He stood and shrugged, evidently resigned about the prospect of paying for a new set.
“So that’s my room key, building key, student card, and campus card,” he ticked off solemnly, “which means I’ll have to shell out the full sixty for replacements. Great.”
“Use Karl’s account,” I said, pulling out the bank card that Karl gave me and tossing it over to him.
“He lets you use this?”
“Yeah. It makes him feel like he’s doing something.”
Jack looked down at the card and mockingly admired the glossy silver plastic with an impish smirk.
“In that case, thank you Uncle Karl,” he said. “I’ll be sure to send him a letter of my appreciation – right after I charge a few more things to the account.”
“Go to town.”
“I will – literally.”
He stopped and looked more closely at the card, viewing it as though seeing something of interest that he hadn’t noticed before. The silver caught in the lamplight as he moved it slowly in his hands. Glancing back up at me, he said, “You know, I’d bet we could pretty far on this alone. We could drain it, get to Europe, and set up some place. By the time Karl noticed, it would be too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“To find us.”
He looked at me enticingly, daring me to consider his idea for just a moment.
“Come on, Nim. We could leave right now.”
It the dim light, his eyes were darker than the lightless sky outside. He was looking at me earnestly with an excitement that I couldn’t get up the nerve to muster. I rubbed the bridge of my nose tiredly.
“No, we couldn’t,” I said.
“You really want to graduate?”
“No, but my father would hunt us down if I left now.”
“He might never find us,” Jack said. “If you think about it, we’ve been training our entire lives how to disappear.”
“I have to wait until I’m eighteen,” I said. I toyed with a thread on the comforter as I spoke, wondering if Jack could tell that I wasn’t being completely honest. “You know he’ll send anyone he can to find me as long as I’m a minor.”
Jack blew out a heavy breath that sent his dark hair up from his forehead and then shrugged.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he said, pocketing the card. “I guess we can wait it out.”
“Why are you in such a rush to leave, anyhow?” I asked, pulling off my boat shoes and sitting down on the mattress. “Was Miss Mercier giving you more ideas about leaving?”
“I wish,” Jack said. “She wasn’t here today.”
“Why not?”
“Her friend’s sick or something, so she went to visit her.”
His tone was duller than the situation called for.
“That’s too bad,” I said. “For her friend, I mean.”
“Yeah, but it’s weird, isn’t it?”
I pulled out my notebooks and ordered the assignments from most to least important, though I still had no energy to begin any of them.
“Which part?” I asked, dropping the Physics book back down.
“That she was suddenly called out of town for a sick friend. I’ve told a lot of excuses in my life, Nim, and that sure sounds like one.”
“Why would it be an excuse, though?”
“That’s what I want to know. But you’d think that she would have mentioned it in class yesterday.”
“Or when you walked her home,” I said offhandedly.
“Yeah, or then. What are the chances that she got a call between then and now?”
“I don’t know. When did you actually get back to her house? Midnight or something?”
“Yeah. So what does that leave, a five-hour window or something for the morning ferry? You took statistics last semester – what’s the likelihood of it happening?”
“I don’t think there’s a formula for something like that, Jack,” I said, rolling my eyes as he skipped over what he had been doing out so late the night before once again. “We only ever calculated completely useless data, and then did some more calculations to figure out how wrong we were about our initial findings.”
“What a waste.”
“You’re telling me.”
He looked across the room with a discouraged expression.
“Come on, Jack,” I said. “It’s not the end of the world. She’s coming back.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s just that I was looking forward to talking to her this weekend.”
“You can talk to her when she gets back.”
As I said it, I was suddenly struck by a bitterness that I couldn’t quite place. His dejected tone seemed like a plea to get me to spend the weekend going in and out of town or venturing through the Bickerby woods, and the idea that he was trying to sway me into doing so despite knowing that it would mean I wouldn’t finish my assignments bothered me more than it should have. Somehow, his disappointment that he wouldn’t get to speak to Miss Mercier for a mere number of days seemed unqualified knowing that I had been waiting for months to speak to someone who, I knew, would never speak again.
Ch. 4
Just as he had predicted, the weekend was spent in relative boredom. A drizzling rain began sometime during the morning on Saturday and continued well into Sunday night, preventing anyone from doing anything other than holing up in their rooms. Even though I had thought that spending so much time inside would ensure that I finished my homework, by the time we went to sleep on Sunday night there were still several undone assignments in my bag.
Jack fell asleep almost immediately after lying down. I wished that I could do the same, especially given that I had slept so little in the past four nights, but my eyes stayed decisively open. After an hour or so of staring at the ceiling, tiredness finally began to seep into my bones, but no sooner had my eyes begun to flicker shut than a strange pattern of lights danced in front of the lids. I reopened them and stared across the dark room. After a moment, the room lit up with speckled lights once again.
The window was on Jack’s side of the room and was hard to see out of properly without being on his bed. Throwing off my covers, I crossed to his bed and cautiously raised one leg to step over him. Grabbing the window frame and heaving myself over so that I was crouching on the sill, I peered down to the grounds to see what the source of the light was.
Surely enough, several rays of light were crossing the campus. It took me a moment to realize that there were various people with flashlights walking about below: the campus was alit with pinpricks and beams of light, painting the darkness with dots and slashes. I frowned and pressed my face closer to the window, wondering what was going on.
“Nim, if you wanted to cuddle, you could have just said so.”
Jack had awoken and turned on his side to face me. Though tired, he was clearly amused.
“Stop,” I said, rolling my eyes. Since he was already awake, I took the opportunity to step off the windowsill and onto the mattress. My legs were cramped from how I had been sitting. “Look at this – what’d you think’s going on down there?”
Jack sat up and knelt beside me to observe the grounds. He squinted through the darkness.
“Looks like a search party,” he said. Just as I had done, he pressed his face closer to the window to try and make out more of the scene without the distracting glare from the moonlight on the glass.
“A search party?” I repeated. “For who?”
He shrugged.
“Missing student?” he suggested. “One who hasn’t figured out to sneak out past their building monitor yet, evidently.”
“Seems like a lot of trouble for a student out of bed.”
“What else could it be?”
“Some sort of prank?” I suggested. It wasn’t entirely uncommon for sports teams or clubs to initiate new members by inviting them to do something stupid or reckless, though it was usually to a lesser degree of trouble that ensured that, if caught, the highest punishment would be a suspens
ion.
“No … those are police flashlights.”
I didn’t have to ask how Jack could tell the difference between a regular flashlight and a police-issued one. Instead, I said, “So a prank gone wrong? What do you think – vandalism?”
“Nah ... look what we did last year: that was vandalism, and Barker didn’t call the police on us.”
“No, he called my father. That was worse.”
“True, but it turned out better: you didn’t even get a detention.”
“No, I got a psychiatrist.”
“Good point. I’d take the detention any day.”
“But why would they be here?” I said. “Barker wouldn’t send the entire police force out for a student out of bed.”
“True.”
He sat back from the window and was silent for so long that I thought he might have fallen asleep again, but then a clicking noise sounded between us and a light appeared. He had flipped open his lighter and was lighting a cigarette. His expression was thoughtful.
“You know what I think?” he said with a hint of deviousness in his voice. “I think this has to do with that girl who washed up on shore on Columbus Day.”
I glanced over at him warily.
“They found her,” I reminded him skeptically, “so why would they need a search party?”
His grin glowed red behind his cigarette.
“They found her, sure,” he said. “But they didn’t find whoever threw her.”
I rolled my eyes.
“On that note,” I said briskly as I made to climb off of his bed, but he grabbed my arm and pulled me back.
“Ah, come on, Nim,” he implored. “– just think about it: nothing ever happens on this island, and then what? A girl goes missing, is found dead, and the police are on Bickerby’s front steps.”
The flame from the lighter went out and drenched us in darkness. Jack sighed before shutting it, shaking it roughly, and flipping it back open so that we were bathed in light once more.
“Why would a killer choose to hide at Bickerby?” I said. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Nim, you’re so naïve. He’s not hiding here, he lives here.”
“What?”
“He’s a student.”
I paused, mouth still open from the negating response that I had been about to give, and then frowned.
“Why would someone here throw a local girl off the cliffs?”
Jack rolled his eyes in exasperation.
“Why does anyone do anything, Nim?” he asked incredulously. “Besides, does it matter?”
“If someone down the hall from us killed someone? I think so.”
“No, I meant that it doesn’t matter if one of us did it at all,” Jack countered. “Think about it: a local girl shows up dead, and where do the police start looking? Here.”
He gave me a blunt look and I sighed in agreement. Whenever something was to go wrong on the island, whether it was turned over trashcans littering the streets or an excess of noise coming from the campus during sporting events, the locals didn’t hesitate to draw up formal complaints against Bickerby students. They blamed us for anything and everything that they could, going so far as to say that we were the reason their tourist season had been severely depleted. Their complaints were, perhaps, a large part as to why the rules for the students were so harsh.
“Good point,” I said.
“Thank you.” He stubbed his cigarette out against the window sill and kicked his covers back so that he could crawl beneath them again. “Now, you’re welcome to stay and keep vigil, but I’ve got to get some sleep.”
I threw one last glance out the window at the flashing lights before climbing off of his bed and returning to my own. The sheets were cold and uninviting, and I couldn’t seem to get my mind off of the girl in the water and how she had gotten there; I wondered if she had died before hitting the surface or struggled uselessly while she drowned.
I was awoken far too early by the door to the room opening loudly and a sharp sweep of cold air coming into the room. Instinctively curling up beneath the covers, I half-raised my head to see who had opened it. Jack was still asleep across the room.
“Boys.”
I looked up at the familiar unpleasant voice. Sanders was standing in the threshold looking stern, his thin face holding its ever-present look of disapproval that ran from his eyes and down his nose.
“Lund, Hadler,” he said curtly, “get up.”
Sanders wasn’t a very threatening person in appearance. He was of average height and had the build of a student who lived off of nutrient-lacking school food and whose only recreation was walking back and forth to the library. It was only his expression and tone that made him so reproachable, and only his quickness in handing out warnings and reporting students to staff members that made him intimidating. He had single-handedly reported Jack to the administrators forty-six times and succeeded in warranting him probation on a few occasions. He had almost gotten him suspended, as well, for smoking and drinking on campus, but was unable to retrieve proper evidence that Jack had actually been doing either.
“Sanders,” Jack said at last, rolling over on his bed to peer at the other boy. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“You need to get up, boys,” Sanders said somberly. He waved his hand as though he was a traffic monitor inviting a line of cars to come through a construction zone. Jack and I looked at one another warily before complying.
“Right, good,” Sanders said once we had stood. “Now, I’m here to inform you that students have orders to stay in their rooms for the morning until further notice.”
“What?” Jack said. “You woke us up to tell us to stay in bed?”
“You should have been up hours ago, Hadler,” Sanders countered. “It’s no wonder you’re always in trouble – you have no self-discipline.”
Jack rolled his eyes.
“So what’s the deal, Sanders? Why can’t we leave the room? You didn’t put us on house arrest, did you – what’d we do this time?”
Sanders raised his eyebrows at Jack’s words.
“I don’t know, Hadler, what have you done?” he asked.
Jack turned his head to look my way.
“Quick, Nim – hide the evidence,” he said tonelessly.
“Hadler,” Sanders warned.
“Sanders,” Jack countered. “Come on – you wake us up to tell us to stay in and then you don’t tell us why?”
“What about classes?” I said.
“What about breakfast?” Jack asked.
“I – official orders are to stay in for the morning, boys, just until further notice –”
“Right – meaning that you have no idea what the reason is,” Jack said.
“No. No, I know what the reason is, but it’s not my place to divulge –”
“Yeah right. They didn’t tell you, did they Sanders? You’re not important enough to know the goings-on around here, are you?”
Sanders stuttered in response, grasping for something to say to counter Jack’s accusation, but was saved from doing so by a voice from the door.
“I know what’s going on.”
The three of us turned to see Julian Wynne leaning up against the doorframe, arms crossed as he observed the conversation taking place between Jack and the building monitor.
“How would you know?” Sanders demanded.
Julian gave us his most convincing smile and shrugged.
“You don’t need to know that. I just know.”
“Well, don’t go spreading anything around, Wynne. It’s official business, not just some gossip –”
“It’s more than that, though, isn’t it?” Julian said. “It’s news. And I think everyone has a right to know the local news, don’t you?”
Sanders didn’t reply. Jack raised an eyebrow at the exchange.
“Well either tell us or get out, Wynne,” he said. “I’d like to get another hour of sleep if there aren’t any morning classes.”
; Julian gave him a dark look before sidling into the room.
“What’ll you do for me if I tell you, Jack?” he asked. “Specifically, mind you. Information isn’t free.”
“I’ll tell you what I won’t do to you,” Jack replied. “Specifically, to your face.”
“Watch it, Hadler,” Sanders said. “And you, too, Wynne. You can’t go making deals and threatening one another – I’m standing right here, after all.”
Neither Jack nor Julian looked very worried by Sanders’ supposed authority.
“All right, Jack.” Julian shrugged in a careless way. “I’ll tell you for nothing, then. It’s not like you have anything I’d want.”
“I should hope not,” Sanders said.
“The police were here last night searching the grounds,” Julian continued, ignoring Sanders’ remark.
“That’s all you know? Nim and I could’ve told you that much.”
“Sure. But do you know who they’re looking for?”
“Enlighten me.”
“A girl who went missing.”
Jack and I looked at one another, each raising an eyebrow in turn.
“Didn’t they already find that girl?” Jack said. “You know, washed up on shore? What happened – did they misplace the body?”
“Hardly. I’m not talking about that girl. I’m talking about a different one.”
Jack didn’t seem to have an answer to that, though he did a good job of keeping the surprise from his expression.
“Two girls go missing in the same week?” he said casually. “What are the chances?”
“Wait a minute,” Sanders cut in irritably. “Where did you hear that, Wynne? That’s not what I was told.”
“What’d you hear, then?”
“I – I told you, I’m not at liberty to discuss ...”
“You want to know what I think, Sanders?” Julian asked disparagingly. “I think you don’t really know why we’re all in for the morning, do you?”
“You know what I think?” Jack said. “I think neither of you do, so would you mind leaving us alone? Nim and I’d like to enjoy our morning, and it’d be impossible to do so with you two hanging around.”
“Whatever that means, Hadler,” Julian said, throwing us an odd look.
Jack appeared unfazed.
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 6