by Anita Oh
Tennyson Wilde was obviously hiding something. Something major. Something to do with the boy who looked like Sam. He obviously thought I was onto him and that’s why he hated me so much. If I could just find out what it was he thought I knew, I could use it somehow to make him back off. And at the same time, I could maybe find some closure about Sam, stop being haunted by him and be able to sleep through the night again. I needed to tackle the whole situation head on. I needed answers. I’d just run out of places to look for them.
The weekend could not come fast enough. Friday was the worst. Tennyson Wilde had clearly not been showing enough approval for the bullying techniques of the general school population, so they decided to up their game. Most of it was fairly low grade — spitballs and tripping me in the hallway, rude messages via social networks. Annoying but nothing I couldn’t handle — but it ended with me face down in the fountain after once again leaving the dining hall hungry.
“I’ll go find you a towel,” said Hannah, ducking off into the gardens toward the Red House. “I’ll be back in two seconds.”
I sat in the fountain alone as I waited for her, trying to dry off my glasses while cupids shot water at me from all directions.
“You should leave this school,” said Tennyson Wilde, melting out of the shadows and into a distinctly jerk-shaped blur.
I snorted and shoved my glasses back on my face. “You think you can bully me into leaving? You are such a jerk.” I stood up and climbed out of the fountain, water pouring off me. “You don’t know me, so let me tell you a thing,” I said, and started wringing water out of my hair. “There is nothing you can do to make me leave here. Nothing you can say or do is more important than what I get if I stay. I don’t know what I did to you to make you act like such a massive butthole, what you think I know or saw, but you do not want to throw down with me, because you will not win.”
He stared at me for a long moment, making me fully aware of how I dripped water all over the pristine paving stones, how my uniform didn’t fit properly and my glasses slid down my nose. I was a mess and he was immaculate, and that was clearly obvious to us both. A smirk curled his lips and he turned and walked away.
I watched him go, but with each step he took, my anger built up. What an arrogant jerk, walking away from me like that, as if I wasn’t even worth the effort, as if I would just pack up and go home because he got some kids to throw spitballs in my hair and push me in a fountain. He thought he could just treat me however he liked and I’d have to give in. That was obviously how he’d dealt with every problem he’d ever had in his life.
Standing there, shivering in my wet uniform, I got madder and madder. It wasn’t just Tennyson Wilde, it was everything he stood for, the idea that money was power. I might be poor but I wasn’t weak, and I’d prove that to him. I squelched after him, but my uniform was heavy and chafed my skin, and he was at the Zen garden by the time I caught up to him.
“Hey!” I said. “Stop right there!”
He stopped walking but didn’t turn toward me.
“You owe me an apology,” I told him.
“I owe you nothing,” he said, turning suddenly and walking toward me. “You have brought this all on yourself. I told you not to pry into my business and yet you continue to ask questions and snoop around.”
I snorted and took a step closer to him, standing almost toe to toe. He was taller than I’d thought, and I had to tilt my head up to glare at him. He smelled all clean and pine fresh and it made me hope that I dripped mucky fountain water all over his shiny shoes.
A mist had rolled in from the sea, creeping slowly across the garden floor, but despite that, the night seemed somehow brighter, as if there was a glow from somewhere in the garden.
“You jerk, you think you can just treat people however you want?” I poked him in the shoulder. “Cutting off my food, blocking my student access, setting your flunkies on me, you think that’s how people act in the real world?”
He looked down at where my finger dug into him, then back at my face, his eyes filled with disdain. “This is my world.”
I was momentarily struck dumb by what an arrogant, doucheface jerk he was. He seemed to take that as a sign the conversation was over and started to move away, but I was so not done. Now that I had him there, I was getting some answers.
“Who is that boy, the one who looks like Sam?”
An expression flickered over his face, and I knew he was trying to think up a lie. He definitely knew something. The mist wrapped around us, seeming to shimmer with a blue glow but I barely noticed it, I was so intent on Tennyson Wilde and how close I was to finding some answers.
“I saw you talking to him and I know you know what I’m talking about,” I told him. “Just tell me the truth.”
Everything fell silent as the echo of my words hung strangely in the air. It was as if someone had hit a mute button on the night, sounds I hadn’t even been aware of shut off – wind in the trees, the trickle of water in the pond. I looked around the garden, confused.
Then a sound broke the silence, a strange sound, like the air itself was shattering. I narrowed my eyes at Tennyson Wilde but he looked just as confused as I felt.
“Take heed!” a voice boomed out.
Tennyson Wilde and I both jumped and spun toward the voice. Someone had clearly slipped something funny into the water supply, because the statue of Professor Amaris had stood up from his Buddha pose and was pointing right at us. The entire garden was now lit with the glow coming from him, the blue glow that had seemed to be in the mist. The core of the light was a small orb, around the size of a baseball, that Professor Amaris held in the palm of his left hand.
“Take heed!” he repeated in his booming voice. “Those of you with secrets in your heart and falsehood on your tongue. A light has arrived to shine on your darkness, to clear away your shadows. There will be nowhere for you to hide.”
It seemed that he wasn’t speaking figuratively. The light grew brighter and brighter, until it was blinding. Then there was that same sound, like something delicate shattering. All the light in the garden condensed for a moment into the orb, small and impossibly bright, then exploded outward, like thousands of tiny blue fireflies.
Only, they were definitely not fireflies. Some of them swarmed on us, passing completely through our bodies or vanishing into us, but I couldn’t feel them. They had no physical form. The other lights zipped off in every direction, into the gardens, toward the school and the forest and the houses. I had no idea what it meant.
There was still light around the professor, the outline of the ball of light hovering like a ghost, now just a dull glow. He opened his mouth wide, wider than seemed possible, and swallowed it down, then closed his mouth again and settled back into his Buddha pose.
“Well, that was weird,” I said, then jolted. It felt as if something had forcibly pushed the words out of me. I suspected it was one of those blue lights that had flown into me, though my evidence for thinking so was circumstantial.
Tennyson Wilde stared at me with such coldness, I thought I’d get hypothermia.
“The nonconsensual use of witchcraft is a very serious offense,” he said. “You need to lift this spell immediately. Do not come near me or my house again.”
Chapter 6
I walked back to the house in a daze, barely even noticing that I was still soaked through.
“You’re always complaining that your butt looks big, but I don’t see you swapping out those Doritos for a salad,” I heard a girl say as I passed the door to the house kitchen.
“Didn’t hear your boyfriend complaining when he was grabbing it in the common room last night,” said the other girl.
I hurried for the elevator. The doors slid open to reveal two boys taking swings at each other.
“Take it back!” one said, lunging for the other. “Take back what you said!”
“No! I only watched Enter the Dragon because you invited me over and I was trying to bang your sister,” said th
e other as he got the first guy into a headlock. “I thought it was the most boring movie ever! I don’t even like Bruce Lee at all, I think Chuck Norris would kick his ass!”
I stepped over them to get into the elevator. Something strange was definitely happening. Tennyson Wilde apparently thought it was witchcraft. He also thought it was my fault. I thought Tennyson Wilde was a bag of dicks.
When I got to my floor, it was to scenes of chaos.
I walked past a boy yelling uncomfortable truths at a closed door.
“Your eyes are too close together and you smell like marinara!”
There was a couple leaning against my door, making out.
“I’ve loved you since the second grade,” the girl told the boy.
“My father’s planning to take over your family’s company and he wants me to get close to you for insider information,” he said.
I pushed past them to get outside and away from all the madness. Hannah wasn’t in, I hoped she wasn’t wandering around the school grounds looking for me.
I peeled off my wet clothes and jumped into the shower. As I let the hot water warm me up, I thought back over what had happened. There had been a talking statue and strange lights, so obviously hallucinations. Possibly connected to my Sam hallucinations, but I didn’t think so. I’d definitely seen Tennyson Wilde talking to someone who looked like Sam, so I was leaning toward the lookalike theory over the hallucination theory with all that. The Sam weirdness seemed to be a whole different weirdness to this new and vividly improved sort.
Tennyson Wilde had definitely seen the statue and lights though, and everyone was acting strangely. There was probably something in the water supply or the food. Maybe the air. The only other explanation I could think of for the shared hallucination and strange behavior was an illness, maybe some type of virus. There was a campus doctor but he was a fly-in, so an appointment time had to be scheduled in advance. I’d do that online after my shower, and look into collecting samples of the food and water.
I shut off the shower, feeling much better now that I had a plan of action which was logical and had nothing to do with witchcraft.
When I left the bathroom, Hannah was back in our room.
“Are you okay?” she asked, looking up at me from the sofa. “Everyone is acting really weird. First weekend of term, I guess, but I was worried.” She held out a bag of peanuts for me. “I got you these.”
I settled in beside her. “People here are always weird.”
There was no way I was telling her about the lights and the talking walrus man. As nice as she was, I got the feeling she already thought I was a bit odd. I caught her looking at me sometimes as if I was a problem she could solve. Talking to her about having hallucinations definitely wouldn’t help with that. Still, when I spoke there was that sensation again, of something moving around inside of me, pushing out the words.
Hannah sighed and scrolled through her Netflix queue on the TV. “What will you do about Tennyson Wilde?”
Whatever was causing the weird sensation, the hallucinations, I figured I needed to know exactly how it affected me. I’d told Tennyson Wilde to tell the truth and now it seemed as if everyone was being truthful, though whether that was just part of my psychosis wasn’t clear. Testing it out on Hannah seemed the safest thing. I tried to lie to her and say I was ready drop the whole thing and move on.
“I’m not just going to forget what he’s done,” I said. The more I tried to resist the words and tell a lie, the stronger the sensation became, like the truth was being pulled out of me. “I can’t just drop it. He’s definitely hiding something and I’m determined to find out what it is.”
“You should be careful,” she said. “Milo may be paranoid but he’s not wrong about the Wilde family. They’re really powerful.”
“Tennyson Wilde is a jerk.” It was true facts. I couldn’t lie.
“Maybe so, but that’s even more reason for you to watch out for him.”
There were drugs that worked like truth serums, sodium amytal and that kind of thing, maybe it was something like that. The Wildes were a powerful family but the school was full of kids from powerful families. If someone wanted to get the secrets of the business and political worlds, they could bug the school, drop some truth serum in the water and put some well-placed questions out there. It could be rival families or journalists… it could be anyone. Anyone with access to the school. To be honest, I wasn’t so fussed about corporate espionage but it made me sick to think someone had taken away my free will. It was terrifying, not being able to control what came out of my mouth, having my bodily autonomy taken from me. I wasn’t about to just let that go. It was probably another student, but I couldn’t rule anyone out. I knew the teachers had to go through like a thousand security checks but the brochure hadn’t said anything about other staff.
“The staff here are very good, aren’t they,” I said to Hannah as she kept scrolling through her queue. “I haven’t even seen them around.”
“Staff?”
“Cleaners and cooks and gardeners, you know?”
She shrugged. “I think everything is sent out, but I know the chefs are flown in each day. Most things are automated, probably.”
I didn’t see how stuff like trimming hedges or changing bed sheets could be automated, and I made a mental note to look into it later. Everyone was a suspect.
If it were a truth serum, or even a virus, there would still be rules. A polygraph test could be fooled if the person taking it believed an untruth or knew how to control their bodily responses. If I knew the rules, I could protect myself from what was happening.
Hannah started playing a Harry Potter movie and I settled in to watch it. I couldn’t say anything that wasn’t true but I wondered if I could make statements that were subjective.
I tried to say, “Prisoner of Azkaban is best.”
“I think that Prisoner of Azkaban is best,” is what came out.
“Deathly Hallows,” Hannah mumbled, clutching a cushion to her chest as Dumbledore appeared on Privet Drive.
Okay, so I could only state things as opinions, not truths. I reached around for my bag, taking out some of my computer repair work to do while I watched the movie. I’d gotten a bit behind on it with everything else going on, and the orders had started piling up but I could get most of them done over the weekend to send out Monday. The school had a fast and efficient postal service, at least. And the work would help my brain sort through everything.
I wondered if I could state things as fact if I didn’t know them. I wasn’t sure, but I tried.
I tried to say that it was all Tennyson Wilde’s fault.
“I bet this is all Tennyson Wilde’s fault.”
Hannah was too engrossed in the movie to even look up, but I thought it was kind of fascinating. Creepy and horrible, but fascinating. I couldn’t state things that I didn’t know for sure, but how did my body know that? Was it because I was aware that it wasn’t a complete truth? Logically, it seemed as if there was some sort of interruption between my brain and my mouth, but within my body, it still felt as if those little blue lights were jumping around, finding the truth and forcing it out of my throat.
I thought it over as we watched Harry Potter and by the end of Chamber of Secrets, I’d caught up on most of my repair work and was getting sleepy. My brothers called me on Skype, but I declined the call. I tried to send a message saying I’d call back later, but I couldn’t type the lie, so I just sent a message saying I was busy. That was only part of the truth, but apparently lies of omission were okay. I didn’t want to risk talking to them and telling them I’d been seeing things, or how much I missed them, or how despite all the rich stuff, Amaris was kind of awful. There were so many truths I didn’t want to spill to them. I went to bed feeling kind of down. I hoped that whatever had happened would just wear off in the night and when I woke up things would be back to normal.
The first thing I did the next morning was try to tell a lie.
“My pajamas are blue,” I said. They were blue, I’d tried to say they were yellow.
Hannah was curled up asleep in bed. I didn’t want to leave the safe bubble of our room, but I couldn’t just sit around and let this thing take its course. I gathered up some water and food samples and took them to the science labs to test for anything weird. There wasn’t a lot I could do with my limited scientific knowledge, and the Internet mostly just said to buy a testing kit or to send my stuff to a lab, so I did what I could with some pH strips, ammonia and a Bunsen burner. Nothing strange appeared. Well, eventually Mr. Corbett appeared and told me to get out, but nothing strange in the food or water. Which didn’t mean anything, except maybe that I needed to study that kind of thing more.
I gathered up my stuff and headed back to the Red House. Mr. Corbett was a jerk. What did it even matter if I used the science labs on a weekend? It wasn’t like I was using them to cook up some meth or whatever. I’d clearly just been doing a simple experiment.
I wandered aimlessly through the gardens, trying to think of other explanations for what had happened. Before I realized it, I was standing in the Zen garden. It looked just as it had the night before, and yet completely different with the morning sun streaming down, no creepy mist or weird lights. It would’ve been peaceful, but for the person standing by the pond.
“Returned to the scene of the crime,” said Tennyson Wilde. “I suspected that you would.”
I rolled my eyes. “You do understand that whatever happened is affecting me as well, so when I tell you I didn’t do it, I’m not lying.”
“Do not take me for a fool, commoner. I’ll not fall for your manipulations.” He locked his hands behind his back and turned to face the statue. “It is common knowledge that the spell has no effect on the caster.”
I snorted, edging closer to the pond. It was so tempting to push him in, but probably not worth the fallout. So tempting, though.