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I’m not just living in my bad feelings—I’ve become them.
In the afternoon, I’m forced to go back to Olmsted because I’ve torn my cape. I’m on my bed reknotting it when Lucie enters with puffy eyes, swiping at her face. Four o’clock.
“I just heard there was someone running around campus dressed in a cape and—what the fuck?” Lucie gapes at me. “That was you?”
“Guilty.” I tie a vintage No Doubt concert tee to my Neptune High shirt.
“You really love alienating people, huh,” she says, and if I don’t think about what happened between us yesterday, then it doesn’t need to hurt. “Wild. Okay. Well, I’m sure as hell getting out of here as soon as I can.”
“Good luck!” I say brightly. “Pretty sure we’re stuck here forever.”
She looks at me like I’m scaring her, and maybe I am. Maybe I’m scaring myself a little too.
I wreak as much havoc as I can before changing into all black for a late-night mission, leaving my cape behind. It’s ten o’clock, dark enough for me to creep into the journalism building undetected. Everyone else is immersed in their first-night activities, as though they’re still important after all these weeks.
Sparse lights cast the hallways in an eerie greenish glow. I’m lucky the paper is only put out on Mondays and Wednesdays, or the newsroom would probably be full of people staying late. But that’s where my luck ends, because the door is locked.
I let out a growl of frustration as I wiggle the doorknob back and forth, then try heaving all my weight against the door—nothing. I stare down the glass and take a deep breath, psyching myself up.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I smash my elbow into the glass with every ounce of force in my body.
“Shit shit shit!” I gasp out, glass shattering around me. I wait for a few moments, my breathing rough and shaky, just in case I’ve triggered an alarm. When nothing happens, I slowly extricate my arm and—oh god. There’s blood. Not a tremendous amount, but enough trickling along my elbow and down my forearm to make me sway for a second.
I’ll be fine tomorrow, if a little sore, but it still fucking hurts and there’s so much glass and and and—
Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. I am an invincible nightmare of a girl.
I stick my arm back through the hole I’ve created, trying to avoid the sharpest shards of glass, fingers grasping for the lock.
Once I’m inside, I shove out a breath and collapse against the door, clutching my injured arm to my chest. Letting the blood disappear into my black T-shirt. Jesus fucking Christ, this is batshit, and I must be delirious because I suddenly start laughing. Nothing is funny. Everything is funny.
I’m definitely losing my mind.
Slowly, slowly, I come back to my senses. When I can breathe normally again, I let the newsroom fill me with a much-needed sense of calm. Everyone says newspapers are dying, and they have been for years, small papers folding all over the country. And yet I remain nostalgic. At home we get the Seattle Times every day, and I always look forward to it, especially the Sunday editions with their thick arts-and-culture sections. My online subscriptions are great, but nothing compares to the feeling of newsprint in your hands, graying up your fingertips, or the thrill of a magazine showing up in your mailbox every month.
I run my hands along the walls, the Sharpie quotes that don’t make sense but were surely hilarious when first uttered. I’ll never have a chance to work here? Fuck it. I’ll make my own mark.
I swipe a pen from a nearby desk and uncap it, finding a spot on the wall just above where somewhere scrawled, I don’t want to put that in my mouth, but I’ll do it for you in tiny letters. And… irony of ironies, I can’t come up with anything to write. Maybe Barrett Bloom was here, but that just reminds me of PROPERTY OF BARRETT BLOOM, Miles’s half-finished, long-gone tattoo. And thinking about Miles is a bad idea, no matter how much I wish we could go back to how we were before.
It’s a realization that startles me so much, I’m not quite sure what to do with it.
I shake this off, stalking through the newsroom, past Annabel’s office, into a dark little alcove. ARCHIVE is printed on the plaque on a door. And this one is unlocked.
“Oh my god,” I breathe out as I switch on the single light bulb overhead.
Every issue of the Washingtonian is in here, from decades ago and just last week, stowed away in labeled filing cabinets stacked floor to ceiling.
That article Christina Dearborn found on Elsewhere was from 2005. I open up a drawer, starting with January of that year. An article about a new dorm being built, a review of Hitch. Nothing in February or March, either. But in April, right there on the front page—
SPRING QUARTER RUSH: REGISTRATION SITE CRASHES WHEN TOO MANY SIGN UP FOR TIME-TRAVEL CLASS
I clutch the paper tightly, the words swimming on the page. She exists. And she doesn’t just exist—she was beloved.
I find her again in 2007, in an article about people wanting to shut down her class because they thought she wasn’t teaching real science. Angry parents calling her a quack, a fraud. A manipulator. “She’s clearly not all ‘there,’ if you know what I mean,” one of the parents is quoted as saying.
Jumping ahead a few years, I learn she was placed on administrative leave, and just as I’m slipping a November paper out of its slot, a neon-yellow sticky note glares back at me.
Removed from online W archives per E. Devereux’s request. For further information:
