The Walk

Swearing, mild religious horror(?)

“Will you watch me walk tonight?” Cass asks me. Which is, according to every speech the university has given since freshman year orientation, tantamount to asking, will you blaspheme against the patron?

I prop myself up on an elbow, the universal symbol of vaguely interested. I have no problem blaspheming—the fact that I’ve made it through four years here proves that—but Cass is as devout as they come. That first night in our dorm, he’d set up his shrine before his mattress, incense sticks neatly pointed away from my side of the room. As if that would do anything, of course—but maybe it did. The sheepish picture of courtesy meant something on a campus that tolerated my existence largely by pretending I didn’t exist.

“You’re okay with this?” I asked him then. (Eighteen-year-old me was, to put it bluntly, something of an asshole.)

“What?” (Eighteen-year-old Cass was almost exactly like he is now.)

“You know I’m godless, right?” I said. Cass winced, paling under his freckles, and even in the youngest, narrowest version of my assholery I could see he’d felt it. Not the light sting of exposure—oh, you got me—or the inconvenience of a social nicety tearing like store-brand tissue paper. No, he’d felt it like I’d meant it: a deep, pointed shame.

“You know I’m godless, right?” I say now, and Cass rolls his eyes. I know he does, even though I’m actually staring at the side of his head as he squashes himself against our bathroom sink, trying to get his makeup on right.

“I wish you wouldn’t say it like that.”

“Everyone else is thinking it” —true— “and anyway, the point is, I am not invited to the patron walk.”

Cass swings away from the mirror for a second to look at me: “I’m inviting you.”

I’d laugh at the sentiment if I could; owlish Cass, with his gown that hangs off of every bone in his body and a face full of half-finished prayer marks, has no power over the ceremonial decisions of Lestyn College. He can’t invite me any more than he can fix the light panels in the ceiling, which have flickered for four years straight because all the bugs crawled into the wiring and died. And truthfully, I would rather stay here with the dead bugs—a futile exercise all around.

Cass asks anyway, though, and my laugh snags in my ribcage. Should I have expected that, too? Maybe. Cass throws in his lot with futility every day—he’s not the godless one, after all—and I? Well. I’ve lived with Cass.

—

We’re some of the last to leave for the patron walk, heading into the stone-somber darkness between White and Trillby. The honor students have gone down hours ago, and no light remains for the socialites to stick around. The statues rise up along the paths less like markers than overgrowths, like weeds sprouted off from a forest of buildings.

I like the statues more like this. Like funny-shaped trees.

Actually, I like the whole campus more like this, the edges softened, the shapes mutable if you squint a bit. It’s easier to let the fondness well up when I can see it mostly by memory: that study room where I pulled my first all-nighter. That lecture hall with desks so tiny my notebooks fell off them in the middle of a class. The tree where I kissed Jess from Poly-Sci, and she very sweetly did not try to convert me.

In the harsh light of day, though, Lestyn College is Lestyn College. The statues are statues: founders, prophets, alumni, whatever. You are walking this path, they say with their dour faces, the shape of the whole campus condensed into stone, unobstructed by memory.

I don’t tell Cass this, obviously, for one because he hasn’t looked up from his sleeves for a good few minutes. Call me godless, but I don’t want the reason he trips off the curb, concusses himself, and misses his graduation to be “his dumbass roommate tried to start a philosophical debate.” Instead, I say, “It’s fine, Cass.”

“Right,” he mutters. “Right.”

His sleeves are fine. And even if they weren’t, with our colors, it won’t matter much. (For a school with a water patron, I have no clue why they made our colors black and crimson. Was every shade of blue spoken for?)

We duck under the scaffolding of the tech building (I give a salute to my biology labs, tucked behind it). The ghostly light from the poor folks still studying for finals pours from the windows and illuminates Cass’ face. He looks a little seasick—that same pale beneath his skin as when I first met him.

“Hey—” I start to say.

“Cass!” someone interrupts before I can—before I have to?—work out what to say next. A girl, a sophomore maybe, jogs up to us on the path. The mark of the patron glints around her neck, one of those overpriced student merch items they scatter through every conceivable place you can spend money on campus. “I thought you were walking tonight!”

A point of unnecessary irritation pricks at my skin; Cass has the graduation marks literally painted across his face. “Oh, I am,” Cass says, much nicer than I would.

The girl’s eyes dart to me. Even in the weak light of the tech building, I know her expression by heart: godless, it sneers on instinct. It cycles through the surprise, the discomfort, the discomfort with being discomforted, the decision to stop thinking about it—me—altogether. “I wish I could watch,” she says to Cass instead, “but I’ve got an eight A.M. tomorrow. In Henry’s class.”

Cass’ face twists in commiseration. Maybe mine does, too: the grapevine is as sacred here as anywhere else, and anyway, Cass teetered on the edge of a nervous breakdown that whole semester. Henry haunted me by proxy, the specter of him just one sleepless, overcaffeinated body away.

It reminded me of how I studied: brute-forcing my way through, relying on nothing but my mind and my teeth, my godless will. Maybe that’s why you like Cass. You can separate some part of him from the patron—a piece of a real person—and you can’t do that with anything else here. That’s what I told myself then.

“Sorry,” says Cass now.

“It’s fine. I am kind of mad I won’t get to see the chosen, though. You know, in the moment—so I know what they want. Or at least what to expect.”

Cass looks vaguely seasick again, though he keeps his voice kind: “I don’t know if that’s—I think you just have to walk the path.”

The girl snorts, her smile so offhand it seems wrong, like a wound gone crooked. “Easy for you to say. You’re definitely going to be chosen.” She claps his shoulder—I try to give her the benefit of the doubt, that in the half-light she doesn’t catch how Cass flinches—and hurries into the tech building on her bright, clear way.

Cass and I glance at each other, and after a moment, Cass’ expression cracks into a grin. Underclassmen. They’re babies.

“Do my markings look okay?” Cass asks after another moment.

“She didn’t even touch your face, man.”

Cass rolls his eyes, tilting his chin for me to see. I check the whorls of the waves, the places where a less careful graduate would smudge a curve. Not Cass, of course. I know it like I knew that dickhead professor, like I knew how to dress for a ceremony I could not attend, like I know Cass: without asking. Without wanting.

“It’s fine, Cass.”

—

Outside Theobald now. They renamed it last year—someone either made a large donation or got martyred, I can’t remember—but everyone still calls it Theobald. It rolls off the tongue.

I never came around the art building much. I’d chosen Lestyn for their marine biology program and their decent scholarships, and those two reasons wore thin enough fast enough. I didn’t need to exist in this place more than I already had to.

The feeling seemed mutual: Lestyn had chosen me to build out its secular track and boost its test scores. Beyond that, it permitted me to stay here with the grace of a good neighborhood finding a fleabitten hound on its streets: because it has to, because it can’t kill me, and because any other solution is too much trouble.

I don’t regret my decision—not going to the art building, I mean. It’s more of a curiosity glimmering, a restless sadness that on the grounds I had chosen to pursue curiosity, that glimmer would die. Maybe if I had gone, I would have found work by my fellow godless hidden in the back: blasphemous images of the patron. Lurid depictions of the blood rituals students conduct before exams. Or life outside of the path, even, the jobs and marriages and mundanity that exist beyond the confines of this world.

If I’m really honest, though, I probably wouldn’t have visited the art building much at any school. Even a patronless one. That sort of escape feels like a waste of time, like walking into a dream full of half-right reflections.

I did ask Cass, once, what the patron looked like. He stared at me like I was crazy. “You know,” he said.

“For real, though. Like, do they literally have him in chains?”

His eyes boggled some more, bright under the fairy lights he’d insisted on putting up. “You can’t ask that!” he hissed.

“I can ask you,” I said.

I think I meant it carelessly, but it didn’t come out that way. It felt more like I’d accidentally ripped a part of my soul out and was holding it in the palm of my hand, waiting for Cass to judge it heavy or not. Maybe karma felt like this. Maybe prayer did.

“I don’t know,” Cass answered me. “I don’t think he’s chained. I think—he doesn’t really have a shape. Just like waves in the dark, you know, how they sort of build and then…”

“Yeah,” I said then. “Yeah, I get it.”

“Walk the path, and the path will choose you,” Cass whispers to himself now. Practicing. He doesn’t need to; he would know the words with his brain cut out.

Walk the path, and the path will choose you. Hallowed be your name, in deathless glory. Hallowed be these halls, in immortal fame. Bless us as you bless these grounds, our patron, praise to Thee.

—

You’re definitely going to be chosen, the girl had said. I’ve lived with Cass all four years at Lestyn, and I still can’t understand why he would even want it. To be bound, just like the patron himself, to this fucking school—the evangelists of a god chained in a basement.

And then—I look over at Cass, fretting over words he’s had memorized since—since forever, probably, Cass is a legacy kid—the pity strikes my chest. I’ll get out of here with a degree. I will leave—the school will spit me out—on a path forward, maybe to research, maybe to expeditions. What will Cass have if his faith fails him? The very ground beneath his feet demands his devotion.

“Cass,” I say.

“What?”

“If you’re not chosen—”

He freezes. We’re almost at the ceremony: the mouth of a canal, boats ready to take the graduates down. Lanterns burn around the entrance, red and orange cast through the water like molten glass.

In the light, Cass looks like glass, too. “Michael,” he says.

The flame quivers in his dark eyes, underneath the paint. I can see it about to shatter, all sharpness and softness together, and a thought so much like surrender, so utterly painful, it could almost be love:

Godless.

I’ve spent four years finding every human part of him, every tick and insecurity and tenderness that marks him separate from the god that rules here. But maybe that was a fool’s errand. The patron has touched every part of him.

Maybe the patron has touched me, too, despite it all. Because I’m going to get in that boat, and I’m going to watch Cass, with his bony shoulders and his fidgety hands and all the parts of him, then and now, inextricable from this place, walk the fucking path. Like there’s something real on the other side.

“Don’t,” I rasp. And then: “It won’t change your life. Not like you want.”

The glass in Cass’ face falls away, leaving something gentle as a bruise. It’s almost exactly how he looked at eighteen. It’s nothing like that at all. “Tomorrow,” he says, “you’ll get a piece of paper.”

“That’s different,” I say. (It will be. No boats for the godless.) But I feel it like he means it.

Cass steps forward and brushes a leaf out of my hair, like moving a tassel. If it’s not—he’s too kind to say. “I’ll watch you walk tomorrow.”