Page 5 of The Library at Hellebore
I did, but I glared balefully at her instead, happy in my meanness.
“I was wondering,” she said, clearing her throat, “if you had an Asian name too.”
It took me entirely too long to parse her question, so appalled was I at her presumptuousness, and when I did, all I could do was bray with laughter.
“What’s so funny?” she demanded.
“Listen, just listen for a second,” I said when I had the wherewithal to speak coherently again, swabbing the tears from my eyes with a sleeve. “It’s very clear to me that I am the last person you wanted in this room with you—”
“That isunfair.”
“—and you are trying so very hard to be polite,” I continued, inexorable, remorseless as the heat death of the universe.“But with all respect, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be your friend. And I damn well don’t want to play twenty questions. Also,really? Do you not think it’s maybe a little bit gauche to ask for someone’s whole and truest name? I have absolutely read up on what people do with such things. Haven’t you?”
The flimsy edifice of her self-esteem broke at last, her smile vanishing like kerosene-soaked paper touched to a flame. She bleated something that might have included the wordsorryas she rose, stiff-limbed and sobbing, to totter out of the room.
In her hurry to leave, Johanna left the door ajar, and I watched in silence as the corridor filled with people. A great majority were in their late teens, early twenties; a few anomalies drifted through the throng: sorcerous-looking geriatrics in jewel-hued robes and prepubescents who all but sloshed in their school attire, hems dragging. Most strode past without acknowledging the exposed entryway. Those few who did met my eyes with a mix of disapproval and uncertainty, their expressions ranging from furtive to frightened. It wasn’t until much later that I would understand why that open door was such an egregious sight in Hellebore.
More bells began to sound, deep and mournful. The students increased their pace, all funneling in the same direction. I wonder sometimes what might have happened if I had been kinder to Johanna, or quicker to move, if I had been savvy enough to close the door, hide myself, scale down from a window, do anything other than gawk moronically at the crowd while in plain view of the hall. If nothing else, I think I’d at least have kept my dignity.
“Assembly,” slurred a custardy, rotted voice, a voice that could only have come from lungs that had ballooned with decay and a throat so rimed with bacterial overgrowth it wasborderline useless. Yet despite this, the word was spoken with no little volume. It boomed loudly enough to echo through my bones.
My mother used to tell me that in the seventies, there had been a preoccupation with anthropomorphizing food—likely to disguise the fact none of it was very good. The massive figure leering through the doorway might have been a Christmas centerpiece from back then. Its head resembled a child’s papier-mâché masterstroke in all but one way. Whoever had created the thing hadn’t had any paper on hand and so had resorted to sheets of raw muscle instead. It had eyes but no eyelids, a lipless grin of a mouth. It wept lymph as it stared at me, never breaking eye contact, not even as it ducked to enter the room, upsettingly graceful for what was essentially a giant Lego figure crafted of uncooked meat. I screamed. I screamed like a little girl handed a frog for the first time.
“Assembly,” it said again, shambling forward, and that was very much it for my escape fantasies.
The meat man waited until I dressed before herding me into a vaulted corridor, the ceiling frescoed with dead men swaying from nooses of their own intestines, all hung on the branches of fig trees so heavy with fruit their boughs sagged almost to the ground; with black-haired, blank-faced women who had the eyes and wings of wasps, hovering above labyrinths of books; sweet-faced knights too young and too lithe for their pitted ancient armor; and carnivorous deer. The last was an especially prominent motif. The artist was obsessed with those deer. They had them in every scene. Sometimes, the deer were prey, supine before triumphant hunters, a glory of entrails bared to the eye. Most times, though, the deer werethe predators, stalking frightened men through black woods, their muzzles steaming, a red glare in their eyes, which were only pupil.
“The painter was a woman named Bella Khoury,” came a conspiratorial voice in my ear, its timbre low, amused. “Legend has it that she used her own blood to create those.”
I looked over. Beside me, falling in graceful lockstep, was an older girl in an ensemble—she had on at least three layers of finely made, carefully layered tweed—that should have had her basting in sweat but somehow did not. “That so?”
“Oh yes. That part was true. The part that was a lie was that she did it because a man had broken her heart,” said the girl drolly. “Can you imagine? Amaninspiring such art?”
I laughed. She laughed. I guessed my companion to be about twenty-five from the soft lines beginning to fan from the corners of her eyes and the edges of her mouth; she carried herself like someone much older, though. The horn-rimmed glasses and slightly myopic stare didn’t help that impression at all.
“Was she the one who came up with the school’s heraldic crest? Seems like her style.”
“I think it was the other way around, actually. She spent the entirety of her time in Hellebore painting the ceilings like she was possessed. After graduation, she purportedly vanished, and the school decided to honor her by incorporating her favorite design elements into the armorials,” said the girl, shedding her glasses to raise them up to a slat of pale light. No dust traveled the beam, which seemed impossible given the walls were drenched in gold-shot, ancient-looking tapestries. There should have been dust everywhere, no matter how vigorous the janitorial staff. There should have been atleastsome,but against all logic the air remained clean and unpleasantly equatorial.
“Did all this work get her extra credit?” I asked.
“It got her immortalized.”
“Good enough, I guess. What can any of us ask?”
The girl buffed her eyewear on a sleeve, then replaced them on her nose, smiling thinly at me when she was done. She was unreasonably beautiful even with her eye bags, which were the density of neutron stars: she had a face for magazine covers, a profile someone with more smarm might have described as editorial, with its high cheekbones and amused mouth.
“Portia,” she said.
“Is that what they ask for?” I couldn’t help myself, a hint of a flirt in my voice. “Your name? I don’t blame them.”
Her answering melancholic smile had my heart misplacing a beat. “They usually start with your name. Then it gets much worse from there.”
I didn’t have an adequate response for that. Everything I thought of felt too glib, too naïve. Her voice carried a burden of history and it felt then like if I wasn’t careful, the weight of it would crush whatever might be growing between us. The fact I worried about the early death of this small and uncertain thing would surprise me later when I had time to sleep and ruminate on the events of that first day. I couldn’t remember the last time I cared to nurse a conversation like that, couldn’t rememberwantingtenderness or ever having any knowledge of its shape. Right then, though, all I wanted was for her to stay.
“I’m Alessa, by the way. Alessa Li. Now that you have my name, we’re even. I can’t do anything to you that you can’t do to me.”
Her smile dimpled along her right cheek. “Shame.”
