The Wicked Awakening of Anne Merchant

by Joanna Wiebe

  “What’s your sentence?” I ask him. “You’re being forced to produce twenty more soulless copies of the Dance of Death sculpture?”

  His smile is weak. “You’re wearing it.”

  I glance down at his blazer. He’s always worn a school blazer; it’s part of the reason I’d assumed he was a senior. But I understand his meaning in little time.

  “They made you a student,” I guess.

  He doesn’t respond; that’s response enough. I stumble out of his hold and steady myself against a tree stump, which we soon sit on, side by side. In silence. I drop my chin onto my hands and stare ahead, piecing together the implications of Ben’s punishment. The reason he looks like he’s twenty-one now is because the curse that kept him young has been lifted; he’s now cursed with a fraction of the life he could have had.

  “Tell me you’re a junior,” I say hopefully.

  He shakes his head. “Cania’s newest senior.”

  So much for hope! Ben’s only got a little over eight months until graduation at the end of May, when they’ll award the Big V to one senior—and kill all the others. Eight months in which to prove himself. Not impossible, but most seniors started the competition in their junior year and, thus, have a whole extra year on him.

  “I can’t believe this is the fallout of what we did. You’re going to need the most insanely motivated Guardian to help you win this late in the game, Ben.”

  “Let’s be real. Winning is unlikely,” he says. “You don’t know who my Guardian is.”

  “Oh, God, who?”

  He raises his gaze to mine. “You saw her kiss me on the cheek a half hour ago.”

  “They gave you Garnet?” I jump to my feet and start pacing as he looks on. “She’s your Guardian?”

  “Did you think I was helping her move her own boxes into the guys’ dorm?”

  “Is that why she kissed you?”

  “That’s why I let her.” His voice is a whisper as I stomp back and forth. “I thought you were gone. Sucking up to her is—was— my only chance of being with you again. She was, as heartless as it sounds, a means to an end.”

  “She’ll be fighting for you?”

  “Ha.”

  “Ben.”

  “And you’ll never guess my PT.”

  “I don’t want to know.” I stop pacing and roll my head up to the sky. “You will succeed in life by giving crazy ex-girlfriends second chances. You will succeed in life by making out with girls formerly known as Lizzy who sold their souls to be with you.”

  “It’s to make sacrifices,” he says. “That’s my PT.”

  I sigh. And give it some thought. “Well, that doesn’t sound that bad.”

  But he’s a step ahead of me, explaining before I can speak. “She wants me to be with her. The first sacrifice, if she had her way, would be you.”

  I close my eyes. The rain is letting up, but it feels heavier and colder than ever. I was this close to being with Ben. This close. And now she’ll have him again. I’ll have to walk the halls and see them holding hands, eating lunch together, and kissing. I’d tear my eyes out rather than watch that.

  “So that’s the last nail in the coffin. In our coffin,” I say, resigned to our doom.

  “No, Anne, listen.” Ben joins me and cups his palms around my face so I can’t help but look into his beautiful eyes and watch his lips—lips that were juuust about mine. “It’s you I want.”

  I shrug out of his hold. I can’t pretend that being with Ben makes sense. Not if his life will be even shorter because of it.

  “You have to give Garnet what she wants if you’re going to win.”

  “Who said I wanted to win?”

  “You’ve been hanging around Pilot Stone too long.”

  “Har har.”

  “She’s a wily one, Ben—I’ll give her that. She figured out how to separate us. No wonder she won the Big V last year.”

  “She may be clever, but she misjudged my feelings for you.”

  His feelings for me are perhaps the only topic I’d ever like to discuss, if given the choice, but that’s not in the cards right now. Hearing about his feelings will only make it harder to sever our ties so he can play, and win, her game.

  “Anne, I want to opt out of the Big V competition.”

  “That’s not an option.”

  “I’m already dead.”

  “Everyone is.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Yeah, and I’d like to live again. With you.”

  He blushes. “What if we could just treat these next months like the gift they are?”

  “Sorry, but where you see a gift, I see gift wrap on a ticking time bomb.”

  I’m pacing again.

  His gaze follows me patiently. His calm resolve only frustrates me more. He can’t actually be serious about this. Give up the chance to live again—and be with me for real off this island—just because he doesn’t think Garnet will fight for him? No. He has to be with her. She thinks he’s into her again; he needs to roll with that, and I’ll just have to wait until he wins…then wake up and join him in California.

  “Anne, come on,” he says, interrupting my scheming. “Stop thinking about tomorrow.”

  “I’m thinking about tonight. I’m thinking about you tracking down Garnet and throwing yourself at her within the hour. Kiss her. Tell her you love her. Do whatever it takes to win your life back, Ben.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Not doing it would be crazy.”

  “Come on. Be young and reckless with me.” He stops me mid-stride. “Just live in the here and now, where we’re together and we can be as connected as I’ve been dreaming about.”

  Before I can list off the many, many head injuries he must be suffering from, he presses his lips softly to mine, then more powerfully. I stagger on the spot. He draws his hands down to my shoulders and, with a need that surprises me, pulls me about as close to him as a person can get without actually melting into him, which it sort of feels like I’m doing. I wonder if the lines around us are blurring, like they do when he holds my hand. To test the limits, I curl my fingers into his soft hair.

  Definitely melting into him.

  I’m kissing Ben Zin. I’m kissing Ben Zin. In the moonlight on an island, I’m kissing Ben Zin.

  And he’s kissing me. His lips trail away from mine and run up my cheekbones, to my eyelids, and down my jaw, softly, wonderfully, to my throat.

  Definitely melting into him.

  I open my eyes to see his are closed. I close my eyes and imagine his open.

  I think he says my name. And I’m pretty sure I say his. Warm shivers replace the cold ones. His lips find mine again. His breath is fast, and I’m not sure if I’m hyperventilating or holding my breath— air intake is, frankly, not high on my priority list right now.

  It’s not until I begin to unbutton his shirt—just one button— that our eyes open. Ben looks at me, his face flushed, and grabs my hands, stopping me.

  “Anne,” he breathes. Then he shakes his head.

  “You’re right. It’s too cold out here. Let’s go find my dorm—we can kick Harper out. No one will see you.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” With the most unusual expression, he steps back and releases my hands. He pats his hair back in place. “I don’t want to do this with you.”

  four

  Envy

  THIS IS THE PART WHERE I DIE.

  “Anne, I moved really fast once before,” Ben says, his tone pleading but firm. “And, God help me, I’d love to repeat that mistake right now, but it would be a mistake. I’d never forgive myself.”

  I am standing with my hands still in the air, positioned where his top button was. I am a statue memorializing the purest moment of rejection any girl has ever known. A plaque rests at my feet: The Easy Girl. Somehow, this is what I’ve become, what he’s made me. Somehow, the boy is telling the girl she’s moving too fast. I’m that girl. Even though I’m not.

  I drop my hands
.

  Embarrassment heats my skin, making me feel so hot all over, I’d take his blazer off if he wouldn’t think I was trying to seduce him. If I could die, I would be dead right now. Death by sexual shaming.

  “Anne, please don’t take that the wrong way.”

  It’s a line he’s made famous for me. Don’t take my cold shoulder the wrong way. Don’t take the implication that you’re a total slut the wrong way. He repeats my name, but he keeps his distance. I shake my head like it’s no big deal. I need to disappear. I need to rewind to the moment he first appeared at the top of the cliff and do this all over again, but this time I’ll make him feel like a sexual deviant.

  “You’re angry.”

  I shake my head again. “It’s cold. I should go find my room. Unpack. And stuff. I’m really sorry you got Garnet for a Guardian, Ben.”

  “A-Anne.”

  “Please don’t,” I whisper, stepping past him and shaking him off when he reaches for me. “I wasn’t suggesting what you think I was. I just liked… It doesn’t matter.”

  “Don’t leave,” he says, following me. “I don’t know why you’re taking this so poorly.”

  You wouldn’t know, I think. You’re always the one doing the rejecting; I’m always the one receiving it.

  “Good night, Ben.”

  “Anne, please!” he shouts after me.

  My head is in a daze as I rush down the hill, cross the quad, and run toward the girls’ dorm. All I can think about is Ben with Garnet. Sure, he talks like she was a proxy for me, but I’m damn sure that he got a lot closer to my would-be understudy than he’s willing to get to me.

  I reach the girls’ dorm before he can catch up with me. I shove the door to the squat stone building open and dart inside, closing it behind me to distance myself from him. The whole way here, I could hear his breath as he ran a timid five or so paces behind me. He could’ve overtaken me at any point, but evidently he’s smarter than that.

  The lights are dim inside the dorm. The stained-glass windows won’t let me see if he’s still outside.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I whisper. I stare at the wall next to me. And then lean into it.

  Here, with my forehead pressed against a copy of the Cania Christy Code of Student Conduct—featuring BS rules like no fraternizing with the villagers, who are basically gone now anyway—I close my eyes and see Ben with Garnet. Doing everything he says he doesn’t want to rush into with me. I relive the time I cowered at the edge of the Zin property and watched as, standing with Ben in his kitchen, Garnet lifted his hand to her mouth; there was nothing innocent about that. I’d be more than a little naive to believe they never slept together. Ugh. They totally did. They def-in-ite-ly did. Ben slept with Garnet. And the mechanics of it! I can’t help torturing myself with each painstaking step in a process I’m unqualified to imagine. The taking off of clothes. The selection of a suitable location. The spoken or unspoken agreement that this is going to happen. I squeeze my eyelids until I see bright orange dots instead of two intertwined bodies. Where I’d be a tense, awkward mess, they probably weren’t even shy about it. Garnet’s so damn confident, and Ben’s so impossibly gorgeous. They slept together. Naked. Skin to skin. Probably more than once. Oh, God. Probably a lot. In a bed. In his bed. Where else? Anywhere else? Everywhere else.

  “Wake up, loony bird,” Harper calls down to me, her twang thicker than ever.

  I glance up to see her leaning over the railing of the second floor and snickering at me. Her long bangs are pinned back perfectly, and she’s wearing pajamas that look more comfortable and less overtly sexy than I would have expected.

  “Not sure how y’all do it in Broke Assville, California,” she says and drums her fingers impatiently on a newel post, “but here we sleep in actual beds, not leaning against walls. So haul ass up here and make yours.”

  I trudge up the creaky wooden stairs, worn in their centers by decades of dead girls coming and going. Most of the bedroom doors, which are nine feet tall, intricately molded, and heavy-looking, are closed, but some are ajar just enough that I can hear a girl practicing the violin down by the second-floor bathroom and another girl reciting Shakespeare just across the way. I round the top of the stairs and glance away from Harper, who’s tapping her foot like I couldn’t be more irritating if I tried, to see steam flooding out of the bathroom. It’s Sunday night. Back to school tomorrow. Since the last time I sat in a Cania classroom, everything has changed, yet nothing is different.

  “Don’t look so excited. This isn’t the beginning of a lifelong friendship, Murdering Merchant,” Harper says. She points to the door behind her. “We’re in here.”

  She saunters into our room ahead of me. I step warily through the open doorway as she grabs a hairbrush from a dresser, flops back on her fluffy duvet, brushes the ends of her red hair, and watches me like I’m some sort of half-trained monkey.

  The room is just as I’d expect the room of a privileged daddy’s girl to be, or at least her side of it is; it’s the antithesis of my bedroom growing up, which I frankly loved but which was so far removed from this, it could have been a different species. Divided into two sides that are mirror images, though Harper’s side has started creeping into mine, our room is all cream, purple, and sparkling glass. Two chandeliers hang from the coffered ceiling, shedding glimmers of light across the large lavender area rug in the center of the hardwood floor. Harper’s side is closest to the door. Her four-poster bed, puffy with more pillows than we had in our entire house back home, is against the violet-and-cream striped wall in which her closet, packed so full the doors can’t close, is set. Next to her bed are a desk and chair, both of which are in front of a dormer window. On the wall with our door, a marble fireplace sits unlit in the corner near my bed, beside two antique-looking dressers.

  “I had it done exactly like my bedroom at home,” she says as she runs the brush through the ends of her hair. A Hermès scarf is draped over her nightstand lamp. Gold-framed affirmations and vision boards make a neat row on her side of the room. I can see from the doorway that she’s filled not only her closet with Tory Burch and Chanel’s latest but half of my closet, too.

  I feel her gaze zero in on me as I step into my barren new space. My attic bedroom at Gigi’s was too narrow and slanty to be anything more than the Before shot in a home reno magazine, but at least it was wholly mine. No roommate. Now, on closer inspection, I see that my bed, which has been stripped bare, is paint-chipped; the wall it’s pushed against is stabbed with nail holes and bruised by bare patches left behind by hastily pulled tape. A low stack of pale painting canvases are on my mattress, as are two boxes of my stuff and the flat pillow, thin sheets, and patchwork quilt I used at Gigi’s. The desk under my dormer window is beat up. I look closer: someone’s etched Murdering Merchant into the desktop. Gee, I wonder who could have done that?

  “Don’t unpack,” Harper says. “If I have my way, you’ll be back in California before the week’s up.”

  “One can hope.” I move the boxes to the floor. “Who used to live here?”

  Harper groans. Because evidently the sound of my voice puts her over the edge. I look over my shoulder and wait for her to reply, which, with a huge eye roll, she finally does.

  “Tallulah Josey.”

  “Your friend?”

  She arches an eyebrow. “Tallulah thought she was slyer than a cat in a fish factory. When the teachers were all up in arms today, she took it upon herself to sneak into the front office and call her old boyfriend, who wasn’t even that good-looking. Anyway, she got expelled this afternoon.”

  I stop unpacking.

  “Who caught her making the call?” I ask.

  She keeps brushing her hair.

  “Who turned her in?”

  She clears her throat.

  “You know that expulsion means death, right? Harper?”

  She flings her brush down at her duvet and scowls at me. But she doesn’t say anything.

  “I see,” I say and sta
rt making my bed. “But I’m the murderer.”

  “I guess we’ll both be sleeping with one eye open.”

  AFTER BARELY SURVIVING the onslaught of glares and whispers in the bathroom Monday morning, I leave the dorm to find Ben leaning against a tree. He’s wearing his cardigan because his blazer’s up in my room. He looks at me and smiles apprehensively. And I forget why I was angry with him last night.

  Then I remember.

  And now I have to decide if I want to stay mad at him to prove some sort of point or let it go so I can feel what it’s like to hold his hand as I walk to my first-period workshop. Which is instructed by Garnet. Which makes me think he probably shouldn’t show up there with me. Which means it’s pointless to hold hands because it’s only a thirty-second walk to the Rex Paimonde building.

  “Still mad?” he asks.

  I shrug. I’m undecided.

  Out of nowhere, Pilot comes flying at us. It looks like he’s going to crash right through us, but he stops short, grinning in his nasty way. Ben and I grab hands on instinct; I hadn’t realized we had an instinctive need to connect. Decision made: I’m not mad at him.

  “Bonnie and Clyde,” Pilot says to us. “What’s it like to look the guy you killed in the face?”

  “Kinda like I imagine Superman feels when he destroys a villain,” I reply.

  Ben tugs my hand. “Come on, Anne. He’s never been worth it.”

  As we’re walking away, Pilot grabs my arm.

  “Not so fast,” he says. “Voletto wants to see you in his office.”

  “And he sent you to tell me?” I shrug free. “Doubtful.”

  “I’m your Guardian. So yeah. He wanted you there ten minutes ago.”

  “Fine. I’ll be right there.”

  “I’m not leaving without you. Come on.”

  I glare at him. “Could you give me a second with Ben?”

  “Oh, right, Clyde needs to kiss Bonnie good-bye.” He gives Ben the finger but takes a few steps away.

  “What would the headmaster want with you?” Ben asks me.

  “Who cares? Listen, Ben, I hope you gave some thought to this Garnet situation.”