The Last Academy

by Anne Applegate

  “Are they still doing the séance?” I whispered, wanting her to know that I knew what was going on, that I had some kind of right to be there, too.

  Rachel nodded. Looking inside the chapel was like seeing into another world. Everything seemed calm. The warm honey of the wooden pews and the flicker of candlelight. A blanket lay in the aisle, and the low murmurs of girls talking wafted out. From where I stood, only their legs were visible. It gave me the shivers. It was like I was spying on something holy. I shook the idea off — I’d had enough of feeling like an outsider.

  “How’d you hear about it?” I asked Rachel.

  “Big Mouth Sasha,” she said. “She was bragging about doing this yesterday at lunch. You didn’t get invited, either, huh?”

  I shook my head. “They think they’re so cool.”

  I glanced back inside the chapel, kind of grinning despite myself. All of the sudden, I had a new friend. One who thought Sasha was a big mouth. I kept thinking: We’ve snuck out! And it made me feel giddy and light-headed. I never broke rules at home. I’d never had any place to sneak out to. Even Lia hadn’t ever done anything like this. It was a little hard to breathe when I actually stopped to consider what was happening. If it wasn’t for all the oxygen-saturated air, I probably would have passed out right there.

  Soon, the girls would be done with their séance. When that happened, Rachel and I would have to slink back to our dorms and hope we didn’t get caught — either by teachers or by the cool kids. All this anger at Sasha, Tamara, Brynn, and even Jessie, came boiling up in me. I wasn’t going to let them be happy inside and make me feel like a loser outside.

  I studied the stained glass and how loose it was in the runner. I mimed to Rachel that I was going to shake it. Then I pointed into the chapel and the girls inside. After a moment, Rachel gave me a sly thumbs-up. I whispered, “On three!”

  We were going to give them a show, all right. After all, that’s what they came to see. Rachel snuck over to the far end of the sliding glass. She put her palms flat. I moved to the other end and put my hands up on the windows, too. From my new position, I saw Jessie kneeling on the floor of the chapel, head bowed in concentration. Her fingers moved slowly over the Ouija board. For a second, our plan seemed like a bad idea, and I hesitated.

  But I couldn’t stop. Giggles fizzed up inside me until the pressure of them was unbearable, like I was a soda bottle someone shook up and left capped. Candles flickered inside the chapel. I mouthed: One … Two … Three!

  We shoved the glass. Hard. It made a terrific rattle, from the floor all the way up to the sliders on the ceiling. Whap! Whap! Whap! It was hard not to laugh and shriek. Our bottle caps popped right off. We were giving them their ghost, was all. And that ghost was an earth-to-heavens racket in the dead of night, when we were supposed to be tucked into our own beds.

  Brynn screamed. Glass shattered. I caught a glimpse of Jessie’s face — her mouth a dark circle of surprise. Suddenly scared, I stumbled back and saw it — a pane of glass had fallen out of the wall.

  Run! Rachel mouthed, barreling toward me. Then we were scrambling around the corner and sprinting away. It was a lot better than slinking, I can tell you that. A-million-stars-exploding-in-my-chest better.

  I looked back when we split off in different directions, Rachel waving cheerfully at me as she tore off. No one came out of the chapel. It was completely dark. All the candles were blown out.

  Right before dawn, Tamara snuck back into our room. I’d crawled into the safety of my own bed around three fifteen and giggled for half an hour, waiting for her to creep in. Around 4 A.M., I got concerned. By the time she actually showed, I was completely sure we’d all end up in disciplinary committees by second period.

  She sank onto her bed, silent. I closed my eyes and got about three minutes of peace before Tamara started crying. My own body chemistry practically electrocuted me with adrenaline. It made my heart cramp and my fingertips tingle. They’d been caught after all. I sat up in bed, all stiff like a zombie. Tamara sat on her bed, dressed in sweats and sneakers. It seemed weird that she didn’t even take her shoes off. Her legs were tucked up crisscross. She hugged her pillow.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered. Sure, I had spent all night pretty much hating Tamara. But right then? She was a genuine, staring-into-space, red-eyed mess. She didn’t answer my question. So I crept over and grabbed a box of Kleenex off her desk. Nothing. I sat next to her, pulled a tissue out of the box, and held it up to her face.

  Then I got it. Tamara was crying because Rachel and I had scared the snot out of her when we shook the chapel wall. I bit my lip so I wouldn’t smile. Tamara sniffled. I knew if I laughed, Tamara would probably rage out. On the other hand, at least I had a working relationship with Tamara’s rage face. This glassy-eyed disaster of a girl scared me.

  “Hey.” I gave her a quick squeeze. “Chill out. We pranked you, is all. We shook the chapel wall. We got you good, huh?” I gave her an elbow, grinned, and waited for her to get furious.

  “I wasn’t in the chapel. I was with Shane,” Tamara said.

  The giggles inside me dropped like flies. And, yeah, the feeling was as gross as it sounds. “What?” I asked. “With who?”

  “A sophomore. Shane,” she said. I didn’t know who she was talking about. Then after a minute, I kind of did. There was a pack of sophomore guys who roved campus. They constantly punched each other in the arms, or flicked each other on the backs of their ears. I’d heard they hazed the younger boys by duct taping their ankles together and hanging them, upside down, in their own closets. Bullies. I was pretty sure one of them was named Shane.

  I remembered back home, when Grace — who was more Lia’s friend, but sort of mine, too — had invited Lia, Brooke, and me to a sleepover. In the dark of night, Grace had confessed how she’d kissed her chemistry partner at his house one day after school. We’d squealed with laughter and peppered her with questions: Was it fun? What did he say? Would you ever do it again? It didn’t seem like any of these were good questions now.

  “What happened? Are you OK …?” I stopped.

  Tamara shrugged. “Kinda,” she said. “He was with Sasha when I got to the chapel. I didn’t want to go to that stupid séance thing, so we ditched.”

  “Where did you go?”

  Another shrug. “Little Quad Lawn. At first it was pretty fun. We started kissing. But then he wanted to go further. And when I wouldn’t … he called me names … and ditched me.” She had to take three big, watery breaths to get it all out there.

  I thought of that place, and how open and exposed it was. The school nurse asleep in her cottage fifty feet away. Dumpsters on a concrete slab nearby. Not exactly Romance City. And then to have the guy call you names and bail? I felt bad for Tamara.

  She hugged me and bawled for real then. I wanted to be sympathetic, but also? She smelled bad. Probably what making out with Shane next to the Dumpsters smelled like. But I let her hug me, anyway.

  It must have been the stress and the lack of sleep and everything, but the odor on Tamara started to make me queasy. My ears started ringing. It kept getting worse, until it sounded like a truck backing up in my head. I thought I was going to throw up or pass out, and the whole time, she was still crying.

  I thought: Tamara’s poisoning me. It was a crazy idea, but as soon as I thought it, it felt exactly right. My hands got cold and shaky. She blew her nose and rested her head on my shoulder.

  I started to feel like I was in one of those movies where someone gets radiation poisoning, right before their skin starts to slough off and their eyes bleed. My blood pressure fell through my toes. I thought, I’m dying. Which was crazy. I kept trying to breathe, but no air got in.

  Panicked, I shoved her away and bounced off her bed. My legs wobbled, my knees trying to buckle. And then I had a hallucination.

  My roommate’s skin got all withered and yellowed. Her eyes turned milky and rolled up in their sockets. Scabbed-up lips stretched across her teet
h. It was worse than seeing a corpse, because she was still alive somewhere inside there. She’s the Golden Mummy Girl.

  I heard my own voice say, “He sounds like a loser. Good riddance, right?”

  Then it was normal old Tamara sitting there. Except something in her eyes let me know she was still the Golden Mummy Girl underneath. It was a certifiably unhinged thought. I stumbled and caught myself. I was going to completely lose it. Freak out or start laughing until the school nurse came and shot me full of horse tranquilizers. Then the tiny boss in my head pulled some kind of switch I didn’t even know I had. It shut the crazy thinking down, but it hurt my brain to have it happen.

  “You’re calling him a loser?” Tamara laughed. She straightened her spine and tossed her head. “You don’t know anything. I’m not surprised. You’re too ugly to get noticed on this campus, anyway.”

  A minute ago, I had been wiping her nose for her. Now any hope for becoming friends lay like broken shards of glass between us. Honestly, any hopes of me not seeing her as the Cryptkeeper was a bad bet.

  “You know why you’re here, loser?” she asked. My mouth dropped open, but no sound came out. “Your parents don’t love you. You’re here because they didn’t want you anymore.”

  “What?” I stumbled back. Dawn was breaking and the room was getting lighter now, by little shades of sunlight each few minutes. I could see Tamara growing a shadow. It looked like rage.

  “You got sent to boarding school because your parents didn’t want you. Right now your family is sitting at breakfast in your old home, and they don’t miss you at all. Their life is better without you.”

  “That’s not true.” I was afraid to turn my back on her. Now it was clear what was going on: Tamara was the one who was crazy, so insane it made me sick. I backed toward the doors.

  “You’re here. I’m here. We’re all here. Go ask your friend Barnaby Charon why,” she yelled. “You go ask him why your parents sent you to a place like this.”

  I bumped against the patio doors, knocking them open, and ran out in my pajamas. Everything was gilded in the dawn sun. The lawn and the buildings and even the sidewalks glinted gold. But all the superoxygenated air had burned off with the dew. This new air was too thin and I couldn’t breathe.

  I started keeping to myself. I did homework during announcements instead of talking to anyone in the seats near me. I went up to the lacrosse field and watched boys scrimmage instead of going to see Brynn play tennis. I brought a textbook to the dining hall and sat alone. After, I’d go to the library.

  I needed the time to think. My roommate hated me. A junior had branded me as a rat and I’d broken a pretty serious school rule. Plus, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I had seen, heard, and thought things that seemed pretty mentally unbalanced. It was a lot to process.

  But what kept coming back to stick in my mind was what Tamara had said about my parents not wanting me anymore. I mean, I knew it was a lie. But I couldn’t let it go.

  Why had they sent me to boarding school? I’d been a good student, never the kind of kid who needed a strict, away-from-home kind of environment. It was weird, but now that I was here, I could barely remember the summer, when the decision had been made. Had I been so consumed by my issues with Lia, my life, and my friends that I’d somehow missed something bad happening between me and my parents?

  Wondering about it made me feel like I was some stupid dog a family didn’t want anymore and so they drove out to the woods and let it go. The family tells themselves the dog is going to be all happy chasing rabbits and frolicking and stuff. The dog doesn’t even know what’s going on until the car is out of sight.

  Half a dozen times, I picked up the phone in the dorm hallway to call my parents and disprove my roommate’s rattlesnake-mean theory. But there was always a good reason not to dial. Like I had work to do, or someone else was already on the phone, or the two-hour time change made it too late to call there. Keeping busy seemed a lot easier than having to dial home and ask whoever picked up on the other end why I was far away when they were together.

  And even all that was better than thinking about those other things that had happened: The Golden Mummy Girl Tamara had turned into, or that smell on her that made me think I was being poisoned. Or what Tamara had said at the end: Go ask your friend Barnaby Charon.

  A few days later, I sat on a bleacher seat, pretending to watch lacrosse. I felt nice and invisible there. The boys in the bleachers watched the game and the other girls mooned over the players, so there wasn’t too much pressure to talk to anyone. This time, a few of the varsity players stayed to watch the JV team practice. That meant I got to peek at Mark Elliott for a whole hour. I didn’t want to care about boys anymore, but even as Eeyored out as I felt, I couldn’t entirely ignore him.

  When the practice finished and everybody started heading back to campus, he caught up and walked next to me.

  “Hi,” he said. Just like that.

  “Hi,” I said. He was still sweaty and dirty from practice, and he scrubbed his face with his jersey. When it pulled up, I saw his stomach was completely flat, except for these muscles that flexed when he moved. It made me a little dizzy.

  “Some scrimmage,” he said, into the jersey.

  “Yeah.” I kept sneaking glances. It was like being exposed to some superprivate thing. Like his belly button was the page of a diary. “I thought Kirby was going to tank when he got the ball, but he held in there. Janson’s got a serious tackle.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. Game something. I nodded. When was the last time I had taken a breath? I felt kind of faint. When I inhaled, everything smelled overwhelming: the sun on the grass. The occasional whiff of Mark Elliott. My own hair blowing around, getting caught in the corner of my mouth.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You know Beau?” Mark Elliott asked. Beau was one of his friends. They played lacrosse together. Beau was walking a distance behind us, talking to three other senior jocks, his hands tucked casually into his waistband, I guess for lack of pockets.

  “Think you might want to go out with him sometime?” Mark Elliott asked me, staring out across the field, not meeting my eye. His eyebrows squinched together like he was angry.

  “What?” I stopped moving. Breathing, talking, and walking were all I could handle. Throw thinking into the mix, and I had to give something up.

  “He’s kind of shy, but he thinks you’re cute,” Mark Elliott said, still looking off at the horizon like he was too annoyed with me to make eye contact.

  I glanced back at Beau. He and his friends had stopped, too. Beau was cute. He was popular and seemed nice enough. I was superflattered, but I didn’t go all flushed and giggly at the idea of him. I mean, zero sparks. He wasn’t Mark Elliott, was all. We started walking again.

  “No, thanks. I mean, I like him fine. But I don’t … he’s not …” I stopped, totally flustered. Was I actually rejecting a date with a good-looking senior? Did I just say no to something Mark Elliott asked me? How could I be more wrong?

  “He’s not what?” he persisted.

  “I like you.” As soon as it was out of my mouth, I smacked my hand to my lips, trying to grab the words back before they got heard.

  “Oh,” Mark Elliott said. He stopped. I kept walking. I don’t know why. I just kept walking. I wanted to die.

  I continued to want to die all the way across the soccer field and the baseball diamond, past the pool and the tennis courts, along the theater, and down to Kelser House.

  Nora stood outside my room, pounding the patio doors with her fist. I was glad to see her, to really talk to someone for the first time since I had fought with Tamara. At least, until Nora turned around. Her face was pale and worried. I stopped. Nora never worried about anything. When she saw me, she gave me half a smile and rushed over. Compared to her usual bounding stride, rushed walking made her look pinched and weird.

  “Hey, you snag those keys yet?” Nora asked, peering over my shoulder.


  At first I didn’t even know what she was talking about. Then I remembered her plan to lock up the secret room.

  “No. What’s up? How you been?”

  I was kind of shocked by how she deflated, like she’d been counting on me having something I had completely forgotten about. It made me squirmy. I still wasn’t sure about the whole thing — she was asking me to do something that might get me kicked out if we got caught. Then she wiped the look off her face, leaving nothing but determination there.

  “Come with me.” Nora grabbed my wrist and led me over to her and Jessie’s patio. She gave a quick, obligatory knock and yanked the door open.

  The room was dark. I stood there, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Jessie was slumped on the bed, like a battered piece of luggage forgotten on a claims carousel. Her pretty green eyes, unfocused. I thought: Just like Tamara-poison-Golden-Mummy-Girl. What’s wrong with everybody?

  “Jessie?”

  Her rib cage expanded as she breathed, but that was it for movement.

  “She’s been like that all day now. Even yesterday it wasn’t this bad.” Nora sounded somewhere between annoyed and concerned.

  “Tell Miss Andersen.” I said it out of the corner of my mouth, because it felt weird to be talking about Jessie when she was right there.

  “Jessie said not to. She’s been practically comatose since that séance. But last night, she would at least talk to me. Now nothing.” Nora reached over and poked Jessie with one finger. No response. Nora frowned at me like Jessie was a weird bug she had never seen before.

  “The séance?” I asked. That felt like a million years ago. And then I knew.

  I’d been focused on scaring Tamara, not even considering how I might have frightened someone I actually liked. My insides sank. Jessie had been in that chapel, waiting for a sign from the dead. And now she was sitting in front of me like she’d swallowed cement.