Chapter 3: The Library
The library at St. Aurelia's occupied what had to have been the chapel once. The windows went up for two stories, pointed at the top, filled with pale glass that let the evening through without warming it. Cold light fell in long slabs across the floor and never quite reached the backs of the shelves. Somewhere above, a mezzanine ran the length of the far wall, iron railings, shadows between the balusters.
Chloe had come in to be alone, which was the mistake. There was nowhere alone in a building like this. The aisles were twelve feet high and the books on the top shelves needed a ladder, and she had been walking between the stacks for twenty minutes touching spines at random without reading a single title, and her head was full of Vance's voice saying wanting is the raw material.
"You get lost in here your first term," said a voice behind her. "Everybody does. It's designed for it."
She turned. Petra stood at the end of the aisle with a book in one hand, dressed, this time, in the same uniform Chloe wore, except that Petra wore it like a rumor, blouse loose, skirt short, collar open two buttons past the point where a teacher would have said something. Wet black curls dried now into a dark halo. The smile was the same as the bathroom's, but it had been dialed down to something almost careful.
"You," Chloe said.
"Me." Petra came down the aisle at an ordinary walking pace and stopped a polite six feet away, and held up the book like a passport. "Creevey, on the alumnae fund. Boring as sin. It's a prop. Nobody actually reads in here on a Friday." She set it on a shelf. "I wanted to say something to you without an audience and without being naked. So. Here I am."
"Say it."
"I'm sorry about the hand."
Chloe had braced for a lot of things. Not that. She blinked. "You are."
"Actually sorry, not sorry-because-I-got-caught." Petra leaned her hip against the shelf, and the shelf took it without complaint. "The touch was the plan. The plan was a bad plan for you specifically, because I took your measure wrong, and I don't usually do that. I clocked you as a girl who'd say no twice and then want to be talked over. That's most first-years. You're not most first-years, and I pushed three seconds past where I should have stopped, and that's on me. Rule's a rule. I broke mine." She spread her hands. "That's the whole speech. No sale attached."
Chloe studied her. Olive skin, a small crescent scar near one eyebrow, nothing softened for the occasion. It was harder to hate someone at six feet with clothes on, and she suspected that was the entire architecture of the apology.
"You stopped when I said," Chloe said. "After three seconds."
"After three seconds. Yeah." Petra didn't flinch at the number. "You counted them out loud in your head. I could see your lips." A beat. "Do you want to know what I saw in those three seconds? Or would that ruin the apology?"
"It would ruin the apology."
"Fair." Petra smiled, and it was smaller than the bathroom smile, and truer. "Then here's the part with no sale attached either. This place runs on two currencies. One is the stuff Vance told you about, I assume she told you, she always does the ledger speech. The other is information. Who wants whom. Who said no and how long they took to say it. Who leaned in for a millimeter." She tapped the shelf beside her hip. "I have a piece of information about you now. I could trade it around. Petra the first-year shark, that's a version of me that exists."
"But you're not going to."
"I'm not going to. And in exchange I'd like to do the thing we're supposed to do, which is introduce you properly. Not the shower version. The real version."
"The real version involved you touching me."
"The shower version involved me testing you." Petra pushed off the shelf and took one step closer, and stopped there, an amount of space that was either respectful or strategic. "The real version is slower. It starts with me telling you things you'll want to know anyway. Which rooms lock. Which staff participate and which just know. What Monday is going to be like, when the Ashworth boys come up the road, because nobody warned me about Monday and I walked into it blind and it cost me." Her voice had gone low and even, pitched under the cold light like it was a different temperature than the room. "And it continues, if you ever want it to, wherever you want it to. Your pace. Your word. I stop on your word and I don't ask twice, that's the amended rule where you're concerned."
"You're being very reasonable," Chloe said. "It doesn't fit you."
"Give me a week. I'll be unreasonable again." Petra's mouth curved. "You looked for me at dinner. Third table from the fire, back bench. You checked."
"I looked at the room."
"You looked at one bench in the room." Something in her eyes was patient and pleased and dangerous. "You're doing it right now too, actually. You're looking at my mouth while I talk, and then you catch yourself and go to my collarbone, which is worse, honestly, because the collarbone's not where the sentence is."
Chloe felt her face heat and hated the reliability of it. "You think very highly of your mouth."
"I have data." Petra said it lightly, and then, more quietly, "Look. I'm going to say one more honest thing and then I'm going to let you pick a direction, any direction, including at the door. The showers started something in you. Not me. I didn't start it, Serena started it in July apparently, the whole school knows that story by now, it came up the mountain with your file." She watched Chloe absorb that. "Sorry. Honest means honest. But whatever's in you, it predates me, and it's going to keep going whether I'm in the room or not, because you can't put it back once a birthday and a kitchen and a woman like that has taken it out of the box. All I'm offering is to be the person who does the next part slowly, with rules, with you holding the leash. Or the person who tells you what Monday looks like. Or nothing. All three are fine with me."
The aisle was very quiet. Cold light lay across the floorboards between them in a bar that Chloe realized she would have to cross to leave, which meant Petra had picked the geography, which meant even the apology had been staged in a room designed for it.
"Who told you about the kitchen," Chloe said. "Not the file. Vance said the file was confidential."
"It is. But secrets here are inventory, and inventory moves." Petra shrugged. "Ask me who told me and I'll tell you, but you'll make an enemy of someone who's been friendly, and you've only got a few friendly so far. That's the first real lesson. Everything costs."
"Ruby," Chloe said.
Petra's face did something genuine, the smile breaking its frame. "God, you're quick. Vance said you would be, and I hate it when she's right before lunch." She stepped back half a pace, giving the aisle back. "Yes. Ruby. Who is currently upstairs on the mezzanine pretending to read, by the way, so if you're going to be angry about being watched, aim it in both directions."
Chloe's head came up. The mezzanine rail ran along the shadowed gallery thirty feet above the far end of the aisle, and between two balusters there was a smudge of red that resolved, when she looked properly, into Ruby's hair, and the deliberate stillness of someone who had been there long enough to have heard the apology, the inventory, all of it.
"Vance's arrangement," Petra said. "Guard dog with her own agenda. You're being cared for and shopped at the same time. It's very St. Aurelia's."
Chloe looked from the rail to Petra and back. The heat was still in her, banked, the three seconds and the palm through terrycloth and the kitchen all stacked in the same place under her ribs, and the honest ugly fact of the last two days was that every confrontation left her more awake, not less.
"If I asked you to leave," she said. "Right now. Just walked out of the aisle."
"I'd stand here until you were gone, and I'd mean it when I said it was fine."
"And if I stayed?"
Petra's breath went out slow, the first uncalculated thing she'd done. "Then we'd keep talking, and I'd keep my hands to myself until you told me otherwise, and I'd want to die a little, and that would be my problem."
Chloe stayed. It was a decision made more by exhaustion and curiosity and the red smudge at the rail than by anything she'd have called desire, but she stayed, and she saw Petra understand exactly which thing had decided it, and respect it anyway.
"Then tell me about Monday," Chloe said.
Petra lit up like a lamp. "Monday." She glanced up at the rail, then back, conspiratorial, and pulled Chloe by the sleeve, one light touch on fabric only, three steps deeper between the shelves, out of the sightline of the gallery. "Sit. This takes ten minutes and there's a bench." There was, in fact, a bench, built into the gap between two cases, worn smooth. Petra sat at one end and left a foot of cold wood between them, honoring the arithmetic. "So. The Ashworth boys come up at four. Forty of them, second-years and up, and the school dresses them in charcoal and leaves them in the east hall like bait at a feeding station. First-years get introduced in order of application, which means I already know where you'll be in the line."
"Does everyone know what the social is for?"
"Nobody knows, first time. That's the cruelty of it. You stand there in your uniform thinking it's a dance." Petra's voice dropped, and the pleasure in it was real. "It's a market. The seniors walk the room like buyers. The teachers walk it like auctioneers. The boys think they're the hunters because nobody's told them they're inventory too, and the ones who figure it out fastest are the ones you'll want, because that's the aptitude test, right there, in the room, in real time. You'll get approached inside the first hour. A boy will say something clever about the weather or the mountain, and his hand will find your waist like it's been fitted to it, and the whole thing is choreographed down to the minute, and you will feel, for one second, completely free. That's the product. That's what we sell later, at scale, to men who pay for the feeling."
"You're telling me your school's secrets pretty freely."
"I'm telling you because Ruby would tell you a prettier version, and Vance would tell you a truer version, and neither of them would tell you the version with the hand on the waist." Petra leaned back against the shelf. "Also because I want you to think of me as the one who tells you things with edges. I've thought about what I want from you and it's not a fast yes. A fast yes from you wouldn't even be worth having. I want the version where you decide with your eyes open."
"Very patient of you."
"I'm a very patient person with a lot of inconvenient feelings about a girl who counted to three in a shower." It came out lighter than it was, and she let it be light, and turned the conversation with a shrug. "Monday. Dress code. Don't wear the standard collar. Second button, maybe third. Not for the boys. For the seniors. The first impression you make in that room gets written down, I'm not joking, there's a book."
"There's a book for everything here."
"There's a book for everything everywhere, Chloe. This is just the first place that's honest about it." She said the name for the first time, plainly, no new girl attached, and Chloe felt it land somewhere below the conversation. "Now. Question for you, and you can refuse it, it's a small one. Monday, when the hand lands on your waist and the clever boy does the weather. Do you want to know beforehand what it feels like to have it done right? So you can tell the difference?"
"And who would demonstrate that."
Petra's smile came back, the whole smile now, unhidden. "I'm sitting right here. It's a waist, not a widow. One hand, ten seconds, through the uniform. Then it's yours to compare against."
Chloe looked at her. The cold light, the shelves, the red smudge at the rail above that she could no longer see but knew was there, watching, cataloguing, Vance's eyes by proxy. Her body had been a series of ambushes since July and this was, at least, an ambush she could see coming, priced, labeled, with a rule attached.
"Ten seconds," Chloe said. "And I say stop, you stop before the S."
"Before the S," Petra agreed, and she rose off the bench, and came around it slowly, giving Chloe the whole walk to call it off, and Chloe didn't, and hated the not, and stayed sitting with her hands flat on the worn wood of the bench on either side of her thighs.
Petra's hand settled on her waist through the blouse. Warm. It did nothing at first, just rested, the weight of it arranged along the curve of hip to rib, and then the fingers flexed once, a small proprietary contraction, the exact gesture of a hand that had already been granted something, and Chloe understood in those ten seconds precisely what Petra meant about choreography, because it felt less like being touched than like being claimed, and her spine answered it before her mind got a vote, a slow involuntary arch of a half inch toward the pressure.
Petra took her hand away at nine. She sat back down at the far end of the bench and left the foot of cold wood between them exactly as it had been, breathing a little faster, visibly filing the half-arch away, and said nothing about it at all.
"That," she said, "is your baseline. Hold onto it. On Monday, when the boy does his weather, you'll know if it's worse."
Chloe sat with the heat sitting where the hand had been. Above them, at the rail, the red smudge shifted and was gone.