“Is it because you don’t know where it’s been?” asked Sumi.

Jack opened her eyes and favored the smaller girl with a withering look. “I can only dream of such glorious ignorance. My issue with this body is that I know precisely where it’s been, precisely what it’s done, and moreover, precisely what has been done to it. I am a ghost trapped in a charnel house, and I dislike it immensely.”

Alexis began stroking Jack’s hair. Jack reached up and caught her hand with gloved fingers, pulling it to her lips and kissing it gently.

“I’m sorry, love,” she said. “I’m trying. For you, I’m trying.”

Christopher blinked. Of all the things he’d been expecting—which, to be honest, included essentially none of the day’s events—Jack showing affection toward another human being had not made the list. He turned and hurried across the room to the shelf Jack had identified, beginning to sift through its contents.

It was a little odd how he’d preserved all Jack’s things, even after the room had officially become his. Nancy had taken it before him. She’d been newer to the school, but she’d been given priority by her roommate’s death—even with as dotty as Eleanor could sometimes be, she’d been able to recognize that Nancy probably didn’t want to sleep in Sumi’s room without Sumi. It had been Nancy who’d cleaned out the twins’ clothes, giving them to Kade to add to the school’s communal wardrobe. She hadn’t been there long enough to deal with anything else, and when Christopher moved in, he’d found the combination of mad scientist’s lab and Victorian lady’s parlor oddly soothing. It wasn’t anything like Mariposa, but it wasn’t anything like his parents’ house, either. It was his. It was home.

Sure, he’d covered up the creepier aspects, since there was “willing to share space with a taxidermically preserved alligator” and then there was “waking up every morning and looking at a whole shelf of different kinds of acid.” One was quaint. The other was disturbing.

The box was right where Jack had said it would be. Christopher picked it up, hesitated, and grabbed a pack of wipes. Jack liked to be clean. Jack took “liking to be clean” to the extreme. She’d want her glasses to be clean before she put them on.

Sumi and Alexis were signing to each other again when he returned to the group. “Here,” he said, offering the box and wipes to Jack. “I thought you might want to clean the lenses.”