“He’s just back there.” Esther paused on the stairs and raised a hesitant thumb back toward the lecture theater. “You could ask him yourself.”

“I’m asking you to ask him.” For a second it looked as if she might have been smiling. “Because I think he’ll say yes to you.”

Bewildered, flattered, and a little uncomfortable, Esther carried on down the stairs, trying to decode the subtext of their interaction.

At the bottom of the steps, Vectra turned and arched her eyebrows at Esther.

“Let me know about the notes, yeah?”

“Yes, umm . . .” Esther did a quick sweep of the foyer, relieved when she saw that Daisy was preoccupied with reading the Postcard Poems display. “How? E-mail? Phone?”

“Or you could just bring them to the next Creative Writing seminar.”

Of course. Esther was still getting used to her new schedule—and the fact that she was supposed to be sticking to it. Vectra gave Esther’s outfit an impenetrable head-to-toe assessment.

“Nice belt.”

And then she was out the door, turning her collar up against the wind and pulling her headphones on.

“Esther?” Daisy stood at Esther’s shoulder, following her gaze to Vectra, who glanced back with another enigmatic half smile before disappearing.

“Vectra Featherstone liked my belt.”

“That’s good . . . well done for having a nice belt.” She petted Esther much as she would Baby Gordon. “Shall we go and see Susan now?”

There was a gentle touch at her elbow, and Esther felt herself steered gently outdoors, someone zipping up her top and pulling her devil-horn hat down over her ears. (Daisy, presumably.)

“Do you know what a compliment like that means in the universal language of the outcast?” Esther turned, wide-eyed with conviction. “It means we’re friends.”

The walk from the English building to the hospital wasn’t so long—not compared to how long it took to walk all the way up the hill to Catterick Hall—but the conversation made it feel an awful lot longer to Daisy. Although it was less of a conversation and more like listening to a monologue on Vectra Featherstone and all the ways in which she was some kind of super race of human brought forth into the world under a moonless night, anointed with sacrificial blood and destined for darkness.

When Esther liked something, she really went all in, something that Daisy admired. It took conviction and confidence in one’s own judgment to make such strong proclamations about something—or someone—about which she knew so little. Daisy always felt that knowing what she liked took time, a seed planted and tended and watered, nourished under many suns, watched and cherished until it blossomed into something true and beautiful or withered away to create more fertile soil for something else. One of the many reasons she’d found her Social Period so stressful was because she’d planted too many seeds for her to keep track of.