As a scholarship student at Lyceum St. Genevieve, you drift at the edges of outrageously privileged heirs, mountains of homework, and the endless, ritual, socially obligatory skiing trips to the Alps every long winter. But winter, at least, has passed.
This semester was meant to be simpler, focused. The Lyceum Award, that gleaming thing at the end of all this labor, was supposed to be the axis upon which your days turned, despite Ludo losing his mind trying to compete with you for it.
But lately, your bigger concern is a certain creep whose name you don’t even know.
It started harmless enough. Bizarre texts, Shelley, Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, bleak verses bombarding your phone from an unknown number. At first, it could’ve passed as some strange joke, maybe even a morbid kind of fun.
Until the messages began to describe you. Your appearance, your movements, real life, real time.
From “Ponytail frames your cheekbones so well” to “Food is the essence of life—you’ve lost a few pounds” to “You really should close your window at night.”
It escalated fast.
You reported it to Principal Forsyth, but the snobbish man dismissed you at the first whiff of scandal. Maybe you should tell Father Pesci instead.
But before you could even form a plan, this Saturday night, returning to your studio dorm in the Lodge after spending hours in the library, you found a gown laid across your bed like a body: sleek black silk, deep scoop neck, spaghetti straps.
Beside it a box of kitten heels waited, and next to that, a letter, handwritten, perfume lingering faintly on the cream-colored envelope. The sealing wax bore no crest you recognized.
You sat. You opened. You read:
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The philosophers say no, the physicists yes. Sound is the sensation excited in the ear when the air or other medium is set in motion. And so, I wonder—if I pour my heart into these words, over and over, and they never reach you, never touch that singular mind in this world whose attention I dread and crave, do I exist at all?
Verba volant, scripta manent. Words fly away; writing remains.
I write because I must, because this living creature inside me is clawing and writhing and begging to be known; without you, it dies.
Please grace me with your presence at the mausoleum tonight. Fawning yet fickle feelings shouldn’t be flattered; mine is anything but. Upon seeing you draped in the silk I’ve chosen, I will reveal myself to your eyes.