make of this? Fancy School Manages to Kill Student. And the fact that she had been there?
Would the school close?
Maybe close for a few days. It couldn’t close for the year because of this, could it?
Why was she thinking like this? Someone was dead. Hayes was dead.
Because that is what brains do. They think. Her brain attic was full of new and strange things she had not been able to classify and sort yet. Stevie couldn’t feel guilty for her thoughts and she couldn’t engage with all of her thoughts. That was something they taught you in anxiety therapy—the thoughts may come, but you don’t have to chase them all. It was sort of the opposite of good detective work, in which you had to follow every lead.
She stuffed her face into her pillow for a while as her head throbbed gently. Her mouth still had a strange taste in it, the taste of . . .
Outside, she could hear strange voices and the occasional squawk of a radio. She managed to pull her face up and out of the safe, soft confines of the pillow and rubbed the gunk from her eyes.
Hayes. That had really happened. He had actually died. Hayes had died, and they had found his body. And, in response, she had come back and made out with David. It was all too real, too immediate, her feelings all coming together into one knot of terror and shakes and queasiness and embarrassment.
Focus.
Her brain floated around the facts for a bit. Hayes was on the ground, already dead. How could that have happened? She mentally looked around the little space at the end of the tunnel. She peered at the empty shelves on the wall. She scuffed at the stone floor with her shoe. She looked up the ladder, at the hatch that led to the observatory. . . .
About twelve feet up. If you fell from that distance onto the stone, you would be in bad shape. You could die.
Stevie saw it in her mind’s eye. She had gone up there. She had closed that hatch behind her. Had Hayes gone up to look around? Maybe he stepped the wrong way in the dark and fell through the hole.
Why did he go back? Probably to film something. But Hayes would have brought someone for that, probably. It really looked like he wanted to go alone. She saw the way he did his backward walk, trying to slip back.
But he hadn’t gone back to the garden. He’d gone all the way around, to the maintenance road, to the woods, to the tunnel. He’d gone back and died.
Riddle, riddle, on the wall . . .
She’d almost forgotten that, the terror that had woken her the other night. She had to have dreamed that. She was thinking about murder and death and tunnels and Truly Devious and her brain projected it all onto the wall.
Right?
Stevie rested flat on her back and practiced a few minutes of breathing exercises, making the exhales longer than the inhales, taking the air all the way down to her abdomen.
She could still smell some musky body wash or shampoo on her skin. David.
There was that as well. On any other day, this would have been the only story. Today, it barely made the cut.
“Okay,” she said to herself. “Now. Okay. Now. Get up. Now.”
She got up.
Shortly after, a showered Stevie, dressed in thin, loose sweatpants and her black hoodie, emerged into the common room. Janelle and Nate were at the table, both still in pajamas. Pix was on her phone in the kitchen. David sat on the sofa in rumpled jeans and a wrinkled maroon Henley shirt. His hair was wet, flattening some curls to his forehead. He looked at her when she came in—a direct, lingering look, but one without humor. He seemed to simply be taking her in, noting her presence.
There was little to say, some mumbled good-mornings, some nods. What do you say when your housemate dies, even if you don’t know him that well? Even if what you did know you didn’t like much?
You say very little.
Ellie appeared, wearing paint-stained, waffle-textured long underwear bottoms and a large, ripped-up T-shirt for a French band and long tube-sock tops on her arms. Her eyes were bright red and swollen. She dropped down on the sofa next to David, curled into a ball, and put her head on his lap. He absently set a hand on her mess of matted hair.
Stevie felt a swell