden Hellie, the girl Len had expected her to hate, maybe hoped she would, the girl she’d loved instead—until that night at Ground Zero when everything had gone so very wrong, until the morning she’d woken up to Dean
Sandow in her hospital room.
He’d taken some papers out of his briefcase, an old essay she’d written when she still
bothered going to school. She didn’t remember writing it, but the title read, A Day in My Life. A big red F was scrawled over the top, beside the words The assignment was not fiction.
Sandow had perched on a chair by the side of her bed and asked, “The things you describe in this essay, do you still see them?”
The night of the Aurelian ritual, when the Grays had flowed into the protective circle,
taken on form, drawn by blood and longing, it had all come flooding back to her. She’d
almost lost everything before she’d begun, but somehow she’d held on, and with a little help—like a summer job learning to brew the perfect cup of tea in Professor Belbalm’s office, for starters—she thought she could hold on a little longer. She just had to lay Tara
Hutchins to rest.
By the time Alex finished in the Lethe library, the sun had set and her brain felt numb.
She’d made the initial mistake of not limiting the retrieved books to English, and even after she’d reset the library, there were a baffling number of hard-to-parse texts on the shelf, academic papers and treatises that were simply too dense for her to pull apart. In a
way, it made things easier. There were only so many rituals Alex could understand, and that narrowed her options. Then there were the rites that required a particular alignment of
the planets or an equinox or a bright day in October, one that demanded the foreskin of a
yonge, hende man of ful corage, and another that called for the less disturbing but equally hard to procure feathers of one hundred golden ospreys.
“The satisfaction of a job well done” was one of those phrases Alex’s mom liked.
“Hard work tires the soul. Good works feed the soul!” Alex wasn’t sure that what she intended qualified as “good” work at all, but it was better than doing nothing. She copied
the text—since her phone wouldn’t work in the annex, even to take a photo—then sealed