Sebastian was more valuable as someone to keep me on my toes, to bebetter than. Had he been adopted younger, he would see it too, the impossibility of us.
We brushed past the curious glances in my hallway and went down onto the Quad. The sky was sharp, the air cold enough that I could blow rings with my breath.
“Almost time,” Sebastian said.
We came to a halt. Midnight came and went in silence.
“Fucking Peter,” I said.
During midterms at Helshire, everyone opens their window at midnight and shrieks into the void—the Primal Scream. An exhalation of stress, a symphony of fury. But out of respect for our dead cousin, the tradition had been canceled this term.
“He would not approve of this quiet,” Sebastian said.
I took a drink. “We were on this very spot for his first one.”
Another Helshire tradition was not to warn freshmen about the Scream. Last term, Sebastian and I had lured Peter onto the Quad with this same flask.
“He didn’t ask what was happening. Just joined in.”
“To hell with it, then.” Sebastian lifted his head, and let out a bellowing cry.
Like his laughter, Sebastian’s scream was rampant, uninhibited, going until he ran out of breath. Ragged as a battle flag.
There was a campus-wide shudder of silence, a collective intake of breath—a thousand Hellions wondering how unseemly it would be to scream their lungs out, only a week after one of us had fallen to his death.
“Do it,” I whispered.
A moment later, they did.
The cries spilled from the Quad dorms first—Lavernick, Ridermore, Banner, and King—then spread, quick as lit kerosene, to the outer ring of Ogden, Manor, and the Terraces. The great wedding cake of MainHall began to flicker, the residents turning their lights on and off, a splinter tradition that other dorms never dared copy.
Finally a lone voice from Dewitt itself, someone in a lab late at night, letting out a hyena laugh as the rest subsided.
The silence rushed back from the darkness, satisfied at last.
“You should’ve joined in,” Sebastian said, hoarse.
“I prefer to listen. You get scarier every year, cousin.”
He coughed, snapping for my flask. He took a swig—and scowled.
“What is this stuff, the devil’s licorice?”
“Sure,” I said, taking the flask back. It was my most pagan cocktail: rye, an amaro called Braulio, a splash of Underberg. Pine and pitch, like some ur-Christmas tree, burned on the winter solstice to make the sun return.
“It clarifies,” Sebastian said and coughed again, his breath a tentacle of mist in the dark. “I do miss him. After what happened when we were little, him dying this way feels like a bad joke.”
“He wouldn’t miss you. He didn’t like you.”
An arch smile. “Rivals for your attention.”
“I’m all yours now, cousin.”
Sebastian’s laugh was ragged from the screaming.
I raised the flask. “To Peter. Always an explosion.”
4