“When did she die?”

“The same day Alexis Clément died. Saturday, December nineteenth, 1992, the day of the snowstorm.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Now it was Fanny’s turn to look up at Our Lady of the Rosary. Behind Mary, two angels were holding open her mantle so that the meek might find shelter there. In that moment, I wished that I could join them. But Fanny raised her head, looked into my eyes, and, with her next words, destroyed everything I cared about.

“Because I’m the one who killed her, Thomas.”

Fanny

Nicolas de Staël student residence, Saturday, December 19, 1992

Utterly exhausted, I stifle yawn after yawn. Pages and pages of my notes on molecular biology dance before my eyes, but my brain refuses to take them in. I’m fighting sleep. The cold is the worst, cutting me to the bone. The battered heater is about to give up the ghost, and right now it’s barely breathing dusty lukewarm air. I’ve put music on to keep myself awake. “Disintegration,” “Plainsong,” “Last Dance”…the speakers pour out the exquisite melancholy of the Cure. A perfect mirror of my forlorn soul.

I wipe condensation from the dorm-room window with my sleeve. Outside, the landscape looks surreal. The campus is silent and deserted, frozen beneath an opalescent carapace. For a moment, I gaze into the distance, beyond the pearl-gray sky from which snow is still falling.

My stomach is rumbling and beginning to cramp. I haven’t eaten a thing since yesterday. The cupboards and the fridge are empty. I know I should face the fact that I need to sleep a little, stop setting my alarm clock for four thirty a.m., but I feel so guilty that I can’t. I think about the crazy study schedule I drew up for this two-week vacation. I think about the brutal first year of pre-med that will chew up and spit out two-thirds of the students in my class. And I wonder whether there is any point. Or, rather, I wonder whether there is any point for me. Do I really want to be a doctor? What will my life be like if I don’t get into medical school? Every time I imagine my future, all I see is a bleak, dreary landscape. Not a wintry plain, but a boundless expanse of gray, the gray of concrete and tower blocks, of highways and getting up at five a.m. The gray of hospital rooms, of the metallic taste in your mouth when you wake up, sweating, next to the wrong person. I know that this is what awaits me, because I have never had that lightness, that carefree spirit, that optimism so many students at the lycée wear like a badge of honor. Every time I imagine my future, I see fear, weariness, emptiness, pain.