An Arcane Inheritance by Kamilah Cole - 5

Hudson was dressed like he had come from the party: loose black jeans and a slate-gray crewneck sweater, black high-tops, and a Natty Ice. It was the kind of frat boy beverage she would have thought was beneath him, but then again, she would have thought that crime novels were beneath him, that romances were beneath him, that bell hooks’s film criticism was beneath him… If she hadn’t held the evidence of a book read over and over, full of written notes and taped edges, she might have still thought that. The callous, condescending reality of him usually shattered whatever soft illusion she pieced together in his absence.

“The door was open,” Ellory said. “I’d hardly call it breaking in .”

“There was a rope blocking off the second floor.”

“Has that literally ever worked?”

His lips twitched like he wanted to smile. “No.”

“Well, you can blame Liam Blackwood. He said I could use the upstairs bathroom.”

“This isn’t a bathroom.” Hudson’s eyes fell to the book at her feet. An expression bolted across his face, there and gone too quickly to read. “But you seem to have made yourself comfortable.”

“I love this book,” she gushed as she retrieved it. “I love bell hooks, but this book—” It took all she had to stop herself from being vulnerable in front of someone who had consistently preyed on her weaknesses. He was staring at the battered paperback, a frown heavy on his face. Ellory had the sudden strange feeling that she was the one who had caught him in a weak moment, but that was ridiculous. “I mean, when she talked about Tarzan as a white savior fantasy…”

It was a test, one she didn’t feel good about but needed him to pass. She thought she knew his handwriting as well as she knew her own by now, but this could be someone else’s copy. Liam’s, perhaps, or maybe a paramour had left it behind. Maybe it had come with the room, and he’d simply been inspired to create a great wall of other books around it.

“I thought she stretched the white-daddy metaphor a little too far in that chapter, but yeah.” Hudson stepped farther into the room. “She made really interesting points about the way society—and we ourselves—view Black and white masculinity, and how it’s further colored by an unfair portrayal across film and television.”

“What, did your film and media studies major fall through so you had to settle for poli-sci?”

“Hilarious.” Hudson joined her at the desk, setting his can of Natural Ice on the only free area he could find. The stacks around it wobbled but ultimately remained standing. “I actually want to be a lawyer, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have other interests.”

“Like”—she nudged a book on top of a nearby pile with her free hand—“Nora Roberts?”

“Did you go through my closet, too? Should I call the campus police?”

“We’re not on campus.”

“They like me more than you do.”

“Complete strangers on the street like you more than I do. An anthill you’d smash likes you more than I do. A baby you’d kick likes—”

“Your point has been assiduously made, thank you.”

Her mouth moved before her brain signed off on it. “Why do you always talk like you swallowed a textbook?”

Familiarity shivered through her. The words, the almost-playful way in which they’d come out…it felt old, common, routine , and yet this was the longest conversation they’d had in the four weeks since she’d started at Warren. Wasn’t it?

“Hey,” Ellory murmured. “Do you ever feel like…? Have we had this discussion before?”

“About bell hooks or about my elocution?”

“Okay, Encyclopedia Brown.” That nickname. It felt unnaturally natural, even though she’d never used it before. “Seriously, have we…?”

“I have no idea what you’re asking me, Morgan,” Hudson deadpanned. “You’ll have to use your words.”

Ellory realized for the first time that the space between them had disappeared. Hudson leaned against the desk, gazing at her like he was searching for something. She clutched Reel to Real between them, but that was all that was between them. If she breathed too deeply, her knuckles would brush his sweater. Their height difference had evaporated, thanks to her heels. When she didn’t have to tilt her head to meet his eyes, they felt more equal. It startled her, how intense the brown of them was from so close. Strong and earthy, deep and dark. The kind of brown that buried people alive.

The kind they wanted to be buried in.

“Morgan,” he said, and it sounded louder than usual. The distant sounds of the party trickled in slowly, a light drizzle too insubstantial to register. “What exactly are you doing in my room? Even with the door open, you couldn’t possibly have seen that book from the hallway.”

Ellory sighed, setting bell hooks back on the desk. She cleaned imaginary dust from the cover to buy herself some time. There was nowhere to sit but the bed, and she refused to sit on the bed. Bass rattled the carpet beneath their feet. Cheers filtered in from the backyard. The conversation she’d fled echoed in her ears all the same, shriller now thanks to his reminder.

“I got tired of the party,” she said. “It’s a party, but all anyone wants to talk about is homework.”

“Talking about homework isn’t your idea of fun?”

“I actually want to be a lawyer, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have other interests,” she parroted back at him, eyebrows raised.

Hudson made a noise she chose to believe was a chuckle, though it was more breath than sound. “ Do you want to be a lawyer?”

Her pulse skipped. “What kind of question is that? Of course I do.”

“Not everyone has the passion. And there are plenty of things you can do with a degree in political science besides taking the bar—”

“ I want to be a lawyer .” It came out like a bark, too quick and defensive to be believed. Ellory realized her shoulders had inched up toward her ears and forced herself to relax. “You don’t know me, Graves. If you’re trying to intimidate me away from law because you know I’ll be better at it than you, it’s not going to work. And, quite frankly, it’s beneath you.”

Hudson’s expression was carefully blank. Ellory almost wanted to take the words back, but she was tired of doubting herself. She didn’t need to hear her midnight thoughts from his sneering mouth. It didn’t matter what she wanted. She had her family to think about, their sacrifices to get her here. Everything else—this conversation and this party, her hallucinations and this unrelenting sense of déjà vu—was a distraction.

And, unlike Hudson, she could not afford distraction.

“Have you heard of Professor Colt?”

Of all the things Hudson could have said next, Ellory had not expected that. Preston Colt was one of Warren University’s most prestigious instructors; he taught political theory to the upperclassmen, but he had also written several award-winning books and been on almost every talk show. Finding out that he taught here had eased the last of Aunt Carol’s concerns about the impromptu scholarship offer. If Ellory could walk the same halls as Preston Colt, it was worth ignoring a few red flags.

“He hosts a monthly salon at his house,” Hudson continued when she didn’t answer. “It’s a select group, but we’re each allowed a guest. I’ve never taken advantage of that particular clause, but…how would you like to be mine for the one in October?”

“What?” Ellory blinked. “Why me?”

“I—”

“ There you are.” Tai appeared, beaming, her eyes bright with obvious drunkenness. She wore a colorful medal that, upon closer inspection, appeared to be several beer-bottle caps welded together. Her car keys dangled from a finger. “You need to drive us home, because I am fuuuuuuucked upppppp .” Her grin dimmed into more of a puzzled curve. “Am I interrupting something?”

“No,” Ellory said quickly. “Of course not. Are you ready to go now?”

“Are you ?”

Ellory glanced at Hudson. He was still leaning against the desk, but now he was staring out the window as if to let them have some privacy. If Hudson had been about to give her an explanation less shocking than the initial invitation, the moment had clearly passed. She wasn’t sure there was an explanation less shocking than the initial invitation. She was afraid that if she lingered, he would realize the absurdity of extending her this opportunity and snatch it back.

She cleared her throat. “Yeah, I’m ready.” And then, to him: “I’ll go. But if this is some sort of prank—”

“I’ll text you the details. Give me your phone.”

Ellory held out her hand. With another puff of amusement, Hudson handed his over. His background was blank, factory settings, but when she inputted her number, sent herself a text, and closed it up, she saw that his lock screen was Luke Fox in the Batwing suit. She didn’t comment, even though she desperately wanted to smile.

“All right, Flip Cup Queen,” she said, stepping forward so Tai could throw an arm around her shoulders. “Let’s get you back to Moneta without your residents seeing.”

“I’m an adult,” Tai sniffed. “Please don’t let me puke in my car. I just cleaned it.”

“I’ll pull over.”

Ellory could feel the prickling weight of Hudson’s gaze as she shuffle-dragged Tai to the stairs, but she forced herself not to look back.

***

Instead of returning to her room after putting Tai to bed, Ellory camped out on the floor in case she was needed. She’d forced Tai to down an entire bottle of water before falling asleep, and now her friend snored on her side from between the pillow barricades Ellory had erected to keep her from rolling onto her back. There was a bottle of ibuprofen on Tai’s side table. The trash bin had been emptied and placed by the bed in case she couldn’t make it to the bathroom. She was sleeping deeply, but Ellory found it hard to do the same.

Adrenaline chased away her exhaustion. She replayed her interaction with Hudson a thousand different ways. It was an oddity in a month of oddities, and she couldn’t shake it off as easily as the others.

Ellory was familiar with déjà vu in the same way most people were: it was a French loanword, a cliché, something children picked up from pop culture to describe a universal feeling. She had been on campus since the last week of August, and instead of a fleeting moment once or twice in her life, déjà vu had become a presence as constant as her shadow. And every time she tried to rationalize it, to ignore it, it returned more insidiously than before.

Then there were the things she couldn’t explain: the way her surroundings had twice blurred around her like watercolors, the discordant giggling that appeared to have no source, the soccer ball that had dropped to the ground in front of her when all science, all logic, indicated it would’ve slammed into her face. Reality always seemed to reaffirm itself afterward: Of course, this is Riverside Campus. Of course, I was panicked and seeing things in the gloom. Of course, that strong wind was capable of stopping a ball in its tracks. When she thought about it, really thought about it, she was uncomfortably unsure if these were her own desperate excuses or the placating hand of something she couldn’t remember once her breathing calmed and her world made sense again.

Maybe she had always been haunted, and her body was begging her to finally do something about it.

After a long stretch of time spent staring at the same crack in the ceiling, Ellory reached for her laptop. She had no idea what she expected to find, but some of the tension sloughed from her shoulders when she opened a blank Word document.

Riverside Campus. Miss Claudette. Teeming shadows. The Warren Communiqué . Encyclopedia Brown. Everything poured out until she had a chaotic wall of disjointed sentences, a bullet point list of weirdness in Times New Roman twelve-point font. Then she wasted a half hour adjusting the borders of the document, adding and formatting the dictionary definition of déjà vu, and organizing the information under headings, afraid to look directly at what she’d written.

But she was too well trained from her long days and longer nights in Newspaper Club. Her mind began to see patterns in the fractured memories, ghostly illusions, and visceral dread that swept over her in those moments. If places she’d never been and conversations she’d never had felt familiar, there had to be a reason, even if that reason was that she was under so much stress from the workload that she was starting to crack.

Aunt Carol had once said that déjà vu was past lives reasserting themselves. “I read on Facebook the other day—don’t make that face; it wasn’t that anti-vaxxer or flat-earther crap—but apparently Plato said that human beings used to be androgynous. Zeus thought we were too powerful like that, so he split us in half, and now we spend our lives searching for our missing piece. Our soulmates.”

She’d taken another sip of brandy and continued: “It’s heteronormative bullshit, but there’s something to the concept of people who feel like you knew them in another life. Maybe you did. Our brains can store only so many memories, and we’re already losing the earliest ones from this life before we’re even halfway through it. Who’s to say this is the only life we’ve ever had?”

Feeling silly, Ellory plugged her own name into Google, pulled up her genetic-testing results, and fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole for a page that felt a little too close to home. But if she’d had a past life, it didn’t reveal itself to her before the sun crept over the horizon.

There was something here. She knew there was, even if it wasn’t coming together as quickly as she’d hoped. She saved the document and emailed it to herself as a backup. Her eyes felt strained, and her temples pounded in a searing ache.

Yet she also felt accomplished. Like she was off to a strong start. Like she had more control.

Maybe she couldn’t secure her own invitation to Professor Colt’s mysterious salons, and maybe college had been an impossibility without the sudden benevolence of total strangers. Maybe she hadn’t scored as high as she’d wanted on her con. law quiz, and maybe she couldn’t handle a simple conversation about school without fleeing. But her instincts were still sharp enough to find a narrative where others might have seen nothing, and that was enough.

She slid her laptop back into her bag, her fingers catching on the flyer. For once, it didn’t cause a pit to grow in her stomach. Instead, she traced its edges lovingly, a reassuring touch from one friend to another. She didn’t need the Warren Communiqué . She was starring in her own story, weird and frustrating though it might be. Figuring out what was going on with her life suddenly felt more pressing than interviewing locals about neighborhood crimes or her fellow classmates about curriculum changes.

Above her, Tai snorted herself awake with “Buh? Oh, god. Oh, fuck.”

“The trash is to your left,” Ellory said. “Ibuprofen is to your right.”

“Fuck.”

“You’re welcome.”