Nora took out a padlock and three keys, making sure each key popped the lock open. Then she handed one of the keys to me and one to Brynn.
“What do you think was going on?” Brynn asked her.
Nora shrugged. “Maybe it’s just like Dr. Falzone said.” She ticked off each point on her fingers.
Index: “I told Miss Andersen that Jessie was having problems.”
Middle: “Miss Andersen told the faculty.”
Ring: “Jessie knew they were coming to get her at a certain time, and she got up to meet her dad or her sponsor or whoever.”
Nora looked satisfied, with her three fingers out.
“But why get her in the middle of the night? And why the lie about crisis counseling?” Brynn asked. I wasn’t worried about that. I was staring at Nora’s fingers, particularly ringy there.
Nora smiled at her and shrugged. “C’mon. The most reasonable explanation is probably the right one. I mean, the other options don’t make any sense.”
I said, “Your logic has a big problem. If you were with Jessie all night, and she was spaced out so bad she was barely responding, when would Miss Andersen tell Jessie someone was coming for her? How would Jessie know to get up at a certain time and go with that man?”
Nora frowned. She started to speak and stopped.
I didn’t know what she was thinking, but I was pretty sure of a couple of things: Dr. Falzone had lied about Jessie’s departure, and it did sound like Nora’s room was bugged. Also, Brynn looked like she might puke.
“You guys, what are we going to do?” Brynn asked.
I turned to her. “I know who you saw outside Jessie’s room.”
I told them about meeting Barnaby Charon on the plane and the girl I’d seen with him, and how it seemed like she was Drea Shapiro, Brynn’s would-be roommate. Then I confessed how Jessie’s elusive Mr. Skinny Butt might have been Barnaby Charon, lurking in the back of the chapel during announcements. But I couldn’t bring myself to admit I’d … well, dreamed it was him. Instead, I finished with how I’d tried to get a picture of Barnaby Charon from the archives and had been denied.
“What does he look like?” Brynn asked. “How tall?”
I didn’t know. I had only seen him sitting down at formal dinner and on the airplane. Also, he could have been old with a good plastic surgeon, or middle-aged with a lot of sun damage. I said, “Light hair, cut short. Maybe forty or fifty … or sixty.” Brynn stared blankly at me. “He has luggage skin and cuff links,” I said.
Brynn scrunched up her face and shrugged. “I’d know him if I saw him again, but I couldn’t say about cuff links or … luggage skin.”
“He was expensive looking,” I tried again. My voice was too desperate and hurried. I could see Brynn’s attention slip away.
“That’s most men around campus.” She rolled her eyes. I blushed.
“What were you doing up in the middle of the night, anyway?” I asked the question before I knew it was in my head.
“None of your business,” Brynn said.
Except I already knew what she’d been doing. I jumped on the one thing I could nail down as fact. “You were sneaking out of your room! That’s why you were up, how you saw onto their patio.”
Nora’s mouth fell open as she connected the dots, too. “You were! Who were you with, Brynn? That Troy guy?”
“Who says it has to be just one?” Brynn retorted, and I knew it was supposed to be a joke, but it came out sour. Her whole face went red. “Maybe it was Mark Elliott,” she taunted me, eyes flashing.
“So many you forgot? Must’ve been a busy night,” I snapped, flushing with anger.
“Shut your stupid, fat mouth!” Brynn shoved me hard. She had those tennis forearms, and when she slammed her hands into my chest, it knocked the wind out of me, sending me flying.
The first star in the sky, and the bubbles in the water. The hard scrape. I’m falling, I thought out of nowhere, as I landed on the wooden plank floor, thumping it like it was the world’s biggest drum. I couldn’t breathe any air in. Now they’ll laugh, the rogue commentator whispered, in my head.
But the room was silent as a graveyard. I bared my teeth at Brynn, hating her as much as I’d hated Lia.
When I saw Brynn’s eyes wide with tears, some of my anger melted away.
“They came after me,” she whispered, holding her hands up. I had no idea what she meant, but all the tiny hairs all over my arms stood on end to hear her say it. She put one of those lifeless hands up to her lips, her face a mask of shock. And like a camera flash, for a split second, there was a ragged twist of duct tape across her mouth, gone before my brain understood what I’d seen.
Nora whispered, “Look, I think we can all agree that Brynn wasn’t sneaking out, right? Let’s … let’s just agree to that.” She cleared her throat, eyes glued to Brynn’s hands. “Even if it was this guy — Barnaby Charon? — even if it was him with Jessie that night, he might still just be the guy who was supposed to pick her up. Right? He’s part of the school system. Maybe it was his responsibility.”
I thought what Nora said was ten pounds of cow flops in a five-pound bag. But I didn’t feel like arguing the finer points right at that moment. I didn’t want to be in that room with her, and especially not with Brynn.
“Whatever,” I coughed as I dragged myself to the tunnel and left. With a lurch and a heave, I got out of there. Then I was stumbling back to my dorm, whispering to myself, “Don’t think. Don’t think.” I filled my head with those two words until I was in my room, out of my clothes, and wrapped in a towel. I jogged down to the dorm showers: Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t.
I cranked the valve to “H,” waited to see steam, threw my towel on a hook, and stepped under the spray. The water hit my chest and my breath caught. Even though it was only a shower, something inside me shrieked with panic. I stopped chanting.
The silence was like the sound of a glacier cracking. My shoulders started shaking, all the way down my hands. I leaned against the tile wall and heaved out these silent, hunched-over sobs behind the flimsy pink shower curtain. A couple of people walked in and out of showers a few feet away. That’s another thing you learn in boarding school: how to cry with all the loudness up on your face. Teeth bared, mouth hanging open, snot dripping everywhere, and every muscle in your face wrinkled up. Maybe biting the skin of your arm so your body could complete the circuit of understanding back to your brain. If you did it right, from the other side of that curtain, it sounded like someone taking a few deep breaths.
When I thought about arguing with my friends, and those sophomore guys yelling at me in front of everybody, and Jessie disappearing, I was in danger of curling up in bed and never getting out. That didn’t even cover the freaktacular duct-tape hallucination, or how frightened Brynn had seemed.
Yanking on my favorite little black dress and glossing on my brightest red lipstick, I told myself I was absolutely going to go to the Halloween party. I needed to do anything but think about what had happened. Plus, I was much more likely to run into Mark Elliott at the party than in the girls’ dorms. When I was ready to face the rest of the world, I swung by the props room in the theater and grabbed a glittery pink-and-silver harlequin mask.
As I walked up to the dining hall, I tortured myself with thoughts of what I’d do when I found Mark Elliott. Flirting at Lethe could be tricky. Romantic interludes were completely covert ops during the school year. If the faculty suspected anything, you and Romeo allegedly got your names on the List. That meant teachers kept tabs on your whereabouts, including “pop-ins,” when faculty walked into your room without knocking first.
The trick was to find a guy who liked you and cram in as many make-out sessions as possible before the teachers caught on. Like what Nora and Thatch were doing — ignoring each other in public and meeting up secretly in dark corners of campus. Not that I knew any secret hand signals that might let Mr. Right know I was interested.
The dining hall
had been transformed into a haunted house. A cold fog bank rolled over my feet, cottony cobwebs hung from the ceilings, and oversized spiders dangled above the deserted dance floor. The smell of dry ice was in the air. I spotted Nora, dressed as Darth Vader, eating a candied apple by the kitchen. Thatch also ate a candied apple, a few feet away. They were studiously ignoring each other.
In one corner, a carnival-style glass maze was set up. Behind its smoky mirrors, Rachel and two other girls bumped into one another, reversed, bumped into a glass panel, and laughed. In the reflected glass, I caught a glimpse of a pretty girl in a black dress, pink mask, and stylish bob. I smiled to make sure she was really me.
A tall figure in a yellow wig and a polka-dot dress circled the floor, sneaking up behind unsuspecting students and scaring them. Guess Mr. Cooper was in charge of tricks for the night. A few minutes later, Mr. Graham arrived, still in his Dracula cape, and took over the drama teacher’s chaperoning duties. Mr. Cooper wandered off toward the faculty room.
I didn’t see Mark Elliott anywhere. He was probably too cool to show up to things like school functions. I realized I probably also fell into the category of things Mark Elliott was too cool for. That was depressing.
Brynn was in the Rowntree Room, standing by a four-tiered punch bowl filled with DayGlo orange liquid. She was dressed as a cat. Or at least she was wearing cat ears and had painted black whiskers across her cheeks, but the centerpiece of her costume was a tight black leotard. A bunch of guys stood around her, and she was laughing like it was the best time ever. It was hard to believe she could be so giggly when I’d just seen her, a few hours ago, all tearful and scared.
I walked over to the punch-o-rama to get a drink. A tall junior guy wrapped a lanky arm around Brynn’s shoulder. She didn’t seem to notice. She laughed with some other guys, who circled around her. They watched her like those old cartoon wolf types, their eyes bugging out and tongues lolling. The beanpole hanging on Brynn was shirtless, with the word “!ooB” written on his chest in red lipstick.
It took a few seconds before I got it. Then I laughed. The letters were backward because he had written them while looking in the mirror.
“Boo?” I asked him. OoB Boy rolled his eyes. No goofy smile for me like he had for Brynn.
“It’s supposed to be ironic,” he said to no one in particular, kind of turning and dismissing me, like he couldn’t be bothered to explain himself. He snickered to the guy next to him like, Hey, check this out. Then OoB Boy reached down and grabbed Brynn’s butt.
Brynn didn’t seem to mind. She made flirty eyes at a different boy standing in the circle. I was embarrassed for her.
“I dunno. You look like an Oob to me.” I don’t know why I said it.
A couple of the guys snickered. Oob Boy turned around. He was very tall. After a second or two of thinking, he said, “Oh, yeah? What are you trying to do, get me to kill myself?” It was even funnier to the guys around him.
“You’re that girl?” one of them brayed. “Oh, burn!” and gave Oob Boy a high five.
“Hey, c’mon. Don’t be jerks,” Brynn murmured. She tugged at Oob Boy’s forearm, which was now wrapped under her chin. Her defending me caught me like a fishhook in the heart, torn between being grateful and angry.
“Seriously,” Oob Boy said in a loud voice, speaking to me, but looking all around the room. “You scared that girl into killing herself? What are you, psycho?”
I said, “You talk a lot of smack for a guy who can’t even spell ‘boo.’ Sure you’re not st-OOB-id?”
Oob Boy flung Brynn away in his rush to get in my face. If I got smacked, I would have to take my lumps. In a way, I was looking forward to it. My insides felt messed up. It seemed right that my outside matched. But before I even knew what had happened, Oob Boy got pinned against the far wall by Dracula.
“Don’t. You. Touch. Her,” Mr. Graham roared, his forearm under the kid’s neck. All the fight went out of Oob Boy. The fight was not yet out of our teacher. You could smell something primal and electric coming off Mr. Graham. For a tiny second I was weirdly flattered he would come to my rescue like that. Then I noticed Mr. Graham’s other hand pointed at Brynn, splayed on the ground. He wasn’t talking about me at all. “What do you think you’re doing, you grabby-handed punk?”
We all were a bunch of hoot owls, our eyes peeled open as wide as they could go. Teachers never touched kids like that. After a moment, Mr. Graham seemed to realize everyone was staring. He took a couple of breaths and stepped back.
“You,” he growled at Oob Boy. “And you.” He pointed at me. “Let’s go.” He stalked out the door. Oob Boy made a sarcastically gallant gesture toward me. Ladies first, it said. Fine. I flipped my hair out of my face, reckless with angry adrenaline. Marching right past Brynn, not even glancing her way, I led the Big Trouble Conga Line out the door.
We ended up in the faculty room. A fire burned in the fireplace. Mr. Cooper was snuggled up in an old wing chair, sipping from a coffee mug. He’d taken off the yarn wig, and sat like a man in his dress. His eyeglasses reflected flames. He raised a brow at us.
“Sit,” Mr. Graham ordered us. He pointed to a scuffed leather couch. Oob Boy sat down, as far as he could possibly get from me. Mr. Graham stomped out of the room. Mr. Cooper went back to studying the fire.
After a moment, I felt pretty bad for losing my temper. I mean, sure the guy had been a jerk and poked me where I felt weak. But I had called him a name first. That hadn’t been very nice.
“Sorry about the Oob thing,” I said. He grunted.
“What’s your name?” I asked him. I had heard it around. Trevor or Travis or something.
“What do you care?” he muttered.
“When I say I’m sorry, I mean it,” I said. “Plus, I gotta call you something. Unless ‘Oob Boy’s’ growing on you.”
“I’m not stupid. I know how to write.” His voice went up a pitch. It hit me all of the sudden: He was actually worried about it. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who had gotten her weak spot smacked in front of everyone tonight.
“Travis?” I asked.
“Troy,” he said into his chest.
“Troy. I feel bad.”
He nodded. “Yeah, well, I’m leaving a note blaming you if I decide to kill myself tonight.” Then he bit his lip. When he did that, he was almost cute. I decided not to say anything about his writing skills and whether or not anyone would be able to decipher it.
“Graham sure had his shorts in a twist,” I whispered.
Troy smiled a little. I tried again.
“What do you think you’re doing, you grabby-handed punk?” I whispered, all dopey. He giggled. So did I. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed khaki pants headed our way and figured Mr. Graham was back.
Troy’s trickle of sniggering stopped midsnuff. He stared at the man standing in front of us. It wasn’t Mr. Graham. I closed my eyes, pretty sure I was going to pass out. Everything smelled like fresh soap.
“Leave us,” Barnaby Charon said. Troy leapt like a small woodland creature from the couch, his footsteps light on the floor. My eyes were still closed. I couldn’t get up the nerve to open them. Barnaby Charon sat next to me. Underneath the soap, I could smell all those secret smells that belonged to him.
When I did open my eyes, the first thing I saw was that Mr. Cooper had vanished. Only his steaming mug remained to prove he had been there at all. One of the big rules at boarding school was that at least one faculty member had to be in the faculty room at all times. Usually there were three or four. In case of emergency, you could always find someone here. I wondered if Barnaby Charon counted as faculty. I wondered if this counted as an emergency.
“Now I’m rather glad you didn’t get off in Denver, Camden,” he murmured. I couldn’t look at him. My heart was falling down a staircase into some sort of panic-induced heart attack. It thumped in my chest with one big, painful thump and got back into rhythm again.
“It has been … amusing.” He stopped, as if co
nsidering, then started again. “Yes. It has been amusing to watch you … develop during your time here.”
The warmth of his breath made all the hairs on the back of my neck goose bump. It was crazy, but I wanted to jump up and … I dunno. Make him stop. Except I was already in trouble, and this guy owned the whole school. And there was no one to see what was happening. Still, the urge to unload a big dose of shriek ’n’ slap on him was overwhelming.
“What happened to Mr. Graham?” I asked.
“He was not in the right mind-set to mete out punishment. Did you know,” he added, after a pause, “years ago, Mr. Graham’s own sister disappeared, never to be seen again. Now he attempts to save them all.” He made a tsk-tsk sound.
Another missing girl. My legs got the shakes, like they wanted to take over and bolt on their own.
“You are afraid of me?” he asked, but not like he was surprised.
“Did you take Jessie?” I asked back. His breath stopped midexhale. It was almost as good as hitting him.
“And who would suggest something like that to you? What little bird?” Fingertips drummed his thigh. “Brynn Laurent, next door, perhaps?” He seemed like a slow shark in the water, circling me there on the couch, lazily debating the merits of attack over swimming silently away.
I didn’t answer.
“I’ve brought you something.” Barnaby Charon pulled up a brown gift bag by its handles and put it in my lap. There was something heavy inside.
He stood, finally putting space between us. I glared hot fury at the back of his knees. Like it was an afterthought, he dug around in his pocket as he turned to me.
“I have something for your nosy little friend as well. Pass this along to Brynn. She’ll know what to do with it next time I find her.” He opened his fist and dropped something small and gold into my lap. I thought it was one of his cuff links as it hit my thigh. It was so gross — like he had dropped a cockroach on me. I shoved the bag off my lap. It fell onto the floor with a clunk. I jumped up, finally ready to give him a hard crack to the face, no matter how much trouble it meant for me afterward.
The Last Academy Page 9