I remember this feeling; I felt this way in the hospital—like my very soul was constructed of laminate floors and fluorescent light. Sterile. The first several nights I cried for my mother. A mistake, because she never came. And even if she had, I probably would have regretted it.
But that place didn’t ruin me. I was cursed already. The Dalloway witches had carved out my heart and consumed it for heat. I had nothing left to give.
I get out of the shower only when the water has gone lukewarm, then stand there in front of the mirror, dragging a brush through my hair over and over until my hand shakes. I get dressed in dry clothes and lie down on my bedroom floor.
Ellis finds me like that sometime later. I don’t get up even when I hear her knock, or when my bedroom door opens.
She settles in next to me and rests her hand on my brow. After a few seconds I shift and let her tug my head into her lap, her fingers combing through my hair.
“It’s the comedown,” she tells me with surprising gentleness. “Nights like that can leave you feeling terrible. This happens sometimes.”
It doesn’t feel like a comedown. It feels like the world is fracturing and falling apart.
I’ll never drink again, I tell myself. I want to believe it this time, but I’m no better than my mother.
I open my eyes and gaze up at Ellis. She looks less familiar when seen from upside down, her features gone alien and surreal. “I forgot the bike,” I say.
“We can go back and get it later.”
“It wasn’t even my bike. I stole it.”
A soft breath bursts from her lips, and I recognize it a beat too late: a laugh. “In that case, we might as well not bother. I don’t know if a bike would fit in my truck anyway.”
“I could ride it home.”
“You could,” she agrees.
Ellis is close enough that I can feel her breathing; her stomach shifts against the back of my head every time she inhales. Some part of me feels, bizarrely, like we all died out there in the snow. I cling to this small evidence that she’s alive. That we both are.
“It snowed,” I murmur. “I knew it would. Believe me now?”
Ellis twists a lock of my hair around her finger. “It’s November, Felicity. It would have snowed regardless.”
I sigh and don’t bother arguing. Ellis was the one who wanted me to prove magic to her, after all; if she doesn’t want to believe me, that’s her prerogative.
I think about her breathing, and the rug beneath me, the wax still burned into the silk fibers from when I knocked over the candles the week Ellis and I met.
“I’m going to help you through this,” Ellis promises, her hand still stroking my skull. “There’s no ghost, and there’s no magic. I’m going to prove it to you.”
I invent reasons to stay in my room the next day: too much homework, food poisoning, I overslept. The truth is, I can’t bear to face Leonie and Clara now that they’ve seen me in that state.
“It was the whiskey, Felicity. Everyone understands that,” Ellis says with a note of impatience to her tone. It doesn’t matter. I saw the way they looked at me. I know what they’re thinking.
But Kajal wasn’t there, so I find myself spending time with her instead. She’s also a Wyatt student, and it’s easy to commiserate over Wyatt’s ridiculous standards and share French pressed coffee as we read through our assignments. “First she wanted me to talk more about the rhetoric of silence in late Victorian literature, and now she wants me to delete everything,” Kajal bemoans.
The next night I find Kajal in her bedroom with a bottle of pills, neatly swallowing one tablet with a glass of water. Our eyes meet and she immediately frowns.
“Can I help you, Morrow?”
“No,” I say quickly. Only, then: “Well—no. But…I take those too.” They’re antidepressants. I would recognize this particular med’s shape and color anywhere. I attempt a smile. “I hate how they make me feel. Like I’m underwater.”
But if I expected some kind of commiseration, all Kajal gives me is a thin grimace. “Yes, well, not all of us can afford to quit taking our medication on a whim, Felicity.”
My hands clench in fists. “I didn’t,” I say. “I don’t— It wasn’t a whim.”
“Regardless, we aren’t going to talk about it.” Kajal neatly screws the top back onto her medication bottle and drops it into her desk drawer. The sound of the drawer sliding shut feels like punctuation at the end of a sentence: a dismissal.