“What about the layout plan?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” Libby snipped.

  “You have standing tables planned out and then those banquet tables with the little aisles . . . I’m not sure if that’s the most accessible.”

  “We’ll let maintenance figure it out. They’re doing all the setup and takedown for the banquet.” Libby was ready to move on, but Charlotte pushed.

  “I’m not sure that’s gonna be enough. I feel like it’s this committee’s responsibility to make sure the space is accessible.”

  Libby rolled her eyes. “Do you even know if anyone there is going to be a wheelchair user?”

  Charlotte’s nostrils flared, her cheeks flashing pink. She leaned into the camera. “Does it matter, Libby?”

  At a loss, Libby countered. “If you care so much, then why don’t you volunteer for setup?”

  “All right,” Charlotte said. “Sign me up.”

  So Charlotte and I wound up on setup duty together. Like I said, it could’ve been worse. But it also could’ve been better.

  “Veronica, where are you? We need to get started!” Charlotte’s voice carries over the tops of the bookshelves, closer than it was before.

  “What do you remember saying to her when she first arrived to meet you?” Rory whispers. I think for a second. “Quick,” she hisses. “It has to be exactly the same as you remember it or the loop will reset.”

  It’s hard to ignore Rory’s tone but I do what she says. I call out to Charlotte. “I’m just in the bathroom. Be out in a sec!”

  “K. But hurry up though! After we finish setting up, I still need to get my hair done.” Charlotte’s voice doesn’t come any closer. I hear the sound of a bag flopping onto a table and the groan of an old desk under someone’s body weight.

  Boo-boo-boop. Boo-boo-boop.

  “Is she video chatting someone?” Blythe whispers.

  Drew bends down, squinting through the gaps in the bookshelves, trying to catch a glimpse of Charlotte’s deep red locks. “I can see her,” they whisper. The rest of us crouch down next to Drew and peer through the bookcase. Sure enough, Charlotte is sitting there with her back to us. She is holding her phone out in front of her, angling the camera lens just so.

  Boop. Someone picks up the call.

  “Char, where are you? We’re all here in Maddie’s room getting ready to go to dinner.” I don’t recognize the voice on the phone, but I feel Drew stiffen next to me.

  They catch me looking at them and whisper, “It’s Faith Harlow. She and Charlotte are tight.” Clearly, Drew isn’t a fan of Faith’s. It makes sense. Faith is one of the chancellor’s minions and a royal pain in the ass. It wouldn’t surprise me if she and Charlotte were quietly torturing a kid like Drew in the privacy of their dorm room.

  Faith’s voice rings through the cell phone speaker at a higher pitch than Charlotte’s. Her words come out faster, almost gargled. “We need you over here, girl! It’s a big night!”

  Charlotte plays with a curled petal on one of the flower arrangements as she speaks into the phone. “I told you. I gotta set up at the library first. I’ll be over soon—whenever this weirdo senior from the committee finishes dropping a deuce so we can get started.”

  Drew regains the twinkle in their eye as they peer over at me. “Is it true?”

  “What?” I breathe.

  “Were you dropping a deuce? Is that your worst memory?”

  “Oh my god, Drew. Shut up.” I knew I liked this kid. I don’t think anyone else in the world would make a potty joke at a time like this.

  “Must’ve been an epic deposit,” Drew continues.

  “For real, Drew, shut up. I’m trying to hear.” Blythe’s voice is low and sharp. She and Rory wear permanent scowls.

  Charlotte and Faith yammer on for a while about what they’re going to wear to Founder’s Night, what booze they’re going to try to sneak in, and the “top-secret thing” they’re going to do after. “My mom’s a legacy and she said that it’s not so bad,” Faith explains on the phone. “She said the hardest part for her was staying up super late.”

  “Yeah? My grandma Evelyn’s stories are way scarier,” Charlotte says. “Initiation is no joke. She told me all about it. Every detail.”

  “Oh my god, Charlotte. Your grandma is totally not supposed to talk to you about initiation,” Faith shrills into the phone.

  “So what? Neither is your mom! Plus, I’m her granddaughter. She’s not gonna keep secrets from me. She’s just trying to prepare me for what I’m getting into with the Lilies.”

  “Gah! Don’t say the name. Like, just stop talking right now.”

  “What’s the deal with the initiation thing they’re talking about?” Drew whispers.

  “It’s more freaky, culty, secret society shit,” I answer.

  Rory keeps her mouth shut, even though I can tell it’s taking every ounce of her willpower.

  “Don’t talk about what you can’t understand,” Blythe says. I don’t expect the jab, and before I can respond Rory springs for the jugular.

  “What happened between you and Charlotte?”

  “What do you mean?” I try to stall. She’s about to see the whole thing play out anyway. No use in rehashing what I’m about to relive.

  “You do realize that Charlotte hasn’t been seen since Friday night, right? You were clearly one of the last people to see her.”

  The memory of Charlotte’s scowl reassembles in my mind. Then her frown twists into a new shape. Her red hair fades to gray and suddenly I can see the portrait of Rory’s steely grandmother hanging over me again. Something is really, really wrong here. I feel like I’m losing it. Charlotte is . . . missing?

  I turn to Drew. “I thought you said that she went home to Potomac over the weekend?”

  “You know Charlotte too?” Blythe turns to Drew. “Who told you she went home? Did you see her? Like, in the flesh?”

  Drew seems to crumple under Blythe’s rapid-fire questions. As I watch them silently wither, my stomach twists. I resist the urge to tell Blythe to lay off. Finally, Drew manages to squeak out a partial response. “Charlotte was my roommate.”

  There’s that word again: was. Past tense.

  Before I can totally spin out about all the reasons why this situation is deeply not okay, Malcriada’s ghost comes to me. Keep it together, she says. Gather your thoughts. Get caught up. Then get ahead. I breathe out and review what I know.

  One: Drew and Charlotte were roommates.

  Two: Charlotte was a Lilies legacy member.

  Three: Charlotte has not been seen since Founder’s Night.

  I breathe in and choose my next words carefully. “Didn’t Charlotte just say that later tonight—aka Friday night—she’s going to join the Lilies for an initiation? Wouldn’t that suggest that you two were some of the last people to see Charlotte?” I gesture to Blythe and Rory.

  “Oh man,” Drew says. “That’s right! She never made it back to our room after Founder’s Night.”

  Blythe opens her mouth but no sound comes out. Rory speaks for her, “Nice try, Veró, but you’re barking up the wrong tree. You don’t know what we saw or didn’t see on Friday night.”

  “I bet I will know . . . pretty soon,” I say. “I bet I already know about some of the secrets that your little society might be hiding. I can think of at least one secret about your mommy, the chancellor.”

  Rory screws up her face. “What’s my mother got to do with it?”

  “Cool it, y’all,” Drew says. “Regardless of what happened, all our memories overlap with Charlotte somehow. That’s gotta mean something . . . right? What happens next in your memory, Veró?”

  I sigh. Things were just about to get juicy. “Charlotte gets restless,” I answer. “She starts to wonder where I am, so she—”

  Charlotte appears at the end of the corridor of shelves. “Uh, Veronica, what the hell? I thought we were gonna set up the space together. Wait, why are all of you hiding back here?”

  BONG!

  The sound of a clock chime reverberates from the library rafters. Charlotte has found us, all of us. This isn’t how the memory played out the first time. I was supposed to be alone in the bathroom when Charlotte found me.

  BONG!

  I feel my body seize and thrash and then I’m disintegrating, flying apart in every direction. We’re falling away. We all are. Together, we are pulled back into darkness.

  BONG!

  9

  Rory

  I know this feeling—the feeling of falling apart and coming back together again.

  My molecules are suddenly rearranged.

  I’m both fragile and elastic, delicate and invincible. It’s the all-too-familiar feeling of coming down from a high—a telltale sign that a dose of sand is starting to wear off. It’s the same feeling that I get now as I’m sucked out of Veró’s memory and spit back into the closet where we started. The four of us are left sprawled out on the floor, breathless and queasy. It doesn’t feel great, but at least we’re all alive. For a second, I wasn’t sure whether I’d make it through.

  “Everyone okay?” I rasp.

  “What was that?” Drew asks, rising to their feet. “I hated it.”

  “That was the loop,” I say. “It reset.”

  “Oh lord,” Blythe mutters. She is sitting on the floor, leaning against the closet door, looking like she’s about to lose her lunch.

  “We’ve gotta do that every time?” Drew asks. “That felt like being in a blender.”

  “More like a hurricane,” Veró says, coming to a stand. She massages a knot on her shoulder.

  I shrug. “Hate to say I told you so, but . . .”

  “You didn’t exactly mention being ripped apart at an atomic level. I would’ve remembered that.” As Drew speaks, they finger the sleeve of one of the hanging white gowns. In the dim, I can make out the lace pattern overlaid on the satin. My stomach clenches in on itself and the words fly out of my mouth before I can think.

  “Don’t touch that,” I say. “It isn’t yours.”

  Drew yanks their hand away, as if my words have turned the white satin into hot coals. “Sheesh,” they say. “Sor-ry.”

  “It’s not yours either by the look of it.” Veró swoops in, reaching around Drew to pluck the gown’s hanger from the rack. She holds it out in front of her, examining the dress’s tapering neck and A-line ’50s skirt. Some of the ivory crinoline petticoats start to fall out of the bottom of the dress, and I flinch.

  One time when I was little, I pulled that same gown from the hanger and laid it out on the floor as a blanket. I don’t really remember why . . . maybe to ground myself or something. I could’ve been protecting myself from roving spiders . . . or intrusive thoughts.

  When my mother came to get me out of the closet, she looked absolutely horrified. “What are you doing?” Her voice was the sharpest it had ever been . . . at least up to that point. She would get even sharper with me later, her words cutting deeper and deeper with each passing year. “Lilies things aren’t toys,” she said. “Family heirlooms aren’t toys.”

  “Put it back,” I growl. “It’s a family heirloom. It belongs at the back of the closet.”

  “Then why was it hanging right here?” Veró asks.

  “Because it belongs with the other Lilies stuff,” I say.

  “Which is it then?” Drew asks. “A family heirloom or a Lilies thing? Does it belong up here or does it belong in the back of the closet?”

  I don’t know why, but the question makes me so angry. It’s a stupid question, really. It’s not an either/or answer. For Archwell women, there is no difference between family heirlooms and Lilies things.

  There’s no use in arguing. I yank the hanger out of Veró’s hands and hold the dress close to my body. It’s laced with the smell of lilacs and radiates an unexpected warmth.

  My mother made it very clear that I was never supposed to touch this gown again. Not after she found it on the floor. “It isn’t yours to play around with,” she said. “It’s not mine to handle either. It’s all your grandma Adeline had left of her sister. It’s special. I don’t want you to ruin it.”

  Now, smoothing the wrinkles from the gown’s skirt, I’m surprised to find that it’s already ruined.

  “Oh no.” Just below the gown’s neckline, I see the flecks of blood. Bright crimson dribbles down the front of the dress. My heart starts to pump harder as my fists clench the bodice of the gown. This is really bad, the kind of bad I might not be able to get around.

  “What’s this? What did you do?” My voice barely sounds like my own. It comes out as a low growl.

  Veró stands between me and Drew, shielding them from my words. “That stain was already there. I saw it when I pulled it off the rack.”

  “Impossible,” I say. “This gown belonged to my great-aunt Lillian. It never had a stain on it before.”

  Drew checks their cuticles before holding their fingers up for me to see. “I’m sorry, Rory, but my hands are clean. I have no idea how that got on there. Must be old.”

  “If it’s old, then why is the blood fresh?” I ask. “Old blood dries brown. Everybody knows that.”

  Veró and Drew steal a quick glance at each other. I know what they’re thinking: that I’m overreacting, that I’m being over the top. But when my mother sees this, she is going to kill me. They may think they know the wrath of Eleanor Archwell, but they have no idea. As soon as I notice I’m digging my nails into the fabric, I loosen my grip on the dress. My tongue is as dry as a mothball. I need water and about five Annys.

  “Rory,” Blythe says. She stoops down and snatches something from underneath the rack of cloaks and gowns. “This fell off the hanger.”

  At first it looks like Blythe is handing me a Lilies robe, but when I get ahold of the thing, I realize it’s softer and a bit smaller. It has no hood, but the color is identical.

  “I think it’s a blanket,” Blythe says. And as she does, I realize there is some wetness to it. I hang the gown from one of the shelf ledges and hold the blanket up to the light. It is dark green, so the stain isn’t as obvious, but it’s there. Fresh blood.

  Drew says, “That’s really weird.”

  “Do you think someone used the blanket to clean up blood?” Veró asks.

  I lower the blanket and meet her eyes. “My mother is the only one who uses this closet,” I explain. “She’s the only one with the keys. I don’t think she would use something like this to clean up blood, of all things, and then just throw it on a family treasure to dry.”

  Veró shrugs. “You said yourself that this closet is filled with Lilies stuff. Do you think someone from the Lilies Society put it in here?”

  “What are you implying?” Blythe narrows her eyes at Veró.

  “Only that y’all trade in secrets. It just seems possible to me, since most of the stuff in this closet has some relationship to the Lilies, that this might too.”

  “What would a Lily be doing cleaning up someone else’s blood?” I ask. I hate the implication Veró is making, but I am trying to see if she’s brave enough to put it into plain words. I know it’s a gamble, but I like my odds. Verónica Martín doesn’t have the ovaries to accuse the Lilies of murder. She doesn’t have the guts to say that she thinks this is Charlotte’s blood.

  My bet pays off. Veró says nothing.

  Instead, Drew breaks the silence. “Are we ready to go back out there and find Charlotte?” Some may find it endearing, but I swear, Drew has the tact and cunning of a Great Dane. It doesn’t matter, though. It’s easy to use to my advantage.

  “Yes,” I say, folding the blanket and placing it on a shelf. “Veró, take us to Charlotte.”

  I want out of this closet. True, I got us into this mess by agreeing to unlock the door and shuttle us all in here. Even though it was the last thing I wanted to do. But at least I haven’t had to reveal all of my secrets—and I intend to keep it that way. As long as I can hold the memories at arm’s length, I’ll be okay. I have to be.

  The loop is dangerous, yes. But if I’ve learned anything as a Lily, it’s that secrets and memories are the most valuable currency.

  The gown was bought for my graduation. Yes, I got it nearly a year in advance, but it looked so picture-perfect in the shop window. I tried it on for Evelyn as a surprise. I paired it with a crimson lip and my class ring.

  In my recollection, the dress is a perfect, silky ivory. But then the memory cycles through to its ultimate conclusion and the gown is ruined every time. It dies a thousand deaths, just like me. And every time I return to the closet, the stain from my blood is fresh.

  My senior portrait was never hung. My graduation cap was never ordered. So, I put the dress in a place where they can see it.

  I want them to know what happened.

  I need them to remember that I existed.

  I need them to sound the alarm.

  10

  Blythe

  I’m the nearest to the closet door, so the others look to me to open it. I don’t want to. The memory isn’t even mine, but it makes my fear swell inside of me just the same. Panic attacks are like earthquakes: once there’s been a full-blown one, there’s always the risk of aftershocks. It’s when I’m at my most vulnerable that I’m most likely to be carried away by a memory or a feeling. I have to be careful about getting my mind right and keeping it that way, but it’s really hard.

  In my sociology class, we read about a famous experiment where psychologists asked participants to do a certain task while trying not to think about a white bear. But the people in the experiment said that trying not to think about the bear just made him appear in their minds even more.

  For me, Founder’s Night is a white bear.

  Charlotte, my Lilies little, is a white bear.

  Everything about the loop screams it at me.

  “Blythe, you’re going to hurt your fingers.”

  Rory’s words make me think to look down at my nails. Every one is chewed, three out of ten have no polish left at all. Sean and Salim will not go easy on me . . . assuming that I ever see them again.