“What?” Nate said, pulling off his headphones.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” Stevie said. “Go over to the dining hall and get some cake?”
Nate glanced at his screen, looked back at his friend, and sighed.
“Fine,” he said. “But only because I love cake.”
Stevie sagged with relief when he agreed. She had been dangerously close to almost reading three entire sentences.
Fall nights in Vermont were crisp. The air had an edge to it that snapped you awake. There was a general crunchiness to everything—leaves, frosted grass, cold gravel pathways. When you stepped on a stick, it sounded like a firecracker going off under your foot, and every pile of organic detritus rustled with some life-form. The moon tonight was full and huge—a massive yellow eye suspended overhead, casting its gaze down on the mountaintop.
“You get any new ones today?” Nate asked.
“Visions. Industrial dryer. Community garden.”
“It’s been a while since you got a vision.”
“It’s a nice change from everyone who has a neighbor who gets a boat and an oversized cooler,” Stevie said. “A lot of people buy boats and coolers. Only, like, half of them are serial killers.”
“How many of these messages are you getting now?”
“Just a few a week,” she said. “Maybe ten.”
“That’s still a lot of people who want you to solve their weird crap.”
“They don’t want me to solve anything,” Stevie replied. “They want to tell me about something they saw. And everyone sees stuff. There’s nothing to do. I’m just . . . itchy.”
“I’m aware. This is what you’re like when you don’t have something to work on. It’s not great. Once it gets dark and you’ve already talked to David, you basically turn into a zombie. Which is why I’m out here walking with you now, to keep you from eating the sheep.”
“I’m not going to eat a sheep,” Stevie replied. “Maybe an owl, though.”
“Crunchy, hollow owl bones. Delicious owl meat.”
“Or a moose. If I ever see one.”
They reached the central green, in front of the Great House—the school’s administrative heart. The green was the wide oval of pristine lawn that rolled out in front of the building, with a marble fountain depicting the god Neptune at the top and a cupola at the bottom. Normally, there was nothing but open space in the middle, but one of the new students, a girl improbably named Valve, who’d grown up on a farm sanctuary and wore at least seven crystals at all times, had introduced three sheep to the school. They meandered around the grounds but preferred the green. They noodled around under the moonlight, largely in the vicinity of the little wooden structure that had been erected for them.
Free-range sheep might be a strange sight at most schools, but this was not most schools. This was Ellingham Academy.
Ellingham was in the mountains of Vermont. Its story was the stuff of legend, its reputation gold-plated, its illustrious graduates legion. Its story was long but can best be summarized thusly: Famous rich guy Albert Ellingham climbs a mountain in the roaring 1920s, gets loopy from the limited oxygen, decides to build his dream school—a place where learning is a game. He even decides to build himself a massive mansion in the middle of said school so he can be a part of the whole process. He dynamites the face off the mountain and empties his bottomless pocketbook, building the most elaborate and fantastic campus. Yale and Princeton would bite their ivy-covered knuckles in jealousy over the red and gold bricks; tree-lined paths; sculptures; twee, twisting pathways; and Gothic spires.
Albert Ellingham declared that his school would have no admissions criteria; students applied in whatever way they thought was right and expressed their passion. If the school chose you, the experience was free for two years, which was the length of the program. The school would design bespoke learning experiences for each student. Only fifty students were accepted each year. It was competitive. It was egalitarian. It was forward-thinking. It was perfect in all ways except for the murders.
Murders. Plural.
Some had occurred in 1936, when Ellingham’s wife and daughter were kidnapped and a student killed. This turned into one of the great crimes of the twentieth century. Stevie had gotten into Ellingham with the stated purpose of solving this case. The other murders had been more recent—just one year ago. Last year at Ellingham had been, as the administration called it, “a time of challenges.” That was a polite way of saying, “we had a minor murder spree and a mass evacuation.” （This explained why the incoming class all seemed a bit on the nervous or excited side. They were jumpy.）
Stevie topped off this experience by working on another cold case on her summer break, this one in Massachusetts and dating from the 1970s. This should have gotten her a pass on reading something like “Defining Bias: How We Interpret What We Read.” But that is not the way the world works, because the world didn’t care what she did last year, or last month, or even earlier tonight when she had bravely tried to read three sentences. If the world is feeling super charitable, it might take a passing glance at what you are doing now. What matters is what you are doing next. And high school was nothing if not about the next box you had to check.
“You hate it when Vi and Janelle work on their spreadsheet,” Nate said. “It freaks you out every time.”
This was true. It was October in her last year of high school, and Stevie’s entire college plan so far consisted of seven bookmarked pictures on Instagram, three browser windows she never closed, and a notebook page that contained insights such as “science?” and “where is it?”
Because college meant majors. It meant knowing who you were and where you wanted to go in life. It meant figuring out how smart you really were, and would you be as smart as everyone else at your imaginary school? Should you go somewhere you were the smartest? Should you go somewhere tiny or to a huge university that filled a city? College also meant money, and money was confusing. She had a little now, enough for small things, and maybe a semester somewhere if she used it all at once. The rest would have to come from somewhere. Loans. Scholarships. Her parents didn’t have it, that was for sure. The only reason she could go to Ellingham was because it was free.
So, to counter Nate’s entirely justified remark, she responded with a question.
“You never mention where you’re applying,” she said. “What have you been doing for college stuff?”
“I’m working on it,” he said. “I’ve done some applications.”
“Where to?”
“Different places. I’m still working it out. But you have to start and I know you haven’t even really looked yet. You can’t avoid it forever.”
“What are you, the college police?” she asked.
“I’m just saying,” he went on, “you’ve been genuinely spaced, and that shit is going to be due soon. You have to pick some places. Any places. Start filling out applications. There are first years here who have some of that stuff ready to go. Even David did it.”
He had invoked Stevie’s far-off boyfriend a second time. This was a direct jab at her.