by Anita Oh
“Place your index finger on the sensor,” said a computerized voice from the gate.
I did as it said and waited. A green laser light shot out and ran over me. I raised my eyebrows. The Golden were definitely hiding something. Something more than a possibly zombified Sam. Nobody needed that kind of security. Not even the president had that kind of security, or the queen, or Beyonce.
“Lucy O’Connor, Red House,” the voice said. “Access: restricted.”
Something clicked and the imposing gate creaked open.
I stepped inside slowly, carefully, as if the ground would give way at any moment. The Golden Garden was amazing, bright and otherworldly. I had never seen trees like that, with shining golden leaves. Bushes of cheery yellow flowers were arranged in artful groups around the garden walls, and the whole place seemed to have an air of hope, of optimism. It was probably easy to be optimistic if you were a gazillionaire.
The house seemed more like a castle, turreted towers rising from each corner of the building, in a rich sandstone that glowed gold in the afternoon light. I walked toward the house, no longer sure what to expect. I’d thought their house would be tacky, somehow, overdone. I hadn’t expected the simple beauty of it.
Suddenly, I was grabbed from behind. I struggled, but whoever held me was strong. Two men in masks, I realized, as I twisted around, trying to break free. I was so stupid. I was going to sleep with the fishes, just like Milo had said. I should’ve known better.
They put a stinky cloth over my face, smothering me with it, and within seconds, I was knocked out.
When I woke up, there were no fishes, at least. I was tied to a chair. I’d been stripped down to my underwear and a bunch of weird wires had been taped to my body. The room was bare, with stone walls painted white, and I could hear the ocean right outside. Through a high window, I could see that it was night, but I had no clue how long I’d been unconscious. To my left was an old wooden door, and to my right was a small table with a box that all my wires were hooked up to.
Standing beside the table was Tennyson Wilde.
“Wow,” I said. “I knew you were a jerk, but I didn’t realize you were criminally insane.”
“I’m only doing what is necessary,” he said, twiddling a knob on the box.
“Where are your hired goons?” I asked, looking around as much as I could.
“They weren’t hired.”
I snorted. Like that made a difference.
“They weren’t goons, either; they were from the polo team.”
I snorted again. Polo. I knew it was for jerks.
“What is your full name?” he asked me.
“Are you serious? Is that a polygraph machine?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Lucy O’Connor. And I think you’re a jerk.”
“You need to state the question as part of the answer, please.”
“My name is Lucy O’Connor and I think you’re a jerk.”
After that, he made me say my date of birth, home address, all things that were irrefutable facts.
“Is this even legal?” I asked him. “It was bad enough when you were just stalking me from the shadows, but this is probably going a bit too far. You know, I could go to the media with this: Tennyson Wilde is a big creepy jerk who ties girls up in their underwear.”
“My family owns the media,” he said, unbothered as he twiddled his knobs. The big knob twiddler.
“Why do you even need a polygraph? It’s not as if I can lie.”
“As I told you previously, you cannot fool me. I know that the spell has no effect on the caster,” he said. “What energy source did you use to cast the spell on the school?”
I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t cast any spell. I don’t know any witchcraft.”
He narrowed his eyes at me and then went back to his machine.
“Where did you learn the spell?”
“Is your machine broken?” I asked him. “I didn’t learn the spell anywhere. I don’t know witchcraft. I don’t even believe that’s what’s going on here.”
It went on and on and around in circles. Tennyson Wilde was the most stubborn-headed mule I had met in my whole life. He asked me the same questions in every variation, twiddling his knobs and jotting down little notes. It was lucky I’d joined C&C club instead of a club where you didn’t get food, or I’d have wasted away to nothing, because I was in that little room for at least ten years.
“I don’t know what I can say to convince you,” I said to him, after the millionth question. “When are you going to start on the torture part of this fun adventure?”
He stared at me blankly. “I have no intention of torturing you.”
“As if being kidnapped, tied to a chair and asked the same question a million times wasn’t torturous enough,” I muttered. “In a freezing cold room in my underwear.”
He seemed surprised. “You’re cold?”
“Are you for real? I’m tied to a chair in my underwear. Of course I’m cold. It’s like two degrees in here.”
“Oh.”
Oh, he said. He twiddled his knobs some more and then moved out of my line of sight. Well, that was new, at least.
“I’ll let you leave,” he said, his hands surprisingly warm against my skin as he untied me from the chair. It made me feel exposed in a way I hadn’t earlier, when he’d been standing across the room, barely looking at me. “But don’t think that this is over. I have no intention of letting you be until you’re out of our lives.”
“Whatever, jerkface,” I said, ripping his stupid wires off me and tossing them to the floor. “I don’t even want to be in your life. I just want you to leave me alone.” I grabbed my clothes from where they were hanging over the back of the chair and started pulling them on, anxious to be out of there and away from stupid Tennyson Wilde. “I don’t know why you’d think I care enough about you and your stupid secrets to go to the trouble of learning witchcraft to find them out, but here’s a newsflash for you: I don’t.”
“You care enough about Sam,” he said quietly, facing away from me, neatly winding up the cords of his stupid polygraph machine.
“Even if I did,” I said, being extra careful of my wording as I pulled on my shoes, “even if I did care that much about him, that is not how I roll. I might not like you, I might think you’re the biggest jerk I’ve ever met, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to go to all this effort to hurt you. I have better things to do with my time. And the fact that you expect the worst from people like that does not tell me good things about you.” I picked up my bag, which he’d placed by the doorway, and stomped my foot down to get my shoe on all the way without undoing my laces. “So suck it, jerk.”
I left the room to find I was at the top of some sort of tower. I made my way down the winding stairs, assuming it was just one of the towers I’d seen at the Golden House, but when I burst through the door to outside, I found I was at the edge of a treacherous cliff, and the tower was actually a lighthouse. The lighthouse shone out over the water below, long, sweeping stripes of golden light. There was only a slight clearing between the cliff where the lighthouse perched and the forest.
“Oh yay,” I muttered, edging along the forest line to look for a path.
I had very limited options, none of them appealing, and I was just weighing up whether getting myself lost in the forest was worse than going back into the lighthouse with Tennyson Wilde when something flashed from within the forest. Eyes, I realized. Some sort of animal was watching me. Before I could creep myself out thinking about the possibilities, the animal came toward me, and I realized it was the wolf that had led me to Sam.
“Oh, hey, wolf. Are you here to lead me to safety?” It wouldn’t even be the weirdest thing that had happened to me since I got to this school. “What do you think of that jerk, Tennyson Wilde? Can you believe him?”
I would definitely take Option Three: Follow the Wolf over Option Two: Ask Tennyson Wilde for Help, any day of the week.
The wolf turned back in
to the forest, and I hurried to keep it in sight.
“Don’t leave me stranded again, buddy,” I said. “That didn’t end so well for me last time.”
The wolf’s eyes flashed again as it looked back at me, and it huffed as if it thought I was talking nonsense.
“You don’t even know,” I told it. “The forest is where the fun is on this island, let me tell you. The school is no fun at all. The people are mean, and you can’t just frolic about chasing bunnies.”
It would be so much better being a wolf, I thought. Things would be simple. If you wanted to provide for your family, you just hunted some food, made a little den. You didn’t have to earn money and go to a fancy school and carry all this stress around. I could totally hunt bunnies. Maybe I should’ve joined the archery club instead of the eating club.
Before I knew it, I stumbled out of the forest and into the Red Garden. The wolf waited at the tree line as if it wasn’t sure I’d make it safely back to the house without supervision.
“Thanks, wolf buddy,” I told it. “You’re a lifesaver.”
I could’ve sworn it nodded at me as I walked away, but maybe I’d just watched too many movies with anthropomorphic animals as a kid.
I was exhausted when I got back to my room, and kind of pleased that Hannah was already curled up asleep in her bed and I didn’t have to try to explain where I’d been or what had happened. I didn’t even know if I could explain it. Things just kept getting weirder and weirder.
I got ready for bed without turning on the light so I wouldn’t wake her, so it took me a moment to notice the little golden box sitting on the table at the end of my bed.
“This came for you,” said a note in Hannah’s handwriting.
I hesitated before opening it. I’d just been kidnapped, so I wasn’t sure what to expect – maybe my little brother’s finger or an ear or something? But it was way worse than that.
It was mac and cheese. Mac and double cheese with bacon and olives. The best mac and cheese in the world, just like Sam’s mom used to make.
I put the lid back on the box and went to bed, but it was a long time before I fell asleep.
Chapter 9
My blood test results came back and they were fine. I was healthy as an ox. A super healthy ox. That was a good thing but it put me back to square one as far as fixing this thing went. It was getting worse and worse. I felt constantly lethargic, as if I had weights strapped to my body, pulling me down.
Everyone else obviously felt the same. Classes were practically empty and a spirit of gloom filled the halls. Nobody even bothered to bully me anymore. I’d heard a few people complain of nausea too, and when I opened a bag of study snacks, Hannah clapped a hand over her mouth and rushed to the bathroom. I had to come up with some sort of solution before I got too sick to do anything.
I’d been looking for the cause of it, but maybe that wasn’t the way. Tennyson Wilde was delusional, but maybe his method wasn’t so wrong. He thought I was to blame and he focused all his efforts on getting me to stop it. Someone was obviously behind what was happening. Rather than looking for the cause, I should find the causer. I’d find the culprit and get them to fix whatever they’d done.
I started by hacking into Tennyson Wilde’s blog and creating a poll. People loved him, they’d answer anything he asked, no matter how strange or invasive. I asked what they were doing the night I’d seen the talking statue. I asked about their knowledge of truth drugs and airborne viruses. I put in some control questions as well, and some tricksy ones, and made sure they had to include their name, house and class. I changed all the fonts to Helvetica, because for some reason that just seemed very Tennyson Wilde, and made the typeface white on black. I was just about to post when I rethought it and added in a question about witchcraft. It was just as Assistant Head Noel had said at the start of term, once you ruled out the impossible, what was left was the truth. I couldn’t overlook something just because I thought it was poppycock, that would skew the results.
I sent out a school-wide alert about the poll, then waited for the results to come in. They were much faster than my water samples or blood tests. By the time Hannah emerged from the bathroom, most of the school had answered. I collated all the data into a spreadsheet, and after analyzing it, there was one person who was clearly more suspicious than the others.
“I didn’t do it,” I said to the screen, exasperated. “Why would I?”
Hannah barely looked up from the cocoon she’d made in her bed, but after a few minutes her results came in from the poll as well. She tried to act as if she didn’t care at all about the Golden, but even she wasn’t immune.
As the last few answers filtered in, I went over and over them to find something, anything that might help. Most people had a watertight alibi for the night everything went weird. I was operating on the assumption that whatever had happened couldn’t be activated in advance or on a timer or anything like that, but I put a little note to explore that possibility at some point if I needed to. Of the people without alibis, most had no knowledge that would enable them to execute such a dastardly scheme. That actually ruled out most of the student population. What was left was the Golden and two sophomore girls who hadn’t answered the poll, and a senior boy called Tomlinson Myer who knew way too much about strange chemicals. When I looked them up on social media, it was obvious the sophomore girls were innocent. They’d live tweeted about how they snuck out of school for the weekend to go to a Justin Bieber concert.
The poll didn’t account for teaching staff, but I’d double-checked about the fly-ins and all unauthorized staff had to be off school grounds before 6pm each day. There were strict measures in place to make sure they didn’t stick around. Plus, they obviously weren’t affected by whatever had happened, because I’d heard the teacher we had for math say to Astor “good work” but that was an obvious lie because Astor did neither good nor work. I crossed all fly-ins off my list as irrelevant. That only left the campus teachers. The day everything had gone strange, Assistant Head Noel had spent half of morning assembly taking about how he’d be off speaking at academic seminars for the next few weeks, and a quick Google search confirmed that was true.
I had a shortlist. All I had to do was make my way through it and surely I’d come up with some answers. If only investigating Tennyson Wilde and his creepy secrets was so easy.
Wednesday was a good day to investigate the teaching staff. I had Mr. Porter in the morning and Mr. Corbett later on. Mrs. Pritchard taught economics in eleventh and twelfth grade, so I’d have to be creative when it came to her.
Mr. Porter was easy to rule out. Something had definitely dimmed his sparkle – he didn’t even work up a good rant when I asked him his opinion of The Da Vinci Code and Astor said it was the best book ever. The apathy had clearly gotten to him. He was so pale and had such dark circles under his eyes that he looked like a panda bear. I thought about staying after class to question him more, but felt too sorry for him to bother him.
I decided to skip gym class to find Mrs. Pritchard, figuring so many people were off sick that one more missing student would go unnoticed. I looked up where her office was. If she was in class I could maybe just snoop around a bit.
Her door was open a crack, so I poked my head in. There was nothing that seemed particularly evil or witchy, no plaque that said “Mrs. Pritchard: Econ Teacher and Evil Witch,” or like animal bones or virgin blood or anything.
“May I help you?” asked a voice from behind me.
I jumped and spun around, knocking my elbow into the door. Mrs. Pritchard stared at me with her lips pursed.
“Yes, sorry!” I said. It so was hard not to lie sometimes, but I was getting better at it. You could imply things with questions or body language or qualified statements. “Do you have any advice you’d give a young girl thinking about a career in economics?”
I felt a bit bad as Mrs. Pritchard’s eyes lit up and she guided me into her office. She obviously didn’t get too many students in
terested in her subject – I supposed if you were super rich you had people to take care of that kind of thing for you. As she talked, though, I became more and more into in what she was saying. I loved money almost as much as I loved food. More, maybe, because money could buy food but also other things too. If I got super good at economics, maybe I’d be able to hoard money the same way I had that stash of snacks in my drawer, only in a more figurative way.
“I always wanted to be an economist,” Mrs. Pritchard told me sadly, “only my husband said I was too stupid and pushed me toward teaching. Well, who’s laughing now? Not him, because he’s dead!”
She looked at me with her big sad eyes, as if she wasn’t even aware she’d said anything strange.
“Never let anyone tell you what’s best for you in this life, and never get married,” she said, twisting her wedding ring around and around on her finger. “You can’t do my class until next year, but if you want to sit in on it sometimes, I won’t mind.”
I promised I would and then left her to it. It definitely wasn’t her; she had both the truth and the tiredness. Two down, one to go.
I should’ve gotten Mr. Corbett out of the way first. He was the worst, the actual worst. Hannah had said that Tennyson Wilde was the actual worst, but Mr. Corbett… No, Hannah was right, Tennyson Wilde was the worst. But Mr. Corbett was a different sort of creepy jerk.
It was even worse with everyone out sick, because he had fewer targets to pick on.
“Quiz,” he grunted as the bell rang.
One of the Green girls put up her hand. Stephanie Von Something or other, I thought, but all those tall blonde girls were hard to tell apart.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, gathering up her things. “I’m feeling unwell. Might I please be excused?”
He put a hand on her shoulder and guided her to the door, making sympathetic noises. He was always nice to the pretty girls, but I’d rather have him be mean than putting his meaty hands on me.
“Sir?” I asked him as he handed out the quizzes to the remaining five of us. “What do the teachers do on a Friday night? Say, the Friday night before last, for example.”