Page 31 of House of Hearts
“That was his last message to us,” Sadie sighs, and with a tap of her finger, her phone returns to life. The screen is blank like the last two minutes never happened, and when she finds her group message with Calvin and Percy, there’s only one iteration of his text.
And it was sent last fall.
Birdie clenches a hand over her mouth, but all I can do is stand there. Stubborn tears prick in the corners of my eyes, and I swat at them before they can fall. I can’t do this.I can’t do this!
I stagger back two steps at a time, wanting to place as muchdistance as I can between myself and this crazy situation.
“You didn’t strike me as the type of person who’s easily scared,” Calvin says, and he’s right, I’m not, but that’s because there’s always been an explanation. Logic hiding behind every bump in the night.
My own haunted message loops in my brain,find Percy, over and over and over again.What good will my revenge do if I’m finding a sack of bones and asking it to confess? And if this truly is a curse and not cold-blooded murder, there’s nothing for me to prove and no way to get closure. How do you get justice when the culprit has been dead for over a hundred years?
No, no, it’s not possible. Itisn’tpossible.
“I’m not scared,” I snap. “I’m just not the type of person who likes wasting time.”
Sadie’s the first to speak up again as I storm my way over to the office door. “Where are you going?”
I turn back with my hand gripping the knob. “Anywhere but here.”
11
There’s a mummy in the dorm hall.
Luckily, it’s the toilet paper kind.
“Don’t snitch to the RA,” Amber says the moment I step inside. It’s about a month too early for Halloween, but the decorations are already in full swing. She’s got three bundles stolen from the girls’ bathroom and she’s currently in the process of mummifying her door in one-ply rolls. Her roommate—a girl whose name I never bothered to learn despite hearing it ten times—is assisting her with duct tape and moral support.
“You have my blessing to steal it all,” I tell her as I rummage around in my pockets for my keys. I was in such a mad scramble to get out of the Cards meeting, but now that I’m back in the dorms, I’ve returned to the land of logic. Storming off and leaving has been replaced by a carefully laid exit plan: pack my belongings, call my mom to come and get me, and then discuss with the registrar’s office how to get my transfer initiated. Once I get home, I’ll plan out my next move.
Still, I can’t help but feel wrong for it all. Emoree’s face is forever seared in my mind,find Percystitched beside her gap-toothed grin. My whole reason for coming here is muddied in a single instant.
“Where’s Birdie?” Amber asks innocently. Her tone might’vefooled me if I wasn’t so good at detecting the jealousy lodged in her throat. It’s been there since Sunday morning when she’d loitered in our doorway in pink silk pajamas.
“Mom said she’d order pity brunch for us if you’d like to have a consolation-prize picnic today. Who gives a shit about the Cards, anyway?”
Birdie had wet her lips, her eyes shyly darting to mine before lifting a Queen of Hearts in the air. I had followed suit. “Sorry, Amber.”
Amber’s smile had wavered on her face, disappearing for only a second before it returned with strained force. “C-celebration brunch, then.”
She’s wearing the same look now: a flash of white teeth, a crinkle of her nose, smiling and yet looking utterly dejected all at once.
“Back in the House of Hearts,” I answer truthfully, and she nods as if she expected that but still doesn’t like the answer.
“That makes sense,” she says, busying herself with a piece of Velcro on the door. “Totally explains why she hasn’t texted back yet. I was going to ask if you guys wanted matching dorm decorations, but…another day, probably.”
I’ll be long gone in a week, but I can’t fight the need to comfort her in some small way. Despite it all, Amber and Birdie have been nothing but nice to me—until I messed everything up with Birdie and torched our relationship to the ground. “I’m sure she’d love that. Your door looks awesome.”
That seems to shake some of the jealousy away, and she beams proudly at her hard work. “Liz and I did a good job, huh?”
Liz—whose name I will promptly forget again in the next hour—flashes me a rubber band smile, her braces a bright neon pink. “I made it as historically accurate as possible.”
“Yeah.” Amber snorts. “My googly eyes were vetoed.”
With that, she whips out her camera to snap photos of her door for theHerald. I’m not sure promoting your own arts and crafts on the front page counts as heavy-hitting journalism, but I can’t deny it’s front-page-worthy.
It’s definitely well done. There are the four sons of Horus depicted in construction paper jars and Velcroed in place under the door handle. Back in ancient Egypt, they’d remove the stomach, liver, lungs, and intestines and leave only the heart intact—the core of someone’s being.
My stomach is intact, but I think my brain might be in a jar somewhere.
