Knowing that Volkov wouldn’t waste valuable class time giving me multiple reprimands, I took out my copy of The Aeneid so that I could produce at least part of the translation to hand in for Latin. I was so engrossed with finishing the last sentence that I didn’t hear the bell ring until Cabail’s magnified eyes rotated around in his head and settled on me. He looked like a huge, spindly bug trapped within a glass jar, peering at me in a silent request to be let out. I stiffened and looked up at him. To my surprise, he opened his mouth and spoke.
His voice was a young, twisted sort of sound. It sounded as though he was being strangled by some invisible force deep inside a tunnel.
“What are you doing here?”
I turned my head ever slightly, wondering what he meant by such a question.
“What do you mean?” I said. “I have class.”
“I know,” Cabail said. His huge eyes stared unblinkingly at me. “So why are you still here? Physics ended six minutes ago.”
I jumped and looked around. Surely enough, the seats in front of me were empty. I couldn’t fathom how the class had filed out of the room without me noticing, but I didn’t have a moment to spare to think about it. Jumping up, I gathered my notes and book from the desk and slid them into my bag before making a dash for the door. Cabail watched me all the while. I let the door swing shut on his blank face.
The campus was clear again, indicating that I was indeed as late as I feared, and I shot across the grounds and through the central gardens at a run in order to get to the Foreign Language Building as quickly as I could. I ran the length of the hall, slowing only when I saw the door to Albertson’s room, and took a moment to take a few huge breaths and regain a normal breathing pattern before opening the door.
Albertson’s room, unlike Volkov’s, was not based in a large lecture hall but rather a small classroom. There were less than two dozen students who sparsely filled up the seats, heads bent low over their translations, with Albertson seated at a desk at the front of the room. It was, essentially, an impossible room to enter without detection. Albertson glanced up at me.
“Sorry, Mr. Albertson,” I said, my breath still heaving. I sat down quickly and reached for my book. Albertson gave me a faint smile but said nothing. I blew out a breath of relief at my evident reprieve, glad that I wouldn’t be called out twice in a row in front of the class by the teacher, and shakily took out my homework. It was considerably wrinkled from how I had shoved it into my bag and looked like a poor excuse for a graded assignment; I hesitantly smoothed it out with my arm, but the paper remained wrinkled and the ink smudged. I sighed in discontent.
As we set to work on a practice translation that was written on the board, Albertson rose from his chair and came to stand by my desk. I looked up as his shadow fell over me, and he slid the paper onto my desk.
“Your exam from last week,” he said in explanation.
“Thank you, Mr. Albertson.”
When he turned away, I flipped over the exam and did a double-take. The paper was filled with so many red marks that it would have been easier to point out which parts were correct rather than incorrect. Noticing the number written across the top of the page, I wondered for a fleeting, desperate moment if it had been graded out of something other than the standard hundred points. I bit my tongue and laid the exam back down on my desk, face down. Another low grade. I seemed to have received more in the past two semesters than I had in all the other semesters at Bickerby combined. I wished that there was a way I could disappear across the ocean with Jack after all.
When the bell sounded at the end of class, I hurriedly picked up my things and slid them into my bag to leave, but had only just turned to the door when Albertson called me back.
“Mr. Lund.”
I paused and waited for the rest of the class to file from the room. A heavy silence fell around us that I in no way wanted to fill.
“Yes, Mr. Albertson?”
I tried to act oblivious as to why he had stopped me despite knowing that my exam grade was quite possibly the lowest that Albertson had ever graded. I turned back to face him but didn’t approach his desk, hoping to remain as close to the door as possible.
“Mr. Lund, I thought you might want to discuss your exam with me,” Albertson said.
I kept my face impassive. Albertson studied me with flickering eyes.
“I’m sure you have some questions,” he continued kindly.
I squinted and glanced towards the door, anxious to leave, and then looked back at Albertson. I should have liked him, I supposed, with his kind nature and heavily-wrinkled smile. He had continued teaching long after he was due to retire solely because he enjoyed the subject, and not even the fact that his class numbers dropped lower and lower with every year could discourage him.
“No, I don’t have questions,” I said. I could hear my voice was flat and cold but couldn’t think of how to fix it. Albertson frowned slightly at me.
“None?”
“None.”
He looked at me for a long while, surveying my face in a way that I didn’t like at all – as though he could read every thought just by tracing the circles beneath my eyes – before finally speaking again.
“Enim,” he said, with an odd emphasis on my given name, “I understand that you’re going through a … difficult time right now. I was sorry to hear about your mother.”
I dropped my gaze to the floor and bore my vision into the white linoleum. The artificial lights overhead sent a horrifying gleam glaring back at me; the light hit me in the eyes painfully, but I dared not look away. I didn’t want to see Albertson’s expression. He had no right to go looking into my life; he was trespassing where he didn’t belong.
“I’m willing to let you retake the exam,” he said at last.
My face twitched and my untendered energy boiled down into my legs, making them restless. I wanted to run from the room or jump through the window, but I couldn’t. Albertson was waiting for me to say something.
“Thank you, Mr. Albertson,” I said quietly.
He nodded slowly.
“I just want to see you do well, Enim; I hope that you know that.”
“Of course.”
I turned and fled from the room before he could continue the conversation. It was hard to decide which was worse: Volkov’s irritated ridicule of me or Albertson’s gentle compassion for my wellbeing. I wished that I could sink into invisibility and not have to worry about either of them anymore, but it was evidently too much to ask to be left alone.
I made my way to the dining hall and crossly waited in the long line just to get a cup of coffee. Holding it carefully by the rim, I set it down at an empty table and watched the steam rise off of it.
“That’s not all you’re eating, is it?”
I looked up at the friendly voice that masked an accusation and found Julian standing in front of me. He was holding a lunch tray and his roommate, Kyle Trask, was at his side. I eyed him skeptically, wondering why he felt it was any of his concern if I was skipping a meal, when they sat down across from me. I instinctively leaned back, unaccustomed to sitting with anyone other than Jack at any given time.
Trask took a large bite of his sandwich and, halfway through chewing it, addressed me.
“So, Enim, you heard about that girl in town?” he asked from Julian’s side. I moved my eyes over him. He put the emphasis on the wrong part of my name, unaccustomed to using it. I wondered what he normally called me behind my back.
“I heard.”
“Exciting, right? We were all talking about what happened to her. We’re taking bets, if you want to put something in.”
I raised my eyes to his carefully. Sometimes I wondered if he could hear himself speaking. Other times I simply wondered how Julian could insult my friendship with Jack when Trask was clearly a worse choice.
“What’d you mean, what happened to her?” I said. “She died, didn’t she?”
“Well, yeah. We’re just wondering how.”
“I assume she drowned.”
“No, Enim –” Julian laughed and glanced at Trask. “We mean, how’d she die? It’s not like she went for a swim in these temperatures and cramped up.”
I eyed them carefully as they waited for my response.
“She might’ve,” I said noncommittally. I raised my coffee to my mouth and blew on it to cool it down faster. If Julian kept talking, I was going to need an extra cup or so to ward off a headache.
“Oh, come on, Enim – it’s got to be something more exciting than that. Kyle thinks she jumped.”
I sucked in the coffee unintentionally and burned my lips and tongue. Spluttering out the hot liquid, I coughed violently. It had already scorched the back of my throat.
“I know, right?” he continued, taking my surprise as something entirely different. “I mean, I don’t really think so, but it would at least make a better story than what they’re saying now. Something about her toppling off the cliffs after a run ...”
The image of her falling into the water and plunging down beneath the surface, never to come up again, came to my mind. I sucked in my breath and was unable to let it out again as though I was drowning as well.
“Are you all right?” Julian asked.
“Fine,” I said, but my tone said otherwise.
Julian’s eyes moved off of me to look over my shoulder. I followed his gaze and saw that Jack was heading towards us.
“God, does he ever go away?” Julian muttered in irritation, but then, realizing that I could hear him, added, “Well, we’re going to meet up with some of the other guys, but ... I’ll see you around, Enim.”
The two of them picked up their trays to find another table and I waved my hand vaguely in a farewell. I wished that Julian would let the subject of the dead girl drop; the more I heard about it, the less interested in the details I became. I certainly didn’t want to hear that she might have killed herself.
“You look like you’re in severe pain – you didn’t have to reenact Caesar’s assassination in Latin, did you?”
I glanced up, torn from my thoughts. Jack had arrived at the table and taken the seat that Julian had just vacated.
“What?” I said distractedly, only half-wondering why he would think that we would reenact something from the first century BC when The Aeneid took place in the twelfth.
“Nothing, Nim, it’s a joke,” Jack said. “What happened to you?”
I pressed my fingers against my temples as the headache that had been threatening to form behind my eyes finally arrived.
“Nothing, just listening to Julian,” I said.
“Yeah, I suppose Wynne would have that effect,” Jack agreed. “What’d he want, anyhow? Or is he just so bored with his own life that he thought he’d check in on yours?”
“He’s just still going on about that dead girl.”
“Right, him and everyone else,” he said distractedly. “Listen, I was going to take my lunch up to Miss Mercier’s – I had a few things to ask her.”
“Right, sure. Have fun.”
I had barely gotten the words out when he bolted off again, and I finished my coffee and left the dining hall before Julian could think to rejoin me. I had been hoping that Jack would give an entertaining monologue during the meal that would take my mind off of the conversation with Albertson, and without it my headache only worsened as the day went on.
By the time that classes had ended for the day, I had received another reprimand from Donovan for failing to hand in a history essay, and Doyle had interrogated me with questions about chapters from the book that we were supposed to have finished over the weekend, both of which successfully heightened my sour mood. Since Jack would be in class for another hour, I paused in the Center Garden and considered going to the library to begin my homework before my mind flickered to another idea. Without thinking of the consequences, I turned and wandered in the direction of the woods instead.
Bypassing the front gates adorned with the newly-made Bickerby shield, complete with a thick varnish to protect the figure of the opossum and school motto, Curre, ante ursos manducare vobis, I approached the place where the grass met the trees and ducked beneath a branch to enter the woods. Though the air was colder without the sunlight and the ground beneath my boat shoes was hard and frozen, there was something in the way that the trees circled about me and blocked out the noises and view of Bickerby that eased my mind.
I walked deeper and deeper into the woods until every side of me was a sight of a thick expanse of brown tree trunks. With the way that the pine needles fell upon the path and the sky looked peeking through the diamond-shaped cutout in the branches above, it looked remarkably like the woods in Connecticut that had lined the backyard of my childhood home. I wished that I could pretend I was there instead.
A chill swept over the spot and compelled me to keep walking. My hands were stiff in the cold and my sweater was much too thin to keep me warm, but I continued walking until I caught sight of the slab of rocky clearing ahead of me. With another few hesitant steps I left the dirt ground and approached the cliffs that overlooked the water.
My mother had always loved the water. The majority of my memories of her were located on the beach, her blond hair turning wavy as it dampened and her white dress catching in the wind. She would clutch her light sweater to her as she crossed barefoot across the sand, too impractical to ever wear a proper coat or shoes.
I inched forward and took a seat on the edge of the cliffs. From there the land plummeted straight down into the ocean in one long, ugly drop. Regardless, I swung my legs a bit to ward off the cold, my shoes dangling over the deep blue pit below, and stared off into the distance. A few years back Jack had managed to convince me to dive off the cliffs for a thrill, assuring me that as long as we jumped out far enough there was no danger in it. I couldn’t imagine ever doing such a thing now.
My eyes darted down to the rocky beach that was a part of the Bickerby campus. If what Trask said was true, that was where the dead girl had washed ashore. With its gray stones and the murky hue of the water, it looked solemn regardless. I tried to picture my mother in her white dress and loose sweater capering across it, but the image of her was marred: I could see her stumbling as her bare feet hit the sharp rocks, and the way her face would pale in the cold, and how her eyes would reflect the graying skies and look hollow and chilled as well. She wouldn’t be happy here. But she wouldn’t be anything anymore, I reminded myself firmly.
I shook my head to dispel the thoughts. I shouldn’t have been thinking of her, especially not there on the cliffs. I had spent months learning to keep away from her memory, and yet the traces of her that were most detrimental could still not be cleared out. Her memory floated back to me with every glance at the ocean and every note coming from the Arts Building that I hurried past at a rapid pace, and despite the months that stretched between the moment when she had gone and the present, the memories were just as present as ever and they would not leave me alone.
When the sun sank down on the horizon, looking like an egg that had broken against the surface of the water and pooled down below the depths, I stood and wandered through the darkness back to the campus. In the night Bickerby was as forsaken in appearance as ever, and I hurried through the Center Garden and onto the poorly lit path before anything could make its way out of the darkness.
“You have pine needles in your hair,” Jack commented as I sat down across from him at dinner.
I futilely tried to rake them out, but my arms felt heavy and numb with cold. After a moment of watching me struggle, he reached over and pulled them out for me.
“Thanks,” I said lowly, more grateful that he hadn’t asked me where I had been than I was to have my hair clean.
“No problem.”
Leaving my bag next to the seat, I stood and went to get some coffee. There was a hollow burning beneath my ribcage as I passed the line of food, and I selected a roll from the bread basket in the hopes of impeding it. By the ti
me that I sat down Jack was nearly finished.
“Can’t wait for this semester to be over,” he said, observing a spoonful of jelled-dessert with boredom before eating it. “Wish we were in France right now.”
I tore a piece of bread and put it in my mouth, but my hope that it would dissolve on my tongue ended when I tasted how stale it was. I took a gulp of coffee and waited for it to grow soggy before swallowing.
“Me too,” I said tiredly.
Jack glanced up at my tone, but before he could comment on it something behind my back caught his eye. He slouched in his seat and averted his eyes.
“Ugh – Nim, quick: pretend like we’re deep in conversation.”
“What? Why?”
I half-turned to see what had distracted him, but he grabbed my arm to hold me still with a warning look.
“It’s Porker,” he said. “Trust me, Nim, you do not want to –”
“Enim?”
He was cut off by a timid, unfamiliar voice behind me. I slowly turned in my seat to face whoever had spoken and was surprised to find that the voice – which had sounded so small – came from someone very large. He stood next to the table awkwardly, hands clasped together in front of his stomach nervously, as his eyes darted between me and Jack. There was a light misting of sweat on his face as he waited for me to speak.
“Hi,” I offered uncertainly. Though Jack had uttered a name just a moment before, I hadn’t registered what it was. I shifted uneasily as I considered that I should have known him if he knew me, but he didn’t look at all familiar.
“I meant to catch you after class,” he said, “but you ran out too quickly.”
“Right, yeah, I was ...” I faltered as I tried to come up with a proper excuse; without knowing what class we had together, it was too difficult to decide what to say. “I was ...”
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 3