The Last Academy (6 page)

W
hen Tamara came back to our room right before ten o’clock check-in, I was already in bed. We both pretended I was asleep. She set her alarm, and I sincerely hoped it was for 7 the next morning and not 2
A.M
. What if someone heard her alarm go off in the middle of the night? If she was going to be that dumb, she’d get caught. Then tomorrow or the next day, Sasha would make an announcement that featured me prominently in the role of Tattletale McSquealerpants.

I was still awake at one thirty when Tamara’s bedsprings creaked. I heard her feet on the floor, and then the patio doors opened. I was so mad at her; I hoped she got caught. I was scared to death she’d get caught.

I was alone in our room. She had really done it.

My insides pretzeled when I thought about how the
consequences were out of my hands. In the dark, every creak in the dorm was a teacher coming to check Tamara’s empty bed. Every gust of wind was more teachers, probably holding lit torches and the leashes of growling bloodhounds, on the trail after Jessie and Sasha and Tamara and Brynn. As I lay there, I could actually see Sasha, caught and crying. But also penning her announcement for tomorrow morning. Behind her, the headmistress called an emergency disciplinary committee together, still wearing her bathrobe.

About a minute later, it was three in the morning. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I slunk out of bed and got dressed, convinced I was getting stupider by the second to do what I was thinking about doing. The patio doors opened like a thunder crack. I waited either to have a coronary or for Miss Andersen to walk in and bust me. Who could have slept through that noise?

The moon was out. Billowy silver clouds blew fast across the sky. All the lights around campus were dimmed for the night, leaving little pools of amber splashed around the pathways. I shivered.

And then I was outside. An expulsionary offense. My shoes scuffed the patio, loud as a jackhammer, so I slipped
them off. The ground was cold and wet, but I didn’t care. Bare feet didn’t make noise. I took off at a jog, not bothering to crouch in the shadows or anything. If someone saw me, that was just my bad luck.

The crazy thing was how great it felt to be outside in the middle of the night. The air seemed superoxygenated; every inhale made me light-headed with all the energy in it. I ran, hardly needing to breathe at all. It felt like I was the only person left on earth.

But once I got to the back door of the chapel, I didn’t know what to do. I heard a noise and peeked around the corner of the building.

There was nothing but scraggly bushes, a narrow dirt path, and the edge of the mesa. I could see right away that the stained-glass wall was open a bit. And a girl was crouched outside the chapel, peeking in. Candlelight from inside flickered on the stained glass, striping the girl’s face with red and orange.

The girl looked at me, eyes wide, finger over her lips to warn me not to shout out. I crept over to her. It was Rachel, from my Spanish class — she was a loud, exuberant girl with pink cheeks and big brown eyes. In class, she always cracked jokes using our vocab words, and whenever
she raised her hand, the teacher always sighed before he said, “Yes, Rachel.”

“Are they still doing the séance?” I whispered, wanting her to know that I knew what was going on, that I had some kind of right to be there, too.

Rachel nodded. Looking inside the chapel was like seeing into another world. Everything seemed calm. The warm honey of the wooden pews and the flicker of candlelight. A blanket lay in the aisle, and the low murmurs of girls talking wafted out. From where I stood, only their legs were visible. It gave me the shivers. It was like I was spying on something holy. I shook the idea off — I’d had enough of feeling like an outsider.

“How’d you hear about it?” I asked Rachel.

“Big Mouth Sasha,” she said. “She was bragging about doing this yesterday at lunch. You didn’t get invited, either, huh?”

I shook my head. “They think they’re so cool.”

I glanced back inside the chapel, kind of grinning despite myself. All of the sudden, I had a new friend. One who thought Sasha was a big mouth. I kept thinking:
We’ve snuck out!
And it made me feel giddy and light-headed. I never broke rules at home. I’d never had any place to sneak
out to. Even Lia hadn’t ever done anything like this. It was a little hard to breathe when I actually stopped to consider what was happening. If it wasn’t for all the oxygen-saturated air, I probably would have passed out right there.

Soon, the girls would be done with their séance. When that happened, Rachel and I would have to slink back to our dorms and hope we didn’t get caught — either by teachers or by the cool kids. All this anger at Sasha, Tamara, Brynn, and even Jessie, came boiling up in me. I wasn’t going to let them be happy inside and make me feel like a loser outside.

I studied the stained glass and how loose it was in the runner. I mimed to Rachel that I was going to shake it. Then I pointed into the chapel and the girls inside. After a moment, Rachel gave me a sly thumbs-up. I whispered, “On three!”

We were going to give them a show, all right. After all, that’s what they came to see. Rachel snuck over to the far end of the sliding glass. She put her palms flat. I moved to the other end and put my hands up on the windows, too. From my new position, I saw Jessie kneeling on the floor of the chapel, head bowed in concentration. Her fingers moved slowly over the Ouija board. For a second, our plan seemed like a bad idea, and I hesitated.

But I couldn’t stop. Giggles fizzed up inside me until the pressure of them was unbearable, like I was a soda bottle someone shook up and left capped. Candles flickered inside the chapel. I mouthed:
One … Two … Three!

We shoved the glass. Hard. It made a terrific rattle, from the floor all the way up to the sliders on the ceiling.
Whap! Whap! Whap!
It was hard not to laugh and shriek. Our bottle caps popped right off. We were giving them their ghost, was all. And that ghost was an earth-to-heavens racket in the dead of night, when we were supposed to be tucked into our own beds.

Brynn screamed. Glass shattered. I caught a glimpse of Jessie’s face — her mouth a dark circle of surprise. Suddenly scared, I stumbled back and saw it — a pane of glass had fallen out of the wall.

Run!
Rachel mouthed, barreling toward me. Then we were scrambling around the corner and sprinting away. It was a lot better than slinking, I can tell you that. A-million-stars-exploding-in-my-chest better.

I looked back when we split off in different directions, Rachel waving cheerfully at me as she tore off. No one came out of the chapel. It was completely dark. All the candles were blown out.

Right before dawn, Tamara snuck back into our room. I’d crawled into the safety of my own bed around three fifteen and giggled for half an hour, waiting for her to creep in. Around 4
A.M
., I got concerned. By the time she actually showed, I was completely sure we’d all end up in disciplinary committees by second period.

She sank onto her bed, silent. I closed my eyes and got about three minutes of peace before Tamara started crying. My own body chemistry practically electrocuted me with adrenaline. It made my heart cramp and my fingertips tingle.
They’d been caught after all.
I sat up in bed, all stiff like a zombie. Tamara sat on her bed, dressed in sweats and sneakers. It seemed weird that she didn’t even take her shoes off. Her legs were tucked up crisscross. She hugged her pillow.

“What’s wrong?” I whispered. Sure, I had spent all night pretty much hating Tamara. But right then? She was a genuine, staring-into-space, red-eyed mess. She didn’t answer my question. So I crept over and grabbed a box of Kleenex off her desk. Nothing. I sat next to her, pulled a tissue out of the box, and held it up to her face.

Then I got it. Tamara was crying because Rachel and I had scared the snot out of her when we shook the chapel wall. I bit my lip so I wouldn’t smile. Tamara sniffled. I knew if I laughed, Tamara would probably rage out. On the other hand, at least I had a working relationship with Tamara’s rage face. This glassy-eyed disaster of a girl scared me.

“Hey.” I gave her a quick squeeze. “Chill out. We pranked you, is all. We shook the chapel wall. We got you good, huh?” I gave her an elbow, grinned, and waited for her to get furious.

“I wasn’t in the chapel. I was with Shane,” Tamara said.

The giggles inside me dropped like flies. And, yeah, the feeling was as gross as it sounds. “What?” I asked. “With who?”

“A sophomore. Shane,” she said. I didn’t know who she was talking about. Then after a minute, I kind of did. There was a pack of sophomore guys who roved campus. They constantly punched each other in the arms, or flicked each other on the backs of their ears. I’d heard they hazed the younger boys by duct taping their ankles together and hanging them, upside down, in their own closets. Bullies. I was pretty sure one of them was named Shane.

I remembered back home, when Grace — who was more Lia’s friend, but sort of mine, too — had invited Lia, Brooke, and me to a sleepover. In the dark of night, Grace had confessed how she’d kissed her chemistry partner at his house one day after school. We’d squealed with laughter and peppered her with questions:
Was it fun? What did he say? Would you ever do it again?
It didn’t seem like any of these were good questions now.

“What happened? Are you OK …?” I stopped.

Tamara shrugged. “Kinda,” she said. “He was with Sasha when I got to the chapel. I didn’t want to go to that stupid séance thing, so we ditched.”

“Where did you go?”

Another shrug. “Little Quad Lawn. At first it was pretty fun. We started kissing. But then he wanted to go further. And when I wouldn’t … he called me names … and ditched me.” She had to take three big, watery breaths to get it all out there.

I thought of that place, and how open and exposed it was. The school nurse asleep in her cottage fifty feet away. Dumpsters on a concrete slab nearby. Not exactly Romance City. And then to have the guy call you names and bail? I felt bad for Tamara.

She hugged me and bawled for real then. I wanted to be sympathetic, but also? She smelled bad. Probably what making out with Shane next to the Dumpsters smelled like. But I let her hug me, anyway.

It must have been the stress and the lack of sleep and everything, but the odor on Tamara started to make me queasy. My ears started ringing. It kept getting worse, until it sounded like a truck backing up in my head. I thought I was going to throw up or pass out, and the whole time, she was still crying.

I thought:
Tamara’s poisoning me
. It was a crazy idea, but as soon as I thought it, it felt exactly right. My hands got cold and shaky. She blew her nose and rested her head on my shoulder.

I started to feel like I was in one of those movies where someone gets radiation poisoning, right before their skin starts to slough off and their eyes bleed. My blood pressure fell through my toes. I thought,
I’m dying
. Which was crazy. I kept trying to breathe, but no air got in.

Panicked, I shoved her away and bounced off her bed. My legs wobbled, my knees trying to buckle. And then I had a hallucination.

My roommate’s skin got all withered and yellowed. Her eyes turned milky and rolled up in their sockets.
Scabbed-up lips stretched across her teeth. It was worse than seeing a corpse, because she was still alive somewhere inside there.
She’s the Golden Mummy Girl.

I heard my own voice say, “He sounds like a loser. Good riddance, right?”

Then it was normal old Tamara sitting there. Except something in her eyes let me know she was still the Golden Mummy Girl underneath. It was a certifiably unhinged thought. I stumbled and caught myself. I was going to completely lose it. Freak out or start laughing until the school nurse came and shot me full of horse tranquilizers. Then the tiny boss in my head pulled some kind of switch I didn’t even know I had. It shut the crazy thinking down, but it hurt my brain to have it happen.

“
You’re
calling
him
a loser?” Tamara laughed. She straightened her spine and tossed her head. “You don’t know anything. I’m not surprised. You’re too ugly to get noticed on this campus, anyway.”

A minute ago, I had been wiping her nose for her. Now any hope for becoming friends lay like broken shards of glass between us. Honestly, any hopes of me not seeing her as the Cryptkeeper was a bad bet.

“You know why you’re here, loser?” she asked. My
mouth dropped open, but no sound came out. “Your parents don’t love you. You’re here because they didn’t want you anymore.”

“What?” I stumbled back. Dawn was breaking and the room was getting lighter now, by little shades of sunlight each few minutes. I could see Tamara growing a shadow. It looked like rage.

“You got sent to boarding school because your parents didn’t want you. Right now your family is sitting at breakfast in your old home, and they don’t miss you at all. Their life is better without you.”

“That’s not true.” I was afraid to turn my back on her. Now it was clear what was going on: Tamara was the one who was crazy, so insane it made me sick. I backed toward the doors.

“You’re here. I’m here. We’re all here. Go ask your friend Barnaby Charon why,” she yelled. “You go ask him why your parents sent you to a place like this.”

I bumped against the patio doors, knocking them open, and ran out in my pajamas. Everything was gilded in the dawn sun. The lawn and the buildings and even the sidewalks glinted gold. But all the superoxygenated air had burned off with the dew. This new air was too thin and I couldn’t breathe.