Page 25 of The Headmaster’s Binding

"Lights on is the rule," Wes said, and the room rearranged itself, people sliding down walls onto the floor, June pulling a cushion into her lap, and I noticed she turned the playlist down without anyone asking her to.

"So there's a second-year," Wes said. "Like us. And he's the smart one. Every ghost story needs the smart one, that's the part that goes into the woods first, except he's not book-smart the way we're all book-smart, he's the other thing, he reads a page twice and has it forever, whole pages, he'd do it at this party, right there where June's sitting. Brightest of anybody. Ask Priya. Priya doesn't rate people."

"He was rigorous," Priya said, to her glass, which from Priya is a eulogy.

"He never sat still," Kit said. "Not even in seminar. If he wasn't writing, he was reaching for somebody's book or somebody's coffee." Priya and Wes nodded before anyone could make it a joke.

"And in the spring, this is last spring, this is eight months ago, he goes quiet. Misses a Friday. Misses two. And then the word comes down, and the word is transferred. Middle of a term. Middle of a thesis. And his room's empty and his supervisor won't answer, so in the summer I go to the registrar and I ask Ballard, and Ballard says 'transferred,' because that's what the record says, and here's the thing, here's the whole thing." He put his glass down for the first time all night. "Transferred people take their bikes."

The playlist ran on underneath, very small.

"His bike sat on the Whitlock rack all summer. Green. Drop handles. It went right before term started, and nobody moved it, and if you ask who moved it you get a wall of polite silence. And his coat." Wes pointed at the door, at the pelt of coats on the rail beyond it. "His coat hung on the third hook in the common room downstairs until May. Nobody took it down, because taking it down would have been a theory. Then one day it wasn't there. Which was also a theory. And nobody got to hold either of them."

"The machine," Hannah said.

Everyone looked at her. She had both hands around her glass and she was looking into the wine like it was a long way down.

"The coffee machine in the common room has a timer," she said, flat, the way you read evidence into a record. "You can set it the night before. It was set for two cups, ten past eight, every morning, all spring. It stayed set for two cups every morning through June. I unplugged it at the end of the month." She turned the glass once. "Nobody asked me why."

Wes let that sit. Drunk, but a performer. Then he leaned in and finished it the way the genre finishes:

"And nobody ever says his name. That's the story. That's the whole ghost. No gray lady. A college that's one bike heavier than its paperwork, and if you say the name out loud—" he clicked his fingers, softly, "—the room does what this room is doing right now."

Because the room was doing it. Nineteen people, and the temperature had figured out how to drop without a window open. I want to be careful in this notebook, because the easy word is fear, and it wasn't only fear. Half of them shared a bench with him. It was the thing you get when people miss somebody they've been told they aren't missing.

"Game," Kit said.

* * *

The room moved like it had been waiting for the word.

"For the new member's benefit," Priya said, settling onto the desk beside June with the air of counsel approaching the bench. "The game is building, or not building. Someone names an anomaly. The room votes. Building means the college did it. Not building means the world did it. Simple majority. No abstentions."

"No appeals," Toby said.

"There's case law?"

"There's precedent," Priya said. "Sit down."

Toby went first, because Toby always goes first. "The radiators in Letters knock in iambic pentameter." Hands went up amid the jeering: not building, twelve to seven. Priya delivered the majority opinion: "Air in the pipes. Air scans."

June went next. "The library clock runs eleven minutes fast and Miss Hale won't let anybody touch it." Hands rose for not building, ten or eleven of them, Kit's among them, and then Kit took his hand down and put it up on the other side.

"Building," Kit said. "Don't ask."

And I watched the room count the fact of Kit, who runs this game, who has hosted it for three years, and hands crossed the floor like starlings changing their minds, and building carried it. Nobody asked.

"Do the fog," somebody said from over by the window.

A small quiet. Kit looked at me for a second, and then at the room, and put it formally, like a chairman: "The fog. It sits level. It doesn't move in wind. It stops at the gates. Building, or not building."

Every hand in the room went up for building. All nineteen. Even Priya's. "Building," she said. "Stipulated to the fog and to nothing else, and if anyone quotes me I'll deny it." Nobody laughed. That's the part I keep snagging on, writing this up: the game was funny for exactly as long as the votes were split. Unanimous isn't funny. Unanimous is a congregation.

Then Toby, flushed with cake and momentum and most of a bottle, raised his glass toward the window. "Okay, okay. Big one. Micah V⁠—"

"Don't," Hannah said.

Not loud. The way you'd say it to a man reaching for a live wire: one syllable, in time. And the whole room obeyed it, including Toby's mouth, which closed around the rest of the name, and including me, and I don't even know what I'd been about to do. Kit crossed to the desk, turned the playlist up, and asked loudly whether anyone else was going to eat cake or whether Toby had died for nothing, and the party went back to being a party with the smoothness of a scene change in decent theater. I stood at the steamed window with my glass, where somebody had wiped a porthole an hour before, and looked out at the smear of dark where the east range sits, and let the room be warm at my back.