Page 80 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

25

EVERLY

After the tea in Catalina's office, I mostly stop sleeping.

The Sanguis first-year on the blankets in front of me has been crying since I put my hands on him. He doesn't make any noise about it. The tears just keep running down his face and dripping off his chin onto his Nyxhaven sweatshirt, and now and then he stops to apologize.

"Sorry. God, sorry, I don't know why I'm⁠—"

"It's fine," I tell him, and keep working.

His heart is under my hands, and the rune runs under it in a tight, cold line. I take it apart one turn at a time while Ren holds his heartbeat steady.

He isn't the first one tonight. I keep hearing Catalina say it, in that calm voice, with her gloved hands folded on the blotter: I can put it back on every one of them in an afternoon. So whenever the next kid on Brittany's list is small and new, I squeeze in another before sunrise. Sleep is overrated, I tell myself, and unwind another turn with fingers I can barely feel. So are fingers.

Lunch was peanut butter on bread that's one day from growing a personality, eaten standing up at the counter while Brittany read out the night's list. Then Callum taught death on the floor of the Burial Ground with the lamps turned down and his sleeves rolled up, explaining rigor mortis, and I didn't hear a word of it. Normally I'd pay real money to watch that. This time I was too tired to even enjoy his forearms, which is how I know it's bad.

By the time it's done, the sun is coming up grey through the high windows. The boy wipes his face on his sleeve and thanks me, then thanks me again at the door, before a Storm Daughter walks him back across the grass.

I don't go to my own bed afterward. I go to Ren's.

He's lying on his mattress on the floor of the little room at the back of the second floor, the one he picked because it's the quietest—though I've never figured out what quiet means to someone who can hear every heart in the building. I come in without knocking and lie down next to him on top of the blanket with my shoes still on.

"Your heart's been racing since the tea." He doesn't open his eyes. "You can't keep going like this, Ev. I can hear it getting worse."

"She told me to tire myself out," I say to the ceiling. "Right to my face. I'm not giving her that."

Ren turns on his side and puts his arms around me, pulling me in against his chest.

His heart is right under my ear, slow and steady. Through the bond I can feel him listening to mine, the warm push of his blood magic finding my pulse and resting on it, and he holds on until my heart slows down to match his. Then he keeps holding on.

My mom calls the next afternoon. I'm asleep on top of my covers with my shoes on again, and I answer without opening my eyes, because her ringtone is the only one I'd wake up for.

"You sound terrible," Ma says. "Are you sleeping? You're not sleeping."

"I'm sleeping right now, Ma. You woke me up."

"In the middle of the afternoon?"

"I was up late studying," I lie.

"Hang on, your father wants you." She puts me on speaker, and I can hear their kitchen behind them, the radio on the counter and onions going in a pan.

"Ev! Quick one." My dad always starts like this, as if trivia were an emergency. "Johnny Appleseed. What did most people do with his apples?"

"Ate them?"

"Drank them! Hard cider. Most of those apples were too sour to eat off the tree, so the man walked across Ohio planting bars." He sounds thrilled about it. "Which brings me to my point. The orchards up by you are open through the end of the month. Your mother and I want to drive up next weekend and take you apple picking. We'll get a hotel. You won't have to do a thing."

"I'll bring food," Ma says. "Lemon rice. You can share it with your roommate."

I lie there with the phone against my ear, and I want it so badly my eyes sting. I want Dad in his flannel reading the sign about apple varieties out loud to strangers. I want Ma pressing a warm container into my hands in a hotel parking lot, and I want to sleep in the back seat of their car the whole way to the orchard while they argue about directions.

But they'd want to see my dorm and meet my roommate. They'd want to walk across the quad to the building where I study communications, and I'd have to lead them past the wardens to a dorm I don't live in, for a major I've never taken, at a school that threw me out in the spring. And any night I'm gone is a first-year I'm not sitting on the floor with, while the rune in them keeps pulling.

"I can't next weekend," I say. "I picked up weekend shifts at the media archives. They're short-staffed."

"The archives!" Dad sounds like I've won something. "Are they still using the microfilm readers with the hand crank? Ev, you have to send me a picture of one."