Liv, Forever (6 page)

“I dropped the computer.”

She glared at me. “That’s not what you previously reported.”

“He was just trying to be nice. To help me. Because I’m new. And I let him because I didn’t know about Final Whatever.”

“
Warning
,” she clarified.

“But he can’t be expelled for something I did. It’s not fair.”

I could feel his eyes on me, but I refused to look over. I was going to stick to this story. I was not on Final Warning. I had nothing to lose.

“Is this the truth?” she demanded, shifting her stare to Gabe.

“Yes,” I said firmly, before Gabe could reply.

“Well, in that case,” she said with a smirk, “You’ll
both
receive an appropriate punishment.”

OUTSIDE, GABE QUICKLY THANKED
me. We walked across the quad silently for a good while. I caught a few glimpses of his face, and he was clearly wrestling with something. Finally, once we were far away from everyone, he stopped. So I stopped, too.

“Do you want to know?” he asked.

I nodded. I was prepared for the worst: A) He was mentally ill, B) He had an imaginary friend, or C) He took bath salts—not that I ever really understood exactly what bath salts were.

“I saw Lydia. She’s gruesome. She was coming at us.”

I nodded again. It was definitely C.

“I hear the voices of ghosts at Wickham Hall. And there
are certain places—dark, cursed places—where I can see them, too. They haunt me. All of them. I don’t know what they want.” He bit his lip, seeing I didn’t believe him. “Wickham Hall
is
haunted. It’s not a ‘silly myth’ like they say. Ask me questions. I’ll tell you about any of them.”

I was silent.

“Lydia’s in the catacombs. She’s the only one whose name I know. Sometimes she repeats it again and again. Her neck’s kind of tweaked like it was broken or something. She wears a Smiths T-shirt, and she’s insane. There’s another one in Main, in the lobby. And there’s one by the weeping willow tree near the well. And there’s a bloody one on top of Skellenger … and …”

He stopped when he saw my face.

“Let’s go to the infirmary,” I managed to say. “Let’s get you help.”

He recoiled. “No!”

“Did you take some drugs?”

“No!”

“Do you have, you know, a medical history?”

He started to almost shake with frustration, but then he paused. Calmly, he said, “I understand why you think I’m crazy. I thought I was crazy, too. But it’s too consistent. Always the same voices, the same faces in the same places. I’m telling you it’s
real.
”

I paused. How do you even respond to something like that?

His demeanor changed. He was nervous now, almost desperate, and bargaining. “Look, it’s fine if you won’t believe me, but please, you
have
to promise me you won’t tell anyone.
I’ve never told anyone else here. I don’t even know why I told you. I was just grateful. I thought you’d understand.”

I couldn’t pretend I believed him, but I did promise I wouldn’t tell anyone. I only hoped he wasn’t dangerous. He didn’t seem the type to ever hurt anyone, but he definitely seemed capable of hurting himself. I’d hate to be the person who failed to report that kid before he snapped.

He didn’t want to let me walk away. I could see he felt vulnerable. But there was nothing more to say.

I’D NEVER THOUGHT MUCH
about ghosts. I certainly didn’t believe in them. I’d been taught when you die, you go to heaven—that is, if you’ve accepted Jesus into your heart. So, let’s just say that is true, then what about everyone else? What about the kind man in Timbuktu who never even had a chance to hear about Jesus? My mother never had an answer for that one. My parents’ church had confused me. It’d actually driven me away from God, if there was one.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about Gabe’s description of Lydia. What did a ghost look like? I didn’t know. Did it look like a Francis Bacon painting, distorted and ethereal? Or tortured, like Munch’s
The Scream
? Was a ghost more like the chubby cherubs of Titian or the horrific devils of Hieronymus Bosch?

The thought of her haunted me, so I did what was natural. Alone in my studio, I drew her. I covered the paper in black charcoal and erased her out of the blackness: a ghoulish veil. I was interrupted by a text chime. I looked.

At first it just said:

hi liv. malcolm here.

Just seeing the name made my chest thump. Seriously, like out of a Keith Haring painting—a giant heart, neon and throbbing. Before I could reply, another bubble popped up. He’d been looking for me. He finally got my number from the admissions office. He wanted to meet.

I texted back, told him I was drawing.

He offered to come meet me in the studio.

I told him another day would be better.

I wanted to see him, but my head was full of ghosts, and I couldn’t possibly tell him Gabe’s secret. Plus all that thumping. That rush like I had stood up too fast. Why did he do that to me? Excitement. Fear. I honestly didn’t know. For all I knew, that’s what love felt like. I just hoped I wouldn’t fall over or—God forbid—faint the next time I saw him. Avoiding him seemed the best course of action, at least for the moment.

I made it back to my dorm just in time for Handshaking, the nightly ritual where every student has to shake hands with the dorm mistress and the dorm prefect, who, in my case, was Abigail. When she looked down and saw the charcoal I’d smudged on her palm, she huffed off to the bathroom.

I just smiled and went to get my toothbrush. I was exhausted.

EVERYTHING WAS BLACK. I
could feel myself moving through the darkness. It was thicker than water, more like oil. As my eyes adjusted, I could see subtle colors in the murkiness: browns, purples, reds. It felt like I was being born or like
I was a piece of film being developed … until I emerged and found I was kissing Malcolm.

My eyes were closed, but I knew it was him. I could
feel
it. He was warm and gentle. And it felt good. I wanted it, but I felt out of control. I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried.

I separated from myself, imagining what we looked like. From above, I could see we were lying on a deep red velvet blanket, two teenagers making out in the dark Founders Tomb. But then images started to emerge from the darkness around us. At first they were pleasant: a Titian cherub, a Chagall angel. But then one of Bosch’s devils appeared. And Munch’s screaming terror. Francis Bacon’s agonizing
Pope.
And one of Basquiat’s jagged skulls. We were surrounded by ghouls and ghosts, yet we were still kissing, oblivious.

Then another ghost appeared. She was from a painting I didn’t recall ever having seen—glamorous but haunted. She could have been painted by Kirchner or Emil Nolde. She was so vivid, a beautiful girl about my age with her copper red hair in pin curls and a beaded flapper dress. But the dress was caked with dark blood that had clearly drained from a slim wound across her neck.

She leaned down and tapped my shoulder. “Stop yourself!” she whispered to me. But I kept kissing Malcolm. So she shook me harder until finally I pulled away. At once, I was back in my body, and I looked directly at her as she warned me, “Stop yourself or they’ll get you, too!”

Suddenly I realized what was happening. It was a nightmare. I was plagued by nightmares as a child and had learned long ago how to wake myself from one. I blinked
my eyes several times—that usually did the trick. And it worked.

I bolted upright in bed, panting with thrill and fear. It had seemed so real. But it wasn’t. I flipped on the light, grabbed my notebook, and started to draw what I’d seen.

 

I should’ve known something was horribly wrong when Cyrus Huckle came to the woods with us to sneak a cigarette. Cyrus Huckle didn’t smoke. None of the Preps smoked, at least not with us.

At first he kept to himself, pacing, but then he sat next to me. I ignored him until he offered me a swig from his flask. I didn’t even know what it was. I didn’t care. I had two. I played Echo and the Bunnymen on my boombox—“The Killing Moon.” I remember he laughed when I told him the name.

It was unusually cold for October, and someone had a blanket so we all shared it. Under the blanket, his hand reached out for mine. Our fingertips touched. And even though he was a Prep whom I despised on principle, I held his hand secretly. All my friends—the Freaks (at least that’s what the Preps called us)—were sitting right there, and none of them had a clue.

As we all walked back to campus for curfew, he quietly asked me to meet him at the nook in the catacombs under Main. At midnight.

I checked into my dorm. I had to fake out even my roommate. I
couldn’t tell anyone I was meeting Cyrus Huckle. No one would’ve believed it. Not possible. Not real. So, I put on my pajamas. I even ate a Tastykake like I did every night, just so no one would think anything was off. That was my last meal. A butterscotch Tastykake because Katie Milton was out of chocolate.

I hid an outfit in the shower. At eleven forty, I slipped into the bathroom and put it on—my crimson Doc Martens, well-worn Dickies, my favorite Smiths T-shirt, and a flannel. I grabbed my Walkman and listened to more Echo and the Bunnymen while I stole across campus.

When I got to the nook, he wasn’t there. I started to think it was a joke. Of course. Just as I was about to leave, he walked up. He grabbed my waist and pulled me deeper into the nook. We kissed, but I didn’t stop the music. I really wanted to finish the song because I kind of felt like I was in a music video.

He jammed his tongue into my mouth forcefully. I noticed a bitter taste as he put his hand down my shirt. The music was so loud, I didn’t hear what came up behind me. But I heard the snap of my neck while Ian McCulloch sang:

 … the killing time
unwilling mine …

It was weird how little I saw Malcolm during those first weeks. Considering we were confined within the walls of the campus, you’d think we might have collided more often. But we had no classes together. His dorm, Pitman, was at the other end of Dorm Row from mine. And boys and girls ate all meals in separate dining halls except for Saturday Supper. And I just might’ve skipped most of those to work in the Art Center.

When he texted me, I was always busy, headed to class or the studio or my work-study job, where Gabe and I would enter ridiculous names into the growing database, both of us awkwardly trying to pretend that I didn’t know about his delusions.

And Malcolm was busy, too—classes, meetings, sports, and whatever sorts of things it was an Astor had to do. There was little time for flirtation at Wickham Hall. The school practically seemed designed that way.

Our only shared activity was the weekly morning Chapel. Once I bumped into him there, but he was being pulled in the opposite direction by his friends. And I was quick to tell him I was headed to the studio and would see him soon. I noticed his group—Abigail, Kent, and the others—always sat in the exact same spot near the front of the chapel, so I always sat in the back. This way, I managed to avoid Malcolm (without totally avoiding him) for a few weeks. I told myself I was playing hard-to-get like all the other girls seemed to do. But, as I watched the leaves turn from green to yellows and oranges as brilliant as Cezanne’s fruits, I couldn’t stop thinking about that spontaneous kiss he’d given me and wondering what exactly it had meant.

At Chapel, I kept waiting for someone to come out and talk about God, until finally a girl in my art history class told me it wasn’t a religious thing. It was just an all-school meeting thing, and they only called it Chapel because it was in the chapel. Every week the headmaster came out and made various announcements, most of which were boring and braggy: Wickham Hall had won This Award, so-and-so alumnus had been appointed to That International Whatever. I was already in the habit of tuning him out and counting blazers in the pews or pieces of stained glass in the windows.