The Last Academy (9 page)

Brynn scrunched up her face and shrugged. “I’d know him if I saw him again, but I couldn’t say about cuff links or … luggage skin.”

“He was expensive looking,” I tried again. My voice was too desperate and hurried. I could see Brynn’s attention slip away.

“That’s most men around campus.” She rolled her eyes. I blushed.

“What were you doing up in the middle of the night, anyway?” I asked the question before I knew it was in my head.

“None of your business,” Brynn said.

Except I already knew what she’d been doing. I jumped on the one thing I could nail down as fact. “You were sneaking out of your room! That’s why you were up, how you saw onto their patio.”

Nora’s mouth fell open as she connected the dots, too. “You
were
! Who were you with, Brynn? That Troy guy?”

“Who says it has to be just one?” Brynn retorted, and I knew it was supposed to be a joke, but it came out sour. Her whole face went red. “Maybe it was Mark Elliott,” she taunted me, eyes flashing.

“So many you forgot? Must’ve been a busy night,” I snapped, flushing with anger.

“Shut your stupid, fat mouth!” Brynn shoved me hard. She had those tennis forearms, and when she slammed her hands into my chest, it knocked the wind out of me, sending me flying.

The first star in the sky, and the bubbles in the water. The hard scrape. I’m falling
, I thought out of nowhere, as I landed on the wooden plank floor, thumping it like it was the world’s biggest drum. I couldn’t breathe any air in.
Now they’ll laugh
, the rogue commentator whispered, in my head.

But the room was silent as a graveyard. I bared my teeth at Brynn, hating her as much as I’d hated Lia.

When I saw Brynn’s eyes wide with tears, some of my anger melted away.

“They came after me,” she whispered, holding her hands up. I had no idea what she meant, but all the tiny hairs all over my arms stood on end to hear her say it. She put one of those lifeless hands up to her lips, her face a mask of shock. And like a camera flash, for a split second, there was a ragged twist of duct tape across her mouth, gone before my brain understood what I’d seen.

Nora whispered, “Look, I think we can all agree that Brynn wasn’t sneaking out, right? Let’s … let’s just agree to that.” She cleared her throat, eyes glued to Brynn’s
hands. “Even if it was this guy — Barnaby Charon? — even if it was him with Jessie that night, he might still just be the guy who was supposed to pick her up. Right? He’s part of the school system. Maybe it was his responsibility.”

I thought what Nora said was ten pounds of cow flops in a five-pound bag. But I didn’t feel like arguing the finer points right at that moment. I didn’t want to be in that room with her, and especially not with Brynn.

“Whatever,” I coughed as I dragged myself to the tunnel and left. With a lurch and a heave, I got out of there. Then I was stumbling back to my dorm, whispering to myself, “Don’t think. Don’t think.” I filled my head with those two words until I was in my room, out of my clothes, and wrapped in a towel. I jogged down to the dorm showers:
Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t.

I cranked the valve to “H,” waited to see steam, threw my towel on a hook, and stepped under the spray. The water hit my chest and my breath caught. Even though it was only a shower, something inside me shrieked with panic. I stopped chanting.

The silence was like the sound of a glacier cracking. My shoulders started shaking, all the way down my hands. I leaned against the tile wall and heaved out these silent,
hunched-over sobs behind the flimsy pink shower curtain. A couple of people walked in and out of showers a few feet away. That’s another thing you learn in boarding school: how to cry with all the loudness up on your face. Teeth bared, mouth hanging open, snot dripping everywhere, and every muscle in your face wrinkled up. Maybe biting the skin of your arm so your body could complete the circuit of understanding back to your brain. If you did it right, from the other side of that curtain, it sounded like someone taking a few deep breaths.

When I thought about arguing with my friends, and those sophomore guys yelling at me in front of everybody, and Jessie disappearing, I was in danger of curling up in bed and never getting out. That didn’t even cover the freaktacular duct-tape hallucination, or how frightened Brynn had seemed.

Yanking on my favorite little black dress and glossing on my brightest red lipstick, I told myself I was absolutely going to go to the Halloween party. I needed to do anything but think about what had happened. Plus, I was much more likely to run into Mark Elliott at the party than
in the girls’ dorms. When I was ready to face the rest of the world, I swung by the props room in the theater and grabbed a glittery pink-and-silver harlequin mask.

As I walked up to the dining hall, I tortured myself with thoughts of what I’d do when I found Mark Elliott. Flirting at Lethe could be tricky. Romantic interludes were completely covert ops during the school year. If the faculty suspected anything, you and Romeo allegedly got your names on the List. That meant teachers kept tabs on your whereabouts, including “pop-ins,” when faculty walked into your room without knocking first.

The trick was to find a guy who liked you and cram in as many make-out sessions as possible before the teachers caught on. Like what Nora and Thatch were doing — ignoring each other in public and meeting up secretly in dark corners of campus. Not that I knew any secret hand signals that might let Mr. Right know I was interested.

The dining hall had been transformed into a haunted house. A cold fog bank rolled over my feet, cottony cobwebs hung from the ceilings, and oversized spiders dangled above the deserted dance floor. The smell of dry ice was in the air. I spotted Nora, dressed as Darth Vader, eating a candied apple by the kitchen. Thatch also ate a candied
apple, a few feet away. They were studiously ignoring each other.

In one corner, a carnival-style glass maze was set up. Behind its smoky mirrors, Rachel and two other girls bumped into one another, reversed, bumped into a glass panel, and laughed. In the reflected glass, I caught a glimpse of a pretty girl in a black dress, pink mask, and stylish bob. I smiled to make sure she was really me.

A tall figure in a yellow wig and a polka-dot dress circled the floor, sneaking up behind unsuspecting students and scaring them. Guess Mr. Cooper was in charge of tricks for the night. A few minutes later, Mr. Graham arrived, still in his Dracula cape, and took over the drama teacher’s chaperoning duties. Mr. Cooper wandered off toward the faculty room.

I didn’t see Mark Elliott anywhere. He was probably too cool to show up to things like school functions. I realized I probably also fell into the category of things Mark Elliott was too cool for. That was depressing.

Brynn was in the Rowntree Room, standing by a four-tiered punch bowl filled with DayGlo orange liquid. She was dressed as a cat. Or at least she was wearing cat ears and had painted black whiskers across her cheeks, but the centerpiece of her costume was a tight black leotard. A
bunch of guys stood around her, and she was laughing like it was the best time ever. It was hard to believe she could be so giggly when I’d just seen her, a few hours ago, all tearful and scared.

I walked over to the punch-o-rama to get a drink. A tall junior guy wrapped a lanky arm around Brynn’s shoulder. She didn’t seem to notice. She laughed with some other guys, who circled around her. They watched her like those old cartoon wolf types, their eyes bugging out and tongues lolling. The beanpole hanging on Brynn was shirtless, with the word “!ooB” written on his chest in red lipstick.

It took a few seconds before I got it. Then I laughed. The letters were backward because he had written them while looking in the mirror.

“Boo?” I asked him. OoB Boy rolled his eyes. No goofy smile for me like he had for Brynn.

“It’s supposed to be ironic,” he said to no one in particular, kind of turning and dismissing me, like he couldn’t be bothered to explain himself. He snickered to the guy next to him like,
Hey, check this out
. Then OoB Boy reached down and grabbed Brynn’s butt.

Brynn didn’t seem to mind. She made flirty eyes at a different boy standing in the circle. I was embarrassed for her.

“I dunno. You look like an Oob to me.” I don’t know why I said it.

A couple of the guys snickered. Oob Boy turned around. He was very tall. After a second or two of thinking, he said, “Oh, yeah? What are you trying to do, get me to kill myself?” It was even funnier to the guys around him.

“You’re that girl?” one of them brayed. “Oh, burn!” and gave Oob Boy a high five.

“Hey, c’mon. Don’t be jerks,” Brynn murmured. She tugged at Oob Boy’s forearm, which was now wrapped under her chin. Her defending me caught me like a fishhook in the heart, torn between being grateful and angry.

“Seriously,” Oob Boy said in a loud voice, speaking to me, but looking all around the room. “You scared that girl into killing herself? What are you, psycho?”

I said, “You talk a lot of smack for a guy who can’t even spell ‘boo.’ Sure you’re not st-OOB-id?”

Oob Boy flung Brynn away in his rush to get in my face. If I got smacked, I would have to take my lumps. In a way, I was looking forward to it. My insides felt messed up. It seemed right that my outside matched. But before I even knew what had happened, Oob Boy got pinned against the far wall by Dracula.

“Don’t. You. Touch. Her,” Mr. Graham roared, his forearm under the kid’s neck. All the fight went out of Oob Boy. The fight was not yet out of our teacher. You could smell something primal and electric coming off Mr. Graham. For a tiny second I was weirdly flattered he would come to my rescue like that. Then I noticed Mr. Graham’s other hand pointed at Brynn, splayed on the ground. He wasn’t talking about me at all. “What do you think you’re doing, you grabby-handed punk?”

We all were a bunch of hoot owls, our eyes peeled open as wide as they could go. Teachers never touched kids like that. After a moment, Mr. Graham seemed to realize everyone was staring. He took a couple of breaths and stepped back.

“You,” he growled at Oob Boy. “And you.” He pointed at me. “Let’s go.” He stalked out the door. Oob Boy made a sarcastically gallant gesture toward me.
Ladies first
, it said.
Fine
. I flipped my hair out of my face, reckless with angry adrenaline. Marching right past Brynn, not even glancing her way, I led the Big Trouble Conga Line out the door.

We ended up in the faculty room. A fire burned in the fireplace. Mr. Cooper was snuggled up in an old wing chair, sipping from a coffee mug. He’d taken off the yarn
wig, and sat like a man in his dress. His eyeglasses reflected flames. He raised a brow at us.

“Sit,” Mr. Graham ordered us. He pointed to a scuffed leather couch. Oob Boy sat down, as far as he could possibly get from me. Mr. Graham stomped out of the room. Mr. Cooper went back to studying the fire.

After a moment, I felt pretty bad for losing my temper. I mean, sure the guy had been a jerk and poked me where I felt weak. But I had called him a name first. That hadn’t been very nice.

“Sorry about the Oob thing,” I said. He grunted.

“What’s your name?” I asked him. I had heard it around. Trevor or Travis or something.

“What do you care?” he muttered.

“When I say I’m sorry, I mean it,” I said. “Plus, I gotta call you something. Unless ‘Oob Boy’s’ growing on you.”

“I’m not stupid. I know how to write.” His voice went up a pitch. It hit me all of the sudden: He was actually worried about it. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who had gotten her weak spot smacked in front of everyone tonight.

“Travis?” I asked.

“Troy,” he said into his chest.

“Troy. I feel bad.”

He nodded. “Yeah, well, I’m leaving a note blaming you if I decide to kill myself tonight.” Then he bit his lip. When he did that, he was almost cute. I decided not to say anything about his writing skills and whether or not anyone would be able to decipher it.

“Graham sure had his shorts in a twist,” I whispered.

Troy smiled a little. I tried again.

“What do you think you’re doing, you grabby-handed punk?” I whispered, all dopey. He giggled. So did I. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed khaki pants headed our way and figured Mr. Graham was back.

Troy’s trickle of sniggering stopped midsnuff. He stared at the man standing in front of us. It wasn’t Mr. Graham. I closed my eyes, pretty sure I was going to pass out. Everything smelled like fresh soap.

“Leave us,” Barnaby Charon said. Troy leapt like a small woodland creature from the couch, his footsteps light on the floor. My eyes were still closed. I couldn’t get up the nerve to open them. Barnaby Charon sat next to me. Underneath the soap, I could smell all those secret smells that belonged to him.

When I did open my eyes, the first thing I saw was that Mr. Cooper had vanished. Only his steaming mug remained to prove he had been there at all. One of the big rules at boarding school was that at least one faculty member had to be in the faculty room at all times. Usually there were three or four. In case of emergency, you could always find someone here. I wondered if Barnaby Charon counted as faculty. I wondered if this counted as an emergency.

“Now I’m rather glad you didn’t get off in Denver, Camden,” he murmured. I couldn’t look at him. My heart was falling down a staircase into some sort of panic-induced heart attack. It thumped in my chest with one big, painful thump and got back into rhythm again.

“It has been … amusing.” He stopped, as if considering, then started again. “Yes. It has been
amusing
to watch you … develop during your time here.”

The warmth of his breath made all the hairs on the back of my neck goose bump. It was crazy, but I wanted to jump up and … I dunno. Make him stop. Except I was already in trouble, and this guy owned the whole school. And there was no one to see what was happening. Still, the urge to unload a big dose of shriek ’n’ slap on him was overwhelming.

“What happened to Mr. Graham?” I asked.