The next morning arrived with the kind of gray November light that made everything look washed out and hopeless, and Silver wished desperately that she could dissolve into the accumulated snow outside her Gothic dorm window and never be discovered by anyone who might demand explanations for her current emotional state.
Sleep had been impossible. Eli's words had carved themselves into her consciousness with surgical precision, playing on endless loop like footage of a catastrophic fall that sports networks replayed until the failure became more famous than any success that had preceded it. She's beneath me. Every time exhaustion nearly claimed her, she'd hear those three syllables again—sometimes in his actual voice, sometimes distorted by her imagination into something even sharper and more deliberately cruel.
