Page 136 of Because I Killed Him
“Has anyone seen my hair ribbon?” I ask.
Charlotte and Jack shake their heads.
“Ha,” Dickie chides. “Trying to change the subject, I see.”
“No,” Edmund replies. And beneath the table, I watch—stunned—as he closes his fist around the ribbon, hiding it from view.
His expression remains calm, with no trace of a bluff, but that’s what undoes me.
The most convincing lie I’ve ever seen him tell is the one that just gave him away.
That night, I can’t sleep.
I spend hours in my salon, practicing with my fencing stick, sweat slicking my palms until the grip nearly slips. My arm trembles as I redirect an imaginary blade, answering each phantom attack with a riposte that lands nowhere. The burn crawls from my wrist to my elbow, then up into my shoulder, a deep, grinding ache that is a welcome distraction. I tell myself to focus on form and control, but my thoughts refuse to obey.
Edmund cares for me as a friend. He probably picked up the ribbon without realizing it was mine, and when I asked about it, he thought it would be awkward to hand it back. I’m just building illusions I want to be true, and the danger is as clear as a shouted warning. Vivian says a lot of people do the same when they’ve got a hole in their hearts they’re desperate to fill. She did it herself before Harrison finally asked her out.
So I force thoughts of Edmund aside.
I advance again, harder this time, driving forward on the ball of my foot, the stick snapping out in a reckless beat attack that would earn me areprimand from my old fencing instructor. I disengage, circle my wrist, and cut back into line, sweat flinging from my hair as I pivot across the room.
I fence as if fighting a part of myself—the part that wants to risk it all, rush to the Blue Dormitory, and tell Edmund how I feel, consequences be damned. I lunge too deep, overextend, and recover sloppily, my arm shaking so badly I can barely hold my guard. By the time I finally stop, my muscles are screaming, my clothes are soaked through, and my pulse is pounding like the final ticks of a timer before an explosion.
I stumble into my bedroom and collapse onto the bed, limbs buzzing with spent adrenaline.
Sleep still doesn’t come.
Hours pass as my mind races in tight, merciless circles, replaying how Edmund’s fingers slid carefully across my ribbon and how I want his hands to touch me like that, too. By three in the morning, I’m still wide awake, so I swallow a sleeping pill to make the thoughts stop. The darkness takes me quickly, dragging me into a heavy, dreamless sleep.
But when morning comes, and I step back into my salon with bleary eyes and sore limbs, it all comes rushing back.
Seashells are everywhere. Baskets of them line the windowsills, scatter across the floor, and pile on the cushions of my sofa. A few are chipped, but most are flawless. Some are pale as bone, while others shimmer with coral pinks and dusky violets, still glazed with salt.
I edge forward, my heart hammering so hard I feel it in the soles of my feet. Then I see Edmund’s note, tucked into the largest basket:
Because you saw a pretty seashell and left before I knew which one.
Everyone was made to see the world, but some of us were made to see it from the sky.
—ERNEST PREW
CHAPTER 32
In early March, an angry blizzard blows down from the northwest peaks, stripping the campus flowers to naked stalks. For nearly a week, the streets are buried under so much snow that the Pinkies only plow the routes to the Lecture Halls. Benjamin Bogart calls it “the last cold front before spring,” bright and chipper, as if he’s announcing a holiday, but few of us manage to smile through our chattering teeth.
The streets empty out. Students stop studying in the rose gardens and on cafe patios, and even the horn-heavy beats from the nightclubs fade. Most of us only venture out for class. The rest of the time, we hole up somewhere warm and pretend it’s spring.
For Charlotte, Jack, Dickie, and me, that’s Edmund’s suite. It becomes our hideout, the kind you tiptoe through at first, too stunned by the grandeur to sit without worrying you’ll leave a mark or a wrinkle. From floor to ceiling, it shines brighter than Vivian on her date nights with Harrison. The crown molding curls in hand-carved flourishes, and the hearths crackle with tidy red flames that never spit or smoke. Pinkies glide in and out of hidden doors, delivering trays of velvety espressos and replacing dirty ashtrays without a word. Meals appear like clockwork on gold-rimmed plates in a dining room that smells faintly of cigars and fresh beeswax polish.
When the snow falls sideways and the wind claws through the chimney flues, we draw the drapes and turn up the jazz in the bar. Music sounds better in here, somehow realer, as if it’s being played live just down the hall.Sometimes I tap dance with Charlotte; other times I shoot pool with Jack or play video games with Dickie. All the while, I do my best to avoid Edmund.
I’ve always been good at lying. Dad says I could bullshit my way past President Reeve’s security detail. But hiding how I felt while thanking Edmund for the seashells, telling him the pretty pink one I saw was among them, took enough effort to hurt. My feelings for him keep growing, tangling inside me like a wild, unruly tree I never meant to plant.
By now, the roots feel too deep to tear out.
So, instead of trying to kill my feelings, I redirect them. I slip into the exercise room in Edmund’s suite, pull on a pair of boxing gloves, and square up to the heavy bag hanging from the ceiling. Without a thought for form, I throw a hook that lands with a thud, sending the bag lurching sideways. The chains shriek overhead as I hit it again and again, my guard dropping carelessly between blows.
I pivot late, twist too far through my hips, and throw another cross that rattles up my arm and into my shoulder. The bag swings wildly, crashing back into my chest, but I meet it head-on, my fists slamming into the worn leather to drain my energy and leave me too tired to think about Edmund.
