Page 7 of Breaking Isolde
I kill the afternoon by reading my class schedule a hundred times and plotting the shortest routes between every building on the map. Archer House has no real common room, just a converted parlor with shitty couches, an ancient fireplace, and a table stacked with abandoned puzzles and a deck of dog-eared playing cards. I pick the couch closest to the door, back to the wall, and lay out my entire arsenal: highlighters, old field notebook, my phone, and the first three weeks of syllabi I downloaded from the Academy’s network.
I watch the minute hand chase itself around the clock. The wind rattles the glass every so often, and sometimes I catch a shadow moving past the window, fast enough to make me doubt I saw anything at all.
When the grandfather clock in the foyer whines out six chimes, I hear footsteps above my head. Slow, steady, deliberate. They descend the staircase, and each creak lands like a warning.
The second roommate is nothing like Charlie. She moves with the caution of a cat in an unfamiliar house, eyes scanning every corner. She has the kind of brown hair you forget as soon asyou see it, tied back with a rubber band. Her glasses are too big for her face, and the lenses catch every bit of overhead light, hiding her eyes unless you stare. She’s hugging three thick environmental science textbooks to her chest, and I doubt her skin has seen the sun in a year.
She says nothing at first, just drops the books onto the table, and turns her gaze to me.
I raise my hand in an awkward half-wave. “Isolde,” I say, for the record.
She nods, lets the silence linger, then says, “Lucy.” Her voice is lower and sharper than I expected. She sits at the opposite end of the couch and opens one of the textbooks, flipping immediately to a page she’s already annotated in blue ink.
I count twenty-two seconds before she speaks again. “You’re the new roommate.”
“Apparently,” I say.
Lucy’s face doesn’t move. She uses a pen to underline something, then looks up at me over the frames. “What are you doing here?” The question isn’t friendly, but it isn’t hostile either. It’s pure curiosity, stripped of any social bullshit.
I flip my notebook closed. “Classes start Monday. I wanted to get a head start.”
She seems to accept this. “No one ever lasts in this house,” she says, like it’s a trivia fact.
Charlie arrives with a bang, slamming the door behind her and shedding her coat as she skips into the room. “Party time!” she shouts, then checks the mood and dials it down to a nervous laugh. “What’s up, bitches?”
Lucy doesn’t answer. I think maybe she’s already gone blind to the rest of us.
Charlie plops down next to me and peers at my schedule. “Ooh, you have Abernathy for Genetics? He’s a psycho. Failed half the football team last year for cheating.” She grins. “They say he’s got a secret room in the bio lab full of mutant frogs.”
I let her rattle on, because the alternative is the kind of silence that makes your skin itch.
After five minutes of trivia and rumors about the staff, Charlie’s energy crashes. She curls into a ball on the armrest and stares at the floor. I glance at Lucy, who’s still scribbling, but now her leg is jiggling under the table.
“Were you both here last year?” I ask, keeping my voice casual.
The temperature in the room drops instantly. Lucy’s pen stops dead. Charlie looks up, her mouth pressed into a thin line.
I press because Charlie’s answer wasn’t sufficient, but maybe now that they’re both here I can get some answers. “Did you know Casey?”
This time, it’s Lucy who answers. “We don’t talk about that here.” Her voice is dead flat, and her gaze is fixed on some point over my left shoulder.
Charlie’s fingers fidget with the hem of her pajama shirt. She starts talking—fast, too loud, like she can drown out the rest of the conversation by sheer force. “Anyway, laundry is on Tuesdays and Fridays, unless someone overflows the machines, and then maintenance takes a week to fix it because they don’t care if we all have to wear swimsuits to class. We can eat here or we can go to the dining hall. We avoid it because they’re not super nice to our kind.”
“Were they nice to Casey?”
Lucy closes her book, stacking it on top of the pile. “We don’t talk about that here,” she repeats, this time with the force of a threat. She stands and leaves the room without another word.
Charlie waits until Lucy’s footsteps disappear upstairs. Then she turns to me, her eyes glassy and a little wild. “Look, you seem cool, so I’m going to do you a favor.” She leans in, drops her voice so low it’s almost a hiss. “Stay the fuck away from the Feral Boys. If they invite you to a party, say no. If they ask you to go somewhere after dark, say no. If you see one of them waiting outside Archer House, you text me and I’ll come down and walk you in. Understand?”
She’s gripping my wrist, nails digging in through the skin, and for a second I see a flash of real, unfiltered panic in her face.
I nod, and only then does she let go. She peels herself off the couch and goes to the kitchen, where I hear her slamming drawers and muttering to herself.
I sit in the ruined quiet and let the clock tick down to midnight before heading to my room.
Upstairs, the house goes still. I hear nothing except random old house noises, and, once, the echo of a door slamming somewhere far away.
I look at the map pinned above my desk, the red X bleeding into the blue of the lake. The answers aren’t here yet. But the questions are multiplying.
