“I’m not going back out there,” I say. “I’m done.”

  “We have to,” Veró says. “We have to face the past in order to change it. It’ll be worth it. I promise you.”

  “You don’t know what happened,” I say. “It’s not your memory to change.”

  “It’s our memory,” Rory tells me. “I was there too, remember? I get that it’s hard to face what happened, but we need to find a way to get through all this.”

  I attempt to wipe my tears away again, but they keep coming. No surprise there, I guess. I can’t stand crying in front of other people, but I can’t keep pushing all this down. It just makes it worse.

  “I maybe didn’t live through the same thing you did,” Veró says, crouching next to me on the floor. “But I definitely know what it feels like. We all do.”

  “For real,” Drew says. “This whole thing is a total—”

  “—mindfuck,” Rory finishes Drew’s sentence. She waits a beat, giving me a moment to collect myself a bit, before speaking again. “I don’t blame you for feeling this way about Founder’s Night, Blythe. I truly don’t. But we don’t really have a choice here.”

  Then I’m back to crying again. The only way out is to face the truth, whether I relive the memory completely or I try to change what happened.

  I catch my breath, preparing myself for what’s about to come out.

  “The initiation,” I say. “It went . . . wrong.”

  “Okay,” Veró says. “Wrong how?”

  “Say more,” Drew urges.

  “I . . . I don’t know . . . if I can.”

  At first, no one says anything. Drew shifts their body weight and bumps against the closet shelves on the opposite wall. Something clinks to the floor.

  Rory reaches out, wrapping her manicured fingers around the little thing before she holds it up to the light. I half expect it to be a ring from the collection, but it’s a weirdly shaped thing. Some kind of pipe.

  “What is—? Oh my god, does the chancellor have a drug habit on top of everything else?” Drew asks.

  Rory flashes daggers at them but avoids her attack instinct. “This is obviously an antique,” she says.

  “Yeah, but the bowl is black. It looks like it’s been used,” Veró adds. “What’s it for, sand?”

  “You don’t smoke sand,” Rory and I say in unison. Then I look at her, wishing that I didn’t know anything about sand. Wishing that Rory had never introduced me to the stuff.

  “That’s an opium pipe.” All eyes turn to Drew, whose expression shifts from confident to sheepish in a split second. “Don’t look at me like that,” they say. “My mom and I like to watch Antiques Roadshow together. One time someone brought on a snuff box and an opium pipe like that—for the appraisers.”

  “You really are a little weird one, aren’t you?” Veró says.

  “Oh, yes.” Drew grins. “Very strange. But useful! I could come by your dorm some time and appraise some of your valuables if you want.”

  Veró blushes. These two have completely lost the thread of our conversation.

  “GET A ROOM,” Rory groans, breaking the spell.

  “Huh? Whatever, Rory. Chill.” Veró pretends like she doesn’t know what Rory is talking about, but her blush deepens all the same. “Where were we? Charlotte. The Lilies initiation gone wrong. Blythe, you don’t need to rehash it right now if you’re not ready, but when we go back out there, we need consensus about our game plan. I say we keep trying to disrupt whatever happened to Charlotte. Maybe stop the initiation. But we need everyone to commit.”

  She directs a pointed look at me, and I wince. I need a fire alarm for this whole situation. But there is no escape hatch, not for me anyway.

  “Only when her sisters’ wrongs are once again made right will she escape anew and take her place within the light,” Drew recites.

  I give them side-eye. “You committed that to memory pretty quick,” I say.

  “Well, like Veró said, I’m an AP Lit kid. We memorize stuff.” They say this as they fidget with their shirt collar. “More important, I’m serious about finding Charlotte,” they say. “And I want out of this loop before . . . well, before—”

  “Before it all turns to shit?” Rory interrupts. “Too late! We’re knee-deep in it!” I realize now that Rory is pacing the closet. Something is winding her up. Maybe it’s the fact that Drew can recite the Lilies vow from memory, maybe it’s because we’ve been lingering in the closet for a while, maybe it’s something else. All I know is that Rory is looking pressed as hell to get out of here.

  “But we can at least—”

  Before Drew can finish their sentence, Rory starts shouting.

  “WE-CANNOT-CHANGE-THE-PAST.” She claps to emphasize each of the syllables in her thought. “THE-LOOP-WILL-KILL-US-IF-WE-KEEP-TRYING. WE-WILL-ALL-TURN-TO-DUST.”

  Rory seems surprised when none of us are impressed by her rhetorical tactics. “AS-IN-FISH-FOOD,” she adds.

  That last bit makes some of us giggle. It’s a wild kind of sound, like we’re all just about to crack, but we tamp it down before Rory flies off the handle completely.

  Suddenly, Charlotte’s bright smile pops into my mind. I shut my eyes and the rest of her face appears to me as clearly as if she were standing right in front of me. Drew and Veró believe that she can be brought back. If time is infinite, if the present is the past, if I can relive more than one memory at once, then maybe they’re right.

  Maybe infinity is not rigid like the ring on my hand. Maybe it is flexible. I consider whether we can do what the vow says and right the wrongs to escape anew. There must be a hole in the loop. A loophole. Another wild giggle escapes my lips.

  The Charlotte in my mind nods encouragingly. She’s as earnest and open as the first day I met her, shortly after she was selected to join the Lilies.

  When I found out she was going to be my little, I was genuinely annoyed. Pairing us was Rory’s little way of playing a joke on me. I try to keep a low profile, but she was sticking me with a little Lily that had a reputation for being loud.

  “I’m SO EXCITED you’re gonna be my big sister, Blythe,” she told me.

  “Definitely, same,” I said, adding honey to my voice. “I’ll always have your back. When you’re a Lily, someone is always looking out for you.” I left out the part about how someone also will always know your deepest secrets and not hesitate to lord them over you, but Charlotte was about to find that out soon enough.

  Her expression shifted slightly. A flicker of sadness cut across her smile. “That’s good.”

  I immediately sensed it: an opportunity to extract information.

  I was always good at this part of being a Lily. It fit in well with my whole low-profile thing. I could make anyone feel like I was on their side. Girls would confide in me. I would collect secrets like currency.

  “You okay, Char?” I asked, cocking my head to the side.

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure, girl?” I said. “C’mon. You can tell me.”

  She exhaled as she spoke, like she’d been holding something in for a long time. “I mean, it just sounds nice for someone to support you . . . Sometimes I feel like . . .”

  “Yes?”

  She sighed a little and stared at the ground. “I just feel like I have to always watch out for myself, you know? Like, sometimes I get weird looks from other girls, like I’m being too much or something. I dunno. The rules are like . . . not innate to me, you know?”

  I nodded and forced a smile. Charlotte was talking like she was the only one in the world with this problem. Like she was the only one who ever had to put on a mask to fit in. To survive.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m getting judged. I know there’s a lot of lesbians here, but I feel like I get side-eyed for being . . . I dunno . . . a slutty lesbian.”

  “What?”

  “I dunno. There’s rumors going around about me,” Charlotte said. “I’m sure you’ve heard some of them. People say that I just want to hook up and then be a loudmouth about it.”

  “Oh.” I shook my head. “I haven’t heard that,” I lied.

  “Well, I’m not slutty. I just like girls. And I don’t mean to be a blabbermouth or interrupt people or whatever, but my brain just works differently. I feel like girls here don’t understand what it’s like to have ADHD. I’m getting judged for it.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to Charlotte. The best thing I could come up with felt hollow. “I’m sorry you feel like that’s happening.”

  She said nothing in response and only turned away. “Anyway, I’m just really excited to be a Lily. You know, my grandmother, Evelyn Smith, was one of the founders. Have you heard of her?”

  “Of course,” I lied. At the time, I tried to fix my expression by biting down on the insides of my cheeks. What did Charlotte know about judgment? About prejudice?

  Thinking about how I behaved toward Charlotte, even before her Lilies initiation, I start to cringe. If I had treated her like she was really my sister, things might have worked out differently. I might have been able to interrupt some of those sidelong looks. I could’ve squashed gossip and rumors about her. After all, wouldn’t the girls who were being weird about Charlotte be even more likely to be weird about me? I remind myself that weird isn’t the right word.

  Time has a funny way of changing your perspective on things.

  “For only when her sisters’ wrongs are once again made right will she escape anew and take her place within the light . . . We have to change it,” I mutter.

  “What did you say, Blythe?”

  I look up at Veró, Drew, and Rory from the closet floor. “I said, I want to try to change what happened,” I say. “For real this time.” I climb to my feet and meet Rory’s bloodshot eyes.

  “Let me try,” I say. “It’s as much in our vow as anything: I need to try to right the wrong I did. I want to stop what happened at initiation. I know I’ll have an opportunity.”

  “What if it . . . What if it doesn’t . . .” Rory’s voice is way smaller than before. She sounds like she’s pleading with me but I’m not sure why. She’s holding something back . . . but that’s just Rory being Rory, I suppose.

  “You just have to trust me,” I say. “Try to trust, Rory.”

  “Think of it like an experiment,” Drew says.

  Rory says nothing. Instead, she fiddles with her Lilies ring and avoids meeting my eyes. If three of us are resolved about changing the past, then she can’t keep us from doing it.

  “Fantastic. That’s settled,” Veró says. “Let’s not waste any more time out there. Where does initiation take place?”

  “The basement,” I answer. The words pull at my throat. My body doesn’t want to go back there. Neither does my mind. But my heart . . .

  “Okay,” Drew says.

  “Okay,” Veró says. “Then we’ll go to the basement.”

  Rory stays silent. A storm is gathering between her eyebrows. But it doesn’t matter what she thinks right now. Not when so much is on the line.

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  I never tried sand before that night. I might have looked like a beatnik, a child of the underground. But really, it was a pose. I was just another high school girl.

  Adeline was the one who liked the rush. She kept a stash of the stuff in her nightstand, along with all the trappings one would need to drop out of this reality—things that were mostly a mystery to me. My little sister was always the daredevil of the family, even though she masked it with her stringed pearls and tasteful hemlines.

  Meredith was the one with the car, so she would drive us all to town: me, Adeline, and Evelyn. I went for the people watching. Sometimes I’d get a soda with Evelyn. It was all cool . . . until I learned to notice what Adeline was doing in town.

  Meredith knew before I did.

  Saint Meredith, who tried to help but made things so much worse for all of us. If only she hadn’t written that letter . . . the letter that landed me in this nowhere place. The letter that tried to bare all our family secrets.

  She could never, of course. She didn’t know the half of it. But the note still makes my blood boil every time I see it.

  I keep it where I keep all my secrets. Not because I want to hide the thing. Quite the opposite, actually.

  If I’m being honest, I probably keep it out of pettiness. But if someone like Meredith Simmons tried to stab you in the back, you would be petty too.

  16

  Drew

  Mom did a reading for me the night before she moved me into the Archwell dorms. I cut the deck. She flipped the cards over and laid them out carefully on my bedspread.

  The Moon, the Tower, Death, and the Ten of Swords. My past, my present, my future, and a bit of advice for good measure.

  “It’s a big transition,” she said. “It makes sense that you have triple Major Arcana energy here. It looks scary, but maybe the reality of the situation is not as intense as it feels. Sometimes the Ten of Swords suggests that we’re being overly dramatic about a perceived problem in our lives.”

  I looked down at the tarot spread, studying the illustration of the ten swords plunged into a person’s back. Beside it, wolves lurked in the half-light of the Moon card. At the end of the spread, flames leapt from the windows of the crumbling Tower. And then, of course, there was Death. Things were not looking good, but Mom was trying to soften the message. She was trying to shield me from the consequences of my choice. I was throwing myself to the wolves, upending my senior year, all for us. Inheritance money was going to change everything. It was supposed to make things better . . . but the cards suggested otherwise.

  I ran my fingers across the Ten of Swords, along the edge of the illustrated blood pooling underneath the tragic figure. “It’s a big transition,” I repeated Mom’s words.

  She offered me her little encouraging smile. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It will be okay.”

  It wasn’t.

  I am cold in the library in only my undershirt. It doesn’t help that something has shifted in the atmosphere, a new humidity that sharpens the loop’s penetrating chill. I’m almost grateful when Rory wraps the green hooded robe around me. Almost.

  We’re at the threshold of the library basement, a dim stone corridor tucked deep into the stacks. In this labyrinth, I can just barely make out the dull murmurs of the Founder’s Night party winding down. Twisted snippets of music carry in from far away.

  Time. Time. Time is on my side. Yes it is.

  Rory unfurls the second robe she brought from the closet and drapes it over Veró.

  “Make sure you keep your hood pulled over your face,” she says. “We don’t want you to get recognized as an outsider.”

  “Noted,” Veró says, pulling the velvety hood over her curls. “Do we say anything in particular when we get down there?”

  “There’s no password or anything. It’s not like that.”

  “Ut sacram memoriam,” Blythe says. “It’s the beginning of the vow. When you’re called to speak, that’s all you should say.”

  My intestines start to crawl when I hear the Latin aloud. The ring on my finger, Grandma’s Lilies ring, feels hot against my skin. My memory comes alive and I see my grandmother sitting up in the hospice bed, gray as a gravestone, wheezing the same words over and over. Ut sacram memoriam.

  “You okay?” Veró asks me.

  Blythe and Rory are already robed and hooded. It’s time to go.

  “I’m fine,” I lie. I pull the hood over my face.

  I’m not fine. But surviving at Archwell is an exercise in denying myself again and again—making myself smaller as a way to stay safe. This place is at war with me because of what I represent: a “threat to the community.” A threat to their precious little rules, their understanding of the world, and their understanding of themselves.

  I’m certain that this is why the Lilies didn’t want me. And I’m certain that I will not be safe in their midst.

  Find the Lilies, Drew, my grandmother whispers to me.

  I know what you did, Death breathes in my ear.

  “I’m fine,” I say again. It doesn’t sound convincing but lying is a survival tactic. I’m willing to do it if it means getting to Charlotte before the loop can get to me.

  We descend the stairwell, bare bulbs illuminating the brick arches overhead. The odor of decay strengthens as we go farther and farther underground.

  “Why does it look like a crypt?” Veró asks.

  Rory shrugs. “My grandfather really liked Gothic architecture. He wanted this place to look like it had been here for centuries. Every detail had to be perfect, even in the old servant corridors down here.”

  I steady myself, feeling along the cool condensation of the stone wall. Shadows gather around us and unidentified shapes start to congregate in the dark. I can’t tell if my mind is playing tricks on me or if this is just the loop’s way of exaggerating the past. I think about how many times we’ve had to dive into this memory in order to get to this point. I can’t remember if this is the third go-around or the fourth. Either way, I would like it to be the last. I don’t want to stick around to find out the true meaning of the phrase memory erodes the mind.

  At the bottom of the stairs, there’s an arched opening to a dimly lit room just out of sight. The flickering light suggests the presence of candles. I’ve been here before, but last time it was completely dark.

  I hear a noise on the stairs behind us and my shoulders meet my ears. I’m frozen, expecting a ghost. Instead, Death brushes past me and every hair on the back of my neck pings up. I turn to the figure next to me on the steps, also robed and hooded. I brace myself for the hood to fall back and reveal the skeleton beneath. But Blythe’s voice creeps out from beneath the hood.

  “There are others coming,” she whispers to me. “Just act natural.”

  What a thing to say.

  I turn around and see that she’s right. More robed figures are descending the basement steps. There are three of them. One is blindfolded with their hood slightly askew. The other two, crowned with flowers, flank their captive. They move slowly, guiding the blindfolded girl down the treacherous stairs.