*
When I got back to the dorm, Alice was cross-legged on her bed, a red highlighter poised in her hand as she read a textbook. I’d never seen a red highlighter before, and could only assume she imported them directly from Dante’s fifth circle of hell.
‘Hey,’ I said breathlessly, before I could talk myself out of it. She pressed a forefinger on to the page to mark her place and looked up distantly. ‘I just wanted to say I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot.’
She frowned, peering at me as though I were faintly stupid. ‘But you don’t have anything to apologise for.’
‘Okay, well, I’m saying it anyway.’ I smiled. ‘Even if you don’t think we can be friends, I’d at least like us to be amicable. I mean . . . surely you don’t want things to be this fraught?’
She gave the slightest sigh-nod of acknowledgement.
‘And I warn you,’ I added, ‘I am one persistent son of a bitch. I will continue to be nice to you against your will until you like me.’
After considering this for a moment – a moment in which I wondered how she could possibly object to this benign sentiment – she nodded once more and went back to her book.
It wasn’t an apology, but it was a start.
Later that night, we were both in bed by ten. Rain was pattering at the window like a thousand tapping fingertips. I was reading the demonic possession book I’d checked out of the library, while Alice was lying flat on her back in her full-length red plaid pyjamas, staring at the ceiling.
‘Do you ever get . . . impulses?’ she asked mistily. ‘Like . . . violent impulses.’
I laid the book down uncertainly. This conversational path was particularly unnerving. I suspected she knew that, and got a kick out of making me uncomfortable. Was she calling my bluff on being nice to her no matter what? Pushing the boundaries of my kindness?
‘Sure,’ I replied cautiously. ‘Like when you’re standing in a high-up place and your imp says “but what if you jumped?”’
She turned her head to face me, so the dim lamplight cast half her pixie-ish face in shadow. The elfin upsweep of her browline was particularly striking tonight. She genuinely looked like a cartoon villain at times. ‘I mean, that’s a strange thing to say when we’re mere metres away from a place where four people fell to their deaths.’
I flushed pink. I guess it was.
‘Also . . . yourimp?’ she asked, the slightest frown tugging her forehead.
I rolled on to my side to face her, propping my head up on my elbow. The pulse beating in my temple echoed in my palm. ‘Yeah, the Imp of the Perverse. Like in the Edgar Allen Poe story?’
Her expression remained blank.
‘Basically, everyone has an imp in their mind that urges them to do the worst possible thing in any given situation,’ I explained. ‘Like a mother standing at the top of the stairs holding her baby, and she suddenly thinks “you could just throw him down”. It doesn’t mean she hates her baby, or that she’d ever actually act on it. It’s just the imp, right? Baudelaire explores it too, in ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’. “C’est une espèce d’énergie qui jaillit de l’ennui et de la rêverie.” The twin cause of this energy is ennui and fantasy.’
‘So we all have an imp?’ Alice asked, as though the notion filled her with immense existential relief.
I nodded. ‘Mine’s called Steve.’
A sudden burst of laughter from deep in her chest made me jump. She looked just as surprised as I did, as though she’d forgotten what the sensation felt like.
‘Steve?’ she said incredulously, with something like genuine glee on her face. ‘WhySteve?’
‘Just a particularly impish name, isn’t it?’
She shook her head, but she was smiling. It changed her entire face, crinkling her usually cold eyes and scrunching her nose up in a way that could, at an absolute stretch, be described as cute.
‘Night, Lottie,’ she chuckled, turning over to face the wall.
For a few moments, I felt a warm glow of triumph. I’d appeased the cartoon villain, if only for a moment. And I’d proven that I wasn’t just some idiot who’d waltzed in on a sports scholarship.
But the satisfaction didn’t last, because as soon as I flipped off my own lamp and tried to fall asleep, her original question worked its way back into the forefront of my mind.
Do you ever get violent impulses?
Her imp was different to mine or most other people’s.