Dead Beautiful

  But that was the reason we buried people, wasn’t it? After gazing at him in confusion, I raised my hand, determined to get the right answer. “Because leaving people out in the open is unsanitary.”

  Mr. B. shook his head and scratched the stubble on his neck.

  I glared at him, annoyed at his ignorance and certain that my responses were correct. “Because it’s the best way to dispose of a body?”

  Mr. B. laughed. “Oh, but that’s not true. Think of all the creative ways mass murderers have dealt with body disposal. Surely eating someone would be more practical than the coffin, the ceremony, the tombstone.”

  Eleanor grimaced at the morbid image, and the mention of mass murderers seemed to wake the rest of the class up. Still, no one had an answer. I’d heard Mr. B. was a quack, but this was just insulting. How dare he presume that I didn’t know what burials meant? I’d watched them bury my parents, hadn’t I? “Because that’s just what we do,” I blurted out. “We bury people when they die. Why does there have to be a reason for everything?”

  “Exactly!” Mr. B. grabbed the pencil from behind his ear and began gesticulating with it. “We’ve forgotten why we bury people.

  “Imagine you’re living in ancient times. Your father dies. Would you randomly decide to put him inside a six-sided wooden box, nail it shut, then bury it six feet below the earth? These decisions aren’t arbitrary, people. Why a six-sided box? And why six feet below the earth? And why a box in the first place? And why did every society throughout history create a specific, ritualistic way of disposing of their dead?”

  No one answered.

  But just as Mr. B. was about to continue, there was a knock on the door. Everyone turned to see Mrs. Lynch poke her head in. “Professor Bliss, the headmistress would like to see Brett Steyers in her office. As a matter of urgency.”

  Professor Bliss nodded, and Brett grabbed his bag and stood up, his chair scraping against the floor as he left.

  After the door closed, Mr. B. drew a terrible picture of a mummy on the board, which looked more like a hairy stick figure. “The Egyptians used to remove the brains of their dead before mummification. Now, why on earth would they do that?”

  There was a vacant silence.

  “Think, people! There must be a reason. Why the brain? What were they trying to preserve?”

  When no one responded, he answered his own question.

  “The mind!” he said, exasperated. “The soul!”

  As much as I had planned on paying attention and participating in class, I spent the majority of the period passing notes with Eleanor. For all of his enthusiasm, Professor Bliss was repetitive and obsessed with death and immortality.

  When the he faced the board to draw the hieroglyphic symbol for Ra, I read the note Eleanor had written me.

  Who is cuter?

  A. Professor Bliss

  B. Brett Steyers

  C. Dante Berlin

  D. The mummy

  I laughed. My hand wavered between B and C for the briefest moment. I wasn’t sure if you could really call Dante cute. Devastatingly handsome and mysterious would be the more appropriate description. Instead I circled option D. Next to it, I wrote Obviously! and tossed it onto her desk when no one was looking. Eleanor rolled her eyes, wrote something below it, and tossed it back to me.

  Has he kissed you yet?

  I wrote a one-word response and passed it back.

  No!

  She slid it back with a reply. I unfolded it in my lap.

  What’s taking him so long? Maybe he doesn’t know how, and that’s what he’s so pensive about.

  I smiled and scrawled back a response. I was wondering the same thing.

  Maybe he doesn’t like me like that. I mean, I don’t even know that much about him. He deflects all of my questions. And he called me a “friend.”

  Eleanor looked puzzled when she read my note. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her crush it in her fist and drop it into her backpack. Then she mouthed “Later” to me and focused on the board.

  Just as Mr. B. turned to write something on the board again, a folded piece of pink paper hit my arm and dropped to the floor. I picked it up and flattened it out. In a loopy blue cursive, which didn’t look like Eleanor’s handwriting, it read:

  When darkness falls and eyes stay shut

  A chain of voices opens up.

  Let wax not wane give breath to death.

  Room 21F

  Friday, October 31

  11 p.m.

  p.s. Shhh

  I glanced suspiciously around the room to see who had thrown it, but everyone was focused on the board. “Did you write me that note?” I whispered to Eleanor.

  “What note?” she mouthed with a grin, and held up an identical piece of pink paper with what looked like the same words on it. Putting a finger to her lips, she bent over her notebook and started copying the terms on the board.

  While Mr. B. talked about cremation, my mind drifted from death and burials to the cryptic note and what it meant. Absentmindedly, I started doodling in the margins of my paper.

  Renée, I wrote in cursive, and then again in bubble letters and then in the loopy handwriting of the mystery note. I drew a tiny picture of the moon above a lake. And then stick figures of people swimming in it. And then for some reason, I wrote Dante. First in print, and then in large, wavy letters, and then in all caps. Dante. Dante. DANTE. I had just finished writing, when I heard someone say my name.

  “Renée?”

  I shook myself out of my daze to discover that Mr. B. and the entire class were staring at me.

  “Earth to Renée. The most primitive tombs. What were they called? ” he repeated.

  I glanced at my notes for the answer, but they were covered in doodles.

  “Dante,” I blurted out, reading the first word I saw. Immediately my face went red. “No, sorry, I meant … I meant dolmen.”

  I winced, hoping I was right so that I would be saved from further embarrassment. Thankfully, Dante wasn’t in my class.

  Mr. B. smiled. “Correct,” he said, returning to the board. He drew a diagram of a stonelike lean-to, which I recognized from the reading. I took notes and kept my head down for the rest of class.

  After the bell rang, Eleanor and I walked back to the dorm. But when we climbed the stairs to our room, the door was ajar. We exchanged surprised glances and pushed it open. At first it seemed like nothing was different. But the papers in my desk drawer were out of order, my bookshelf was rearranged, and my dresser drawer was pulled slightly out. The same was true for Eleanor’s.

  “Someone was definitely here,” Eleanor said, looking through her closet, which she claimed was messier than it had been; though I doubted it could get any worse than it was before.

  There were no locks on any of our doors, but it was an unspoken rule that you never entered someone else’s room without permission. “Who do you think it was? Should we report it? Maybe it was Lynch. You know she doesn’t like me,” I said.

  Suddenly Eleanor ran to her underwear drawer, as if remembering something important. She rifled through it, throwing its contents on the floor, and then sighed. “No. We shouldn’t report it,” she said, her back to me. “If Lynch wasn’t the one who took it, I definitely don’t want her trying to get it back, because then she’d read it.”

  “What are you talking about? What’s missing?”

  She turned to me. “My diary.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Twisted Whispers

  aCCORDING TO PROFESSOR BLISS, SOME CULTURES think that Fridays are unlucky, especially when they fall on Halloween, but what happened that Friday had nothing to do with luck. I’ve never been a superstitious person. I’m not scared of graveyards or curses. In fact, ever since my parents died, it seemed like I was drawn to death. Every word my professors uttered seemed morbid and ominous, and everywhere I looked things were dying: moths dangling in spiderwebs under the radiator, bees curled up on the windowsill, and the oak trees, now thi
n and naked, their leaves crunching under my shoes like beetles. But I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t believe in life after death, and I definitely didn’t believe in ghosts. That Friday was windy and overcast. The clouds hung heavy in the sky, their bellies black and swollen with rain. Gottfried didn’t do anything to celebrate Halloween. In fact, I think the school intentionally ignored it, which I found strange, though acceptable. The day had been eerie enough already. I had spent most of it indoors, waiting out the storm. Eleanor told her brother Brandon about the stolen diary, but there wasn’t much he could do except keep an eye out. The one thing he did know was that Mrs. Lynch hadn’t taken it. If she had, word would have gotten to him, since he was on the Board of Monitors.

  “What did you write in it that’s so bad?” I asked Eleanor. “Everything,” she said. When I pressed her for specifics, she evaded my questions. “I just hope that whoever has it keeps it to themselves. If the stuff I wrote in there got around, I would kill myself.”

  I still didn’t know who had passed me the note in History class, but something about the way Eleanor refused to talk about it made me sure she knew what the rhyme meant. All I knew was that 21F was Genevieve Tart’s room, though why we would go there was a mystery to me. Up until that point, I thought I was more or less a patient person, but Eleanor was testing my limits. “Does it have something to do with Halloween?” I asked, but she wouldn’t answer. “Come on, it’s Friday night, we’re supposed to do whatever it is the note meant any minute now. Why can’t you just tell me? I mean, what’s the big secret?”

  “Why can’t you just wait and see?” Eleanor said, sitting on her bed in her school clothes with a book in her lap. A single candle illuminated the room. “Besides, if I tell you, I know you won’t come. And if you don’t come, we won’t have enough people. Plus, I think you’ll like it.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. If you think I’ll like it, then why wouldn’t I come?”

  “Because you’ll think it’s stupid. And you never like things at first.”’

  “What do you mean?” I said, taking offense. “Of course I do.”

  Eleanor rolled her eyes. “You didn’t like me. And you didn’t like Dante. And you didn’t like Gottfried.”

  I sighed, but before I could respond, there was a tap on the wall over Eleanor’s bed. It was 10:45 p.m. We both froze and listened. There was another tap, then two more.

  Eleanor’s face perked up. “It’s time.”

  She opened her dresser and pulled out two candles. “Are you ready to go?”

  Room 21F was on the fifth floor. We were on the third.

  I gave her a skeptical look.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll give you one hint, but you have to promise you’ll come.”

  I nodded.

  “Suffice it to say, it has to do with Genevieve Tart and some of the other girls. They have these secret gatherings that no one gets invited to except for the girls that Genevieve thinks have potential. Whatever that means.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Each gathering is different. And sometimes people aren’t invited back. So don’t say anything ridiculous before you give it a chance.”

  Defensive, I put a hand on my hip. “Why would I say something ridiculous? Do I say ridiculous things? And what if I don’t want to be invited back?”

  Eleanor shook her head and pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail. “See, this is exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “Fine. I won’t say anything impolite or rude. In fact, I’ll try not to speak at all. Now, how do we get past Lynch?”

  Eleanor smiled. “You’ll see,” she said, and unbuttoned her skirt.

  I looked at her blankly. “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t want to get my clothes dirty,” she said, peeling her stockings off. “You should probably take yours off too if you don’t want to ruin them. It’s dusty in there.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “In where?”

  I thought the fireplace in our room was merely decorative, but as it turned out, it wasn’t. Eleanor threw the candles into a bag that she hung around her wrist. On the side of the mantel was an iron knob. Eleanor pushed it to the left, and the flue creaked open. A mixture of cold air and dirt gusted into the room. I waved it away with my hand, then peered up into the shaft. A sprinkling of soot fell on my face.

  “Have you done this before?”

  “All the time.”

  I was skeptical. She hadn’t done it all this year.

  “It’s the only way,” she added, as if reading my thoughts.

  Then, wearing just a tank top and a pair of pink underwear, she stepped into the fireplace and hoisted herself up. I watched as her torso, then her legs, and finally her feet disappeared into the chimney.

  I stripped down and changed into my pajamas—a pair of shorts and an old T-shirt—then followed her. The chute was sooty and so narrow I barely fit inside. Metal rungs were nailed to one side, creating a makeshift ladder.

  “Don’t fall,” Eleanor teased, her voice echoing against the brick walls.

  I looked down. The shaft of the chimney ran all the way from the basement to the roof, connecting our room to the rooms above and below it. I let out a nervous laugh and tightened my grip on the rungs. Wisps of broken spiderwebs floated around the edges of the passage, getting caught in my hair. My knees scraped against the brick as I inched up.

  We emerged on the roof. Dozens of other chimney stacks poked out around us.

  “The ladders were for the chimney sweeps,” Eleanor explained, counting three stacks to the right, and then two down. “This one,” she said before climbing inside.

  Descending was faster than going up. Eleanor counted to herself as she stepped tenuously down the rungs—15, 14, 13, 12—and then stopped.

  “I thought Genevieve Tart was on the Board of Monitors,” I said. “Aren’t they supposed to follow the rules?”

  Eleanor glanced up at me. A finger of soot was smudged across the right side of her forehead. “Exactly. Lynch would never suspect Genevieve.” Eleanor tapped the flue twice with her foot. After a moment, it creaked open. “And besides,” she said just before squeezing her body through the narrow hole leading to the fireplace, “this was her idea.”

  Genevieve’s room was lit by candlelight. Seven candles were positioned in a broken circle on the floor, and seven girls were lounging about the room. I knew some of them from my classes; a few others were friends of Eleanor’s. The rest were juniors who I had seen around campus but never met before. There were legs everywhere—Maggie’s thin calves draped over a bed frame as she talked to Katherine; Greta’s athletic thighs crossed on the carpet, cradling a magazine; Charlotte’s pale knees, which she hugged while Rebecca braided her hair; Bonnie’s ankles, just visible beneath her nightgown as she opened the windows; and Genevieve’s long, tan legs, which stemmed from a pair of blue shorts.

  “Finally,” Greta said, closing her magazine.

  Eleanor wiped her hands on her thighs. “Are we the last ones?” she asked, lighting our candles and placing them on the floor with the others.

  Charlotte nodded. Charlotte was Genevieve’s roommate. She had large eyes and banana curls that bounced when she walked. The walls above her bed were plastered with posters of actors and musicians, the most prominent being David Bowie, whose hollowed face stared back at me over the foot of her bed.

  In contrast, Genevieve’s side of the room was pink and neat and bespoke an obsessive attention to order. Everything was placed in a careful arrangement: the makeup on her dresser in perfect symmetry, the notebooks and folders on her desk all organized by color, the photographs on the wall framed and centered.

  Eleanor nestled herself between the girls and introduced me. “Everyone not in the know, this is Renée. She’s my roommate.”

  Genevieve gave me a fake smile. “We know who she is. Why do you think she was invited?” Then she looked at me. “The headmistress is always talking about you. She says you’re one of the
best students in your year in Horticulture.”

  I gave her a confused look. I hadn’t met the headmistress. How could she be talking about me? But Eleanor cut me off before I could say anything.

  “And she’s dating Dante Berlin.” She smiled, her blue eyes growing wide as everyone in the room looked at me with new interest.

  Genevieve cocked her head. “Really?”

  I blushed. “We’re not dating. We’re just friends.”

  Eleanor rolled her eyes. “She’s being modest. Dante is practically obsessed with her. He’s even tutoring her in Latin.”

  “That’s not true. I mean, he is tutoring me, but it’s just because I’m terrible at it. And the headmistress couldn’t have said that about me. I’ve never even met her.”

  This didn’t seem to bother Eleanor. “Professors talk. Maybe Professor Mumm told her about you.”

  “And you shouldn’t be so sure that you and Dante are just friends,” Charlotte said, tossing her curly hair over her shoulder. “Latin is a Romance language, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Charlotte,” Genevieve snorted. “It’s a Latinate language.”

  Charlotte looked stung by her remark. “But aren’t the Romance languages based on Latin?” she asked.

  “The language is dead,” Genevieve said with a hand on her hip. “Just like the people who spoke it.”

  A rigid silence fell over the room, and Genevieve stood up and cleared her throat. “Okay, is everyone ready?”

  She opened a leather-bound book titled Talking to the Dead and began to call out instructions. “Sit in a circular formation. Position a candle in front of each person, thus forming two concentric circles.”

  It took me a few seconds to realize what we were doing, but when I did, I had to suppress a groan. “A séance? Really?” I mouthed to Eleanor after we sat down. She was right; I did think it was stupid. Nonetheless, I couldn’t leave now. We sat in a circle around the candles. Eleanor was to my right, Genevieve to my left. Our shadows flickered across the walls.