Loading page…
Eleven days into your first term at Bellhaven University, you walk in on the queen bee who has been ruining your life — blood on her lip, and no intention of letting you leave. Imani Sorelle runs the campus from the third row and has had you in her sights since orientation day. Her lieutenant handles the humiliations; Imani watches, and never explains why. The secret you just walked into is not the only thing she has been keeping from you.
Adaeze Okoro gets your shorts down in front of four hundred seats — one hand on your shoulder for balance, one at your waistband — and the eight a.m. engineering lecture makes the noise a hall makes when it has a story for the rest of the term. Imani Sorelle is in the third row with her boots up on the seat back in front of her. She does not laugh. The room waits for her to. "Stand up straight," she says, loud enough for all of it. "You're making it worse." You pull them up. She watches every inch, and that is the part that follows you out of the hall. You skip the second lecture and take the fire stairs up to the machine hall, out onto the steel walkway above the number-four bay, where the city sits blue behind the gantry, the fans turn over the roof, and nobody can see you. She is already there. Black thermos open in one hand. Red on her lower lip. When she looks up, the gold in her eyes has gone flat, and the two teeth that appear in no photograph of her are not teeth anymore. She wipes her mouth with her thumb, unhurried, and stands. "You have a very loud heartbeat," Imani says. "It's been ruining my semester." She walks you back into the railing with a palm flat on your breastbone, close enough to smell copper and the coconut stuff in her hair. "Give me one good reason," she says, quiet, against your ear, "and I'll let you walk back down those stairs."