Chapter 6: Room 214

The doctor gave her four hours and a gauze mask that covered her left cheek and jaw.

"Four," he said. "Not five. If your temperature goes up, you come straight back."

"Thank you," Lucia said.

Rafael drove, with Marta in the back seat and her handbag on her lap.

"I'll wait in the car," Marta said at the curb. "If anyone looks at her wrong, I'm coming out."

The campus was quiet at noon, with sprinklers ticking over the grass and students crossing the quad with iced coffees.

Lucia stepped out of the car, and the quad went still.

A girl at a bench lifted her phone.

A boy elbowed his friend and pointed.

"That's the acid girl," someone whispered.

"She looks awful."

"I heard she tried to kill Paulina."

Lucia kept walking.

Her left hand wanted to rise to the mask, and she made it hang at her side.

Rafael stepped half a pace in front of her and put his palm flat over the lens of the nearest phone.

"Delete that," he said.

"Hey, you can't..."

"Delete it," Rafael said, "or I'll tell the dean who paid for the new library."

The boy deleted it.

They crossed the grass without anyone else raising a phone.

Hollis Hall was a brick dormitory for first-years, with a front desk and a bulletin board.

Rafael walked past the desk to the second floor and stopped in front of door 214 without checking a single number.

"How did you know which room?" Lucia asked.

"I had Abuela's driver pull the guest list from the party," he said. "The girl's name was on it."

It was a perfectly good answer.

She still noticed it.

She knocked.

The door opened a hand's width on a chain.

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