and comatose at a crime scene, next to a girl who hadn’t been lucky enough to survive the fentanyl they’d both taken. The details of it were all more sordid and sad than he could have fathomed, and he’d tried to feel sorry for her. His Dante, the girl he would gift with the keys to a secret world, was a criminal, a drug user, a dropout who cared about none of the things he did. But he’d tried.
And still nothing had prepared him for the shock of her presence in that shabby Vanderbilt common room. The room was small but high-ceilinged, with three tall windows that looked out onto the horseshoe-shaped courtyard and two narrow doors leading to the bedrooms. The space eddied with the easy chaos of a freshman year move-in: boxes on the floor, no proper furniture to be seen but a wobbly lamp and a battered recliner pushed up against the long-since-functional fireplace. A muscular blonde in running shorts—Lauren, he guessed (likely pre-med, solid test scores, field-hockey captain at her Philadelphia prep school)—was setting up a faux-vintage turntable on the ledge of the window seat, a plastic crate of records balanced beside it. The recliner was probably hers too, carted along in a moving truck from Bucks County to New Haven. Anna Breen (Huntsville, Texas; STEM scholarship; choir leader) sat on the floor trying to assemble what looked like a bookshelf. This was a girl who would never quite fit. She’d end up in a singing group or maybe get heavily into her church. She definitely wouldn’t be partying with her other roommates.
Then the other two girls shuffled out of one of the bedrooms, awkwardly hefting a banged-up university-issued desk between them.
“Do you have to put that out here?” asked Anna glumly.
“We need more space,” said a girl in a flowered sundress Darlington knew was Mercy Zhao (piano; 800 math, 800 verbal; prizewinning essays on Rabelais and a bizarre but compelling comparison of a passage in The Sound and the Fury to a bit about a pear tree in The Canterbury Tales that had garnered the notice of both the Yale and Princeton English departments).
And then Galaxy Stern (no high school diploma, no GED, no achievements to speak of other than surviving her own misery) emerged from the dark nook of the bedroom, dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and black jeans totally inappropriate to the heat and balancing one end of the desk in her skinny arms. The low quality of Sandow’s video had caught the slick, straight sheaves of her black hair but not the severe precision of her center part, the hollow quality of her eyes but not the deep inkblot of their color. She looked malnourished, her clavicles sharp as exclamation points beneath the fabric of her shirt. She was too sleek, almost damp, less Undine rising from the waters than a dagger-toothed rusalka.
Or maybe she just needed a snack and a long nap.
All right, Stern. Let’s begin.
Darlington rapped on the door, stepped into the room, smiled big, bright, welcoming, as they set the desk down in the common room corner. “Alex! Your mom told me I should check in on you. It’s me, Darlington.”
For a brief moment she looked utterly lost, even panicked, then she matched his smile. “Hey! I didn’t recognize you.”
Good. She was adaptable.
“Introductions, please,” said Lauren, her gaze interested, assessing. She’d pulled a copy of Queen’s A Day at the Races from the crate.
He extended his hand. “I’m Darlington, Alex’s cousin.”
“Are you in JE too?” Lauren asked.
Darlington remembered that unearned sense of loyalty. At the start of the year, all the incoming freshmen were sorted into residential colleges where they would eat most of their meals and where they would eventually sleep when they left Old Campus behind as sophomores. They would buy scarves striped in their residential college colors, learn the college’s chants and mottos. Alex belonged to Lethe, just as Darlington had, but she’d been assigned to Jonathan Edwards, named for the fire and brimstone preacher.
“I’m in Davenport,” Darlington said. “But I don’t live on campus.” He’d liked living in Davenport—the dining hall, the big grassy courtyard. But he didn’t like Black Elm sitting empty, and the money he’d saved on his room and board had been enough to fix the water damage he’d found in the ballroom last spring. Besides, Cosmo liked the company.
“Do you have a car?” asked Lauren.
Mercy laughed. “Oh my God, you’re ridiculous.”
Lauren shrugged. “How else are we going to get to Ikea?