Perfect Ruin

10

I BURY MY FACE IN THE CURVE OF BASIL’S neck. I’m breathing in his smell of bottled redolence and crisp linen, telling myself that one day I’ll be the one in charge of it. It’ll be my job to keep his shirts pressed, to buy the soaps he likes.

He breathes in, and it sends a ripple through me. This is absolutely where I belong.

Why is it easier to realize this when we aren’t face-to-face? Lately he looks at me and I avert my eyes. He says the sort of things he’s always said, and my cheeks go warm. But when we’re like this, standing on the shuttle, every dip and muscle of my body fits against him. In fewer than three years, we’ll be married, and I hope I have all of this confusion settled by then.

Beside me, Pen is pushing Thomas against the window. “Must you always tug at my hair?”

“I’m just fascinated by your ringlets, dearest.”

She hugs her arms to her chest and turns away.

Basil chuckles.

Pen clears her throat. When I look at her, she nods at the patrolman standing at the front of the shuttle who is tearing down the page that was attached to one of the windows. He crumples it and stuffs it into his pocket. Then he fixes a silver festival branch that he knocked askew.

I didn’t get a very good look, but I know it was a passage from Daphne Leander’s essay. I’ve reread it several times. I’d know it from a thousand paces away.

Basil sees it, too.

I turn my attention back to him. Back to where it’s safe. “I won’t be able to have lunch with you today,” I tell him. “Pen and I have a literature project we’re trying to catch up on.”

“We’re writing a play,” she says.

“How artistic,” Thomas says. “Ladies, I applaud you.”

Pen rolls her eyes.

The shuttle jolts to a stop. The patrolman is telling us the usual: Keep it moving. Be safe.

The essay sits in his pocket, just another of the many secrets the patrolmen surely keep.

I hesitate.

Pen balances herself on the ladies’ room sink and pushes on the window until it opens out. She frowns. “It doesn’t open very far, but we’ll be able to get through. I’ll go first if you promise not to look up my skirt.”

“I don’t know about this,” I say.

She stops pushing at the glass and stares down at me. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

“We could get caught.” I say.

“And then what? A few demerits? We’re not doing anything wrong, you know. The king is the one letting us all go on in oblivion while a murderer is out there.”

There’s no sense trying to reason. She’s made up her mind. “Stay if you want, but I’m going,” she says pertly. “If I’m brutally murdered by Judas Hensley, it’ll be because you weren’t there to protect me.”

Before I can say a word, she dives through the window.

I hear the swish of leaves as she lands in one of the hedges.

I hoist myself onto the sink and peek outside after her. “Did you die?” I ask.

“Like landing in a cloud,” she says, tugging a leaf from her hair and flicking it away. “You coming?”

I think about Judas’s white hair in the moonlight and his bleary eyes and the words Pen left for him in the cavern: “Are you a murderer?”

I push myself through the window.

Pen reaches up for my hands as I wriggle through and helps me accomplish a slightly better landing. And then we’re both standing outside the academy in the middle of the day, while our classmates are at lunch and our betrotheds think we’re writing a play. It seems as though something should stop us. The god of the sky himself should send a gust of wind in warning. But nothing happens at all.

Pen and I make our way along the stone fence that divides the academy’s property from the university’s, and we step over a shallow river that trickles in a ravine at the base of the woods. If Internment were a clock, the section with our academy would be the six and the section with the park would be the twelve; it’s a short walk.

Everything about this feels wrong, but I don’t stop.

“Basil is going to be hurt if he finds out I lied to him,” I say.

“He’ll get over it. It isn’t as though you won’t still marry him in a couple of years.”

My palms are sweating. My chest feels tight.

By the time we reach the cavern, the seams under my arms are damp with sweat and I can scarcely breathe. Pen looks into the cavern.

“Morgan!” she says. I crouch beside her and follow her gaze.

Her question has been smoothed away, and scrawled in its place: Yes.

Pen has her hand over her mouth, but by the swell in her cheeks I know that she’s smiling.

I crawl into the cavern. He was here. That’s all I can think. He was here.

“We should ask him something else,” Pen says, wiping away his response.

All I’d like to ask is why he’s lying. But I don’t say that. Maybe I’ll come back and ask him myself.

“We have to go,” I say.

She turns a pebble in her hand, considering. I take it away and set it in the dirt, and continue, “We’ll barely make it back before lunch is over if we leave now.”

“Fine,” she huffs. As we make our way back to the academy, she perks up at the sound of every snapped twig, every rustled leaf. It’s a game to her. Our secret murderer stowed away in the trees, sending us messages.

I would tell her that what we’re doing is wrong, but I like that we have a secret together, like the kinds we had when we were children. It’s been so long since she’s shared any secrets with me.

When we return to the academy, the window to the ladies’ room seems a lot higher than either of us remember, and there’s no sink out here for us to stand on. Pen tries using the hedge, but that proves impossible.

“Okay,” she says, “if I hold my hands out, you could use them as a step and make it inside. Then you can pull me up after you.”

“Or you ladies can enter through the proper door,” Headmaster Vega says from behind us. “I’m more than happy to escort you. It seems we have some things to chat about in my office.”