A few lights shine in the distance; fireflies still dance among the trees. It is beautiful and terrible at once, and fear skitters through my body. I instinctively take a step backward. The open windows—it is a long fall to the ground.
“What is this place?” My voice is too quiet, my breath shallow. It is claustrophobic, this vast expanse before me closing in through the night.
Becca Curtis flicks a lighter and sets it to a candle, then steps out of the shadows with it in her hand.
“The Commons. It’s a study room. It’s quiet here. We’re all very studious, you know.”
In the candlelight, Becca’s green eyes are a bit bloodshot. Has she been the one smoking? Surely pot isn’t allowed here, even among the vaunted seniors.
“Thank you for coming,” Becca says conversationally. “I wouldn’t have blamed you for dismissing the summons out of hand.”
“I had a choice? Then, by all means, I’ll bid you goodnight.”
Becca laughs. “Ash. Stay. We should talk.”
“About what?”
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
“No. I’ve heard you’re quite brilliant.”
“Hmm. Do I look fat?”
“It’s dark, but no. You don’t.”
“Then your insult was not only ill-advised but inaccurate and illogical.”
“Excuse me?”
“Sit.” Becca takes a chair, pats the sofa cushion nearest her. She sets the candle on the coffee table. I carefully lower myself, muscles clenched in case I need to flee. I don’t like this place at all.
“If, Ash, by your own admission, I am neither fat nor dumb, then calling me a daft cow was a weak insult.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Ash, Ash. You’re a Goode girl now. Your insults must be precise. Cutting. Elegant. Intelligent. You’re an intellectual girl, you can surely do better. Where did you learn computers?”
“In England. I like them. They’re easy for me.”
“Tell me about your life there. Tell me about your family.”
“I have no family. I’m an orphan.”
“A rich British orphan. How quaint. Let me guess, there’s some mad aunt in the attic who left you her estate and money?”
“No. My parents were wealthy. They had accounts for me. There’s a regent who handles the funds.”
“A regent. My. Aren’t you fancy. So very British.”
Here we go.
“If you’ve brought me here to mock me or terrorize me, can we get on with it?”
It is a brave speech, but I’m not feeling very brave at the moment. The chill in the air is making me shiver, and I have the most awful sensation of someone watching me. The hair on the back of my neck is standing on end. I shift, sliding my head down into the couch cushion so I’m not so exposed.
“I have no intention of terrorizing you,” Becca says. “I want you to do something for me.”
Uh-oh. All hands on deck, this is going to be good.
“What?”
“I need you to hack into Dean Westhaven’s email. She’s been speaking with my mother and I want to know what’s being said.”
“Are you completely bonkers? No. Absolutely not. I’m sorry.”
“No. You never apologize for something you didn’t do wrong. You say ‘excuse me.’ Never ‘I’m sorry.’ If you spend your life apologizing, you’ll never gain any confidence.”
Becca takes down her ponytail and begins twisting her thick hair into a braid. Her tone is so casual I fear what else she’s going to ask. Something’s coming. Something’s up.
“But in this case, I do apologize. I should have been more clear. I’ll pay you, of course. I notice you’ve been borrowing your suitemate’s dresses. You might appreciate being able to get some clothes of your own.”
I borrowed Piper’s dress once. My God, how closely is she watching me?
“You’re raving mad. That’s an Honor Code violation.”
Becca laughs again. “Who are you going to tell? I’m the head of the judicial board. You’re supposed to report code violations to me. And I’m giving you the instructions. You won’t get caught, not if you’re as good as you think you are.”
“I am that good, and I still won’t do it. You can tease and bully all you want, but I won’t. If you push me, I’ll inform the dean of your request. I doubt she’ll be so amused. You’re violating the code just by asking me to do this, aren’t you?”
Dice, thrown. I keep my head high, staring Becca in her pretty, bloodshot, evergreen eyes. There is no way I’m going to play along with this girl. I have too much at stake to be tossed out of Goode because of someone else’s mommy issues.
Becca smiles and does a slow clap. The transformation on her face is confusing. She seems almost...friendly now.
“Bravo. You’ve passed.”
“What?”
“I was testing you. You passed. Now run along. I have work to do. That damn Python project will be the death of me. If I don’t figure it out, maybe you can help me. Explain it to me, I mean. And feel free to have breakfast with me tomorrow. You might find my friends a little less backstabbing than yours.”
She gestures toward the door, where the twins are waiting with the blindfold. They’ve heard the entire exchange.
“Get her safely downstairs. We don’t want the bogeyman to get her. And then get back up here. We have a date.”
“Is he driving?”
“Who else?”
Becca pulls her braided hair into a knot on the top of her head and blows out the candle, plunging us all into darkness. The audience is over.
I’m still standing there, staring, trying to figure out what in the world is happening, when the girls grab my arms and tie the blindfold tight around my head. The sudden loss of light and bearing makes my heart kick up again, but I’m prepared this time, don’t panic. They can’t hurt me. More, they don’t want to hurt me.
And they don’t. They walk me back down to my floor, take off the blindfold, and push me through the door. I stagger into my hall. The stairwell door closes.
The summons is over, and deep in my heart, a shift begins.
Becca Curtis was kind to me.
Maybe this place won’t be so bad after all.
20
THE FEVER
I am alone on the hall. It’s quiet, too quiet. The eleven o’clock bells haven’t rung to signal curfew has started, not that it matters; normally the girls giggle and titter in their rooms until well past midnight. Now, though, the hall is silent. The lack of noise makes the hair stand up on my arms. I doubt I’ll ever get used to the pervasive silence of this place. It must be the mountains, absorbing all the noise.
I cast a brief glance at the storage room across the hall as I slip into our room, trying not to wake Camille. I needn’t have worried; she sits on the sofa, staring blankly out the window. She doesn’t turn when I enter.
“Camille?”
“Mmm?”
“Are you all right? Camille?”
Camille’s eyes are glassy, her face flushed. I instinctively put a hand on my roommate’s forehead.
“Whoa. You are burning up. Come on, up you go. Let’s get you to the infirmary.”
“No!”
Camille jerks back, shrinking into the cushions. She’s holding a heating pad to her stomach, disguised under a throw pillow.
“Camille, you’re sick. You need to go see the nurse. I don’t want to catch whatever you have.”
“You won’t,” she mutters. “It’s that time.”
“Your period gives you a fever? Come now, you need to be seen.”
“Sometimes it does. I just want to sleep.” She manages to focus on me. “How was your audience with the queen?”
“Changing the subject won’t deter me. You need
to be seen.”
“If the fever hasn’t broken by morning, I’ll go, I swear.”
“Fine.” I take a seat next to her. “She wanted to elucidate my manner of insults. She felt I was being illogical by calling her a daft cow as she’s neither stupid nor fat.”
Camille laughs softly, wincing at the effort.
“Then she invited me to breakfast.”
“With the seniors? Whoa.”
“Yes. Now that I’ve been properly chastised, if you won’t see reason, I’m going to bed. Can I get you anything? Hemlock?”
“You are so strange. Maybe just some Tylenol? It’s in my bag.”
Camille’s purse hangs from the back of her desk chair, easy to find. I start to dig in, but Camille says, “Wait. Just, hand me my purse, would you?”
I hand it over, and her clear, reusable water bottle with the school crest labeled on the side, half-full.
“Thanks.” She digs in her bag, pulls out the white-and-red bottle, swallows down the pills. “Listen, Ash. I know this place is weird. Just stick it out. It gets better. The first couple of weeks in a new school are always difficult. Goode is exceptional. You’re going to fit in fine.”
I collapse onto my bed with my worn copy of The Republic. “I admit to wondering if I should have been focusing on Machiavelli instead of Plato.”
“Stop making me laugh, Ash. It hurts.” Camille giggles and snaps off the light.
The darkness bleeds around us, sweet and velvet, and I think back to the strange sense I’d had in the Commons as if someone were watching me. I’ve been chalking it up to being surrounded by 199 other girls and the teachers, maids, groundskeepers on-site, all of us shoved into the tiniest fishbowl imaginable, but now I wonder if there’s something more. This school is old for America; these buildings stretch back hundreds of years. The area is isolated; the mountains whisper secrets on the breeze. Places have memories, especially when there’s been bloodshed. A walk along any battlefield will confirm that.
My mother would love it here. Would have done, that is.
My parents are dead.
A small voice from the ceiling pulls me away from the sharp pain that floods my chest at the thought of my mother’s soft, lined face, worn and gray and riddled with worms. The notes from Grassley’s Bach fugue rise in my mind.
“What’s her room like?” Camille’s question chases away the scene in the parlor, Father on his back. Mother, gray and lifeless.
“Becca’s? Don’t know. They took me to a big room that overlooked the mountains.”
“The Commons?”
“Yes.”
Camille’s disembodied head appears over the side of the top bunk. “Holy cow, Ash.”
“What?”
“The Commons is where you go if you get tapped.”
“I thought you didn’t know about any of that?”
“I know a few little things. I mean, my sister...”
Humblebrag, humblebrag. Camille is just so good at it.
“It’s supposed to be a really weird spot.”
“I’ll admit, it was a bit odd. In the dark, it feels like the room is suspended in midair over the mountains. I would like to see it during the daytime.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t. There’s a closed-off stairwell from it—now this is part of school lore, I’ve never seen it—but it’s called the red staircase because a girl committed suicide there after her boyfriend was killed in a car accident. He was coming to see her and never made it. She hung herself from the banister, but she also cut her wrists, so the blood dripped down the staircase. She was in there over a break, but no one knew about it because the school thought she’d gone home. When they finally looked and found her, the blood had soaked in so deeply they had to paint the stairs red to cover it up. Supposedly, one of the secret societies makes you spend a night locked in the stairwell.”
“And I thought I left all the crazy ghost stories back in Oxford.”
“Piper told me she warned you about the arboretum, too.”
“Oh, she did. It seems Goode has had its fair share of student deaths over the years.”
“There are a ton of legends here, some true and researchable, like the girl in the arboretum, some harder to verify. But I think that’s true of any boarding school, don’t you? There are prerequisites—the school must have a dark past, be haunted, suffer a terrible tragedy—I mean, you’ve read all the books, I’m sure.”
“I have,” I say lightly. “Perhaps we can make it through the next three years sans scandal or tragedy, yes?”
“God, I hope so. I don’t like ghosts.”
* * *
I’m almost asleep when I hear Camille crying quietly. Should I acknowledge this? It feels private, but with her fever... Maybe she’s more ill than she’s letting on.
“Are you well, Camille? Should I call someone?”
A big sniff. “I’m okay. Thanks for checking on me, Ash. Just missing home.”
“Is your fever down?”
“I’m okay,” she repeats. “Go to sleep.”
Soon after, the bed shifts and Camille slides off the top quiet as a stalking cat. She is out the door a heartbeat later.
I let her go. Don’t get attached. You’ll only get hurt.
But when she hasn’t returned thirty minutes later, I am compelled to seek her out. My feet are chilled as I walk the abandoned, darkened hall toward the bathrooms. Privacy isn’t important here; though there is a handicap toilet on each hall, each wing has its own bathroom, complete with showers and toilet stalls. Like a prison. Everything on display. Do you know how hard that is for teenagers? Torture, first degree.
I hit pay dirt. Camille is inside—I can smell her Philosophy perfume that reminds me of the marshmallow cream I had as a child. She is sobbing so quietly I can barely hear her.
I speak low so as not to startle her. “Camille?”
But it is Vanessa who steps from the stall. “She’s fine. Go back to bed.”
“She’s sick. I think you should take her to the nurse.”
“Mind your own business, Brit. I’ve got this under control.” A low moan escapes the stall. “Go. Now.”
Against my better judgment, I do.
Camille doesn’t return to the room that night.
21
THE AFFAIR
Ford’s inability to fall asleep has always been an issue. Though she dutifully climbs into bed at 10:00 p.m. every night, sleep mask on to help her melatonin levels rise, she often lies there, listening to her own breath, until she finally gives up and goes to her desk.
Tonight’s nagging worry, the conversation she had with Muriel Grassley about Ash Carlisle before her untimely demise.
“She hasn’t been playing, certainly. Said her parents’ death has traumatized her. You should have told us, Ford. She shouldn’t be held to such a standard, trying to hide the fact that her parents are so recently deceased.”
“I will take your opinion under advisement, Muriel. She’s planning to quit entirely?”
“Yes. Says her heart isn’t in it. Honestly, Ford, I can’t say I disagree. She certainly isn’t the same player we heard on the tapes. Such a shame to let such an astounding, God-given talent go to waste, but we can’t force art. She’s just a child. A hurting child.”
“Oh, my. That is distressing news. We certainly don’t want to force her. She seems to have shown an aptitude for computers, of all things.”
“Really? Well, if she’s giving up the piano, it isn’t a bad substitution. Still a creative field, in many ways. I do hate to see her lose this much practice time, though. You know how hard it is to get yourself back to tip-top shape.”
“Yes. Why don’t we revisit the subject in a few weeks? Give her a chance to settle in. Thank you for letting me know, Muriel.”
Ash is a concert-level playe
r. Could be, that is. If she isn’t interested in playing anymore, Ford isn’t going to force her. And now that they’ve lost Muriel—what a shame. What a damn shame. The two would have made magic together.
She’s left the window open to help circulate some air; even the night is warm still. The cottages have air-conditioning, but she prefers to leave it off, instead listening to the night sounds from the forest—the wail of a solitary mockingbird, the chirps of crickets, the rustling of nocturnal creatures coming out for their dinner.
If she can’t sleep, she might as well try to write.
She rolls a piece of paper into the typewriter, runs through a few lines, stares up at the school. Lights flicker in the Commons, and she smiles. What are her girls up to tonight? Earlier, there was noise coming from the grounds. One of the secret societies, no doubt, titillated by roaming the grounds after dark.
The secret societies at Goode are a centuries-old tradition. Ford knows of at least ten, though some are secret enough they’ve stayed off even her radar. The school has been pressured to disband them over the years, and there have been quiet lawsuits now and again due to hazing gone wrong.
Ford is realistic enough to know Goode can ban the societies and they’ll continue on regardless. Cliques form in large groups, this is simply a fact of life. Belonging is good for teenagers. Finding like-minded individuals, girls with whom they can feel at home, will strengthen them, ready them for the world. She has always resisted the idea that all the girls are equal. This is why Goode is so successful. All girls are not created equal. All girls do not fit a preconceived notion, a standardized cutout. Some are good at math, some are good at English. Some can ride, some can run. Her job is to nurture their strengths and help them find ways to mediate their weaknesses. To make them strong, not delicate creatures easily crushed by the world.
She knows this method works. Not only did she graduate with honors, she’d been in a couple of the societies when she was a student, too. Whenever a parent freaks out, Ford has the right words: “Trust me when I say it’s all in good fun. No one is getting hurt. They are doing nothing wrong outside of breaking curfew now and again. And it’s good for them to find their allies in this world.”
Good Girls Lie Page 9
