Chapter 32

Piper’s first instinct is to call Tyler and have him come over so Piper can cry in his arms. Piper’s second instinct is to hide away so they never have to apologize to Tyler for assuming he was the one who’d called the police, who’d set all this in motion.

Their third instinct, a sort of gasping impulse half-formed over the upturned desk and split-open picture frames, is to go see Isabel.

It isn’t surprising. They put on their coat, jamming their arms through the sleeves. Isabel is the one they turn to for direction, for guidance. They shove their feet into their boots, left sock peeling down to leave their heel exposed. Isabel will want to know what just happened; Isabel will be outraged about what just happened. Piper tugs off the boot and rights their sock. Isabel will treat this as yet more proof that when the outside world gets involved in the departmental conflict, bad things happen.

Piper walks the fifteen minutes to Schenley in a hazy cloud. Their thoughts are scattered and sharp. Isabel, full of righteous fury. Isabel, looking at Piper with increased attention. Increased respect. Because now Piper has taken a direct hit. They have become the keeper of Lu’s things, Lu’s thoughts, Lu’s innocence. Wind bites at Piper’s face as they cross the campus, pushes at the door of the humanities building so Piper must struggle to open it. Their footsteps echo on the stone floors, up the stone steps.

They knock. “Come in,” says Isabel’s voice.

Her head is bent over scattered sheets of paper, a ballpoint pen behind her ear. She wears a dark green dress, thigh length, belted tight, and her dark hair is scraped back into an uncommonly harsh ponytail. She looks up, lines of concentration between her eyebrows, crow’s feet distinct and fine at the corners of her eyes. Still, she gives off that familiar sense of energy barely contained, zinging out where not bundled in. Piper feels a rush of familiar warmth and reassurance and fondness and nervousness. That is what it is to stand in front of Isabel.

“Piper,” she says, then frowns as she registers Piper’s distress. Her voice sharpens. “What’s happened?”

Her hand moves from its resting place on the desk and Piper can see a scribbled sheet of paper underneath it labeled OPEN HOUSE SCHEDULE DRAFT. Red ink lines and X’s and exclamation points litter the page. Below a note too messy to read is the word URGENT, underlined three times.

The words die on Piper’s lips. They realize, looking at that big red word, that whatever propelled them here to Isabel Ortiz’s office, it wasn’t a desire for battle orders.

“Just now—” They swallow. URGENT, on the draft of the admitted grad students’ open house schedule. “Lu,” they say instead. “Aren’t you worried about Lu?”

Isabel raises a surprised eyebrow. “Of course,” she says. “Why? Has something happened?”

Yes. No. Piper doesn’t know what to say. “I just…” They swallow. The words are bubbling up, fighting their way into Piper’s throat as they try to push them back down. “Just. Open house, it—I know it’s important, but…Lu’s missing. Still. She’s still missing. And someone is dead, and…”

Isabel tilts her head. “What are you saying, Piper?”

Roiling stomach—more words, more treacherous thoughts, kicking up into Piper’s head, into Piper’s mouth. “Why aren’t you—I don’t get it. You and Lu. You’re so close. She’s—she’s your…” favorite, they don’t say, “one of your best students. And she went missing without telling you. Why—why aren’t you trying to find her?”

Isabel’s shoulders tense. She frowns. “Of course I care, Piper, but Lu is an adult who made a choice. I can’t dictate that for her. If she wanted to leave, it wasn’t my place to stop her.”

Piper almost manages to suppress a hard shocked laugh. Almost. Isabel’s eyes widen. “You,” Piper says, taking a shaky breath, “you’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t just let us leave,” Piper says. Incredulity laced with resentment surges through them. “We not allowed to just walk away from this. The last time Lu thought about dropping out you talked to her for hours and hours about it, whole days, told her how important it was to stay, told her the fight was hard but so, so crucial—”

“Did she tell you that?”

“Yes,” says Piper. “She did. And…” They struggle with their words, not sure if they’re trying to keep them in or push them out. “And we can’t even—the second we step out of line, the second we voice some sort of doubt, we—you—you get us right back in—”

Isabel bristles. “You’re allowed your own opinions, Piper. Of course you are.”

“So if I said I didn’t think we should be worrying about open house right now—with everything going on—”

Isabel gives them a long look, and her expression softens. “Oh. I see.”

“What?” Piper asks, wrong-footed by the sudden gentleness.

“I understand, Piper. And I should have seen it before. This has all been a lot for you. You and Lu are so close. I can’t imagine what you’re going through. Listen, let’s just…have you take a step back. You don’t need to worry about open house this year. That’s a lot of pressure given your situation. The others can handle what needs to be done.”

Piper feels an instinctive recoil of embarrassment—too weak, they’ve failed Isabel—and then, slowly, shakes their head. “No,” they say. “No. That’s not it.”

The barest flicker of frustration on Isabel’s face, smoothed over immediately. “No?”

“No.” Strategy meetings and hushed conversations and secrets, years and years of them, years and years of living on a tightrope, living in crisis—and Jack’s body bleeding all over the floor, and Lu’s bed empty, and all the rest of it pales, all the rest of it turns inside out and—how had it taken Piper so long to see it?—it is hollow. There is nothing there.

“What would you do if I said I wanted Dr. Catlin on my dissertation committee?” Piper asks.

Isabel’s head jerks up. “What?”

“Dr. Catlin works on race in the nineteenth century. Her work shares a lot of the same questions as mine. It makes sense.”

Isabel is staring at them. “What are you after, Piper?”

Piper’s heart is racing. “I’m not after anything except a committee that can best support my work. And my chances on the job market.”

“Piper,” Isabel says. Her tone is placating, but with an edge of danger. “Come on. You know perfectly well why that’s not possible.”

“Jack’s dead and Lu’s missing and the job market is falling apart and English departments are shrinking and we are doing nothing.” Piper’s voice shakes. The blood rushes in their ears. It’s terrifying; this is terrifying.

“The job market? Really? That’s more important than the way that we think about queerness, about history, about politics? Are you serious?”

Piper shakes their head, the realizations rushing fast and hard. “No. It’s not more important than how we think about those things, like, as a society, as a culture, but—but just because what we write about is really high stakes doesn’t mean our writing itself is life or death—and—and it’s definitely not more important than a person actually dying—”

“Are you saying you think any of us had something to do with Jack’s death?” Isabel is bristling.

“No, I—” Piper quells the crash of fear in their stomach, hardens their voice. “I don’t know. That’s not what I mean. Everything is actually falling apart. Actually.” The image of their ruined living room, the police walking Schenley’s halls. “And we’re still plotting and scheming like there’s still something here we can win.”

Isabel’s lips have thinned. Her face has tightened. “Well,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry to hear you feel that way.”

Piper feels that twist of guilt, that urge to win back her approval. No. “Isabel…” They take a breath. “Aren’t you worried about Lu? Aren’t you afraid something’s happened to her?”

The smallest flicker of something in Isabel’s face. Then she looks down, rearranging her papers on the desk. “Trust me, Piper. If I thought something had happened to Lu, I would do something about it. But I…” A moment’s hesitation. “Piper, I really believe she left of her own accord.”

Piper waits. But Isabel says nothing else.

“It’s been hard,” Isabel says, voice going gentle again. She looks back up at Piper. “Take a rest. Take a few days off. You’ll feel differently when you’ve gotten some perspective.”

And there, beneath all the guilt and anxiety and the sense that they are betraying everyone they care about, is something else: a flat, anticlimactic disappointment.

“No,” they say. “I won’t.” They start to go, then—in for a penny—they say, “I’m going to get hold of the form to change dissertation committee members. I’ll talk to Dr. Catlin and see if she’s willing to join mine.”

Isabel looks at them silently, and it’s there on her face, too—disappointment. Every line, every curve, is flush with disappointment.

Piper swallows it down, the bitter pill, and hopes she can see the disappointment on their face, too.