by Joanna Wiebe
The cottage is quiet. The lights are out. Gigi already shouted her goodnight to me, and Teddy left my room after his final assessment of the night ten minutes ago. Even Skippy has stopped yipping and settled on Gigi’s big brass bed. It’s so quiet, you can almost hear the cover of the scrapbook creak when I open it.
Inside, I see the same photos, scraps, and stickers I saw at lunchtime. Plum singing. Lotus smiling; I pause again on her page, taking time to read a newspaper clipping pasted under her freshman-year school photo:
Kidnapping Turns Tragic
The body of Lotus Jane Featherly, daughter of Lord Marshall Featherly, was recovered early this morning from the Thames, just six days after Miss Featherly was abducted from her London mansion.
Confused, I turn the page and see Tallulah Josey smiling at me. A note card that looks like a party invitation is placed to the right of her photo; I open it to discover that it’s no party invitation. I should have recognized it instantly. I’ve helped my dad fold thousands of these.
“A funeral program.”
Hiltop P. Shemese is next, but her page is empty. There’s just a photo of her in uniform, smiling softly. No stories, no clippings, no photos of a past life.
Agniezska is a few pages down. Bright, colorful photos of her in The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. She’s breathtaking—a little too thin, but stunning onstage. I’d feel a twinge of jealousy if I didn’t quickly spy a magazine clipping with the headline, “Anorexia Claims Prima Ballerina Agniezska Kytian, Dead at 70 Pounds.” In the story, Agniezska’s mother-slash-manager is referenced as pushing her daughter to the brink, forcing her to be thin at all costs.
I flip back to Plum’s page. There, I see newspaper clippings in Thai layered over photos of her rushing through throngs of fans, bodyguards all around. Everything is in Thai, so I can’t read the details. One of the photos speaks plainly to me, though: Plum and a much older man, sprawled across a velvety chaise longue, champagne bottles and glasses smashed around them, a powder-covered mirror on the table. It’s her and her dad’s friend. It’s the scene she described taking place before she came to Cania.
A candle flickers next to my bed. My breathing halts.
I flip to Harper’s page. In her largest photo, she looks depressed. She has acne. She weighs at least twice as much as she currently does. Her hair is stringier, not at all the silky red hair I envy today. I can’t breathe as my eyes dart over the many clippings on her page and land on the label of a pill bottle—a prescription for Vicodin. And then on a note card with a speech on it, the number 4, presumably the fourth card of the speech, at the top:
What can we make of my baby girl’s last moments? We might look at the lasso she’d tied around the neck of Misty, my wife’s prize stallion, and we might assume she had ill intent. Did she think she could strangle Misty? Did she feel so voiceless in her own home or so desperate for the thing she wanted most—not the pink Hummer, but my attention—that she was brought to such a lowly state? I’ll never know. All her stepmother and I will have is the vision of finding her the next morning, on our return from the city, with that unfathomable gash on her head where Misty kicked her.
The card ends there.
The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck are standing at attention. A shudder has been running up and down my spine repeatedly since I read Lotus’s clipping, running like a car on a never-ending roller coaster. I don’t know how many more death announcements, eulogies, and funeral programs I read. I don’t know if I close the book or not. I don’t know anything. The one thought I have hasn’t quite reached me yet. It moves through the darkness of my room slowly, deliberately, like the Grim Reaper wading through a sludgy pond to reach me, like he’s been wading toward me for days, has jerked his way up the stairs, and is finally here, his slender, long arms extending toward me. I want to back away from him, from my one unavoidable thought, but he keeps approaching, nearer and nearer until I’m in his cold, wet grasp.
It can’t be.
Breaking the silence is a knock at my door; startled, I scream loud. I hear my door swing open, and I know Teddy’s rushing up the stairs, so I stuff the book under my duvet and do my best not to look as fucking crazy as I suddenly feel. I can’t handle him being here. I need to be alone. To think.
Because it can’t be. What the scrapbook was telling me can’t be true.
“What?” I shout at him. “Teddy, get out of my room!”
“Don’t talk to me that way.”
“Get out!”
“Why did you scream?”
“Get out!”
“Have these candles been burning all night?” he demands. I glance at the clock. I’ve been sitting in stunned silence for hours. “You’re going to start a fire.”
Fine by me. I’ll start a fire. I’ll burn this whole place to the ground and it won’t matter. Because. I can’t finish the thought. Teddy goes from candle to candle, puffing each one out and taking his time as he does it.
“Please leave,” I beg.
“With your attitude,” he says as he walks back to the stairwell in the darkness, “you’re never going to be valedictorian.”
Valedictorian? As if that matters!
“Can you please leave now?” I implore through gritted teeth.
“Not until you lie down.”
I throw myself down on the bed. “Now?”
There’s a creak on the stairs. The door clicks closed. I’m alone again, in the dark, with this book of death in my quivering grip.
In the time it took for Teddy to blow out all the candles in my room, the thought—that one thought—has made its way into my mind. That doesn’t mean it’s sunk in yet, but I’ve realized it.
The perfect-looking students at Cania. So angelically untouched by acne, fat, and everything else normal teenagers endure.
The tuition. Only for an extraordinary purpose would people like Manish beg and offer anything to get their children into this place.
The isolation from the rest of the world. We are all alone here. No visitors allowed. Only the villagers are here with us, and they’ve made a pact with Villicus, they’ve been bribed into secrecy. Secrecy about something hugely valuable. Something that’s so clear to me now, so horrifyingly clear.
Molly died. But she was in my room, in the flesh, that night; and she was in her mother’s arms that night. It wasn’t until a body—her body—wrapped in cloth, was cremated and, as her grandpa said, her spirit was freed that she disappeared.
She was dead. And yet she lived again. On this island.
Lotus died, too. So did Harper, Plum, Agniezska, Tallulah—everybody at Cania Christy. Augusto went off a cliff before he came here; was it a skiing accident? Emo Boy leapt onto that dancer’s cage and ended up at the hospital; could he have gone to the morgue? Pilot tried unsuccessfully to rescue a girl from a house fire; could he have died in that very fire? Could it be?
It must be. Every other half-ass theory I’ve had fails to piece together like this one does. It must be.
Every single student at Cania Christy is dead.
“But…But wai…” I don’t want to think about what comes next. But it’s too late. My brain rushes there instantly. And what I realize next hits me with a powerful whoosh that plasters me against my bed.
Every single student at Cania Christy is dead. And so am I.
seventeen
DEATH AND THE MAIDEN
“ANNIE, YOU LOOK REALLY TERRIBLE,” PILOT SAYS FOR the eight-hundredth time today.
He has no idea what I know or why I look at him so strangely, like I’m seeing him for the first time every time.
“I can’t believe you’re still pissed at Ben. Your smile looks awesome. I’m no big fan of the Zinanator, but you should thank him.”
You’re dead, I think, staring at him, knowing I have enormous rings around my eyes from the most sleepless, unimaginable night ever, a night spent fixating on my new reality. I’m at a school for dead kids.
But I can’t say that. Not t
o Pilot. Not to anyone.
All day, my mind has turned over so many possibilities, I’ve barely noticed a thing going on around me—and yet, at the same time, I’ve noticed everything. Their translucent skin. Their flawlessness. I spent ten minutes in the cafeteria today just staring unabashedly at a skinny freshman with bright blue eyes and long blonde hair, a perfect angel without the wings. I watched her move. Wondered how she got here, how she died. The scrapbook she’s probably in is under my pillow at home, but I didn’t pay any attention to her last night. I was too caught up in the death stories of the people I know here.
I’ve spent the day wondering if this is purgatory. Or Hell. Or Heaven.
I’ve wondered how exactly I died. Because I can’t remember. Is that normal, to be unable to remember how you die? Is that why they made that scrapbook, why they clipped those stories and pasted in pieces of their eulogies?
I’ve wondered if my dad’s dead, too. How else did I talk with him on the phone? And am I still on earth? I must be. The parents are all coming this weekend. Surely they’re not dead, too. Surely that’s not how Heaven works: kids die, parents die, and only on select weekends are they allowed to see one another.
I’ve wondered if the other kids know they’re dead, hence the need to keep villager kids separate from Cania kids. But if they don’t, how could one explain the scrapbook? I can’t. They all know they’re dead—199 students are allowed to know they’re dead…and I’m the only exception.
Correction: I was the only exception.
Why me? Why shouldn’t I know?
Most of all, I’ve wondered if I’m crazy. I’m alive. I feel it. Pilot’s alive. I feel it when I smack at him as he makes some idiotic face that’s supposed to be an imitation of me pissed off. He’s flesh and bone and blood and brains, just like me. He’s heart and soul and life. Just like me.
And I have a new zit today! Ha! Take that, Death.
I’m torn between believing my hunch and believing my eyes. If I believe my hunch, this must be Heaven, in spite of Harper’s presence. If I believe my eyes…
“Have you even seen Ben today?” Pilot asks me. He’s stuffing gift bags with tissue flowers as we sit on a tabletop at the Parents’ Day meeting after school. “You could always ask him if he’s, like, a magician or something.”
I’m trying to refocus on the conversation. I’ve been observing Pilot more than I’ve been listening. It’s like déjà vu. I remember watching him, not listening to him, last week on the beach, when he asked me to the dance, back when I was still blissfully ignorant. That morning, we sat near a family of sea lions; they didn’t notice us because animals don’t notice spirits. Except for dogs, which yelp at them—like Skippy does every time I come around. He also yelps at Teddy. But he doesn’t yelp at Gigi. So does that mean Teddy’s dead, too? And Gigi’s alive?
When did all the others find out they were dead? A week after their arrival? Two weeks? Is there some test going on here that I’m not passing, something I should be doing to prove I’m allowed to know that I’m dead? Does everyone know that I don’t know? That must be why I’m at Gigi’s. Because if I lived at the dorms, I surely would’ve found out last week. It took me about two minutes in the dorms to find the scrapbook. And one minute of reading it to get it.
“Earth to Annie?” Pilot sings. “Ben. You know, Ben Zin? The guy who changed your teeth? Your neighbor.”
“What about him?”
“Have you asked him what happened?”
I haven’t wanted to think about Ben. When I caught him looking at me in the hallway this morning, I immediately headed for the girls’ bathroom. For some reason, the idea of Ben not being real makes my brain want to shut down, to block it out, even more than I want to hide from the fact that Pilot, Harper—everybody else—are deceased, are physical manifestations nothing like you’d expect of spirits, but spirits nonetheless. Fleshy spirits. Of all the questions that have entered my mind, Ben’s life status is the one I promptly shut out.
Naturally, I have millions of questions about my own death. Why don’t I remember dying? The best explanation—the sane explanation—is that I’m making all of this up. That I’m not dead. Nobody is. That book I found was just a morbid joke a bunch of rich bitches put together; Hiltop’s page was empty, probably because she knows such a joke would be in very poor taste. Molly’s cremation was just the hallucination of a girl with a family history of mental illness and the recent secondhand-smoking of some Devil’s Apple.
“No,” I finally say to Pilot, glancing at Harper and her gang, who are obviously whispering about the two of us while they frame Parents’ Day signs in glitter. “I haven’t talked to him.”
I’ve spent all day biting my tongue and hiding my expressions during moments of intense realization, moments when I wanted to scream loud and hard and tear out of whatever room I’m in. Walking through the hallways and bumping into kids, knowing they’re all dead. This, what I’m about to ask Pilot, is the closest I’ve come to speaking of what I suspect—what I’m not certain of, but what I suspect.
“Annie.” He holds two tissue flowers to his chest and smiles. “Look. I’m a late bloomer.”
That act alone stops the wheels in my mind from turning. Why did this perfectly nice, fun guy have to die? He said he got here last year, so he died when he was just fifteen? Feeling my lip start to quiver, I bite down and taste blood. We have blood. Why the need for blood? Why the need for sleep? Maybe we’re not dead at all. Maybe I really am just going crazy.
Mental diseases are genetic, after all.
What’s more likely? That I’m at a school for dead kids…or that I’m afflicted with a disease I’m in denial about, a disease similar to the one my mother coped with?
That’s it. That’s got to be it. I’m losing my mind.
“Never mind,” I say, swatting the flowers from his hands with a smile.
“Hey, you lovebirds,” Harper calls to us. “More work. Less flirting.”
Pilot and I both blush.
It’s devastating to know that my mind is already slipping away from me, but at least that means everyone here is still alive. The idea sends a wave of relief over me, a wave that carries me toward Parents’ Day that very Saturday.
No, we’re not dead.
Dead kids can’t stand in uniform out in the quad, shivering with the cool breeze whipping off the Atlantic, waiting for their parents to arrive on a yacht we can see making its way up the island. And dead kids can’t slouch on the stools next to their sketches and watch as Dr. Zin and Ben stroll side by side, taking in the various displays.
“Why are you even here, Fainting Fanny?” Harper scowls as she takes her place at the entrance to the Art Walk. “Your dad’s not coming. And your sketches suck.”
Garnet approaches us, and Harper’s attitude abruptly changes.
“Harper,” Garnet says, “good work on organizing Parents’ Day.”
For a split second, Garnet darts a glance in my direction, and I wonder for the hundredth time if she made Harper the Art Walk lead as a warning to me, now that I know about her relationship with Ben. She’s telling me to keep quiet or she could easily destroy my life here. I get it—message received, loud and clear. I’m not saying a word. And with the scare I gave myself this week, I almost don’t care about Garnet and Ben; my mind obviously needs to focus on fewer things—to stay healthy—which means there’s no room for boys, especially confusing boys tied up in affairs with teachers.
“I’m sorry to hear your father won’t be joining us, Anne,” Garnet says. Her expression is sincerely sorrowful. “I can only imagine how heartbreaking that must be for him.”
As Dr. Zin and Ben near, I watch Garnet’s gaze chase after Ben, who’s pretending to admire the sketches but whose gaze returns to her again and again. They’re obviously in love. And I don’t care. Nope, just a healthy, clean frame of mind for me—no Bens allowed. Even when he ignores my sketches and stands alongside Garnet, who whispers in his ear, I refuse to car
e. That said, I still want some answers about what he did to my teeth. He’s not getting off that easily. If he can answer that question, then I’ll ask him about the troubling math problem that is how he could have been sixteen when his sister passed away five years ago.
“Ben!” I call.
Both Ben and Garnet turn coolly in my direction.
“What is it?” he asks. His tone is unmistakably icy.
“I have something I need to ask you.”
Flicking a glance at Garnet, he sighs and walks over. But before I can get a word out, he’s leaning in and doing one of those loud-whisper things Harper does, where everyone in a ten-foot vicinity can hear.
“Sorry if you’re confused, Anne,” he says, “but I am not your friend. Got it?”
Then he sweeps away. Garnet follows him.
Humiliated, I tell myself no one can see my chest heaving. Surely no one’s looking. But, no, they’re all looking, from Harper to Dr. Zin to Augusto, who’s sitting next to me on the other side. Harper smirks. Augusto drops his eyes.
“Miss Merchant,” Dr. Zin says, taking this awkward moment to view my work. “Perhaps you would be heading this art show if you spent more time on your craft and less breaking into people’s homes.” And then he walks away.
Great.
Keep it together. Everyone’s a jerk because of the Big V competition. Chill. Don’t start crying—if you cry, so help me, Anne…
A foghorn blows out on the water. Within minutes, the yacht has docked and parents are rushing off, bounding up the white staircase from the campus dock to the quad. The Glee Club, led by Pilot and Plum, begins singing the school anthem, backed by the Horn Club and Handbell Club. As the parents reach the quad, they glimpse their children at this display or that and rush to their sides, throwing their arms around them and weeping madly. I can’t help but notice that they’re all overreacting almost as much as my dad did on the phone with me. Both Harper and Augusto, who are on either side of me, jump to their feet and let themselves fall into the embraces of their adoring parents.