“You know you don’t help yourself when you do things like this, lurking in the shadows, acting as if you’re mute.”

“I’m not,” I snap impulsively.

His head whips in my direction, his gaze meets mine through the bookshelves, and his mouth curls into a fiendish smile.

“Ah…there you are. Petit de la souris.”

I watch him warily as he approaches, wondering what his plan is, worried he’ll suddenly realize our respective roles: lion and lamb.

My hands ball into fists as he walks to the aisle just before mine and turns in, stopping once he’s right in front of me. I feel my heart pound down in my stomach as the books that separate us get tugged away one by one, tossed carelessly to the ground, until his suit-clad chest is fully visible through the gap.

Then, slowly…he bends down so we’re eye to eye.

For a brief moment, we merely look at each other across the top of the empty shelf.

I’ve never seen him this close before. He’s cast in shadow, but he might as well be cast in bronze, a beautiful boy with sharp cheeks and hard angles and mean eyes. His is the body the devil would take if he wanted to walk the earth.

I wonder what he would say if he knew I keep a photo of him underneath my pillow, a page I ripped from the St. John’s yearbook. He’s grown up even more since that portrait was taken, taller by the day.

He tips his head, studying me.

“So you do have a voice.”

I narrow my eyes, but my annoyance only amuses him.

“Why are you here?” he asks, gentler now.

“It’s not because of you if that’s what you’re thinking.”

His dimples pop. He thinks I’m lying.

“Do you regularly sneak around in the library?”

I regularly sneak around everywhere. I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately.

Death will do that to a person.

“What are you scared of?” I ask myself sometimes.

I don’t know how to answer. It feels silly to admit that I’m scared to close my eyes, that the night my mom passed away, I was woken up from a deep sleep, my grandmother’s maid standing at my door, her hand covering her mouth.

I can still hear her racking sobs.

“Lainey, you poor thing. You poor soul. I can’t bear it.”

When I went to sleep, my mom was alive. When I woke up, she was gone.

Logically, I know sleep will not steal the living from me. I’ve slept many nights and woken up to find my grandmother still alive and well. I know I’m not cursed like that. Only, at night, when it’s dark and quiet and I’m alone with my thoughts, I can sometimes convince myself otherwise.

The first time I left my dorm for a midnight stroll, it was on a night when insomnia had a firm grip on me. I was tossing and turning and knew I was annoying Blythe. Her groans of agitation told me I had better lie still and soon. Instead, I got up, slid on a pair of flip-flops, and left my dorm. The faculty here are lenient when it comes to curfews. This is a posh boarding school with enough privileged students (AKA Daddy and Mommy are wrapped around their little fingers) that the faculty has learned they have to pick and choose their battles. Nothing illegal, but beyond that, use your judgment, and quite frankly, even the illegal things get overlooked most of the time. The amount of drug use at St. John’s could rival Studio 54 in its heyday. Still, most of the time, the faculty is more than happy to ignore the stench of weed or a little bit of white powder if those tuition checks keep rolling in and those hefty endowments keep clearing.