over the yurt.
“You weren’t going to say that, were you?” he said. His eyes were so bright, so piercing.
There was an awkward pause in their corner. To end it, Ellie tipped herself off the edge of the sofa into David’s lap.
“I thought that was solved,” she said to Stevie. “Wasn’t it? Didn’t someone confess?”
“Someone was found guilty,” Stevie said. “He probably didn’t do it. He confessed because . . .”
A burst of laughter from behind, and Ellie looked up to see what was going on. No one wanted to hear why Anton Vorachek, the local anarchist who was arrested and tried for the crime, confessed.
“He confessed because he was on the stand . . .” Stevie tried to continue.
Unlike before, when everyone was listening, now there was a dance breaking out and David was doing this weird smirk and Janelle, Vi, and Nate looked vaguely uncomfortable.
You know when your moment is over.
A flask appeared from somewhere. Ellie had some. David passed. It was waved in Janelle, Nate, and Stevie’s direction, and they all shook their heads. Stevie thought drinking from containers other people drank from was gross. She embraced Locard’s exchange principle: every contact leaves a trace, meaning in this case, backwash.
Ellie and David went away to talk to some other second years, leaving the first years on their own.
“He seems fun,” Janelle said with forced brightness.
Nate was unable to bring himself to lie.
“I feel kind of better,” he said to Stevie. “I think you’re even more screwed than I am.”
Nights always brought the worry. Night was hard.
It was three in the morning and Stevie was wide awake. If she was going to have a panic attack, it would likely be tonight. New school, new start, new friends, new home up here on the mountain when she’d never been away from home and her parents for more than a few days. The night brought cooler air, but still, the room felt a bit crowded. When she opened the window, a giant moth blew in. It beat a hasty path to the ceiling light and landed against it with a thunk.
“I know the feeling,” Stevie said to it.
The panic attacks had started when she was twelve years old. No one knew why. Her parents tried to help but were largely confused by them. Medication took care of some of it, but Stevie had worked out the rest with some assistance from the school counselor and by reading more or less the entire internet.
It had been a year and three months since Stevie stopped having the panic attacks all the time, and at least six months since she’d had a big one. But the nights still worried her. She still paced before she slept, eyeing her bed, wondering if this was going to be one of the nights she was dragged out of sleep by a heart racing like a car with no driver and a board pressed up against the gas pedal.
She sat on the floor beneath the window, closed her eyes, and let the breeze play on the back of her neck. Breathe in. Breathe out. Count. One. Breathe in. Breathe out. Two. Just let the thoughts come and go.
You weren’t going to say that, were you?
Let it go.
You can always come home.
Let it go, for real. Go full Frozen.
You’re even more screwed than I am.
She opened her eyes and looked over at her bureau. She could take an Ativan and knock herself out, but she would be groggy tomorrow.
No. She was going to do this. It was going to be fine.
So she turned to her other medicine—her mysteries. Stevie had always loved mysteries from the time she was small. When the attacks hit, she found that mysteries were her salvation. If she was awake at night, she had her mystery novels, her true-crime books, her shows, her podcasts. Maybe most people wouldn’t be soothed by reading about the acid bath murders, about Lizzy Borden or H. H. Holmes, about highway murders, about the quiet neighbor with the dark secret, about bodies in walls and latent fingerprints, about thirteen guests at dinner when you know they can’t all live. . . . These things were problems for her mind to work on, and when her mind worked on the mystery, it couldn’t panic.
So Stevie became a mystery machine, with true crime playing in her ears between classes at school and while she filled bean containers at the coffee shop at the mall. She couldn’t get enough. She got into the