“You don’t have to do that.” We fought over possession of my arm until I gave up for lack of space and excess of interest from onlookers.
“You’re making a scene, new girl.” Dex smirked.
“Smirked” is a weird word. You see it a lot in books and think you know what it means, but it’s not a feat many can pull off. Not like him.
“You really don’t have to follow me,” I insisted. “Really. Truly. Preferably …”
It’s exceptionally difficult to map out someone’s social downfall if you’re dragging a five-foot-ten, hundred-and-sixty-pound stalker. I’d hoped to figure out where Brooks went after he left not-trig, but the window of opportunity on that one had shut. “I know where I’m going.”
“We’re side by side, which puts this firmly into escorting territory, and no you don’t.” He angled the shoulder with my bag on it away so I couldn’t take it back.
I was sure he thought this routine was creating endearing aggravation, but all it did was tempt pre-Lowry Dinah into coming out to play for a few minutes and reminding him how different girls from Ninth Street were compared to the ones here.
“Ones downstairs, twos upstairs, threes in the annex,” I said.
“And Mr. Tripp outside in the courtyard.”
That wasn’t on my schedule.
“It says room three twenty.” I waved my slip in Dex’s face as I wondered what the school charter had to say about sending the new girl on a wild-goose chase.
“Normally, yeah, but he’s got some sort of special project brewing, and he told us to meet outside since the weather’s been so warm.”
“If you’re lying, I will hurt you.”
“If I’m lying, you’ll get your chance in detention. I’m in the same class.” He confiscated my schedule and looked it over before sticking it in his pocket. “I’m also in your gym class, and theater.”
He took my arm again.
“So you’re trying to pass off convenience as manners. I think I need to see a copy of this charter thing.”
“You have one, if Headmistress Kuykendall gave you a new-student folder.”
I tried to get ahead of him and slip into traffic, resigned to letting him keep my stuff for the time being, but that wasn’t as easy as it should have been. Not when the person I was trying to evade was taller and had control of my arm. Dex pulled me to the right when I headed left at the bottom of the stairs to go out the back doors.
“Courtyard’s this way,” he said.
“This school needs GPS,” I grumbled.
“You don’t need it. You’ve got me.”
I made a mental note to tone down my Claire impression in the presence of any boy but Brooks. There was no other explanation for Dex’s response unless hair bleach was made from smart-ass pheromones. Random guys did not just walk up to me, take possession of my body parts, and assign themselves as my personal entourage.
“I’d rather figure things out on my own,” I said.
“We’ll just end up there at the same time anyway. I might as well get some brownie points out of the deal.”
“You don’t strike me as the Girl Scout type.”
“I have a little sister,” he said. “Brownie points are very important.”
“Only if you earn them.”
“I earn everything I get,” he said. “Otherwise, I get nothing. People like us have to look out for each other. Once you pass the front doors, ‘friend’ becomes a multitiered arrangement, and, believe me, we’re never on even ground.”
Okay, so maybe Dex was climbing up the “like” list a bit.
We went out the front doors and turned down a covered walkway that led past the parking lot. I hadn’t noticed much about the grounds when Dad dropped me off, other than to realize they were very green, but now that I had a chance to look around and take it in, Lowry was beautiful. Even the area not covered by an awning wasn’t really open to the air. Huge oak trees grew everywhere that wasn’t asphalt. Leaf-patterned shadows created a shaded patchwork on the ground and our skin. This was the sort of place they used as backdrops for our class photos in fifth grade, and the kind that showed up in travel magazines when fall turned the leaves different shades of red and gold.
“This way.” Dex tugged on my arm again.
We left the walk and headed to the side of the school building, where a tall iron gate grew out of the wall stones. Beyond, a group of students milled in a courtyard, staking claim to ornamental rocks for seats. A couple of people took off their blazers and sat on them instead.
They gathered around a middle-aged man with a silver suit, silver hair, and silver-rimmed glasses, who had taken over a bench under the biggest tree I’d ever seen outside a brochure for Disney World.
“It was planted the year they laid the school’s foundation,” Dex said, pointing at the tree. “Eleanor Lowry’s husband and son are buried under it.”
“You made that up.”
“It wasn’t all that uncommon in her day. They died in some kind of epidemic; the tree’s a memorial. She’s buried here, too, but her grave’s sealed under the foyer. There’s a marker carved into the marble if you want to look for it.”
I was going to school on dead people. Scratch that—my aunt and uncle were paying a fortune for me to go to school on dead people. The only things buried under Ninth Street were gerbils.
Rich people were weirder than I thought.
“Does it bother you?” I asked.
“The graves?”
“Being around so many people who come from a completely different place even though they live in the same zip code?”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“Money uncomplicates a lot of things,” I said. “I didn’t have the bloodline or the grades to get in here. My uncle made one phone call and the next thing I know … Prep School Barbie.”
“Your choice or his?” Dex asked.
“Mine. I thought it would be worth it.”
“It can be. Just think of Lowry as a stepping-stone. Things aren’t all that different here.” He pushed the gate open and held it for me. “If you watch where you’re going.”
“Sure they aren’t.”
I glanced back at a parking lot full of Porsches and BMWs; I was sure I spied a Lamborghini near the edge.
“There but for the grace of God and a seven-figure trust fund go I,” he said.
5
As promised, Mr. Tripp didn’t make me give a speech or stand in front of the class to introduce myself. He scribbled my name in his ledger, handed me a book out of his crate on wheels, and told me to find a seat with everyone else.
Dex didn’t give me a lot of choice about where that would be. After he’d dragged me up to meet Mr. Tripp, he led me back the other way to an empty spot on the ground next to a pair of girls who were too absorbed in their own giggles to notice they had company. He opted for the “make a pallet from your blazer” approach; I flopped down on the bare grass and stretched my legs out, while double-checking to make sure English lit was free of people I wanted to flay alive. I could only hope Brooks was saddled with the Gargoyle and thoroughly miserable—preferably in a room where the ceiling dripped asbestos-tainted water on his head.
“So what’s in Oregon?” Dex asked.
“Sky.” I picked at some of the pricklier shoots of grass and let the breeze blow them off my fingers. “Mountains. Rivers. Lots of open space.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Yeah, it does sound that way, doesn’t it?”
“Ouch.”
The sound of pain, very appropriate. Oregon was beautiful, but so are most deadly creatures. And for the few months I’d lived there, I existed in a vacuum. No air, though I was surrounded by it. I could shout and scream, and all I’d get for my trouble was my own echo mocking me.
“Is it safe to ask about your cousin,” he asked, “or does that look on your face mean something’s about to burst out of your thorax and kill me where I sit?”
Old mo
vie references. He sounded like my friend Brucey.
“She’s in the hospital,” I said, just like I had in not-trig. I pulled my knees up under my chin so I could rest my head against them.
“Does she have cancer or something?”
“No.”
There were ways to treat cancer. Claire would have fought cancer. Cancer wouldn’t have left her in a bloody mess on her bathroom floor with a razor still clutched in her hand. What got Claire was subtler than cancer. It had rotted her from the inside out and left no trace of itself behind.
“An accident?” Dex guessed again.
“Not exactly.”
Not at all. It was intentional, and malicious, and selfish. Evil, like the devil himself.
I mulched another handful of grass. Too much that time; it left green splotches on my hand that wouldn’t wipe off.
“What happened to her?”
“Long story.”
Claire met Brooks; he was evil—the end.
Dex finally took the hint that it was a subject best dropped, and moved on.
“Look, I get that you’re in a bad place. You got tossed into a new school that you obviously don’t like—”
“I like it fine.”
“If this is fine, I’d hate to see you angry.”
“You’ve known me all of fifty-five minutes.”
“I’m good at reading people.”
“Then maybe you should try another translation. I’m—”
“Fine?” he asked. “I won’t argue with you, but sometimes it helps to get an outside perspective.”
But what do you do when you are the outside perspective?
I was the intruder. I was the one who didn’t fit, and apparently all my effort at remaking myself into a typical prep-girl had flamed out. Starting conversations wasn’t something I did naturally. I stuck with the friends I’d had since grade school, even after I moved out of state. Tabs, Brucey, and I talked more online than I did to anyone in Oregon (despite my mother’s best attempts to pair me off with every new acquaintance she deemed worth my time and hers).
Why couldn’t I do this? People did this every day. Claire did this—easier than anyone I’ve ever seen. I just had to figure out the mechanics and apply them.
“What do you want to know?” I asked.
“Anything,” he said. “Something simple. I know you don’t like pink, so what else are you hiding under that blazer?”
“I refuse to be held responsible for my actions if you ask me my favorite color.”
I didn’t get to find out if he thought that was funny or not. The bell rang, signaling the start of class, and Mr. Tripp called for attention. At least he was interesting to watch; male teachers with ponytails certainly weren’t the sort of people I assumed I’d be stuck with at Lowry.
“Tell me why you got rid of the nose ring,” Dex whispered while Mr. Tripp was busy trying to set up a large easel for his whiteboard.
“Because it’s against the dress code.”
“But why didn’t you keep the metal and go back to Ninth Street? Wouldn’t you have been happier there?”
Dex had this way of talking that made it impossible not to pay attention to him. He wasn’t what I’d call handsome, but he was … captivating. Maybe that’s the word. The tone of his voice was like listening to someone with perfect pitch. I know it sounds stupid to say it like that, but it’s true. You couldn’t sit close to him and not feel better.
Most people look at you, or past you, when you speak to them, but Dex looked me straight in the eye. We must have blinked at the same times, because I never noticed him move at all. It was unnerving, and after a while, I didn’t have to pretend all those butterflies were flitting around in my stomach. I could have puked monarchs.
“What does it matter?” I asked.
“It doesn’t.” He shrugged and took up my habit of picking grass. “I just wondered why your parents sent you here.”
“They didn’t mail me—I asked to come back.”
“You didn’t want to move to Oregon in the first place, did you?”
“I begged them to let me stay with my aunt and uncle.” If we hadn’t moved away, I’d have been here when Claire needed me. I dug my heel into the ground until the dirt showed through, ruining the green perfection of the lawn. “Claire’s the closest thing I have to a sister.”
“Claire’s your cousin?”
“Yeah.”
“Pretty name. I like it.” He smiled as though there were a good memory attached to his words.
“You’d like her, too.” Everyone did. “When my uncle called about her being in the hospital, Dad flew me back, first thing.”
“Just your dad?”
“Mom doesn’t do well with hospitals.”
Dex nodded idly, as though he understood, but he couldn’t. The only way to understand my mother and the poison cloud that rises from her presence is to experience it firsthand. Dex didn’t deserve that for being nice to me.
I obliterated a flower that had the misfortune of growing close enough for me to reach. It was a weed, so I was sure no one cared.
“Dad said I could stay here if I wanted, and my aunt and uncle had already paid Claire’s tuition for the year, so I asked if I could come to Lowry instead of Ninth Street. Going to school here makes me feel closer to her.”
“She was a student here?”
“This was supposed to be her first year. Uncle Paul came into some money, and she’s definitely smart enough to fit in here. He thought she’d like it.”
As much as people didn’t fit with me, they would have clicked with Claire in an instant. She would have had thirty new numbers in her contact list by the end of the day, easy.
My thoughts turned sour, picking up the thread of all the things Claire should have been doing besides lying in a hospital bed, and I became acutely aware of the fact that I was wearing her clothes. Her itchy skirt and the stabby headband she would have found a way to love, and her white knee socks picking up grass stains. It should have been her sitting there on the ground, chatting with a guy who wasn’t Brooks Walden and wouldn’t send her into a tailspin because he got bored. She should have been the one getting guided tours and flirting in Eleanor Lowry’s family cemetery, not me.
When Mr. Tripp finally won his battle against the whiteboard and started class, I tried to pay attention, but it was no use. It didn’t even matter that the lesson was a darkly ironic reading of Alice Through the Looking-Glass. I couldn’t get my thoughts to settle down; it took all my energy and concentration not to start crying right there in front of everyone. That would have meant looks and whispers and questions I didn’t want to answer.
If Dex spoke again, I didn’t hear him. He was a distraction, and I’d let him knock me off my goal too easily. I’d offered up too much information. The more specifics people knew about Claire, or me, the more likely it was that Brooks would figure out that my presence had something to do with her. I’d almost said as much to Dex. He was too easy to open up to, and I wasn’t familiar enough with the phenomenon to know how to counter it.
So I went on autopilot. I set my inner alarm to ignore and coasted through class; then I drifted to gym, following Dex as he once again appointed himself my escort. I changed my clothes and lined up obediently with the rest of the girls the way Coach Blackwell told us to. I played basketball. I shot. I ran. I even scored six points.
All while wearing a burgundy T-shirt with “C. Reed” stenciled on the back.
As my body was guarding a girl named Brooke (who should be happy I didn’t hit her in the face with a ball for that fact alone), my mind was back on point. I had a purpose for being at Lowry. One that didn’t involve things like trying to make friends or flirting for the fun of it when someone else started the game. Forget the fact that under normal circumstances, Dex was a guy I might have actually liked to talk to, or that his personality reminded me of friends I already had. I was there for Claire, not me. And by the time I was finished, things like friends
and chitchat wouldn’t matter anymore.
6
Dex was a traitor.
Worse—he was a minion. I’d spent the better part of my morning being grilled by the devil’s right-hand demon and hadn’t even realized how dangerous he was. After he took me to the door of my history class (which was next to his), he spent the last five minutes of the passing period cutting up with Brooks and trying to get me to participate.
“I found a stray puppy and brought her in out of the rain,” he said.
“It’s not raining, idiot,” Channing spat. She stood leaning close to Brooks in what I assumed was a move to mark her territory. I should have known the leech would be attached to the beauty queen.
“Hi,” Brooks said with the sort of smile I’d have thought charming if I hadn’t known better.
“Hi,” I said back.
A one-syllable test word to prove to myself I could speak to him without any sort of crackle or rise in my voice. Thankfully, his fingers were once again occupied with his pen, so he couldn’t shake hands or anything else that required skin contact. Speaking, I could force myself to handle. Touching, not so much.
“What’s that?” I angled for a better look at the paper he was holding on top of his book.
“Nothing, really. Just something to fill the time when Greystone wasn’t watching.”
“That’s an awful lot of ink for nothing.”
“It’s a high-rise,” Channing supplied. “Brooks designs buildings, but his plans are too complex for anyone to actually build.”
“They won’t be someday.” Brooks slid his paper into his book. “You’re Diane, right?”
“Dinah,” I corrected, mentally cheering that Mr. Perfect had screwed up.
“Oh … sorry. I’m usually better with names.”
“ ’Sokay. You’re only about the eighth person to say it wrong. Today.” I turned to the girl beside him. “You’re Channing, right?”
“Chandi,” she corrected. “I’m changing it. Channing’s too long for a stage name. Plus, there’s a guy already using it and I don’t want to end up androgynous.”
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