Behind me, Jack chuckled. I ignored him.
“I was wondering, since there’s an exam coming up, if you wanted to study together,” the boy continued. “I mean, I was pretty confused at the last part of the lecture, and I thought that maybe you knew what it meant.”
“Ah ... right, the lecture,” I said, frantically trying to think of which class he could be referring to. “Right, so that was ...?”
“Hi, Thomas,” Jack said, leaning forward in his seat as he finally chose to save me from my discomfort. “Fancy seeing you here, in the dining hall.”
“Jack,” the boy said, barely taking notice of the insult as though too accustomed to them to give it much thought. He turned back to me with a much friendlier tone. “Yeah, I mean, normally I wouldn’t ask, but Mrs. Beake said that this one would be more difficult, so ...”
“Right, Calculus,” I said with relief. “Yeah, her exams can be difficult.”
“Great – so you’d want to study with me, then?”
I gave a tight smile as I faltered for an answer. Regardless of the fact that I hadn’t even known his name, I couldn’t imagine why he would want to study with me: I certainly didn’t want to study with him.
“Ah ... I already studied for it, actually,” I said.
“Even how to derive logarithms from class today?”
“Well, not ... not that, I guess.”
“Great, so we can go over it together! How about we meet on Thursday?”
I had barely inclined my head when he beamed and hurried away. As I turned back around in my seat, I found Jack glaring at me with a deadened expression.
“Nim, why did you agree to that?”
“I couldn’t say no.”
“So you said yes? Do you realize what you just got yourself into?”
I shrugged.
“It won’t be so bad.”
“Are you kidding? It’s Porker, Nim.”
“What’s that mean?”
Jack rolled his eyes.
“Do you know why he asked you to help him study? Because no one else in their right mind would do it – it’s not like he has any friends.” He pushed away his empty tray to put his elbows on the table. “Trust me: there’s a reason that no one likes him, and it’s not just because he’s a complete joke. I had two classes with him last year. All he did was sidle up to people and beg for answers, then once he found someone to latch onto he wouldn’t let go. If I didn’t hate everyone at this school, I might’ve even felt sorry for them.”
He gave me a pointed look and leaned back in his chair.
“Do you know that his mother still sends him care-packages, too?” he added, as though the thought was worse than bidding for answers.
“So?”
“She sends them every week!” Jack shook his head. “He cries about how much he misses her – it’s pathetic.”
“Alright, so he misses his mother. That’s not the worst thing.”
“It is when you’re the one stuck listening to him.” He gave me a dark look. “If anyone has a right to cry over their mother, it’s you – and I’ve never heard you complain.”
I dropped my gaze to avoid answering and rotated in my seat to scan the dining hall. Surely enough, in the far back corner at an otherwise empty table, Thomas was sitting alone. He looked to be reading something whilst eating and accidentally spilled his food onto the page. I watched as he futilely tried to wipe it off, even dabbing his napkin into his milk to do so, before letting his shoulders slump in defeat. I turned back to Jack.
“It won’t be so bad,” I repeated.
Jack shook his head and tossed his napkin on top of his tray. He stood to leave, but I waved him ahead without me under the pretense that I wanted another cup of coffee. When he had gone, however, I stood to leave as well, ducking in the opposite direction to take the long route back to the residence building.
The campus was pitch-black and silent except for the sound of my shoes on the frost-covered ground. I shivered and pulled my jacket tighter around me, wondering what it was that was pulling at the back of my mind and filling me with unease, when the light on the side of the nearby building flickered and went off. I stood in the dark in the hopes that it would turn back on again, but the bulb appeared to have burnt out for good.
As the breeze caught and drifted over to where I stood, it brought with it the distant sound of music from afar. I strained to hear it, sure that I recognized the song, when it occurred to me that I was much too far from the Arts Building to hear anything of the sort. What was more, the classical notes were coming from a piano, and even if it wasn’t too late for any of the students to be practicing, I was certain that I was the only one who played that instrument.
Fumbling through the darkness, I hurried up the path to where it grew lit again and scrambled inside the residence building. My heart was pounding painfully against my ribs and the newfound silence in my ears was hollow and cold. I shook myself and reasoned that the music could have easily come from somewhere rather than the emptiness all around, but no amount of rationalizing could take away the numbness that had set in over my legs. No one at Bickerby knew that song but me: it had been taught to me by my mother.
Ch. 3
When classes came to an end on Thursday, I had nearly forgotten about the promised study-session with Thomas until I found him waiting for me at the back of Mrs. Beake’s room. Groaning inwardly, I forced a polite smile while hoping that he didn’t want to study for too long; I had numerous other assignments that were more important than studying for the exam.
We walked in silence across the campus to the library, a large building with ornately placed bricks decorating its façade. I frequented the library so often that it felt more familiar than the student lounge in my building, though it felt rather odd to walk in with Thomas in tow. I found a vacant table and set my calculus book out to the chapter we had discussed in class, but had no idea where to begin.
“So ... was there a particular part you wanted to study?” I asked.
Thomas scratched the back of his ear.
“Sort of ... all of it,” he admitted lowly.
“Right.”
I flipped to the beginning of the chapter and made a few comments about it, but it was clear that he wasn’t following what I was saying. After a few more minutes of struggling to go over it with him, the realization that Jack might have been right came over me.
“Do you want to just ... look at my notes for a while?” I asked after another half-hour had passed without getting much further than the first example in the chapter. He nodded eagerly and took my notebook, scrambling to copy down everything that I had written. I gave him a wary glance before deciding to do my Latin assignment while I waited.
“Does it make more sense now?” I asked when he passed my paper back a while later.
“Not really,” he said. “Hopefully it will tomorrow, though.”
“Right.”
I looked back down at my translation, which was just missing the last line, and squinted as I tried to recall the declension of one of the nouns.
“How do you do it?”
I looked up at his statement and found him staring at my pile of assignments with an expression of awe.
“Calculus, you mean?” I gave a noncommittal shrug. “Math’s kind of easy for me, so ...”
“Yeah, but what about the rest of it?” Thomas persisted. “How do you keep from falling behind?”
I looked at my paper and sighed.
“I don’t.”
“But you have to,” Thomas said. “They’ll take away your scholarship if you don’t keep your grades up.”
I looked up at him uncertainly as the tip of my pen continued to press down onto the page, leaving a horrible dark spot in the middle of the line.
“I’m not on scholarship,” I said.
“What?” he said. “But ... Only I thought you were, too, since you study all the time and ...”
He trailed off with a look of perplexit
y on his face, and I finally realized why he had singled me out to study with him.
“So you’re just like everyone else, then,” he said.
“What?”
“Smart, rich, good-looking. You’ve got everything.”
“I – that’s not true.”
I gave him an odd look as his tone turned cold. His offended tone didn’t match the fact that I had just spent the last hour allowing him to copy all of my notes.
“So why do you bother to study at all? It doesn’t matter if you fail a class.”
“Yes it does. Just as much is at stake if I fail a class, Thomas.”
He scoffed.
“Yeah, right. Your parents can just pay Barker off – I’d get kicked out of school.”
“My parents don’t pay Barker off. I just study.”
“Of course they do. What about what you and Jack did last year? Why didn’t you get expelled for that?”
I looked back down at my nearly-finished Latin translation futilely, not wanting to discuss the incident from the previous semester in the least.
“I didn’t believe it when everyone said you took the blame for Jack, and Barker let you off because your parents paid him off – but I guess it’s really true,” Thomas ridiculed.
“What?” I said, regardless that the statement was very close to the truth. “Who said that?”
“Everyone says it. Everyone knows it. Jack’s been in way too much trouble to have gotten off without so much as a detention, but you’ve never been in trouble before, so ...”
“It’s not true,” I said suddenly. The smugness in his tone irked me almost as much as the idea that everyone was still talking about what had happened did. I quickly tried to draw up another explanation in my head, but nothing was coming fast enough.
“Yes it is.”
“It’s not – that’s not why we weren’t expelled.”
For a split-second Thomas looked unsure.
“Then how’d you get off?”
“Barker just ... decided to let me off,” I said.
“Out of the goodness of his heart? Come on, Enim – you’re lying.”
“Not out of the goodness of his heart,” I said. My heart skipped several beats. “It’s because my mother had just died.”
The library, which was already quite quiet, grew more so at my words. Thomas’ mouth had opened a bit and he stared at me in silent shock.
“I ... I didn’t know,” he said at last.
I shrugged in what I hoped appeared to be a careless way.
“Now you do,” I said expressionlessly. Before he could offer the standard sympathies that I had grown all too use to, I collected my things and muttered a hurried goodbye. Once I had escaped into the cold air outside the building, I let out the breath that I had been holding upon telling the lie. My heart continued to beat irregularly all the way back to my dorm room.
“So how’d your date with Porker go?” Jack asked as I stepped into the room. “Do you think it’s love? Should I draw up engagement invitations?”
I sighed loudly and dropped my bag next to my bed, already mourning the loss of what might have been a productive afternoon.
“No,” I said heavily. I glanced over at him before adding in a low voice, “You were right.”
“Sorry? I didn’t quite catch that,” he said mockingly.
“You were right,” I repeated. “He’s ...”
“Annoying? Pathetic? An incredible waste of space?”
“Problematic,” I countered.
“What do you mean?”
I ran my hands through my hair and rubbed at my eyes.
“Nothing, he just ... he went on and on about how unfair it is that my father pays Barker off to let me stay in school.”
“He should meet your father – then he wouldn’t be jealous.”
“Yeah, well ... I don’t know. I didn’t know what to say.”
“Don’t tell me that you told him you’d help him study again,” Jack said incredulously. “Nim, nothing he told you could be sympathetic enough to waste your time with him.”
“No, I didn’t tell him that.”
“Good.”
“I told him that my mother died and that was why Barker let me off the hook last year,” I said tonelessly.
“Ah, Nim,” Jack said, shaking his head at me. “What’d you go and lie for? Who cares if your dad bought Barker off?”
“I know – I don’t know why I said it.”
He looked at me closely for a moment and I was afraid that he might say something more about my mother, but then he simply gave a shrug.
“Oh well, nothing you can do about it now,” he said. “Though next time you want to elicit sympathy, just say that you have a heart murmur or something.”
“Will do.”
He stood and stretched with a loud yawn and I felt myself growing more tiredly simply by looking at him.
“Want to go to dinner?”
I glanced at the clock.
“You go,” I told him. “I have to meet Beringer soon, so ...”
“Right, Beringer.” Jack rolled his eyes. “Have fun. If you decide to skip it, though, the Foreign Language meeting goes until eight.”
I nodded irresolutely and he donned his sweatshirt and left. With the realization that I wouldn’t complete any of my assignments on time, I pulled on my jacket and headed down to the Health Center, wishing futilely that Beringer could write me a note out of doing them.
Beringer’s office was at the far back of the Health Center in what had once been a filing room. The cabinets had been pushed to one side of the wall, lining it in harsh metal, to make room for a desk and chairs for the weekly sessions. Though cramped, it was warmly lit by a desk lamp rather than strewn beneath fluorescent lights, and it was as secretive as I could have hoped for.
“Hello, Enim,” Beringer said as I entered. “How are you?”
He smiled over at me across the desk where his hands were neatly folded over an open file. He was about the same age as Karl, though looked younger due to the lack of lines around his eyes and mouth that had drawn across Karl’s face in recent months; and though he wore the standard dress shirt, slacks, and tie that Karl did, there was something far more relaxed in his appearance than the other man could ever hope to have. It was the type of nature that my mother had had that could always put me at ease.
“You seem distracted.”
I blinked and shook my head at his voice, aware that I had been staring blankly and had failed to answer his question.
“Sorry, Dr. Beringer. I was ... thinking.”
“Oh? About what?”
“Just ... classes.”
He waited a moment to see if I would go on, but I dug my eyes into the hem of my sweater to avoid doing so. Though I liked Beringer, I was always careful about the content of our sessions. I knew the subject that he had been hired to get me to talk about, and the knowledge that he was waiting for me to say something about it only made me less inclined to speak of it.
“How are they going?” he asked.
“They’re ... all right. I’m falling a bit behind.”
“I see.” He nodded understandably. “Are you still having trouble concentrating?”
“Yes.”
“Because your mind is elsewhere.”
He said it gently, but it pressed against my chest uncomfortably all the same. I turned to stare at the one of the filing cabinets and waited for him to ask the question that he always did.
“What do you think about when your mind is ... in another place?”
I kept my eyes on the metal so that I wouldn’t have to look at him when I lied.
“I don’t know.”
“I see. And are your thoughts still making it difficult to sleep?”
“Yes.”
“Is the medication helping? Because if it’s not, I can adjust the dosage or we can switch to something else altogether.”
“No, it’s fine.”
His expression had bare
ly flickered over my face, but he seemed to know that I was lying just as though he had peeled back the skin stretching over my skull to peer inside of my head.
“Well, that’s good, then,” he said, making a note in my chart. “But if you ever find that it’s not working quite right, let me know. It’s only there to benefit you.”
He set the pen down and leaned back in his chair before continuing.
“Was there anything in particular you wanted to talk about today?”
“Not really.”
“Apart from classes, how are things at school?”
“They’re fine.”
“And Jack?”
“Fine.”
He gave the slightest of smiles at the response.
“Is there anything that’s not fine going on?”
I stared at my hands as I searched for a response. As difficult as it was to hold a conversation by saying so little, it would be much harder to say anything more.
“A girl in town died. Her body washed up on the beach earlier in the week.”
Beringer leaned his head against his hand and furrowed his brow.
“Well, that’s certainly far from fine,” he said. “Have you given it much thought?”
“A bit,” I admitted. “It’s hard not to with everyone talking about it.”
“Oh? What do they say?”
“All sorts of things,” I said, my face twitching at the thought of Jack’s ridiculous theory. “But nothing serious. They’re just excited when something interesting actually happens around here.”
“And do you find it interesting?”
“No. Why would I?”
He made no response, but only because he didn’t need to. The air in the room seemed suddenly much too stuffy and the compact space felt too tight with all of the filing cabinets and bookshelves piled up against the walls. I tugged at my collar and stole a glance out the small window behind Beringer’s chair, but the sky outside was so dark that it only made the room feel more barred. I turned back to him and cleared my throat.
“She’s just some girl who died,” I said. “There’s nothing exciting about that.”
“No, certainly not,” he agreed. “I only wondered if it was bringing up some other thoughts that you might have, given the ... similarities it shares with an event in your own life.”
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 4