Monster Academy

by Catherine Banks

  “I thought it would get less spooky as we got older, but it’s the opposite,” Loralie whispered.

  “Come on, you big scaredy cats. We’ll be in an out in no time,” I said, looping arms with them and taking them up to the front door.

  Before I could knock, it opened with a large groan and Terrance, a zombie butler, bowed to us. “Princesses,” he greeted us in a deep voice.

  “You need to get those hinges oiled,” I said and swallowed hard. “That’s super creepy.”

  “Mistress Frankenstein has requested that we leave it so she has a warning if any intruders get by us,” Terrance said and shrugged. His shoulder hit the bottom of his ear and the ear fell off with a splat to the stone floor between us. He looked down at it with a scowl.

  Most of her zombies were in top notch shape, and Terrance was one of her oldest creations. Why was he falling apart?

  “Are you alright?” I asked.

  He muttered something, bent, picked his ear up, and said, “Mistress Frankenstein is on floor two.”

  Loralie pulled me forward, past Terrance, and up the stairs to the left.

  Tsukiko let out a big breath I hadn’t realized she had been holding. “Oh, dark gods, he smelled worse than usual.”

  “Is he sick or something?” I asked softly.

  Loralie shrugged. “I didn’t know zombies could get sick.”

  “You think the doctor knows?” Tsukiko asked.

  “The doctor knows all,” a deep woman’s voice said above us.

  We tilted our heads back to look up to the next floor.

  Dr. Frankenstein was tall, light-skinned, and had black hair that no matter how much she brushed it never lay down flat. She looked like she had been electrocuted all the time. She also almost always had goggles on, which made her eyes look larger than they were.

  “You popped a stitch?” Dr. Frankenstein asked.

  I nodded. “Yes, Doctor.”

  She sighed. “Everything is falling apart. Someone must have cursed me again.”

  Again?

  “Was it just one?” she asked. "You might be growing out of your current body. Though, I thought this body would be mostly permanent from here on out. I suppose I'll have to start searching for appropriate parts. Would you like to be blue? I think I can make you blue this time. Or red? Red would look really neat. Or purple! If I can mix the blue and red—"

  "I just popped one stitch. I don’t think I need a new body, but I will let you know if things change," I answered quickly. If I let her go off on a tangent for too long, she would just decide things for me and before I knew it, I would be leaving with a completely different body.

  She spun away from the railing. “Hurry up here and I’ll fix it. I don’t have much time.”

  She never had much time.

  “Yes, Doctor,” I said and tugged Tsukiko and Loralie up the stairs, two at a time.

  We reached the spot the doctor had been, but she was no longer there. We followed the sound of crashing items into one of the doctor’s surgical rooms. There were five metal beds, wall-to-ceiling cabinets filled with jars of various items, including everything from bits of creatures to medical herbs, and a wall of steel tools that included surgeons’ tools and hacksaws.

  The doctor stood before a cabinet, tossing things out that were crashing to the floor, which were immediately scooped up by two female zombies wearing scrubs and placed on a rolling tray.

  “Sit. Sit,” the doctor ordered me with a wave of her hand at an empty table behind her.

  I sat on it and Loralie and Tsukiko stood on the far side of the room with their backs to the wall.

  “You two need anything?” Dr. Frankenstein asked.

  “No, ma’am,” they both answered.

  She turned and eyed them. “You both reek of sadness. You as well, Frances. Boys already?”

  “Maybe,” all three of us muttered.

  She sighed. “If reproduction wasn’t necessary for some of you monsters, I would tell you to ignore the males completely, but alas, for the generations to continue, reproduction is required. You could always have arranged marriages by your parents.”

  “No!” The three of us yelled.

  She cackled and then snorted.

  Loralie and Tsukiko looked at me, and the three of us sighed nervously. She may not have known it, but our grandparents had discussed arranged marriages earlier in the year with us.

  It wasn’t until our parents had argued for a few hours that they’d given up on the idea.

  I personally didn’t think it was over yet, that they would bring it up again, but I for sure wouldn’t bring it up.

  Dr. Frankenstein grabbed a few more things and then marched over to me. “Which stitch?”

  I showed her the popped stitch and she scowled at it. “This…is strange.”

  If Dr. Frankenstein called something strange, it was time to be worried.

  “What?” I asked, my pulse skyrocketing.

  She poked me in several places, took some measurements, and made several hmm’ing sounds.

  Tsukiko and Loralie walked closer.

  “Is she going to be okay?” Tsukiko asked.

  “Shush,” Dr. Frankenstein ordered her.

  Both clamped their lips closed.

  Dr. Frankenstein moved around me a bit and then said, “Disrobe.”

  One of her zombie assistants brought me a sheet.

  Despite bringing it to me, no one turned around or gave me privacy. I was used to it and honestly didn’t care, so I quickly stripped to my underwear, took my bra off, and wrapped the sheet around my boobs to cover them and let the cotton cloth drape down over my lower body.

  Dr. Frankenstein snapped her fingers. One of the zombies picked up a pad of paper and a pencil, and the doctor went about taking measurements and having the zombie nurse write them down. She then restitched the one that popped and said, “I'll call if there's anything. If you don’t hear from me then that means you're fine.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied and got dressed.

  We walked back to the taxi and got in it in silence. The skeleton drove us back to the academy, and we walked into our dorm rooms without a word to anyone we passed by.

  I sat on my bed and looked at my friends. “Do you think something is wrong with me?”

  Tsukiko and Loralie exchanged a look and then eyed me with matching worried expressions.

  After a moment, Tsukiko said, "If it were serious, Dr. Frankenstein would have kept you there for observation. She's probably just trying to find a way to convince you to let her make some adjustments like she always does. If she doesn’t call, then everything will be fine."

  She smiled reassuringly, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.

  If I looked at this unbiasedly, then I would agree with her. The doctor liked to convince people to let her use them as guinea pigs. She constantly tried to get Tsukiko and Loralie to let her do tests on them. And she was always trying to convince me to let her make changes to my body or improvements. I would just treat this like I always did. Like the doctor was just being weird.

  Yeah, she was just weird.

  Five

  TSUKIKO

  I suggested we stay in for the evening, but Frances and Loralie insisted we needed to go out to celebrate finishing our first day and to distract ourselves.

  Frances spent an hour picking out our outfits. Then, Loralie spent half an hour doing our makeup. She forced us to swear oaths never to tell anyone that she liked doing makeup. Death's daughter enjoying doing makeup would be embarrassing, or so she thought.

  I didn’t often wear makeup, but Loralie enjoyed doing it, so I let her do mine on occasion. Tonight, was one of those occasions.

  Finally ready, we headed out of our dorms and to the forest on the south side of the academy grounds.

  It took us at least five minutes to reach the bonfire that the students were hanging out around.

  Frances’s eyes were super wide as she moved closer to the bonfire, but about
thirty feet from it, she stopped and her body trembled.

  “This is close enough,” I said. “I’m starting to sweat beneath my fur.” It wasn’t actually a lie, but I knew she disliked fire as much as I disliked snakes.

  Ainsley, a harpy with silver eyes and hair, skipped over to us with a wide smile. “Hey, guys!”

  “Hey,” we all greeted her.

  “How was your break?” I asked.

  While she wasn’t a close friend, I enjoyed spending time with her on occasion. She was nice and fun and one of the most honest girls I had ever met. Plus, she got along with all three of us, so it was never awkward when she was around. She was often super cheerful and brought our moods up even during dire situations. She was like a little ray of sunshine.

  “It was horrifically glorious,” she crowed and flapped her wings a bit.

  “Oh?” Frances asked with a smirk. “What did you do?”

  “My parents took me to their nesting place and taught me how to take out distracted sailors,” she said.

  “You attacked humans?” Loralie asked, her mouth in an ‘O’ of surprise.

  Ainsley preened. “Yes.”

  “Lucky,” Loralie murmured.

  “It was so much fun,” she squealed. “Did you three do anything exciting?”

  We looked at each other, and I bit my lip. “Not really.”

  She arched a brow. “Hiding secrets?”

  “We just did a bunch of boring exercises that involved learning which greetings were proper and which creatures were most likely to want a war with humans. Did some training, too, but not really anything fun,” Frances said and sighed. “Super boring.”

  “Well, maybe I can convince my parents to let you guys come next time,” Ainsley said.

  “Wishful thinking,” I said. “There’s no way my parents would let me go.”

  “I’m telling you, we need a foreign exchange program where we could go to another country to learn more about the humans there and the differences between the creatures in other countries,” Loralie said.

  “That would be amazing,” I whispered wistfully.

  It would never happen, though. Our families were much too protective for that.

  Plus, there were things way out of our control that required us to stay close to our parents.

  “So, who do you three have your eyes on this year?” Ainsley asked, moving closer to us. “I’ve been eyeing Antoine.”

  I smiled. “You and Antoine would be super cute together.”

  They really would. And, I knew that he had been eyeing her last year.

  She sighed dramatically. “We so would.”

  “Go for it!” I encouraged her. “None of us have a thing for him.”

  “Dibs!” She yelled and flapped her wings quickly, stirring up dirt around her feet.

  The four of us burst into a fit of laughter.

  “I think I see him over there,” Frances said and pointed behind Ainsley.

  Ainsley turned and smiled. “I’m going to go say hi. Have fun tonight, girls.”

  We waved as she walked away and I sighed, watching her walk right up to Antoine and start chatting with him.

  I admired her bravery. I couldn’t walk up to someone like that. Crush or not.

  “We need drinks,” Loralie said. “Come on.”

  Frances and I followed her around the bonfire, keeping our distance from the flames for Frances’s sake.

  On the opposite side of the bonfire was a chest filled with ice and drinks. There were also some bottles of alcohol.

  Loralie, of course, went straight to the alcohol and poured some in three plastic cups, and then added some juice to them to make the drinks taste better. She handed us our cups and then raised hers. “To a great year.”

  Frances and I smiled and raised our cups, too. “To a great year.”

  A fourth cup raised and tapped against ours. “To a great year,” Dante said, smiling wide.

  Frances’s eyes widened, and she nearly dropped her cup, but managed to bring it close to her chest and almost hide her shakiness.

  “Hi, Dante,” I greeted him. “How was your first day of school?”

  It was an agreement we had come up with as soon as we started liking boys. If one of us was too flustered to talk to the guy we liked, another one of us would talk to him, so he would stay nearby and we could hear him talk even if we weren’t the one talking to him.

  “It was alright. I hated standing so long in that stupid line for our schedule though. It wasted half the day,” he said, looking at Frances as he answered.

  “We were afraid we were going to miss dinner,” she said softly.

  “Same,” he chuckled and ran his hand through his flame hair.

  Frances swallowed hard and took an involuntary step back as her eyes focused on the flames.

  “Love the new style,” Loralie said. “How is it possible to make flames look messy?”

  Dante smirked. “It actually takes me quite a while to style my hair. Once I do it when I wake up, though, it will stay the rest of the day until I sleep on it.”

  “How do you keep from lighting the bed on fire?” Frances asked, her voice squeaking way more than usual.

  “The fire only burns when I want it to,” he said. “You can touch it, if you want.” He took a step towards her, and her eyes widened so much I thought they were going to pop out of her head.

  Loralie stepped between them. “Hey, Frances, isn’t that Ainsley? We should go say hi.”

  Loralie pushed Frances away before Dante could say anything else.

  Dante turned to me with a scowl. “Was it something I said?”

  I fidgeted and shifted my feet. Should I tell him? She had a huge crush on him and I didn’t think it was going to go away. Would she be mad?

  “Frances...isn’t a fan of fire,” I whispered. “I’m sure you’ve heard how terrified her grandfather was of it?”

  His eyes widened. “Really? She’s scared of it, too?” He looked after her and his face fell. “That explains a lot.”

  “She tries,” I whispered to him. “Don’t give up on her. Just...don’t try to get her to touch the flames, okay?”

  I spun around and jogged to catch up to Frances and Loralie who had moved even farther away from the bonfire now.

  Frances trembled slightly and chugged her drink.

  “It’s okay,” Loralie assured her. “There’s no fire here.”

  “I know. I know. I’m being ridiculous,” Frances growled.

  “No, you’re not. We’re all scared of things and it’s okay. It’s great that you can admit your fears,” I said and patted her back.

  “He must think I’m such a freak,” she whispered, and her head dropped forward.

  “I don’t think he does, but if that is the case, then it is his loss. You’re an amazing catch. Any guy would be lucky to have you,” I said, and Loralie nodded.

  “Maybe I should just let Dad and Mom set me up,” Frances whispered.

  “You know they’ll probably try to make you a boyfriend,” Loralie said and swallowed hard.

  Frances scowled. “Oh, dark gods. I didn’t even think about that. They totally would.”

  “Look, all hope is not lost. If his fire really doesn’t burn you, then maybe he could help you get over your fear of it,” I suggested.

  Frances shuddered. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m not saying try it now. I’m just saying it is a possibility. So, not all hope is lost, Frannie.”

  She glared at me. “Don’t call me that where others can hear.”

  I raised my hands in surrender. “Sorry, it just slipped out.”

  “Come on, let’s refill our cups and enjoy the rest of our night. Tomorrow we have our first real classes, and we all know it is going to suck,” Loralie said.

  We headed back to the drinks, and I saw Rathik out of the corner of my eye. He crooked his finger at me and backed up into the shadows of the forest behind him.

  I swallowed hard and said,
“I’ll be right back. I need to find a secluded bush, if you get what I mean.”

  Frances waved me off and I jogged into the trees after Rathik, following his scent a hundred feet or more away from the party before I found him leaning against a tree with legs instead of his snake lower body.

  “Hey,” he greeted me with a smile.

  "H-hi," I replied, my smile wavering. As long as he stayed back and didn’t shift to his snake body, I would be okay.

  He stepped closer. "I was hoping we could talk more in person now. We talked a bit by letter over the break."

  "M-maybe." Why did I always stutter around him?

  "Well, let's start small, okay?" he asked.

  I nodded. "Small. Is good."

  Six

  LORALIE

  Tsukiko was hiding something. I’d felt it the day she came back from her family trip and as I watched her run off into the trees, I felt it even more.

  “What’s wrong?” Frances asked as she drank from her cup.

  She seemed mostly back to herself, which was good. I really didn’t want her freaking out about Dante when she didn’t need to be. It seemed obvious to me that he was interested in her.

  “I don’t think she actually needed to go to the bathroom,” I said.

  Frances’s eyes widened and she looked in the direction Tsukiko had run. “What is she actually doing?”

  “We should find out,” I said.

  “We are not spying on our friend,” Frances said and folded her arms over her chest.

  “Spy is such a harsh word. I didn’t say we would spy. I said we should find out—you know, check on her. Good friends check on their other friends,” I argued.

  “You think she’s in trouble?” Frances asked.

  “No, but she’s been acting different since her trip,” I whispered.

  Frances’s face fell. “Yeah.”

  Truthfully, we had all been acting a bit different since our summer family trips. I didn’t want to tell them what had happened and it seemed they all felt the same. Being pushed by my father and grandfather to increase my power and learn new things was great. However, the number of souls I’d needed to ferry had taken a toll on me. If it hadn’t been for the girls and I developing our secret joint power, I wasn’t sure I would be nearly as cheerful. Being death was hard.