Dead Beautiful (17 page)

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.

“The sacrificial flesh, when burned, should form a triangle,” Genevieve read.

I pinched Eleanor.

“Ow!” she squealed. Genevieve squinted at her.

She passed around a pair of metal scissors, and we each snipped off a lock of hair and held it over the flame of our candle until it ignited. Instantly, the room was filled with the stench of burning hair. Eleanor winced. I coughed and wafted the smoke from away from my face, but Genevieve didn’t flinch. Without asking, she took the top sheet from Charlotte’s bed and laid it on the floor. After all the hair had burned out of her candle, she took it and dripped wax across the sheet so that it formed a large triangle within the circle of candles.

Charlotte gasped.

“Relax,” Genevieve scolded. “It’s just wax; it’ll come off. Now, we all have to concentrate on our ‘object,’ or, in other words, the dead person, which Charlotte and I have decided will be the first headmaster of Gottfried Academy, Bertrand Gottfried.”

Before she continued, Eleanor interrupted. “Why do you get to decide?”

“Because I organized it. And we have to see if it will even work.”

“But I don’t want to talk to him.”

“Do you have a better suggestion?”

Eleanor went silent. “What about a celebrity or something.” She winked at me. “Or how about Benjamin Gal-low?” Now I understood why Eleanor made sure I came. I gave her the beginnings of a smile.

Genevieve rolled her eyes. “What, so you can ask him how he died? We all know how it happened, Eleanor. He had a heart attack.”

There was a long silence as everyone tried to pretend they weren’t paying attention.

“You know, I don’t really want to talk to the headmaster either,” I said. “Can’t we all just pick our own objects?” I gazed around the circle for approval, but everyone avoided eye contact.

Genevieve sighed. “Fine.” Raising the book again, she said, “We each have to think of someone who died. Once you choose the person, you have to concentrate on them as hard as you can. The book says, ‘The object that you choose should be someone you were intimately acquainted with or know a great deal about. In order to conjure it from the dead, you must visualize your object in its entirety. Repeat its name in your head, and then once you hear its voice in your ear, silently speak your question.’”

Genevieve lowered the book and gave us a somber look. “Does everyone understand?”

“What if we can’t hear its voice? How will we know when to ask?” Eleanor said.

“If you do it right, it’ll work,” Genevieve said, dismissing her question. “Okay, now close your eyes and visualize your object.”

I closed my eyes and thought about my parents while Genevieve began to chant in Latin. I tried to imagine my mother sitting in the sunroom with a book in her lap, and my father eating toast while doing a crossword puzzle. But their images kept fading away from me. Sitting in Genevieve’s dorm room surrounded by candles and girls I barely knew, I felt so far away from my parents that it was hard to conjure any sort of tangible memory. It was as if they had ceased to exist in my mind as real people, and instead had become nothing more than the blurry idea of two people I had once met in a dream.

I opened my eyes and looked around the circle. Everyone else had their eyes shut, concentrating on their objects. I shut my eyes again and tried to focus, but the images of my parents kept darkening, becoming overshadowed by the one person who I couldn’t get out of my head since coming to Gottfried Academy. Dante.

I pictured him in the library, the way he’d pulled me through the stacks of books, his legs brushing against mine as we’d waited, hushed, in the dark. I blushed just thinking about it. Where was he right now? Probably in his room in Attica Falls, sleeping, or maybe reading. I wondered if he was thinking of me too.

Then a gust of wind blew through the open windows, rattling the shutters and rustling the papers on Genevieve’s desk. The candles flickered.

A whisper blew around us like an autumn breeze. The low murmur of voices filled the air, though none of us were speaking. My body acted without me, and I leaned toward Genevieve and cupped my hands around her ear as if I were about to tell her a secret. Then my mouth began to move against my own volition, the words coming out jumbled and strange. They were more sounds than words, eerie utterances that spilled out of me faster than I could process them. Even my voice was different—it was deeper, the pitches varying quickly and capriciously, as if coming from a different body. I tried to make it stop, to stop speaking, but I couldn’t control my lips or my tongue.

One by one, each of us leaned toward the girl to our left, perched against her ear like we were playing a game of telephone.

And then I felt something tickle my ear. Before I could turn to see what it was, a voice began whispering to me. It was Eleanor, but it wasn’t. Her voice was low and deep and sounded like it belonged to a man. My dad. I was so shocked that I completely forgot I was simultaneously whispering to Genevieve. The only thing I wanted to do was listen. All at once, a million questions crowded my head. I chose the most important one and concentrated on it.

How did you die?

The voices stopped. All I could hear was Eleanor’s breath, deep and husky, on the back of my neck. And then a sound rolled off her tongue, which turned into another sound that folded into another. The words spilled into my ear like a flood. They were nothing but strange sounds that started as words but transformed into an echo of a place, a smell, a feeling, a taste that I once knew.