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The next evening when I return to my room, a mountain of boxes, bins, and books awaits. Everything from the geography of speleology, the study of caves, to the Victorian era’s influence over Western style and fashion, several history books, and a new list of Latin vocabulary. Abby is at her desk asleep in the chair under a pile of invitations. She startles when the door closes.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you.” I pull a thin book by Emily Post with a familiar name from the top of the stack on my bed. Then another. Putting the Charm in Charming, A Member’s Guide for Proper Living, The Language of Style. The list goes on.
“It’s fine. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.” Abby smooths a drip of drool from her mouth but misses the rhinestone stickers stuck to her face. “I need to get these invitations out.” She joins me at my bedside. “What happened to you after the Tavern?”
“Do you have to do those tonight?” I ask, removing the first bin from my bed and starting a stack by my closet. A little black journal with a fleur-de-lis on the front slips from the stack.
“My mentor said the calligrapher is running behind. And these have to get out, like, now. The Art of Manners chapter seventeen: Send an invitation too late and the guest may already be booked. Twelve days is not early. Ugh!”
I peel the rhinestone tape off her face. “I can help you.”
“Are you sure? Have you seen your stack of things?”
She’s not wrong. I pick through the bins and pull out a bound manual thicker than a dictionary. A quick thumb through is telling. “A checklist?”
“Yep.”
“It’s like four hundred pages!”
“This is Third Rite, Quell.” Abby smiles awkwardly. “The kid gloves are off.” She plops onto her bed, falling back on her pillow.
“Abby, you need a break.”
She hugs her pillow, faux sobbing. “There’s no time!”
“All right, that’s it.” I roll up my sleeves. “I need to learn to do this stuff, too. We’re doing it together.”
I grab an invite from her stack and toss her sparkly, studded tape. “First off, we’re ditching this. Less is more.” I wrap a thin ribbon around it. “There, that’s enough.” I stuff it in an envelope and grab another.
“What happened to you last night after the Tavern?” Abby asks again, joining me to fold. “Mynick told me Jordan ditched early, but then you weren’t home for a while.” She hands me my invite, trying to situate the ribbon on it.
“Speaking of Mynick,” I say, ignoring her question, “I’m so bummed you can’t take him.”
“Yeah, that sucks. I even asked Cuthers if Headmistress would make an exception, and it was a flat no. But Jordan? Last night?”
I hand her a roll of ribbon. “This one is kind of cute.”
“Quell! You’re not getting out of answering my question.” She takes the ribbon and tosses it back at me.
“I just needed some time to myself.”
She sits on the bed. “Because you like him, and he likes you, and y’all are pretending like you don’t.”
That’s part of it. “I, ugh . . . I don’t know.”
“And I suppose you went with Jordan to the Tavern together just because.”
“He’s my mentor. We were celebrating passing my exam.”
She makes a face, and I remember the way his eyes light up every time we talk about books. The way he looked at me without surprise when I completed Second Rite.
“Don’t look at me like that.” I wish I could tell Abby everything. “Sometimes he just frustrates me.”
“Is that what you call it? How you get all fidgety and smiley when he’s around. The way you can’t stop looking at him when he’s in the room.”
“Abby, shut up! I do not.” I gnaw my lip. Wait, do I? hangs on my lips, unsure how much to share. “He is the last person in the world I should be thinking about that way.” If only it were that simple.
“Why?”
