Roses and Rot Read Online Free Page B

heirloom that had belonged to her great-grandmother, and so even though it was less practical than cardboard boxes, she had used it to ship her things to Melete. It was beautiful, but even unpacked it was heavy, and it was currently stuck on the second turn of the stairs.
    “Are you going to be done anytime soon? I need to get my lunch out of the kitchen,” Helena said from the landing above us.
    “You could help. We’d be done faster,” Ariel said.
    “All of my stuff is in my room. Neither of you helped get it there,” Helena said.
    “True, but we would have, if you’d asked,” I said.
    “Would you really?” The thing was, she sounded genuinely curious, like the idea of asking for help would never have crossed her mind.
    Ariel stood up, wiped the sweat from her forehead. “Go get something. Anything. And I swear, I will carry it up and down the stairs as many times as you want later, if you help us move this damn thing now.”
    Helena cocked her head. “Okay.”
    Ariel looked at me. “What have I just done?”
    I shoved my hair out of my eyes and laughed.
    Helena snaked herself between the wall and the trunk to help us lift it. “If you have everything out of this, why does it need to bein your room? Just put it in storage or leave it in the front room or something.”
    “Count of three?” I said, and we all heaved on cue.
    “Because it’s like home,” Ariel said, yanking up and backward as we finally got the trunk unjammed. “And because my great-grandmother was a nightclub singer, until she got married. She traveled with this. It reminds me of what I come from, of who I want to be.”
    “That’s a good reason,” Helena said.
    “Glad you approve,” said Ariel.
    We wrangled the trunk the rest of the way up the stairs and down the hall to Ariel’s room.
    “You can go bring me my lunch,” Helena told Ariel, “but you don’t have to walk anything else up and down the stairs.”
    “Thanks for helping,” Ariel said.
    Helena nodded, a sharp jerk of her head, then walked off.
    “It’s like she spent part of her life being raised by wolves,” Ariel said, watching her go. “She only almost knows how to be a human. Do you want me to bring you anything while I’m carrying my penance, er, Helena’s lunch?”
    “No.” I grinned. “I’m good.”

    I rechecked the directions my mentor, Beth Edwards, had sent me, then slid my phone into the back pocket of my jeans in case I needed them again as I walked. The mentors lived on the Melete grounds as well, but their houses were grouped on the opposite side of the studios. “Close, but not so close I can read over your shoulder while you’re working,” Beth had emailed.
    As I walked, I could see fellows moving into their studios, carrying instrument cases and paint-splattered bags. Somewhere in themidst of them a piano crashed through a phrase, paused, and then repeated. I felt like I was walking through the opening montage of a movie—everything was just a shade brighter than real.
    At some point, I knew, being at Melete would feel settled, normal. I would be used to seeing houses with moats, or constructed with the same impossible geometry as a Dr. Seuss drawing. It would be no big deal for an Oscar-winning actor to smile at me as we passed each other walking, and I wouldn’t blush as I smiled back. Until then, I would revel in the novelty.
    Farther out, on the edge of the Commons, was a rose garden. Drowsy with bees and full of late-summer blooms. A riot of color, the surrounding air drunk on the scent.
    Just past the roses, I veered left off the path, toward a faded Cape Cod–style cottage so weathered it could have been plucked from some coastal peninsula and then set down in the New Hampshire forest.
    It was a weird thing to be standing outside Beth Edwards’s house. She had won the Orange Prize for the book she had begun while at Melete, a novel in stories about the young women at the center of the Salem witch trials, and that had only