Page 83 of White Lights
“I’m sorry—”
“You fucked up. Again.” Lebevre seizes her wrist with his egg-coated hand. “Which of your fingerprints would you like to be relieved of?”
“None,” Dez says, barely breathing. “I’ll start over. Your grandmother’s recipe. Just the way she made it. No shells.”
“No fucking shells,” Lebevre says to Dez, to Simon, throwing his hand down before grabbing a bottle of sherry and storming out the back door into the snow.
Dez folds over at the waist, resting her face on the counter to catch her breath.
“He almost did it this time,” she says to Simon, who rubs her back. Lebevre threatens every day, but he’s never grabbed her hand like that, never looked at her fingertips like he really couldn’t wait to carpaccio them. She straightens, tosses the eggs down the sink, and grabs a new container.
“So I’m thinking of bouncing early for fall break,” Simon says. “Going home to Oklahoma for a minute. Or forever.”
Dez stares at him. “Simon.”
“This place,” Simon says. “The chef wants to cut us and …”
He trails off, and Dez knows what he means. There are worse things at Acheron than Lebevre.
“First that Charles guy,” Simon says, “then Alice. WeknewAlice. And my anxiety is like—” He mimes his head exploding. “Jet keeps telling me it’s just another week, but I don’t know if I can make it.”
Dez nods. She gets it. And Simon doesn’t even know about the body Dez saw last night. Something darker than suicide is going on. Something she can’t begin to understand. Something worse even than Dez’s nightmares.
And worse still, if Simon goes home before the midterm, they’re not going to let him come back. He’s her firewall from this place’s deepest crazy. He’s the only one here who makes her laugh.
“Have you told Jet how you’re feeling?”
Simon shakes his head. “I don’t want to let him down.”
Dez has thought of leaving Acheron a thousand times, but her hand always finds that pill bottle in her pocket, reminding her of what she did. Even when classes dismiss for fall break next week, Dez willstay holed up in her suite, watching the sky for more nightmares. She has nowhere else to go.
“Simon,” she says. She has to tell him what happened after Alice’s service last night. He’s as affected by the suicides as Dez, and he deserves to know. “Last night I saw another one.”
“Another one what?”
“Another dead body.”
“What?”
“But this time I watched it fall out of the sky.”
“Dez …”
“It was a man. Older. Really broke-down looking. But the weirdest part is, Si, he fell fromnothing,” Dez says. “I saw him land in the middle of the tri. Nowhere near any building he could have jumped from. And I think he was dead before he fell.”
“This is what I’m talking about,” Simon says. “I don’t think this place is healthy. For either of us.”
“Please, listen to me. The school is covering something up—”
“And let me guess, you want to find out what it is?”
Dez looks at him and feels a flicker of hope. “You want to help me?”
“Hell no! I want to book a six-hour session with my therapist and binge Kurosawa movies in my bathtub.” Simon sighs, glaring at her. “But now I’m scared that if I do leave early, you’ll get yourself in even deeper shit without me.”
“I will.”
“Fuck you,” he mutters, but he gives her shoulder a bump.
