The Vault of Dreamers (21 page)

“You had to sign that paperwork when you came, right?” I asked, remembering the waivers
my parents and I had signed. Dr. Ash had mentioned them, too, the day of the fifty
cuts. “Was your mom the doctor concerned at all about side effects from being here?”

“No.” Janice looked both revolted and concerned.

I wound my finger around a twist of my hair and pulled it taut. “You feel totally
fine, don’t you? You never feel the least bit weird or stressed or anything here,
do you?”

“Okay, maybe I should take you over to the infirmary,” she said.

“Just because I’m asking questions doesn’t mean I’m sick or crazy.”

“No, but if you
were
sick or crazy, you’d be acting a lot like you are right now,” Janice said.

I took a good, hard look at my friend. Janice oozed confidence and energy. I’d thought,
when I first got to know her, that she was a little East Coast prim. These days, she
laughed easily and had tons of outgoing theater friends. She’d cut her long blond
tresses into a wispy, wild hairdo, and she wore what she called her Hamletta scarf
wherever she went.

I glanced past her shoulder at the rest of the room. Henrik and Burnham were flicking
a triangular paper puck across one of the tables, aiming at goals made with their
pinkies. At that moment, Paige trapped the puck under her hand. Then she dropped into
Henrik’s lap, draped her willowy body around his, and kissed him before she gave back
the puck. Other students around us were laughing and lively, too, glowing in the hotbed
of creativity that was Forge.

The contrast to my own stifled condition hit me in the gut. What I felt most, unexpectedly,
was envy. What on earth was wrong with me? I was taking my pills like everyone else.
Why wasn’t I turning into an artistic genius? Why was I the only one who was unraveling?

As the blip rank board on the wall began its flipping noise again, I covered my ears
with my hands and closed my eyes. I didn’t let go of my ears until it stopped.

“It’s no good trying to hide,” Janice said. “The blip board knows all.”

I looked up then to see I was ranked fiftieth.

“You’re fifty,” Janice said.

“Thanks.”

“To clarify, you’re absolute last,” she said.

“I got that. Really.”

“Look, whatever’s going on with you, you need to figure it out,” she said. “I mean
it. This isn’t a place that lets students fall apart. Honestly? I’m surprised no one’s
onto you.”

“Unless they want me to fall apart,” I said.

“Come again?”

I sighed. At some level, I’d never stopped worrying about what was happening at night.
Inside, I was half-unglued, and apparently it showed because the board, like a magic
mirror, never lied.

“Maybe it’s good for the show, altogether,” I said. “Maybe they like having one student
in crisis so the rest of you look good.”

She scratched her head. “They haven’t done that in past shows.”

“Maybe it’s new for this season,” I said.

“Are you admitting you’re in crisis?” she asked.

“No.”

I slouched my arm out along the table and laid my cheek along my arm. This way, my
eyes were close to my fork when I twirled it in a morsel of Sloppy Joe. I was serious
about wanting to know how many Forge alums committed suicide or otherwise died young.
How to figure that out was the question. I got an idea.

I sat up straight and made a slow-motion princess wave with my hand.

“If anyone out there in viewer land can tell me how many Forge alums kill themselves
or otherwise die young, I’d be grateful for the info,” I said. “Same about kids who
get cut in the fifty cuts. Feel free to send me an email. R-Sinclair-at-TheForgeSchool-dot-com.”

“What are you doing?” Janice said. “I do not approve.”

“I’m just putting it out there,” I said. “There’s freedom in being dead last. And
incidentally, for the record, even though I’ve actually said the word
suicide
out loud, I’m perfectly fine.” I slumped back on my arm and fed myself a cold, waxy
morsel of Sloppy Joe.

*   *   *

On Tuesday, after classes, I headed down to the basement of the library. Most of my
cameras for my ghost hunting project had reached capacity on their memory, and I needed
a way to store the footage or lose it. So far, I’d watched only a fraction of what
I had. Even though I seriously doubted that Dean Berg would allow me to record anything
to incriminate him, I still had to try. I also needed to use the footage for DeCoster’s
class.

I chose a computer near the windows, and I was uploading my footage when Burnham came
in.

“Hey,” I said.

He scooped up a Ping-Pong ball by the net and strolled slowly nearer. “It’s Rosie,
at it again.”

His hair was wet and his blue shirt looked fresh, like he’d just come from a shower.
“Is this seat taken?” he asked, pointing to the place beside mine.

“Go ahead,” I said.

He swiveled into the chair, turned his computer on, and set the Ping-Pong ball in
a paperclip on his desk, where it couldn’t roll. It was a little weird having him
near me since we were still barely speaking. I glanced to see if anyone else was coming
in, but we were alone.

“How’s your project going?” I asked.

“Not bad.”

A gaming program came up on his screen, with panels for settings, rules, and characters.
I watched him skim through various screens until I saw a bird’s eye view of a clock
tower and a quad.

“Are you making a game of the school?” I asked.

“Sort of.”

“
Are
you?”

“Sort of.”

He was. How totally cool. I leaned closer, intrigued. He even had the benches in the
quad and the fence around the rose garden configured in 3-D so they shifted appropriately
whenever he swiveled angles.

“That is so cool,” I said. “Who are the characters?”

“I’m still working on them.”

“Let me see. Are they us? That looks like a knight.” I hitched my chair closer to
his so I could point. “Does that guy have a name?” I asked.

“She’s a lady knight,” Burnham said.

“Really?” I said, peering closer.

He pointed. “She has boobs.”

I laughed.

“It’s a little hard to tell under her armor, but they’re there,” he said.

“For the discerning gamer,” I said. “The boob-seeker.”

“Exactly.”

I gave the character a closer inspection. “Did you mean for her to look like me?”

“No.”

“She does,” I said. “Curly brown hair. Nasty, nasty scowl. That’s totally me.”

Burnham nudged his glasses and leaned toward the screen, examining his own artwork
as if he’d never seen it before. “You’re full of it,” he said.

I looked down at my own cleavage and straightened my violet tee shirt. “If you say
so.”

He frowned over at me. “I hear you’re looking for ghosts?” he asked politely.

“Yeah. I know. I don’t believe in them, either, but there’s merit in an impossible
search,” I said. “The problem is trying to sort through all my footage. If I watched
it in real time, I’d have to watch ’til I’m forty.” I swiped a couple of files on
my touch screen.

“Why are you spying on Forge?” he asked.

“Like I said—”

“No. Why? I’m curious.” He planted an elbow on his desk, swiveled in my direction,
and waited like he expected a real answer.

I opened my mouth and no words came out. A flash of panic hit me. Since he could guess
I was spying, he ought to know I couldn’t explain my motives on camera.

“I’m just attempting to fail, like Mr. DeCoster said,” I said.

The lie was so obvious between us, it was almost a form of truth. Was this why he
had sat next to me? To ask about this?

“And you’re doing it with all your heart?” Burnham asked.

“That’s the goal. To fail with all my heart. Remember the assignment?”

He lifted one of my video cameras, the one from the graveyard. I’d taped a cross to
it so I could keep track. “Are these all the cameras you have? Nine?” he asked.

I glanced at my row of video cameras. I had hours of footage that showed moonlight
shifting over the quad, and a security guard passing in a golf cart, and cleaning
crews going by with barrels of garbage. The one useful thing I’d discovered was that
the techies consistently headed home around midnight, after which I could expect hours
of nothing. “I have one more camera on top of the observatory,” I said.

“Why there?”

“It’s haunted.”

He picked up the Ping-Pong ball and rolled it between his palms. “To start with, if
you want full coverage of the school at night, you need to plot out the angles of
what the cameras are covering,” he said. “Then you need a system to review the footage
efficiently.”

I noticed he’d gotten past needing to know why I wanted the coverage.

“How would a person review the footage efficiently?” I asked.

“It’s easy,” he said. “You could use ten computers simultaneously to load the footage
and dump it in the K:Cloud, and then combine them in your editing platform.”

I had been stuck on the technical limitations of the uploading, but his idea made
perfect sense. I glanced again at his game, and remembered my pretend motivation for
filming the school at night. “I could add a little ghost to some of the scenes, and
move it from screen to screen,” I said.

“That would be
faking
a ghost sighting, which isn’t what you set out to do,” he reminded me.

“True, but it would be fun,” I said. “Fun’s worth something and projects evolve. I
don’t suppose you’d help me.”

He leaned back in his chair, still rolling the small white ball. “Possibly, I could,”
he said slowly. And then, “Catch.”

He tossed me the ball and I caught it. For the first time since before the fifty cuts,
he smiled at me for real, and I smiled back, relieved. Burnham’s gaze shifted toward
the door behind me.

I turned to see Linus framed in the doorway.

19

THE LOOKOUT TOWER

LINUS’S HAIR WAS
shorter, and he was wearing a dark jacket I hadn’t seen before.

“Hey, Sinclair,” he said. “You busy?”

I smiled and set the Ping-Pong ball back on Burnham’s paper clip. “Come on in. Do
you know Burnham?”

Linus stayed where he was in the doorway. Burnham swiveled his chair around and said
hi. Linus said hi back.

It wasn’t awkward at all.

Linus hooked a hand around the back of his neck and looked toward me. “I was wondering
if you wanted to come do something,” he said. “I’ve got a half hour.”

“It’ll take me a minute to pack up,” I said.

“I can watch your stuff,” Burnham said.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

Burnham reached over to swipe my touch screen, and nine bars showed the uploading
progress of my footage. “No problem,” he said.

“Thanks. I’ll be back soon,” I said, and zipped up my backpack to leave it tidy by
my chair.

Linus and I climbed the stairs to the main door of the library and pushed out into
the fresh air. Though it was still sunny, the temperature had dropped, and I could
hear a breeze rippling the trees along the quad.

“You cut your hair,” I said. He’d taken out a couple of his earrings, too, I noticed.

“It’s too short,” he said.

“No, it’s good.” I examined the back of his neck where the trim little hairs looked
soft and sharp. He looked older, somehow, with the shape of his head more defined.
“It’s definitely good.”

“Thanks. Want to watch the storm come in?” he asked.

I glanced over my shoulder at a dark bank of clouds. “Sure.”

“I know just the place,” he said, and reached for my hand. “You’re cold.”

“A little,” I admitted.

He shrugged out of his jacket and put it around my shoulders.

“But then you’ll be cold,” I protested.

“No, I’m fine,” he said. He had only his white tee shirt on, and I could see goose
bumps all up his arms.

I protested again, but he insisted, and when I reluctantly slid my arms into the sleeves
of his jacket, I could feel his residual body heat in the fabric.

“Okay, I’m never giving this back,” I said.

He laughed. “I’ve missed you,” he said.

“You saw me yesterday.”

“Even so.”

I lifted my gaze quickly to his. He meant he missed me at night.

“I have to be in class sometimes,” I said.

“I know.”

We moseyed between the chapel and the art building. He leaned over sideways and put
a kiss on my earlobe.

“You’re cute in my clothes,” he said. “Want my pants?”

“Like that’ll happen,” I said, laughing.

“You wouldn’t have to actually
wear
my pants,” he clarified. He nodded at the chapel. “We could always take a couple
blankets behind the organ.”

I’d heard about that. “But there are still cameras back there,” I said.

“I know. It’s not ideal.”

“And everyone would know what we’re doing.”

“They would, yes,” he said, smiling. “They would absolutely know.”

“Are you teasing me?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“Just how old are you?” I asked.

“Seventeen,” he said. “How about you?”

“Fifteen.”

“When’s your birthday?” he asked.

“December.”

“December whath?”

“December fifth,” I said. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Sixteen just seems like a good age.”

“For what?”

“For teasing somebody.”

I laughed again. We were walking behind the art building, past my favorite wooden
spools, and I glanced up at the lookout tower where a big camera lens was, predictably,
aimed at me. Linus drew me over to the base of the tower.

“Hey, Otis!” Linus called up. “Drop us the key!”

The old man with the mustache peeked out from behind the camera. “A storm’s coming.”

“Yeah, I know,” Linus called. “That’s why we’re coming up.”

“Stand back,” Otis said.

A moment later, Otis tossed out a small, spiky object that fell in a long arc to the
gravel at our feet. A trio of metal, old-fashioned keys was attached to a mini rubber
duck. I peered toward the top again.