The Woman Who Walked Through Walls

Brit is a scholarship student on a campus that wasn’t built for her, nursing a cracked phone screen and eleven hundred Instagram followers, when she finds an abandoned device on a bench outside the student union. The phone is warm. It opens doors in walls. And whatever happens on the other side doesn’t follow you back.

What begins as a way to survive — borrowing money from richer versions of themselves, stealing small things from people who won’t notice — accelerates with the arrival of Jasmine and Aubrey, two alternate versions of Brit from parallel dimensions. Same face. Same history. Radically different thresholds.

Together they build something that looks like a life and functions like an operation: hotel rooms, burner wallets, a training range in an industrial district, and a notebook full of intelligence files on three crime figures whose removal, Brit has decided, will constitute justice. Her logic is careful. Her planning is meticulous. Her rationalizations are entirely convincing, right up until they aren’t.

Narrated in Brit’s razor-sharp first-person voice — sardonic, self-aware, and increasingly dissociated — The Woman Who Walked Through Walls is a psychological thriller about the architecture of moral collapse. Each decision follows cleanly from the last. The descent is so gradual it’s almost invisible. And the betrayal, when it comes, was built from Brit’s own handwriting.

Dark, propulsive, and formally inventive, this novel asks what you become when accountability is optional — and whether the answer was always there, waiting to be confirmed.

Questions

Read the Opening

Chapter Two

Worthless Without a Phone

My eyes snapped open at the sound of my phone alarm and I lay there staring at the ceiling.

The dorm room in the morning smelled like industrial carpet and the faint trace of midnight ramen and the radiator doing its own thing on its own schedule. The radiator was old, old enough that it had developed a personality, a series of knocks and hisses that came in the same order every morning, like it was running through a checklist. Someone in the hall was showering. The pipes knocked back.

The ceiling had a water stain in one corner that I’d been looking at for three weeks. It was shaped a little like a dog’s head. This was not useful information but it was the kind of thing you accumulated when you lay in bed not getting up.

The phone rang. Sheila’s photo on the screen. Sheila, who had arrived at orientation with matching luggage in a color she’d described as champagne, and a rug she’d ordered specifically for her room dimensions after taking measurements during the campus tour in July, and a yellow convertible that sat in the student parking lot like a question I didn’t want to answer.

I answered.

“Still asleep? I knew it!”

“Me? No.”

“Getting ready for school?”

“Obviously. I’m like, almost ready.”

“You totally forgot.”

“I didn’t forget. I’m just—” I sat up. My shoes were on the floor where I’d left them, both of them on their sides like they’d given up. My bag was half-packed on the desk. My outfit was still on the chair where I’d laid it out the night before with the optimistic energy of someone who believed she would definitely wake up on time. “—a little behind.”

“I’ll be there in an hour. Be ready.”

She hung up. The screen had a crack running from the top left corner to about the middle, held together with a clear case that was also beginning to separate at one edge. The battery was at eleven percent.

I plugged it in and went to the bathroom.

The bathroom was shared with four other rooms on the floor and it smelled like four other people’s shampoo. The fluorescent light had a flicker at one end that maintenance had been going to fix since the second week of term. Under that light, the reflection had raccoon mascara and hair choosing two incompatible directions.

While I waited for the shower to find its temperature I checked Instagram on four percent battery, which was exactly the kind of decision that explained why the battery was at four percent.

Jessica’s party. Photos from last night, the party I hadn’t been invited to, or hadn’t heard about, which were technically the same outcome but felt different in a way I couldn’t fully articulate at seven-fifteen in the morning. Twenty people in a well-lit apartment wearing clothes that cost what my textbooks cost. Jessica herself in three of the photos, laughing, the easy laugh of someone who’d never had to check whether she was included before she walked into a room.

Did they not tell me or did they just not think of me. Because that’s, those are different.

I was on scholarship, full tuition, room and board, and the scholarship didn’t cover incidentals, which turned out to cover a lot. Books, which were shocking. The specific notebook for the professor who required one, which was eighteen dollars at the campus store and probably three dollars to produce. The winter coat I’d been putting off replacing for two years, which had a broken zipper I was managing with a safety pin that I’d been telling myself was temporary since October.

Sheila’s yellow convertible pulled up with the top down and music playing, something with a lot of bass that I didn’t recognize, and she was wearing sunglasses even though the September sun was still low and amber rather than actually bright, and she looked like a poster for the idea of college rather than college itself.

I climbed into the leather passenger seat and felt the sun on my face and the warm leather under my legs and the bass from the speakers in my chest.

I could get used to this.

I’m not going to get used to this.

I didn’t know yet how wrong I was about what I was feeling. I didn’t know that the thing I was feeling wasn’t nerves about college. It was something older, something I’d been carrying long enough that I’d stopped noticing the weight, the particular loneliness of being in the right place by the wrong method, scholarship girl in the convertible, knowing all the words to a life she hadn’t been invited to live.

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