respond. Instead, she holds the door for me, and I follow her out into the foyer. Without a word, she leaves for the parking lot.
I make out Iliana’s dad’s beat-up Honda just behind Bootsie’s massive Cadillac and march my way up to the only place she could be: the art wing for open studio.
I may not be killing anyone in literal terms, but somebody is about to figuratively scrape Iliana off the Studio B floor.
CHAPTER 23
ILIANA
Username: Curious-in-Cheshire
Last online: 2d ago
The Conservatory is a graveyard on the weekends.
Most of the residential students crash on a local’s couch as soon as the last bell rings on Fridays, and with only a few days left in the semester, everyone would rather be curled up next to warm hearths rather than in drafty cinder-block dorms. The sky is gray, the wind is cold, and when I pulled in, the parking lot was empty, save for a thirty-year-old Cadillac parked with one tire hiked up onto the front curb.
The chill that’s settled into my bones has nothing to do with the weather.
Kiersten and Sarah. Cheshire.
Three people, three problems.
The numbers don’t multiply, though—they divide against each other, three separate girls and three separate problems.
One Big Fucking Crisis.
Somehow, Kiersten and Sarah have bonded over their mutual hatred of me—a given, since I can’t imagine what else they have in common—Kiersten looks like the kind of jewel-studded artsy-fartsy dream girl a creative writing–track boy in a fedora hallucinates into existence for his characters to objectify. I only know three things about her: she loves glitter, being angry, and enjoying her privilege.
Meanwhile, Sarah is malleable. She reminds me of Harry Potter’s boggarts: No one knows her true form, because she takes a different shape with everyone she meets. She was still in her performing arts school form the last time I saw her at Sylvia’s, flannels and ancient band shirts and frayed denim shorts worn over patterned tights in thirty-two-degree weather.
So much of the same, but the BeDazzled cassette player is the first step in what I predict will be an abrupt change.
It’s such a small change, but I feel like I already don’t know her anymore.
Everything is escalated to stage-3 fucking crisis by Rhodes—Alice—deleting her Slash/Spot account. I have no way to make this right. It will never happen with Rhodes, never. Kiersten and Sarah have given me forty-eight hours, but at this moment Rhodes hates me, so it’s practically over before it even starts.
The only grace I have going for me is my Capstone project. I haven’t touched it in days, but the knowledge that it’s in my work locker waiting for me is the only thing I have left.
I’m loaded down for a long night in the studio: I have bags over one shoulder, loaded with Tupperware full of whatever Mom packed because I can’t afford to order in tonight. Bags over the other shoulder loaded with everything from a first aid kit (X-Acto knives are sharp), to changes of clothes (studios are messy, and sometimes too hot, and sometimes too cold, and never predictable), to every kind of technology I could cram into a backpack: laptops, and drawing tablets, and chargers, and external batteries, and point-and-shoot digital cameras, and a handful of cords from the junk drawer in the kitchen because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The hallways are eerie in their silence. A fluorescent light flickers over my head in the east stairwell, and hard, deliberate footsteps from deep within the school make my hair stand on end. If my life were a movie, this would be the precise moment Kiersten (or Sarah, or Kiersten and Sarah) would show up behind me to take a hatchet to the back of my skull.
But Studio B is bright, and warm, and empty. The gray skies are giving way to rain through the expansive windows on the south and east walls, and the residual scent of rubber cement in the air feels like a welcome home. My stuff takes up an entire table in the back of the room, but it doesn’t matter because I’m alone.
It’s not scary anymore, with the door shut behind me.
It’s tempting to go straight to the work lockers in the back of the studio, to pull out my work and throw myself in headfirst. After everything with Kiersten and Sarah, though, I need to center myself.
My tarot cards are in the front of my messenger bag, where they always are.
Their silk bag feels like a comfort blanket. The way