Chapter 16 Faye

Mary stepped forward as Faye stumbled back. Faye's hands were empty; she had left the scalpel plunged into Ro's neck and she had lost her phone at some moment in the commotion—where was her phone? Mary had her light and she brought it to fall upon Ro's quiet body as though he were some strange object of fascination. Sweeping her light from his feet up to his head, she said nothing.

Davey was on the floor. He'd either been knocked down or he'd thrown himself there to avoid being struck in the head with the shelving stool; no one could quite remember the order of things. In the meager light from Mary's phone, he found his own and picked up Faye's for good measure. He handed her device back to her and then, like Mary, he went to stand over the body, sweeping light back and forth at the horrid, bloody thing on the floor.

Faye, crouched there with the phone Davey had returned, didn't dare approach the body, but she was brave enough to cast her light on it. Why did you do that, Faye, she asked herself, the way she often did when she said something embarrassing in front of someone she'd like to befriend. In what little light they had, the blood that soaked Ro's lovely gray sweats looked black, not red.

"He might be alive," Faye said. Her voice sounded alien to her.

"There's an awful lot of blood," Mary said. She swung back to look at Faye, but she kept her light trained on Ro.

"Well, the human body has an awful lot of blood!" Faye said. Someone should help him, she thought. Someone should check to see if he's alive. Someone should do something.

Faye was so ashamed that she couldn't move. I came here to be friends with these people. I promised to keep them safe, and now look what I've done. She moved to get up, but her head spun and she thought she might throw up. She stayed on the ground. Back at the arena, their candles were still arranged in a lovely circle and somewhere there was an ear of corn, and maybe Davey had even hidden some bottles of beer in the stacks somewhere and it all had the makings of the night she'd imagined for herself.

What an awful place the library was, Faye thought. The endless rows of gleaming spines, the pages pressed together, keeping their secrets from the outside world. In the orderly lab where every action was noted, where everything was in its place, this couldn't have happened. If she'd never come to the library, if she'd only stayed where she was comfortable, she'd never have hurt someone as she had here tonight.

"Why isn't anyone helping him?" Umu fell to her knees in front of her friend, though she'd been just as frozen as the rest of them until that very moment.

"He's beyond help." Davey kept his light trained on Ro's neck. "Unless you'd like us to try a reanimation ritual, but I don't think I'm into that in this case."

You should go and help to prove you're still good, Faye told herself, but then she didn't move because she couldn't.

"Should I pull it out?" Umu had her hand on the blade, the blade that was the best-lit thing in the whole damn basement. "Do you think it's hurting him? If it's hurting him I want to pull it out?"

In perfect darkness they wouldn't have seen she was crying. It was a quiet sort of crying, no gasping hysterics, only silent tears that slid down her cheeks and onto Ro's face, onto Ro's neck, reflected in the beams of those flashlights.

"Check for a heartbeat, if you can." Faye surprised herself by speaking up. I'm helping, she thought. I'm good and I'm helping. "If his heart is still beating, you can't pull out the…you can't pull it out."

"Now you have advice?" Umu said. She leaned over him to put her ear to Ro's chest. To check for life in a stranger, you put your fingertips to a pulse point. To check for life in a best friend, you lay your whole body on top of theirs.

"She's a scientist; you should listen to her," Davey said.

"It's physics," Faye whispered, but no one heard.

Umu did it. She pulled the blade out of his neck, and they all thought there had been a lot of blood before but they were wrong: the blood only came now.

"Yikes, you totally shouldn't have done that," Mary said, and she took a step back to protect her shoes, but she didn't move to help.

Umu pulled her body off Ro's and reached for the nearest thing that might stop the bleeding. An 1873 typography manual with marbled endpapers off the bottom shelf. She chose well, the fine cotton paper could hold more than its weight, and it quickly turned crimson as she pressed it down on Ro's throat.

"Maybe he was alive after all?" Davey said. "Weird. Wouldn't have guessed that."

The next volume Umu grabbed was a personal account of the First World War. The paper wasn't as fine as the first book, but at 298 pages, it was beefier and could hold more of Ro's blood. She tossed the typography manual aside.

"Here," Davey said, having gone to the shelf. He held a volume out to Umu. He's helping! Faye thought. Davey is helping! All of us are good, all of us are trying.

"The one you're holding is a presentation copy from the author," Davey said. "Can I trade you? This is the exact same text but it doesn't have the personalized inscription."

"You're a monster," Umu said. She took the new book from him, but she didn't give the inscribed copy back. Now both were being used to try and stem the bleeding.

"I think it's pretty clear that we've slayed the monster," Davey said. "The monster is bleeding out all over the words of Terence MacDermot as we speak."

"He's not dead," Umu said. "He couldn't be bleeding like this if he were dead." The presentation copy was bled all the way through. She tossed it aside. The next volume in arm's reach was a first edition of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged with its dust jacket intact. No one objected.

"Well, he will be unless you plan on cutting your wrist to give him an infusion," Davey said.

"Can I do that?" Umu asked. "Is that a thing?"

"So dramatic," Davey said.

"You absolutely should not do that," Faye interjected.

"We're safe now," Davey said. "Umu, you can stop. Your friend was the danger but now the danger's gone. You can stop."

She didn't stop. She wept and applied pressure and wept and applied pressure. The quality of paper that Random House was using in 1957 was quite poor compared with the older volumes Umu had tried first, so the Rand was having little effect at stopping the river of blood that kept coming from Ro's neck.

"I pity you," Umu said, though she was the one most deserving of their pity. "If you think Ro could have done this, if you think Ro could have poisoned the drugs, then I pity you."

"He brought the drugs, Kip ate the drugs, the drugs killed Kip," Davey said. "Case closed."

"I ate the drugs, too!" Umu said. "He handed out the tabs and he watched me eat one! Have you never had a friend in your whole, sad life?" She tossed the Rand aside and now just used her hands, nothing but her fingers to try to get the blood to stop. "I loved him and he loved me. If the drugs had been poisoned, he'd never have let me near them."

That original slipcover on the Rand, the thing that had lent it most of its value, was torn and stained. The picture was of a train's light in the distance, cutting through a green mist. But the light flashed red instead of yellow, a sinister warning. The red now bled all over, absorbing much of the green in the cover image. It wasn't a warning any longer: it had been fulfilled.

"I saw Kip's body," Soraya said. Suddenly unfrozen, she came to stand over Ro and Umu.

"We all saw Kip's body," Umu said.

"No, but I touched it; it was on me." Soraya ran her hands down her face, her throat, her breasts, her ribs, her hips. "You don't understand because it wasn't on you. We're safer now that what happened to Kip can't happen to anyone else."

The fear, or the drugs, or the dark, were making Soraya blind. However much blood had been on Kip, there was more on Ro. However much of that blood had soaked her, there was more dripping from Umu.

"You're disgusting," Umu said. Her fingers were so slick with blood it was hard to keep them laced over Ro's wound. "You did this."

"I mean"—Mary raised her hand—"I think we all saw pretty clearly that Faye did this." She turned to Faye. "No offense."

"She started it," Umu said. Her attention was still on Soraya. Ro's blood had plastered a curl to Umu's forehead and it was dangling into her eye but she didn't care. "You're like one of those chicks who spills her drink on a bodybuilder in a club and then leaves your boyfriend to get his ass kicked by him. You started in on Ro, you got physical…"

"Your metaphor doesn't work because I can't leave my boyfriend to fight my fight because your boyfriend killed him!" Soraya wailed.

"Babe?" Mary crouched down, found a clean spot on the floor, and put her phone flashlight side up. "Can I call you babe?" She put her hand on Umu's shoulder.

In the bickering, Faye had remained quiet. The full weight of the event landed on her only when Mary pointed out that she'd been the one responsible, that she was the one who had done it. Perhaps she could have done something more, perhaps she could have made herself useful, if not for the feeling that settled upon her. Another man, this one scarcely more than a boy, really, was dead, and her hand had delivered the blow. She put the fingers of her left hand to her lips to stop herself from screaming, and only in doing so did she see how violently she was trembling.

"Babe," Mary was saying to Umu, "he's not bleeding anymore. You can let go; there's no more bleeding."

"Did I stop it?" Umu said. She lifted her hands from Ro's throat and, indeed, the blood had stopped coming. She wasn't a stupid girl, but it was a stupid question.

"No, babe," Mary said, "it just…stopped."

Once the blood stopped, Umu let her hands fall to her lap and for a moment, they were all silent. Respect for the dead, or uncertainty about what came next.

"An eye for an eye, or whatever," Davey said, breaking the silence sooner than it needed to be broken. "It's all over now."

"That would be true," Umu said, "if Ro had done anything to hurt Kip, to hurt anyone. But he wouldn't, he didn't, he couldn't."

"It doesn't make a difference now," Davey said. He offered her his hand to help her up, but she didn't move.

"It does make a difference," Umu whispered. "Someone poisoned Kip, and it wasn't Ro."

"Come on!" Davey yelled. "This is enough. Everyone can see what was happening here. Kip has a hard-on for you—sorry, Soraya—he invites you along so he can get it on with you in the library basement, your in-love-with-you-since-childhood bestie tags along and takes out the creepy older guy who's trying to get it in. Tale as old as time."

"Great theory," Umu said, getting up without Davey's help. "Except Ro was gay."

"I've definitely told girls I was gay to get them to take their tops off in front of me," Davey said.

Umu went to the stacks and started to pull down armfuls of books. "Then you're a psychopath," she said. "Ro wasn't gay in theory; he was gay in practice. He loved dicks. Dicks, dicks, dicks, dicks, dicks. He didn't care that Kip wanted to fuck me—sorry, Soraya—and he didn't kill anyone."

Umu let a pile of books fall to the ground next to Ro with a deafening "thwap" and then went back to the shelf for more. In the best of circumstances, on the best of days, Faye wouldn't have had the courage to walk up to Umu and be the one to try and strike up a conversation. Yet here she was. With trembling hands and a head that was still swimming, Faye approached Umu.

"I'm so sorry about your friend," Faye said.

Nothing from Umu. She kept pulling down volumes. She had time now to be more selective than she'd been when trying to stem Ro's bleeding. Anything in an acid-free box stayed on the shelf—too much trouble to unpack it. Heavy leather-bound things, too: they were more weight than they were good. Not that the volumes she left behind were safe; the blood on her hands stained them as she flipped past, or they flopped over or onto the sticky ground. She didn't care.

"Did you mean what you said," Faye continued, "that it was impossible for Ro to have poisoned Kip?"

She needed to know. Had she killed a killer? Or just a boy?

"Are you really trying to talk to me right now?" Umu said. The stack of books she was holding reached her chin. "Your conscience is your problem. You need to take several seats and shut your mouth."

"What are you going to do with…" Davey began to ask and then trailed off as it became clear what Umu intended to do. She knelt back down in front of Ro and picked up the first of the volumes that had fallen on the floor. She opened it and tore out a fistful of pages.

"Let's get you clean," she said to her friend.

What was the book she was destroying? Was it something prosaic? Something that had wound up in the library because a pile of money in pinstripes had donated it along with the rest of their collection and the institution had been too polite to decline it? Or was it something truly scarce, perhaps the only copy in the whole country, in the whole world, that was being used now to sop up this young man's blood?

"Umu?" Mary tried again to take her turn at being the voice of reason. "It's beautiful what you're doing, what you're trying to do for your friend."

Umu continued, tearing pages out of the book, using the paper to clean Ro's blood off his body, then tossing the soaked paper to the side. Over and over—rip, wipe, crumple, discard, rip, wipe, crumple, discard—with no end in sight to the supply of blood that soaked Ro.

"What a way to honor your friend," Mary continued. "The trouble is, I'm almost certain the police will object to the body having been cleaned when they get here in the morning or whenever they get here. Strictly speaking, you're disturbing a crime scene."

It could have been all the blood; it was almost certainly all the blood, but Soraya retreated in on herself. The shelf where Umu had grabbed her books was largely empty now and Soraya crawled onto it; she crawled right on and curled into a fetal position in that little nook.

Umu finished with the book she was shredding. There were no more pages. There was plenty more blood. She tossed the empty cover aside and reached for the next. Faye could see from Davey's grimace that he recognized this one as soon as Umu took it in hand. The Latin text of Caesar's Bellum civile, his account of his civil war against Pompey. It had been printed in Venice in 1575. It had foldout maps and plates. Davey's face—he must have loved that book. It was beautiful.

"That's the Commentarii," he said.

Umu ripped.

"I can help you clean him, if you like," Faye said. If Umu heard her, she didn't show it. The pages of the Commentarii were vellum, it wasn't a particularly good material to sop up anything, and Umu struggled to separate the leaves from their binding. Books that old had been built to last forever. Umu didn't care; she kept at it. Faye crept forward. The next volume in Umu's pile had deckled edges, a sign it was printed on a high-quality paper and likely to be useful for Umu's purpose. With her hands still shaking, she picked it up and handed it to Umu.

"This one might be better," Faye said. "It might do a better job."

Umu slapped the book out of her hand. She'd grown frustrated with the Commentarii, and she tossed that one aside, too. She took the next book from her pile. The deckle-edged book, having been spared its fate, lay happily on the floor. She was determined to do her work alone, or at least without Faye's interference.

Now that the Commentarii was free from Umu's grasp, Davey came to inspect it. He crouched by where Faye had been when her offer of help had been rebuffed. Her hands were still shaking.

"You can hardly be surprised she doesn't want your help," he said, trying to pull apart the sticky pages of the centuries-old book.

"I did what anyone would have done," Faye said. A thank-you from Davey would have gone a long way toward assuaging Faye's guilt.

Davey had a pained expression. He held one of the leaves that had been removed and tried to slide it back into the volume. Finally, he looked up from the book and at the person and allowed himself a human impulse, or at least allowed himself to succumb to her human need.

"Thank you, by the way," he said, finally looking at her full in the face. "For intervening."

It helped. A little, but it did. Intervention was such a clever, delicate euphemism for what she'd actually done. She shouldn't have been surprised by his poeticism. Wasn't this a place devoted to language?

"I have a dog now. Isn't that ridiculous?" he said. "A Jack Russell. His name's Nero. I just got him."

Faye wanted to tell him about Beans and how much she missed him, but it felt too private for the moment.

"When I walk Nero," Davey continued, "he growls at any big dog that comes near us. He'd throw himself at them if there wasn't a leash."

Once Faye had been walking Beans out in a cornfield, the sun barely over the horizon, when a coyote had come upon them. The coyote raised its ears and bared its teeth and crouched so that it looked ready to pounce and Faye said a silent goodbye to Beans, but then he bared his teeth, too, and he barked and growled and held his ground until the coyote disappeared into the cornstalks. Beans and Faye ran all the way home.

"Nero leaves the little dogs alone, but he knows a threat when he sees one, and he always goes after the big dogs. You were… It was like Nero faced with a big dog," Davey said.

He gazed at her and she felt seen. There was an instant when she was sure he was going to reach out and stroke her cheek.

"You have blood on your face," he said. Then he turned back to the Commentarii.

It was only when he said it that she realized she'd been looking at him through blood-speckled glasses. She took them off to try and clean them, and the world in her vision, already dark and blood-soaked, turned even more terrifying when everything blurred. She put the glasses back on without cleaning them.

***

"You should clean his hands," Mary said. Umu was still working mostly at his face, but Ro's hands, which he had reached up with to stem the bleeding in his throat before he lost consciousness, were stained with blood, too. "I mean, you shouldn't really do anything until the body is cold if you're going to insist on doing it at all. But if you're going to clean him, you start with his hands. That's what they did with my grandpa."

Davey put down the Commentarii and came to stand next to Mary. In the near-perfect silence of the basement, he let out a tormented wail, then beat himself upon the chest with his fist.

Umu dropped the pages she was holding, Mary took two steps back from him, Faye wrapped her arms around herself, and Soraya didn't move from her place on the shelf.

"It's, like, respect for the dead," he said. "You have to mourn loud enough that they can hear you."

"His blood is on my shoes, so you're going to need a boom box, at the very least, to generate enough sound," Mary said. She turned back to Umu. "You're supposed to wait until the breath has left the body. He just died. I'll bet there's still breath in there."

Davey let out another pained yawp.

Having no talent for funerary custom, Faye again found herself at loose ends. The basement, which would have been large enough to host a regulation-sized soccer pitch had all the shelves been removed, felt tiny. She couldn't see any of the bars from where she was, but she felt the grating, was aware at every moment that she was in a cage. If Umu, Mary, and Davey found themselves contented and busy with the preparation of a body, or with arguing about the correct manner of preparation of a body, then there was at least one other occupant of the cage who was aware of being trapped.

Soraya lay trembling on her shelf.

"Whoever built this place really hated emergency exits, huh?" Faye said, kneeling on the floor next to Soraya. She could think of nothing better to say. She'd have commented on the weather if she had any view of the outdoors. "Do you think Woodend partnered with the architects to make this place a firetrap so he could use it to kill his wife if pushing her down the stairs didn't do the trick?"

"You have blood on your face," Soraya said, through her chattering teeth. There was so little light where they were, as the undertakers had commandeered most of the flashlights, that it was shocking Soraya could make out anything at all.

"I know," Faye said. She reached to push some of Soraya's hair out of her face. "Davey told me."

As much as she could in the tiny, cramped space on the bookshelf, Soraya reared back. She did so with so much violence that the metal shelves clattered and rattled. Had they been in the B ranges, where the old rolling shelves liked to wobble on their tracks, she might have sent a whole stack tumbling.

"I can smell it on you," Soraya said.

Faye put her hands to her face. There was blood on her hands, too, and Soraya buried her face in her arm to avoid the sight of it.

"I can't smell anything," Faye whispered. It wasn't unlike being a schoolchild on the verge of puberty and being told one stunk. She whispered it so the others wouldn't hear. So they wouldn't hear and come over and sniff and tell her they smelled it, too.

"You stink like his blood," Soraya said into her arm. She moaned like she was in pain, and indeed she must have been, bent into a new geometry, her teeth chattering, her joints crammed against the hard metal shelving.

Faye moved back a bit to give Soraya some space.

"I think it might be your imagination," Faye said.

"It's not."

"Or the drugs telling your body that there's a smell that isn't there. Your brain playing a trick on you." To give Soraya the benefit of the doubt, she stuck her nose in the air and took a big, loud, performative sniff to prove that there was no smell.

She found herself to be a liar. There was a smell. The faint hint of smoke.

***

They say you can't claim to be from somewhere until you've brought a baby into the world and put a body into the ground there. With the untimely end and subsequent burial of Mrs. Woodend, the Woodend family officially became Vermonters.

The librarians, university trustees, lawyers, none of them wished Mrs. Woodend any ill will, but they were all glad to be rid of her husband once he was finally incarcerated for what was very clearly a murder. It wasn't the way they would have chosen to end the story, but it was over, prison bars being the thing that finally prevented Mr. Woodend from pursuing his legal case to get his money back.

For the university's part, they launched a campaign to get the Woodend name scrubbed from the library. It was an ugly episode, and they could hardly be blamed for not wanting to be reminded of it when they walked past the man's name carved into the stone facade every day.

It was on this matter that Mr. Woodend got his retribution. If the university lawyers had crafted an airtight contract that made it impossible for Mr. Woodend to get his money back once he had promised it to the library, then Woodend's lawyers had done the same to ensure that there was no circumstance in which his name could be removed from the building. There were years more in court fighting the matter. Woodend's guilt, his lack of character, that was never questioned, it was written into the court record, but it was found not to matter because the university had promised that in exchange for taking his money, his name would remain on the building in perpetuity.

In 1926 there was a judgment that the only way the university could proceed with the removal of Woodend's name from the building was by paying back his initial investment, adjusted for inflation. By that point they were willing to do so, but when Woodend was approached, via his lawyer, with the proposition, he refused to take his money back. Facing the rest of his life in prison, he had no need for $400,000.

The Woodend children, on the other hand, could have benefited from that money a great deal, though William Woodend made it clear that he didn't have a lot of concern for their needs the day he murdered their mother. Far from being resentful of their father and the stained legacy he left them, the Woodend heirs embraced the library—their library as they saw it. They were Vermonters, after all, tied to the land by the body of their mother. Over the decades the fortunes of the children improved, and rather than use this newfound financial freedom to leave the community that would always remember them as "those poor Woodend kids," they dug in further, involving themselves with the library, donating volumes to build the library's collection of books bound in emerald-green book cloth, attending every public reading, lecture, and symposium, and pointing to the Woodend name proudly. No matter their improved fortunes, no matter their involvement with the institution and their willingness to fill its stacks, no Woodend heir would ever donate a cent for the upkeep or improvement of the library building.

Faye was reminded of it all—the Woodends, their stance toward the improvement of the building, and the woefully inadequate fire suppression system—when she smelled that hint of smoke.

"We forgot the candles." Faye turned back to the others. One of them or all of them had begun to remove Ro's shirt but for some reason had stopped halfway through the process, and now he had one arm in a sleeve and one out of it while the three stood over him and discussed it. "Over in the arena. We forgot about the candles."

"Maybe you'll kill all of us with fire before the night is done," Umu said.

The candles couldn't be left there, they needed to be extinguished, but the truth was she was scared to walk through the dark alone. There wasn't a killer anymore, there wasn't any danger, there was only dark, and yet it was the most terrifying thing she could think of, being alone out there.

"Go put them out if you're worried," Mary said. "I don't know why you lit them in the first place; we have plenty of light from our phones."

Not true. And they'd have even less once the batteries started to go.

"They're probably fine, right?" Faye said. "We left them in the middle of a concrete floor. The worst that can happen is that they burn themselves out."

"They'll probably tip over and light us all on fire and destroy a significant portion of the world's knowledge while roasting us to death alongside these two corpses," Mary said. She had picked up one of the books from Umu's stack and was fanning herself with it. Was it hot? Faye didn't think it was hot.

Davey's full attention was on Ro's body. Faye was lurking now, over his shoulder, over Mary's. She was repulsed by them but she needed to be near them.

"Do you think I should go put out the candles?" she asked Davey.

"What candles?" In the light from her phone, she could see some fresh scratches on his cheeks. The scratches made his mosquito bite look worse, or his mosquito bite made the scratches look worse. He'd torn his cheek open with his own fingernails to demonstrate his grief or to demonstrate how one should demonstrate their grief.

"Is that how it is in the Greek ritual?" she asked, reaching partway for the scratches on his face.

"The Ethiopian," he said. He frowned at her like it was obvious. He wasn't making sense.

"You said we were reenacting the Eleusinian Mysteries."

He gestured at Ro's body in reply, as though she'd somehow missed seeing it.

"But now we have a death and that deserves a ritual, too." He didn't look sad about Ro, he looked sad about the idea of death itself, so much so that she again had the urge to reach out to him.

"Why an Ethiopian ritual?" she asked.

"A custom, really, not a ritual," he said. "It's the one I know best. The one I remember from my mother."

"Do you want to come with me to get those candles?" Faye asked again.

He shook his head.

"Faye, we're preparing the body."

She didn't want to go alone. She didn't want to stay here next to the grotesque evidence of what she'd done. She only wanted to be home.

"I thought it would be safer if someone went to get them," Faye said, but Davey was no longer listening.

She had a picture of it in her mind. One of the candles burnt down far enough that the heat from the wick warmed the pool of hardened wax that was keeping the candle upright. The thing tilting sideways, slowly at first and then toppling all the way over. Fine. No problem, not at first, but then a little tuft of that ever-present dust was stirred up and blew past the active flame. They'd be so happy to see one another, the flame and the dust. Fast friends. Maybe the tuft of dust would carry on blowing, alight with flame, or maybe it would just be an ember, but it would get to the stacks eventually. It wasn't the flames that would overpower them, Faye thought. It was the smoke that would kill them first.

"Soraya, I'm going to find a fire alarm!" Faye said, springing back over to Soraya with delight at her realization.

There was a flicker of lucidity in Soraya. She lifted her face a little, pulled it out of her shirt.

"I've never seen a fire alarm here," she said.

"No one sees fire alarms," Faye said. She wanted to stroke the hair out of Soraya's eyes, wanted to take her hand so they could both be touching someone. "They're ubiquitous. You don't notice they're there until you need one. We need one now. We'll pull it and help will come."

If she'd kept the light trained on the floor it might have been better or if she'd stayed a few steps back it might have been better, but there had been some real lucidity, she was sure there was progress for a minute there. The change came when Soraya looked her full in the face.

"Look at you," she moaned.

Faye looked down at her clothes, self-conscious, but this wasn't an older girl looking to tease her about her apparel.

"There's blood all over your face," Soraya said. "I can smell it, I can smell the blood on you." She buried her face back in her arm. Whatever lucidity had been there, it was gone.

"Can someone come with me?" Faye asked, looking back toward the others. "It'll be quicker with two people. We'll stay at the perimeter. If there's an alarm, it'll be along a wall somewhere. We pull the alarm and help will come and you won't have to do whatever it is you're doing right now."

Davey had a white sock, the last of Ro's clothing. He would have been a beautiful man if he'd lived long enough for real manhood. Nice calves, Faye thought. Perhaps because he had a job that kept him on his feet a lot.

"I'm going to find a fire alarm to pull," Faye said. "I'm going to get us out of here."

Despite only having access to paper and leather, Umu had done an effective job of cleaning Ro's face. In the dark, his eyelashes and eyebrows looked like they'd been darkened with makeup, not with blood, and the fine curve of his cheekbones was free from blemish.

"We should move to the anointing," Davey said.

"Where are you going to get oils for anointing?" Mary asked.

Here, finally, Faye could make herself useful. She went into her pocket, not for a weapon but for the rose-scented lip gloss. Without a word, she handed it to Davey.

"I have lip balm," Davey said. He held it like it had been his all along and showed the others. She didn't mind that he didn't credit her. She wasn't looking for plaudits; she was looking for peace with the dead. "Not exactly perfumed oil but pretty damn close for an improvisation." Davey held it to his nose and sniffed. "It's scented."

"Are you going to do the anointing, babe?" Mary asked Umu.

Standing to the side, her request for a partner for her fire alarm mission ignored, Faye waited for Umu to rage at the suggestion. Here was her friend, his youth radiating up at them now that his face was clean, who had been struck down by a group of strangers. How could she be anything but furious at this charade by the group who demonstrably had cared not at all about her friend in life, who had called him a murderer and celebrated his death?

Umu took one of her hands from the side of Ro's face. To shake a fist at Davey? To slap that lip gloss out of his hands? To tear her own hair out in grief?

No.

She took the makeup that Davey offered. Her own phone lay on the floor, face up by Ro's bare shoulder. It illuminated her face better than it did his, but the angle of the light cast strange shadows, made it impossible to clearly make out facial expressions because every feature was so exaggerated by the severe interplay of light and dark. Was she sneering? Weeping?

When she took the lip gloss, it was like the shadow disappeared and her features were just her features again. Soft and young and unbothered, like a twenty-two-year-old girl should be. Ro's lips were slightly parted, the skin at their bow slightly cracked. She took the cap off the gloss and applied it to those unmoving lips, first to the bottom, then to the top. In her own small way, she anointed him, laying the scented oil upon his skin so he would feel no pain when he crossed over to the other side.

"I'm going," Faye said. She was embarrassed by the intimacy of Umu's gesture. "You'll know I've found a way out when you hear the fire alarm ringing."

Umu put the cap back on the little plastic tube, and the moment was over. The shadows found her features again and formed a disgusting display. You could only think, when looking at her, that she'd swallowed something repulsive.

"This was yours?" Umu held the little pot toward Faye without looking at her. She kept her eyes on Ro.

The idea that Umu would thank her made it all so much more bearable, made her think that the door to forgiveness had been opened. She reached to take the pot back from Umu, knowing that for a moment they would graze fingertips and she'd feel that electrical shock of redemption.

Umu let the pot fall to the floor. The plastic lid snapped in two when it made impact.

"When we had that poli-sci class together, I remember you from that," Umu said. "I even told Ro about you. How I was impressed that you didn't wear any makeup, especially since there were so many lip-filler Barbies in that class. But I guess I was wrong about that, huh?" Umu did take her eyes off Ro, finally, but it wasn't to look at Faye, it was to look at the broken pot of lip gloss. "Guess nothing about you is quite what it seems though, is it?"

She didn't want to go alone, Faye didn't want to go out into the dark alone, but she owed it to them. They weren't in their right minds, they were grieving, they were terrified, and she, with her prefrontal cortex in order, with her reasonable serotonin levels, had promised to protect them. She owed it to Umu. She needed Faye to find their way out.

"You'll keep an eye on Soraya?" she said. To none of them, to all of them. And she walked away, out into the dark to do the thing she had promised.

"You're not even chanting!" Mary said. Faye could hear them until she couldn't. She went back to the arena first. The way back was familiar; there would be light when she got there; it wasn't so bad, going there alone.

The Persephone myth, the one they were meant to be reenacting in the ritual, started a little like this, with a maiden who wanders off alone. When she read the story in one of those library books, Faye was surprised that she didn't already know it. If Demeter was the goddess of agriculture, shouldn't Faye have grown up with the story? She thought that may have been why Davey invited her. It was all wrong though. Real farm people were too practical for stories and prayers. They knew that the thing that made the corn grow year after year was work.

The story didn't start with Demeter, but with her daughter. Persephone was abducted by Hades, god of the dead, as she gathered flowers. As far as Faye could tell, the Greeks were always writing about maidens being abducted as they gathered flowers. It was like they thought the trope lent a little romance to their rape stories.

Demeter searched the world, or Greece at least, for her daughter, and then finally in her grief, she wandered to Eleusis, where she disguised herself as a mortal. When the Eleusinians learned there was a god among them, they were filled with awe. They built her a temple to honor her, but she didn't want honor; she wanted her daughter. She was too aggrieved to move from Eleusis, to rejoin the rest of the gods in the heavenly realm, and in her grief, she caused a year-long period of sterility in the harvest that threatened to starve the mortals throughout the world.

Zeus tried to bribe Demeter into returning to her place among the gods, but his gifts were as little use to her as the honors of the Eleusinian people were. She wanted none of it; she only wanted Persephone. So Zeus went to Hades instead. Not with gifts but with threats. And it was those threats that finally freed Persephone. Hades said that he'd let her leave the underworld to go see her mother, but before she left, he tricked her into swallowing a pomegranate seed, and that morsel of food tied Persephone to the underworld forever.

Faye was starving. Her eyes watered at the idea of a mouthful of pomegranate seeds.

Demeter was devastated that she'd found her daughter only to lose her again, so Zeus and Hades struck a deal. Persephone would be tied to Hades forever, as he intended. She'd spend part of the year in the underworld with him and part of the year with her mother.

Faye had made a choice to move across the country from her mother. No one tricked her, no one forced her. But she was still devastated by the distance every single day. She'd arrived in Vermont with a bout of homesickness so intense she thought it might swallow her whole. And then time passed and what was left wasn't homesickness; instead, she walked around a dark blue sort of lonesome all the time.

"Introduce yourself to some people," her mother, who had lived in the same town all her life, would say on the phone. She was a great mom, but it was terrible advice.

When Faye had been sitting at the picnic bench the day Umu invited her to the roller skating party, it was the type of interaction her mother thought happened all the time. She never even told her mom about it because she would have been so disappointed that Faye refused to lace up her skates and go.

What if she'd gone roller skating? What if she hadn't been afraid for once in her life? How different would everything be?

Faye opened the messages in her phone and scrolled all the way back until she found it. She hadn't even bothered to save Umu as a contact because she knew the girl would never talk to her again after the declined invitation, but the text with the party details was still there. It was right below another message, from a classmate named Frankie inviting her to a study group. Frankie had likely sent that invitation to every person in the class, just to be polite. She'd declined that one, too.

She knew it wouldn't send until the morning, but she started to write a message, belatedly replying to Umu. Should she apologize about Ro? Suggest they go out for a coffee and talk about everything that happened? Offer to take Umu roller skating? She hovered in the light of the message screen for a long time, but she never could figure out what to say.

In the story of Persephone, after the bargain was struck, Demeter returned to live among the gods, and the world bore fruit and grain again, but every year when Demeter was separated from her daughter anew, the fields were once again barren. It was a story about an imperfect outcome.

When Faye arrived at the arena, she saw that one of the candles had gone out. It hadn't tipped over, it hadn't taken anything with it. The flame disappeared as though helped by a puff of air from a ghost. That would have been the little bit of smoke Faye smelled, when the flame went out. Around the corner, Kip's body was laid out flat, but she didn't go check on it. She could only hope the others had exhausted all the grief in their bodies on their treatment of Ro.

Faye went to the remaining candles and blew, puff, puff, puff. It was only in the light of the very last one that she caught sight of her hands. She'd been holding her phone, casting light with it all this time. She'd looked right at them when she'd been looking at her messages, but somehow the sight had escaped her. Her hands were stiff with blood. Blood in the dry beds of her fingernails and staining the lines in her palms. She scratched at it to try and flake it off, wiped it on her jeans, spit on the backs of her hands to try and get them clean, but she couldn't. The blood stuck like a tattoo so she couldn't forget what she'd done.