The Unseemly Education of Anne Merchant (22 page)

“There.” She places the barrettes on the table and smoothes my hair. “Doesn’t she look hotter’n hell’s door hinges now, ladies?”

Feeling my neck and shoulders relax, I sigh. “Thanks.”

As the next song starts, Tallulah and Agniezska pair off, leaving me alone with Harper. Maybe this is a turning point in our relationship. I know I don’t want to be her friend; I don’t want to be a member of the Model UN from Hell. But tonight. Tonight, I want to have a good time. Without conflict. Is that too much to hope for?

Harper shoos away two nervous-looking sophomore boys before they even have a chance to ask us to dance. “We need some girl time,” she tells them, absentmindedly rolling one of my barrettes in her hands. “Y’know, some people are saying you’re gonna headline Art Walk and even be a contender for the Big V. Can you believe that?”

I swallow.

“You really think you can make it to the Big V?” She looks perplexed. “When you’re up against me? And even with Pilot not wantin’ you to get caught up in it all?”

I glance at the beloved barrette she holds so casually and remind myself to play nice. Who knows what this hotheaded Texan could do if worked up enough? A change of topic is in order.

“So, will your parents be coming to Parents’ Day next weekend?” I ask.

“My daddy wouldn’t miss a chance to see me for the world.” She clenches her jaw. “He wants me to get the Big V more than anything.”

“That’s nice.”
Put my mom’s barrette down. Right now.

“I would never even have come to Cania if it wasn’t for my stepmonster,” Harper continues. “My daddy needs me back home.”

“Is your stepmom coming, too?”

“Unfortunately.” Harper’s face goes blank. Gone is her wide-eyed and obviously feigned innocence. “Guess some people don’t get it.”

“Don’t get what?” My voice breaks.

“That they don’t belong on this island. And that they should leave.” With that, Harper snaps one barrette in half. My mouth drops open. She snaps another.

“What are you doing?” I cry, my voice barely audible with the drums beating madly. I grasp for my remaining barrettes. Just miss them. She snaps them both.

“Wake up, you reject,” she hisses. “You don’t belong here. And you’re ruining everything.” She brushes the pieces of my broken heirloom onto the floor. “
Wake up!
” And storms off.

twelve

CONSEQUENCES

I WAS WRONG. I
CAN
MARCH UP A MOUNTAIN–OR AT
least a steep hillside—in these heels, if I’m angry enough.

Fuming, I head to the cliff where I watched Villicus the other day. My motivation for climbing up here is simple: I want to get as far away from that dance as possible, and I don’t want to go home. I just want to escape. To a place where it’s dark and calm. My first thought was the parking lot, but a bunch of kids were making out there. So I marched on and up. To the one place where I can stare out at the enormous sky and hope to feel my mom looking down. Where the echo of my voice might reach her, and she can call on some angels to help me out here—maybe even send a lightning bolt to zap Harper like a Kentucky-fried bitch. But, no matter how I beg, there is no lightning. Only a chilly breeze that grows fiercer the higher I get.

The air is filled with competing sounds. A cover of a My Chemical Romance song pours from the castle; loons and sea lions, which ought to be asleep, sing their lonesome odes below; my breath heaves as I storm up the hill, giving myself hell for wimping out with Harper. At the summit, I unstrap my borrowed shoes—the words
Property of Molly Watso
written inside them—and look out over the endless black waters. My toes curl into the cool, damp grass. My bare heels rest on a flat patch of icy cold rock. Shoes in hand, I creep to the edge, where Villicus stood, where the pulsating moon beckons me as though it has a secret to share. I peer over the cliff, listening; my head swoons with the waves crashing below. Here I stand, staring down a 100-foot drop, inches away from a fall that will mean death, the ultimate escape from the bitches and freaks at Cania.

“It’s not worth it.”

I recognize his voice without even looking back at him. What’s
he
doing here?

“What do you know?” I ask. But, heading his words, I stumble away from the cliff, leaving the waves to clobber the black granite, to wear away at it chip by chip. The wind thrusts wide wisps of hair across my face when I turn to see Ben, who is just feet away, cloaked in the dark shadows of darker trees. I’m not in the mood for him. I don’t need to feel like an idiot any more tonight, thanks.

“What are you doing up here?” he asks. He looks gorgeous in his suit, and that only makes things worse.

“I didn’t realize this was private property.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“What are
you
doing up here?”

He shrugs. “You left the dance?”

Pressing my tongue against the back of my teeth to keep from saying more, I nod. I need to forget about Harper, not rehash it all.

“You weren’t having a good time?”

I shrug.

“You’ve lost the ability to speak?”

I huff. “No. I’m just—it doesn’t matter.”

Sighing, Ben passes me, a current of air carrying his aroma as he glides by and walks to the very spot I was just standing, inches from the edge. There, he gazes at the water below.

“I used to love dances,” he says. “I used to go to my sister’s recitals all the time.” He faces me again. His eyes are fluorescent green against the gray sky; his expression tortured. “Jeannie took ballet. Jeannie. That’s my sister.”

He’s obviously struggling with some old memory, some homesickness I could relate to, if I wanted to. But I don’t. I don’t want anything more than to be left alone. Especially by Mr. Hot and Cold himself.

“You remind me of Jeannie sometimes,” he says out of nowhere. “And not just because you won that dance-off back there.”

The revelation nearly knocks the wind out of me. I stare at him, wondering why he’s so damn hard to pin down. His emotions must run on a dial, and he’s just turned it from Complete Asshole Mode to Charming Mode.

“Because I’m blonde?”

“How do you know Jeannie’s blonde?” Then he smiles. “Oh, yeah. The break-in yesterday. You saw her photos on my computer.”

It’s bad enough that he knows I broke in, but that’s he’s calling me on it? Now, when I already feel like jumping off a cliff?

“What else did you see?” he asks. The moonlight on his face reveals his mystified expression.

“Nothing,” I lie.

“Nothing?”

“What does it matter?” The wind whips my hair across my face and into my mouth, making me cough. Damn Harper for breaking my barrettes! “I saw a web page,” I growl, shoving my hair away. “Some photos of your family.”

“That’s it?”

“Your sketchbook. And a freaky old book about demons.”

“Did you read it?”

“Read it? Why would I?”

“Because your PT is to look closer,” he says, gliding toward me. I stumble backward with surprise, but that only brings him forward even more. “Tell me you read it.”

“How do you know what my PT is?”

“Everyone’s PTs are saved in a spreadsheet on my dad’s Mac, which you’d know if you were any good at looking closer.”

“My PT is private!”

“My whole
house
is private.”

He rushes toward me now, and before my heart can skip a beat, before my brain can process the fact that he’s near, his incredible face is little more than an inch away from mine. I gasp, trying to step back further, to stay at a distance where he won’t see my crooked tooth and judge me again like he did before. But he catches me by the waist and pulls me against his chest.

“But that didn’t stop you from breaking in,” he finishes, gazing into my eyes disarmingly.

“You’re wrong, you know,” I stammer, trying to find my voice and winded by the surprise of feeling his body against mine, his hands on my back, tortured by the presence of his beautiful lips so near mine but so out of reach. “I looked for answers on your computer.”

“Then what did you find?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

Am I
supposed
to be looking for something? This isn’t the first time Ben’s implied so. He tilts his head and inches his face close enough that our lips nearly brush.

“You
should
have
read the whole book,” he says. “Every book on our shelves. I can’t—” he sighs, his eyes flooding my face “—I can’t
give
you the answers.”

“What answers?” I gasp. This closeness to Ben, when he is always so unimaginably distant, is clouding my mind and compromising my focus.

“I can’t risk everything. You have to try. I thought you were smarter than this.”

“…smarter?”

Exactly the word to wake me from his trance.

Worst of all? He’s right. I’m an
idiot
for falling for his charms time after time. And the moment I let that fact hit me, the moment I remind myself that I am hopelessly brainless around him, I shove at his chest, trying to free myself.

But he refuses to release me. “That’s not what I meant,” he says, his low voice rumbling over my face as he grips my wrists behind my back. “You always misunderstand me. Just hold on a second.”

Even as I wriggle, I notice that his breath is sweet like cotton candy. His eyes unimaginably clear. His skin glowing. When he turns his head a fraction and the moonlight slips over the side of his face, he radiates a soft white light. I stop wrestling.

“Oh, my gosh,” I whisper, locked on him.

“What is it?”

Our eyes meet. And slowly, before I can stop myself, I say, “You’re
perfect
.”

He thrusts me away. I stumble, barely keeping myself from falling, as he retreats.

“No,” he says. It sounds like a warning. “I’m not.”

Again, I’m an
idiot
!
I’ve lived my life with a perfect GPA and was once called an art prodigy. Yet, somehow, I’m totally mental when it comes to Ben Zin.

“You of all people,” he sighs, running his hands through his hair wildly. “You’re an artist! You should want to look beyond the surface. Find the greater truth. Look at all the layers and reject them, one by one. Don’t you get that? You must
try
to see beyond the illusion of normalcy they create.”

“Normalcy?”

“I’ve hinted at so much already, Anne.”

“Hinted? You call those hints? A few book titles outside some hall? You’re so unbelievably cryptic, it’s like talking to Gollum!”

That comment obviously throws him off but only for a moment.

“Look, I’ve been doing my best to help you. I got in trouble for it, too.” He fidgets with his suit sleeve. “Why did you bother breaking in? Weren’t you looking for exactly what’s inside
Ars Goetia
?”

“It wasn’t my idea. It was Molly’s,” I blurt. And, with that, my confession is just
spilling
out of me. “She said we should find out about your girlfriend. We saw you leave. And we just thought…” I search the moonlit horizon for a way out of this. “It was stupid.”

“My girlfriend?” His smile makes a surprise reappearance. “And who exactly is my
girlfriend
?”

“You tell me!” I holler, exasperated as I throw my hands in the air. The shimmery Jimmy Choos in my hand reflect the moonlight. “That blonde girl. The one in your house the other day.”

He says nothing for an eternity. So I don’t, either. Instead, I stand silently in the wind, waiting for who knows what. Beating myself up for abandoning Pilot at the dance. Silly me. A perfectly nice guy with a good head on his shoulders likes me, and I’m in a shouting match with an unattainable snob who takes every opportunity to trash my intelligence.

“It doesn’t matter,” I stammer, ending the silence, ending it all. “I’m going to be smarter going forward.”

“You saw me with her?”

“I don’t want to hear a word about it.” It’s bad enough that I’ve spent the last few days stressing over it. It’s bad enough that I’ve told myself Ben couldn’t have a blonde girlfriend, that I’ve convinced myself it was his study partner. If Ben actually has a girlfriend, he can keep it to himself. I’ve suffered enough tonight. “I’m over it.”

“Over it? Why? Because you’ve found
true love
with your reckless boyfriend, Pilot?”

“My what?”

“Be careful with him.”

“He’s neither reckless nor my boyfriend. He’s
good.
He never makes me feel like you do, and he doesn’t judge me for my flaws.
That,
and he’s above this whole valedictorian race.”

“Wait a second,” Ben says, shaking his head. “What makes you think
I’m
not above the race, but he is?”

“Because you’re so hateful! You keep to yourself. You never say hello. You’re just like everyone else. Except Pilot.”

For a second, Ben looks like he’s had the wind knocked out of him. For a second, I wish I could take it back.

“That’s what you think? I’m hateful? You don’t…you don’t feel any sort of connection to me whatsoever?” he asks, his eyes narrowing as he moves closer to me, sending me staggering backward again.

My heel hits a rock, and I lose my balance, regaining it just in time to keep from falling but not before my shoes fly from my hand and down the dark hill.
Great.
Now I’ll never find them.