She scanned the page again.

“Most of this you can read yourself. I said no fires already. Seriously, Ellie . . .”

“No fires,” Ellie mumbled into the floor.

“Okay! Then that’s it. Everybody take a folder.”

Nate immediately grabbed a folder and scurried back to his room. Pix headed back up to her apartment. Ellie peeled herself off the floor and went to the table to lean in over Stevie and Janelle.

“Tub room,” she said to Janelle and Stevie in a low voice. “Both of you. Fifteen minutes. Bring a mug.”

It seemed like a command that should be obeyed.

Fifteen minutes later, mugs in hand, Janelle and Stevie knocked on the tub room door. Ellie was in the tub, dressed in what appeared to be nineteenth-century pantaloons and a corset. This alone would have caught Stevie’s attention, but what held it was the fact that the water was bright pink.

“Shut the door,” she said. “We needed to have a little cocktail party to celebrate your arrival.”

She indicated a pile of wet, used towels on the floor next to her as if it was a comfortable divan.

Stevie wasn’t sure where to start, really. The fact that they’d just been lectured about drinking. The fact that Ellie was in the tub, dressed in pantaloons, and dyeing herself pink. Or the fact that there was a saxophone leaning against the tub. That too.

She decided to let the whole thing go and see where the conversation took them. That was a technique in criminal investigation when you wanted to get a sense of someone—let people talk, let them guide, and they’ll take you to who they are.

“I’m just dyeing my outfit for tonight,” Ellie said.

Both Janelle and Stevie decided to sidestep the fact that Ellie was also dyeing herself pink. No need to state the obvious.

“What’s tonight?” Janelle asked.

“Tonight is the party!” Ellie said. “Here. Mugs. Here.”

She reached around clumsily behind her and pulled out a champagne bottle.

“Mugs,” Ellie said again, reaching out.

“But Pix just said . . . ,” Janelle started.

“Mugs.”

Stevie passed over her mug, and after a moment, so did Janelle. Ellie poured some foamy champagne into each.

“It’s warm,” she said. “I only managed to bring a few bottles home from France, and it’s cheap, but even the cheap stuff in Paris is better than most stuff here. Okay. I’m going to talk you through all of that. First . . .”

She raised her mug, and Stevie and Janelle got the hint that they were to clink.

“Skål.”

Ellie sipped heavily. Janelle looked into her mug. Stevie hesitated for just a moment, and then decided to go for it. She had only drunk a few times in her life, but if there had ever been a time and a place, this was probably it. And they could probably ditch the mugs in time. Probably. The champagne was warm and had a hard, mineral taste and fizzed up her nose. It was not unpleasant.

“Drinking,” Ellie said, draining her mug. “They know it happens. We’re in the middle of nowhere so that kind of limits what goes on. This is a real no-one-can-hear-you-scream kind of place.”

Janelle was still staring into her mug. She raised it to her lips a few times and was clearly pretending to drink.

“They don’t really care as long as you don’t get too messed up,” Ellie went on, rolling to the side to adjust her wet clothing. “If Pix catches you, she just makes you dump everything out. My advice: buy cheap, buy often, put it in another container. Most people get stuff on the weekend coaches to Burlington. The only thing to watch for there is that Security Larry has a bunch of narcs in the liquor stores who’ll call him if anyone from Ellingham shows up. They make things hard but not impossible. Plenty of people on the street will buy for you for five bucks. But don’t get caught by Larry. He’ll bust your ass. Okay! Next point.”

She poured herself a little more.

“Curfews. This one is easy. You can handle it a few ways. One, you can have someone take your ID back to the house and fake tap you in for the night. Works sometimes, but if Pix is in the common room and sees it isn’t you, that’s bad. Better solution, come back and go out the window. Again, Larry will bust your ass, but it’s not as bad as drinking. The other security people, they vary. Depends on how hard Larry’s been riding them. Having people in your room, not too hard. Pix doesn’t really check very much. She’s cool. She’s also easily distracted. She’s super smart but her mind is always elsewhere.”

The way Ellie was holding her arms, Stevie got an eyeful of her tattoo. In fact, she was pretty sure that Ellie was holding her arm in the universal “ask me about my tattoo” position. It was composed of elegant script. The ink was very dark, and while there was no redness, there was just a bit of white scarring around it if you looked carefully. It was new, and it extended from the inside of her elbow to her wrist:

Mon coeur est un palais flétri par la cohue . . .

“It’s Baudelaire,” Ellie said when she saw that Stevie was fully engaged. “I got it over the summer in Paris. Do you speak French?” she asked.

“I do,” Janelle said. “Well, some. I think it means . . . my heart is a palace . . . something . . . ?”

“. . . debased by the crowd.”

Stevie had no idea what the hell that meant, but she nodded.

“I was reading this poem one night in Paris over the summer,” Ellie said, elegantly turning her arm, “and it just hit me, and I said to my mom, I’ve got to get it on my arm. My whole arm. And she agreed. We had some wine, and we went and found a place in the Canal Saint-Martin. My mom’s new lover is a street artist down there and he knew a place.”

Stevie reflected for just a moment on how she’d spent the summer. The majority of the time she was working at the Monroeville Mall in the knockoff Starbucks. When not working, she read. She listened to podcasts. She walked down to the ice cream place. She bought mysteries cheap from sale tables in front of the library. Doing everything she could to drown out the politics. Her life was the opposite of hanging around Paris with your mom and your mom’s lover getting tattoos.

“Another thing,” Ellie said. “The cell service up here sucks. The Wi-Fi goes out all the time.”

“How do we watch TV?” Janelle asked.

Stevie had the feeling that Ellie was about to say she didn’t watch TV.

“I don’t watch TV,” Ellie said.

Stevie gave herself a point on her mental scorecard.

“You don’t watch TV?” Janelle said, in the same way you might ask, “You don’t breathe oxygen?”

“I make art,” she said.

“I make machines,” Janelle replied. “And I keep the TV on while I build. I need TV. It’s how I focus.”

Janelle looked to Stevie in a kind of panic. Stevie knew from their summer conversations that Janelle was not joking. She seemed to know every show. Janelle was nature’s finest multitasker, someone who could talk, build a robot, follow a show, all at the same time.

“Can’t help you,” Ellie said, proffering the bottle again. When Stevie and Janelle declined the refill, she topped up her mug. “I don’t watch TV at all. Never have. We never had one growing up. My house was always about making art. I grew up in an art colony in Boston, then in a commune in Copenhagen, and then in New Mexico, and then we went to Paris for a while.”