Dead Beautiful

  “No, I’m being serious. I’ve never felt anything like it. It was like my skin was going numb.”

  I heard Margerie say something in the background. Annie covered the receiver, muffling her response. “Hold on, Mom, it’s Renée,” I made out before she returned to our conversation. “I don’t get it. You lost circulation or something? Are you sure you weren’t just nervous? Or maybe you were leaning on your funny bone.”

  I frowned. “No,” I said. “I know it sounds crazy, but I felt it. It was real.”

  There was a long pause on the other side. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I believe you.” But she wasn’t very convincing. “So remind me again: if this guy is such a jerk, why are you so obsessed with him?”

  “Because I think he knows something. And I’m not obsessed,” I added, and told her about Benjamin Gallow and the incident last spring. When I mentioned the heart attack, Annie’s end of the line went silent.

  “Coincidental, right?” I said softly.

  Annie hesitated. “It’s different, Renée. Your parents... they were at an age when...”

  “When what?”

  “Nothing, it’s just … I’m sure the doctors and police officers know more about that stuff than we do. No one suspects anything but you, right?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “I bet that kind of thing happens more than we think.”

  I curled the cord around my fingers beneath the sheets. “Yeah, maybe...”

  We talked for a few more minutes about California and my old school. Annie told me all of the gossip about what the new teachers were like, who was dating whom, which freshmen had made the lacrosse team. It should have been exciting, but for some reason I couldn’t get into it. When she finally hung up, I threw my blankets off and stared at the ceiling. The receiver was resting on my chest, the dial tone dissipating into the darkness of the dorm room. What was wrong with me? Annie had been my best friend since we were kids; she was the only person left who knew everything about me. So why I did feel relieved when she said she had to go?

  “I think it’s perfectly normal.”

  Startled, I sat up. Eleanor was still sitting in bed, in silk pajamas, holding a pink highlighter and a book called Symposium, by Plato. A half-burned candle flickered on the nightstand.

  “What is?”

  “Dante.”

  “You could hear me?”

  “Of course I could. You were beneath a blanket. And you’re not good at whispering. Anyway, I think what happened between you and Dante is romantic.”

  “Oh no, well, I don’t think it’s like that. I mean, I like someone else. Well, I did before I came here.” Though I knew that reality was quickly fading away. Annie told me that Wes had been asking about me, but I hadn’t heard anything from him since arriving at Gottfried. “I’m not going to get involved with Dante. He isn’t right for me.”

  Eleanor raised a perfectly shaped eyebrow. “That’s strange, considering you spent almost the entire conversation talking about him.”

  “It’s also strange that you spent the entire time listening to my conversation when you were supposed to be reading,” I challenged, giving her the beginnings of a smile.

  “That’s not strange, it’s normal. What else was I supposed to do? Besides, if I hadn’t listened, you wouldn’t have anyone to talk about Dante with. So really, I’m doing you a favor. And if you want my opinion, I think it’s obvious that he’s into you. That hand thing. That means something.”

  I let out a sarcastic laugh. “Yeah, probably that I’m allergic to his cologne.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t think it’s that out of the ordinary.”

  I gave her a skeptical look. “Really? Has that ever happened to you?”

  “Oh, no. Of course not. I’ve never heard of anything like it. But I think if something creepy like that could ever happen, it would be with Dante Berlin. Or maybe Gideon DuPont, though then you’d have to face the wrath of Vivian.”

  “They’re Dante’s friends, right?”

  “They’re Dante’s old friends. The Latin scholars. Gideon’s a senior. He always wears black suits and these old-man glasses, like he just stepped out of the Great Depression or something.”

  Immediately, I knew who he was. He was one of the people in the class I’d walked in on. Vivian must have been the girl beside him.

  “And Vivian Aletto is his best ‘friend.’ Though everyone’s pretty sure there’s something going on between them. They’re always together and they’re always arguing like they’re brother and sister. But once I saw Gideon stroking the inside of her wrist. And Vivian sometimes wears his glasses. It’s really bizarre.”

  “And they were friends with Dante and Cassandra Millet?”

  Eleanor nodded. “And Yago Castilliar. You’ve probably seen him around; he wears a lot of pastels. Seersucker pants that just barely make dress code; loafers with no socks. Always needs a haircut, but never seems to get in trouble for it. I think it’s because he flirts with Mrs. Lynch.”

  I had seen him around. He was easy to spot, considering he was the only guy who was brave enough to wear a pink oxford.

  “Anyway, they were like a family. The oldest and most intimidating of the five were Gideon and Vivian, who were like the parents. Yago was the delinquent child, and Dante was the older brother, even though he’s actually younger than Yago. And Cassandra was the baby, the darling.”

  “Don’t they have real families?”

  “Sort of. At least Yago does. His father is some Spanish baron, so he’s always back and forth between Spain and New York. I think Gideon is from around here. New Hampshire maybe. And Vivian, who knows? I wouldn’t be surprised if she killed her family and ate them.

  “Cassandra lost her entire family in a skiing accident before she came to Gottfried, and inherited their fortune. I think technically her great-aunt is her legal guardian, but she always used to tag along with Yago’s family on the holidays. Or with her boyfriend, Benjamin. Until he, well ...you know. The heart attack.” Eleanor closed her book and ran a finger back and forth through the flame of the candle, waiting for me to ask the question that we both knew came next.

  “What about Dante?”

  She sat up straight and narrowed her eyes dramatically. “He’s the strangest one. Apparently he’s an orphan. Or so he says. He never leaves Attica Falls on holidays; even over Christmas.”

  Attica Falls. The gas station, the general store, the diner. It was like an abandoned town. A stray cat and a rusty pickup truck were the only signs of life. “Where does he live?” I asked.

  “In an old boarding house. I’ve only seen the outside, but it looks depressing.”

  “No wonder they were all so close,” I murmured. “They didn’t have anyone else.” It was a situation I could relate to.

  “I know. Can you imagine not having a family?”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. “I can.”

  Eleanor went silent, and I immediately felt the uneasiness that always followed when I brought up the death of my parents.

  “Wait, how do you know all of this? Your brother?”

  Eleanor shook her head. “Don’t you remember? Cassie was my old roommate.”

  Friday morning we woke up earlier than usual for our first Horticulture class. All of the other classes started at eight, but for some reason Horticulture was at six. Something to do with plants and the sun, I assumed. Eleanor was in the class too, and I glanced at my schedule while I waited for her to get ready.

  Horticulture F 6:00 a.m. The Chapel

  “Hey. Our class is in the chapel?”

  “I guess so,” Eleanor said, pulling on a wool skirt while simultaneously trying to pin back her hair. “Ironic, considering how ungodly it is to get up this early in the morning.” She took one last look in the mirror and then grabbed her bag. “Okay, let’s go.”

  It was a clear autumn day. The oak trees towered over us as we walked down the cobblestone path. The chapel was in the westernmost corne
r of campus. It was dreary looking, with gothic steeples that harkened back to the Dark Ages. All of the arches seemed to be slouching over, as if they had gotten tired of standing upright after three centuries. Statues of saints were carved into the façade, framing the door with blank, eyeless faces. Water stains ran down the stone figures, and a bird’s nest was wedged between two of the apostles.

  “It’s been out of use for ages,” Eleanor said. “I think like a hundred years ago Gottfried was a religious school, but then the chapel was abandoned. It’s supposedly under renovations from some fire a while back, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone working on it.”

  We approached the tall riveted doors and attempted to open them, but they were locked. Eleanor and I looked at each other, confused. I jiggled the handles a few times and pounded on the door in frustration, but it was no use.

  “I guess it’s canceled,” Eleanor said happily. “We should probably go back to the dorm.”

  I was about to agree with her when we heard voices coming from behind the building. The entire class was standing in what looked like an overgrown graveyard. It was a small class: me, Eleanor, a pair of twins named April and Allison, who lived on our floor, a few guys I had never seen before, and a cute boy who looked uncannily similar to Wes. Eleanor and I joined them.

  Professor Betty Mumm was a tiny birdlike woman. She had a weathered, wrinkled face from too many days in the sun, and short brown hair cut like a boy’s. She stood in the grass in front of us, wearing tall rubber boots, gardening gloves, and a sun hat.

  “Welcome to Horticulture,” she said, and pulled out a bag of flower bulbs from a burlap sack on the ground. “Today we’re going to be learning the basics of soil.”

  She passed out the bulbs, a set of trowels, boxes of matches, and gardening gloves. She was surprisingly nimble considering she looked older than my grandfather.

  “The first thing you need to know about horticulture is that without the appropriate bed for the appropriate plant, you will never succeed in growing anything. There are dozens of varieties of soil, each with its own unique characteristics. Fortunately for us, all of them can be found in this very garden, due to the fact that the ground in this particular area of campus has been dug up and replaced over the course of the last two centuries.”

  As Professor Mumm discussed the five most common kinds of soil, I glanced around the graveyard. The grass was speckled with wildflowers that grew up to the middle of my shins. They were moist with dew. Nestled beneath the weeds were barely visible fragments of chipped gravestones, centuries old. When I’d first seen Horticulture on my schedule, I hadn’t known what to expect, and I would be lying if I said I’d been excited about the class. I’d assumed we’d be learning about plant biology, not digging around in an abandoned graveyard.

  “Isn’t this a little morbid?” I said to Eleanor, keeping my eyes on the professor, who was demonstrating how to hold a trowel correctly.

  “What makes you say that?” a deep voice replied.

  Startled, I turned around. Eleanor had moved closer to the chapel, and was now whispering to one of the twins. Standing in her place was the cute Wes impersonator.

  “I’m Brett,” he said with a grin.

  Suddenly I felt very shy. “Renée.”

  Brett was tall and athletic, and looked like he had just come from playing rugby. His features seemed exaggerated, giving him a dashing and overly masculine look, which I had only attributed to characters in fairy tales.

  “So who did you mean to talk to before I so rudely interrupted?”

  “My friend Annie. I mean Eleanor. My roommate Eleanor.”

  “Annie, Eleanor, which is it?”

  “Eleanor. Eleanor Bell.” I pointed to where she was standing. “Sorry, my friend Annie is from California. I mean ...that’s where I’m from too. I just moved here. I’m still trying to keep everything straight.”

  “A California girl. Aren’t you supposed to be blond?” He flipped a lock of my brown hair with his fingers.

  I could feel myself starting to blush, and tucked my hair behind my ear. Brett seemed like the kind of guy who could get any girl; who plays Frisbee with his shirt off and his pants cuffed at the ankle, whose sweat actually smells good; the kind of guy who I never imagined would talk to me. Just like Wes. Yet here he was, standing next to me, doing what I could only identify as flirting.

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “Maine.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be a bearded farmer?”

  Brett laughed. “So that’s what you thought it’d be like here? It must have been a huge disappointment.”

  “Devastating,” I replied, and we both fixed our attention on Professor Mumm, who was motioning for us to follow her into the “garden.”

  “Each of you has a different kind of flower bulb—woodland, climbing, perennial, annual, or arboreal. Now, what I want you to do is find the most suitable soil for planting your particular bulb, and shovel it into one of these bags,” she said, holding up a handful of cloth satchels.

  One of the twins raised her hand. “But we don’t know what kind of bulb we have. How are we supposed to know what kind of soil is best if we don’t know what our bulb is?”

  Professor Mumm gave her a wise smile. “Intuition. That is the first rule of horticulture. Intuition. Follow your gut!” she said, clicking her heels together. “And remember what we recited. H-E-R-B-S: Handle, Eat, Rub, Burn, Smell. Now, don your gloves and man your trowels!”

  Brett and I parted ways as everyone in the class started wandering aimlessly around the graveyard. Eleanor found her way to me and pinched my arm from behind. “Hey,” she said, the twins beside her.

  I jumped. “A graveyard is not the place to creep up on people!”

  Eleanor laughed. “It’s broad daylight! Besides, I wasn’t the only one who crept up on you.” She glanced at Brett.

  April butted in. “He does that with all the girls,” she said. Her sister Allison nodded in confirmation.

  “That doesn’t mean we can’t look,” Eleanor replied.

  We all watched him bend over to pick up his trowel. As he stood up, he turned to us and smiled. Embarrassed, I looked away. Eleanor, on the other hand, responded by giving him a coy wave.

  “I think I’m going to go ‘test the soil’ closer to Brett,” she said. “I never get tired of his dimples.”

  I laughed as Eleanor skipped away, trying to inconspicuously follow Brett to the left side of the “garden.” Around me, dozens of gravestones peeked out of the grass, their faces so faded that I couldn’t read the inscriptions. My parents were like these people now, reduced to epitaphs, tombstones, coffins. Shaking the thought from my head, I picked up my bulb and turned it around in my palm. It was brown and bulbous like a ginger root. I held it up to my nose, but it just smelled like dry dirt. Intuition, I thought, and began to walk.

  I didn’t know where I was going, but I stepped forward, changing directions every few minutes as if I were being pulled by an invisible force. Every so often I bent over to sift through the soil. H-E-R-B-S, I repeated to myself. H for Handle as I felt its weight in my hand. E for Eat as I raised the soil to my mouth and tasted it. R for Rub as I pressed the soil into my palm, comparing its color and texture to that of my bulb. B for Burn, though none of the soil was oily enough to ignite when I struck a match to it. And S for Smell—confusing smells of apple and grass and walnut, but none of them seemed right. Every batch of soil was either too dry or too gritty; smelled too much like pastrami or tasted too bitter.

  Eventually I found myself a good distance away from the rest of the class, in a patchy area by a collection of trees. I bent over to pick up a handful of soil, which was cool and so moist it almost felt oily. I smelled it. Nothing. What had the professor said while I was talking to Brett? If the soil was grainy and smelled of smoked meat, it was best for woodland bulbs. If the soil was dry and tasted of salt, it was high in minerals and best for annuals. Or was that perennials? I
couldn’t remember.

  Reluctantly, I pressed a finger into the soil and raised it to my mouth. At first it just tasted gritty. And then slowly, it took on the faintest aftertaste of molasses. I examined my bulb, which was stringy and dry, and had the same brownish-red hue. For some reason, it felt right. Bending down, I shoveled a handful into my sack.

  No one else seemed to have finished. Some were meandering through the weeds; others were crouched low to the ground, feeling around in the soil, dirt smeared on their cheeks. Professor Mumm was walking around examining our progress while offering tips about trowel technique. But instead of going back to the group, I walked on, inching closer to the forest. I didn’t know why I was doing it, only that it felt as if I had just remembered something very important that I had forgotten to do, and that something was in the trees.

  I pushed through the grass, which was wild and as tall as my knees. A lazy bee hovered over a bunch of wildflowers. Behind me, I heard Eleanor calling my name. “Renée! Where are you going? Did you figure out what bulb you have?” I glanced over my shoulder to see her running to catch up with me.

  “No,” I said. “Just looking around.”

  The morning sun was hot and beat down on the back of my neck. Ducking under the shade of a tree, I stopped. Was there something in the grass? Something brown that looked like a stick, but wasn’t. Wiping the sweat from my forehead, I bent down. I heard Eleanor approach as I pushed the wildflowers aside with my trowel. And there it was, the thing that I now knew had been pulling me toward it. Behind me, Eleanor screamed.

  It was a fawn, dead and curled up in the grass. Its limbs were contorted in unnatural angles. Flies buzzed around its head, its fur still a soft, spotted brown.

  In seconds, the entire class had gathered around us, all staring at me and the fawn. Professor Mumm zigzagged through the group. When she reached me, she took off her hat and looked at the fawn and then at me.

  “I... I just found it,” I said. “I was looking for soil....” Even though that wasn’t the truth.

  Professor Mumm’s face softened, and she took me by the shoulders. “Come away, dear,” she said. “No use in looking at it. There’s nothing we can do now.”