The School of Nine

by Amanda Marin

  I never thought the boy who teased me yesterday would do either.

  “That’s really …” My mouth goes dry as I try to find the words.

  “Thoughtful?” he offers, raising an eyebrow and flashing me that half-grin of his.

  Dumbly, I nod. “Thoughtful. Exactly.”

  Sebastian extends his hand toward me. “Let’s go then. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll still catch Ms. Dashwood’s lecture on the finer points of how to quietly sip soup.”

  His tone is heavy with sarcasm, and I can’t help but giggle. “Is that really what today’s lesson is about?” I ask, taking his hand.

  He nods as we start across the foyer to the former ballroom of the towering, Gothic-inspired mansion that houses Brightling Academy. “According to the syllabus, yes,” he tells me. “It’s a serious topic. Didn’t you know it would be nearly impossible for you to fulfill your Muse-ly mission as a soup-slurper instead of sipper?”

  I giggle again. “That’s sort of what I was trying to tell Headmistress Fothergill yesterday.” I look up into his face, surprised by the similarity between us. His eyes meet mine; they are the sea, and for a moment—just a few passing seconds while we walk to class—I wish I could float within them.

  “You and the headmistress were discussing soup-eating etiquette?” he asks, shaking his head, amused by the absurdity of it.

  Heat rushes into my cheeks. “Not exactly,” I clarify. “Just something like that. Portrait Poses. That was when she …” My voice trails off. It was when she assigned me to Sebastian Greenbriar babysitting duty because I’m flunking Poise and Charm. But I still don’t want him to know that—not even after getting to know him a little better today. It’s too humiliating. “Never mind.”

  We reach the door to Ms. Dashwood’s classroom then. A flurry of wings beat nervously in my stomach. She can’t fail me. She can’t. I have a good excuse this time—and Kash is in the infirmary still, resting. There’s actual proof to back up my story.

  I take a deep breath. Time to put on my brave face. If I have a brave face … which I’m not convinced I do.

  But Sebastian stops me. He pulls away—we’re still holding hands, I realize—and reaches for the knob himself. “Let me do the talking,” he tells me. “You sneak in behind me and get to your seat. Maybe she won’t notice you.”

  Before I can open my mouth to argue—to tell him, once again, that he doesn’t have to, he’s entering the ballroom. I hang back in the shadows of the half-open door a moment, hesitant, waiting to be sure Ms. Dashwood is sufficiently distracted and listening to snippets of him attempting to dazzle her.

  “I just had to help Kassia Beckett back from Grand Park, Ms. Dashwood,” he tells her. He leans against the doorframe in a position I can only assume is meant to be both unassuming and mildly seductive. “Who knows what would’ve happened if I left her alone …”

  “That was soooo heroic of you, Sebastian,” Melody Dillard coos, batting her lashes as she gazes adoringly at him.

  A chorus of agreement rises across the room, dozens of awestruck stares and nodding heads, curls and buns bobbing enthusiastically, turned toward him. Under other circumstances, the obnoxious display may have made me queasy. But right now, I’m glad I was right earlier about him still having a devoted fanbase. Even Ms. Dashwood can’t resist him.

  “Of course, of course,” she clucks, her avian transformation well underway. Her chest swells and her arms flutter as she ushers Sebastian into the room. “You did the right thing.”

  As he steps forward, she puts her arm around him like a mother hen. Her back is toward me. That’s my cue. Time to make my break for it. While she fusses over Sebastian, I lift my gown and tiptoe hurriedly to my usual chaise toward the back of the room—a chaise that, like all the others tiled across the room, still has a tray with a small, steaming bowl of soup in front of it.

  “Kash was so lucky you were there, Sebastian—” someone’s telling him.

  I scurry past Juliette Atwell. She scowls and pulls back her feet defensively so I won’t trample them again like I did yesterday.

  “I’d like to go to Grand Park with you sometime, Sebastian,” another girl says.

  “Me, too!”

  “All right, ladies, let’s allow the hero of the hour to take his seat,” Ms. Dashwood says, releasing Sebastian and clapping her hands to refocus everyone’s attention.

  I dive for my chaise. As I straighten out the layers of my gown around me, my hand knocks against my tray. The spoon clinks against the bowl—but nothing spills.

  Ms. Dashwood’s stare falls on me while she watches Sebastian make his way to the back of the room. I hold my breath as her eyes narrow. I wasn’t here a moment ago. She’s almost certain of it. Almost. But she’s not completely sure.

  So she simply clears her throat and resumes her lesson.

  “Now, ladies, remember to always put your spoon down in between sips,” she instructs, illustrating her point at her own tray at the front of the room.

  Sebastian winks at me as he passes by, and I smile back. It worked.

  I’m saved—saved by Sebastian Greenbriar.

  There’s a sentence I never thought I’d say.

  6

  We hear about the fire a couple of days later, after the weekend. The whispers make their way across the cafeteria, moving from one of us to the next like the flames must have the previous night. Georgiana Sutton tells Bernadette Norcott. Who tells her stepsister, a sophomore, who tells her friends. One of them tells her cousin, Zelda Mackey. And once Zelda Mackey finds out about anything, it’s only a matter of time before everyone knows.

  Even Aurelia Ketterling knows before I do. She leans over while passing me a platter of French toast at breakfast. The way her eyes look haunted, like clouds crossing over a full moon at night, sends a chill down my spine.

  “Someone burned down the artists’ kiosks at Brambleton Terrace last night,” she tells me solemnly, in a hushed tone, like she’s unveiling the darkest of secrets.

  I take the platter, my hands shaking as I stab a piece of toast for myself and pass it to Sebastian on my other side. “What do you mean by ‘burned down’?” I ask her.

  “It’s gone,” Aurelia says. Her voice reaches my ears faintly, like an echo across a canyon. “It’s ash. Rubble. Refuse. Not a single stall left.”

  Kash leans across the table to hear us better. She knocks over her crutches, which are propped up against the table beside her, in the process. “There must be something left, isn’t there?”

  Aurelia shakes her head. “Not a thing. Like it never even existed.”

  “But we were just there yesterday,” I murmur. “It can’t be gone.”

  Tears sting my eyes. Brambleton Terrace. My favorite place in the city, other than Brightling itself. The place where I see my past, present, and future together at the same time. Now I know how Harmony Dillard must have felt when she learned about the theft of the Laffitte painting. And it’s not just me who will suffer from this loss, either. It’s everyone—the entire city, not to mention the artists themselves. Where will they all go? How will they make their living? Who will bring beauty to the park in the same way they did?

  Only a monster could do such a thing. A terrible, cold Mundane with no sense of imagination. With no hope.

  Sebastian nudges me playfully in the side. “Just relax,” he says. He tries to charm me with his grin, but the glisten doesn’t quite reach his seafoam eyes. “They’ll rebuild it. It’s not like you could go to Brambleton today—Kash’s ankle is busted, and besides, it’s gross outside.”

  He nods toward the row of windows across the room. Over the sea of ribboned, curled, and ponytailed heads, I see it’s raining out. The sky is a shroud above, weeping tears of mourning for the artists of Brambleton. It figures that outdoors would look exactly the way I feel inside.

  I know Sebastian’s trying to help, but it’s no comfort. I just push my plate away moodily and shrug. “I guess you’re right …”

&n
bsp; The rest of the day passes by slowly, everyone in a daze. Shocked. The Laffitte and now Brambleton, two strikes against art—against everything we stand for—in less than a week. There are worried whispers about it in the hallway, the novelty of Sebastian’s arrival overshadowed by the specter of the theft and arson.

  “I heard the police have no suspects.”

  “They don’t know how the fire started yet, just that it appears suspicious.”

  “It must’ve burned for hours before they managed to put it out.”

  Then, as Sebastian and I walk together to Inspiration Practicum, we pass a pair of freshmen tossing about the word “pyromaniac” a little too casually for my liking. I turn sharply on my heel, my skirt swirling around my knees, and glare at them until they wither back against their lockers like pulled weeds left in the sun.

  “So, I learned a new step today in tap class,” Sebastian says, trying to distract me. “If it’ll cheer you up, I’ll show you later. It’s guaranteed to make you laugh—I promise.”

  I give him a skeptical, sideways glance. He would humiliate himself for me? Just to put a smile on my face? Every moment I spend with him is like peeling back another petal from a rosebud, only to find a more fragrant, softer part underneath.

  “I have to warn you, though, this is a limited-time offer—going fast and for your eyes only,” he adds, his half-grin lifting the corner of his mouth.

  His insistence breaks me.

  “Fine,” I huff, letting out a deep sigh. I hope it sounds like I’m at least a little bit reluctant, but the truth is I’m really not. I’m getting to like Sebastian, I think. Despite how we met and the way the other girls look at him and how he seemed to enjoy the idea of Melody Dillard complimenting him.

  Sebastian’s eyes brighten—fully this time, not halfway, as they did this morning at breakfast. He holds the door to Ms. Applegate’s classroom open for me, and when we step inside, I see Kash is already waiting for us, propped up on her crutches in our usual spot. A frown on her face that not even our arrival can lessen.

  Her expression is a grim reminder of what happened this morning. That I’m not supposed to be happy. That there is no joy on a day like today—not for a Muse, anyway.

  The students aren’t the only ones dismayed by the fire at Brambleton. Even the teachers seem impacted. In the hallways, Headmistress Fothergill hardly smiles like she usually does. She doesn’t pause to peek in the open doors of our classrooms to observe for a moment, either. In Poise and Charm, Ms. Dashwood doesn’t peck with her usual vigor. She barely scolds Juliette Atwell when she breaks her teacup and stains her gown. She even commends the curl of my pinky finger when she passes by. And at dinner in the cafeteria, Ms. Westbrook seems even more agitated than usual as she paces between the tables.

  “Everyone’s taking it so seriously,” I say to Kash that night in our dorm room as we get ready for bed. “It almost feels like maybe there’s something bigger going on—like there’s this cloud hanging over us.”

  As if agreeing with me, the sky outside our window flickers with lightning, our view of Grand Park and the skyscrapers towering on its opposite side illuminated for a fraction of a second. A dull rumble of half-hearted thunder rolls off in the distance.

  Kash squeezes a bit of facial moisturizer into her palms and rubs her face with her hands as she talks. “I know. But at least my ankle’s feeling a bit better. I think maybe tomorrow I can stop using the crutches altogether. If you want, we could go to Brambleton and see it for ourselves.”

  I put down the book I’m reading—Pride and Prejudice—for my Conversational Arts class. We’re supposed to read the novel and be prepared to lead a five-minute conversation about it with a classmate drawn at random next week, but I just can’t focus. I keep reading the same page over and over: Elizabeth overhearing Darcy insult her at the ball. It makes me think of Sebastian. And then I think of the ocean waves in his eyes and how I’m sneaking out to meet him after Kash falls asleep—he owes me a tap dance, after all. And then I lose my place and have to start the scene again.

  “Thanks, Kash, but I don’t know if going to Brambleton will make me feel better,” I tell her. I stretch my arms over my head and fake a yawn, hoping she’ll take the hint and wrap up her nighttime beauty regimen a little quicker.

  It works.

  “Well, just think about it,” she says. She ties her hair up in a messy bun, then clambers into her bed on the other side of the room—a room the size of my grandma’s lavish, custom closet back home in Westchester County. Her pink, fluffy comforter rustles as she pulls it up to her chin.

  “Aren’t you going to wash your makeup off?” she asks, looking over at me expectantly.

  Crap. Of course she’d notice. At least she hasn’t realized that beneath my own blankets, I’m wearing the least pajama-like pajamas I could find—selected in preparation for meeting up with Sebastian later: black yoga pants and a star-speckled tee shirt. I’m not ready for him to see me in anything too embarrassing, after all—even if he is humiliating himself for my sake.

  “I’m too tired,” I tell her.

  “Okay if I turn out the light, then?” Thankfully, she doesn’t challenge me.

  “Sure.”

  The room goes dark, aside from the faint glow of the fairy lights suspended over the window—Kash’s idea, the same ones we’ve had since freshman year, when we moved in together. And it’s quiet, aside from the never-ending rain pelting the window. After a few minutes, I hear the addition of a new sound: Kash’s rhythmic breathing—part snore, part sigh. She’s asleep.

  Time to make my getaway.

  Boys are so uncommon at Brightling Academy that I never even thought about where they might house one until today, when Sebastian promised to show me his newly acquired tap-dancing skills. His dorm room, he told me, is on the tenth floor—the same as the teachers’ apartments. It’s not as posh as one would assume, he said—not considering the tuition rate and the opulence of the rest of the building, anyway. Still, in almost four years at Brightling, I’ve never been above the ninth floor. I wouldn’t know.

  That’s not where he and I are meeting tonight, though. Instead, we’re meeting at the base of the main staircase in the foyer—the same one where he sat waiting for me, where he took my hand and walked me to Poise and Charm class the other day. I use the flashlight on my cell phone to navigate through the darkened halls, past my resident advisor’s room, and to the elevators that descend to the classrooms and administrative offices below.

  The chime announcing the elevator’s arrival and the rumble of the door as it slides open seem so much louder in the night, without music playing and the chatter of twenty girls in their rooms filling the space. I hold my breath, waiting for my RA’s door to swing open—to get caught. But a moment after I step inside the elevator, the door slides closed again, and I’m off. Normal breathing resumed.

  “Sebastian?” I whisper his name into the dark as I descend the grand stairway. There’s no sign of anyone else moving around the building at this hour, and for a second, as my feet hit the bottom step, I think maybe he tricked me—maybe this is some sort of prank. I unlock my phone, hands trembling, to text him, but as soon as my fingertip glides along the screen, I feel a hand on my shoulder.

  “Bianca—”

  Stifling a shriek, I whirl around to see him standing behind me.

  “Sorry—I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says quickly, in a whisper only vaguely quieter than his usual tone. “Nice pajamas,” he adds, with his self-assured grin, as his eyes skim over my hips and thighs. His words may sound sarcastic, but I think he actually does like the slim fit of my pants on my frame.

  Just in case I’m misreading him, I go on the defensive. “Yeah, you too.” I smirk and brush my hand against the shiny pair of tap shoes tied together and slung over his shoulder. “I hear all the socialites are wearing tap shoes to bed in France, so this is very fashion-forward of you.”

  Sebastian’s smile widens, and he chuckles. �
�I thought it’d be easier to change shoes once we get there than to wear them and get caught being out after hours.”

  I raise an eyebrow and put my hands on my hips. “Well, what are you waiting for? Put them on now that I’m here—you promised me the performance of a lifetime,” I tease.

  He glances around the dimly lit foyer and dampens his lips. “Not here,” he tells me. “Come on—this way.” Seeing the coast is clear, he tugs on the sleeve of my sweatshirt and starts towing me deeper into the shadows of the hall.

  “Where are we going?” Now I’m speaking in loud whispers, too.

  “The auditorium,” he tells me. “I promised you a proper show, and I meant it.”

  The idea of sitting alone in the auditorium—having my pick of seats and watching my own personal dance recital starring the novelty that is Sebastian Greenbriar—should make me smile. It should make me laugh and feel special. It should make me excited—not just for Sebastian’s performance, but for what it might mean that he’s shared it with me. Me, of all the girls at Brightling.

  But it doesn’t. It makes me freeze where I stand and turns my stomach to knots. I’m not ready for him to enter the auditorium yet. I don’t want him to see the display set out against the far wall or read my grandmother’s name on the plaque above it. I don’t want him to put the pieces together. I like the way he looks at me now, without knowing about my family and what’s expected of me—the legacy I have to uphold. I just want to be an ordinary girl to him for a bit longer. A Muse like any other, including him.

  “That’s too much, Sebastian,” I say. I pull on his hand, like an anchor dragging him to a standstill. “We’ll get caught.”