Page 42 of The Library at Hellebore

“Oh, please. We’re in Hellebore. You’renotscary.”

Stefania swaggered forward a step, the duvet forgotten in a heap.

“I’m not trying to scare you,” she said. “I’m just telling you what’ll happen if you keep fucking around.”

I decided then that I wanted a fight. It’d been a long enough day. I no longer wanted to cry myself hoarse but there was nonetheless a welter of raw emotion that needed release or I would implode. A fight, one full of literal teeth, with someone who acted like they were spoiling for the same, felt exactly like what the doctor had ordered.

But then, because she was that kind of sanctimonious bleeding-heart showboat, Johanna rushed between us, arms out and palms raised so we would keep separate.

“Please,” she said, voice trembling. “It was an honest mistake. We thought—”

“I was only gone for a few hours!”

“Days,” she corrected.

I paused.

“What do you meandays?”

“As in, multiple twenty-four-hour periods,” said Stefania, a bit unnecessarily. “Three, to be precise.”

“I’ve been gone for three days?” Any thought of violence died with the revelation. My interlude with the headmaster had felt like minutes. I could have understood it being actual hours, what with how trauma could smudge one’s perception of time. But days? Small wonder that Johanna had given me up for dead.

“People die quick around here,” said Stefania.

“In that case,” I said. “I guess I’m… sorry for losing my shit.”

Johanna spluttered. Stefania tensed like she’d expected me to sucker punch her. When it became clear I was being sincere, the pair dropped their own pretenses. Johanna collected herself; Stefania zippered up the mouths that had opened across her, faint red inflammations where the lipless maws had welded themselves shut the only sign they’d ever been there.

“Words I’d never thought would come out of your mouth,” said Stefania. When I glared at her, she shrugged, unrepentant, and said, “Johanna is my best friend. I have heard all the stories.”

“Look, it’s fine,” said Johanna, her smile brittle and bright as glass, a fever light in her blue eyes. “Things happen. We’re all tense. Alessa, I hope you can forgive me—”

“Done,” I said, not wanting to hear her flagellate. “As long as you can promise me you haven’t given away any of my things.”

“We were hoping to disinfect them first, so no,” said Stefania.

“Under different circumstances, I could see us being friends,” I said.

“Under different circumstances,” said Stefania in return, “I could see eating you.”

I shouldered past her to where they’d stacked my personal effects, leafing through the piles, still unsettled by the thought that the headmaster couldcontrol time.There’d been a glutinous hallucinatory quality to those first few weeks, a sense of being toyed with; of lost hours and endless afternoons steeped in a fatal dullness, the tedium such that it made me desperate to do crimes. Now, with this recent discovery, it felt like a definite thing, the implications of which terrified me in a way I wasn’t at all ready to process. So I locked my abject horror behind a smirk, hoping neither of them would scent my new weakness. “And I wouldn’t even need to ask? You’re such a darling.”

“Fine, I’m alittlesorry we ransacked your side of the room.” Her expression said this was the most contrition she was willing to show which was, well, fair. Anyone who’d ever met me knew Stefania was justified. Myself included.

I twitched a shoulder in her direction in acknowledgment, and Stefania rolled her eyes. Johanna sighed. I didn’t blame her. There’d been progress in our relationship, something she had made clear she was overjoyed about, and it was evident that all of that would be set back by this confrontation with Stefania.

I glanced at the reading nook she’d cajoled me into helping her assemble: we’d scavenged furniture from across Hellebore, pulling it from shadowed corners and store rooms, even a standing lamp from the amphitheater where the headmaster performed her inaugural address. The armchair we recovered last week—last month, last year,who fucking knewwith a time-bending headmaster—was the crowning piece: piebald for the most part but still beautiful where it wasn’t, a linen-tonedcream scarified by years of use, but so very comfortable from the weathering. It was into its seat that Johanna poured herself, knees to her chest, an arm comfortably wrapped around her legs. She stared at me, beaming sunnily, like we were girls at a sleepover and not trapped rats.

“Are you going to tell us what the story is with you and Rowan?”

I stared uncomprehendingly at her for a pathetically long time before what she meant clicked in my head.

“Oh,” I said, intelligently. The thought of being in competition with Johanna for anything, least of all aboy,curdled my stomach. “No, it’s not like that. I promise.”

She pursed her mouth. “I’m not jealous.”

The remark caught me off guard.

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