So I got my guts set and crept into the building, past the stage, and up the narrow stairway behind the velvet curtain. In a few more steps, I stood in front of the entrance to the secret room. I took out my key and crawled into the tunnel. I turned the corner, feeling my shoulders rub against both walls. When I got to the door Nora had constructed, I fumbled around, holding the key in one hand while I felt for the padlock with my other. It was already unlocked. As my eyes adjusted, I saw it was more than unlocked. Nora’s makeshift door was broken, cracked, and splintered down the center, one hinge ripped out of the wood, the metal twisted from the force of whatever had happened.
“Nora!” I whispered. No one answered. I listened and listened and listened and didn’t hear anything, not even phantom knocking. Then I went in.
The secret room was dark and silent. The only sign of life was the uneven sound of my breathing. I fumbled around on my hands and knees until I found the penlight. In the zigzag stripes of light, I saw that Nora wasn’t there, and that was good, because when I’d called her name and she hadn’t answered, I’d been afraid she was lying on the floor inside, dead. I sat down and watched the light jitter on the wall until my shakes got smaller and smaller and the light got steady.
There were books on the floor. Nora must have stolen them from the archives. They were all open and piled one on top of another. She must have been up here, studying them. Whatever she had read had made her leave the splintered wreckage of her door unlocked behind her. Even though I was pretty sure I didn’t want to see, my body had its own plan. I sank down to my knees in front of the books Nora had left.
The one on top was opened to a big, glossy photo. It was an oil painting of half-naked people piling into a wooden boat docked on black water. The oarsman stood in rags. Underneath the picture, it said: Nineteenth-Century Interpretation of Charon’s Crossing.
On the opposite page, I read: Charon, the mythological ferryman on the river Styx, carried the newly deceased from the land of the living to the land of the dead….
I pushed the book away. It slid off the top of the pile. The one underneath was an encyclopedia. The entry on the open page read: Psychopomps are mediators between conscious and unconscious realms. Their purpose is not to judge the souls, but to protect them on their journey into the afterlife.
The next book read: Forms of obolos: payment for passage across the river Styx. Underneath that heading were dozens of grainy, black-and-white photographs of coins, each with its own subtitle. Two rows down, I found the coin Barnaby Charon had given me: Danake, gold (Persian). At the bottom of the page, the text continued. Those who died without an obol were required to wander the shore for a hundred years….
I pushed it away, too. On the bottom of the pile, one more book was open to more paintings of Charon crossing the river Styx. In the paintings, there was always a dark figure escorting scared, sad-looking people onto an overgrown canoe. The image of Charon was skeletal, blurred, vague, and anonymous.
But there, sitting in the boat. I recognized that guy, despite the toga and old-time flip-flops. The passenger wore the same tear-streaked face I’d seen up in the faculty room. Our drama teacher, Mr. Cooper.
“You knew who Barnaby Charon was all along,” I whispered at his image.
It was the craziest thing, but all I could think of was how the ringing in my head had stopped and how quiet everything was, up here in the dark. And that’s when I knew why Nora had gone. The others, too. I threw the book across the room. It hit Nora’s broken door and crumpled to the floor, like a bird hitting a window, pages fluttering.
Broken. I thought of Jessie’s broken Ouija board. What about the picture frame in the faculty room? That had been Mr. Graham’s — the picture of his sister. What about Nora’s door?
Everything broken was something important to that person, I guessed. Although exactly how it worked, I didn’t understand. Maybe those things had to be destroyed for the people to get their coins. Had I been Brynn’s important thing? I must have been, since I’d given up her coin. Except I didn’t feel broken. What happened with Brynn in the theater made me feel changed for sure, but not destroyed like the Ouija board.
I crawled out of the secret room, not caring how loud I was. I left the broken door behind me, with the books still open for whoever needed them next. I was ready to meet Barnaby Charon. I knew the directions to find him were back on the spring fling cruise sign-up sheet. The only problem was that I needed payment for the guy, and I still couldn’t figure out what I needed to break to get my coin. Then I realized I had already broken something.
I went to the squash courts. It was full dark outside by then. The security lights were on, and the pay phone stood in a pool of illumination next to the locker rooms. As I walked up to it, it felt exactly right. This was the place where I had both been broken and broken something. I took a deep breath and jammed my finger into the coin return.
The thing was, I was so sure of what I was going to find that I was practically on my way before I realized there was nothing between my fingers. I bent over, poked the little metal door aside, and peered into the darkness of the coin return. Nothing was in there. Very slowly, I straightened, holding on to the phone booth, where my dad had told me I couldn’t come home. For a crazy moment, I wondered if maybe I had the wrong phone. Or the wrong idea.
I grabbed the phone and put it to my ear. “Dad?” I asked. Nothing but a dial tone. The phone stood there, being nothing more than an ordinary phone in front of me.
“I didn’t want you to have it,” Mark said. I hung up and turned around. He stood there, trying to smile, watching me like I might be dangerous. It made my skin prickle and tingle to have him look at me like that. “It fell out of the return when I hung the phone up. I put my shoe on it when you started crying.” He stepped forward with one foot, mimicking what he had done.
“You still have it,” I said.
He shook his head no.
The air in my lungs froze into a block of ice that I couldn’t blow out or suck all the way in. Then, very slowly, Mark nodded. And like that, I could breathe again.
“I need it.” I held out my hand. I had a boat to catch.
“No, you don’t, Cam.” He stuffed his hands in his jeans pockets, and I knew he had brought the coin with him, just as I had started carrying Brynn’s around. He stepped back. “You can’t just …” He looked away. “Everyone else leaves. You should stay here with me.”
“I know about Charon,” I said. I opened my mouth to tell him — I had a crazy idea for a second that we could go together.
“Don’t!” he yelled at me. “I don’t want to know what you know.”
“But …”
“I heard what your dad said to you.” He stepped closer and touched my arm. “You are worth something to me. I would never want you to leave.”
What he said fluttered around in my ribcage like a living bird. Even if Mark didn’t understand everything, I knew what he was asking me to do. I stepped closer. His breath tickled the side of my neck, and I knew all those little secrets you know about another person when they are very close, like the smell of his toothpaste and deodorant, even the detergent in his clothes. I tried to put every small detail of him into my head, so I could keep them forever.
“Please,” he said, his voice hoarse. “It will break me to let you go.”
A flicker of understanding lit up my mind, about why I’d had Brynn’s coin, and maybe why Mark had mine. I slipped my hand around his neck and pulled his face down to mine, so we were breathing the same air.
“It doesn’t break you. I think it heals you.” It was my coin, not his. The thing that had to break was my heart.
He whispered, “You stood up that day in the chapel. Fearless. I dream about it sometimes.”
“I love you,” I told him, as he leaned down to kiss me. For an answer, he slid his hand between us and opened his fist. I took the coin.
From Little Quad Lawn, I watched Mr. Graham’s motorcycle circle th
e parking lot, gain speed, and finally rev up the hill. The wind blew my hair back as he slowed to a stop next to me. I said, “I need to go to the marina. Can you take me there?”
Mr. Graham wiped his eyes like a little kid and gave me a sad smile. “Hop on.”
As he drove, faster and faster, I became a bird, flying low over the crest of the mesa and past the gates of Lethe. In a blur, I saw that strange little meadow. It was certainly a graveyard, and I was escaping it.
Down through the canopy of trees, then the rows of blossoming orange trees, we rode through town and to the darkness of the yacht club pier, where Mr. Graham brought the motorcycle to a purring stop and let me off.
“Are you sure?” he asked. When I nodded, he said, “This you do alone.” I turned for only a moment, just to see if Barnaby Charon was there. But that was all it took. When I glanced back over my shoulder, Mr. Graham was gone.
When I met him at the ocean’s edge, I wasn’t scared. The sea was black as ink under the night sky, lapping and gurgling against the dock posts, taunting me. But the water wouldn’t end my life. He would. A smile flickered across his face, like he could read my thoughts.
Barnaby Charon was alone, standing in the darkness on the pier. There was a building out there, and he stood next to it. Inside, the lights were off and the glass of the windows reflected the ocean. I thought we were the only two people left on earth.
I took a deep breath.
“How long have I been dead?” I asked him.
“Usually, by the time a person meets with me, they have completely passed,” he said. I thought back to the first time I had ever laid eyes on Barnaby Charon. I had been dead since before Denver, apparently.
“Usually passed,” I said. “But not always?”
He nodded. “If you will, recall the touch we shared on the airplane.”
I knew what he was talking about, but the way it went down in my memory was not so much a “touch we shared,” as him grabbing my neck. I had thought he was going to kiss me, but …
“You were checking my pulse,” I realized.
“You had none.” He smiled out to sea, like he was fond of the memory.
That’s right about when it sunk in. I mean, technically, I had known since I had seen Nora’s books, but the knowing was on top of my brain, like a hat I was wearing. When he smiled, the knowing sunk down into me like syrup into a pancake. My knees got wobbly and I wanted to sit down, but the dock looked dank. You’ll get your clothes dirty, my head kept trying to tell me. Except that wasn’t true — ghosts, or dead people, or whatever — they didn’t need to worry about that stuff anymore. But that wasn’t exactly right, either, because here I was, dead, and I was still worried about it.
The light came on in the building next to us. Through a window, I saw it was a yachtsman’s clubhouse. It looked warm and inviting, with a polished wood bar, and twinkly glasses that hung from the ceiling, and comfy-looking yellow chairs with navy stripes.
“Let us go inside.” He walked ahead to get the door. In the moonlight, I saw the shine of his hair go white and smooth and skull-like.
Inside, I fell into a chair. Charon went to the bar and made himself a drink. The glasses behind him were etched with the names of poisons. His had “strychnine” on it. I was pretty sure that was a joke. Charon half sat on a bar stool and sipped his drink.
“What happens when you take me across the water?” I asked.
“It is my purpose to take you there. When you are ready.” He hadn’t exactly answered my question. “First, there is something you must do,” he added.
I tensed up. If I was already dead, what could he want from me? I could feel a pull inside my chest, like he had my heart on a leash and he could yank me wherever it was he meant for me to go.
I asked, “What is this place? How did I end up here?”
“The school is a way station. It is a place for you to process what has happened and a chance to get your affairs in order before you pass into the next realm. Those who die young or suddenly often have unfinished business. Every student must fulfill two requirements. One is understand that you have died. Receiving a coin is the mark of understanding.”
He leaned across the bar and reached for something. Then he walked over and placed a book in my lap as if it weighed nothing at all, even though it was as big as a dictionary. The cover was oiled by a million fingerprints.
I expected the thing in my lap to be like a baby book, a This Is Your Life, Camden. But the first page was an obituary for Jake Diaz, a junior guy I hardly even knew. I flipped more pages. The whole book was full of newspaper clippings of my schoolmates. Sometimes it was a little blurb of an article, like with Jake, who’d been in a car accident. Or it was like the next article, which had a small paragraph under the headline Family of Four Dead in Home: Carbon Monoxide Likely Culprit. Sometimes they were big articles on old, yellowed, and crackly paper. Others looked new.
I saw my prank buddy, Rachel, smiling in an old holiday card. Next to her photo, the words: House Fire Claims Victim. Followed by, Firefighters were called to the 1800 block of North Kingston Street Wednesday afternoon. There, they rescued sixteen-year-old Rachel Smith from the burning home. She later died at the hospital. Authorities suspect faulty wiring…. I studied it for a long time, trying to believe it and failing.
I turned the page. Two Minors Perish in Rollover Accident. It read, Both victims were pronounced dead at the scene. Next to the article was the photo I’d seen on Jessie’s desk, of her and her brother.
“She thought she lived through that crash with her brother.” I remembered what Jessie told me. “But she knew there was something wrong with her seat belt.”
Charon said, “The brain obscures the events of death. It is the last survival instinct.”
“What do you mean — what does that mean?” I demanded of Professor Death over there, with his fifty-cent college words.
“Jessie believed she survived the accident because she had worn her seat belt, but she did not. The argument with her brother distracted both from their tasks. The mind is cleverer than the person: It can both know the truth and obscure it until the person is prepared to face what has happened to them. Jessie suffered tremendous guilt, believing her speech impediment prevented her brother from fastening his seat belt. The only words she was able to say clearly were ‘I hate you.’ Seeking out her brother with the Ouija board, she was able to forgive herself. So absolved, she awoke to her true existence and then knew to call for me.”
“You took her.” I slumped down. I had known, of course. But I had thought he killed her.
He seemed the slightest bit offended. “I only supplied the vehicle. She drove herself.”
“Why …?” I started, but I knew. Just as I met Charon down by the water’s edge, Jessie had come here in a car like the one that had killed her.
In that moment, I understood that the spring fling cruise had been only for me, a sign telling me where I needed to go.
“Did Jessie really talk to her brother that night in the chapel?” I asked instead.
“Yes. The dead may speak across realms to other dead.”
A horrible idea crossed my mind — I’d called my father. “What about the living? Can you contact them?” My chest got tight. I thought I might die all over again if I found out my dad was dead.
“Your father dreams of you. He slept, aching with loss, when you called,” Charon said.
“He misses me?” I asked. Charon leaned over and handed me a soft linen handkerchief. His face suggested he was trying hard not to show it, but maybe, buried deep under the thousands of years of doing this job, he was still a little grossed out by human things like snot leakage. I wiped my nose.
“You are his daughter.”
“He said I couldn’t come home,” I whispered.
“Of course he did. You are dead. You cannot.” Charon smiled a little. “Haunting is a seductive and destructive force within every deceased. It has the great potential to damage both
you and the ones you attempt to contact. It distracts from the tasks that must be completed in this realm. Your father knew this. His was an act of great love to discourage your return.”
I thought about my dad telling me not to come home. Not because he didn’t want me, but because he loved me. Because he was still trying to do right by me, even though he probably thought I was a figment of his dreams. Charon had just told me that it was bad — a haunting — but all I wanted to do right then was call my dad again and tell him I loved him. I’m not a figment, I’d say, and he’d know it was me. I closed my eyes. I could call every day and tell him I loved him, and maybe after a while, it would be like I wasn’t even dead, and everything would be OK, and …
Except I knew what that looked like. I’d seen it firsthand at Mark’s house.
“Some kids get lost when they try to go back home, don’t they?” The book in my lap was warm, like a sleeping cat, and I turned the page without waiting for him to answer.
The obituary was only a small column. No bold headline or picture, just life and death news in a small town: Mark Elliott, eight months, passed away in his home in Nueva Vista of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). He is survived by his parents, Edward and Nancy, and his brother, John.
“Mark isn’t a baby,” I said.
“This is haunting,” Charon said. “Sometimes he stays with your kind, he grows and learns. Sometimes he gets caught up in contact with his past.” His face hardened the slightest bit. “He will not see me.”
“Was that his mother I saw? And his brother?” I got an icky feeling in my stomach. “Did I haunt them?”
The Last Academy Page 17