Chapter 1
JONAH
He stared at the boy on the floor. He was wearing a sweater—a campus sweater with the crest over the chest: a triangle with a horizontal line through its center. Jonah had spent some time before his freshman year staring at that symbol, the way it never seemed to match a traditional university, yet it always entranced him. Perhaps because of its strangeness from expected circumstances, perhaps also because he could see a million different possibilities of the many worlds at his fingertips.
Although, right now, he didn't have many questions. He didn't have many thoughts. He could barely think. He was losing himself in a swathing wave of darkness that slowly consumed him. Jonah hadn;t realized until now that his eyes were lighter than what he had first noticed. There were flecks of light still illuminating on the surfaces of his corneas and for the first time since being admitted into the society, Jonah saw Christopher Henry for the first time. He was a Material Sciences student; Jonah lived across the hall from him and here he was on the floor with an arm twisted in the wrong direction, a leg in the same fashion, and his chin pressed between his shoulder blades. The boy’s tanned-olive skin was purpling in the broken crooks of his arms and his legs. His eyes bulged out of his head. JOnah wondered, how. He wondered what could have done this. What could have taken the small frame of Christopher and contorted him, twisted his very being into the mangled mess in front of him. Then, with the flick of a different switch in his mind, he thought, who. Jonah’s mind in these small moments wandered into dark corners.
A hand clapped onto his shoulders, startling him. He turned to see Simon, brown-eyed, dark-haired Simon with his deep freckles and the grooves of stress and wrinkles over his face. Simon, the House Father and chapter President.
Simon said, “cops want everyone out of the house while they do their thing.” That was all he said—nothing more, nothing else. Jonah nodded slowly and left the house, stepping onto the lawn where the rest of his Brothers were standing, talking, laughing like nothing happened. Jonah’s chest tightened. He couldn’t tell if it was some sort of anger, despair, or something else. Whatever it was, it unsettled him
The police moved back and forth, walking in and out of the house. Or however much you could consider it a house. The house was large, grand even. In all its manorial glory with its ivy covered bricks and pristine white pillars at its entrance. Jonah had been living here since freshman year and, if he had been blindfolded, he could walk the halls of the house without tripping, without missing a beat, without seeing the floorboards beneath his feet. Two years and he knew it like the breath in his lungs.
An officer came up to him, “you live here?”
Jonah nodded, “mind if I ask you a few questions? I’d ask the other boys, but—” he peered over Jonah’s shoulders to his fraternity brothers still laughing in a circle.
With a croak in his voice, “yeah–” he cleared his throat, “yeah, that’s fine.” The officer pulled him over to the house patio. The officer sat on one of the chairs, “do you know if there were any drugs in the house?” Jonah leaned against the wooden rail and stared at the officer. His badge gleamed in the sunlight, which made Jonah nearly chuckle. Not at the officer’s badge but that someone died in the middle of the day. Bright as ever.
Jonah stammered, “no, we’re not allowed–” The officer stopped him.
“You gotta be honest with me,” he paused and for a second Jonah hadn’t realized he was waiting for his name. He told him. “All I ask for is the truth and ain’t none of you are gonna get in trouble, Jonah.” Jonah’s name rolled over the officer’s tongue like a marble, intricate and small and with enough control that it surprised Jonah, like he had known him his entire life.
Jonah swallowed. A lump had grown in his throat he didn’t know was there and he found himself nearly choking. “Be honest with me, Jo,” the officer smiled. Jonah shifted on his feet. He turned back to the group of fraternity brothers on the lawn. Half of them were staring at him, eyes piercing at the back of his neck. He turned back and stepped closer to the officer, taking the seat next to him. He watched as they all slowly turned their attention to him and at their center was Simon, deep brown eyes gazing in Jonah’s direction.
The officer called for Jonah’s attention again, “Jonah?” He turned to the officer and smiled, “um, no. I mean, some of us drink and smoke, but nothing other than that. And the only ones who do are twenty-one,” he was nodding while he spoke, “and never anything dangerous. We try to take care of one another, y’know?” Christopher’s broken body flashed in his memory. “As- as best as we can.” Jonah stood, “sorry, they’re calling me back over.” And they were. Simon was waving at him, gesturing for him. The officer sighed, “okay, Jonah. Thank you,” his voice was low, saturated with disappointment but the tension in Jonah’s chest, the eyes on him, the fear that had been kindled in him was much more severe, more overwhelming, increasingly disastrous as he walked over to his brothers.
Simon threw his arm over Jonah’s shoulder, “what’d he ask you?”
Jonah let out a chuckle, “if we do drugs.”
Another brother, Kyle, asked, “and you said?”
“Every night you and Isaiah do crack and me and Simon do black-tar,” the group laughed when Kyle punched Jonah’s arm.
“They say anything about Chris?” someone off to the side asked. The group fell quiet, so quiet in fact that the officer’s grew suspicious.
Simon spoke, finally breaking the silence, “we won’t know and we don’t need to know. What happened to Chris was fucked up, but what are we gonna do?”
The same boy, “yeah, but–”
Simon turned a sharp eye to him, “what we have to do is damage control for us. The cops are gonna get in touch with Chris’s folks. The university is gonna put us up for a couple weeks while they fix this mess, then we’re going back to normal. Sound good, guys?” Everyone’s eyes turned to look at someone else.
“Good for me,” Jonah said, and the rest of them followed.
Simon smiled at them, “our strength is in our bones”
And in unison the rest of them replied, “but the tongue has none.”
