Dead Beautiful

  I sighed. “I guess.” Even though everything she said made sense, I didn’t believe it.

  “But if Dante’s is hiding something, maybe you can get it out of him,” she said, wrapping an elastic around the bottom of my braid. “I think he likes you.”

  “He said three words to me, then told me I was in his seat. That hardly counts as liking.”

  “Okay, but you have to admit that he’s gorgeous. Aren’t you at least curious?”

  I was, but not just because he was unreasonably good-looking. There was something about the way he’d looked at me that made me feel more alive than I’d felt since before my parents had died. Even though our interaction was brief, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Why did he talk to me but not to anyone else? It seemed too coincidental that he had found Benjamin dead in the forest from a heart attack, just like I had found my parents. Yes, there was no proof he knew anything. He could have left his friends for any number of reasons. But what if there was more to it?

  I was about to respond when someone knocked on the other side of the wall above Eleanor’s bed. A mischievous smile spread across her face. She climbed onto her bed and knocked back three times, waited, and then knocked once more.

  Tiptoeing next to the door, she pressed her ear against it to make sure no one was outside. “I’m going next door. Do you want to come?”

  “What’s next door?”

  “Just the girls,” she said, putting on her slippers. “Genevieve’s going to be there, and I want to hear all the dirt on the Board of Monitors.”

  “Is there dirt? I thought they were model students or something.”

  “Oh come on, everyone has some terrible secret buried away.” Raising an eyebrow, she teased, “Not just Dante.”

  “Isn’t your brother on the Board of Monitors? Why don’t you just ask him?”

  She shook her head. “That’s the only thing he won’t tell me about. Obviously he doesn’t understand reverse psychology. Keeping it a secret only makes me want to know more.”

  The invitation was tempting, but I was still trying to process all the things she’d told me about Benjamin Gallow. “Maybe some other night. I’m exhausted.”

  Eleanor shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  She pulled on a sweater and slipped into the hall, where Rebecca and Bonnie were huddled outside. “Sweet dreams, Renée,” she said, and closed the door.

  Unsure of what to do with myself, I picked up our dorm phone and dialed Annie’s number. Her mom answered.

  “Hel... Hello?” my voice cracked. Even though I had only been gone for two days, it felt like ages. I had taken for granted what it was like to talk to someone familiar, and all at once my emotions about losing my parents and being ripped away from my friends and my life in California came bubbling to the surface.

  “Renée, is that you?” Margerie’s voice echoed from a world that I had almost forgotten.

  I swallowed. “Yes,” I said in a small voice. “Is Annie there?”

  “Oh honey, she’s out right now. Can I have her call you back?”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked, after I had given her my dorm phone number.

  “Yeah, it’s great,” I forced out. “Everything here is great.”

  There was a long silence on the other end, as if Margerie were weighing whether or not she believed me. “Okay. Well, call us if you need anything. And I’ll make sure to tell Annie you called.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and hung up.

  I thought of all the places Annie could have been—the marina, the coffee shop, Lauren’s house—all the places I used to go to, but would never see again. To take my mind off it, I rolled over and picked up the Gottfried Code of Discipline and opened to the table of contents. It had dozens of sections: Dress Code, Curfew, School Boundaries, Leisure Activities, Room and Board, and Attica Falls, among others. I flipped to the chapter on the history of Gottfried and began to read.

  Gottfried Academy was originally founded as a children’s hospital. The patients were housed in two buildings, one for boys and one for girls. Between the buildings was the only known salt lake on the East Coast. The founder and head doctor, Bertrand Gottfried, used the antibiotic qualities of the salt water to ward off disease, and the lake became a bathing area for patients. The infirmary grounds were built around it, including a wall that concealed the grounds behind fifteen feet of stone, to protect the patients from the natural hazards of the White Mountains....

  Although I was tired, something compelled me to continue reading. And that was how I ended my first day at Gottfried—thinking about rules and restrictions, about death and Benjamin Gallow and my parents, until I fell into a dreamless sleep.

  CHAPTER 4

  The First Law of Attraction

  THE FIRST WEEK OF SCHOOL ONLY ADDED TO THE strange events that had been occurring over the past few weeks. It started in Latin.

  Horace Hall, where almost all of our classes were held, was the size of a small Victorian castle, with stone towers and large wooden doors hammered with iron. They were so heavy I could barely open them. Ivy climbed up the face of the building, meandering around the windows that looked out onto the green.

  The doors opened into a foyer with red carpeting, stained wooden walls, and high ceilings supported by oak beams. The windows were framed with heavy blue drapes, their folds gathering on the floor. Behind them, heaters hissed. In the middle of the foyer was a wide staircase with polished banisters that led to the outer wings of the building.

  Our Latin class was somewhere inside. It was first period, and Eleanor was running late and had stopped by the dining hall to pick up breakfast before class, so I was left to find it by myself. A few minutes before the bell rang, I was still standing in the foyer, staring down at my schedule as students rushed past me.

  Elementary Latin M W F 8:00 am

  EW, II, VII, Horace Hall

  I was pretty sure that meant east wing, second floor, seventh room. Or maybe it meant east wing, second room, seventh floor. Or maybe EW were the initials of my professor. I tried to ask for help, but everyone pushed past me in a rush to get to class, a swirling haze of pressed shirts, cuff links, ties, and penny loafers. This place couldn’t be that hard to navigate; I just had to think. I had a gut feeling that it was on the seventh floor, so in a somewhat arbitrary decision, I made my way up the stairs to the east wing.

  I found the room just as the bell rang. Breathless, I pushed open the door and flung myself inside, a flustered, sweaty mess. The entire class turned in my direction, and I knew I’d made a mistake. It was a small group; everyone was sitting around a single wooden table, hunched over their books when I interrupted. They all looked older and somewhat unwelcoming, particularly a brooding boy with short auburn hair that was neatly combed and parted down the side. He was wearing a black suit, far fancier than anyone else in the class, and tortoiseshell glasses. Next to him was a girl who could have been his sister. I couldn’t decide who was more handsome. She was also wearing a man’s suit, though hers was tailored to her slender frame. Her short black hair was parted and slicked back, as if she were a wealthy financier from the 1920s.

  The professor was a robust young man with sandy hair that reminded me of a golden retriever. He was lecturing in a language I didn’t understand. It was probably Latin, though I was sure this wasn’t the class I was supposed to be in. The professor stopped speaking and gave me a questioning look. I could feel my face turn red.

  “Is this Elementary Latin?” I asked stupidly.

  The person in the seat closest to me turned around, and to my surprise, it was Dante. He raised an eyebrow, a beautiful eyebrow, and stared at me with amusement. Seeing him again, I felt embarrassed and excited all at once. He was leaning over the back of his seat, his collared shirt pulled tightly around his broad shoulders. His wavy brown hair was pulled back with an elastic band, a few stray locks dangling just below his chin. I imagined my
self running my fingers through it.

  We made eye contact, and I felt myself blushing.

  “No,” the professor said, taking off his glasses. Behind him, the board was covered in notes written in Latin. The only words I recognized were Descartes and Romulus et Remus. A simple six-sided figure was drawn over and over again in different iterations and dimensions. Confused, I looked at it again. It couldn’t be anything other than the image that had been haunting me for the last two weeks: a coffin.

  “I … I’m sorry,” I murmured, and began to back out the door, when Dante stood up and walked toward me, his eyes never leaving mine. I fumbled with my things, and he reached behind me, his hand grazing my skirt as he opened the door. And giving me a barely discernible smile, he breathed, “Second floor. Seventh room on the left.”

  I was late for Latin. When I walked into the classroom, it was the same thing all over again, all heads in my direction, and silence—a dead, pitying silence. Eleanor’s eyes were wide and terrified for me. “What happened?” she mouthed, curling a ringlet of hair around her finger nervously. But I didn’t dare respond. The professor stopped lecturing.

  “I... I’m sorry I’m late. I got lost.”

  “I don’t want you to speak; I want you to sit,” she said, as if I should have known.

  Trying to keep a low profile, I hugged my bag and made my way to the back of the room.

  Our Latin professor was a fortress of a woman, wearing a wide, shapeless dress and a thick pair of glasses. Professor Edith Lumbar was written on the board in wobbly cursive.

  Edith Lumbar. She was the woman my grandfather had told me to contact if I ever needed help. I closed my eyes and sighed, wishing I hadn’t already gotten on her bad side.

  “To continue where we left off, while you are in my classroom, there will be a number of rules. First, there shall be no slouching.”

  The sound of shuffling filled the room as people sat up straight.

  “Practitioners of Latin must pay close attention to precision in all facets of life if they wish to master the subtle science of the language.”

  She began pacing about the room. “Second, you are not to speak unless you are called upon.

  “And third, and this is by far the most important of all the rules, you are never, under any circumstance, to speak the language of Latin.”

  How could we learn a language that we were never allowed to speak? And what was the point of learning it in the first place?

  “Why?” I blurted out before I could stop myself.

  Professor Lumbar turned around and looked at me with surprise. “Were you not listening when I mentioned rule number two?” she asked, though it clearly wasn’t a question. “What is your name?”

  “Renée Winters,” I said.

  She gazed at me for a moment and then repeated, “Renée. To be born again. An old name, derivative of the Latinate and French verb naître, to be born, and shared by the great thinker René Descartes. While you clearly possess his proclivity for argumentation, it’s evident from your rash behavior that you lack his patience and wisdom to follow a logical progression through to its end.”

  I barely had time to process her diatribe before she continued.

  “So, Renée, what is it that don’t you understand?” Her tone was polite yet rife with sarcasm. The room was so silent I could hear my stomach growling.

  I swallowed. “I was just … I was wondering why we can’t speak a language that we’re trying to learn.”

  “That’s an interesting question. Does anyone want to answer her?”

  A boy in the front row raised his hand.

  “Yes,” Professor Lumbar said. “What is your name?”

  “Prem,” he said.

  “Prem, what do you think?”

  “Is it because Latin is a dead language?”

  “Latin has been considered ‘dead’ for centuries. Yet it is quite alive. Historically, Latin has been a language of the elite. Only select people were able to read it, write it, and most important, speak it. In this class we will study the legends surrounding the people Latin chose to speak through. Since this is an elementary class, it is obvious that no one in this room has been blessed with a Latinate tongue. To attempt to speak it out loud would thus be an act of hubris.

  “However, if you choose to exercise your minds, I can teach you how to communicate the unspeakable. How do you describe the briefest sensation? A smell you haven’t experienced since you were a child? The ecstasy of seeing an animal being born? The immeasurable grief we feel when faced with death? We can’t even begin to communicate these complex emotions to each other. But Latin can illuminate sensations you never realized you had.”

  All eyes were glued to the professor. Suddenly, Latin became interesting. Even as a child I had felt isolated in my thoughts. I was sure that nobody knew the real me, the full me, even my parents. And now that they were dead, I was completely alone. How could I explain all the things I was feeling to another person? Maybe Latin was the answer.

  Professor Lumbar picked up a piece of chalk and began to scrawl something on the board. Latinum: lingua mortuorum. I copied it in my notebook.

  “Now, open your books to page twelve,” she said, and proceeded to make us copy out verb conjugations until the period was over. Once out of class, I flipped through my dictionary to try and decipher what she had written. After writing out the translation, I looked around suspiciously.

  Latin: The Language of the Dead.

  The rest of the day went by in a blur. We were herded from one classroom to the next like cattle, lugging our books up and down the rickety old stairs of Horace Hall with just a short break for lunch. It had been so long since I had been at a new school that I had forgotten how difficult it was to be the new girl. I had no friends, and everyone at Gottfried acted like they’d stepped out of a polo match in the British countryside with the Prince of Wales. And considering that Gottfried actually had a polo team, and one of the upperclassmen was distantly related to the Duchess of Kent, some of them probably had. Eleanor was clearly one of the most popular girls in our grade, and fluttered from group to group chatting about her summer. Because she was only in two of my classes and there was barely time to talk in between, we agreed to catch up at dinner.

  Left to my thoughts, I wondered what my friends at home were doing. Annie would be in biology, sitting in the back row, passing notes to Lauren while Mr. Murnane lectured about the body. And where would Wes be? In U.S. History, or maybe English Lit. Daydreaming about Wes used to be something I looked forward to, but now it just made me sad. Was he still thinking about me, or had he already moved on? The thought of him with another girl was too unpleasant for me to bear, and I pushed it out of my head, resolving to focus on my classes. It was the only way I’d be able to get through the first day of school without losing my mind.

  I was just about to head to Philosophy when I heard something drop. Behind me, a frail girl with stringy brown hair was kneeling on the ground, frantically trying to pick up the papers and pencils and books that had fallen from her bag.

  Feeling her embarrassment, I set my bag down and approached her. She looked rumpled, with puffy eyes and a glazed-over gaze, as if she had just woken up.

  “Do you want some help?”

  She turned to me with gratitude and nodded. Her brown hair stood up in the back with static, and she had a run in her nylons that started at the heel and traveled all the way up to the hem of her skirt.

  “I’m Renée,” I said.

  “Minnie,” she said timidly.

  Before I could respond, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  A woman with a yardstick was standing behind me. She was short and squat, with thick calves and an oversized blazer with a peacock brooch on the left lapel. Her hair was a dull brown and was cut close to her head in a no-nonsense style.

  Minnie’s face contorted with fear and she stuffed the rest of her belongings into her bag and scurried away to the corner of the foyer, leaving a few stray
pencils on the ground.

  “Stand up,” the woman said to me.

  Upright, I towered over her, my eyes meeting the top of her head.

  “What is your name?”

  “Renée,” I said, resentful of being ordered around and asked my name when all I’d been doing was helping a girl pick up her things. Professor Lumbar I could understand, since I had been late, but this was unnecessary. “What’s yours?”

  She stared at me, horrified at my impertinence. “The audacity—” she said, almost to herself. “My name is Mrs. Lynch. But don’t busy yourself trying to remember it; in time it will ring familiar. An insubordinate child like you, I suspect, will be seeing a lot more of me in the future.”

  She took me by the elbow and led me to the foot of the stairs.

  “What are you doing?”

  “General procedure.”

  “But I haven’t done anything wrong!”

  “Kneel,” she barked.

  Startled by the abnormality of her command, I dropped to the ground in front of the staircase, trying to convince myself that teachers no longer beat students with rulers. Did they? Around us, a crowd of students had begun to gather. A group of girls pointed at me and whispered. I tried to ignore them, though I could feel my face growing red. The grainy wood floor was rough against my bare knees, and I shifted my weight uncomfortably.

  Mrs. Lynch circled me, her brown clogs clicking against the floor like a timer. “No stockings,” she murmured, dragging the end of the ruler across the back of my legs.

  “Untucked shirt,” she continued. She dropped the yardstick, its butt hitting the ground with a thud. A hush ran through the crowd of students. I winced, waiting for her to hit me, but instead she bent down and held the stick against my thigh. She looked at my skirt and frowned. “Two and one-quarter inches above the knee. The dress code stipulates that skirts can be no more than two inches above the knee.”