“You okay?” Noelle asked. She was sitting up in bed, legs crossed and only half her face cast in the gloomy morning light that filtered in through the curtains, making her expression unreadable to me.

“I’m fine,” I rasped, my heart still racing, and pulled the blanket tighter around myself.

Noelle looked utterly unconvinced, but didn’t say anything.

Instead, she reached for the phone on her bedside table.

I closed my eyes, trying to rid myself of the shaky feeling to which I had already grown unaccustomed. A few deep breaths in and then out again, over and over. Grounding myself by focusing on the coarse texture of the sheets, the muffled sounds of footsteps and voices in the corridor, the by-now-familiar scent of ancient bricks and woodwork.

I was at Seven Hills.

I was in my room.

“So . . .” Noelle said. “Are you coming to the party tonight?”

Exactly a week had passed since the night I had taken the blame for her sneaking out, and since then something between us had shifted.

Noelle was spending more time in our room instead of staying the night in her boyfriend’s. She had stopped smoking in our room. And, most surprisingly, she had begun actually talking to me. It wasn’t like we were chatting all day long, but instead of ignoring me or pretending she didn’t hear me, she now answered when I asked her something and contributed, even if only monosyllabically, to the otherwise rather one-sided conversations.

Still, hearing her question caught me off guard. Trying to hide my surprise, I asked, “What party?”

“The Welcome Back Party. It’s this party in the basement to welcome everyone back and greet the new students. Happens every year.”

“And the teachers allow it?”

“Not explicitly,” Noelle said. “But it’s the one night when the majority of the upper classes get together to get drunk, and the teachers pretend they don’t know about it. Even Amelia will be there.”

“I guess I have to come then.”

“Would be pretty embarrassing if you didn’t,” Noelle said, her lips quirking into the hint of a smile. After glancing at the time on her phone, she added, “If I were you, I’d start to get ready.

You’ve got some tables to set before breakfast if I remember correctly.”

I was still too relieved about the fact that she was speaking to me to be bothered by the remark and got up without complaint, the shaky echo of the nightmare fading into nothingness.

° ° °

The day passed in a blur of classes, meals in the Great Hall, and a semiproductive study session with Seth. The closer the clock hands moved to nighttime, the more charged the air became, the hallways buzzing with barely concealed excitement, all hushed murmurs and secret giggles.

It was around nine o’clock when Seth and I made our way down the stairs that led to the basement. Finding them hadn’t been hard, seeing as half the students were on their way there, which further proved Noelle’s thesis that the teachers were simply pretending they didn’t know what was going on.