“I don’t see any similarities.”
“No?” He turned his head slightly, but his voice was un-accusatory despite my blatant lie. “Her death hasn’t brought up any thoughts on your mother?”
“No.”
The flat note in my voice seemed to drop through the floor and create a crater between us. Beringer stared over it as he observed me, willing me to say more but knowing that I wouldn’t. He waited for as long as he could in the hopes of drawing out just a word from me about my mother, but I was resilient in my resolution not to do so.
“Well, I’m glad that it hasn’t been bothering you,” he said. “But if it was, I would hope that we could talk about it.”
I gave a short shrug, still unwilling to speak, and allowed him to turn the subject to my lack of ambition about schoolwork only so that we could fill the room with something other than heavy silence.
“Well, we’re just about out of time,” he said sometime later, glancing at the clock as another bout of quiet stretched between us. “I’ll write a refill for your prescription.”
He reached into the top drawer and pulled out a yellow pad of paper to jot down the usual prescription. He smiled as he handed it to me as though the last hour had been something other than a complete waste of his time, and I had the sudden urge to apologize to him for being so difficult, or at least to admit that I had never taken the medication, but the words faltered before they could come: apologizing would require an explanation that I was not willing to give.
“Thank you, Dr. Beringer.”
I pocketed it and wandered down the hallway away from his office at an aimless pace. By then nearly all the staff at the Health Center had left for the night apart from a custodian mopping the floors and a lone secretary. Overhead, the fluorescent lamps were so bright against my skin that it felt as though they were leaving me transparent.
The campus was too dark at that time of night. The path was barely lit by a few lamps on the sides of buildings and the moon was hidden under clouds that threatened rain or snow. In the darkness I kept losing my footing and stumbling. At one point, heading through the garden, I tripped over a stone bench and slammed into the ground. The sudden impact of my hands against the solid, frost-filled ground made my elbows buckle and the side of my face hit the frozen dirt, and when I slowly lifted my head back up, my ears were ringing painfully. After they stopped, I found that the silence in the air had been replaced by the soft sound of music in the distance. This time I could hear it more clearly: it was the same song that I had heard before, Nessun Dorma.
Hurrying to my feet, I sprinted back to my building and up the stairs to my dorm room before I could even register why I was afraid. When I slammed the door behind me to crush out the remains of the lingering song, I expected to see Jack jump up from his bed in a spray of sheets and blankets to see what the matter was, but his bed was empty. As I leaned up against the door to catch my breath, I decided that he must have stayed after the Foreign Language to talk with Miss Mercier.
My limbs were shaking as I undressed and got into bed. I curled my legs up to my chest beneath the blankets to cut down on the shivering despite knowing that it had nothing to do with the cold. Though I tried to think of something apart from the dead girl or the music that I had heard, it was difficult given the conversation with Beringer. I kept returning to the unspoken similarities between the two women that I had hoped no one else would draw while the distant sound of the ocean sounded in the background.
I waited up for a long while for Jack to get back. He was so late in returning that I thought he might have gotten stopped by Sanders for missing curfew, but even Sanders wouldn’t hold him hostage with a lecture for so long. I sat up and peered over at his bed to see if he had somehow snuck in without me noticing, but his bed was still empty. When the clock read that it was past one in the morning, I grabbed my jacket to go look for him, but no sooner had I pulled it on over my pajamas than the door opened. Jack quietly entered the room and tiptoed over to his bed. I sighed loudly.
“Sorry – did I wake you up?”
His nonchalant voice dispelled any worry that I might have harbored for his wellbeing. I took off my jacket and sat back on my bed.
“I wasn’t asleep,” I said. “I was just about to go find you.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
I rolled my eyes in the darkness.
“It’s one-thirty – I thought something happened to you.”
Jack cackled as he took off his sweatshirt and sat down on the edge of his bed to remove his shoes. Pulling the laces out of a knotted mess, I could see the outline of his face change as his cheekbones rose in a grin.
“Like what? I was eaten by a bear?”
“You might have been.”
“Actually, that was what I was trying to prevent from happening.”
“Sorry?”
“I offered to walk Miss Mercier back to her house.”
“Oh.” I raised an eyebrow to the ceiling in a silent question. After a brief but heavy pause, I said, “And?”
“And then I walked her back to her house.”
“Where does she live, Canada?” It didn’t take that many hours to walk clear across the island and back multiple times. I had a strange sense that Jack was hiding something from me and an even stranger one that I didn’t want to know what it was.
He didn’t answer even though I waited several minutes for him to go on; I could tell that he wouldn’t even if I flat-out asked him.
“Well, I’m glad you weren’t mauled, at any rate,” I said when the silence became uncomfortable.
“I appreciate the sentiment.”
“Goodnight.”
“Or good morning.”
He climbed into bed and fell asleep immediately, but I stared up at the ceiling for a good while longer mulling over what he wasn’t telling me. I wanted to think that he had simply badgered her with questions about France, but that didn’t explain why he wouldn’t come right out and say so. After sidling through the other possibilities, though, I decided that I really didn’t want to know.
In the brief moments when I was able to drift off to sleep, my dreams were filled with images of a dead girl floating in the water. She would sit up on the waves as though it were solid ground and point at me accusingly for lying to her. I jolted awake as she did so, shaking so much that I didn’t want to go back to sleep, and my eyes were still open when the sun cut in through the windows and scattered light across my bed. I rolled over and groaned as my head pounded in protest and the room lurched as I stood to dress: I wasn’t sure how much longer I could go without sleep.
I didn’t feel nearly as bad as Jack looked, however. The dark had hidden him from my sight when he had come into the room hours before, but now I could see that the majority of his face was a bruising of blues and purples. The entire left side looked as though it had been beaten with a heavy, blunt object: the eye was rimmed in thin blue skin, the cheekbone was raw and red with fresh marks, and his lips were bloodied with ripped skin. There was also a long gash through his eyebrow which drew a white line of skin through the dark hair.
It certainly wasn’t the worst that I had seen him, and I hardly recoiled when I laid eyes on the impressive wounds, merely raising my eyebrows in response and giving him a weary look as I reached for my shoes. Jack seemed wholly unfazed by his appearance, or perhaps unaware of how bad he looked, and instead commented on my own.
“You don’t look so good.”
“Thanks, Jack.”
I pulled my sweater on over my collared shirt and smoothed out a wrinkle that had formed in my khakis from folding them incorrectly, but no amount of straightening of my clothes could help the fact that my eyes were sunk beneath dark circles and my blond hair had faded and thinned. As Jack pulled on his sweatshirt without bothering to change out of his clothes from the previous day, I squinted at my reflection in the mirror. Even my once-blue eyes seemed to have faded to gray.
“And what happened to yo
u?” I asked as we made our way down the hall to go to breakfast.
“Peters and I had a bit of a dispute.”
“I’d say. Some night.”
“That it was.”
Sometimes I thought that Jack got into fights solely because he was bored. I couldn’t imagine – even with back-to-back classes in which my teachers droned on endlessly, mountains of homework, and absolutely nothing to do for fun – ever being so bored that I would want to get my face punched in over and over again by a lacrosse player, but I supposed that Jack had a much lower tolerance for the uninteresting and a much higher one for pain. I raised my eyebrows at him shortly as we reached the campus and set off in the direction of the dining hall.
“Was this before or after the meeting?” I asked as we crossed through the Center Garden, half-heartedly attempting to place the events of his night in some order.
“Sometime during, actually.”
“I thought you were looking forward to the meeting – why would you want to ruin it by getting into a fight?”
“For the record, Nim, I didn’t start this one. Peters had his own agenda.”
“Why was Peters even there? I took English with him last year: he could barely speak that. I can’t imagine he’d be taking a foreign language.”
“You’re right on that account – he’s taking basic French for the third year in a row.”
“And he hasn’t considered giving up by now?”
“Well, he’s not really interested in the language, is he? None of them are.”
Jack rolled his eyes as we trampled over some low shrubs to get through the gardens quicker. Of course Peters, like most of the French students, was just taking the class because of Miss Mercier. Jack seemed more annoyed about the idea than usual. The nagging inkling that there was something he wasn’t saying came back to me.
“Bet Miss Mercier wasn’t too happy that you two were fighting,” I commented.
Jack shrugged.
“She was upset.”
“Did she write you up?”
“No, she wouldn’t do that,” he said. “She gave me a lecture – en français, of course, which kind of negates the disappointment of it all. Everything sounds good in French.”
“Right.”
“She knew it was Peters’ fault anyhow. I was simply defending myself.”
“You didn’t do a very good job,” I said, looking over the state of his face again.
“It wasn’t my best fight, no,” he agreed.
We steered around a group of students coming down the path and then hurried towards the dining hall. The wind had picked up again and the air was too cold for my light sweater and jacket. Jack pulled his sweatshirt further about him, evidently thinking the same thing.
“And then you walked her home.”
I slid the point into the conversation as seamlessly as I could, hoping that Jack would divulge more information on the matter.
“Yep.”
He reached forward to pull the door to the dining hall open and stood back to let me in. An out-coming student eyed us unpleasantly.
“Stop being such a faggot, Hadler,” he said as he passed us by.
Jack rolled his eyes and ducked inside, shivering as the warmth in the air returned. I almost applauded him for not taking the opportunity to pick another fight, but then I reminded myself that he was probably in too much discomfort from his current injuries to consider getting any more. It couldn’t have been very pleasant to be constantly black-eyed and sore-ribbed, even though he continually allowed himself to be so.
“And why did you walk her home, again?” I asked as we stood in line, finally giving into my curiosity.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Why would you?” I countered.
“Ah, come on, Nim. By the time she’d finished breaking up the fight, lecturing Peters and me, and cleaning up the meeting room, it was already late. I wasn’t about to let her walk home alone.”
“Is she frightened of the dark?”
“She should be – nothing good happens when women walk home late at night.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that it’s not safe, Nim.”
“I hardly think Bardom Island is crawling with crime,” I droned, watching him spear several pieces of bacon and add them to his tray. I looked at it fleetingly, trying to muster up the appetite to take some, before passing it by. Perhaps there was something more appealing further down the line.
“It doesn’t need to be crawling with anything – all it takes is one lunatic who crosses her path and she could be in trouble.”
“I never knew you were so chivalrous.”
Jack turned and gave me an impish smile.
“I’m plenty chivalrous, Nim. I’d walk you home in the dark, too.”
“What would the point in that be? You just said that only women are in danger.”
“Wrong – I just said that women were in danger. You’d be in trouble, too. Look at the way you dress.”
“Sorry?”
“Between the shoes and the sweater alone, Nim, you’re screaming to be mugged.”
“I’ll inform the school – maybe they’ll change the dress code.”
“They might. Your father won’t change his, though.”
When we reached the end of the line my tray was still decisively empty. I looked down at the last items being offered that morning in the bread-basket: the bagels looked questionable, the muffins horrid, and the pastries sickeningly sweet. I eyed the whole-grain bread mistrustfully before giving in and dumping two slices onto the toaster rack. By the time I had returned from getting myself coffee, the toast was charred with black. I sighed and put them on my tray regardless.
The coffee eased my headache considerably and I was able to think again. As I crunched on the burnt toast, I got the nagging feeling that I was forgetting something. After pulling my Latin translation out of my bag to complete the line that Thomas had prevented me from finishing the afternoon before, the feeling didn’t disappear, but I considered that it had to do with the numerous assignments for other classes that I had failed to complete.
When the bell rang two hours later and signaled the end of Latin class, however, it suddenly occurred to me what I had forgotten. As I was sliding my books into my bag, Albertson approached my desk. I sat back up and faced him. He had a paper clutched in his old hands; it was bright white with a smooth finish that was highlighted in his wrinkled, blue-spotted fingers.
“Enim, are you still prepared to take the make-up exam today?”
My mouth instantly dried and my stomach squirmed uncomfortably. Having completely forgotten about the make-up exam, I hadn’t studied for it any more than I had the first one.
“Oh, yes – I’m prepared.”
He gave me a smile and returned to his desk. Looking over the first page of questions, I realized that he had given me the same exam as the previous one: the questions had not even been reworded or reordered. Had I just looked over the one that I had failed, I would have been able to complete it again easily. I dropped my head into my hand miserably.
I filled in answers that I knew were incorrect with a feeling of annoyance, and when I had completed the poorly-written translation on the last page, I stood and dropped the test on Albertson’s desk and fled from the room before he could ask me how it went. As I hurried across the campus, I vaguely wondered what another failed exam would do to my grade.
My mood only worsened as the day went on. I had forgotten to do my reading for English and Doyle, sensing as much, bombarded me with questions that I could only give stuttered responses to, much to the amusement of my classmates; Donovan returned the History essay that I had all but failed; and Calculus, normally an easy enough class for me to disappear in, was made uncomfortable by the fact that Thomas had moved his seat to sit next to me. By the time the day was over, I was ready to lock myself in the dorm room for the rest of the semester.
Jack was leaning up against the door to our room w
hen I returned to the residence building, wearing a miserable expression that rivaled mine and made his bruised features look, if possible, worse.
“You look about as happy as I feel,” I commented.
“Yeah? What happened to you?”
I unlocked the door and stepped inside before answering. He rolled lazily into the room behind me.
“Nothing, just classes,” I said, not in the mood to relive the day’s events. “What are you doing out in the hallway?”
“Forgot my keys.”
He glanced around the room for a moment in search of them before getting down on the floor to look beneath the bed. I watched him shake out a few shirts and turn out the pockets on a pair of pants before he turned back to me.
“Did you see where I left them?”
“No,” I said. I glanced about at the mess on his side of the room and shook my head in wonder. “Are you sure you didn’t lose them?”
“I might’ve.”
I was hardly surprised: he was constantly misplacing them. At least once a semester he would rely on me to let him in and out of locked buildings around campus as well as our residence building and dorm room. Sometimes the keys would turn up in a random, completely illogical location; other times he would have to break down and buy a new set.
“When did you last see them?”
“Hard to say for sure.”
“Today?”
Jack leaned back on his heels from his crouched position on the floor and thought for a moment.
“No ... I didn’t need them until now.”
“So they’re probably somewhere in here,” I said. “You used them to get it last night, after all.”
Jack thought about it and then frowned.
“No, you left the door unlocked last night.” He ran his hand through his hair and sighed. “Which means that I probably dropped them when Peters attacked me.”
“Check the lost and found, then.”
“Who actually brings things to the lost and found?”
“I don’t know – the custodian might’ve.”
“Right,” Jack said skeptically. “Let’s face it, whoever found them probably tossed them in the trash.”
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 5