Alex touched her fingers to the cracked railing, already thinking about how to phrase
her description of the prognostication for the Lethe House records. Dean Sandow
reviewed all of them, and she wasn’t anxious to draw his attention to anything out of the
ordinary. Besides, if you set aside a helpless man having his guts rearranged, nothing bad
had actually happened.
When Alex emerged from the passage into the hallway, Tripp Helmuth startled from his slouch. “They almost done in there?”
Alex nodded and took a deep breath of comparatively fresh air, eager to get outside.
“Pretty gross, huh?” Tripp asked with a smirk. “If you want I can slip you some of the
tips when they get transcribed. Take the edge off those student loans.”
“What the fuck would you know about student loans?” The words were out before she
could stop them. Darlington would not approve. Alex was supposed to remain civil, distant, diplomatic. And anyway, she was a hypocrite. Lethe had made sure she would graduate without a cloud of debt hanging over her—if she actually made it through four
years of exams and papers and nights like these.
Tripp held his hands up in surrender, laughing uneasily. “Hey, just tryin’ to get by.”
Tripp was on the sailing team, a third-generation Bonesman, a gentleman and a scholar, a
purebred golden retriever—dopey, glossy, and expensive. He was rumpled and rosy as a healthy infant, his hair sandy, his skin still tan from whichever island he’d spent winter break on. He had the ease of someone who had always been and would always be just fine, a boy of a thousand second chances. “We good?” he asked eagerly.
“We’re good,” she said, though she was not good at all. She could still feel the reverberation of that buzzing moan filling up her lungs, rattling the inside of her skull.
“Just stuffy in there.”
“Right?” Tripp said, ready to be pals. “Maybe getting stuck out here all night’s not so
bad.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“What happened to your arm?” Alex could see a bit of bandage peeking out from
Tripp’s windbreaker.
He shoved the sleeve up, revealing a patch of greasy cellophane taped over the inside
of his forearm. “A bunch of us got tattoos today.”
Alex looked closer: a strutting bulldog bursting through a big blue Y. The dudebro equivalent of best friends forevah!
“Nice,” she lied.
“You got any ink?” His sleepy eyes roved over her, trying to peel back the winter layers, no different than the losers who had hung around Ground Zero, fingers brushing her clavicle, her biceps, tracing the shapes there. So what does this one mean?
“Nope. Not my thing.” Alex wrapped her scarf around her neck. “I’ll check in on Reyes
on the ward tomorrow.”
“Huh? Oh, right. Good. Where’s Darlington anyway? He already sticking you with the
shit jobs?”
Tripp tolerated Alex, tried to be friendly with her because he wanted his belly rubbed
by everyone he encountered, but he genuinely liked Darlington.
“Spain,” she said, because that was what she’d been instructed to say.
“Nice. Tell him buenos días.”
If Alex could have told Darlington anything, it would have been, Come back. She would have said it in English and Spanish. She would have used the imperative.
“Adiós,” she said to Tripp. “Enjoy the party.”
Once she was clear of the building, Alex yanked off her gloves and unwrapped two sticky ginger candies, shoving them into her mouth. She was tired of thinking about Darlington, but the smell of the ginger, the heat it created at the back of her throat, brought him even more brightly alive. She saw his long body sprawled in front of the great stone
fireplace at Black Elm. He’d taken his boots off, left his socks to dry on the hearth. He was on his back, eyes closed, head resting in the cradle of his arms, toes wiggling in time
to the music floating around the room, something classical Alex didn’t know, dense with
French horns that left emphatic crescents of sound in the air.
Alex had been on the floor beside him, arms clasped around her knees, back pressed against the base of an old sofa, trying to seem relaxed and to stop staring at his feet. They just looked so naked. He’d cuffed his black jeans up, keeping the damp off his skin, and those slender white feet, hair dusting the toes, had made her feel a little obscene, like some sepia-toned pervert driven mad by a glimpse of ankle.