Dead Beautiful

by Yvonne Woon

  “But it’s only a quarter inch!”

  “Nevertheless, you are out of dress code,” Mrs. Lynch sneered, showing a row of tiny yellowed teeth.

  I glared at her and stood up, pulling at my skirt. How was this possibly punishable?

  “You will go back to your room and change.”

  “But I have to go to philosophy—”

  She ignored me. “And on the way you’ll pay a visit to the headmistress’s office.”

  “I have class now!”

  “You’ll have to miss it,” she said, and began to walk away.

  “But it’s the first day!”

  She turned to me. “Young lady, you’re lucky it’s the first day. Otherwise your punishment would have been far more severe.”

  I hoisted myself up and was wiping off my knees when I heard a woman’s voice behind me. “Excuse me,” she said to Mrs. Lynch. Startled, she turned around.

  The woman was thin and plain, with straight brown hair and a linen skirt. She was about the age of my mother, and had creases around her eyes from smiling. “This is one of my students. I’ll deal with her.”

  I had never seen her in my life.

  Mrs. Lynch gave her a suspicious look. So did I.

  “I only mean to escort her,” the woman said, studying me as if she had seen me before. “She’s new.”

  Mrs. Lynch grunted in reply and went back to her office, her yardstick tapping as she walked. When she was gone, the woman turned to me. “Come.”

  The crowd in the foyer of Horace Hall parted, and I held my head high as I walked, avoiding eye contact with anyone, to hide my mortification. Once we were outside, she stopped and glanced around us. “Go back to the dorm and change.”

  “What about the headmistress?”

  “Do you really want to see her?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  I didn’t know who she was or why she was helping me. “Why—” I started to say, but she interrupted me.

  “Don’t get caught out of dress code again.”

  With a nod, I ran back to the dormitory. I went through all of my mother’s clothes until I finally found a more modest pleated skirt. I put it on, along with a pair of stockings. Then I tucked in my shirt, slipped on my cardigan, and stood in front of the mirror. I could barely recognize myself. If Annie saw me now she would have walked right by me. Yet for some reason the woman who had just saved me from the headmistress’s office had looked at me as if she’d seen me before. Who was she? Sighing, I ran a hand through my hair and pinned it back with my mother’s barrette.

  By the end of the day I had met up with Nathaniel, and together we walked over to our last class, Crude Sciences. It was in the Observatory, a tall spindle of a building in the center of campus. On the way, I told him about how I’d walked into the wrong class before Latin, and about Minnie and Mrs. Lynch and the mystery woman who had intervened.

  “Yeah,” Nathaniel said. His poorly knotted tie was too long, and swung against his chest as he struggled to hold his books and keep up with me. “Lynch loves watching people squirm. She’s always on me for having too much facial hair.” He fingered the three or four lone whiskers that had sprouted from his chin. “I don’t even own a razor!” His voice cracked, and he blushed. “And next time don’t worry about Minnie. She’s always tripping over things and dropping stuff, which doesn’t really help the fact that everyone here thinks she’s crazy.”

  “Why do they think that?” I asked, gripping my book bag.

  “She had this outburst last year in the dining hall. I don’t really know what it was about. I wasn’t there.”

  I shrugged. “Speaking of crazy, what was that class that I walked in on? There were all these morbid drawings on the board, and the teacher was speaking Latin, I think. And everyone looked miserable. Though I guess I would too if I had to stare at drawings like that all day.”

  Nathaniel wiped the sweat beading on his forehead with the end of his tie. “I don’t know. It’s not that weird. It was probably one of the Advanced Latin classes.”

  “Okay. But what about the drawings on the board? And Dante was in it. He’s in our year. Shouldn’t he be in my Latin class?”

  Nathaniel pushed up his glasses. “No. I’m in an Advanced Latin class too,” he said proudly. “They group us based on ability instead of year, since there aren’t that many of us. And as for the drawings, maybe they were just using them to learn vocabulary words.”

  I gave him a skeptical look. “A chapter on coffins? I highly doubt that.”

  The inside of the Observatory was much larger than its small frame suggested. The walls were white, and a single spiral staircase led up to the glass dome of the roof. When we made it to the top, we were in a laboratory with long concentric counters lined with beakers, scales, and metal instruments. Bottles of brightly colored liquids and vials of powder lined the walls. In the center of the room, a giant telescope faced up into the sky.

  Nathaniel and I sat at an empty bench in the back row. The professor was standing in the middle of the classroom, a position that emphasized his potbelly and disproportionately skinny legs. He wore spectacles and had the spacey look of a mad scientist who believed in conspiracy theories and aliens. Pens stuck out of his shirt pocket, and frizzy tufts of hair sprouted in a ring around the crown of his head. He glanced at his watch and flipped the lights on and off to signal the start of class.

  I was about to ask Nathaniel more about his Latin class when I felt someone’s eyes on me. I looked up and saw Dante. He was sitting on the far side of the classroom, the afternoon light bending around his silhouette. His dark hair was strewn carelessly about his face, making his skin look ashen and smooth in contrast.

  Our eyes met, and I tried to smile, but Dante didn’t waver. Instead he gave me a curious, almost troubled look. What was he thinking about?

  The professor flipped the lights on and off one last time, making Dante’s face disappear and then reappear like the flash of a ghost. When the lights came back on, he was still staring at me. A prickly feeling of anxiety crept up my spine. I shuddered and looked away.

  “Professor Starking is my name, though this is but a formality. The details of our identities are quite insignificant in the complex system of forces that comprise our universe.”

  He patted the shaft of the telescope and glanced up through the glass ceiling. Clouds floated carelessly across the sky. A small flock of birds flew beneath them.

  “But before we look into the outer realms of the cosmos, we must revisit this world. Thus we study the crude sciences. Biology, physics, chemistry—we will master these before we move on to the stars and planets.”

  Professor Starking tilted his head down and studied the class over the top of his glasses. “In our time together I will attempt to reshape your Galilean brains. You may experience discomfort. Expanding the mind can often be painful.”

  I glanced back at Dante, unable to help myself. Everything about him seemed irresistible—the waves of his hair, the stubble on his chin. I could look at him all day and still not have all of the contours of his face committed to memory.

  “We’ve learned from history that we are more efficient when we work together,” Professor Starking said. “Plato had Socrates, Galileo had Archimedes, Doctor Frankenstein had Igor.” He let out a chuckle, which degenerated into a fit of coughing.

  “So,” he continued, clearing his throat, “everyone has been assigned a lab partner, who you’ll be working with for the entire semester.”

  He began to read off names. Please, I thought, read my name with Dante’s. Please.

  “Nathaniel Welch and Morgan Leicester.” Nathaniel shrugged and stood up.

  “Greta Platt and Christian Treese. Paul McLadan and Maggie Hughes.

  “Renée Winters and Dante Berlin.”

  Surprised, my body went rigid. In California, I always seemed to be partners with Oily Jeremy, the boy with terrible body odor, or with Samantha Watso
n, who was only interested in talking about her nail polish. A chair scraped against the floor, and Dante walked across the room and took the empty seat next to me, his shoulder blades shifting underneath his shirt like tectonic plates as he leaned on the table.

  After studying me for a few moments, he turned and faced the professor without even acknowledging me. Shocked by his rudeness and unsure of what to do, I turned my attention to the board and pretended to ignore him. We sat in silence until the professor finished calling off the names.

  “The Laws of Attraction.” He approached the board.

  His voice was drowned out by the noise of rustling paper.

  “The First Law of Attraction states that attraction and repulsion are two sides of the same force.”

  And as Professor Starking talked about physics and magnetism, I turned to Dante.

  “Why do you keep staring at me?” I muttered under my breath.

  He glanced around to make sure no one was listening and then leaned toward me. His voice was hushed. “You have pen on your face. Here,” he said, touching the space by his nose.

  “Oh.” I felt my face go red as I wiped my cheek with my hand.

  “That and you remind me of someone I know. Or once knew. But I can’t place who it is.”

  “I thought you didn’t have any friends,” I challenged.

  Dante smiled. “I don’t. Only enemies. Which doesn’t bode well for you, considering the fact that you must resemble one of them.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You know, you’re really good at compliments. Actually, it’s surprising that a person with charm like yours has any enemies.” The words came out before I could stop them. At this rate I would never be able to ask him about Benjamin Gallow, and it didn’t help that every time he looked at me I wanted to melt.

  “So you think I’m charming?” Dante countered, mocking me. “Is that why you keep staring at me?”

  “Alarming, not charming. And no, I’m just curious.”

  “Curious?” Dante gave me a bemused look and leaned back, draping his arm over his chair. “About what?”

  “Why don’t you talk to anyone?”

  “I thought that’s what we were doing.”

  “To anyone else.”

  “Talking isn’t the only way to communicate. I speak when I have something to say.”

  “Then you must be pretty boring, judging from what everyone says about you.”

  Dante let out a laugh. “And what are they saying?”

  “That you won’t talk to anyone at school because you think you’re superior.”

  “And what if I am?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You’re not. You just think you are.”

  Dante smiled and leaned toward me. “So now you can read my thoughts?”

  I swallowed. “No. I can just tell.”

  “Really? What am I thinking now?” he said, lowering his eyes to mine.

  It was difficult to act normal with him staring at me so closely, so intensely. My voice wavered. “You’re...you’re wondering where I’m from.”

  Dante’s face softened. “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” he said, studying me. I wasn’t sure if he was joking.

  “Somewhere green, I’d guess,” he continued. “With a lot of sun.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  Without touching me, he traced his fingers through the air along the top of my cheeks. “Freckles.”

  I blushed. “California. And you...you’re from—?”

  “Here and there,” he said, brushing off my question. “Nowhere, really.”

  I gave him a suspicious look. What did that even mean? Though, admittedly, I couldn’t imagine him being from anywhere. He was too handsome, too mysterious to come from a place.

  Before I could ask him another question, Dante continued. “So why did you come here? You don’t seem like the average Gottfried student.”

  “Why?” I said, taking offense. “Because I don’t have a trust fund and a summer home?”

  “Because you say what you think.”

  “Oh,” I said, averting my eyes. “And people at Gottfried don’t?”

  “Not like you did to me at the Awakening. Or to Mrs. Lynch this morning.”

  I sighed. He saw that. “I’m not used to so many rules. My old school was more...laid back.”

  “So your parents sent you here?”

  I shook my head. “My grandfather. ..” my voice trailed off.

  I felt Dante’s eyes on me, examining my face.

  “Do you have parents?” I asked, before realizing how stupid a question it was. Everyone had parents.

  Dante hesitated. “No, not really.”

  “What do you mean not really?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s...just, never mind.”

  I rested my chin in my hand, considering his aloofness. “What’s the big secret?”

  “No secret,” he said with a smile. “Just nothing to tell.”

  I gave him a coy frown. “Or nothing you want to tell.”

  Around us, everyone was flipping through the pages in their textbooks as Professor Starking recited something about forces. I shuffled through the pages haphazardly, more aware of Dante’s presence next to me than the vectors in the book.

  He gave me the beginnings of a smile. “Look, I think we got off on the wrong foot. Can we start over?” He held his hand out beneath the desk. “I’m Dante,” he said.

  I studied the creases in his palms, the veins running up the contours of his arms, before responding. “Renée,” I said quietly, slipping my hand into his.

  His skin was cold to the touch, and I felt a tingling sensation in my fingers, as if they had just begun to go numb. Our eyes met, and my face became warm and flushed, my insides fluttering like a cage of small birds. It was alarming; nothing like this had ever happened before, and I didn’t understand why I felt so strange. It wasn’t just nerves or butterflies. I’d felt those with Wes; but this was different —frightening, almost supernatural. I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

  He pulled his hand back quickly, and the sensation in my fingers slowly returned to normal, the warmth seeping through my skin like ink. I blinked once, and everything except for Dante seemed muted and distant. I stared at him—horrified, confused, excited—at his lips, parted and drawing breath into his body as he tried to understand what had just happened, and I knew that nothing would ever be the same.

  CHAPTER 5

  Horticulture

  DANTE WAS COMPLETELY WRONG FOR ME. Unsociable. Severe. Intellectually condescending. Or at least that’s what I told Annie. It was Thursday, and I was nearing the end of my first week of classes. I called her after lights-out. The gnarled cord of the phone was stretched across the room as I huddled beneath the covers and whispered into the receiver, trying to find some semblance of privacy.

  “He’s the exact opposite of Wes. And Wes is perfect, isn’t he? So what does that say about Dante?” I asked her. All week I’d been trying to convince myself that I wasn’t interested in Dante. I just wanted to get close enough so I could ask him about Benjamin. But the likelihood of that was slipping further and further away. After our hands touched in Crude Sciences, he’d stared at his and then at mine with a look of confusion mixed with disbelief.

  Lowering his hand beneath the desk, he opened and closed his fist, watching his knuckles turn white.

  Turning to me, he asked, barely audible, “Did you...?”

  But as he studied my face, his voice trailed off. Had he felt what I felt? I didn’t have a chance to ask him, because without saying anything else, he stood up. The class turned to us as his chair scratched the floor. Professor Starking stopped lecturing.

  “I have to go,” Dante said, gathering his things and giving me one last glance, the door slamming behind him.

  I had tried to talk to him the next time we had Crude Sciences, but he was too busy flipping through a Latin book under the desk and writing in a leather-bound journal t
o grace me with more than a one-word answer. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t even looked at me, which made me even angrier.

  “Could you pass me the—?” I’d asked during a lab about the physics of a butterfly, but instead of paying attention to the lab, Dante was reading. Before I could finish my sentence, he passed me the magnifying glass. As he did, our hands brushed against each other. He pulled his hand back.

  “Don’t touch me,” he said quickly, before averting his eyes.

  His words stung as I stared at him, not knowing what to say. “What?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, without looking at me. “I … I shouldn’t have said that.” He turned back to the book in his lap and flipped a page, tracing the lines with his finger until he found the sentence he was looking for. “It’s a milkweed butterfly, by the way.”

  “How … how did you know that? You didn’t even look. .. .”

  But he didn’t respond. And after confirming that it was, in fact, a milkweed butterfly, I turned to him, frustrated. Holding the magnifying glass over my eye, I peeked over his shoulder, trying to see what he was reading. It was all in Latin.

  “Is that for Latin class?” I asked, staring at his Roman profile, which was even more impressive when magnified.

  Dante looked up, startled. “No,” he said, shutting the book. “Gray,” he remarked, staring at my eye through the glass. “Like the sky. Pretty.”

  So maybe he was strikingly handsome, and maybe his voice was deep and buttery. And maybe he did say brilliant things and always knew the right answer even though he had spent practically the entire class reading a mysterious book in Latin. I wouldn’t let that distract me from the fact that he had was exactly the person that Eleanor had described: evasive, arrogant, and inexplicably distracted. But if all of that were true, I asked Annie, why couldn’t I stop thinking about him?

  “The weirdest part was when we shook hands. He touched my fingers and my hand got all prickly, like it was falling asleep. That’s when he got up and left. He’s pretty much ignored me since.”

  Annie laughed. “Oh, Renée. You’re always so dramatic when it comes to guys.”