Page 43 of The Library at Hellebore

“Why would you be jealous? Oh.”

Stefania rolled her eyes with so much enthusiasm, I briefly expected them to clatter onto the floor. “Everyone knows they’re sleeping together.”

“I did not need to be part of that group,” I said. “Also, how?”

Johanna pinked winsomely.

“Barriers are a thing,” said Stefania, tugging at the skin along her nose bridge, aghast to play interpreter in this frankly uncomfortable conversation. “It’s basically magical herpes.”

I mimed frantically hanging myself, flinging an invisible rope over the rafters and tugging with due gusto. “I did not need to hear those words.Magical herpes.Kill me now. Take my room. I want nothing more than to die. Don’t let me live a life knowing those words have been said in sequence.”

“Oh my god, Stef!” said Johanna.

“Well, it is. Anyway, they do a lot of hand stuff.”

My roommate’s cheeks deepened from an attractiverosiness to a lurid, nearly purplish red. For once, we were in alignment: neither of us were happy to have the mechanics of deathworker sex outlined so thoroughly. Groaning, Johanna sank her head under her pillows, while Stefania looked dispassionately on.

“I interrupted. What were you going to say?”

“Kill me,” I said.

“Me first,” said Johanna and I was alarmed by how dangerously close we were to developing a rapport over this.

I studied the letter again in lieu of contemplating the logistics of avoidingmagical herpes,affrighted at the concept I might be misreading a proposition. The triple underline could have been symbolic of sexual intent, I suppose, but I was practically illiterate in the habits of my own generation so who the hell knew?

“I don’t want him.”

Johanna sprang back up. “It’s okay if you do—”

“He’s a skinny weirdo. Sorry you don’t have any taste.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Stefania, settling on the satin nightmare of Johanna’s bed. Snacks were spread over the foliated duvet, the sight of which made me only nominally sorry for my own continued existence: they’d been planning a celebration.

I thought about this more. I didn’t know yet what I felt about Rowan; had rarely, if ever, spent much time dissecting my feelings as a general whole, but I knew I didn’t hate him. Something about him resonated: a sense of kinship, of recognition and being recognized.

“Look, the two of us are entirely too alike for there to be any kind of attraction,” I said. “Just, no.”

“Mutual interests are important for compatibility,” said Johanna and then: “It’s okay. Honestly. We’re just friends.”

“With benefits,” said Stefania.

I chewed on my first response a dutiful twenty-five times before swallowing it down, smiling instead as Stefania broke into a packet of sriracha-flavored corn chips. “If you say so,” I managed, and it almost sounded polite.

“What the hell happened in the garden that day?” asked Stefania.Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.She ate with her mouth open. “Fleur was furious.”

“He was all the school could talk about for a day and a half. A deathworkerherein Hellebore,” said Johanna. “Most people weren’t aware of this beforehand. Now they are, and well, I think that’s a good thing.”

Deathworkers were almost indistinguishable from folklore at this juncture of history. Most died while in the gestation phase, necrotizing their mothers’ wombs within days of implantation: the poor women were inevitably found liquefied, sludge and rot and nothing more, their little embryonic murderers dead in the decay. The few deathworkers who survived to birth generally found themselves snapped up immediately, spirited away by cults and demon-possessed ministers, anyone with ideations of world domination. Rowan was a winning lottery ticket, an urban legend, and now, with the stunt he pulled in the garden, he was a target.

“I don’t understand why anyone’s surprised,” said Stefania, a sigh in every syllable. “If there was anywhere you’d see a deathworker, it’d be here.”

Johanna shrugged. Semantics weren’t of interest to her, were rarely ever of any interest to her as they had a tendency to muddy the story, and it was the story Johanna loved best. She stared at me, unblinking, those green eyes of hers like tumbled malachite, deeper than Rowan’s, richer in hue.

“Whatever the case, are you going to go see him?” she said a little breathlessly.

I reread the letter—note,really, but his overelaborate packaging of it was the stuff of Jane Austen romances, and the wordletter,with its implications of careful thought and long meditations on content, felt like the only word that did the presentation justice—Rowan had sent for what felt like the umpteenth time, lingering on theFor Reasons.

“Sure, why the hell not?”

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