Nine

I wake with the final shivery remnants of last night still clinging to my skin—the moonlight, the music, the feeling of something shifting, like I was emerging out of the darkness into my true form.

I rub the sore spot on my finger where Laini pricked me with the needle. It was a strange night, a strange initiation. The cemetery, the oath, the blood, the ring of candles. I see now where the rumors about Magni Viri's satanic rituals come from. Bobby's dad must have actually witnessed an MV initiation ceremony. I'll admit it must have looked pretty creepy from the outside.

But it didn't feel creepy. It felt like warmth and welcome. It felt like shedding my old life and joining theirs.

Because now I belong with them and to them, and they belong to me. There's no going back.

I am truly, irrevocably, a part of Magni Viri.

I shower and dress in the glow of my new status, not giving a single thought to my usual worries. I even decide I'm not going to fret about what happened in Meredith's room yesterday, not going to dwell on what I felt in there. I just have too powerful of an imagination, and I'm creeping myself out. I've read one too many Gothic novels. As I head downstairs for coffee, I shove Meredith out of my mind. I smile at everyone I pass, and they smile back. That ever-present ache of loneliness inside me is gone, as if banished by my initiation.

Dr. O'Connor asked me to meet with him at 8:00a.m. sharp, so I don't have long to linger in Denfeld. I have to go face the reality of what it means to be part of Magni Viri. I hurry out the front door, my scarf trailing untidily behind me, feeling like I'm leaving a home behind instead of the imposing darkness of a haunted mansion like yesterday.

O'Connor's office is in the main part of campus, on the top floor of a cozy redbrick building that houses the social sciences department. It's surprising to find him someplace so ordinary. I suppose I'd forgotten that he's also a professor, as well as the head of Magni Viri, even if he only teaches a class or two every semester.

I take a deep breath and then knock on his half-open door. He waves me in, barely even glancing up from his computer. His office is large, with a huge window that overlooks campus. Vintage black-and-white photographs of people and buildings decorate the walls. My gaze briefly catches on a photo of a woman posed at the front door of Denfeld Hall before I'm distracted by everything else in the office. The shelves are bursting with books, and there are trinkets Dr. O'Connor has clearly collected from many travels, all of them beautiful and expensive-looking.

I pull my eyes away from a little golden fountain that makes delicate chiming noises as I settle into the chair across from him. He leans back, smiling neutrally. He reminds me of a cat, I realize, that same patient, inscrutable gaze, that same lurking possibility that he might pounce at any moment.

"Well, how are you finding Magni Viri so far?"

I can't help but smile. "Really good," I say.

"Everyone's been welcoming?"

I bite my lip. Everyone except Neil. "Of course," I lie.

But he reads my hesitation. "I imagine some of your peers are still struggling with Meredith's death."

"Yes."

He smiles sympathetically. "They'll come around. They are a resilient bunch of people, as are you."

I nod, my eyes alighting on an antique typewriter at the end of his L-shaped desk. It's beautiful, with a shiny black body and silver keys. I bet he uses it to write correspondence.

"Well, then," Dr. O'Connor says, leaning forward and lightly tapping his hands against the desk to regain my attention. "Let's talk about your course schedule." He must have it pulled up on his computer because he reads off a list of my classes: Quantitative Reasoning, Literature of the Ancient Near East, Gothic Literature, American History I, and Freshman Seminar. "Why did you select these courses?"

"Well, I have to take Quant Reasoning and Freshman Seminar," I say. "They're core curriculum. And a history elective is required."

"Sure, but why American history pre-Reconstruction? How does that fit with the literature courses you've selected? And why those courses?"

I blink at him for a moment. My academic adviser didn't ask me any of this. She simply made sure I was taking three required courses and two courses for my major. That was all. And I never considered the classes' connections. So I tell Dr. O'Connor the truth. "I picked the literature classes that sounded most interesting to me. And American history fit with the rest of my schedule."

He nods. "And why aren't you taking a writing course?"

"I'm an English major on the teaching track, not a creative writing major."

He raises his eyebrows at me. "Do you not wish to be a writer? Is that not the dream you have for yourself?"

I squirm, uncomfortable under his scrutiny. "The English-for-secondary-education track sounded more practical. I had planned to teach when I graduate, maybe do Teach for America to pay off my loans quicker."

His eyebrows, impossibly, rise still farther. "Do you wish to be a high school English teacher?"

"Well, no, but I got rejected from Magni Viri, didn't I? I had to be practical."

"Are you going to change your major now?"

My cheeks burn. "I don't know. I haven't had a chance to think about it. But I mean, I will have to make a living when I leave here, even if I won't have loans to repay," I say, hedging.

Dr. O'Connor levels a burning gaze on me. "You are a scholar of Magni Viri now, Tara. We chose you because we believe you can be exceptional. But you have to act like it. Do not choose a life for yourself like lukewarm tea."

I clench my jaw, suddenly angry. What does this privileged man in his fancy office know of my life, my dreams, my potential?

"What do you want me to do?" I ask, annoyed to find tears burning in my eyes. I look away, pretending to study the typewriter again while I blink the tears away.

"I want you to take control over your life and your education," he says, leaning forward, drawing my eyes back to him. "Choose your course of study with purpose. Choose your future with purpose."

"Drop/add is already long over," I say. "I can't change my schedule even if I wanted to."

He waves the concern away. "You will drop one class and take an independent course with me instead."

"I'm not interested in the social sciences," I say carefully.

He laughs. "It will be coded as an honors tutorial. It will be your required project for Magni Viri this year, which I will oversee with the help of one outside faculty member whose expertise is relevant."

"What kind of project?"

"You will write a work of fiction. A novel or a collection of short stories."

I shrink into my seat. "Oh."

He cocks his head at me. "Tara, why on earth does that surprise you? I didn't choose you for this program for your ability to teach other people's literature. I chose you for your ability to write your own."

His gaze is implacable. He is leaving me no room for self-doubt, no room for hesitation. He's going to force me to become the writer I've always wanted to be. I ought to be happy, but I feel instead like I'm being strong-armed into something. Like my path is once again being decided for me.

"All right. Which class will I drop?" I ask, my mouth gone dry.

He keeps staring at me, scowling now. He wants me to make my own decisions, take control of my education. But only in the way he wants me to do it, that much I can see. I pause, considering my options. There's no point in dropping my required courses. I'll have to take them eventually. That leaves history and the two lit courses.

"Can I think about it and get back to you?"

"By the end of the week," he says. "No later. In the meantime, start writing. I expect to see pages when we meet again in one week."

"Fine," I say, pushing back my chair more forcefully than I mean to.

When I reach the door of his office, he calls my name. I turn.

"Stay angry. Let yourself feel. You've been like a bit of flotsam drifting through the sea since you got here. That all changes now. Now you are a ship on the waves, captaining your own destiny."

I nod. "Goodbye," I say, hating the way my voice shakes. I walk quickly out of the building and stop on the steps to drag in big lungfuls of the cold, crisp October air. My throat burns with the tears I was holding back, so now I let them run warm down my cheeks.

I sink down onto the steps and put my head on my knees, all the anger leaving me, as if in defiance of Dr. O'Connor's command to stay angry. I feel overwhelmed and vaguely ashamed, as if I've just proven to him how lost and unremarkable I am. As if I've shown him how little I understand about this education I'm trying to get. No wonder the senior MV students look so exhausted—they've been putting up with O'Connor for years.

"Tara?" someone asks.

I look up, surreptitiously wiping my eyes. It's Penny, standing in the sunshine, her hair loose around her shoulders.

"Hey, you all right?" she asks. She sets down her leather backpack on the steps and then sits next to me, bracing her knee as she lowers herself to the step. She doesn't have her cane today. She's dressed more casually than I've seen her yet, in an oversize cream-colored fisherman's sweater and faded jeans. "First meeting with O'Connor, huh? He can be such a hard-ass."

I sniff and laugh. "He really pissed me off actually."

Penny smiles. "You're an angry crier, aren't you? My little sister is like that."

"I'm an everything crier. Sad, angry, frustrated—you will find me crying about it." I laugh again, wiping the last traces of my tears away. "Honestly, he made me feel like an idiot."

"You're definitely not an idiot." She bumps her shoulder against mine. I get a whiff of her shampoo, which is not the usual fruity ones in the women's hair care aisle. It smells like cedarwood and cardamom, like a forest in autumn. I have to stop myself from leaning forward to breathe it in.

"I have to drop a class to take a tutorial with him."

She nods. "All the first years do a yearlong tutorial with him. It's really just to give us time to work on our own projects. He mostly makes sure we're staying on track and getting any help we might need."

"What's your project?"

She grins. "O'Connor managed to get hold of Dr. Coppola's research for me, so I'm learning as much as I can from it. She was working on ways to combat white-nose syndrome, which is a disease caused by a fungus bats pick up during hibernation. It has been wiping out bat populations all over the US."

"Oh wow, that sounds complicated," I say. "All I have to do is write some fiction."

"That's all?" Penny says in a teasing voice. "Invent people and places and stories from thin air?"

I put my face in my hands and groan.

"Come on," Penny says, pulling me by the arm. "Forget O'Connor. Let's go hang out. I want to get to know you better."

"Don't you have class?" I ask, refusing to get up. But I do finally look at her; she's smiling mischievously.

"Nah, I was just heading to the library. You know, if I had my cane, I'd whack you with it. Better be glad." She compromises by gently kicking the sides of my legs.

I laugh and finally get to my feet. "Where to?"

"Have you seen the conservatory yet?"

"I think Quigg mentioned a greenhouse, but it wasn't on the tour."

"Come on," Penny says. "You'll love it." We walk back to Denfeld in companionable silence until my phone rings in my pocket. The sound of it is like an ice bath: it takes me right back to that moment in Meredith's room yesterday, to the certainty I felt that she was going to speak to me. That all this time, she's been trying to reach me. I take a few deep breaths, hoping whoever's calling will just give up, but the phone keeps ringing.

"Aren't you going to get that?" Penny asks.

"It's car warranty scams," I say, pulling it out.

The screen reads "Unknown Number." There's no way I'm going to answer it. That creepy cicada soundtrack is the last thing I need today. I turn off the phone and shove it deep into my bag, turning my attention back to Penny.

When she opens the door to the conservatory, I nearly gasp. It's a riot of green—plants soaring to the glass ceiling, climbing the walls, spreading across the floor. Penny leads the way through confidently, weaving around plants until she finds a shelf. She pulls a blanket down from it and spreads it out on the floor beneath a whole section of orchids.

"On days I can't go to the woods I like to come here," she says. She sits on the blanket and pats the space next to her.

"It's beautiful," I murmur as I take a seat. I crane my neck, looking up through the plants to where the sunlight pours in. "Who takes care of it?"

"We've almost always got a botanist in the ranks here. Right now, it's Dennis, have you met him yet? Third year, built like a Viking? He's really into archaeobotany."

"Archaeobotany?" I ask, sounding out the word.

"Oh, yeah, like, he studies ancient plants, especially poisonous ones. There's an entire section of poisonous plants over there," she adds, pointing toward a distant part of the greenhouse. "Nightshade, stuff like that. And a lot rarer ones too."

"Should that be in a college garden?" I ask, immediately uneasy at the thought. Denfeld already has a resident pyromaniac; does it need a potential poisoner too?

Penny shrugs. "It's all carefully labeled. There's, like, a skull-and-crossbones sign." She lies down and clasps her hands over her stomach. I lie down too, and for a while we stare up at the little makeshift jungle. Slowly, calm spreads over me, as if all these plants are releasing tranquilizers into the air.

"I could have really used this place all semester," I say, turning my head toward Penny. "I would have hidden out in here permanently. Magni Viri kids have all the luck."

Penny's face clouds, and something like regret passes over her features, but then she smiles. "Good thing you're one of us now," she says.

Memories of last night's ceremony flash through my mind—the music, the candles blowing out in one fell swoop, the immediate feeling that I had bound myself to the others. I wonder if my initiation was the reason everyone got weird at lunch when I mentioned the rumors about satanic rituals. They were already planning my initiation, maybe worried what I'd think about it, or afraid of spoiling the surprise of it.

"So the initiation...," I say, "it was indescribable. I've never felt anything like that."

Penny nods. "Yeah, I remember feeling the same way."

"It made me feel like..." I grasp for the words. "Like you were really welcoming me in. Giving me a place."

"We were," Penny says. "But it's a really old tradition. I know it's a little dramatic with the Latin chanting and everything, but that's sort of par for the course for Bauer and Weymouth George."

"The founders?" I ask, thinking of the antique oil painting in the foyer. Two young men standing shoulder to shoulder against the world.

Penny nods. "Yeah, they were kind of over-the-top. Made everything a spectacle. Supposedly they were best friends, really devoted to each other. Weymouth George died shortly after Magni Viri was founded, and Bauer never got over the loss. He built that huge mausoleum in the cemetery for him."

"God, that's so sad. And... intense. Maybe kind of gay?"

Penny laughs. "Yeah, maybe."

"It's cool to belong to something old, something passed on, you know? Like you're another link in a really long chain," I say, "and there will be others after you."

Penny's eyebrows scrunch together in a serious expression, but then she smirks and shakes her head. "You're as dreamy and dramatic as they were." She pokes me in the arm. "What else do I need to know about you? What kind of books do you like?"

I pause, caught off guard by the abrupt change of conversation. "Gothic," I finally say. "Mysteries. Jane Eyre is an old favorite. Rebecca. Um, a few books by Sarah Waters. We're reading Carmilla in my Gothic lit class right now, which is kind of blowing my mind actually."

"So you like creepy books with women's names for titles?"

I laugh, self-consciously pushing my hair behind one ear. "I suppose so."

Penny's eyes track the movement. "You're one of those beauty-in-terror types, aren't you?" she says, raising an eyebrow knowingly.

"That's a type?"

"Oh, big time." Penny gives me a slow smile, her eyes crinkling at the corners.

I'm silent for a while, thinking about it, and then I lean forward and whisper into her ear.

Penny sits up fast. "You did not just quote The Secret History to me."

Now I grin, glad to be the perceptive one. "It's your favorite book, isn't it?"

Her mouth drops open in shock. "How did you know?"

"Your beauty-in-terror quip. Plus, your outfits gave you away."

Penny falls back to the floor, covers her face, and lets out a shriek of laughter, half embarrassed, half delighted. She peeks at me from between her fingers. "I was worried about coming to college, so I found, like, every book I could set in college and read them all. I don't know how much useful information I actually got out of them, but I really loved The Secret History. As soon as I finished it, I started it over again."

"I did the same thing," I say, surprised. "Read all the books, I mean."

"Really?" Penny sits up again, leaning toward me, her expression open, excited.

I stare at her a moment, caught off guard by the feeling of kinship. This is the deepest connection I've felt to someone in a long time. And judging by how Penny is looking at me, I think she feels it too.

I clear my throat, flustered. "Does Magni Viri feel like the Greek class to you? A little private world unto itself?"

"A little," Penny admits. "But I like us better." She smiles at me in a new way, and my insides seem to glow.

We talk for a while longer, about our classes and the ones we hope to take next semester. Penny is a good listener: quiet, patient, sometimes teasing. After a while, I pull her wrist toward me to check the time on her watch, my cheeks automatically warming at the feel of her skin.

"I'd better get to class," I say.

"Okay," Penny says, smiling at my hand where it touches her wrist. "See you at lunch maybe?"

"All right. Thanks for this."

"Anytime," Penny says, then rolls onto her back and gazes up at the ceiling. She looks beautiful here, at home, surrounded by all this green and growing life. Rays of sunlight fall through the canopy overhead and illuminate here a downy cheek, there a thin ribbon of red in her honey-brown hair.

"Don't fall asleep and miss lunch," I say as I turn to weave my way out of the jungle of the conservatory.

"Wouldn't dream of it," she says sleepily.

I smile all the way back to my room. Penny didn't help me solve my O'Connor problem, but she did make me feel better about it. And she reminded me that I do know what I like and what I want, who I am.

Magni Viri isn't meant to change me, I remind myself. It's meant to help me become wholly and fully myself. I don't need to be Meredith Brown, just the best possible version of Tara Boone.

That's a truth I need to hold on to if I'm going to survive four years in this place.