The Unseemly Education of Anne Merchant (28 page)

I’ve wondered if the other kids know they’re dead, hence the need to keep villager kids separate from Cania kids. But if they don’t, how could one explain the scrapbook? I can’t. They all know they’re dead—199 students are allowed to know they’re dead…and I’m the only exception.

Correction: I was the only exception.

Why me? Why shouldn’t I know?

Most of all, I’ve wondered if I’m crazy. I’m
alive.
I feel it. Pilot’s alive. I feel it when I smack at him as he makes some idiotic face that’s supposed to be an imitation of me pissed off. He’s flesh and bone and blood and brains, just like me. He’s heart and soul and
life.
Just like me.

And I have a new zit today!
Ha!
Take that, Death.

I’m torn between believing my hunch and believing my eyes. If I believe my hunch, this must be Heaven, in spite of Harper’s presence. If I believe my eyes…

“Have you even seen Ben today?” Pilot asks me. He’s stuffing gift bags with tissue flowers as we sit on a tabletop at the Parents’ Day meeting after school. “You could always ask him if he’s, like, a magician or something.”

I’m trying to refocus on the conversation. I’ve been observing Pilot more than I’ve been listening. It’s like déjà vu. I remember watching him, not listening to him, last week on the beach, when he asked me to the dance, back when I was still blissfully ignorant. That morning, we sat near a family of sea lions; they didn’t notice us because animals don’t notice spirits. Except for dogs, which yelp at them—like Skippy does every time I come around. He also yelps at Teddy. But he doesn’t yelp at Gigi. So does that mean Teddy’s dead, too? And Gigi’s alive?

When did all the others find out they were dead? A week after their arrival? Two weeks? Is there some test going on here that I’m not passing, something I should be doing to prove I’m
allowed
to know that I’m
dead
?
Does everyone know that I don’t know? That must be why I’m at Gigi’s. Because if I lived at the dorms, I surely would’ve found out last week. It took me about two minutes in the dorms to find the scrapbook. And one minute of reading it to
get
it.

“Earth to Annie?” Pilot sings.
“Ben.
You know, Ben Zin? The guy who changed your teeth? Your neighbor.”

“What about him?”

“Have you asked him what happened?”

I haven’t wanted to think about Ben. When I caught him looking at me in the hallway this morning, I immediately headed for the girls’ bathroom. For some reason, the idea of Ben not being
real
makes my brain want to shut down, to block it out, even more than I want to hide from the fact that Pilot, Harper—everybody else—are deceased, are physical manifestations nothing like you’d expect of spirits, but spirits nonetheless. Fleshy spirits. Of all the questions that have entered my mind, Ben’s life status is the one I promptly shut out.

Naturally, I have millions of questions about my own death. Why don’t I remember dying? The best explanation—the sane explanation—is that I’m making all of this up. That I’m not dead. Nobody is. That book I found was just a morbid joke a bunch of rich bitches put together; Hiltop’s page was empty, probably because she knows such a joke would be in very poor taste. Molly’s cremation was just the hallucination of a girl with a family history of mental illness and the recent secondhand-smoking of some Devil’s Apple.

“No,” I finally say to Pilot, glancing at Harper and her gang, who are obviously whispering about the two of us while they frame Parents’ Day signs in glitter. “I haven’t talked to him.”

I’ve spent all day biting my tongue and hiding my expressions during moments of intense realization, moments when I wanted to scream loud and hard and tear out of whatever room I’m in. Walking through the hallways and bumping into kids, knowing they’re all dead. This, what I’m about to ask Pilot, is the closest I’ve come to speaking of what I suspect—what I’m not certain of, but what I suspect.

“Annie.” He holds two tissue flowers to his chest and smiles. “Look. I’m a late bloomer.”

That act alone stops the wheels in my mind from turning. Why did this perfectly nice, fun guy have to die? He said he got here last year, so he died when he was just fifteen? Feeling my lip start to quiver, I bite down and taste blood. We have blood. Why the need for blood? Why the need for sleep? Maybe we’re not dead at all. Maybe I really am just going crazy.

Mental diseases are genetic, after all.

What’s more likely? That I’m at a school for dead kids…or that I’m afflicted with a disease I’m in denial about, a disease similar to the one my mother coped with?

That’s it. That’s got to be it. I’m losing my mind.

“Never mind,” I say, swatting the flowers from his hands with a smile.

“Hey, you lovebirds,” Harper calls to us. “More work. Less flirting.”

Pilot and I both blush.

It’s devastating to know that my mind is already slipping away from me, but at least that means everyone here is still alive. The idea sends a wave of relief over me, a wave that carries me toward Parents’ Day that very Saturday.

No, we’re not dead.

Dead kids can’t stand in uniform out in the quad, shivering with the cool breeze whipping off the Atlantic, waiting for their parents to arrive on a yacht we can see making its way up the island. And dead kids can’t slouch on the stools next to their sketches and watch as Dr. Zin and Ben stroll side by side, taking in the various displays.

“Why are you even here, Fainting Fanny?” Harper scowls as she takes her place at the entrance to the Art Walk. “Your dad’s not coming. And your sketches suck.”

Garnet approaches us, and Harper’s attitude abruptly changes.

“Harper,” Garnet says, “good work on organizing Parents’ Day.”

For a split second, Garnet darts a glance in my direction, and I wonder for the hundredth time if she made Harper the Art Walk lead as a warning to me, now that I know about her relationship with Ben. She’s telling me to keep quiet or she could easily destroy my life here. I get it—message received, loud and clear. I’m not saying a word. And with the scare I gave myself this week, I almost don’t care about Garnet and Ben; my mind obviously needs to focus on fewer things—to stay healthy—which means there’s no room for boys, especially confusing boys tied up in affairs with teachers.

“I’m sorry to hear your father won’t be joining us, Anne,” Garnet says. Her expression is sincerely sorrowful. “I can only imagine how heartbreaking that must be for him.”

As Dr. Zin and Ben near, I watch Garnet’s gaze chase after Ben, who’s pretending to admire the sketches but whose gaze returns to her again and again. They’re obviously in love. And I don’t care. Nope, just a healthy, clean frame of mind for me—no Bens allowed. Even when he ignores my sketches and stands alongside Garnet, who whispers in his ear, I refuse to care. That said, I still want some answers about what he did to my teeth. He’s not getting off that easily. If he can answer that question, then I’ll ask him about the troubling math problem that is how he could have been sixteen when his sister passed away five years ago.

“Ben!” I call.

Both Ben and Garnet turn coolly in my direction.

“What is it?” he asks. His tone is unmistakably icy.

“I have something I need to ask you.”

Flicking a glance at Garnet, he sighs and walks over. But before I can get a word out, he’s leaning in and doing one of those loud-whisper things Harper does, where everyone in a ten-foot vicinity can hear.

“Sorry if you’re confused, Anne,” he says, “but I am
not
your friend. Got it?”

Then he sweeps away. Garnet follows him.

Humiliated, I tell myself no one can see my chest heaving. Surely no one’s looking. But, no, they’re
all
looking, from Harper to Dr. Zin to Augusto, who’s sitting next to me on the other side. Harper smirks. Augusto drops his eyes.

“Miss Merchant,” Dr. Zin says, taking this awkward moment to view my work. “Perhaps you would be heading this art show if you spent more time on your craft and less breaking into people’s homes.” And then he walks away.

Great.

Keep it together. Everyone’s a jerk because of the Big V competition. Chill. Don’t start crying
—
if you cry, so help me, Anne…

A foghorn blows out on the water. Within minutes, the yacht has docked and parents are rushing off, bounding up the white staircase from the campus dock to the quad. The Glee Club, led by Pilot and Plum, begins singing the school anthem, backed by the Horn Club and Handbell Club. As the parents reach the quad, they glimpse their children at this display or that and rush to their sides, throwing their arms around them and weeping madly. I can’t help but notice that they’re all overreacting almost as much as my dad did on the phone with me. Both Harper and Augusto, who are on either side of me, jump to their feet and let themselves fall into the embraces of their adoring parents.

“Heading up the Art Walk!” Harper’s dad exclaims. “You’re a shoe in for valedictorian if you keep this up.” Even her stepmonster gushes over how lovely she looks, how beautiful her sketches are, how desperately they miss her back in Texas. Harper eats it up.

Augusto’s parents are worse. In spite of myself, I stare at them as they sob, sniffle, and drool over each other. There’s something familiar about all the parents. Something in their expression I recognize but can’t place.

“Next fall,
mon vieux,
you will be leading Art Walk,” his mother, a squat Quebecker, says as his father blows his nose with a silky handkerchief. “It will be a splendid senior year.”

“I tried.” Augusto’s face crumples. With another meaningful sigh, they all embrace again.

And here I stand. Alone. Shivering in the wind, rubbing my arms, trying to look unfazed, and suddenly missing my dad as if I haven’t seen him in years instead of just two weeks.

“Little orphan Annie?”

Glancing over, I see Pilot and his dad, Dave Stone, looking every bit the politician, walking my way. Blinking away tears and hoping my eyes aren’t red, I muster a warm smile.

“Dad, this is her,” Pilot beams.

“Miss Merchant,” Dave says, extending his hand to me. “I see Stanley’s little girl isn’t so little anymore.”

“Nice to meet you.” I shake his hand quickly.

The way Dave’s gaze washes over me in my uniform, I can’t help but feel exposed, dressed up like a common fetish in front of a sleazy politician. The tip of his tongue rolls over his bottom lip, his eyes linger on my low vest and then slide up my neck, over my lips, to my eyes. I dart a glance at Pilot, wondering if he’s picking up on his father’s wandering eyes, but he seems happily unaware. Given what he’s confessed about Dave being disappointed in him, I wouldn’t be surprised if Pilot felt honored to know the girl he took to the dance was being ogled by his dad. Anything to impress the old man.

“It looks like your time here so far has helped,” Dave says. “The exercise alone is putting a lovely color in your cheeks.”

“Oh,” I mumble, confused by his comment.

“Will we see you later? Perhaps after the symposium in Valedictorian Hall?”

The symposium is only open to parents. After it, there’s a whole day of activities planned, activities I’m supposed to participate in even though my dad’s not here. But suddenly, I don’t want to participate. Suddenly, I want to run home, dig the scrapbook out from under my mattress, and pore over it again. I’ve refused to look at it since convincing myself that nobody is dead, after all—that my mind is to blame for everything that’s so bonkers around here. But what Dave said, that the exercise has put color in my cheeks, struck me as more than odd. As if he saw me without color in my cheeks.

What kind of people have colorless faces?

The kind of people who sit on my dad’s cold steel table with embalming fluid running through their veins.

I need to read
The Many Lives of the Girls of Cania Christy
again.

Senator Stone takes one last look at my legs before heading off to the symposium in Valedictorian Hall. Without a moment to lose, I’m gone, racing back to Gigi’s.

eighteen

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

THERE ARE FIVE STAGES OF GRIEF THAT MY DAD Ex
plains to every mourner who enters our home. I’ve heard them a million times. The first stage is denial. I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ve been in all week: denial. Because the moment my fingers brush the cover of
The Many Lives of the Girls of Cania Christy,
I know for a fact that I am dead and so are they. There are hundreds of things I don’t understand about this new reality of mine, this state of existence no doctor can diagnose and no words can describe, but I know for a fact that it is very, very real.

What drives it home? The expression I recognized on all the parents’ faces. I
knew
I’d seen it before. And I had. On the faces of all the mourners I’ve painted through the years. That grief-stricken gaze was just mixed with something today. With shock, disbelief, fear, and desperation.

Next, I can expect anger. And then bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. Not sure when those kick in. Maybe they won’t happen at all. Maybe grieving is different for dead people. Surely the rules of grief don’t apply here. No rules apply here but gravity and whatever Villicus makes up. Tucking the scrapbook into my bag, I race down the attic stairs and almost make it through the kitchen, on my way out the back door, when I see Gigi slouched at the table, weeping into a glass of water. Scratch that—the slouch of her eyelids means it’s vodka, not water. I stop short and stare at her, instantly infuriated.