JORDAN DAVIDSON

Novel | Colorado Academy, Denver, CO

Skin, Bone, Hands, and Teeth

Excerpt

One:

Maine flares around us in an impressionist painting of fall forests, the reds, yellows, and oranges of aspen trees muted by the rain lashing our car window. Helené takes the weather in stride; I lean my head against the glass, trying to let the subtle knocking lure me to a semblance of sleep. It doesn’t work. A particularly fierce curve smashes the side of my forehead with enough force to begin the creation of what will be a particularly nasty colored bruise.

Helené laughs. In both hands, she shuffles a deck of cards. “Love, I told you ignoring the universe’s order to rejoin the world of the living only leads to your pain and suffering. Do you want ice for your forehead before we start our tournament?”

I agree to the ice and accept my hand. Even as the dealer, she goes first—she always does—laying down a run before I can sort through my cards. In the dour lighting in the back of her parents’ limousine, Helené still looks beautiful. If time had dragged us back to an era before science, I would have thought that Helené was a goddess in disguise; even though I know with a certainty that here magic isn’t real, I wonder what combination of circumstance and luck made Helené the way she is: topaz and obsidian, vibrant and blazing.

I’d spent the summer traveling between Helené’s estates and my family in Costa Rica. When I tired of my brothers’ ceaseless tirades against common sense, I reunited with Helené in Paris, and we wandered together for a while, taking in the shores of Italy and Greece, drinking on river cruises in Budapest, relaxing over tapas and paella in Helené’s house in Tossa Del Mar after retreating back to Spain. The summer months have all been spent now; the frosts and withering of fall have dragged us back to school where we will join with the rest of our group—the rest of our family. Most of them chose to spend their summers with their own parents or at school.

“Your turn, Valentina.” When Helené plays cards, she does it with second nature ease, often managing to beat me while badgering me with conversation. The two strategies most likely go hand in hand. She smiles through orange lipstick and blinding white teeth. “Though luck isn’t in your favor.”

“Most likely.” My hand doesn’t allow me to do much more than a simple swap: drawing a card and discarding another a moment later.

“Hmm,” Helené muses after setting down another hand of three. She’s only fingering two cards now—the next move has the possibility to rake me over the coals. The car takes another turn, sending Helené scrambling for the iced tea that begins to roll off the small table set up between our seats. She rolls down the window shade to give us a better look at the outside.

A flurry of maple leaves sweeps by us down the banks of a shallow lake with its surface riddled with rings of rain. In front of us winds the long dirt road that every Redlake student takes to and from the campus, although no other cars line it now, meaning Helené and I are either early, late, or... students didn’t want to re-enroll.

My hands hurt from clutching the cards too hard.

“And the end of last year? What did you think of it?” Helené asks.

“About the same as the end of every other year. Another conglomeration of useless testing, false smiles, and ongoing goodbyes.”

“And where do you think people will have spent their summers?”

“Summer houses. Other countries—traveling.” I know where Helené is leading the conversation, and I do my best to divert it—say anything else—but still answer her.

“Or graveyards.” Helené throws the last words out with an air of carelessness that a lengthy sip of her tea betrays.

With a noncommittal sweep of my hand, I set down the only card I can play, a queen of hearts. For Helene’s deck, her grandmother painted portraits on each individual card. The Queen stares up at us with dark eyes ringed in red makeup. Like mascara burned into her skin.

Helené draws and sets down her last card, leaving me to tally up my points, which end up in negative figures.

While I record the year’s first points in the notebook Helené and I share to track our rummy scores, Helené finishes off her first iced tea and reaches into the fridge below her seat for another, to which she adds a spoonful of the honey she bought from a farm we visited in Kiev. Through the honey covered stir stick in her mouth she drawls, “Your score has to be bad luck. On a cosmic scale.”

“Only to the superstitious.”

The garnets woven into her braids tinkle merrily with Helené’s brief chortle. “I should count how many times you and William get into this argument. You’ve already done your job of establishing yourself as the skeptic and forcing me to be the peacemaker.”

I allow myself a smile, although I know it fails to crinkle the lines around my eyes or make my face more welcoming. The car has just begun the final series of turns twisting around the bases of various lakes, the last stretch of road until we reach Redlake.

Helené has already popped the tab on a can of ginger ale, pressing a sleeve of saltines with it into my clammy hand, before she speaks again. “Of course, if someone was even more superstitious than me, they’d have fled for the hills. But not those hills.”

She refers to the set of low hills that are home to both Redlake and a few summer houses for Redlake’s board of trustees and their children. Helené tries to press me into commenting with pointed blinks of her gold liner covered lids. When I don’t she carries on, “Not when they found Eve’s corpse in her room in one of the vacation chalets.”

Finally, we arrive at the topic that’s clearly been dancing on Helené’s tongue. The brutal murder of Eve Winters, a classmate of ours. Rumors say she was burned from the inside out. In her own room. With the door locked. I don’t know how much of it is true.

I don’t think I want to know.

“You look awful.” Helené rests her elbows on the folding table. I stare at her silhouette across from me, the glint in her eyes screaming a dare to whoever killed that poor girl: Come get me. You’ll see what you find.

“I don’t like thinking about death.” The seatbelt chafes a line along my throat. Did the killer hold Eve by her throat? Did they break the skin? Was she tied up in ropes? Home remedies only wash away the superficial rolls of nausea.

“Really? A writing major who doesn’t like thinking about death? Shocking.” Helené’s lips twitch for a moment, then her face stills. But her fingers drum against anything they can reach: the window, the barrier between us and the driver, the cards. The intensity in her eyes focuses for a moment as the car whips past a fork in the road where one dirt prong splits into another. A weather worn sign instructs us that if we want unparalleled luxury and privacy, all we have to do is call the number listed below, where we’ll be given a cheerful real estate agent trying to set us up with the most eligible properties stranded in Maine’s wilderness.

Only the yellow caution tape and police lines say otherwise. Helené rolls down the window before the road can jerk us away. Water hits my face, making me thank God that I chose waterproof foundation.

Helené raps on the divider with her knuckle. “Stop the car.”

The driver complies; we grind to a slow halt. Helené flings open the door. I hand her an umbrella from my backpack. She’s sure to open it outside the car. On the first step out, my boot heels sink up to an inch in mud and wet coats all of me, from the wool of my coat to the spaces in between the strands of my hair.

Helené doesn’t wait for me to start walking to the scene. I’m happy to let her lead and follow just off her shoulder like we would at school; she’s better at having conversations where she gets what she wants than I am. I write; she talks.

We pick our way through puddles and potholes towards the two police officers—a thin black man holding a camera and a white woman whose stomach pushes at the buttons of her uniform. She speaks to him in a low voice that neither Helené nor I can hear. A third officer peels out of the forest the moment we come within nine feet of the line. His white face contorts around the fringes of his mustache. “Get back in the car,” he says.

Helené cocks her head without a care in the world. But the new lines down her neck tell me that her shoulders are tightening, and with them, the grip of her right hand on the phone inside her pocket, which I saw her set to record before we stepped out. “Is this the start of the Winters crime scene?”

“What do you know about it?” he asks us.

“Not much.” Wind whips a braid or two across Helené’s mouth. With an elegant grace that perpetually evades me, she swipes them behind her ear. The clouds above us darken in synchrony to a clap of thunder. “Just that our school is going to question most of the kids.”

“Your school?”

A jerk of Helené’s head behind us illustrates her point. “Redlake. Where hopefully no one else will be murdered.”

The thin man sets down the camera and crosses the crime scene line to whisper in the mustached officer’s ear. In the span of a second, the thin officer’s face twitches. Then nothing. No indication that Helené’s proclamation changed him. Except that he comes closer to us. Close enough for me to make out the nearly illegible scrawl on the document peeking from his pocket. Eve Winters Homicide Police Report. Below the headline are several pictures; even though most are hidden from view by the blue material of his pocket, I make out a single, pale arm.

“Redlake,” both male officers repeat.

“Redlake.” Helené offers once again, this time accompanied by her hand.

I watch her gaze skim theirs. I wonder what she sees that I miss. Because Helené always sees more than she likes to admit—an attribute if not solely responsible for the creation of our group then one whose role has parted the sea for us to join Helené and her divine warfront, which now I see turning towards Eve’s murder.

Neither officer takes the offered handshake, but behind the men, the female officer surveys us with more intensity.

Seemingly unfazed, Helené puts her hand down crisply. “So tell me, officers, are we safe at school? Or did one of our classmates decide it was time to do in poor Miss Eve—”

“Do you think one of your—ah—classmates would have had a motive to want Eve dead?” The female officer interrupts.

“I have no idea. That’s your job, not mine.” Leaving the officers still processing her words, Helené sweeps back through the limousine doors, her angled shoulders insisting that I do the same. She holds the door open for me; I climb in, Helené waiting a moment to close her umbrella.

The car starts again, and we’re back to our card game as if no police, yellow tape, or body ever existed.

After wiping down my stilettos with a handkerchief from my purse, I ask Helené, “What do you know?”

Helené doesn’t take her eyes off the window when she answers. “I’ll tell you later. I don’t want to repeat this particular theory more than once, and as much as I trust you, Valentina-Love, the rest of the group needs to hear this too.”

The rest of the ride we spend in silence, Helené engaged in solitaire and me listening to the rain’s drumbeat on the roof.

For a high school whose student has just been murdered, the amount of security at Redlake seems not to have increased much. As usual, a guard pokes his head out of the station a few miles from the campus proper to ask for the proper ID. Helené’s driver rolls down his window to present it. Seeing that everything is in its proper order, the guard waves us through. Though vehicles were noticeably missing from our drive here, the same number of glistening sports cars, limousines, and sedans idle with their engines puffing little clouds of smoke into the afternoon rain along the drive. Maybe more.

The entry lanes to Redlake are large enough to be a campus in their own right, but instead, the administration decided a better use of its property would be to plant acres of gardens for student relaxation. To the north of the road, mazes woven of red roses and dark thorns guard the north houses and admission buildings. These are the newest properties on campus, built fifty years ago and renovated just two years before I arrived for freshman year. There, the land puckers and drops when one goes far enough, giving way to a swollen river basin that eventually, when given enough time and miles, filters its freezing waters up through Quebec and to the Atlantic Ocean. In the fall, students separate small eddies from the river with rocks to make their own skating ponds. Helené, the rest of our group, and I built a few freshman year and spent the majority of our winter in and out of the infirmary with skate cuts, bruises, and frostbitten fingers.

I catch a stray rainbow arching over the valley as the road steers our car towards the south side. Here, sculpted hedges give way to field hockey, soccer, and lacrosse fields only used in the spring and summer, when the groundskeepers can unthaw them enough for us to play intramural games. From there, the school’s oak trees bleed into unruly forests of pine and witch hazel where the upperclassmen and postgrads drink and smoke and ultimately get caught by the dorm monitors. The farther south one goes, the more wilderness one encounters until one finds the wrought iron fence severing Redlake from the rest of Maine.

Helené’s driver follows the road east, into the campus proper. Kids filter between Gothic and Tudor buildings, laughing, shoving, and throwing their luggage onto porters’ carts so they aren’t forced to haul their lives up to their rooms themselves. This year, huddles of parents converse in tight knots, each clutching a folded red pamphlet emblazoned with Redlake’s crest to their chest, undoubtedly the new safety restrictions for the coming year. The huddles collect towards the middle school, where every child has a parent. At the curb where Helené and I stop, the high schoolers and postgrads, with a few exceptions, mill around without the suffocation of adults. Most chartered their drivers to take them this year, leaving concerned parents in the dust. Helené and I disembark. I call a porter to take our luggage, but unload the first few cases myself—to give me something to do during Helené’s greetings and dismissals of the normal underclassmen drawn to her glow, and the upperclassmen whose jealousy contorts into enchantment.

“Helené!” The floral scent of Helené’s mother’s Chanel No. 5 blankets the fall air. I’ve always liked Helené’s family. Helené and her mother kiss goodbye and exchange farewells in Creole. They don’t look much alike—one can see more of Helené’s heart-shaped face in her father, who stands next to his wife. But Helené and her mother wear their hair in the same way, in thin box braids that they twist into knots on the top of their heads for special occasions. Mrs. Billeaud motions in my direction. Helené holds her fingers like that too. “Miss Savos! Did you and my daughter have a good ride?”

She’d taken another car so that Helené and I could ride together. I set down my suitcase on a passing porter’s cart. “Yes, ma’am.”

Her hands press into my shoulder blades. The kisses we trade prickle my cheek.

“You take good care of my girl this year.”

“I will.” The smile I give is as pretty as it can be.

She fans her face under the rim of her umbrella. “Sometimes I don’t know why all these parents let their children go so far away.”

“The best arts education in the United States!” Helené waltzes between us. “Mama Dearest, Valentina and I have to go to our dorm room now.”

“Shouldn’t Valentina call her parents before the two of you go off?” Mrs. Billeaud smiles expectantly.

I realize I have forgotten to do so. I duck underneath a balcony and phone them. By the time I finish, Helené’s mother, father, and driver have departed and the rest of our luggage has disappeared up to our rooms. Porters point us towards the Southraven, the dean’s house. There, we approach the wooden table covered in bins of envelopes.

“Welcome back to Redlake, girls.” The woman behind the table, who I don’t recognize, holds out a clipboard. “Sign into your rooms please.”

“I haven’t seen you here before,” Helené says. “Is this because of Eve’s murder?”

The woman’s lips purse so tightly they disappear into her face. “I’m not allowed to say.”

“Are you new security?” The clipboard is set down on the table. Helené juggles the pen from hand to hand, but won’t sign.

“Redlake has been updating their policies.”

“Ah.” Helené passes the clipboard back to me, although I pass it back to the woman.

She looks down at the space where my signature belongs. “Miss Savos, you need to sign to access your room key.”

For a moment, the air around us tightens. Without touching me, Helené inserts herself between the woman and I. “Valentina has a special housing plan.” She scans the woman’s badge. “Mrs. Luminesk. She has all the proper papers, which you would have known if you weren’t new.”

So that Mrs. Luminesk can see the transfer of documents, Helené holds out her hand to me. I rummage through the bowels of my purse for the Manila folder. Once the woman reads it, she gives us both our keys—mine to a separate room. The sharp motions of her hands while the transfer takes place show how she deigns to do so.

By some miracle of Helené’s making, the two of us have been assigned to the same rooms as last year, in Lorkheron House, an eighteenth century gothic manor nestled between the back of the science building and the forest. The oak doors swing open with creaks that herald their years; I like that in this house the floors unleash a symphony of groans at every step and the stairs sing a fanfare. The carpets placed here at the dean’s request do little to muffle the cacophony—Lorkheron house tells us again and again of its age.

I could imagine some great story unfolding here. As we walk, jasmine perfumes tickle our throats. Every year, the houses receive a new crop of freshman; this year’s batch blinks wildly at the carved figures in the ceiling, and the red walls, which could be painted in their blood. We squeeze past them, around the granite fireplace, and up the wooden staircase that yawns in two. Helené and I take the rightmost stair.

We split ways at the student lounge. Neither Helené nor I have roommates to discuss study schedules or decorations with, so we take the time for ourselves, listening to what, for us, suits calm better than silence: the creaks and groan of Lorkheron wood, the scratching of cascades of pine needles being thrown against our windows, and students calling to each other across quads.

My suitcases have been brought up by the porters. Before unpacking them, I check the lock; grease stains my fingers and the key is tucked behind my dresser and its replacement weighs my neck down with its chain.

After weaving this year into my room, I do a bit of writing. I write about Helené, I write about rain on car windows, I write about Eve’s corpse wrapped in yellow caution tape.

At five PM, Helene comes to my room. She knocks; I fix my makeup and leave. Together, we avoid clusters of new students on the way to the student center for a few rounds of cards with the rest of the group in a lounge before dinner at eight. As we go, the campus falls unusually quiet. No boys play frisbee or spikeball in the quads. There are no shouts from the stables, or cries echoing from homesick kids in the dorms. Locks on every window glitter.

They’ve given us new keys to the student center. Helené points out that there were never locks on the public buildings before. They must be because of Eve, but she lets me come to that conclusion on my own.

Our phones grow warm in our pockets with strings of incoming texts set off by Helené: Already there! Of course! Be there shortly. Urgh, as soon as I can dorm monitor being a real— Keep the chat pg thirteen, Lisa! That’s not even how you spell PG-13.

The rain finished an hour or so ago, but muddy footprints track lines to different lounges through the halls. With the gothic interior gutted to make room for computers, vending machines, and illusion stairs, one could almost imagine this place outside Redlake, in some boarding school near the city. When one hears the conversation in passing that illusion dies away.

Did you hear about Eve?

No, I was on my family’s yacht in the Caribbean. Shitty cell service.

It’s a shame.

We won’t be able to sneak out anymore, will we?

Who cares? Mom’ll talk to them. Then we’ll be able to go wherever we want.

“Helené! Valentina!” A dark-haired head pokes around the corner of an upstairs lounge. “Here! It’s good to see you two!”

Emi, Helené, and I blow air kisses. William, who lurks in the corner by a vending machine, stretches out his acres of leg to greet us. He grew a fair amount over the summer; when we said goodbye in the spring, he was still a head shorter than me; now, his chin hovers several inches above my eyes.

Emi’s phone chirps. She checks it. “Lisa’s on her way. She’s just running into some trouble with our dorm monitor and the new keys. Did you meet Mrs. Luminesk?”

“Of course we did.” Helené picks a seat on one of the couches in the center of the room. She crosses one heel over the other, resting her bottom leg on an ottoman. All of us take our cues from her and find our own places: as always, we keep Helené in the center where all of us can see her. After a while, our verbal abuse of Mrs. Luminesk dries out and the conversations split; William and Helené exchange summer stories, Emi and I chat about various things in Spanish since Emi didn’t get the chance to go home this summer.

At about five-thirty, Tennyson and Lisa join us. Lisa sits down next to Emi, and Tennyson takes his customary place back to William. He glares at the vending machine. “What the hell happened to the snacks?”

William bolts up to look. “Those bastards.”

With a huff, Lisa just shakes her head, sending cascades of blonde hair falling down her shoulders from the bun at the base of her neck. Emi tucks the strands back up without Lisa noticing. “They changed it—”

“In July,” Lisa finishes. “Some bull about ‘healthier students’”.

“If admin really wanted healthier students,” Tennyson mumbles, “they’d think more about the stress levels their massive amounts of homework cause. Now, how am I supposed to stress eat my way through finals?”

“You don’t stress eat your way through anything,” Emi glowers, poking his stomach. “You weigh less than Valentina, and Valentina looks like she’d break if you patted her on the back too hard.”

“Tell us more about the vending machine’s self-destruction,” Helené

says.

Lisa complies. She and Emi detail the pamphlets slid under doors over the summer and how the administration made the change in order to fend off the copious amounts of letters from parents following healthy food trends. Apparently, the administration sent maintenance crews to empty the machines and dispose of the undesirable junk food, a feat which Lisa couldn’t stomach. Through a combination of sit-in protests, forcibly blocking the doors, and emailing back and forth with Helené,

Lisa and Emi managed to donate the rest of the food to a teen homeless shelter in New York. The knots holding up my shoulders start to unwind.

Helené holds court; when the story has finished unraveling, she nods her head at Tennyson to close the lounge door. He does so. We fall silent. Every eye turns to Helené. She cuts a striking figure against the couches, defiant, sculpted chin jutting out, resting on her elegantly twisted hands.

“So you all heard about Eve.”

We rustle to be near her, nodding our assents. Emi begins to cry, leaving Lisa to wrap her arms around her girlfriend and kiss the top of her head. On the other side of them, Tennyson and William exchange worried looks. The combination of Emi’s tears and the drumbeat of Tennyson’s foot stamping thunders our own private rainstorm.

Slowly, Helené slides her phone out of the pocket of her jacket and hits play. Real rain fills the room—the sound of Helené’s conversation with the police officer all but drowned out in the scattered crashes and pounding—beneath it all whistles the wind; I hear what might be Helené’s breathing... what might be mine... harmonizing with the low idling of our car.

Then the resonance shifts. A new sound cracks through the monotony. The sharp tenor of voices I missed. Helené must have changed the recording settings under the guise of fiddling with the knobs of my umbrella.

Unmistakably, the female officer says: They’re not the voices on the phone call.

To which the other officers respond:

Maybe they know whoever made it.

Since everyone involved goes to Redlake.

The recording shuts off. Helené leaves her phone on the table. Silence holds. The red walls take turns marching in on our circle.

Helené’s voice comes out low, so low that even if some phantom murderer presses their ears against the door, they’ll only hear Tennyson’s feet scuffing. “The police have made no arrests for Eve’s murder.”

Helené lifting her phone captivates us. Every flashing number as she inputs her passcode milks adrenaline into my veins. 223487.

“Parents got the news before we did, of course. When my mom told me about the death, I started making as many condolence calls as I could. Eve’s parents wouldn’t take any means of communication, I could only assume they were busy with police reports and funeral arrangements. I did get through to Gwenyth.”

Gwenyth was Eve’s—although I don’t know how she feels about the dead—best friend. I haven’t seen her today. Where is she? Will she be joining us? Helené has a way with people.

But Helené catches my inadvertent glance towards the door. “No. She’s not coming back this year.”

“Where’s she going then?” Tennyson asks.

In response, Helené passes him her phone. He reads; his eyebrows furrow. Tennyson hands it to William, who skims whatever’s on the screen before passing it to Lisa, who holds it out to Emi, so they can both read, and from them, it ends up in my left hand. Lisa has the kind of white skin that’s like spoiled milk; susceptible to color changes and riddled with acne along her hairline that she must be on some new regimen for, because it’s almost disappeared over the summer. Her skin flares red if she gets a wrong answer, sours and peels with exposure to sunlight, and, when disturbed, drains until mottled with blue and green.

Emi trails one hand down Lisa’s thyme colored cheek. Wordlessly, they hold each other.

I scroll to the top of what appears to be a transcript. I read down again. I hand the phone back to Helené. Attempt to. My fingers tremble so hard the phone falls to the floor, face down.

Helené reaches down to grab it.

“Moment of truth,” William cracks. No one returns his half-hearted smile.

A thin, hairline crack mars the screen from top to bottom.

“I’m sorry.”

Helené waves away my apology. “I wanted a new phone anyway. I’ll take care of it when we’re finally cleared to go back into town. Did everyone read?”

In synchrony, we nod.

“That... was the call that I made to Gwenyth. From what I could glean from the hysteria—wild accusations about anyone and everyone at Redlake—she was supposed to visit Eve the day of her murder.” Helené pauses.

Lisa fills in. “But didn’t. Because she thought Eve was going crazy.”

“Gwenyth thought nobody would possibly want to make such bizarre death threats to a sweet little rich girl like Eve. But then again, we know what happened, don’t we?” Helené twists her hair around her shoulders, the garnet color of her hair throwing red light on Tennyson’s face. “And the next thing we know, Gwenyth’s been put in a treatment center.”

“For what?” Lisa’s eyes narrow.

The air around Helené seems to warp, and Helené, in all of her righteous justice, steals the next breath from my throat. “Apparently, she tried to throw herself off a building, but her brother grabbed her in time. Either way, she’s not allowed to have visitors, or talk to the police without parental consent, which hasn’t been given.”

With that, bells from the chapel begin to ring, sending us all scurrying downstairs for dinner. We take our spot in the middle, surrounded by two long, wooden tables, sounds, and lights from old chandeliers. The kitchen overflows with sweet smelling steam. Table by table the teachers dismiss us to circle the buffet style food lines welling with hushed conversation. Thunderstorms, tears, condensation—wet has settled in my hair today, trailing its way down my spine.

Back sitting on our benches, the conversation ebbs and flows between various things that all touch, in some way, on Eve. My mind spins images of her body, all extrapolating from the photo of her arm… Tennyson and William lose interest in Emi and Lisa’s discussion of the garden they planted on their dorm window ledge—was Eve buried with flowers and trees?—starting to thumb wrestle between their plates, Tennyson’s mahogany hand intertwining with William’s rose colored fingers. Eve, breaking her nails against the palm of whoever held her.

Helené stops pushing her food around her plate to look at me. Everything will turn out alright. Her eyes say it. I trust her. I have to. Bits of rice stick in the back of my throat, and I need more than one glass of water to dislodge them.

Dinner morphs into dessert. Melting ice cream coats fingers—the traditional Redlake first day desert, although with a quick survey of the room, no one eats. Students orbit Eve’s and Gwenyth’s table, empty now, but no one sits. At the head of the room, the headmaster steps down from her staff balcony and begins to speak with us.... her words pass through my head without leaving a mark... I heard more from Helené…

Fear carves the pupils of students around me to slits. The new freshmen whisper and rustle and ask themselves what kind of school they chose, in contrast to the upperclassmen like us, who sit stock still. Listening. Or too sick to make a sound.

“We expect all Redlake students to be cooperative with any investigation. The police may be conducting interviews within the school. Your parents will be asked to sit in on those meetings to protect student safety and privacy,” the headmistress says.

The room seethes. Then we are asked for a moment of silence in Eve’s memory. Redlake bows its head.

The headmistress ends her remarks with a warning: “Remember, Redlake can guarantee your safety on campus, but once you leave the gates, there aren’t any security guards or cameras watching out for you. Stay here, stay safe.” She steps down from her podium.

We splinter into chatter. Different teachers take the stand, testifying as to their condolences, their new anti-cheating policies, their hopes for this year. The room never goes back to quiet.

Hidden in the burble of words Helené leans towards us. “If someone here killed Eve, we have a responsibility to find them.”

We all nod, pledging ourselves to her—of course we do. We follow Helené like the sun. We follow her like the moon. She is the river that wears away the flaws and falsities of our canyons and the canyon that guides our waters down to the ocean, the place we finally belong. Helené is all we have.