AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Ella Devereux, you said?” I ask. “Did she retire? Or go teach at another school?”
“That, I’m not sure about,” he says with a scratch at his goatee. “I didn’t know her very well, and none of us heard from her after she left UW.”
“Sorry, but I have to head back to class in about five minutes,” Dr. Okamoto says with a glance at her watch, and I stumble through a few more questions before it’s time to go, the mysterious Dr. Devereux tapping at the back of my mind.
“Devereux, Devereux…,” Miles says across from me at our usual table in the physics library. He hits a few keys on his laptop. “I’m finding an HR manager, a TikTok influencer, and someone who died in 1940.”
I pop out one of my earbuds. I’ve been in the process of transcribing the interview. “Did you put her name in quotes? Or try ‘Ella Devereux, physics’?”
Miles levels me with a glare, as though I’ve just asked him if he knows all the steps of the scientific method. “Tried them both.”
His phone rings on the table between us—3:26—and he rejects the call with a quick swipe of his index finger.
“Maybe we’re not spelling her name right.” I go through a few searches of my own, scribbling down some different spellings, trying the Washingtonian archives too. “Or maybe Ella was a nickname and she went by something else professionally?”
At the end of an hour, we’ve tried Ella, Ellen, Elena, Isabella, Eleanor, Elizabeth, and about a dozen more.
“I found something!” I say. After Gladys hustles over and we assure her we’re okay, I flip around my laptop to show Miles. “Eloise Devereux. Graduated with her PhD from Oxford in 1986.” It’s a photo from her graduation day: a petite, curly-haired woman dressed in a hooded red-and-purple robe, shaking hands with the head of her department. “That’s badass. I’d get a PhD just for the outfit.”
“Are we even sure that’s her?” Miles says, and I let out a groan, because, well, no. The name matches, but this doesn’t necessarily tie her back to UW.
I get back to transcribing, hoping it’ll give me some fresh insight, but there’s nothing from the conversation that isn’t already imprinted in my memory. It’s eerie enough to send a shiver down my spine that isn’t just the draftiness of the library. The whole internet, and this class that was apparently wildly popular, if Professor Rivera is to be believed… and one single hit that may not even be her.
Almost like she was never there in the first place.
Chapter 18
MILES KASHER-OKAMOTO, IT TURNS OUT, has some major pop-culture holes.
“You’ve never seen Groundhog Day?” I say from where I’m sitting on my dorm bed, scrolling through a list of movies. “And yet you are, by all definitions, a human being on planet Earth?”
Miles is in my desk chair, long legs stretched out in front of him. His presence makes the room instantly feel smaller. Maybe even a little warmer, given how poor the air circulation is in here. “Nope. And I don’t want you to drag me for it.”
I hold a hand to my heart. “I’m not making fun of you. I feel sorry for you, Miles. It’s a tragedy that you haven’t yet experienced the joy of beloved character actor Stephen Tobolowsky as Ned! Ryerson!” He lifts a single eyebrow at me. “You’d get it if you’d seen the movie!”
There’s that smallest of smiles again, the one he tries so hard to contain. Let it go. Loosen those muscles. I believe in you, I want to tell him.
I think some part of him might be starting to like my teasing, which is entirely too bizarre. Maybe he never got enough of it from his older brother. The mysterious Max.
We decided to set Dr. Devereux aside for now, but the journalist in me remains unsettled. After Lucie left for Zeta Kappa, I didn’t love the idea of spending the rest of the night alone, and while I realize that party is likely not the only one happening within a half-mile radius, I didn’t trust myself. Then I remembered: the movie playing in the quad is Groundhog Day. And it gave me an idea I couldn’t believe I hadn’t had earlier.
“Is there a reason we’re watching this in here instead of out there?” Miles asks, waving his arm in the vague direction of the quad. His roommate sexiled him—he’s been with his girlfriend, a freshman at SPU, for three years—so that was how we wound up in Candy Land as opposed to Disney World.
I adjust the pillows I’ve propped against the wall behind my bed. “One, it’s cold. Two, it’s easier to eat in here.” I hold up one of the boxes of Thai curry I ordered for us. “Three, we might find some inspiration, because we can’t just learn from books. This is me broadening your horizons. And four… I guess I wanted to see your reactions up close. Since you haven’t seen it.”
For some reason, this sounds stranger out loud than it did inside my head. I’m not sure why I’d care about his reactions—assuming we make it out of this loop, it’s not as if we’re destined to become lifelong friends.
“You want to see if we laugh at the same parts?”
“I already know we won’t. You rarely laugh.”
As if to prove me wrong, he lets out a soft laugh, then triangles one leg on his knee while he reaches for a box of red curry. Even attempting to relax, Miles looks awkward, unsure where to put his limbs.
“It’s not that I don’t watch movies,” he continues. “I actually—okay, you have to promise not to laugh.”
“I will do no such thing.”
He tosses a grain of rice at me. “You’re so predictable sometimes.”
