Insanity

by Kira Moericke

  “Oh?”

  “I do not mean to be discourteous, but I feel as though it is just an act.”

  “An act?”

  I nodded. We placed our right hands together and moved around one another. “To show off his wealth.”

  The boy did not say anything after that. Instead, we danced once again in silence, letting the music wrap around us and seep into our bones, guiding our movements until the very last note. When the last note of the cello reverberated through the air, we slowed to a stop, then stood there, staring into one another’s eyes.

  “Master Brier.” A short man with a receding hairline suddenly appeared at the boy’s side, looking nervous and jittery. “Monsieur Gautier and his wife are here.”

  “Master?” I frowned, confused, and quickly stepped out from the boy’s reach. “You’re Brier?”

  The boy smiled brightly at me, as if he were just a young lad who was caught doing something that he should not have been doing.

  “Master?”

  “I am coming, Alfred.” He flicked his eyes to the short mousy man before directing his attention back to me. Before I could react, he grabbed my gloved hand and placed a gentle kiss on the back of it. “Until we meet again, Amoy.” Then he turned around and left with Alfred, leaving me to stand in the middle of the ballroom alone.

  My name is not Amoy, I thought as I watched him disappear into the crowd of dancing bodies. It’s–

  “Miss Knightley.”

  I blinked rapidly, trying to clear the scene that had formed inside my head. But the images clung inside my head like cobwebs. What had just happened?

  “Miss Knightley, could you please answer the question?”

  I flicked my gaze to Mr. Atherton and saw him staring at me, expecting me to answer a question that I hadn’t caught.

  “I…” Looking around, I saw that everyone had their eyes on me. I swallowed the lump that was starting to build up inside my throat and sunk down into my chair. I looked back at Mr. Atherton. “Could you please repeat the question?” I asked meekly.

  Mr. Atherton sighed, then went next to his desk and pulled something out of his drawer. He scribbled something onto it before coming over and slapping an ugly pink piece of paper down on the table in front of me. “I hope next time you can pay a little more attention to my lecture.” When he removed his hand, I saw that he had just given me a detention slip.

  I opened my mouth, ready to apologize and beg him to take back the detention slip, but he’d already turned his back on me and started for the front of the classroom again. But before he reached his desk, he stopped and turned to me. “By the way Miss Knightley; welcome to Brier Hall.”

  THREE

  THE REST OF the day was a total drag. I kept thinking about what had happened in my Past Eras class. The images, the sounds, the feelings all felt so real. And because of it, I got a stupid detention slip that burned a hole in my messenger bag.

  Reaching into my bag, I pulled out the ugly pink slip of paper, my eyes scanning over the glossy black ink. The classroom that detention was being held in was printed on the top: Room 128.

  Throughout the day, Lena had been pointing out Brier Hall to me, so I kind of knew where the room was (not that I wanted to go there).

  I found the room within a few short minutes. It also wasn’t hard to not notice the word DETENTION pinned against the door. Reaching for the handle, I took a deep breath and entered the room.

  Several people were already inside, but none paid any attention to me as I inched my way further into the room, shutting the door behind me.

  “Who are you?” a voice asked.

  I looked toward the front of the room where I saw an overweight woman with a head of short, graying hair. She looked at me with a look of dislike.

  “I’m Em Knightley,” I replied, a slight quiver in my voice. I flicked my gaze around the room. Now that the teacher called me out, a few people were actually paying attention to me. I swallowed a lump of nervousness and quickly made my way to the front of the room toward the grumpy looking teacher. She smelled like grilled cheese sandwiches. “It says I’m supposed to hand you this?” I held out the detention slip.

  The teacher grunted disapprovingly at me as she snatched the slip from my hand. “Sit over there.” She pointed to an empty desk behind me.

  Turning, I slowly walked toward the desk she pointed at and sat down, slipping my bag from around my neck and placing it on the floor beside me.

  The door to the room swished open then shut a moment later. Curious, I turned in my seat and saw a boy come in with tan skin and a large, wispy afro of dark brown curls. When we locked eyes, he smiled one of those sexy half-grins that only a few certain guys could pull off before making his way toward the front of the room.

  “So what was it today, Mr. Hart?” the teacher asked when he reached her desk to hand her his detention slip.

  “Another tardy,” the boy replied lightly.

  “Isn’t that your sixth one so far this year?”

  “Yeah, and it probably won’t be my last.”

  The woman frowned lightly, but she didn’t seem mad. “You need to start getting to class earlier.”

  “Yeah, I know.” The boy shrugged off his backpack that clung to one of his shoulders and unzipped it. I watched curiously as he dug through the black bag and pulled out a small brown paper bag. “Here. I brought you a little something.” He let it plop down onto her desk.

  There was a faint twinkle in the teacher’s eyes as she reached for the bag and looked inside. A small smile rose to her small, pudgy lips as she looked back up at the boy. “You know exactly what to bring.”

  “One turkey sandwich and a fun-sized bag of potato chips.” The boy tapped a finger gently against the side of his head. “I’m smarter than most people give me credit for.”

  The teacher just smiled and shook her head as she pulled out her turkey sandwich and unwrapped the plastic from around it. “Go take a seat, Mr. Hart.”

  I quickly ducked my head low when the boy turned toward my direction and pretended to rifle around my messenger bag. I waited for him to walk past before I looked up, but instead of moving on, he settled down in the desk next to me. Pulling out my calculus book, I stole a glance at him. He was leaning back in his seat, his eyes fixed forward, his hands crossed behind his head in a cool, casual posture.

  For the next forty-five minutes, I struggled with my calc, trying to figure out the rate of change in a function when a soft voice spoke to me from my right.

  “Hey.”

  I turned my head a notch to the side and saw the boy looking at me, his dark eyes twinkling in delight. A small smile played on his lips, sending my heart into double time.

  “Hi?”

  “Want to get out of here?” he asked, his voice soft.

  I glanced at the clock in the front of the room. “We still have fifteen minutes left.”

  “So?” He reached down and grabbed his backpack.

  “So won’t we get in trouble?”

  “Nah.” He shook his head then stood up, slipping his backpack over one shoulder. He took a step toward the door, then cocked his head. “Coming?”

  I glanced at the teacher in front of the room. After munching on the food that the boy had given her, she had fallen into a slumber that had her twitching in her chair and snoring gruntingly. Looking around, I noticed that the few people here were too busy either dozing off, playing on their phones, or sketching in their notebooks to notice anything around them. And I really needed a break from calculus. I could feel a headache forming behind my eyes.

  I quickly closed my math book and stuffed it in my bag. Standing up, I stole another quick glance at the teacher, who grunted out a loud snore. I silently hurried toward the boy, who stood next to the door.

  He eased the door open, and we made out like bandits.

  “I can’t believe we’re skipping out on detention,” I said, watching the boy close the door.

  “Eh, it was only fifteen minu
tes.” He turned to look at me, his warm brown eyes locking with mine. “No biggie.”

  I rolled my eyes but didn’t say anything.

  “I’ve never seen you before,” the boy said, starting down the hall. I followed. “Are you new here?”

  “Yeah.” I hooked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I enrolled here yesterday.”

  “Oh.” The boy twisted at the waist and stuck out a hand. “I’m Jayden Hart by the way.”

  “Em. Em Knightley.” I took his hand, and we shook.

  “So does ‘Em’ stand for something?” Jayden asked, turning forward.

  “It’s short for Emma.”

  “Emma is already a short name, and you want it even shorter?” He raised his left eyebrow. Being this close to him, I could see a white mark slicing through the edge of it.

  “I never liked my name,” I told him sheepishly.

  “Oh?”

  “I never felt like an Emma. I always felt like…like…” I didn’t know what I felt like, but I shook my head, suddenly confused with myself. Why was I blabbing all of this to him? “I don’t have to explain why I want to be called ‘Em.’”

  Jayden held up his hands in mock surrender as we went around a corner. I didn’t know where we were going; I just followed along with him. “Hey, it’s cool. When I was younger, I wanted to change my name to Peter Parker.”

  “Peter Parker?” My brows furrowed. “You mean Spiderman?”

  He nodded and smiled. “Yeah. I thought he was the bomb when I was younger.”

  I couldn’t help but smile too. I suddenly felt bad that I had used a tone with him.

  “So, Em, has anyone shown you around yet?”

  I did a half-shrug. “This girl, Lena, kind of did. She pointed out where some of my classes were, and where the lunch room is and all. But that’s mainly it.”

  “Well, there’s not much else,” Jayden said. “All that’s left, really, is the gymnasium, the garden, the library, and the ballroom.”

  “The ballroom?”

  Jayden nodded. “No one is allowed in there except when we have dances, which is only two or three times a year.”

  “And why is that?” I asked.

  “I guess it’s one of the rooms here at Brier that hasn’t been renovated. Everything is as it was in 1878, back when the owner, Brier, still owned the place. So I guess they don’t want people snooping around and wrecking things.”

  The name Brier sent my mind reeling back to the daydream I had in first period today. That was what the boy in the mask had been called.

  Why had that happened to me? What was it all about? What did it mean?

  Shaking my head, I got rid of my thoughts that were starting to cloud my mind and focused back on Jayden.

  “So how’s your roommate?” Jayden asked, switching topic. We walked around another corner and came to a long foyer. I glanced left at the door that I had entered Brier through, and had a sudden urge to run out them. But I resisted the urge and followed Jayden to the right to a set of glass doors that led out to the back of the building.

  “A nightmare,” I replied as he opened one of the doors and held it open for me. I quickly moved past him outside.

  Jayden laughed a soothing sound that came from the base of his throat. He closed the door after us. “That bad, huh?”

  I nodded. Outside, the air was cool even though the sun was out and the sky was a bright blue. There was a crispness to the air that let you know that it was autumn, and that winter was near. Most of the trees around us were bare; their leaves already dying on the ground. From somewhere close by, I could hear the sound of a leaf blower. And across the large yard space, there was a narrow pathway that was almost hidden by trees and wild shrubs. I pointed at it as Jayden and I walked to a small, lonely stone bench. “Where does that lead to?”

  “It leads to Lover’s Leap,” Jayden replied, sitting down on the stone bench.

  “Lover’s Leap?” I crossed my arms to ward off the chill that slipped through the thin material of my school uniform and sat down beside him. I didn’t realize until after I was seated on how little space there was between him and me.

  “Well, according to the stories, the guy who lived here when it was first built, threw this giant party to celebrate his engagement to–I always forget her name–Adelia, I think it was? But anyways, I guess she saw something going on between her fiancée and some other girl and wandered away from the party so that she could throw herself off the cliff.”

  Something about this story tugged at my heartstrings. “That’s terrible.”

  “Yeah.” Jayden ran a hand through his hair that stirred lightly in the breeze. “I guess the guy was so heartbroken over the loss of his fiancée, that he hung himself from the chandelier that hangs in the ballroom.”

  I turned my head and looked at Brier Hall, sizing it up. The mansion was dark and ominous looking, made completely out of dark stone with wild ivy crawling up the sides. The four story building was so tall that it looked like it could touch the underbelly of the clouds. It was easy to imagine beautiful dances and grand parties happening here so many, many decades ago.

  Something stirred in one of the large windows that overlooked the backyard. Focusing my gaze, I saw that it was a person–or so I thought. Whoever it was, was pale with slightly blurred features. But neither of those things sent baby spiders to tap-dance along my spine. It was that it was looking…

  Directly.

  At.

  Me.

  ***

  After spending another hour with Jayden, I decided that it was time to retire back to my room. To my luck, Nova wasn’t there so I had the whole room all to myself.

  Abandoning my bag on my bed, I walked over to my desk and pulled open the drawer. Inside, my phone sat along with some copies of my enrollment form. Grabbing my phone, I sat down on the desk chair and turned it on. Nine messages greeted me. Four from Mom and five from my best friend from back home, Rue Dallas.

  I checked Mom’s messages first.

  MOM: Miss you already!  ♥

  MOM: I hope you’re having a wonderful time!

  MOM: How was your first night? Sleep okay? Did you have that dream again?

  MOM: Remember that you have your first session with Dr. Langley at 6:30 today.

  I sighed. I had totally forgotten my meeting with Dr. Langley. He was supposed to help me with my reoc-curring dreams.

  I quickly texted Mom back, answering all of her questions in a single text before going to Rue’s messages.

  Rue: Hey girl! How is it at the Haunted Mansion? (A name she had given Brier Hall when I showed her the brochures that Mom had given me.)

  Rue: Any hot guys there? If so, u’ve got to take pics n send them 2 me!!!

  Rue: School sucked today! (More than usual.) I miss u so much! I need my sidekick; my partner in crime. 

  Rue: Guess what. Bianca Turner totally got schooled by Evan Markal today! Wish u would have been here 2 have seen it.

  Rue: Call me after classes!

  A smile rose to my lips. Rue was seriously amazing. Even stuck here with no friends, she could make me smile. Leaving my contacts, I quickly called her.

  “Em!” Rue crowed as soon as she picked up. I had to take the phone away from my ear for a moment so that she wouldn’t pop my eardrums. “I’m so glad you called! There’s so much we need to talk about.”

  “I know.” I moved to my bed, which was just a little comfier than the chair. Just a little, though.

  “Did you get my text on Bianca and Evan?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh my gosh! You are sooo not going to believe it! So, Bianca was being a bitch, as usual, and Evan was like ‘Fuck you, Bianca!’ then he totally dumped his lunch tray all over her, and started this huge food fight. It was totally epic!”

  I knew that there were a lot of pieces of this story missing, but Rue summed it up just enough that I understood it. “Wow. That sounds insane.”

  “It totally was!”


  I had to pull the phone away from my ear again.

  “So, any cute guys?” Rue asked, changing topics.

  I shrugged my shoulders, even though I knew she couldn’t see me do so. Jayden popped into my head. I guess he was kind of cute with his mane of wild curls and sharp features. But instead of revealing Jayden to Rue, I replied, “I haven’t really paid much attention to the guys here. I’ve been more focused on finding my way around this place.”

  “Ah.” I could imagine Rue nodding her head. “I totally get it, but seriously, Em. When you actually start noticing the guys there, call me.”

  I giggled. “I will.”

  “Rue! Dinner is ready!” I heard Mrs. Dallas call in the background.

  “Coming!” Rue called back. To me she said, “I gotta go. But remember, any cute guys and–”

  “–and I’ll call you,” I finished.

  Even though I couldn’t see her, I could imagine Rue smiling.

  “Talk to you later, Em.”

  “Bye, Rue.”

  We hung up. As soon as her picture disappeared from my phone’s screen, a sudden sadness washed over me. My heart ached knowing that my best friend was at home while I was stuck here. Alone.

  Sighing, I placed my phone back in the desk drawer and turned my gaze toward my alarm clock that sat at the edge of my desk. It was almost six o’clock and I had no clue where Dr. Langley’s office was.

  “All the offices are in the North Wing.” Lena’s voice came floating back toward me. Standing up, I walked across the room to the door, then slipped away like a ghost.

  FOUR

  “WELCOME, MISS KNIGHTLEY,” Dr. Langley greeted as I stepped into his office. The sudden scent of mint and pencil shavings filled my nose as my eyes quickly scoped around the small room. There was a lot of brown with a splash of crimson here and there. “Please, take a seat.” He motioned toward the chair in front of his desk.

  Easing the door closed, I slowly walked deeper into the room and took a seat on the brown vinyl chair. It made a weird squishing sound when I sat.