I got down on my knees so I could see her face. “Jessie, it was me. I knocked on the chapel wall. As a joke. I didn’t mean to scare you.” Behind us, Nora took the opportunity to kick me in my butt. I didn’t care.
Jessie’s eyes cleared and she saw me. “Everything shook, the glass broke, and the lights went out. I wasn’t in the chapel, I was in that car.”
“No. We just …” I thought: Why get Rachel in trouble? “I shook the stained-glass wall. That’s what the noise was.” I cringed, remembering the sound of shattering glass, seeing Jessie again in my head, her mouth open in surprise.
She reached out so slowly I didn’t know what she was going to do until she grabbed the collar of my T-shirt and twisted it around her fist. She pulled me close.
“My brother told me things. Good, terrible things. You brought him … thank you.” She stared past me, like she was speaking to someone else behind me. Dread prickled its way up my spine. What had I done?
I put my hand on Jessie’s fist. We were practically nose to nose. I could smell her, but she didn’t smell like poison or anything. Just like she hadn’t showered in a couple of days.
“It was only a prank,” I said.
She let go of my shirt and smiled weirdly. “It was my brother. No one could know that stuff except him.”
Jessie hadn’t stuttered once. I glanced up at Nora. She looked at me with one eyebrow raised.
“Umm. Ohh … kay. What did your brother say?” Nora asked.
Jessie shook her head and mashed her lips together until they were nothing but a white crease. Then she muttered into the front of her shirt, “He told me he was sorry, that it wasn’t my fault. He told me I could go home if I wanted to.”
“You want to go home?” I wondered how come no one besides Nora had noticed what had happened to Jessie. Except I hadn’t noticed, and she sat right next to me in the chapel every day.
Jessie shook her head, that thin scar for a mouth coming back. “My parents don’t want me back. I look just like him.” She glanced at her desk. It was fairly neat — one textbook, some papers, a strange little gold coin, and a framed photo of Jessie, with her arm around a tall guy with the same moss-green eyes and mocha skin. My heart went icy. In my head I heard Tamara: Your parents didn’t want you anymore. Their life is better without you.
“Oh, please. I’m sure that’s not true,” Nora was saying to Jessie.
A soothing thought washed over me: We were all away from home for the first time. The stress was getting to everybody. Tamara was meaner than a one-eared alley cat, I was imagining things, and Jessie heard her dead brother. There were plenty of older kids at the school who must have gone through the same thing and come out the other end fairly normal. For us freshmen, the cracks were showing.
“It’s going to be OK,” I told Jessie. Her eyes were so glassy and dark that she seemed like a doll, but after a moment, she nodded. I sat next to her and gave her a side hug. She leaned against me, already seeming more like Jessie and less like a zombie princess. And if you’re not better tomorrow, I’ll tell Miss Andersen myself, I decided. Even if we both get in trouble for sneaking out.
That night I dreamed I was swimming in an inky ocean under a sky full of stars. Flashing red and white lights reflected on the waves. Sirens droned in the distance, but I felt peaceful. The perfect night for an end-of-summer pool party, I thought.
Then I was back at the chapel with Rachel. Candlelight flickered through the stained glass and made Rachel look like she was on fire, her skin melting. She yelled, “Run!” and laughed at me as her hair began to smolder. She became a young man with emerald eyes and mocha skin. Jessie’s brother grinned at me and rattled the chapel wall, the muscles in his forearms standing out with the effort. Stop it! I tried to say. Inside the chapel, someone screamed. I was screaming.
And then I was awake and falling out of bed. Landing knocked the wind out of me. On the floor, wrapped up in my bedsheets like a freshly caught fish in a net, I tried to catch my breath. The sun shone through the crack of the curtains of our room, too bright. Confused, I glanced at Tamara’s bed, but it was made and she was gone.
My whole leg was asleep. It was like having a rubber chicken for a limb. I gimped over to the desk and checked the clock. Seven forty-eight. My stomach sank. I must’ve forgotten to set the alarm. Class started in twelve minutes.
I’d already missed room inspection and breakfast sign-in. That was a guaranteed two points each — I’d be working four hours of work crew come Saturday, plus the embarrassment of being in trouble. On the plus side, if I didn’t brush my teeth or comb my hair, I still had the slim hope of making it to first period before the tardy bell rang. I threw some clothes on and ran out the door.
During first period, I realized something was off. Even without the alarm, I never should have been able to sleep as late as I had. Miss Andersen should have woken me up at seven thirty when she came in to inspect our room. Five days a week since school had started, she gave our room the once-over before checking our names off on her clipboard. So Miss Andersen had missed inspection.
I didn’t get to think about it too long, because Dr. Falzone, the dean of students, showed up at my classroom, interrupting our Spanish quiz. He raised an eyebrow at my rumpled jeans and bed head and pointed one finger at me. I followed him out to the hallway.
“You missed breakfast sign-in,” he said, when we were alone.
I nodded. I was probably going to get some kind of dress-code violation points, too. My jeans had grass stains on the knees and my T-shirt was an accordion of wrinkles.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I woke up late.”
Dr. Falzone frowned, like my story was a morsel of believability steak that he was rolling around in his mouth, chewing on, testing the flavor.
Someone’s high heels clickity-clacked down the terra-cotta hallway toward us, loud with echoes bouncing off the walls. It sounded like a one-pony stampede.
Miss Andersen stopped midclickity when she saw me and Dr. Falzone, as though she’d been looking for one of us, but now that we were both in sight, she didn’t know what to do next. Dr. Falzone rolled up the attendance sheet and tapped it in his open palm, still frowning. Then he walked away from me.
“Do I have points?” I called after him.
“This is your get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said, waving me back to class. He even smiled at me over his shoulder. It wasn’t until later that I understood he was glad to have found me still safe on campus.
As I walked from Spanish to algebra, I heard a flurry of whispers in the hallways. You have only four minutes to get from one class to the next, and the language classrooms are pretty far from the math lab. So I didn’t stop to listen. But it was like the Santa Anas had gotten into the people around me, with whirlwind bits of nonsensical conversation. Someone behind me whispered, “Suicide …” but moved away too quickly for me to catch the rest.
I guess part of me must have known something. Because after second period ended, and all the students walked to the chapel for announcements, dread started building up inside me. I wanted to drop my books and run the other way. Stupid. I filed into the chapel with everyone else.
Dr. Falzone paced at the front of the stage, tapping his sheaf of papers as people got to their seats. I smiled at Rachel. She gave me a wink.
Jessie’s spot was still empty. Everyone else was pretty much seated. A few people were eyeballing the vacancy next to me.
I glanced over at Nora, who might know Jessie’s whereabouts. She wasn’t in the chapel, either. I got a bad feeling. No one missed announcements.
In desperation, I looked for Nora’s occasional make-out buddy, Thatch. He was sitting center section, twelve rows up. He saw me and gave me a huge grin and a wave. I frowned at him. My friend, who you’ve kissed in secret, is missing, I wanted to yell. Why are you smiling? Haven’t you noticed something is wrong?
Dr. Falzone read a couple of announcements off his papers — school
play rehearsals, athletic schedule changes, work crew assignments, dinner menu. Floor announcements came next. A junior raised his hand: The AV club would project Casablanca out on the lawn in front of Hadley House Saturday night. Bring a blanket. Popcorn would be served. And then it was over.
All around me, students got up and left. Two girls passed by and one murmured, “I heard they called an ambulance, but she was already cold.” Dr. Falzone was still at the head of the chapel, talking to a junior named Jake. I made my way, against the current, toward them.
“Dr. Falzone,” I said, when Jake walked off. “Jessie …” I was suddenly afraid to say anything. Like somehow, if I didn’t bring attention to it, nothing bad would happen. But the look on his face when I said my friend’s name let me know something had already happened. “Where’s Jessie?” I asked.
He studied his papers for a minute, his brow furrowed. “Jessie Keita made the decision to withdraw from school. Perhaps you were aware she’d been dealing with a family tragedy?” I nodded, dumbstruck. Dr. Falzone smiled sadly and sighed. “Camden, I spoke to her at length. This decision was the right one for her.”
I stood there, shocked mute. Dr. Falzone added in a kind voice, “Students come and go here more frequently than you might expect. Lethe is a wonderful, exciting place to be, but the pressure of the lessons here can be overwhelming.” Then he scooped up his papers and left.
I went straight to Nora and Jessie’s room. A crowd of girls clogged the hallway, clustered up in twos and threes. Jessie and Nora’s door was closed and no light came from the crack at the floor.
This was why Miss Andersen never came to do room inspection, I realized. She had bigger fish to fry this morning. I wanted to tell Miss Andersen about Jessie. Guilt stabbed me in the lungs. Why didn’t I? The answer came back quick: Because you were protecting your own hide. I pushed my way through the gawkers and knocked on the door. No answer.
“She’s gone,” someone said.
“Get out of here!” I yelled. One kid bolted down the hallway. A sophomore girl turned her head away. The rest stayed where they were. It was like yelling at city pigeons.
I opened the door. “Nora?” I asked the empty room. Jessie’s closet doors were open and I could see all her clothes and shoes still inside. On her desk lay her wallet, with her student ID under a plastic window in front. An ATM card, a five-dollar bill, two ones, and a twenty were tucked into the side pocket, along with a card for a free serving at FroYo2Go with eight of the twelve spaces punched.
I set the wallet back down and wiped my hands on my jeans, remembering what Jessie had said to me the night before. How flat she’d sounded. I’d told her it was going to be OK. This was definitely not OK. Who decided to leave school in the middle of the night? Without telling anybody? And leaving their wallet? Nobody, that’s who.
The thing is that life doesn’t stop. So I made myself stumble up the path to my third-period class, gut punched.
Tamara stood with a bunch of sophomore guys. A guy I was pretty sure was Shane yelled, “So is it true?” His friend elbowed him in the side. “Quit it!” A couple of other guys laughed and pointed at me.
I squinted. It was bright out on the lawn, compared to the dimness of Jessie’s empty room. My fingertips were tingly and numb where I had touched her wallet. I guess I could have walked up to those sophomores so they didn’t yell for everyone to hear, but they seemed like slow summer wasps. The angry buzz of their words lit up the part of my brain where survival instincts hung out. I didn’t want to go near them.
Shane cupped his hands and yelled again. “I heard Jessie Keita killed herself because of you. You knew her brother was dead. You tricked her at a séance. And you did it on purpose.” It echoed across the lawn.
It was like glass breaking, only it was the whole world. Tamara’s snickers broke the silence. She took a step closer to Shane. Her hip grazed his forearm. My guts took the express elevator to my shoes. I remembered Tamara crying that night she’d snuck out. I had told her what I had done in the chapel. And now she had told everyone. Worst of all, it was true.
I couldn’t deny it, so I mainly concentrated on not fainting. I’d never live it down if that happened. Get up to my brain and help me think, blood! I thought. My blood was comfy staying down below my knees.
“I have to go to class,” I said. It was the squeak of a mouse being strangled with twine.
“Killer!” one of the guys shouted at me, as I ran off. More laughter behind me. “Did you really do that? Hey, I’m asking you a question! Did you do it?”
My classes kept me straitjacketed into the day’s schedule. Nora stayed missing and Jessie stayed gone, and still I was in class. Teachers called on me while I was trying to think. Had I scared Jessie so bad that she’d left school? Or was Dr. Falzone lying? Had she killed herself?
You can only freak out for so long before you burn through your supply of adrenaline and your brain gets dull and wrung out like an old sponge. When that happens, you can think again, if you are willing to go slowly. I went like a snail. Everything in my head was wreckage, and I wandered through it, trying to see if there was any small thing I could salvage. By the time my last class let out, I knew what I needed to do.
I didn’t watch Brynn’s tennis match and I skipped lacrosse. I didn’t look for Jessie or Nora. Instead, I went to the theater and stole Mr. Cooper’s keys.
It was common knowledge that if you searched the theater, you could find three things that belonged to the drama teacher: the coffee cup he always misplaced, a pack of cigarettes he wasn’t supposed to smoke on campus, and a warden’s ring of keys that allowed Mr. Cooper access to the great unknown. Everybody knew about these items, because part of the Freshman Drama curriculum included Mr. Cooper stomping around, cursing under his breath, and asking if anyone had seen his stuff.
The key ring was on the makeup counter, next to a bunch of wigs.
What you are doing? I asked myself. Except I knew. I was stealing. In my head, that voice laughed from across the lawn: Hey, I’m asking you a question! Did you do it?
I stood there for a minute, thinking about Nora, and how I hadn’t done the one thing she had asked me and how Jessie was most likely at home with her parents. But also probably laid out on a slab in the morgue. Either way, I had been part of it.
I grabbed Mr. Cooper’s keys and put them in my pocket.
Cool as a cat burglar, I strolled out of the theater, across campus to the school’s parking lot, where I hitched a ride down to town with Mrs. Sibley’s secretary, Jude. I told her I was going to buy emergency Tampax at the grocery. Jude sang with the radio. I didn’t know how she could be so happy when Jessie had possibly killed herself last night.
Downtown, Jude stopped at a red light and I got out. All the shop windows were decorated with orange, painted pumpkins and hand-drawn green vines. The streetlights were wrapped in black tinsel. It was only because Halloween was tomorrow, but it felt like I had been dropped off in an alternate universe.
The locksmith told me he would be happy to do the job. He said it with a sly smile and a thumb rubbed thoughtfully over the raised directive on each key: DO NOT COPY. While I waited, I went across the street to McDonald’s. A bored, middle-aged manager stared somewhere past my head as I ordered a Happy Meal. I took a seat and looked at the tiny sack of fries and uncomplicated hamburger, but didn’t touch them. I felt like Alice in Wonderland, and if I ate the food, I would shrink too small or grow too big. So instead I solved the puzzle on the side of the bag and waited to feel the right size again.
Half an hour later, I picked up my new keys, along with the old ones. Together they felt too heavy for what they were. Like there was magic inside them. Like they were the keys of good and evil. I put them in my backpack, glad not to touch them anymore, and started walking back to campus. It was a long walk, alongside endless rows of orange trees. But the road was straight, and all I had to do was put one foot in front of the other.
After a while, a car honked a
s it drove by, then slowed and pulled onto the shoulder of the road, kicking up a plume of dust. When I jogged up to the driver’s side, Miss Andersen rolled down her window and said, “Want a ride?”
Her car was cool and quiet and smelled like coffee. It was nice to speed away from the scene of my crime.
“Quick trip into town, huh?” she asked, making conversation the same way she brushed the wrinkles out of her skirt before class started. On her dashboard, a bobble-headed skeleton in a tiny Hawaiian lei nodded at us.
“What happened to Jessie?” I asked, after we had been driving for a few minutes.
“What do you mean?” she asked, her knuckles blanching on the steering wheel. It was just one little thing, but it made me sure there was more to the story. I tried to rephrase, but I couldn’t figure out how to make my question any clearer.
“Well, Jessie’s gone,” I said finally.
“Yes,” Miss Andersen agreed.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Didn’t Dr. Falzone tell you?”
“Yeah,” I said. I slunk down in my seat and stared out the window. I could feel her considering me. I felt glad about the keys then. I didn’t owe her to be honest if she didn’t owe me.
“Well, that’s what happened.” She tapped the steering wheel with her thumb. The skeleton nodded in agreement.
At ten fifteen, after check-in, I went to Nora’s room again. Now she and Brynn both had singles.
The light under Nora’s door was on. Instead of going right in, I went back to my room to get the copied keys. I put them in my pocket and started back to Nora’s. Was that a seam popping? Yeah, I could see how I was going to get kicked out of school: a pile of stolen keys squiggling down my pant leg, landing on my shoe like a big, felonious metal turd, and the sound of someone saying, “Hey, what are those?”
The Last Academy Page 7