“You’re awake,” Alex said.
Mercy glanced up from her copy of To the Lighthouse, its pages thick with pastel sticky notes. Her hair was in an elaborate braid, and instead of bundling up in their ratty afghan, she’d thrown a silk robe patterned with blue hyacinths over her jeans. “Did you even come home last night?”
Alex took a chance. “Yeah. You were already snoring. I just got up to get a run in.”
“You went to the gym? Are the showers even open this early?”
“For crew and stuff.” Alex wasn’t actually sure this was true, but she knew Mercy cared less about sports than just about anything. Besides, Alex didn’t own running shoes or a sports bra, and Mercy never asked about that. People didn’t go looking for lies that didn’t have a reason, and why would anyone lie about going for a morning run?
“Psychos.” Mercy tossed a stapled stack of pages at Alex, who caught them but couldn’t quite bring herself to look. Her Milton essay. Mercy had offered to give it a read. Alex could already see the red pen all over it.
“How was it?” she asked, shuffling into their bedroom.
“Not terrible.”
“But not good,” Alex muttered as she entered their tiny cave of a room and stripped out of her sweats. Mercy had covered her side of the wall in posters, family photos, ticket stubs from Broadway shows, a poem written in Chinese characters that Mercy said her parents made her memorize for dinner parties when she was a kid but that she’d fallen in love with, a series of Alexander McQueen sketches, a starburst of red envelopes. Alex knew it was partially an act, a construction of the person Mercy wanted to be at Yale, but every item, every object connected her to something. Alex felt like someone had come along early and snipped all of her threads. Her grandmother had been her closest link to any kind of real past, but Estrea Stern had died when Alex was nine. And Mira Stern had grieved her but she’d had no interest in her mother’s stories or songs, the way she cooked or prayed. She called herself an explorer—homeopathy, allopathy, healing gemstones, Kryon, spirit science, three months when she’d put spirulina in everything—each embraced with the same fierce optimism, dragging Alex along from one silver bullet to the next. As for Alex’s father, Mira was hazy on the details, hazier when pushed. He was a question mark, Alex’s phantom half. All she knew was that he loved the ocean, that he was a Gemini, and that he was brown—Mira couldn’t tell her if he was Dominican or Guatemalan or Puerto Rican, but she did know he was Aquarius rising with his moon in Scorpio. Or something. Alex could never remember.
She’d brought few objects from home. She hadn’t wanted to return to Ground Zero to pick up any of her old stuff, and the belongings in her mother’s apartment were little-girl things—plastic ponies, rosettes made of colored ribbons, bubble-gum-scented erasers. In the end, she’d packed a hunk of smoky quartz that her mother had given her, her grandmother’s nearly illegible recipe cards, an earring tree she’d had since she was eight, and a retro map of California, which she hung next to Mercy’s poster of Coco Chanel. “I know she was a fascist,” Mercy had said. “But I can’t quit her.”
Dean Sandow had suggested Alex purchase a few sketchbooks and charcoal too, and she’d dutifully placed them atop her half-empty dresser as cover.
Alex had tried to choose the easiest subjects possible—English lit, her Spanish requirement, an introductory sociology course, painting. She’d thought at least English would be easy because she liked to read. Even when things had been really bad in school, she’d still been able to fake her way through those classes. But this English was an entirely different language. She’d gotten a D on her first paper, with a note that said, This is a book report. It had been just like high school except she’d actually been trying.
“I love you, but this essay is a mess,” said Mercy from the common room. “It would probably be better if you spent less time working out and more time working.” No shit, thought Alex. Mercy was going to be in for a real surprise if she ever asked Alex to jog somewhere or lift something heavy. “We can go through it over breakfast.”
All Alex wanted was sleep, but going back to bed didn’t seem to be the thing people did after a run, and Mercy had done her the courtesy of editing her awful English paper, so she definitely needed to say yes to breakfast. Lethe had provided Alex with a tutor, an American Studies grad student named Angus who spent most of their weekly sessions bent over Alex’s work, snorting in exasperation and shaking his head like a horse plagued by flies. Mercy wasn’t exactly gentle, but she was a lot more patient.
Alex yanked on jeans and a T-shirt, then the black cashmere sweater she’d prized so much when she’d picked it out at Target. It was only when she’d seen Lauren’s lush lavender pullover and foolishly asked, “What is this made of?” that she’d understood there were as many kinds of cashmere as there were of cush, and that her own sad sweater pulled from the sale rack was strictly stems and seeds. At least it was warm.
She gave her coat another spray of cedar oil in case any Veil stink lingered, hefted up her bag, hesitated. She opened her dresser drawer and dug around in the back until she found the little bottle of what looked like ordinary eye drops. Before she could think too much about it, she tilted her head back and squeezed two drops of basso belladonna into each eye. It was a stimulant, a strong one, a bit like magical Adderall. The crash was brutal, but there was no way Alex was going to make it through the morning without a little help. The old boys of Lethe had all kept diaries of their time in the society, and they had plenty of tricks they used to cut corners. Alex had discovered this one after Darlington was gone.
Back into the morning cold with Mercy beside her. Alex always liked the walk from Old Campus to the JE dining hall, but the quad looked less beautiful with a gray day on it. At night, the grubby packs of snow gleamed vague and white, but now they were grimy and brown at the edges, heaps of dirty sheets ready for the wash. Harkness Tower loomed over it all like a melting candle, its chimes sounding the hour.
It had taken Alex a few weeks to realize why Yale looked wrong to her. It was the complete lack of glamour. In L.A., even in the Valley, even on its worst days, the city had style. Even Alex’s mother in her purple eye shadow and chunks of turquoise, even their dumpy apartment with its shawls over the lamps, even her no-money friends, gathered at backyard barbecues, recovering from the night before, girls in tight shorts, midriffs bare, long hair swinging to the small of the back, boys with shaved heads or silky topknots or thick dreads. Everything, everybody, had a look.
But here the colors seemed to blur. There was a kind of uniform—jocks in backward baseball caps and long loose shorts they wore regardless of the chill, keys on lanyards that they swung like dandies; girls in jeans and quilted jackets; theater kids with crests of sink-dyed Kool-Aid-colored hair. Your clothes, your car, the music pumping from it, were supposed to tell people who you were. Here it was like someone had filed down all of the serial numbers, wiped away the fingerprints. Who are you? Alex would sometimes think, looking at another girl in a navy peacoat, pale face like a waning moon beneath a wool cap, ponytail lying like a dead animal over her shoulder. Who are you?
Mercy was an exception. She favored wild florals paired with a seemingly endless parade of eyeglasses that she wore on glittery strings around her neck and that Alex had yet to see her use. Today she’d opted for a brocade coat embroidered with poinsettias that made her look like the world’s youngest eccentric grandma. When Alex had raised her brows, Mercy had just said, “I like loud.”