The Last Academy (14 page)

He must have been headed right back to the dance, because I barely touched my knuckles to his door when it swung open and Mr. Graham nearly ran over me. He looked a
little crazy, actually. For one thing, his eyes were all wide and his face pale. For another, his hair was sticking up at the top, like maybe he had been tugging on it. It looked like the tail of an angry rooster.

“What are you doing here?” Mr. Graham asked. I noticed him noticing my destroyed stockings. Below us, footsteps and talk of ordering pizza bounced off the walls as boys came back from the dance. Mr. Graham started to step out and close his door behind him. I didn’t have time to think it through — I ducked under his arm and darted into his apartment.

“Tell me what the danake is for,” I said, as I passed under the bridge of his arm.

The sound of boys got louder as they came up the stairway. I waited to see what Mr. Graham would do. Finally, he stepped back into his apartment and closed the door.

He shook his head and the angry chicken tail danced madly. “How do you know about the coins?”

“I have one,” I told him.

“You can’t have one and be here,” he said. His words were a dark chill slipping over me, sliding under my skin and sinking into my bones. I couldn’t let him see I was scared, though, or he’d never tell me what I wanted to know.

“The coin’s for Brynn,” I said. “It’s from Barnaby Charon.”

His eyes darted all over my face. Whatever he saw must have convinced him I was telling the truth. “Don’t you give her that coin,” he said. “Don’t even think about it anymore. And stay away from Barnaby Charon.”

“Why? What’s going on? What did you mean when you said I couldn’t have one and be here?”

Instead of answering me, he paced to his makeshift bookshelves, picked up a framed photo, held it between his hands for a long moment, and set it down again.

“I don’t know,” he said, after a long while.
Liar
, I thought. The photo was of a teenage Mr. Graham, his arm slung around a tween girl with honey-colored hair. They had the same smile. His sister, I guessed. She looked a little like Brynn.

“She ran away,” he said gruffly.

I said, “If you want me to keep the coin, then write Nora and me a permission slip to get into the archives.”

Mr. Graham glared at me and I glared at him. The balance of power was way off between us. We were like two fat kids on a teeter-totter, waiting to see which of us would out-heavy the other.

“You need to leave now,” he growled at me.

“I need that permission slip,” I told him.

He turned on his heel and went into the kitchen. He slammed a couple of drawers in there. A moment later, he returned and thrust a piece of paper into my hand. Then I stumbled out the door.

Out on the thick grass near Hadley House, I unfolded the paper. On a piece of school letterhead, he had written:

I ran back to the dance, barefoot and giddy. The lights blazed inside, but students were walking out, laughing, and horsing around, and I knew the dance must be over. Sure enough, the dining hall was nearly empty. Gold and silver balloons were strewn across the floor, the remnants of some grand finale. Nora and Thatch were the lone slow dancers on the dance floor. I hesitated, not wanting to
interrupt them, but pretty sure Nora would want to see the note.

“Try not to think too harshly of him,” Mr. Cooper said, practically right in my ear. I jumped about a foot, startled. He wore a navy blazer, khaki pants, and a sad smile.

“Who?” I asked, wondering if Mark had gotten into some sort of trouble while I’d been gone.

“All of them. But Henry Graham, for one. Teachers here are like students, except they’ve made more mistakes. The sooner you understand, the wiser you will be.”

Mr. Cooper must’ve seen me sneak off after Mr. Graham — after all, I was on the List now. Still, what he’d said was odd. “I’m not sure I understand,” I half apologized, giving him a wobbly smile. He was the drama teacher, I told myself. Melodramatic flair was part of his paycheck.

Mr. Cooper leaned closer, conspiring and lecturing in the same voice. “Surely you’ve heard the rumors?” I shook my head, hypnotized by the rasp of his voice, his calm brown eyes behind the wire-rimmed glasses. “They say Dr. Falzone used to be a drinker. One night he got behind the wheel and killed three teens who were driving home from a football game. He hasn’t had a drink since, turned his life
around, came here. He keeps a single bottle of unopened whisky in his desk. Just in case.”

I scoffed, trying for a laugh. “You’re teasing me. You made that up,” I said. But for some reason, I thought of Mr. Graham holding his sister’s picture.

Mr. Cooper smiled. “How about our dear Miss Andersen? You’d hardly believe she once poisoned her sister. An adolescent impulse. They were rivals for the same young man. ‘Just a little,’ Miss Andersen told the police. ‘Just to make her sick for their date.’ You’ll notice how she’s not allowed in the kitchen here.”

There was something so honest in his face that I didn’t know if I’d explode with laughter or believe him and maybe throw up.

“If that’s true,” I said slowly, “then tell me what Barnaby Charon did.”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “He has no story, as he is neither teacher nor student.” All the hairs on my arms stood up when he said that. Of course, that was the kind of reaction Mr. Cooper seemed to love drawing out of people.

“You’re a teacher. Why are you here? What did you do?” I asked.

Mr. Cooper’s hypnotic smile broke and he stepped back. Fresh air whooshed onto my face, and then he was simply a drama teacher in a worn navy blazer, trying to prank a freshman. I couldn’t believe I’d almost fallen for it. He chuckled. “Why, only what happens to us all. I made a mistake.”

I laughed, relieved to be past his spookiness. “You had me going there for a minute. Have you seen Mark?” I glanced at the dance floor, but now it was completely empty. No sign of Nora or Thatch anywhere. Shoot.

“I think that young man has gone home,” Mr. Cooper said, a wistful tone in his voice. I furrowed my brow. He meant the dorms, right? I didn’t ask, though. I’d had enough of Mr. Cooper and his pranks. Besides, it was almost ten. Time for check-in.

“Well, thanks,” I said. “Gotta go.” I hurried toward the breezeway, where I’d dropped my shoes. Furtively, I glanced around for any sight of Mark, feeling guilty I’d ditched him. I didn’t see him anywhere.

“You kids have it so easy!” Mr. Cooper called. I ran all the way back to the dorms, the sound of his laughter trailing after me.

I
woke up around noon, and by then campus was pretty much deserted. Winter break had started. I raced right over to Nora’s room to show her the note from Mr. Graham, but she’d already left. There was an empty, hollow feel to the dorm. With no snatches of conversations behind doorways or hair dryers going in the bathroom, the place felt like a dried-out piece of wood.

I threw on some clothes and ran up to the archives room, but the whole library was closed for the holiday. Disappointed, I stole over to Hadley House and checked out Mark’s balcony window to see if he was still on campus. The doors were closed, the shades were drawn, and it was dark. He was gone without even a good-bye. A dull ache filled up my chest. I didn’t know whether to be mad at him or myself. After all, I was the one who’d left the dance.

One rainy Saturday when I was a kid, I saw a movie on TV about an astronaut. He had to fix something on the outside of the spaceship, and so he got in his gear and went into the zero-gravity blackness of space. The whole time, you could see Earth behind him, so far away and tiny. Just watching, you knew the astronaut’s flimsy tether was probably going to break and send him floating away from the spaceship, and away from Earth, and into the unknowable cold darkness, unconnected to anything and unable to ever return.

As I drifted across the deserted campus, I felt like that astronaut. I was thinking about Mark, and about Barnaby Charon, and what was in that archives room. But another part of me was trying not to panic over the feeling that I was too far away from home, and this empty school was my tiny spaceship, and the phone call to my dad had been my tether.

So later in the afternoon, I called home again. I let the phone ring until the rim of my ear hurt. No one answered. I called again that night. Then at one thirty in the morning, I snuck out of my room and called on the dorm phone. After that last time, I could almost feel my parents on the other side, watching the phone, not picking it up. I slept
late the next day. The first thing I did when I rolled out of bed was to pad over to the dorm phone. I was on a mission to make my parents talk to me.

But the thing was, when I put my finger on the button, I couldn’t move. I stood there, touching the button marked 1 for a while. Then I dialed Mark’s number.

“I missed you,” he said, when he heard my voice. My heart shivered in my chest.

“Come get me,” I told him.

Two hours later, we were on a city bus going through Nueva Vista, sitting in blue plastic bus seats, thigh to thigh. He stretched his arm across the back of my seat and wrapped his hand around my shoulder. Once, he rested his chin on the top of my head and smelled my hair. Each time he did something like that, my astronaut stomach found gravity and I connected to the earth again. It was hard not to fall in love with him a little.

I glanced out the scratched Plexiglas window. We were in a residential neighborhood.

“Let’s get off here,” Mark said, as the brakes hissed and the bus lurched to a stop. I’d already guessed we were
going to Salinas Street, to a movie, to the zoo, and out to lunch. I’d been shot down each time.

We got out and walked up a few side streets, getting peeks of the ocean over the rooftops and greenery. Nueva Vista was a little bit like heaven, if your idea of heaven involves a lot of people and beaches everywhere. I liked the smell. Everything was always in bloom, and you never saw it rain, but the grass was always kind of damp. Whenever the ocean came into view, though, I’d flinch a little.

“You don’t like the water,” Mark said.

“My friend Lia used to say she was afraid of heights. But when she talked about it, her real fear was she’d be somewhere up high and feel compelled to jump.” I shrugged, watching the sunlight glint off distant waves. “I’m that way about water, like if I got close enough, I’d have an overwhelming urge to dive in headfirst. It freaks me out.”

“Can you swim?” he asked.

“Yeah. It doesn’t matter, though. Weird, huh?”

“Well, then, no beach dates. I promise.” Mark grabbed my hand and walked up the front drive of a house.

“This is where my family lives.”

The way he’d said it, so nervous and happy, my heart fluttered. I was glad he hadn’t told me where we were
going, so I didn’t have too much time to freak out about meeting his family. Still, in the twenty seconds it took to make it to the door, granules of freaked-out-ness collected at the pit of my stomach, scratching my innards as they swirled around. We went inside.

My first thought was how everything in Mark’s house looked welcoming. Like you could curl right up on the love seat and snuggle into the perfectly fluffed cushions. An ivory linen couch stood in front of the fireplace, a soft gold throw folded over one arm. A black-and-white cat peered at us from the windowsill.

Under that comfy feeling, something wasn’t quite right. Like when you eat one of those fat-free, sugar-free candies, and at first your taste buds are all, “This is awesome!” but then the flavor changes somehow, and goes all fakey too sweet, and before you can even finish the thought, your mouth is already changing its mind. The house was like that.

Mark held my hand too tight — until the bones squeezed together. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure Mark was breathing anymore. I thought about what Brynn had told me at the tennis courts: Mark was the kid who got sent to boarding school. His brother stayed at home.

He led me through the house, his hand cold and formal in mine. In the hallway upstairs, he opened the door to our right. Inside, there was a bed with a dark blue spread and a desk with a lamp on it.

“This is my room,” he said. There were no pictures on the walls. No knickknacks. It even smelled empty. The sound of a ringing phone line buzzed through my head. Mark stepped back into the hall. Then he opened the door across the way and went in.

The second room had the same bedspread, but that was the only similarity. These walls were papered with photos — some framed, some tacked up. Most included the smiling face of Mark Elliott. There was a bookcase filled with sports trophies. Tennis and baseball. It was what I had imagined Mark’s room would look like. For a second, I thought maybe he’d been deadpanning a joke I didn’t get — he had shown me the guest room first. I took a step inside.

It wasn’t Mark in the pictures. The hair was a little darker, the face fuller. I walked over to the trophy case.
JOHN ELLIOTT
glinted at me from a dozen tiny plaques. It was his brother’s room. I stepped back and bumped into a laundry hamper. A Stonehenge of dirty white socks
and discarded shorts lay in a semicircle on the floor in front of it.

“I want you to know about me,” he said.

“Oh.”

Mark dropped my hand. “Hi, Mom,” he said.

She brushed right past us, holding a basket of folded laundry. I didn’t know if we were in trouble or not, unsupervised and uninvited in her house. She crammed tighty-whiteys into a drawer rapid fire, like she was armed with a semiautomatic underwear stuffer.

Since she wasn’t looking at us, I looked at her. Mark’s mom seemed exactly like the house she lived in — like under the perfect makeup and sparkly bracelet and great tan, she was a woman who knew her husband’s secretary got paid too much.

Mark’s mom laughed under her breath, and for a panicky moment, I thought she’d read my mind. She closed the drawer and said, “You’re always in your brother’s room. Why is that, I wonder?”

Mark’s whole face lit up, like he didn’t notice how awful her body language was. Maybe he was used to it. “I brought home a friend, Mom.” He stepped toward her. Mrs. Elliott’s shoulders hunched up. She put her hands
down flat on the top of the dresser and stared out the window, and she was angry. It must have been bad, because even Mark stopped trying to get closer to her.

“I will always love you, Marky. But you can’t do this — come back here — anymore. It’s too painful for me,” she said.

“Too painful for
you
?” he yelled. I jumped and covered my ears. I swear, the windows rattled.

No one moved. I was pretty sure that if I could’ve gotten even one of my muscles in gear, I’d have taken off running. Mark’s mom was intent on the window, her face hard. I wished she’d at least glance at him. No mom could stay mad when her own kid looked like Mark did right then.

“Mom?”

“Get out,” she whispered. “Let me go. Let me get on with my life. Please, God, please.”

I went back to campus that day, but Mark didn’t. Three days later, he showed back up at school. I didn’t ask where he’d been. Back home? To a hotel?

I’d been kind of relieved when he was gone, actually. It took three days to figure out what to say to him.

We found a shady part of lawn underneath an olive tree and kissed, slow and lazy. It was the middle of the day. About every half an hour or so, a groundskeeper swung by in his little golf cart, but we could hear him coming a mile away.

“Why did you want me to see your house?” I asked, after we’d been lying there for a while.

“To get sympathy,” he whispered into my neck. “Don’t you feel bad for me? My mom hates me. Kiss me and make it better.” He leaned in.

I wasn’t about to get sidetracked. I said, “I’m serious.”

He bit his bottom lip, like he was thinking. “That day you stood up in announcements and told everyone you’d snuck out.” He smiled at the memory, even as I squirmed. “If you could’ve seen yourself, you’d know how I feel.” He paused, staring past me, distracted by his own thoughts. In that moment, I wondered if he loved me. The idea stunned me with happiness. “You’re brave. I like that.”

We lay there, forehead to forehead, breathing the same air.

“What happened with your family?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” Mark said.

I got chills, thinking about the phone call to my father.
How right before I’d called, I had known
and
hadn’t known what would happen, all at the same time. Mark looked like that, like the knowing and the not knowing were battling it out somewhere dark in his head. I snuggled up and he kissed my neck and I tried to concentrate on what it felt like to lie in the grass with Mark Elliott. Because: awesome.

Except this weird idea kept trying to creep in and make my stomach hurt. It felt like I was getting ready to face something I’d been avoiding a long time. But I wasn’t as brave as Mark thought, because all I wanted to do was run away.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

It was the last day of winter break and we were on the bus again. Mark was taking me somewhere special before school started. He poked me in the ribs with his finger. “Quit it.” I laughed. He poked me again and it made me squeal. A lady two rows up made a noise like she could go bulimic on all the flirting, but I didn’t care. It was a perfect, warm, puffy-cloud day, despite the fact that it was January.

But as the bus wound through the residential streets again, it was like someone pulled a plug and all the giggles in me swirled down a drain and disappeared. When Mark got up at the same bus stop as last time, I resisted.

“Do you think this is a good idea?” I asked him.

“C’mon,” he said. “We’ll miss our stop.”

Mark grabbed my hand and we walked the same way as before. Only in my mind, I’d hopped back on the bus and gone back to school. Two nights ago I’d been fantasizing that Mark and I got married, and horrifying myself with the idea I’d have to meet his mom again. It was bad enough to imagine it ten years in the future.

“Let’s go to Salinas Street, huh?” I smiled at him, wondering who was working the controls for my face. “We could catch a movie.”

“I want to show you something,” he said. I had a crazy thought:
He doesn’t remember last time
. I brushed it away. Of course he did. How could he forget?

“I don’t think your mom …” I said. He tugged my hand again. I stayed where I was. Slowly, like he was forgetting I was there, he let go and walked up the path. He didn’t look back. After a few seconds I followed him to the doorway.

The house was the same as before, except I could hear music from the kitchen. A Mark-sized guy stood in front of the fridge, drinking from a carton. Mark’s brother, John, I figured. They studiously ignored each other. John shivered like a wet dog and shut the fridge door. Too much cold milk, I guessed.

“Hi,” I began. But Mark tugged me into the living room, away from his brother.

“We don’t get along,” he whispered in my ear. He took me through the house to the hallway where their bedrooms were. Mark opened the door to the right again, the guest bedroom. I glanced in. His mother was asleep on top of the covers.

Next to me, the muscles in Mark’s arm tensed. All the way down, like a series of goose bumps, until he was squeezing my fingers too tight again. I squeezed back.

Mrs. Elliott was curled up on the bed with her eyes closed, mascara all over her face. Like she’d cried herself to sleep. Her arms were folded up against her chest, holding a piece of clothing under her chin. Mark sat down next to her. The bedsprings creaked. He let go of my hand and gave her shoulder a little shake.

Mrs. Elliott opened her eyes and looked right at Mark. I wanted to bolt. Her eyes were red and bleary, and to be perfectly honest, she seemed a little out of it. But then she smiled. She uncrossed her arms and held out the cloth, like she was sharing a private joke with Mark. It was baby pajamas. Mark laughed. She grinned and a tear slid down the side of her nose. She opened her arms and Mark lay down next to her, his back to her chest. She nestled her face in his shoulder and closed her eyes.

If I were her kid and she treated me like she’d treated Mark that first time, I wouldn’t have the guts to come back. But then again, there were probably a lot of things about their family I didn’t understand. And snuggling infant clothes was on the top of that list.

Then it hit me: Maybe Mrs. Elliott had lost a baby. And then an even worse idea snuck into my head. Maybe Mark had been responsible, somehow. The thought punched me in the stomach. Was that why my boyfriend was exiled from his own home, why it was so painful for his mom to have him around? I didn’t think I could ask him about something like that. My heart burst like a water balloon, flooding everything inside me with sadness.