“Yep. By the looks of it, he took the opportunity after classes ended. Mind you, he didn’t find anything, but this is why we shouldn’t leave the room unattended. I’m stocking up on Parliaments while it’s still warm enough to walk to town, and if he finds the stash it’ll be a long winter.”
“It’s always a long winter.”
“You’re missing the point, Nim. The last thing we need is Sanders in here looking through our stuff.”
“Right, sorry: Karl called. Where were you, talking to Miss Mercier?”
“No, detention. And for the record, I’d take the detention any day over chatting with Uncle Karl.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
I took a seat on my bed and pulled my boat shoes off, arranging them neatly by the dresser before unpacking my bag. There were a dozen or so assignments that needed to be done over the weekend, but I had no desire to do any of them.
“You were really talking to Karl all that time? Hard to believe, seeing as both of you are in competition for who can say the least.”
“He talks when there’s a lecture to be given,” I said. “But I ran into Julian in the hall, and he stopped me for a while, too, so ...”
“Wynne? What’s he want?”
“Information.”
“Obviously, but what’s he think he’ll get out of you? We haven’t been up to anything in months.”
Ignoring his irritated tone, I flipped open my Physics book and tried to remember what chapter Volkov had gone over in class that day. Every series of equations looked the same.
“He’s just completely enthralled with the local news, here.”
“So he really is bored with life.”
“Not exactly. Apparently some girl was found in the water earlier today. Dead.”
Jack raised his eyebrows.
“Weird,” he said. “I mean, exciting, sure, but weird.”
“How’s it weird?” I said, again feeling as though I was the only one reacting properly so such disturbing news.
He shrugged.
“You just don’t expect murders to happen on the island, do you? Usually small towns weed out psychos fairly quickly.”
“I didn’t say that she was murdered,” I said. “Just that she was found in the water. It could’ve been an accident.”
“Could’ve been. But women don’t really die of accidents, do they?”
“Of course they do.”
“No, they don’t: men die of accidents.”
“Women can die of accidents, too, Jack,” I said. “It’s not like prostate cancer, you know.”
“Ah, but it is,” Jack countered, his mischievous love of conspiracies alighted. “You see, men weren’t built to last. We were made to hunt, kill, and be killed. Look back at our male ancestors and see how they died, and I bet none of them died of old age or whatever. Cave men were either killed in the wild or else by another guy who wanted his wife and cave, you know?”
I rolled my eyes and continued to look for my assignment, attempting not to look entertained by another of his ridiculous theories.
“No, really, Nim, it’s true,” he continued. “I took Social Anthropology – I know this stuff.”
“You took Social Anthropology with me,” I said incredulously. “And you failed.”
“Whatever, I got the gist,” he said, waving me off. “The point is, men are the ones who cut off their arms with power tools and walk through glass doors, right? But women, they don’t end up in the emergency room with weird injuries unless someone else inflicted them, you know what I mean?”
“No.”
Jack sighed.
“Women don’t die of accidents: they either live to see old age, or they get killed. It’s as simple as that.” He leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms as though the point had any validity whatsoever. “I mean, think of the last three women you know who’ve died, and I bet they fall into one of those categories, right?”
It only took a moment of the statement hanging in the air before its inference sunk in. Jack’s nonchalance turned to guilt at the realization of what he had said, but I bit the side of my mouth and feigned ignorance to keep the conversation away from the subject of my mother.
“Probably.”
Jack shifted awkwardly and cleared his throat.
“Anyway, we’ve got more interesting things to think about than Wynne’s newest obsession,” he said, shrugging the subject off. “I was talking to Miss Mercier after class today –”
I rolled my eyes and turned back to my assignment once again. Jack spoke to his French teacher, Miss Mercier, so often that it was almost tedious to hear him relay the conversations. Though he was far from being the only student who had taken a liking to her, he was certainly the most candid in his preoccupation with her, often waiting after class to speak with her or else joining her in her room during his study halls. He was also the only one who had become set on the idea of visiting the French Riviera solely because it was the region of France that she was from, and while I was just as eager to get as far away from Bickerby as possible, I wasn’t quite sure that the place would have seemed so spectacular if it wasn’t Miss Mercier who had told him as much.
“—and she explained the whole visa thing, and it doesn’t look like we’ll need one so long as we don’t stay too long. So now all we need is for you to turn eighteen and we can go.”
“And a few thousand dollars, and to graduate, and to think of a way to convince Karl,” I said, carefully copying down an equation from the textbook, “but, yeah, we can go.”
“Ah, don’t worry about Karl,” Jack said with a wave of his hand. “He’ll be so sick of you by March that he’ll offer to drive you to the airport. And we don’t need to graduate, despite what you think.”
“We do if you don’t want my father sending the policia after me.”
“Gendarmerie, Nim, and I’m not talking about your father: I’m talking about Karl. You could easily pull one over on him without him ever seeing it coming. If it was me, I would’ve upped and left right when he showed up at your front door.”
“Right, but this is me,” I said, “and I would never do that.”
“True. You avoid confrontation at all costs.”
“I avoid speaking at all costs.”
Jack cackled.
“Good thing you took a dead language,” he said. “Though it won’t do you much good when we go to France. You know, if you would just come to the Foreign Language meetings with me, you’d pick up some French.”
“I can’t go to those – Latin’s hardly a spoken language.”
“So? It doesn’t matter. We speak in English, after all. Mainly we just talk about international cultures.”
“Sounds like dinner with my father.”
“Hardly. Come on, Nim, it’s fun – we all just ask questions to the international students and talk about other countries we’ve visited or want to visit. You’d like it.”
“We have international students at Bickerby?”
I couldn’t imagine what would attract someone from another country to come all the way to America just to live at the edge of the earth on a snow-laden island. Jack seemed to know what I was thinking.
“Well, we have three,” he admitted. “And they’re Canadian … but that’s not the point, Nim. The point is that the meetings are a good time, and you need to go somewhere besides for the library. It can’t be good for you.”
“It’s good for my grades.”
“Apparently not. Come on, Nim – they’re fun. Miss Mercier runs them, after all. Just come to one, and if you don’t like it, I’ll never drag you again.”
He grinned in his infectious way, and I pushed aside my homework with the realization that it would never get done that night.
“All right, I might come,” I said. “Is it tonight?”
“No, Thursday.”
“Oh. I have to see Beringer on Thursdays.”
“Ugh.”
He made a face at the mention of the psyc
hiatrist, undoubtedly considering a way to convince me that Beringer had purposefully scheduled our sessions on the same day as the Foreign Language meetings just to prevent me from going.
“He’s doing this on purpose. It’s what they do, Nim, those doctors,” he had said, as though there was scientific evidence to back up his theory. “You can’t trust them.”
“I can’t skip the session, Jack. You know he’d freak.”
I kept my voice low even though we were alone. I went through quite a bit of trouble to keep the other students from knowing about Beringer, going out of my way to sneak into the sessions and pick up the medication he prescribed when no one was around, and I didn’t want my efforts to be ruined by Jack’s loud voice. Dropping my eyes back to the textbook, I chewed the inside of my mouth apprehensively.
“Yeah, he would. He’d probably send a search party for you,” Jack said drearily.
“Probably.”
“Of course, he might just go find you by himself,” he said, his voice once-again taking on its maniacal enthusiasm. “Stalk you down in the woods when you’re alone … offer to walk you back to your dorm and tuck you into bed –”
I gave him a disgusted look.
“Stop,” I said.
“I will,” he said. “But Beringer might not …”
I rolled my eyes.
“Please,” I added, though I knew it wouldn’t do me any good. Jack loved having the opportunity to discuss his negatively-lit views of Beringer. Whether his dislike of the man whom he had never met stemmed from an aversion to authority figures in general or just displeasure that my father was convinced there was something so wrong with me that it needed medical attention was unclear. Or perhaps he was simply trying to make light of the entire situation for my sake, assuming that I must have hated Beringer and everything that went with the weekly meetings, and I had just never bothered to correct him.
“Do you know why people want to become psychiatrists?” he said.
“To help people.”
“Right, you keep telling yourself that. It’s because they’re crazy. Really, Nim, who wants to be around lunatics all day?”
He was fishing for a response and I obliged by answering, “No one.”
“Exactly: no one sane. But crazy people love to be around their own kind. It makes them feel more normal, I think. Gives them an opportunity to not be the weirdest person in the room for once.”
“Right,” I said, barely paying attention.
“Now, you know why people want to become child psychiatrists?”
“To help children?”
Jack ignored me.
“Because they’re crazy … about children.”
“Oh, God,” I muttered.
“Do you ever wonder why Beringer’s so keen to come all the way down here just to see you, late at night, all alone?”
Though I did often wonder why Beringer would consent to make the trip all the way out the island just for one session, I felt confident that the reason could at least in part be explained by a generous salary from my father rather than any of Jack’s insane theories.
“Please stop,” I said again, shaking my head.
He cackled and stood to go to dinner, but I opted not to join him with the excuse that I had to finish my homework. He didn’t bother to ask if he should bring anything back for me; I was never quite hungry enough to eat the food at Bickerby.
When he had gone, I shut my textbook and slid off the mattress to go to the window. The campus was dark and silent below, and in the distance the glimmer of the dark ocean was just visible through the trees. Unwillingly my mind returned to the dead girl that Julian had spoken of, and though I knew nothing about her, I pictured her body floating in the water, face-up but faceless, blonde hair billowing out around her head like a halo as the strands rippled in the water, and wondered how it would feel to sink below the surface until the water became black and the air was squeezed from my lungs.
I took a step back and shook the thought from my head. It would do no good to think of such things now, especially given how much time and energy I had put into pushing the thoughts to the back of my mind. But as the silence in the room weighed down around me, images of the fair-haired woman who was somewhere between life and death, with eyes half-open but incapable of seeing, continued to burn against my skull. In my mind I imagined stepping away from her and running away from the beach, leaving her alone on the shore to fade away. I didn’t want to think of her anymore.
But I wondered if she ever thought of me.
Ch. 2
Apart from constant chattering about the dead girl, the weekend had brought with it an intense cold spell that fell over the campus, and by the time that Tuesday arrived I was glad that the Columbus Day holiday had passed despite having failed to complete half of my assignments. With the realization that I was too tired from another fitful night’s sleep to get any more of it done before classes began, I accompanied Jack to the dining hall, our heads bent low to block out the wind as we crossed the grass. When a particularly harsh gust finally eased up, Jack poked his face back out from his sweatshirt and looked over at me.
“And you really want to wait this out until graduation?” he said in exasperation. “Think about it, Nim: it’s sunny and warm in the French Riviera right now.”
I was too cold to take my face out of my jacket and didn’t reply until we were inside the dining hall. Getting onto the back of the line, I grabbed a tray and quickly slid it down the counter.
“If you can think of a good way to get me there without my father noticing, please let me know. If not, then you’ll have to be patient until I’m eighteen.”
“Nah, I got nothing,” Jack said, unhurriedly filling his tray with everything in reach. “Not even I’m crazy enough to think that there’s a way to slip past your father. I just thought you might’ve found a way to convince him to let you go.”
I gave him an incredulous look, but he was too busy collecting the last of the bacon from its tray and adding it to his plate to notice.
“I could never convince my father to do anything,” I said.
“I know that, but he obviously has hope that you’ll become argumentative. He’s sending you to law school, after all.”
“We both know that’s not going to happen.”
“True. Though really, he should’ve figured it out himself by now. You can’t even win an argument with yourself, does he really think you’d be able to become a lawyer?”
“He likes a challenge.”
“Evidently.” Jack smirked. He finished filling his plate and waited for me to pour myself some coffee before we found a place to sit down. The majority of the tables in the room were empty by now, a telltale sign that we were running late, though Jack seemed none too concerned as he began to eat at his usual pace. I gulped down my coffee quickly in comparison even though it was too hot: Volkov wouldn’t hesitate to demerit me for showing up to his class even a minute after the final bell.
“But you do live with a lawyer,” Jack continued halfway through a forkful of food, “so you at least have some idea how to lie.”
“Karl’s not a real lawyer,” I reminded him. “He’s a tax lawyer – it’s like a glorified accountant. I don’t think he’s ever stepped inside a court in his life.”
“Well, there goes that plan, then,” Jack replied with a shrug. “I guess we really will have to stick around until March. Shame we can’t switch birthdays – no one would care if I was gone.”
“Miss Mercier might,” I said.
“Good point. She’d probably notice if I stopped coming to class – God knows I’m the only one who pays attention.”
“I thought everyone paid attention during her class?”
“I meant that I’m the only one who pays attention to what she’s teaching,” Jack corrected. “They pay attention to her, all right.”
He made a face and finished his breakfast in silence and we broke off to go to our separate classes. I turned in the dire
ction of the Science Department, intent on making it in time and avoiding a lecture from Volkov, but I had only reached the front door and stepped inside the building when the bell rang. The artificial lights overhead flickered as I jogged towards his classroom and sent my shadow scampering across the wall. I reached the door to Volkov’s room and gently pulled it open.
Even though the door only made the slightest of sounds when it closed, Volkov immediately took notice of me. He was a white-haired, thin man with sharp features and a hand that always held a metal pointer that gave the impression that it was more likely to be used to hit someone than to point to his slides. His eyes followed me as I slipped into the back row and took a seat next to Cabail Ibbot. I kept my head low as I took out my notebook and pen in the hopes that he would let my tardiness slide for once.
“Mr. Lund,” he called back to me. “Perhaps you can solve the equation on the board.”
I glanced up to squint at the board. It was a fairly straightforward example, not unlike the ones I had done for practice a few nights before out of the book, but I had no intention of standing up in front of the class and writing out the answer with everyone watching me. Volkov was staring at me expectedly. I shook my head.
“I assume that means that you don’t know the answer, as well as not knowing how to tell time?” Volkov asked, and then turned to address the entirety of the class. “If you don’t know how to solve problems such as this one by now, you should not bother to take the next exam.”
I kept my eyes down on my paper. Beside me, Cabail was sneaking a glance at me. I knew that he knew the answer to the problem on the board as well. He was nearly three years younger than me, overtly odd, with round, thick glasses that magnified his eyes to an unprecedented size, and had never spoken aloud that I had heard. The seat next to him was almost always empty. No one wanted to sit by someone both far younger and far smarter than they were. I didn’t mind so much, though, because despite being more intelligent than me, Cabail was also decisively stranger than I was. At least I knew that when people glanced back to where we were sitting, they were whispering about him, not me.
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 2