The Unseemly Education of Anne Merchant (29 page)

“Are you alive?” I demand. My voice is sterner than I’d expected it to be, which must mean anger is setting in. I’m ready for answers now. I know what’s going on, and it’s time everyone fessed up.

She sobs. “I miss Molly.”

“You didn’t even know her. Are you alive, Gigi? Answer me.”

“Everyone’s leaving, but someone has to stay. Watso has to stay. I have to stay. We made a pact. Villicus will take back everything if we flee.” Staring up at me, mascara running down her face, Gigi blinks, sniffles, looks like a sleepy barn owl. “Every day, we invite him back to the island, calling him here by name. Every day, we keep his secrets for him.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“But it was our island before he came here. The perfect location. A forgotten island in the wealthiest country in the world. My grandfather wrote the treaty with Villicus when he got here just after the war ended. Did you know that? He showed up when Germany surrendered,” she slurs. “There was a battle on our shores, where the navy was stationed. The soldiers died. And my own mother was killed—she was just a child. Then Villicus helped her. It was his foot in the door, you see. Her death was the beginning of his reign here. No one’s supposed to know that, but now you do.”

“That’s impossible. That would make Villicus, like, a million years old.”

“No, not a million. But older than he looks.” She finishes her vodka with a loud gulp.

“You’re drunk.”

“I should never have taken you in,” she whimpers. And then another round of sobs bursts out of her in short gasps. “But I was so desperate for the money, to save enough to help others off this island and out of his grip. I had to take you. Villicus needed a place to put you. He wanted you so badly.”

Up until this moment, I’ve been gritting my teeth, frustrated with this drunken old woman I’ve never liked, frustrated that she’s keeping me from returning to campus for answers.

But now. Now I’m interested. Let the interrogation begin.

“What do you mean, Villicus
wanted
me, Gigi?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“You can do anything you want to.”

“I can’t. Villicus owns my tongue, just like he owns everyone and everything else here.”

“No man can own another.”

“Keep telling yourself that, kid.”

“So you’re just going to keep his secrets? Look around you,” I hiss. “Whatever reason you had for keeping anything secret, it’s gone. Dead. What do you have to lose? You said it yourself. It’s over.”

“You don’t have any idea. He’s beyond powerful.”

“Why did he want me, Gigi?”

“I can’t—”

“Why did Villicus want
me
?”

Her mouth opens like she’s about to confess everything. But her eyes zoom in on Teddy racing by the kitchen windows to the back door, which he throws wide open.

“What’s going on in here?” he exclaims. His appearance at exactly the most inconvenient moments is starting to alarm me. Who the hell is Teddy? “Gigi, what are you saying to this girl?”

The ice in her glass clinks as she trembles. Her watery, terrified eyes roll over my face.

“Nothing,” I say dismissively. “Just the idiotic blathering of a pathetic old drunk.”

Villicus has a purpose for me here, and I need to know what it is. But first, I have to get this damn book back into the dorm common area before someone notices it’s missing. Breaking in is easy—the door’s open—but breaking out is more challenging. Because a Texan who looks angry enough to breathe fire out her nose is glaring in the dorm foyer as I try to leave.

“What are you doing?” Harper demands. “Plowing up snakes?”

The good news is she has no idea what I’m doing. I’ve already returned the book, so, unless she finds it and dusts it for fingerprints—unlikely—I’m in the clear.

“What do you care?” I ask, stalking out the door. She races after me and pulls at my arm.

“What are you trying to do?”

“I’m not trying to
do
anything,” I say coolly, glaring. “What are
you
trying to do? Tell me!”

“Lordy, you don’t know anything!”

“I. Know.
Everything
.”

“You know nothing.” Her expression shifts from suspicion to amusement. “Whatever you think you know, even if you’re right, is just a tenth of what you need to know to survive here.” She flips her once-stringy hair over her shoulder. “Now help me set up the gift bags for the parents before I tell Villicus on you.”

We’re both fuming as she marches stiffly ahead of me to Valedictorian Hall, where Agniezska and Plum are sitting, hands folded, at the little table set outside the hall’s front doors. The gift bags Pilot and I stuffed with tissue flowers line the tabletop. Tallulah is walking around the bags and dropping something in each one.

“What’s
she
doing here?” Plum sneers.

I find myself looking closely at Plum, this former child star who overdosed on coke at some nightclub. Until the gift Tallulah is adding to the bags catches my eye.

“What’s that?” I ask, but I don’t wait for an answer. Everything everyone says here is ambiguous crap. If I want the truth, I have to find it myself. So I grab a bag, dig under the tissue, and yank out the gift: an engraved pewter apple with a bite out of it.

“Anne!” Tallulah shrieks. “You’re not allowed!”

“
The world was founded on an exchange,”
I read before staring at the girls. “What the hell does that mean? Like, Eve and the apple?”

Swiping the apple out of my hands, Harper snarls. “Apples go on teachers’ desks. You’re at a school. Hello? It’s so obvious.”

“That’s not what that means.”

“Enough!” she fires at me before jabbing her finger in the direction of a storage room I’ve been in and out of all day, at the rear of Valedictorian Hall. “Go to that closet and get the box of school pins. We need them for these gift bags.”

“Give me the key.”

“You are such a bee in my bonnet,” Harper grumbles. “I left it on the door jamb of the closet. Put it back when you’re done!”

I march to the closet. Mumbling to myself, I pluck the key from over the door, push the door in, and pocket the key, striding expertly through the long, dark closet I navigated all morning, even with mops, brooms, and buckets scattered everywhere. Near the shelves, I pull a dangling cord, and a bare bulb floods the room with yellow light. Lining the walls in teetering towers are crates and bins labeled with peeling masking tape. At the end of the closet, Villicus’s booming voice in Valedictorian Hall shakes the wall, and I can’t help but roll my eyes. Villicus. The idea of him sends a surge of hot blood rushing through my veins.

Hang on.

“What’s the matter with me?” I whisper to myself.

In my fury, I nearly overlooked the fact that Villicus is giving a secret speech
on the other side of the wall
right now. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way into Valedictorian Hall from this closet. Fortunately, I’ve got experience with B&Es. And, overhead, an air duct leads into Valedictorian Hall.

It is extremely
Law & Order
of me to go to these lengths. To stack six crates soundlessly like stairs that I climb until I can reach the ceiling of the closet, if I stretch. To use the flat part of a key to unscrew the vent cover. To wiggle the cover free gently and, taking care, pull it down almost silently, setting it softly on a shelf next to the box of school pins I
should
be retrieving. I grip the inside of the vent, sticky with decades of dust, and, with a thin gasp, hoist myself up, feeling the crates rattle under me but remain, thankfully, vertical. My height makes it possible to fit in, but a part of me wishes I was still the scrawny girl I once was; my hips barely squeeze into the narrow duct. For a half-second, I experience a mild bout of claustrophobia, but I shake it off because time’s a-wastin’ and because, hell, since I’m already dead, I don’t really have to fear dying in here, do I? As noiselessly as possible, I shimmy through the dark, groaning air duct, heading toward Valedictorian Hall and expecting, with every inch I move, to see a light shining through the vent at the end, telling me I’m almost there. The best I see is a dim glow, which barely creeps between the vent cover’s slats.

When I make it to the cover and peek out into Valedictorian Hall, I realize why it’s so dim.

I’d expected the room to be lit like any other room. But, instead, candles burn in little groups up and down the long hall, where hundreds of parents and teachers sit on folding chairs, staring at Villicus, who struts in front of a tall wall of some two hundred tiny drawers.

The vent I’m looking through must be fifteen feet up the wall. Anxiously, I crane my neck to better see Villicus. But he keeps hobbling out of my limited view. The few words of his speech I catch reveal no well-guarded secrets, no insights into why he wants me here. He’s just talking random Cania crap, adding his somber voice-over to an otherwise eerie scene in which shadows flicker across the faces of parents who can’t tear their eyes away. They watch Villicus like they’re in a trance, like someone’s captured them in a spell that keeps them from blinking. Around the perimeter of the room, portraits of valedictorians are suspended midair, hung on invisible line attached to the vaulted ceiling. On the side opposite me, secretaries swarm, giggling with each other; as much as I wouldn’t wish death on anybody, I can’t help but think it wouldn’t be so bad to learn those secretaries are dead, too.

I want to see more, but it’s so dark, and when I shift, the ducting squeals. The majority of the room, straight from the pages of
Beowulf,
is in shadows. I can just glimpse a handful of parents, their expressions indistinguishable under the candlelight. But I manage to make out some faces. Directly below me, a Japanese woman dressed in black stifles endless sobs as she keeps one hand on the empty seat next to her; the other hand clutches a circle of beads from which tassels dangle. Next to her empty seat is a manly-looking woman. Cancel that! It’s a man dressed as a woman. I’m about to write him off as one of those eccentric billionaires you hear about, until I see, in the row behind, a couple who look equally out of place. They appear homeless, with tattered clothing, wasted expressions, gaunt cheeks. Beside them sit the very definition of the odd couple: a devastatingly debonair man holding the hand of a woman so enormous, she is almost suffocating inside her chins.

Where are the fabulously rich parents I’d expected? The CEOs and oil magnates, Botoxed women and too-tanned men? Now I wish I’d paid better attention to these parents earlier, back on the quad. A man glances up at the ceiling, exposing his face to me. “I Love Porno” is tattooed to his forehead.

What on earth?

Before I can peer any further into the darkness, before I can even start to make sense of this abnormal group, a long, lumbering
creak
interrupts my thoughts. The sound is coming from inside the air shaft, right under my arm. It’s followed by a shake—and the duct dropping almost an inch.

“Oh, shit,” I whisper, gently shifting against the opposite wall of the duct just as the shaft groans again. This thing is going to fall any second, and everyone in Valedictorian Hall, including Villicus, will know I was eavesdropping. Even if I can’t be killed, I’m pretty sure I’ll be both humiliated and in serious physical pain.

As cautiously but quickly as I can move, I hold my breath and inch backward. Leaving the air duct is slightly more complicated than entering it. Because it’s so narrow, I can’t turn my head enough to see where I’m going; I can only go straight and depend on the glow of the light from the closet and my feet scraping along the duct to keep me from tumbling out in a pain-packed heap. Just as my toes come upon emptiness—the opening in the closet ceiling—the whole shaft moans so loudly, I worry the parents in Valedictorian Hall heard it. Exactly the impetus I need to shimmy out the rest of the way
pronto
!

Lowering my body out of the shaft in the darkness, I dangle my legs and point my toes, lowering myself as far as I can go and realizing, as I do, that I should’ve added another row of crates. I’ll have to let myself drop at least two feet, and that could send the whole makeshift staircase tumbling down.

Okay. You can do this. Just try to control yourself as you freefall.

With another groan of the duct, I release my grip and fall. And keep falling well beyond the two feet I’d expected. I land in a slump on the floor.

My staircase of crates is gone.

The room is dark. But I left the light on before I went into the airshaft.

This can only mean one thing—one thing that makes the pain of my fall disappear.

Someone’s been in here since I went up.

I scan the darkness for company. “I’m just getting some pins for Harper,” I say. As I straighten up, my hip groans from my landing and gravel crunches under my shoes. I wince, step forward, and nearly leap out of my skin when something brushes my face. Reaching for it blindly, I feel a crunchy mop-head and sigh. But at that moment, I hear deep breathing.

“You thought no one would see you,” Teddy says.
Teddy
! Where the hell did he come from?

As I take another step, I can just discern the outline of a metal shelving unit. And then, all of a sudden, Teddy’s bumpy face. He stands a foot from me, leering, his beady eyes lit bizarrely behind the shadows. Gasping, I stumble backward and topple over a bin, breaking my fall on its lid.