The high school breathes kids and disinfectant. Sneakers screech on wax. Lockers close with the hollow snap of cheap tin. I stand in the vestibule where the glass shows a sliver of Graypoint’s harbor curving like a scar, the sky pressed flat and the smell of kelp sneaking through every time the doors inhale. I pin a visitor sticker to my lapel—HARBOR RIDGE HIGH, HELLO—and tell my jaw to relax before the adhesive catches my pulse.
“Welcome,” the attendance clerk chirps, and I recognize the cadence from donor breakfasts. “You’re here for…?”
“Volunteer tour,” I say, mouth steady. “Foundation liaison. We’re expanding our mentorship line. The yacht club’s silent auction put us over target—sextants did surprisingly well.” I lower my voice the way people lower their voices to be generous. “We love to see where support lands.”
“Of course you do,” she says, charmed by volume and myth. She hands me a lanyard that smells faintly of printer toner and other people’s necks. “Avoid period change. It’s a stampede.”
Period change happens anyway. The bell blares and the hallway fills with the clatter of a minor city. I step sideways to the institutional fish tank where a lone angelfish narrates the whole scene with eyes like pennies. I keep my shoulders round, my mouth pleasant, my eyes unfocused—an object in a landscape labeled HELPFUL.
“You okay finding your way?” the clerk calls over a cresting wave of voices.
“I’m a fast study,” I answer, and then I slip into the hall with the current, chart in hand. Locker banks run the length of the corridor. Numbers climb, then reset where a wing kinks to make room for a chemistry door and a bulletin board selling prom dresses. I trail a trio carrying cafeteria trays like shields. I pass a poster with a bruise-colored background: PROTECT EACH OTHER. The corners are dog-eared; the sentiment is tired.
- 308. 310.
312.
My breath clicks. I let the crowd flow around me while I squat to retie a shoe I don’t need to retie and check my flanking angles. Teachers talk in doorways with their bodies as gates. A custodian leans on a mop like a harpoon and watches for spills. In his wrists I recognize the tide-burn of rope—the same calluses I saw last winter when old-line families hired fishermen off-season to guard their empty estates. Everybody keeps watch here; the uniforms change, the eyes don’t.
I take the folded note from my coat pocket. The paper is thick without being fancy, legal-plain. I’ve hand-printed the message with the tiny precision I reserve for everything that can be used against me. Around it I’ve tied a frayed ribbon stripped from one of Lark’s diaries—caramel brown, the exact shade of sugar taken a breath too far. Burnt-sweet clings to the fibers. When I looped it, my fingers remembered a dorm room stovetop and Lark’s laughter, then a smoke alarm, then a lecture about danger that never taught us the right lessons.
“Need anything?” a teacher asks, catching me paused.
“Map’s upside down,” I lie, flipping it and smiling. “I’ll catch up with the tour.”
She half-smiles back—one of those faces that likes kids but stays tired—and turns to scold a boy who’s developing a relationship with gravity and his phone. The moment opens. I slide the note into the locker’s vented slit and feed the ribbon after it, guiding it through like a vein.
The message is only four lines:
I’m not Vivienne.
Code: sweet tooth.
I won’t say your name unless you let me.
Text this number if you want me to leave you alone—or to meet, your choice.
I add no signature. My handwriting betrays nothing but training.
The bell coughs again, and the hallway empties down to an echo and a dropped pencil. My knees accuse me when I stand. I walk to the end of the corridor, pause at a display case of sports photos, and count to thirty while I look at strangers’ triumphs. The case smells faintly of lemons; custodial love is the only kind that doesn’t perform for donors.
“Volunteer?” the clerk calls as I re-cross the office.
“Generous ghosts,” I say lightly, tapping the lanyard. “Thank you for letting me haunt.”
She laughs. I leave the sticker on her desk with a grateful nod and follow the exit arrows toward air so wet I could chew it. Outside, the wind has teeth. Widow’s Teeth stand gray in the far water, their slick backs catching a scrap of light like a warning flag. I sit in my car and place my phone on the dashboard face-down. Old habits. I stare at the school’s brick until it looks thinner than I want it to be.
Micro-hook: Across the lot, a sedan idles with its wipers grating dry on a windshield that doesn’t need cleaning. The driver wears a ball cap pulled to shadow. Harbor eyes. I check my mirrors, say hi to paranoia, and let it sit beside me without the wheel.
I think of Vivienne’s phrase in the boathouse—the heir is safer unclaimed—and feel bile climb like bad weather. “Safer for whom,” I ask the steering wheel, and the brass bell in my chest answers both tones at once. I put my palms flat on my thighs until the sound resolves into a single, stubborn note: protect the kid.
Ten minutes. Fifteen.
My phone vibrates once on the dash and tries to walk. I flip it. Unknown number. No avatar. The first message is ice:
“Prove you’re not her.”
I don’t breathe for a count of five. Then I type:
“Counter-code: burnt sugar.”
Three dots appear, vanish, appear again. My tongue tastes copper and copier toner.
“Anyone can guess that,” comes back.
I picture hands over a screen, a hallway corner, a face half-hidden by a hoodie, and I force my reply into the shape of consent.
“Then choose your proof. I’ll try.”
This time the dots hold steady. The answer slices:
“What does she call the bell.”
My heart missteps into my mouth. I think of the brass ship’s bell at Sea Ledger rung for donations and deaths with indistinguishable tones, the way Lark and I used to joke about its double mind. I type with hands that remember the kitchen midnight we dared each other to ring it.
“A liar with a good voice.”
Nothing. The pause expands until I can see my breath fog the screen. The sedan’s wipers across the lot scrape again in a rhythm that wants to be menacing and might just be bad rubber. I widen my view to see the water. The harbor is low, exposing black teeth.
The phone pings.
“Okay. Not her.”
The relief is so acute my eyes sting. I don’t chase it. I hold it like glass and set it down.
Another ping, needle-fast:
“Why me.”
My thumbs hover. I refuse the speech that wants to spill—a ledger of grief, a map of lies, the rope of last names. I answer with the one truth I can carry without breaking either of us.
“Because you deserve a choice.”
A full minute. Two. Then:
“No cops. No press. No Vivienne.”
“Agreed,” I type. “No Jonah either, if you want. He’s press. He’s also my friend. Your call.”
“No Jonah,” she fires back before the dots even flicker. “He records even when he says he doesn’t.”
I close my eyes and nod at a girl I haven’t met, a boundary bright as a buoy. “No Jonah,” I write. “You set the terms. I follow.”
“Say that again.”
“You set the terms. I follow.”
The dots soften into a long line. I lean back against the headrest and let wind slide the car two millimeters into a better angle. A gull laughs at nothing on the roofline; its claws scratch a file across the day.
“Meet where,” she asks.
I scroll through my mental map, choosing a place with kids and noise and sugar. “Shaved-ice stand by the boardwalk,” I type. “The one with the cartoon penguin. Public. Safe. You can sit wherever you want. I’ll stay in line of sight and not approach unless you wave.”
“What flavor.”
I smile without meaning to. “Strawberry,” I write. “Or lemon, if you like your tongue to sting.”
“Strawberry is fine,” she replies, which reads to me as code for I still get to choose later. Then another beat, another line: “One more. Prove you won’t hand me to her.”
I look at Widow’s Teeth and feel the part of me that used to beg for Vivienne’s approval starve quietly. Proof wants to be an oath. Oaths bind, and I need to bind myself first. I type:
“I walked out of a meeting where she called you safer unclaimed. I walked into your school with my name hidden. I will eat my keys before I give you to anyone.”
Three dots; I regret the keys the second I send them. She answers anyway:
“Gross proof.”
“I’m new at this,” I write.
“You’re old at this,” she answers. “You’re an Ellison.”
The words punch. I count four notes from the bell inside me before I reply. “Yes. And I’m the one who wants you to define yourself.”
“I already do,” she says. “I just need the paper to stop lying.”
I rest my head against the window. A fogged oval appears around my temple and makes the harbor look bruise-blue. The sedan across the lot finally switches off its wipers; the driver lights a cigarette that glows like a small threat and then goes dark. I memorize the plate half by accident.
“Time,” comes the next text. “I don’t do night.”
I look at my calendar and cross out everything that doesn’t have a heartbeat. “Tomorrow,” I type. “Three o’clock. I’ll be early. I’ll leave if you don’t want me there.”
“You will leave if I don’t want you there,” she corrects.
“I will,” I write. “Your call.”
“No purse,” she says. “No fancy bag. No friend watching. I know what you people look like when you’re pretending to be alone.”
I swallow the sting with the truth that earned it. “Jeans. Phone on the table face-up. No bag. Hair down. Hands visible. I’ll order first so you can watch.”
A small pause. Then:
“Code at the window?”
I type the countersign into the plan like a hinge. “Clerk asks my name. I say ‘sweet tooth.’ If you hear that, it’s me.”
“Fine.”
I hold the phone and don’t move. I need one more thing; she needs one more thing; we’re both trying not to ask. The wind bumps the car; the harbor exhales.
“If you’re not coming,” I add, “text me ‘bell.’ I’ll walk away. No second attempts. No surprises.”
She takes longer this time. When the reply arrives, it arrives in two pieces that don’t fit together unless I build the bridge myself.
“Don’t bring Jonah,” she reminds, like a blade she enjoys holding.
“I won’t.”
“And don’t make me tell you to leave.”
“Then I won’t force it,” I send. “I’ll wait where you can see me. Five minutes. Ten, if you want. Then I go.”
The phone goes quiet. I wait until the quiet feels earned. Across the lot, the ball-cap driver flicks his cigarette into a puddle and drives away without signaling. I log the last four of his plate on the back of my hand under Nora’s fund code, because my brain can carry two threats at once.
I start the car. The heater coughs dust, then grows brave. The smell reminds me of the legal pads in Nora’s basement and the lemon oil we rub into surfaces at Sea Ledger so everything looks expensive and clean. The town smells like kelp, lemon oil, and toner, and none of those scents can disinfect a lie. Mercy and justice talk the same way here; we just assign different verbs.
Before I pull out, the phone vibrates one last time.
“Okay. Tomorrow. Three. No Jonah. If I see him, I walk.”
“I hear you,” I reply. “You set the terms.”
“One more,” she writes, and the words land with the exact weight of my pulse. “If you’re lying—if you’re her voice wearing your mouth—I’ll know. Bring the ribbon.”
I look down at my empty fingers and then at the diary tucked in my bag’s hidden sleeve. A single caramel strip remains on my desk at home, frayed from years of turning. I text:
“I’ll bring the ribbon.”
The typing bubble appears and disappears, a tide that doesn’t commit. My heart knocks a second set of knuckles against my ribs.
“Then I’ll know you read what she wanted me to read,” she says. “And I’ll decide if that’s love or a trap.”
I stare through the windshield at the curve of the harbor, at the invisible line where the boardwalk runs, at the chair-shaped shadow where a shaved-ice umbrella will open tomorrow into a red circle. The bell in me offers a tone I can’t name.
I put the car in gear and ask the question to the road in front of me, to the lockers behind me, to the ribbon waiting on my desk:
Will she see me as the hand that undoes a lock—or the hand that built the door?