Page 4 of The Library at Hellebore
I was told by Hellebore’s guidance counselor that such murder sprees were common with girls like me. She was a Swedish woman, lean, small-breasted, often attired in starchy suits inthe same sodium white of her hair. She smiled like the expression had been taught to her from a manual, and looked like the first abandoned draft for what would become Tilda Swinton. According to her, what we did was natural instinct, a response engendered by a lifetime spent being waterboarded with systemic misogyny: we were angry and we wereacting out.
Hellebore could teach us to be better than our impulses, or so student services claimed. It was what the Ministry guaranteed the world. If you forced me to say one nice thing about Hellebore, I’d give it this: the marketing for the institute is award-winning, Everything that has ever been written about Hellebore suggests it is a place of redemption, a place where the unwanted become the coveted. People dreamt of enrollment. It was the highest possible honor.
No one, of course, said anything about the fact Hellebore sometimes kidnaps its students. My salvation was put into motion with neither my awareness nor my consent. I’d mentioned earlier there were students for whom Hellebore represented escape, an alternative to the killing chute of their lives. But not everyonechoosesHellebore. Many were apparently enrolled the way I was.Conscripted,really. One night, I went to sleep in my shitty tenement in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges. The next day, I woke up in the dormitory, primly dressed in plaid pajamas, my hair brushed to a gloss. The bed I occupied was the largest I’d ever slept on, a California king with a wrought iron canopy strung with fairy lights and muslin. The duvet was a stiff enamel jacquard subtly inlaid with gold leaf, the sheets themselves a plain and sturdy cream-colored cotton, and there were more pillows than reasonable, like someone had wanted to build me a cairn of goose down and pewter silk.
None of my belongings survived my transit into Hellebore’s vaunted ranks. Instead of my things, I found steamertrunks—I should have run when I saw the scratched-out name, theBcarved over and over into the wood, the mottling along the leather straps; I should have known what they were, the discolorations, the corroded grisailles of dried blood, andrun—under the skirts of my bed. Inside were uniforms; Peter Pan–collared dresses (the school had an archaic concept of gender expression) in what turned out to be the school colors, jasper and emerald and oxidized silver; well-tailored suits in the same palette; winter gear inclusive of fur-trimmed capelets; modest heels, walking boots; demure underwear; hats; textbooks; alchemic tools; and magical paraphernalia. Every single item was embossed with Hellebore’s heraldry: fig wasps and the school’s namesake threaded through the antlers of a deer skull, its tines strung with runes and staring eyes.
The first words out of my mouth when I’d inventoried the mess were, “I guess I’m a wizard then.”
I remember laughing myself sick.
What a fucking idiot I was.
Like I said, I should have started running right there and then, and maybe I would have. Maybe I’d have clawed out of those flannel jammies, put on shoes, and bolted amid the chaos of orientation if the situation were even infinitesimally different. If I had been alone that day, with no one but the buttery morning light to bear witness to my escape. But I wasn’t.
A full minute after my histrionics, a timid female voice to my right said, “I guess that makes me one too.”
BEFORE
A small white hand hooked around a fold of my bed’s drapery and began to pull. I caught it by the fingers before it could complete the motion; the skin under my palm was clammy, unnaturally hot, as if a furnace burned under the surface.
“Who?” I began. It wasn’t just the owner of the hand who was fever-warm, but the room itself: the heaters were on at full blast. I could hear steam chatter and clank through a maze of pipes, hissing like a cornered animal. “The fuck are you?”
The hand slid out of mine. A white girl of similar age to me shouldered through the canopy and sat herself on the edge of my new bed, hands set primly on her thighs. She was very blond, very pretty, very much something that made every hair on the back of my neck rise. My skin wanted to crawl down between the mattress and its frame. It was her eyes, I decided, that had so thoroughly upset me. They were wide and green where they weren’t dilated pupil, a noxious and effulgent shade of absinthe. Paired with the docile smile she wore, her eyes made her look like a wolf serving time in the brain of a fawn, a wolf so starved it would eat through its own belly if only it could reach.
“I’m Johanna,” she said meekly. Healing sores dappled the cream of her throat, like bite marks.“I think you’re my roommate, which isnotwhat I was expecting.”
She ended the sentence with a frazzled laugh, both an accusation and an apology in her expression. There was something in her tone I did not like, a thoughtless possessiveness over our current environment that said to me this wasn’t someone who had ever been toldno.Johanna wound a hank of golden hair around a finger until the skin of the digit turned white.
“Did you wake up here too?” I said, in lieu of asking,What were you expecting?
“I came here the normal way,” she said. Cathedral windows sprawled over the wall opposite my bed, showing mountain peaks crowned with snow. “Me and my best friend, we applied to be students in Hellebore and were approved.”
“Good for you.”
When I said nothing further, Johanna added: “Her name is Stefania.”
“I didn’t ask.”
To Johanna’s credit, she hardly reacted to my vitriol. If I hadn’t been eagerly looking, I’d have missed the sudden flutter in her mouth and at the corners of her eyes, as if a current had been very briefly run through her, but I was, and it made me grin to see. She was human enough to upset, then.Good.
“So,” she said, too well-bred to be kept on the back foot for long. Her expression cleared and it was like the sun coming out after a thousand years of dark. Her smile should have reduced me to worshipful cinders; it should have made me want to beg forgiveness for being such a hateful little gremlin. Under different circumstances, it even might have. However, I’d been recently kidnapped in my sleep by educators and I waspissed.“What’s your name?”
“Alessa,” I said absently, looking over the room again. Adistant bell tolled what I assumed to be the hour. Softer still was a murmur of voices seeping through the pearl-colored walls. “Alessa Li.”
Johanna nodded and freed a small leather-bound notebook from a pocket in her dress, licked the tip of a finger, and began leafing through the water-warped, much-highlighted pages until she arrived at a blank space. She wrote my name down, underlining it twice.
“Is that your full name?” she asked conscientiously.
I stared at her in blunt amazement.
“What?”
My new roommate colored. “East Asian people tend to have more than one name, don’t they? Alessa would be your Christian name—”
“I’m not Christian.”
“Okay, that wasn’t the best choice of word, but you know what I mean.”
