Page 56 of House of Hearts
I didn’t dignify her question with an answer.
“Be careful,” she warned when the silence between us persisted. “You have seen our mother’s marriage. Some men know how to burn a girl down and leave nothing but ash in their wake.”
—Anastasia Hart
17
Monday is a gloomy affair. The whole campus has grayed out over the weekend, grown stiff and cold like a funeral procession. The streamers have been picked off the ground and the gourds have been thrown in the trash and the madness of Friday is overtaken by the monotony of the several weeks until Thanksgiving break.
Dr.Sampson might be prattling on about Ovid’sThe Art of Lovein class, but I can’t focus on Ovid talking about hunting women like stags and getting them to sleep with him in 1Bce. The only note written in the margins of my journal issleep of eldest prior.
Graphite digs a hole in the page, and I groan to myself. Is this curse really that hard to parse? I feel like the answer is infuriatingly in reach, but I’m this close to slamming my head into the desk when Calvin waltzes in late, per usual.
His tardy arrival shouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary, but he’s acting incredibly off. Calvin is the type of guy to strut into a room and bask in everyone’s attention like his very life depends on it.
Right now he seems like a paranoid husk of himself.
“Is he okay?” Birdie whispers from our balcony seats. “He looks…”
She doesn’t need to finish that thought as he scrambles his wayup the steps and trips over his own two feet in the process. He’s not looking where he’s going because he’s busy looking everywhere else, scoping out all the corners as if he expects a hit man to be waiting in the wings. When no one takes him down in a mafia-style assassination attempt, he manages to secure his seat, and even then, he searches the room frantically.
Tripp throws him a weird look, but even he must understand that finding your brother in a magical coma does this to a guy.
Class continues like that. Our professor prattles on while Calvin gets jumpier by the second. His paranoia reaches a boiling point mid-lecture and manifests in the snap of a pencil between his fingertips. The pressure splinters it in two and the eraser half thunks into a girl’s head in front of him.
Dr.Sampson’s stub of chalk drags a screeching path down the blackboard, and the sound has Calvin erupting from his seat. He flies up in a worried frenzy, his chair skidding back as he rises to his feet before it tips backward onto the floor.
The class has gone deathly silent, the only sound the flustered panic of Calvin throwing his belongings haphazardly in his bag, papers flying all around him and his expression distant and horrified.
He doesn’t say a word on his way out, just takes the stairs two at a time and escapes the room with a ragged breath and a slam of the door behind him.
The auditorium breaks out in a whispered chorus of gossip. “What the hell was that about?”
For the first time ever, even Tripp seems thrown off as he looks up from his phone to our balcony seats. He doesn’t need to say a word as he meets our eyes because it’s written all over his face.
Something is wrong with Calvin.
It continues like that all week. The next incident falls on Tuesday morning in Sutherland Hall. We briefly make eye contact across the dining hall, and he promptly freaks out. There’s no warning as he drops his untouched food, tray and all, into the trash and runs out.
“God, what’s his damage?” Amber asks, first to Oliver and then to the rest of us when her boyfriend only shrugs. “He was like this in study hall with me, too. He was so weird, it actually inspired me. Okay, follow me here, guys. Full spread in theHerald. Title: ‘Lockwell’s Lost It.’ How does that sound?”
Oliver crunches a celery stick between his teeth and uses half of it to point at her. “It sounds like a lawsuit.”
“A lawsuit for what?”
“Libel.”
She huffs. “Is it libel if it’s true?”
Cafeteria-gate isn’t the last Lockwell incident. It happens again as I’m racing to Shakespearean Lit. The class is hardly worth racing for when I have a Queen of Hearts card in my pocket, but I hate using it and I hate being late for anything most of all.
I run into Calvin outside the English building. He’s muttering to himself while walking in a frantic circle. Cracking his knuckles, chewing on his nails, messing up his already-messed-up hair.
I know I should force myself to walk past him and make it to class, but my legs have another agenda entirely. Before I know it, I’m standing at his back, tugging on his sleeve.
“Calvin?” I ask, and that simple word is all it takes to break him from his trance.
It zaps to the core of him, and he quickly stumbles away, staring atme in what can only be described as an unflattering blend of shock and horror.
