“We’ve already been this morning.” Cherie spread her napkin carefully across her lap. “Of course, you probably mean the swimming pool with water in it, right?”
Hope entered my heart as I remembered there was a normal pool, ghost-free and full of non-haunted water, making the invitation much more appealing. But then I remembered what happened yesterday and I began shaking my leg under the table.
“Of course. Water usually helps with the swimming.” Brent’s tone was one someone would use on a confused child.
Cherie paused dramatically with an impish grin. “We checked out the original swimming pool, the one that’s locked, off limits, and supposedly haunted.”
Understanding flickered across their faces, and I think the phrase ”off limits” especially caught their interest. Giving up all pretenses, Cherie eagerly told them of our morning adventure.
“You guys did that without us?” Steve complained. “We would have gone with you.”
Cherie dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “Honestly, I didn’t think you’d be interested.”
I doubted Steve was upset about missing the pool; I think it had more to do with missing time with my best friend.
“How did you even know about it?” Steve asked.
Cherie smiled demurely. “I did my homework before I came to school.”
“We’ve been down there before. I mean, everyone goes there at least once, sees it isn’t that big of a deal, and leaves. There’s no reason to go back—unless, of course, you believe in ghost stories.” Steve’s expression turned serious when he saw the looks on our faces. “Do you believe in the ghost stories?”
“No, of course not. It was just for fun,” I said before Cherie could answer. I knew for a fact that ghosts were real, but I had learned not to go around telling people that. Even without looking, I could feel Cherie’s heated glare and I determinedly avoided her gaze.
“So, do you guys have any other big plans as far as checking out old school rumors?” Steve asked, his crystal blue eyes watching Cherie.
“Well I thought about looking into the Pendrell curse,” Cherie announced, sipping the soup from her spoon.
Brent scoffed. “You really believe in the curse?”
“Don’t you? I mean you almost died, and with it being so close to the end of the second year, isn’t it almost time?” Cherie asked.
“I was choking— it wasn’t suicide,” Brent said, narrowing his eyes.
“I was meaning to ask you about that. What were you choking on? I asked around, no one knows what happened.” Brent didn’t answer, but the muscle of his jaw clenched. “I know they’re all found to be suicides. But maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re accidents or maybe even murders!” Cherie held up her spoon to emphasize her point. “That makes more sense than the brightest, most popular students of this school killing themselves every two years, doesn’t it?”
“Look,” Brent said, his voice chilly, “you just started here. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Steve tapped Brent on the back. “Yeah. It was usually about midterms or finals and everyone who knows the person who . . . dies agrees that they hadn’t been acting like themselves. They all had majorly traumatic breakdowns. Too much pressure. There’s no mystery.”
“Maybe.” Cherie leaned in, lowering her voice, her blue eyes wide with enthusiasm. “I’ll let you know what I find out at our next investigation.”
“When?” Steve asked. Even though I doubted he believed in ghosts, he wasn’t about to let that stop him from any activity Cherie was involved in.
“I haven’t decided that yet. It didn’t sound like you’d be interested.”
“We wouldn’t miss it.”
“Yes, we would.” Brent slammed one hand down on the table while his other one crumpled his napkin and tossed it on his plate. He pushed his chair away from the table and jerked up. “I’ve got to go.”
“Brent?” I asked as he turned to go.
“I’ll catch up with you later.” He gave me a tight smile that didn’t go further than his lips. I stared after him, wondering what exactly had happened.
****
After lunch, I was in the library, picking up the textbooks I needed for my classes. I had already double checked my list to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything, so I arranged my books by size and hefted them into my arms, trying to balance the unsteady stack.
“I thought I might find you here.” I glanced around my book tower and found Brent smiling at me.
“Hey,” I said. “You okay?”
Brent raised a fingernail to his teeth, then shook his head and dropped his hand. “Yeah.”
“Really? Or do you just not want to talk about it?” I adjusted the top book with the tip of my chin.
“Need a hand with those?”
I nodded and he took all but two from my arms. “I guess that means you don’t want to talk about it.” He didn’t say anything just tucked my books under one of his arms. “You just seemed ticked or something when Cherie started talking about the curse.”
He gritted his teeth. “What is wrong with your friend, anyway?”
“What do you mean?” I followed him into the library’s elevator and pushed the button for the first floor. He didn’t answer, he just stared straight ahead, and I shuffled my feet in the awkward silence until the doors of the elevator slid open with a slight squeak that echoed across the deserted floor.
“Well it isn’t exactly normal to take such a morbid interest in people’s deaths,” he said finally. We walked toward the nearest study area, with two arm chairs, a table, and a sofa illuminated by a large stained glass window. Blue, red, and green rainbows danced across the table.
“That’s not it. She wants to help, she wants to—”
“Solve the big mystery? Why do the over-worked, under-praised students of the most elite prep school on the West Coast kill themselves? The answer is in the question.” Brent dropped my heavy stack of books on the table and sagged into one of the chairs.
“It’s more than that. Cherie has this need to prove there is life after death, that the universe is bigger than science can explain.” I took a deep breath. “She had just started dating my brother right before he died.” I waited for Brent to respond in some way, but he didn’t. “His death really rattled her. Ever since then she’s been obsessed.” I didn’t mention that even Cherie’s popularity at our old school hadn’t stopped people talking about her.
“Why Pendrell?”
“You have ghost stories, curses, the best education, and it’s close to home. How could she not choose to come here? It has everything she wants.”
“Well, tell her to back off. Every year some stupid person brings up the curse and—”
“She isn’t stupid.” My hands clenched my books tightly, digging them painfully into my chest.
Brent gave me a level stare to let me know he didn’t agree.
“She isn’t stupid,” I repeated. “I mean, this place is downright creepy sometimes. You can feel that, right?”
“Creepy?”
I focused on the stained glass window, noting the graceful design of the roses. “Yeah.”
Brent rested his elbows on the table leaning toward me. “Like footprints in her room, dark, ghostly presences, and a feeling like someone is following her.”
My tongue felt numb, and my fingers tingled. “Exactly. That is exactly what she saw,” I lied. I knew I was being a coward, but I still wasn’t ready to admit it was me who had experienced these things. Brent wasn’t like the kids I had fought with as a child. The muscles in my shoulders relaxed. “How did you know?”
“Because it’s in every piece of trash book that is out there about the supposed curse.”
I felt like I had been blindsided by a semi. “But she did see it.”
“Then you’re right; she isn’t stupid,” Brent agreed. “She’s crazy!”
A sensitive internal trigger fired a series of disjointed but powerful images behind my eyes: G
randma talking to nothing but the air in public places, the pointing and taunts that followed. Only in this case he’d called Cherie crazy. Only it wasn’t really her; it was me. That nagging fear that had worried me since childhood became a reality: I had just been called crazy. The room spun for a moment and I figuratively felt myself join the ranks of my lineage. Had each of them had someone they cared for flippantly dismiss them the way Brent had just dismissed me? Apparently, Brent was no different than the other close-minded people who had ridiculed my Grandma, and now me.
“She isn’t crazy either,” I said through clenched teeth, my fingers clamping tighter on my book.
“If it looks like it should be in a straight jacket and it talks like it should—”
I really hadn’t planned to do it but before my brain had a chance to veto the idea, I chucked my five-pound calculus book at him. It soared through the air and clocked him right in the temple. There was the loud thud of the book making contact with his cranium, and then a clatter as the book bounced off the table and landed on the floor. It was probably the most effective and satisfying use the book would get all year.
He rubbed his head while glaring and swearing at me. I hesitated before retrieving my textbooks and stalking off without a word.
Chapter 4
Kicking hard, I struggled to swim up toward the air that my lungs were burning to breathe. My legs flailed and my hands clawed, but the tightening crush of water told me I was still sinking. With a sickening realization, I knew it was my gown that held me captive. Frantically I tried to free myself from the confused tangle my dress had become, but my panicked fingers were unable to undo a single button.
My knotted hair and ripped dress swirled around me like a beautiful ethereal dream, hypnotizing me, twirling in the water with enticing promises of what awaited me once I surrendered to my inevitable fate. I’m drowning; I accepted it as the hazy black edges of my vision started to spread into the center of my sight. My eyes were drifting closed in defeat when I saw him, swimming toward me and I fervently wished he had been a few moments earlier, because I knew he was already too late.
I sat up in bed in a cold sweat, my heart racing, my fingers clutching my sheets in panic. Even though it had been nothing more than a nightmare, my lungs still greedily gulped up air as if it had been real; it felt far too real. For the last month I had the same dream several times a week, every detail nearly identical.
This repeated experience was disturbing, eerie even. I had only had such vivid dreams once before. I pushed that memory aside reassuring myself it wasn’t the same thing. My hands instantly cradled the necklace my family had sent me from Brazil. They said Grandma had picked it out from her local feira market. If she were here, she’d remind me that dreams, especially recurring dreams, were not to be ignored. Her superstitious nature had taught me that, “Dreams are the universe’s way of trying to tell us something.” Of course she had been against me coming to Pendrell, warning me that my grandfather had left believing there was something evil happening at this school. I had been so determined to not live in Brazil that I hadn’t listened.
This train of thought didn’t help lessen my nerves. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep but all I could see were the horribly realistic images from my nightmare. Finally I decided to concentrate on the one aspect that wasn’t scary— the boy swimming toward me— and my pulse calmed. Even though the shadows obscured his face, I always felt like I knew him. I drowned every time, but each night he got closer to saving me.
****
In the morning, I woke still riddled with anxiety over my nightmare, but managed to get myself out of bed to shower. Once showered and dressed, I attempted to convince the worry lines on my forehead to relax, but was having no luck. With a heavy heart and an even heavier backpack I followed an enthusiastic Cherie to our first day of classes.
The morning was a humdrum blur of syllabi, textbooks, assignments, and teachers, except for Language Arts. Not only did the teacher, Mrs. Piper, assign an oral presentation that immediately made butterflies take flight in my stomach, but I had my first run-in with Brent since the library.
Brent, whose bangs were styled to hide his bruised temple, arrived at the classroom just as I did, starting an avalanche of emotions that crushed my lungs and made it hard to breathe. His lips were clenched in a straight line when he opened the door for me. “After you,” he said in a tight voice, motioning me forward. I glared at him as I walked past, making my way toward Cherie.
At lunch, I found Cherie in the cafeteria saving me a seat, I was happy not to see Brent or Steve with her. I hadn’t told her about my fight with Brent not only because I didn’t want to make things awkward between her and Steve, but also because it might lead her to ask some questions about the content of the argument.
I plopped my blue tray on the table, dumping my backpack with a loud thud, and slumped into the wooden chair next to her, mentally exhausted as we exchanged mutual “Why did we want to go to this fancy prep school?” looks. From the buzz of conversation in the room, it sounded like lots of students were complaining about the sadistic amount of work assigned on the first day of classes. If we had pitchforks and torches at our disposal, I would have led the uprising. My hostility level toward my teachers lowered after I polished off a brownie, stabilizing my crashing blood sugar.
“So how was Drama?” I asked as I bit into my turkey sandwich.
“Oh, it’s going to be fabulous. There’s a Drama Club and our first meeting is today. You’re going to be there, right?” At first I thought Cherie had asked me that question, but realized she was talking to Audrey, a girl from our floor, who had just sat down beside me.
“Yep,” Audrey said, pulling out the chair next to me. “It was a relief to know someone in class.”
“Our first day of classes and you’re already ditching me?” Travis, Audrey’s boyfriend, joked as he sat down next to her.
“Oh, every chance I get,” she quipped, giving him a wink and tossing her golden hair over her shoulder.
“What are you going to be doing tonight?” Cherie asked me as she stole a carrot stick from my plate.
“Um . . . were you in Language Arts? You heard we have to introduce ourselves in front of our whole class tomorrow, right? Where do you think I’ll be?” I asked before popping a potato chip into my mouth.
Cherie put her hands to her head like she was trying to read the future. “I see you in the library . . .” she whispered eerily, “stressing out.”
“It’s uncanny, her psychic ability,” I praised sarcastically, throwing a few of my chips at Cherie, who picked them out of her hair with a grin.
“I have to work on my speech, too,” Travis said. “I can meet you there after school. That way we won’t have to be alone while they ditch us for Drama.”
“Sure. I’ll want a second opinion about mine anyway.” I gave Travis a grateful smile. The conversation then turned into a debate between Audrey and Cherie about which play the Drama Club should put on first. Cherie and Audrey were still debating between two plays I had never heard of when the bell rang.
After school, in the library, while browsing through some of the books on public speaking, I ran into Travis. We decided to work on the second floor, in the back corner, so we could practice reading our assignments out loud without disturbing anyone.
An hour later, I had my speech written out, and Travis was calmly making notes on colored index cards with his key points. I loved the fact that he was using bullet points about his own life. For me, prep work wasn’t the problem; it was the actual delivery in front of my fellow classmates. I had found a book about public speaking, and was looking up ways to overcome the stage fright I knew would come. The book, however, was useless.
“Seriously— ‘Be prepared’? Isn’t that one obvious?” I grumbled under my breath. “Make notes? Picture people naked? So, do you think if I picture everyone naked, it will really help?” I asked Travis rhetorically.
“I’m afraid
that might be a distraction, if I tried. I mean, Audrey’s in that class.” He chuckled.
I felt my face flush as I remembered Brent was too. No matter what had happened between us, he was still drool-worthy. “Okay, that one’s out.”
He looked at his watch and started gathering his stuff. “Speaking of Audrey, I’m supposed to meet her in about fifteen minutes. I better get going. You’re going to do fine.”
“Of course I am,” I said sarcastically.
“You sounded fine when you were practicing it.”
“Yeah, but it’s different when you are doing it in front of a friend.”
“Then just look at your friends while you talk.”
“Okay, see, that is good advice. You should write a book.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” he said, standing up to go.
“Tell Audrey hi,” I said. I watched him zip up his backpack and sling it over his shoulder.
“Will do,” he called as he left.
Dropping my head onto the table and sighing, I closed my eyes, mentally repeating the words of my speech. Hello my name is Yara Silva. I. . .
A book from a nearby shelf tumbled to the ground and the pages rustled a moment before settling. I bit my lip, debating. If this was a horror movie, I would be yelling at the stupid girl to run— but I ignored my own advice and walked toward the book.
It was a copy of Pendrell’s Guide to Being a Top Student. It didn’t look threatening, so I picked it up. It was published in the fifties and seemed to be a collection of essays written by former students. I marked the page that had flipped open with my finger as I browsed the table of contents. There were suggestions on everything from acing a test to keeping one’s dorm room clean. The page it had opened to had a small paragraph on public speaking by a T. J. Weld. I read the few sentences aloud.
“When I have to speak in public, I always find it helps to take a few really deep breaths until I am almost dizzy, then close my eyes for a second, and pretend I’m dreaming. It sort of disconnects me from reality and keeps me from over-thinking. I found this exercise to be very helpful and enlightening.”
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