by Eva Chase
So where was he now?
Chapter Two
Trix
I backed away from the painting with Cade’s starburst signature and nearly bumped into a guy I hadn’t heard coming up to me.
“Hey there,” the guy said, catching my elbow just before it jammed into his ribs. He shot me a flash of a smile to show he took no offense and released my arm gently by my side. “You look a little lost. New to the school?”
Apparently not all the students here were total pricks. This one was what back home I might have dismissively called a “pretty boy”: features so soft they were almost androgynous, intense golden-brown eyes, silky straight hair that fell to just below his ears. But the smooth black strands were shot through with punk-bright green, a silver ring pierced the end of one of his arched eyebrows, and over the top of his khaki-green cargo pants, his deep purple sweatshirt was screen-printed with a bold scarlet tiger. Clearly not so soft after all.
Maybe he was another scholarship student—which might mean he’d have been more likely to have talked to Cade. A jolt of hope shot through me.
“Sort of,” I said. “I’m not actually going to be attending classes or anything, but my brother was. He started here back at the beginning of the school year—I’m trying to find out if he’s still on campus, or if not, where he might have gone.”
If the guy thought my dropping in out of the blue was weird, he didn’t show it. His voice came out mellow if a bit hoarse. “I might be able to give you a hand. What’s his name?”
“Cade Harrison. About this tall.” I held my hand half a foot over my head. “Blond hair. Would have dressed more like you or me than the posh kids. He was here on scholarship.”
The guy rubbed his jaw. “Cade… I don’t know. That doesn’t ring any bells for sure. But we can take a look around if you want some help.”
My spirits deflated with his response, but I couldn’t see how it’d hurt anything to have a tour guide if this guy wanted to offer his services. I’d at least work my way through the school faster that way. “All right. The dean said I can talk to whoever I want as long as I don’t bother anyone in class or doing schoolwork. I was going to head down that way.” I pointed to the hall.
“That’s a perfectly good place to start.” The guy raised his hand in belated greeting. “I’m Ryo, by the way.”
“Trix,” I said. “Short for Beatrix.” I fixed him with a look stern enough to convey that if he tried to make use of my full name, he’d regret it.
“Trix. Excellent. Let’s see what we can find.” He gave me another smile, but at the same time his eyes crinkled at the corners in a way that gave his expression an unexpectedly melancholy cast.
That solemn impression vanished as Ryo switched into easygoing tour-guide mode. “The first floor has most of the professors’ rooms and the non-educational common areas,” he said, and pointed to the first room beyond the doorway. “Dining hall.”
A few students were sitting at the eight-seater wooden tables inside, one of them gnawing on a muffin, the others using the space for some midday reading. I guessed that would probably count as the sort of schoolwork the dean had ordered me not to interrupt.
As I glanced inside, a couple of the inhabitants looked up. At the sight of us, one made a slight grimace and the other turned back to her book with a roll of her eyes. The overall student population seemed to have a grudge against newcomers. Maybe I needed to wear a sign with flashing lights saying, I’m only here until I find my brother.
Ryo nudged open the next door down to reveal a space full of ceramic countertops, antique appliances, and shelves of pots, pans, and dishes. A guy was clattering silverware in a sink full of soapy water; two girls across from him were assembling sandwiches on wooden cutting boards. They already had a stack of at least a dozen on a platter.
“Kitchen,” Ryo said, as if that wasn’t obvious.
“The students do the food prep and cleaning?” I asked. Or maybe the college had a culinary program—although I didn’t see a teacher overseeing this bunch, and sandwiches were hardly high cuisine.
Ryo nodded, his green-and-black hair swinging with the motion. “We handle pretty much everything around the building—cooking, cleaning, laundry. It’s all assigned in shifts. You get used to it pretty fast.”
I’d never heard of a college, let alone an uber-exclusive one, where the attendees also functioned as the housekeeping staff. So much for their snobby airs. Did the girl who’d given me that disdainful sigh wash dishes in her silk blouse and tailored jeans?
“I guess it’s a pretty small place overall,” I said. Maybe it simply wasn’t practical to try to house a full staff when the students could pitch in.
“Well, you’ve only seen one part of it.” Ryo moved on down the hall. “Exercise room,” he said in reference to a space with a mat-covered floor and weights stacked in one corner. A guy’s muscles bulged as he did a standing press with a large set. Across from him, a girl was hopping from one foot to the other over the whirl of a dingy-looking jump-rope.
“Hey,” Ryo called out casually, as if breaking their workout concentration was no big deal. “Either of you remember a guy named Cade Harrison?”
The guy’s gaze flicked to us and then away again with a brusque shake of his head. The girl didn’t slow her rhythm. Her lips pursed as if the question annoyed her. “Can’t help you.”
That didn’t mean she knew nothing, I couldn’t help noting, only that she didn’t feel like sharing what she knew. I eyed her for a moment before following Ryo onward.
We passed a closed door to what Ryo said was the infirmary, an empty music room with shelves of instruments along the walls, and a smaller space lined with clothing racks that I guessed was costuming for some sort of theater department, although Ryo simply called it “the wardrobe.” Before I needed to say anything, he asked the girl who was pawing through the racks if she knew anything about Cade. She waved us off with mild irritation. When I glanced back at her, I thought I caught a glare just before she jerked her gaze away.
Was answering that question really that huge of a nuisance? A creeping sensation was starting to spread over my skin.
Even Ryo’s attitude took on a small but noticeably impatient flavor as we emerged back into the foyer. He flicked his hand toward the righthand hallway. “Nothing down there except teachers. If the dean couldn’t help you, they won’t either. Come on. Classrooms are on the second floor, dorm rooms on the third.”
As we headed up the stairs, I studied him more carefully than before. Why was he being so helpful, anyway? I’d thought maybe he’d been happy to see someone whose attitudes, at least about personal grooming, aligned more with his than those of the other students I’d encountered so far. But I was getting the feeling that he’d already decided this quest wasn’t going to lead us anywhere, so he was ushering me through the tour and the questions as quickly as possible without overtly rushing.
If he didn’t actually want to help, what was he after? In my extensive experience with people who hid their real intentions, the truth was never anything to rejoice about when it came out.
I also had plenty of experience at dodging people who were out to use me somehow. Whatever his ulterior motives might be, he wasn’t going to find me an easy target.
The second floor hallway wrapped right around the open space over the stairwell, amber light streaming from a second chandelier. There were three classrooms on each side and a massive set of double doors at the far end that led to a library full of books that all looked—and smelled, even from the threshold—at least a hundred years old. It held no seating, only the built-in shelves on every wall and a few rows of them down the middle too, so I wasn’t surprised that no one wanted to hang out in there.
I wasn’t going to barge into any of the classes after Dean Wainhouse’s warning, but as we left the library, a group of students came walking out of one of those rooms. Really, trudging was a better word for it. They all appeared to be the age I’d expec
t at a college, somewhere between late teens and early twenties, but their faces… The best word I could use to describe them was haggard. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them had pitched themselves over the railing in an attempt to end their apparent misery.
“What godawful class did they just have?” I murmured to Ryo. “It must be brutal.”
My tour guide’s gaze skimmed over his peers with a glazed quality, as if he’d rather not consider them too closely. “Could be anything,” he said in the mellow tone he’d used throughout this tour. “The teachers can get into a demanding mood sometimes.”
Demanding didn’t seem as if it’d wear an entire class down that much, but maybe we had different definitions of demanding. I debated approaching one or two of the students before they drifted away and asking about Cade, but the glance one of the girls shot my way, as if she knew I was considering hassling her and would sooner commit seppuku than have to listen to my questions, held me back for a second.
In that second, Ryo took the questioning upon himself. “Anybody know where a guy named Cade Harrison is at these days?” he asked the hall at large.
We got a bunch of shaken heads and disgruntled mutterings in response. I sucked my lower lip under my teeth and resisted the urge to nibble at it. Was there really no one here who remembered him—had he been wiped out of existence at the school just like he’d been back home?
But his signature was still on that painting. He hadn’t been completely erased. I couldn’t shake the impression that someone here must know more than they’d been willing to say so far. There was something weird about the way certain students had looked at me, as if they could guess what I wanted to ask—and dreaded it. Maybe they didn’t like newcomers, especially ones decked out like I was, but that didn’t totally explain the reactions I’d gotten.
Let’s be real. The whole college had a weird vibe. So far I hadn’t seen any reason at all why someone who had options would go here. The letter and the brochure Cade had gotten had talked about elite professors, unique programs, and “connections that would last a lifetime.” I guessed all that could be true and the place could still be drearier than a shriveled bouquet by a gravestone, but my doubts were growing by the second.
I had to admit that didn’t mean anything at the school was responsible for his bizarre disappearance, though. None of that made any sense. I couldn’t even imagine telling Ryo why I’d insisted on taking the trip out here, why I was so sure something was wrong, because of how crazy I’d sound. For all I knew, Cade had spent a couple of days here, felt just as skeptical about it, and taken off—and run into much deeper trouble wherever he’d gone next.
I might not be able to explain why I was so worried about my brother to Ryo, but maybe he could help me understand why anyone stayed here at all. I turned to him. “How did you end up going to school here, anyway?”
He leaned back against the railing, elbows askew. “Scholarship like your brother. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. And, well, it was a chance to do something different from the path I’d been on before.”
“Do you like it here?” No one I’d seen so far had looked all that happy.
He laughed. “I don’t think many people go to school mainly to have fun. I’ve learned… a lot.” That hint of melancholy passed over his face again, tightening the edges of his mouth for just a second before it vanished. “It’s where I’m meant to be, so obviously everything worked out fine.”
I would have pushed harder in one direction or another, but he was already moving, sauntering over to the narrower side halls that branched off from the classroom area. Two much less grand staircases rambled up toward the third floor at either end.
“All you’ll find upstairs are the bedrooms. Girls in the south wing and guys in the north. Five rooms with six people in each, if they’re all full up. You’re not allowed on the guys’ side, but I can ask around for you and report back.”
Would he? He made the offer so easily. The suspicions that had risen up earlier sent a prickle down my back. I glanced toward the stairs that he’d gestured to at my right. “Sure. I’ll go up and see if any of the girls know about Cade.”
“I’ll find you sometime after, then,” Ryo said, without any indication that he was worried about our paths crossing. He raised his hand in farewell. “We’ll figure this out, Trix.”
He didn’t even know how huge a mystery I had to unravel. The truth was, as friendly as he’d been acting, I was alone here just like I’d always been when Cade wasn’t by my side.
That was fine. No one to piss me off. No one to piss on me. I had way less to worry about that way.
The staircase led to an even smaller hallway with a dormer window over the stairs, two doors on either side and one at the far end. I knocked and then eased open the unlocked door closest to me, and found the cramped bedroom on the other side empty.
As Ryo had said, there were six beds—twins in simple wooden frames—along the walls, each with a bedside table that must have been for personal belongings and a low chest underneath where the students must keep their clothes. The walls held no décor, but from a jacket slung over a bedpost there and a plate left on a bedside table there, I could determine that all of those beds had residents.
I tried each of the other four rooms in turn, making my way down the hall. In the second one, a girl was lying under the covers of one of the beds. I closed the door quickly without taking any more time to look around. The third and fourth were both empty, only five of the beds in each showing signs of occupation. Like with the first, the walls were bare, the furnishings basic—no sign that anyone had tried to make the space at all homey.
Was that a college rule? No wonder the students were depressed if they had to spend the whole school year living like this.
As I stood in the doorway to the fourth bedroom, my mind slipped back to the day I’d been dropped off at the house belonging to my second foster family—the Fricks. When the social worker had brought me around for an initial visit a few days before, the smiling wife had shown us a small but bright bedroom that was supposed to be mine. As soon as the door had closed behind me and my duffel bag on my official arrival, I hadn’t gotten anything but frowns. She’d led me down to a chilly, cement-walled basement room with four metal cots and a creaky dresser each of their four fosters got one drawer in.
My first placement had been crappy too, so I wasn’t really surprised, even at seven years old. When your parents cared more about getting their next meth fix than making sure you were getting a single square meal a day, and the generous folks who took you in next had a sport of seeing who could cause the most pain without leaving any visible marks any time you annoyed them, you have to be really dim not to figure out that someone being a grown-up meant shit-all about whether they were going to look out for you.
I couldn’t completely hate the Fricks, though, because they’d brought me and Cade together. I’d been standing there in the cold room, clutching my bag and gathering my fortitude, when he’d come breezing in: tow-headed and scruffy with dirt and bits of grass from working in the front yard, all of eight but with ash-gray eyes as bright as if they contained decades of fiery energy smoldering beneath.
“So, they got you too, huh?” he said, looking me up and down with a sympathetic grimace. “They’re assholes, but you’ll be okay once you get used to it. Just stick with me, all right?”
Just like that, I’d felt safe for the first time in years. And that was the beginning of everything.
My fingers tightened where I was gripping the door handle. I couldn’t let this be the end. He’d been there every time I needed him, and sometimes when I hadn’t even realized I did. I couldn’t stop until I reached him.
That thought was running through my head when I stepped into the last of the bedrooms at the end of the hall. A dormer window high on the wall let sunlight stream over the six beds in their now-familiar configuration. A girl with a dark cloud of curly hair was sitting on one, her back mostly to m
e, her pen scratching as she wrote something in a notebook. Like the previous two rooms, I spotted one bed that was totally bare of any personal belongings, the top of its bedside table hazy with dust. Resolve rose up to grip my chest.
“Hey,” I said. “Is anyone using that bed?”
The girl glanced over at me when I pointed, and my stomach lurched at the sight of her face. One side—the side I’d seen a sliver of when I’d come in—was regular olive-toned skin, smooth other than a sprinkling of faint acne marks on her cheekbone. But a rippled line cut across her forehead and nose and down her other cheek, touching enough of her mouth to pull that corner down with the patchwork of scars that spread out all the way to her hairline and neck.
They looked like burns, mottled pink from pale to vicious, in some places raw red as if they hadn’t totally healed yet. Her right eye, lost in that mess, squinted under a lumpy eyelid. She stared at me defiantly.
I held in my shock as well as I could and forced my lips into a stiff smile as I gestured again. “Sorry to bother you. I just wondered if that bed is free.”
“No one’s using it,” she said in a clear, almost melodic voice that didn’t fit her rough appearance at all. Then she turned back to her writing.
The rapping of shoes with sturdy heels carried up the stairs. When I glanced back, a middle-aged woman with a heap of cocoa-brown hair piled on top of her head was striding down the hall toward me. She came to a stop, lifting her thin nose with such an air of authority that I immediately pegged her as one of the teachers. The dim light in the hall gave her skin an ashy pallor.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” she said, clipped and nasal. “The dorms are our students’ private space.”
The scarred girl made a noise that might have been a muffled snort. The woman in front of me ignored her.