At the beginning of our freshman year, Aubrey came across as a bit brash, boisterous and energetic. I don’t remember whether it changed all at once or bit by bit, but the Aubrey of later years was closed off. She did her work and vanished back to Abigail House. Sometimes I’d catch her staring off toward the woods, her mouth pressed into a hard line.
I remember suddenly the words I heard whispered on the path. “Did something happen to Aubrey?” I ask.
“There was an accident,” Oster says.
Mrs. Clarke shifts in her chair.
“Is she all right? She’s not—she’s not dead, is she?”
“No, nothing like that,” Oster says, though his pinched expression suggests the truth is serious enough. “I’m sure you’ll hear rumors, so I might as well tell you that she nearly drowned.”
The word drowned makes me jolt. “In the Narrow?” I ask immediately, though, of course, that is impossible. No one nearly drowns in the Narrow. Except, I think, and shove the thought away.
“No. Good lord, we would be planning a funeral then. No student has fallen in the Narrow in decades,” Oster says gravely. “It was the pool. She was out for a walk at night and fell in. Luckily, one of the security guards saw her and was able to revive her.”
“Thank God,” Mrs. Clarke murmurs. There is something oddly rehearsed about the speech and about the haste with which Oster moves on, and it sends a prickle down my spine.
“But in any case, her family has decided that it would be best for her to recover at home. It’s left us in a bit of a bind, as it happened so close to the beginning of classes, and Ms. Fournier is adamant that Delphine have a companion for the school year. You would be doing everyone a great service if you agreed. And you wouldn’t need to worry about your tuition.”
I think of Delphine Fournier in the red beret she wore the day she arrived. I think of her in the window, coppery hair spilling over her shoulder.
I think of her the night Veronica and I sneaked out to jump the Narrow. Mud caking her feet, leaves in her hair.
Cold fingers slipping from my grasp.
The Narrow drowns all it takes.
Not all.
“You might prefer to get in contact with your parents after all,” Mrs. Clarke says.
Oster lifts one finger from the table as if to restrain her. As if to say Let her decide.
But it isn’t a decision, is it? It’s this or go home.
And I can’t go home.
But it’s more than that. In the last six years, I have only ever glimpsed Delphine Fournier from a distance, through glass. I’ve never had the chance to ask her if she remembers what happened. I’ve tried to put it out of my mind, but it has always been there, the whisper of a question.
“I’ll do it,” I say, still staring at the unyielding face of the clock. “Abigail House. I’ll do it.”
Oster sits back, looking relieved and satisfied. Mrs. Clarke’s expression is different. She looks down at the file in her hands, which she hasn’t even opened, and frowns very slightly. And then something else passes over her face—something that almost looks like pity.
Something that almost looks like guilt.
3
ABIGAIL HOUSE SITS by itself among the trees. It was a girls’ dormitory at one point, then used to house staff with families, and when I started at Atwood it was an unassuming two-story house with peeling white paint that visiting parents occasionally stayed in. Ms. Fournier’s money and determination have remade it. The architectural style has been preserved, but the paint and siding are fresh, the windows top of the line. A huge water tank has been installed out back. The house has been completely disconnected from the well-water supply that the rest of the campus uses.
Mrs. Clarke opens the front door with a combination plugged into a keypad over the lock. “I’ll make sure to write the code down for you,” she notes. A camera mounted above the doorway points a single black eye down at us. I stare at my dark reflection in the convex glass.
Immediately inside the door is a large entryway and another door with another keypad. To the left and right are standing screens, and next to the inner door is a bank of cubbies. From one of these, Mrs. Clarke fetches a set of maroon sweats and a sweatshirt and hands them to me.
“No clothes that have been worn outside can pass through the inner door,” she explains. “Put whatever you’re wearing into the blue hamper—that one’s just for you—or fold it for when you leave and place it in your cubby. You can wear these for now, until your luggage arrives.”
I nod as if I understand, though the strangeness of this is starting to hit me.
“One of the perks of Abigail House is that you don’t have to do any of your own laundry, at least,” Mrs. Clarke says. “It’s collected Monday and Thursday and returned the next day.”
“Neat,” I say, because it seems like I should say something.
Mrs. Clarke raises one shoulder in an almost-shrug, a what-can-you-do gesture, like she knows exactly how disorienting this all must be.
I take the offered clothes and go behind one of the screens. I discover that it also conceals a small shower. I glance over my shoulder to make sure that Mrs. Clarke can’t see me before I carefully shrug out of my shirt and pants, taking care not to jostle my arm any more than it already has been. There’s no mirror for me to check the bruising on my back, but I take a paranoid survey of my arms and ribs. Nothing visible, though my ribs still hurt when I twist the wrong way.
I can still feel that weight on my back. The knee grinding down beside my spine, squeezing the breath out of me until lights popped in my vision.
You’ve got a foul mouth, Princess.
It could have been worse. Every girl in the world knows what kind of worse it could have been. There was nothing sexual about what happened to me—Dylan’s interest in me had been so bluntly nonsexual, so devoid of attraction or innuendo that it was strangely dehumanizing. I might have been a dog or a piece of furniture, as far as he was concerned. Now I try to feel grateful for that, to tell myself it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It’s cold comfort.
I pull on the spare outfit quickly and fold up my clothes. I carry them back out and put them in one of the empty cubbies just as Mrs. Clarke emerges from behind the other screen to do the same. In the Atwood sweats instead of her starched white button-up, she looks younger. It turns her harsh lines soft and seems to shrink her.
“It starts to be routine faster than you think,” she says, and puts in the code for the inner door.
A single hallway splits the house down the middle. There’s one door to either side, left and right, with a second on the left down near the end of the hall. At the far end is a door with a glass upper panel, beyond which I can see a set of stairs. Every door but one has its own keypad. It makes me think of a laboratory in a zombie movie, set up to contain the outbreak of a monstrous virus.