At 7:42 a.m., building C’s corridor still belongs to the cleaners, the boarding students looking for coffee, and Lina Vasseur.
She prefers school at this hour. The fluorescent lights do not all hum at once. No one asks whether she has seen a message, can send a photo, can “just check” an assignment. The lockers lined against the wall look like what they are: dented metal boxes covered with stickers, shoe marks, and scraps of tape. Nothing to interpret.
Lina puts her bag in front of 118, turns the dial twice, then once the other way. The rules Alice taught her at fifteen do not stop her wanting to understand too quickly. Her camera is wedged between her philosophy binder and the sweatshirt she thought she lost Friday. She takes it out, sits on the floor, and inserts the memory card into her phone with the club’s adapter.
Eighty-seven photographs from Saturday night.
Malo takes too many pictures. He knows it, everyone knows it, and that has never stopped him taking ten images of the same moment as though one might someday serve as evidence against the other nine.
Lina scrolls.
Jade on the couch arm, one pink sock and one black. Yanis with a mixing bowl on his head. Iris cutting the cake because no one trusted Théo with a knife. Nils Delcourt behind them, blurred, leaning toward the Bluetooth speaker. Half a face, a wrist, his sweatshirt’s green drawstring.
Lina pauses on that one only because Nils’s eyes are closed and he looks asleep on his feet.
She moves to the next.
Malo enters the corridor as she selects six images.
“Are you planning to return the card before finals or take it to your grave?”
He holds a paper cup, his hair still damp. His shirt sticks out beneath one side of his jacket. Lina raises two fingers without looking away.
“Two minutes.”
“You’ve been saying that since April.”
End of excerpt. Discover the other stories in this universe.