Dead Beautiful

  The next morning I woke up early to go to Horticulture. It was our first day back in classes. Eleanor was in bed, curled up, facing the wall. I prodded her gently. “Eleanor, get up. We have Horticulture at six.”

  Eleanor lay with her back to me. “I’m not going,” she said miserably. “I’m not in that class anymore.”

  “What?”

  “They switched my schedule. Just go without me.”

  I waited a moment to see if she would roll over, but she didn’t move; and with nothing else to do, I left for class without her.

  That morning we gathered by the chapel, until Professor Mumm showed up and led us out the gates of the campus.

  “Renée,” Brett called out to me as we walked.

  I stopped, looking at him in a new light. “Oh hi, Brett.”

  He jogged up to me, looking like a robust ski instructor in a winter coat and a blue-and-yellow Gottfried scarf, his brown curls emerging from the bottom of a knit hat. “How’s it going?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You know, I’ve been better.”

  “Break wasn’t so great?”

  I laughed and shook my head. “That’s the understatement of the year. But I did watch a lot of movies.”

  “Crappy horror movies, I bet.”

  I looked up at him, surprised.

  He shrugged, pleased with himself. “You seem like the type.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you do always seem to find dead things whenever we’re in class.”

  I bit my lip, thinking back to the first day of class, when I found the dead fawn, or later in the semester when I found the carcass of a bird when we were supposed to be collecting baby saplings; or when I found a frozen squirrel when we were supposed to be learning about seasonal mosses. “I guess you’re right.”

  Brett stuffed his hands in his pockets. “It’s not a bad thing. Professor Mumm loves you; you’re like her prodigy. Maybe it’s some sort of special talent.”

  Letting out a laugh, I said, “Yeah, right. More like a curse. A Gottfried Curse.”

  I looked at him to see if he recognized the term, but he didn’t seem to be familiar with it.

  “Anyway, I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” Brett said. “About Eleanor.”

  I smiled, unexpectedly comforted by normal conversation. “Thanks.”

  “How is she?” His forehead was furrowed with worry.

  How to respond. “She’s … different. Quieter. I think she’s traumatized,” I said, which was partially the truth.

  “How was her break? Was she at home with her mother? Or was she in the hospital?”

  “I think she was with her mom. It sounded like her break wasn’t so great. Recovering and all. Why don’t you just ask her yourself?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t think so. Is her brother around a lot?”

  Brandon had been hanging around Eleanor a lot these days, looking even more stern and angry than normal. And who could blame him? His sister had probably died, and from the scrutinizing look he gave anyone who talked to her, it was clear that he was certain someone was responsible, and was determined to find out who it was and punish them. “He is.”

  Brett shrugged. “I figured as much. Did she say anything about how it happened?”

  I shook my head. “She doesn’t know.”

  We stopped just at the edge of the woods. Professor Mumm cleared her throat. “Today we’ll be learning how to read snow. Like soil, the texture and topography of snow and ice can tell us what lies beneath. A dune, a crevasse; whether the snow is powdery or packed, blue or creamy or a brilliant white—each of these characteristics can tell us what’s hidden beneath”—she held up an index finger—“if we learn how to read them. Now, what I want you to do is partner up.”

  Brett elbowed me. “You and me?”

  I smiled.

  When I got out of class, Dante was leaning on the stone at the entrance to Horace Hall, waiting for me, as beautiful as ever. He looked up at me as I approached, his face young and dark and gallant, his hair pulled back like an Italian model. If I hadn’t known everything that he was, I would have fallen in love with him all over again. He was wearing a crisp blue shirt and tie. Only a thin coat, no scarf. Snowflakes collected on his hair. Everything about him reminded me of how different we were.

  “Renée,” he called out, but I kept walking. “Renée, wait. Why won’t you talk to me?” He reached out and grabbed my arm.

  Unprepared for the coldness of his skin, I pulled my arm away and stared at him as if he were a stranger. For the briefest moment our eyes met, and a flicker of understanding passed between us before I looked away.

  What does it feel like to discover that your boyfriend is Undead? Shocking. Unfair. But mostly disturbing. How was it possible that I had spent so much time with Dante without knowing what he truly was? I couldn’t decide which was more disturbing—that he was dying, or that a killer was dormant inside him. Was there a part of him that wanted my soul? I thought back to every time we almost kissed. I shivered at how close he had come to taking my life. Could he do it? I didn’t want to ask him or talk about it. What could I possibly say? I was alive, he was dead, and no amount of words would change that.

  “Renée, please,” he said as I turned to go. “Just listen to me. Talk to me. I’ve been trying to call—” But I was already gone.

  “How was Horticulture?” Eleanor asked while we were sitting in Philosophy, waiting for class to start.

  “We had it in the forest,” I said.

  Eleanor’s eyes went wide. “What was it like? What did you do?”

  “Snow topography. With partners.”

  Nathaniel frowned. “What does that have to do with horticulture?” He looked at Eleanor. “So you weren’t there?”

  I shrugged. “It’s pretty useful. You can figure out what the terrain is like below the snow, or if there’s stuff buried beneath it, or what the temperature of the ground is.”

  “They switched me out,” Eleanor said. “Now I’m in something called Elementary Advanced Tongues. What does it even mean for a class to be elementary and advanced at the same time?”

  “I was in that last year,” Nathaniel said, giving her a quizzical look, while I gave him a quizzical look. Was he Undead too? I ran through the criteria in my head, my mouth forming a tiny pink O as he spoke. His skin was cold, his senses were terrible, yet he was incredibly smart. “It’s Latin. Sort of.” He was fluent in Latin.

  Eleanor rolled her eyes and collapsed back into her chair. “Great. When they said I didn’t have to take Elementary Latin, I thought they were giving me a break after what happened in the basement.”

  I had been trying to figure out if Eleanor knew she was Undead. So far, the verdict was no.

  Nathaniel and I went quiet at her mention of the flood, waiting to see if she would talk about it. I hadn’t talked to Nathaniel about it. I thought about telling Miss LaBarge, but assumed that the school knew, especially since they had switched Eleanor’s courses. I tried calling my grandfather, but he was away. So instead I tried to stay up as late as I could with Eleanor every night so she would have someone to talk to, hoping that when she did learn what she was, she would confide in me. Plus, it wasn’t exactly easy sleeping in a room with someone who I knew had the urge to kill me.

  Eleanor looked between us. “What? You’d think a near-death experience would at least exempt me from the most boring class of all time.”

  Slowly she smiled. I did too, as did Nathaniel, which quickly degenerated into laughter, and for the first time in a long while, even if just for a moment, I felt carefree again.

  I didn’t see Dante again until last period. When I got to Crude Sciences, he was already sitting at our lab bench, looking statuesque as he leaned back in his chair, his tie and oxford artfully crinkled around the musculature of his neck. In front of him was a tray, upon which a neat row of medical tools was arranged: a scalpel, a pair of tweezers, a needle and hook, and a spindle of string.
r />   Without a word, I sat down next to him, trying with all my will to keep my eyes on the board. Dante turned to me. “Renée, I meant to tell you, but every time I tried, something always interrupt—” Ironically, before he could finish, the bell rang and Professor Starking walked in carrying a large plastic tub. He set it on his desk.

  “Life sciences,” he said. “Otherwise known as Scientiae Vitae, the counterpart to Disciplina Mortuorum, or Science of the Dead.” He hoisted the tub from his desk and walked down the aisles. Using tongs, he fished around inside until he emerged with a dead frog.

  “I tried to stay away from you,” Dante said. “The beginning of the year. I kept my distance because I didn’t want to put you in danger.”

  “We can’t study life sciences until we study death,” Professor Starking said while he walked. “I have given each of you a frog. This is your vessel.”

  “But I couldn’t stay away. I still can’t stay away from you. I wanted to tell you, I planned on telling you, but I didn’t want to lose you.”

  I blinked back angry tears as I stared at our frog. It gazed back at me with glassy eyes. It wasn’t fair. Maybe it wasn’t Dante’s fault that he was dead, but it was his fault for involving me when he knew what he was.

  “Renée? Say something.”

  “Who can tell me what some of the characteristics of decay are?” Professor Starking looked around the room.

  “Cold skin,” I whispered to Dante, looking at him from the periphery as I steadied my voice. “Stiff limbs. No sensation. Disconnected from the rest of the world.”

  “Living people can have those characteristics too,” Dante replied.

  “The paper cut? The séance? You knew and you let me second-guess myself all semester.”

  “I tried to tell you—”

  “You make me feel alive?” I said, repeating what he had told me that night in Attica Falls. “I thought that was so romantic. I didn’t realize you were being literal.”

  “Why does that have to make it mean less?”

  “Have you killed anyone?” I asked quietly.

  “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

  “Will you kill anyone?”

  “No.”

  My lip quivered. “Will you die?”

  Dante didn’t say anything for a long time. “Yes. But one day you will too. It isn’t so different.”

  “Everything is different,” I said loudly. In the background, Professor Starking had stopped lecturing and was telling us to quiet down, but I didn’t care. “You’re... you’re …” I looked at the frog. “I don’t even know what you are.”

  The class erupted in murmurs. Professor Starking anxiously tried to calm everyone down and get the class under control.

  “I’m still the same person I was before—”

  “You’re not a person!” I said, my eyes watering as they searched his for an answer that would help me understand what he was. Suddenly the room seemed incredibly silent. The entire class was looking at us.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” Professor Starking said nervously from the front of the class, “but you can figure out your differences in work detail.”

  We walked in silence to the headmistress’s office, me three paces ahead. The secretary asked us to wait outside while she fetched Headmistress Von Laark, so I sat on the far side of the bench, arms crossed.

  The office door opened. “Come in,” Headmistress Von Laark’s voice said soothingly. “Both of you.”

  When we were seated in front of her, she asked us what happened. After a moment, we both spoke at the same time.

  “He provoked me.... I was answering a question and he interrupted me,” I said.

  “I provoked her,” Dante said. “It was my fault.”

  Surprised at his selflessness, I suddenly felt embarrassed for blaming him. But it was his fault, I reassured myself. He did provoke me. If he hadn’t been dead, and if he hadn’t kept it from me, we never would have been in this situation. I crossed my arms, trying to convince myself that I was right, but quickly felt overwhelmed with guilt.

  “I see,” the headmistress said. “Still, since you disrupted class together, you will both have to serve a work detail. Five o’clock tonight. The fifth floor of Horace Hall. Room eight, north wing.”

  I left without saying a word to Dante because I didn’t know what to say. Not wanting to walk in the same direction as him, I went to Horace Hall. I couldn’t confide in Eleanor because she already had enough problems of her own, and Nathaniel just wouldn’t understand. The bell rang as I entered the building, and I waited for all the students to empty out before I climbed up the stairs to see Miss LaBarge.

  The floorboards creaked as I walked down the narrow hallway that led to her office. It was tucked into the corner, a thin strip of light peeking out from beneath the door. I knocked.

  Miss LaBarge’s voice floated through the wood. “Come in.”

  She was sitting in an armchair under a yellow cone of light, reading. When she saw me, she smiled and stood up. “Renée,” she said, taking off her reading glasses. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  I wiped my shoes on the doormat and stepped inside. Her office had a warm glow to it, and smelled like cinnamon and burning wood.

  “Have a seat.”

  I took off my scarf and sat in the love seat across from her. A thick hardcover book sat on the ottoman between us, a ribbon resting in its crease.

  “What are you reading?”

  Miss LaBarge picked it up. “Oh, just some silly stuff. Beyond Good and Evil, by a philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche. It’s about how to decide what’s right and what’s wrong.”

  “That doesn’t sound silly at all.”

  She frowned. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

  “How do you tell the difference?”

  She closed the book and put it on the side table. “Sometimes you can’t.”

  “So...say you’re dating a boy, and he tells you that he’s something, but it turns out that he’s actually something else. Is that wrong?”

  “Would this supposed boy have a good reason for keeping it a secret?”

  I thought about it. Dante probably hadn’t told me because he thought it would scare me. And he was right. “I guess so. But it’s still lying, isn’t it?”

  “It is, but if the lie is meant to protect the other person from harm or pain, is it really that bad?”

  “But I didn’t want to be protected; I wanted to know the truth,” I blurted out.

  She shrugged. “Sometimes there isn’t just one truth. Just because you discovered more about him doesn’t mean the person that he was before was a lie. You just had a less complete picture of him.”

  I wanted to believe that what Dante and I had had before was real; that the things he’d said and done were still genuine even though he was Undead. But even if I could, that reality was slipping through my fingers. Dante had an expiration date, and there was no way I could help him.

  “But what if I know we can never be together?”

  “Hmm. That’s tricky. I think this calls for some tea. Hold on to that thought.” She got up and disappeared into the anteroom. I heard water running and then the sound of steam hissing out of a kettle, the clatter of dishes, the delicate clinking of a spoon against porcelain. She returned holding two cups and a teapot. “Chamomile?”

  I nodded.

  “Never only exists in your head. Anything is possible.”

  “But what if he’s too...too different?”

  “Do you still have feelings for him? Even after knowing who he is?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.” And then I thought about it. “Well, maybe... Yes.”

  “Then you’ve answered your question. In love, everyone does things that hurt the other person, so really there is no ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ You just have to decide what you’re willing to forgive.”

  “But what if I know it’s not going to last?”

  “Then savor every moment.??
?

  The pitter-patter of footsteps reverberated from the floor above us. I cradled the cup of tea in my lap. “Have you ever been in love?”

  She smiled. “Oh, I’d like to believe that I’m always in love with something. After all, what else is there?”

  Professor Urquette was assigned to oversee our work detail. She was our Art and Humanities teacher. Her body was shaped like an eggplant, which she emphasized by always wearing multiple shades of purple and green. Even though she’d never married, she had the je ne sais quoi of a jaded divorcée. She hid the baggy skin on her throat beneath crocheted shawls and velvety scarves, and held her pen in the side of her mouth like a long cigarette. Her graying hair was kinky and defied all laws of gravity by puffing upward, making her seem three inches taller than she was. Every few months she dyed it back to its original color—red—and when the gray grew in beneath it, her head looked like it was on fire.

  I arrived at her office a few minutes before five o’clock. Dante was already there, sitting at the desk by the door. Embarrassed about how I’d behaved earlier, I hesitated before going to the opposite end of the classroom and sitting by the window. Outside it was a beautiful clear day, and I could see Eleanor walking down the path with some girls from our floor. A cool breeze blew in, and I felt the tickling inkling of a sneeze. I tried to hold it in, but it came out suddenly, loud and unflattering. My face grew red and I began to rummage through my backpack for a tissue.

  “Bless you,” Dante said quietly from across the room.

  I looked up at him with surprise. “Thanks.”

  We sat in silence until the door opened. Professor Urquette bounded into the room, wheezing from walking up the stairs. After dropping her bags on the desk, she collapsed into her chair and let herself catch her breath. Delicately, she patted her hair, making sure it was still in place.

  “I understand you were both disrupting a school lecture?”

  Neither of us said anything.

  “Okay,” she said, hoisting herself up. “Normally I wouldn’t do this, but the school play is nearly upon us and we need wood to start building the set.”

  We stared at her blankly.

  “Well, gather your things. We’re going into the woods.”