Dead Beautiful (16 page)

“Why do you live off campus?”

“I don’t like shared bathrooms.”

“Why are your hands so cold?”

“Poor circulation.”

Sighing, I pushed my hair out of my face and collapsed back in my chair.

Tapping his fingers on the desk, Dante gave me a pensive look. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

“Why am I the only one you talk to?” I asked softly.

Dante hesitated. “Because you’re impulsive. And stubborn. And too quick to judge. You question everything and you can’t keep your thoughts to yourself, even when you’re wrong.. ..”

Incredulous, I gaped at him and was about to interrupt, when he cut me off.

“And you’re sincere. And searching. And challenging. Even when you’re angry, you’re so full of life that it spills out of you. You think that nobody understands you,” he said gently. “But it’s not true.”

My lips trembled, and I was unsure of whether I wanted to laugh or cry. “You didn’t answer my question,” I said, trying to hide the quiver in my voice.

Dante smiled. “I talk to you because you make me laugh.”

I told Eleanor everything. Which was that I had found out nothing. And upon her advice I put my investigation on hold. The only thing I didn’t tell her about was the last bit, partly because I wanted to keep it for myself, and partly because she wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise. Eleanor had a crush on our History professor, Mr. Bliss, and couldn’t stop talking about him. So maybe he was young and sort of good-looking for a teacher, but in reality, he was closer to our parents’ age than he was to ours, and he smoked out the window before class, and he ate a weird sandwich every day for lunch that made him smell like onions.

“But it’s not just the way he looks,” Eleanor said, licking the oatmeal off her spoon. “It’s what he says. He’s brilliant.”

I rolled my eyes. We were in the dining hall, eating breakfast before class.

“Like that thing he said the other week. What was it?”

I shrugged and played with the crusts of my toast.

“Oh right, I remember,” Eleanor exclaimed. “He said, ‘The truth is generally seen but rarely heard.’ Isn’t that just so true?”

A few months ago I would have agreed with it, but now I wasn’t so sure. Nothing that I had seen in the past month had seemed like the truth. How had my parents died? How had Benjamin died? I was beginning to doubt that the truth even existed. “Ironic that he said it out loud,” I muttered.

“You’re just in a bad mood because of your Latin test.”

She was partially right. I did get a C on my exam, but that was intentional and I wasn’t about to admit it to Eleanor. Regardless of Latin, I was still convinced that most of the things Professor Bliss taught us were made up. “Okay, so what about that time he told us that Napoleon was actually a little boy? Or his theory that ghosts actually exist?”

“He’s just a spiritual person,” Eleanor said. “And how do
you
know who Napoleon really was? You weren’t alive back then.”

I sighed. Thankfully, it was time for class. And lucky for Eleanor, we had History.

Professor Lesley Bliss was in his late thirties. “Call me Mr. B.,” he had said on the first day. To my surprise, he was the same professor who I had walked in on teaching Advanced Latin on my first day of school. As a result, I thought he would be cold and brooding like the students he taught, when in fact he was exactly the opposite.

He was a grown-up boy, with a goofy smile and free-flowing hair that flopped in front of his eyes while he lectured. He always wore hiking clothes to class—zip-off pants and khaki shirts rolled up at the sleeves—which made him look like he had just come from digging in some exotic location.

“Burials,” he began, and approached the board, drawing several images in chalk. The first was a pyramid, the second was a funeral pyre, and the third was a coffin, just like the one I had seen on the board in Advanced Latin. I looked at it again. In Horticulture, we were also studying burials, though of course there we were using bulbs.

“Why do we bury our dead?” His nose was dented in at the bridge like a sphinx; the cause of which I could only imagine had been a freak archaeological accident.

I thought about my parents. They had requested in their will that they be buried side by side in a tiny cemetery a few miles from our house. “Because it’s respectful?”

He shook his head. “That’s true, but that’s not the reason we do it.”

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

a
CCORDING 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 thin 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.”