The Vault of Dreamers (28 page)

“What have I done?” I whispered, starting to shake.

The medics carefully bundled Burnham into the ambulance, and the last I saw of my
friend, one of his loafers was slipping off his foot.

“Rosie!” Janice cried, charging through the bystanders.

She flung her arms around me. Burnham’s ambulance was pulling away. I didn’t know
where they would they take him. I didn’t even know where the closest hospital was.

“You’re hurt,” Janice said, studying me. “Your arm. Is it broken? Dean Berg, Rosie
hurt her arm.”

That was when I first felt the pain in my right elbow. Dean Berg turned his soft,
grave face in my direction, and when I saw his façade of concern, cold fury hit me.
My accident with Burnham was Berg’s fault. My déjà vus and my dizziness were because
of him and what he was doing to me at night.

“Enough,” I said to him. “This has to stop.”

Dean Berg looked like he hadn’t heard me. His forehead was creased in concentration.
He had his normal earphone in one ear, and held another phone to the other. The buzz
of a voice in the receiver was loud enough for me to hear.

I pushed up near to him. “I said, this is
enough
.”

He smiled kindly and took my hand. “We’ll take care of you, Rosie,” he said. “Don’t
worry.”

I jerked away from him. He called out to one of the medics and pointed toward me.
Then he turned back to his phone call.

“Rosie, hold on,” Janice said, stepping between me and the dean. “Let him talk to
Burnham’s parents.”

Burnham’s parents were on the phone? I’d hurt their son. The blame I’d shot at Dean
Berg instantly reversed, and I was hit by an onslaught of guilt. I gripped Janice’s
arm. A medic started asking me questions, but I couldn’t answer him. I kept waiting
for Dean Berg to look back at me. I had to see the moment in his face when Burnham’s
parents accused me.

“Rosie, they found a heartbeat,” the medic said. “Your friend’s heart started again
just as they got him in the ambulance. That’s a very good sign.”

I turned to face him and tried to process his words. The medic was a small man in
a tidy uniform, and he gave me a reassuring nod.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“I’m sure. He has a heartbeat.”

Burnham was alive. I gasped for air and covered my face. Janice hugged me again and
I hid against her shoulder.

I didn’t kill him.

My friend wasn’t dead.

25

THE YELLOW PILLS

NOBODY YELLED AT
me. I wished they would. Or rather, my stepfather yelled at me, but nobody who mattered
did. According to Larry, I could be charged with manslaughter if Burnham died.

“Don’t listen to him,” my mother said, taking the phone back.

I was sitting in one of the examining rooms of the infirmary an hour later, waiting
for the medic to tell me it was okay to go. Apparently, the police wanted to keep
me separate from the other students until they could talk to me.

My arm, in a sling, was numb with a shot they’d given me, but it wasn’t broken.

“I feel awful,” I said into the phone.

“Do you want to come home?” Ma asked. “Are they taking good care of you? I could borrow
a car from the McLellens and come for you.”

“I don’t mean physically.”

The last thing I wanted to do was leave school. My guilt about Burnham now riveted
me to the place.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Ma said. “It was just an accident, and really, if he’d landed
anywhere else he would have been totally fine. It was just that paver in the wrong
place.”

I slumped lower in my chair.

“You’re slouching,” Ma said.

“Don’t try to tell me it wasn’t my fault,” I said. “That doesn’t help.”

“Getting snippy won’t help, either,” she said gently.

She was right. My problems weren’t because of her. I straightened slightly, for her
sake. “I just want more news on Burnham.”

“Forge has changed his profile picture to a still photo,” Ma said.

No surprise there. I fiddled with a penlight the medic had left on the table, flicking
it on and off.

“Rosie’s blip rank is fourteen. Is that good?” my stepfather called in the background.

Fourteen. My rank had never been so high. Brilliant.

“Dubbs wants to know what Burnham said in his letter,” Ma said.

I reached back to touch the bulge in my pocket. I’d forgotten about it.

“I have to go read it,” I said. “Talk to you later?”

“Anytime, sweetheart. I took the day off from work so I’m right here whenever.”

I hung up, stole the penlight, and slipped into the bathroom. It was a small room
with a little sink, a mirror, and a can of air freshener on the tank of the toilet.
I examined the walls and fixtures to be sure there were no cameras, and then turned
my back on the mirror, just to be sure. With my right arm in the sling, it was awkward
getting the envelope out of my skirt pocket, but I managed. Then, as I ripped it carefully
open, I was surprised to find three pills inside. They were small, chalky, yellow
disks, each one imprinted with a
.

Since when did Burnham supply drugs? I unfolded his letter.

Rosie,

I’ve thought about your footage and I’ve come to the following conclusions:

1. You’re spying on Forge for a real reason. Which means,

2. You witnessed something suspicious, and because of the cameras, that could have
happened only at night. Which means,

3. You’re staying awake at night somehow, at least sometimes.

I thought I was the only one. We have to be careful.

These pills are antidotes to the sleeping meds. You can take one right after your
regular pill and it will keep you up. Never take more than one. Never take one by
itself or it will fry your brain. I repeat,
fry
your
brain
.

Please write me back. I can help. My parents are going to be unbelievably pissed if
something unethical is going on here, but they’ll want to know. They won’t kill the
messenger. I promise. Flush this when you’re done.

Burnham
P.S. You’re right. The lady knight is you.

I leaned back against the edge of the sink and read the letter again. Wow. I wasn’t
sure what stunned me more: that he was staying awake, too, or that he’d given me the
antidote pills.
Crafty, crafty Burnham
, I thought.

A tap came on the door. “Are you okay in there? The police are here to talk to you.”

“Coming,” I said.

I wrapped the antidote pills in a tissue and stuffed them down my bra. Then I ripped
his letter in shreds, flushed it, and prepared to go out onstage.

Leave me out of it
, said a small voice.

I held still, my hand on the knob. I waited for her to explain, and when she didn’t,
I tried thinking back at her.
You know I don’t talk about you.

Then, though I was standing motionless, I felt my balance shift, like she was deliberately
doing it to me. I gripped the knob harder.

You mean the déjà vu? The dizziness?
I asked.
But that’s Dean Berg’s fault
.

My mind suddenly filled with an exaggerated image of the dean’s face, and his features
distorted into ruddy ugliness with bulging, evil eyes.

For your own sake, don’t tell them about any of it
, she said.

All right
, I said.
I won’t tell about anything strange.

She slid back into her murk, appeased, and left me alone.

I took a deep breath and stepped back out onstage.

*   *   *

The police grilled me politely but repetitively about what, exactly, had happened
on the ladder. I didn’t see the point, considering how many cameras had recorded the
event, but I hid my impatience and repeated my story: I slipped and fell. Yes, I had
seen the DO NOT ENTER sign, but I had ignored it. It was all my fault, not Burnham’s.
He hadn’t even wanted to climb. Yes, the ladder had seemed safe. I’d been up there
twice before with no problems. I wasn’t scared by the spider, I wasn’t distracted
by any noise, I wasn’t shaken by Burnham’s weight on the ladder below me. I simply
slipped and fell, and Burnham had cushioned my impact or I would have been the one
in the ICU. Couldn’t somebody please get ahold of his family and tell them how sorry
I was?

I left out my déjà vu and my dizziness and my inner voice. When they asked to see
Burnham’s letter, I said it was just a thanks for understanding about his grandpa,
and I’d destroyed it out of respect.

News came that Burnham was in a hospital in Chicago. He was on a respirator and suffering
from brain trauma. Beyond that, nobody would say. They wouldn’t even commit to whether
or not he was in a coma. Twice I tried to reach his family to tell them how sorry
I was, but I didn’t hear back.

The rest of the day was hellishly uneventful. The dean encouraged everyone to keep
attending classes, and a counseling station was set up in the library for anyone who
was too distracted or upset to stick to routine. I didn’t go there.

Instead, I made my way to the kitchen, where the impersonal, well-run activity was
distinctly soothing to me. I took a stool near Linus and hitched my heels on the uppermost
rung so I could lean over my knees. In time, Franny put me to work peeling and slicing
Granny Smiths for pies, which was a perfect, mindless task. I could feel the pain
in my elbow as the meds wore off, and I was glad. I wanted something to hurt. It helped
me settle back into myself.

Around one o’clock, Otis came in the back door and took off his cap. Linus was deboning
a dozen chickens, and though he looked over, he didn’t stop working.

“Parker’s asking after you,” Otis said to Linus. “Ted will let you go.”

“It’s not a good time.”

I looked back and forth between them.

“We had an agreement,” Otis said.

“I can do it tonight,” Linus said.

Otis turned his hat in his hand. I expected his gaze to shift to me, but I was wrong.
Otis didn’t say anything more, and a moment later, he went back out the door. Only
then did I remember that Linus was due to donate his blood that afternoon.

“You don’t have to stay for me,” I said.

“It’ll be okay,” Linus said.

In that one exchange between him and Otis, I’d glimpsed a whole relationship of patience
and power, a dynamic completely unlike anything I knew at home.

Chef Ted passed behind Linus with a sack of potatoes, and Franny turned on the mixer
at high volume for a minute. Linus kept working with the raw chicken, and I glanced
up at the TV screen where a live version of me was sitting on a stool in the kitchen,
watching herself on the TV screen. It went on in an endless loop.
Surreal
, I thought.

And then, unexpectedly, I thought of Parker wanting his meatballs and his movie, and
it mixed up with Burnham being maybe in a coma, and without warning, I felt prickles
rise at the back of my eyes. I had to look up toward the ceiling and blink rapidly
to stop from crying. I didn’t want to cry today on camera. I couldn’t stand the idea
of gaining anything from this situation, not even sympathy from my viewers.

“Your friend’s going to be all right,” Linus said.

He rested the point of his knife on the wooden board, and in his white tee shirt and
apron, he looked aggressively healthy and strong and alive.

“We don’t really know that,” I said tightly.

“His parents will get him the best care anybody could.”

That much was true. I couldn’t bear to talk about Burnham. His loafer had been slipping
off, there at the end. I didn’t want to talk at all. I didn’t want to think.

“Do you know that story of Cyrano de Bergerac?” I asked.

“Turns out, I do,” he said. “Why?”

“No reason in particular.”

He took the hint. For now, we could just be bodies in the same room. Later, we would
talk.

*   *   *

That night, when Orly came to distribute our sleeping pills, Dr. Ash entered with
her. Her red sweater was vivid under the lights as she walked down the length of the
dorm directly to me, bringing my own private tray of a pill cup and a glass of water.

“How’s the elbow?” she asked me.

“Fine,” I said, and rubbed it gently. I had taken off my sling when I changed into
my nightie.

Dr. Ash set down the tray, rolled up my sleeve, and examined the bruise. I smelled
her faint, familiar perfume as she leaned near. Over her shoulder, I saw Janice and
Paige watching curiously. When the doctor turned my wrist, I gasped at the pain in
my elbow. She lowered my arm.

“I could give you something for the pain, but once you’re asleep, you won’t feel it,”
she said.

“I’m really okay,” I said. “Have you had any more news about Burnham?”

“Only that he’s still not responding,” Dr. Ash said. “They’ve cooled him down and
they’re inducing a coma to help him stabilize. It’s standard practice. The next twenty-four
hours are critical.”