It rained for three more days before the sun got out on parole. From the moment Ellory tied her apron on to the moment she yawned back to her dorm, Powers That Bean filled with students who bought a single chocolate croissant and then parked at a table by an outlet for six hours to stay out of the rain. Others loitered by the doors and walls, pretending to be waiting for friends until the manager forced them out into the deluge. Mopping the floor became an exercise in frustration as new packs of customers tracked mud and grass inside, and though they grimaced and whispered, “Sorry,” when they saw the mess, not a single one left a tip.
Iced coffee sales remained steady. There was no weather that iced coffee didn’t improve.
After her shift, Ellory took a walk in the restored sunlight, her drink in hand. The soccer team had claimed Bancroft, which she knew only because Hudson Graves was among them. Ellory refused to do anything more physically strenuous than squeeze into a packed train car on the N during rush hour, so athletes were an alien breed to her. They ran the length of the field (why?) back and forth, again and again (why?), shouting insults and encouragement to one another:
“Pick up the pace, Mendoza!”
“Looking sharp, Novak!”
“Wilson, you’re falling behind!”
“Go! Go! Go! Go!”
No one jeered Hudson Graves, who was ahead of the pack of sweaty, grunting people by at least three yards. His long brown legs ate up the field with every stride, his moss-green jersey clinging to his muscled body. When she didn’t actually have to talk to him, Ellory could admit to herself that Hudson Graves had a certain allure. He was clearly in his element, and that confidence translated to his elegant gait and focused mien. If he was even panting, she couldn’t tell from here.
She needed to keep walking before he saw her and mistook her interest for something else. But she was rooted to the spot.
Luckily, Ellory wasn’t the only one who couldn’t take her eyes off him. On the other side of the field was a small crowd, also wearing jerseys, staring at Hudson like he was a two-for-one sale. Ellory had heard that the football and basketball teams were forever trying to recruit him, but this was the first time she’d actually seen their starving gazes in person. Maybe they meant it to be flattering, but it was dehumanizing, these covetous sentries longing for what they had been told repeatedly they could not have.
Ellory had been to Bancroft twice since she’d moved to campus. Tai liked to watch the soccer team play, especially in the humid summer days when the players would wrap their practice jerseys around their waists and let the sun turn their sweaty torsos gold and pink. But that was mostly because Tai’s partner, Cody, had decided to play for the men’s team. Cody waved when they saw Ellory, and Ellory waved back, admiring their new haircut: shaved on one side, flowing down to their chin in a wave of amber on the other. They were near the middle of the group, keeping pace but not showing off like Hudson Graves, even though, at well over six feet, they could have. Ellory knew a bit of what that was like—that innate fear of calling attention to herself in a place where it was safer to blend in.
“Hey, Morgan.”
Oh no.
“Hello, Graves,” she said evenly as he jogged toward her. “Keep a distance, please. I can smell you from here.”
Behind him, Cody slowed, their eyebrows two thick lines of concern. Even if she weren’t complaining to Tai all the time, Ellory’s war with Hudson was infamous enough that Cody was probably considering whether to intervene.
Hudson stopped a few feet away, close enough that she could see the perspiration collecting at his temples but far enough that at least four people could link arms between them. She couldn’t actually smell him, but she was sure he stank with the fetor of athleticism. His eyes were mockingbird black. His skin was golden brown in the caress of sunlight. His rose-pink lips held the raw ingredients of a smirk without quite finishing the recipe.
A bead of sweat traced the curve of his cheek, dripped onto his sloped shoulder, and disappeared into the fabric of his jersey. Ellory swallowed sharply.
Hudson tilted his head. “Did you hear there’s going to be a pop quiz in con. law tomorrow?”
“What?” Surprise yanked the words from her dry throat. “How would you even know about a pop quiz?”
“I talked to the TA, but it’s all over class.”
Ellory bit the inside of her cheek to keep from saying something she’d regret. After the first day, she’d been afraid to talk to the rest of her classmates in case they were all members of Hudson’s fan club. Her classmates seemed equally content to never speak to her. Occasionally, she checked the student message boards where they submitted assignments, but there was no casual chatter on there. Just can I get an extension and when is this due again and does anyone have the notes on Gideon v. Wainwright?
“Why are you even telling me this?” she asked around a thoughtful sip of her iced vanilla latte. Today she’d tried the oat milk that everyone was going wild for; so far, she was unimpressed. “If I fail, you have another opportunity to gloat.”
Hudson snorted. “I don’t want to be better than you because I have information you don’t, Morgan. I want to be better than you because I’m obviously better than you.” He began to jog backward, and—annoyingly—he didn’t even trip. “Anyway, you have the information now. Study or don’t study. It’s up to you.”
Ellory hated that he was right, that their petty academic rivalry meant nothing if they weren’t on an even playing field. Hated that he knew that, believed that, which made her grudgingly respect him. She also hated the way his black shorts clung to his powerful thighs, and yes, she’d definitely been standing here for too long.
“Think fast, Graves!”
He thought fast, twisting out of the way of the soccer ball that had been hurled at him. It zipped toward Ellory’s head, and she locked up like a deer in headlights, too surprised to move. Move, damn it. MOVE.
A blinding flash swallowed the world.
Her skin went hot and then cold and then hot again, and sound swung back in like a punch: The shouting team running across the field toward her. The distant babble of the Connecticut River indifferently flowing southward to the Long Island Sound. The wind rustling every leaf on the surrounding trees until they loosened and joined the rising piles on the quad. Hudson was in the same place, but everyone else stopped abruptly to murmur among themselves, their gazes on her feet. Ellory glanced down, expecting to see her ankle boots and a pile of shit between them.
Instead, she was standing in a circle of dead soil.
The path that looped around Bancroft Field was a dirt trail, dark brown and packed tight. Now it was the color of wet sand, dusty and cracked. Fissures spider-webbed out from beneath her feet and stretched toward the grass before stopping mere inches from touching the vibrant green. It was like a target of ruptures, and she was the bull’s-eye.
Between the field and the cracks, the soccer ball rested. She hadn’t even seen it drop.
“Are you all right, Ellory?” called Cody. Like everyone else, they stared at the soccer ball like it was possessed. “I thought—well, I’m glad it didn’t hit you.”
“Autumn winds,” Ellory heard herself say, and it was automatic, easy, like she’d said the words a thousand times before. Her hand wanted to fly to her throat, as if that would help her figure out whose script she was performing, but she still couldn’t move. Only her lips remembered how, her mind steady in the certainty that this wasn’t the first time she’d made these excuses. “Weird.”
One of the team members—Novak, perhaps—chuckled. “One time, I swear the wind yanked my backpack halfway across the quad while I was napping.”
“Oh, please,” said another. “You’re so fucking scrawny, you probably got dragged away from it.”
“Who are you calling scrawny?”
The two began to play wrestle, and whatever spell had fallen over them all was broken. Someone, the captain probably, shouted at everyone to get back to their drills. Cody fetched the ball with the kind of friendly wave that promised a full interrogation later. The team jogged away to launch into their next round of exercises, leaving Hudson and Ellory behind in a ringing silence.
There was a wrinkle between Hudson’s eyebrows, but even after he stopped staring at the ground, his gaze settled anywhere but on her. “I’m glad you’re all right, Morgan,” he said to a point over her shoulder. “Be careful when—just. Be careful.”
Then he was gone before she could question his sudden and unprecedented concern for her welfare. Ellory stepped gingerly from the center of the blast radius, half expecting the cracks in the dirt to follow her. Instead, they remained as a monument to where she’d once stood, a serrated circle of death.
This time, she wasn’t seeing things. Everyone else had seen it, too.
Ellory shuddered. What was going on?
The more distance she put between herself and that moment, the more her thoughts raced. She took a long sip of her watered-down latte in the fruitless hope of a brain freeze that would calm her mind.
For a moment, it had seemed like she had…
But that would be ridiculous. It was more likely that the wind had stopped that ball in its tracks. As for the path… she’d probably been too distracted to notice that dead patch. No one else had mentioned its sudden appearance, so maybe it had already been there. That was plausible. And plausible was better than the alternative. The alternative made it sound like she was hallucinating again, and Warren was the kind of place that would pull the Godwin Scholarship if she started claiming she could… what, stop a speeding soccer ball with her mind and crack the very earth itself in the process? Ridiculous.
But for a moment, it had seemed like…
No. Ridiculous.
Ellory threw her empty cup in the recycling bin, tossing her uneasiness out with it. ...
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