Liv, Forever

by Amy Talkington

  “You’re friends with that Gabe guy?”

  “Well, we do work-study together.”

  “He kind of weirds me out.”

  I nodded—if Malcolm only knew—and Malcolm smiled, brushing any thought of Gabe aside, and gestured toward Old Homestead. “But come on. The coast is clear.”

  “OKAY, THIS HAS TO be against the rules,” I said as Malcolm unlocked the front door to Old Homestead. He had the keys; I didn’t ask how.

  “Don’t worry,” he assured me. “I promise, we can’t get in trouble for this.”

  “It just feels wrong.”

  Being there reminded me of that night. And that room with no door. And his friends—Kent and the others. And Abigail laughing at me.

  Malcolm sensed my reluctance. “I swear to you, if there’s another prank waiting in here, you can disown me forever. But I have to show you this. It’s worth it. Trust me.”

  And so I did. He led me into a small room I hadn’t been in before. It was painted a dark velvety brown. And the walls were empty except for one small artwork. I recognized it immediately and rushed over.

  “It’s a William Blake,” I breathed.

  Malcolm nodded. “Supposedly Minerva’s parents knew him.”

  “But he wasn’t famous while he was alive.” I knew Blake’s story well; I’d read two different biographies. “He didn’t mingle at all with the upper class. People thought he was completely insane.”

  “Okay, Livipedia.”

  I looked down, embarrassed by my freakish knowledge on the subject.

  “Well, I’m equally obsessed with Banksy,” he admitted. “I saw his movie fourteen times.”

  “Fourteen?” I asked.

  He nodded. “And I conned my dad into taking me to London so I could secretly see his work.”

  We both just started laughing. Laughing at our dorkiness or our wonderfulness or maybe just the welcome relief of finally sharing our secret obsession with somebody else.

  “What I’m really jealous of is Banksy’s mystery,” Malcolm added. “What I’d give to be nameless. Faceless. Invisible.”

  I wanted to say: That’s exactly how I feel at Wickham Hall: nameless, faceless, invisible. Except when I’m with you. But then I felt it again. A chill. I whipped around. Nothing. I thought again about Gabe and his ghosts.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I just got a chill, I guess.”

  He wrapped his arm around me. “Maybe your clothes are still damp.”

  “Maybe.”

  I looked around again and then hesitantly asked, “So, there are rumors …”

  “That the school’s haunted,” he said, finishing my sentence.

  I nodded.

  He said, “Who knows. Maybe it is.”

  WE ENDED THE DAY (I can confidently say it was the best day of my life) in my studio at the Art Center, working. As usual, it was a ghost town—all the other studios were empty—so we had total privacy.

  I started a collage, a picture of the two of us jumping off the cliff. I played with the blur of our movement, so you couldn’t really tell if we were falling or floating. Floating or falling. This was being with Malcolm. The picture was more an impression than an actual depiction of the moment.

  He sat near me, working on his own piece. We were silent. Just being together and creating. We were Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo without all the philandering and substance abuse. It was the kind of scene I might have conjured as the Perfect Boy Scenario if I was the kind of person who sat around and thought about things like that.

  He closed his sketchbook, put it down, and came over to me. He looked at my collage.

  “It looks like we’re flying.”

  I smiled. He leaned closer, studying the details carefully. It made me both thrilled and uncomfortable, as if he were examining me. Or looking into me, because that’s really what he was doing. However cryptic and controlled, every single thing I drew revealed something about me. I’m afraid. I’m lonely. I feel invisible. I feel out of sync with the world. But this one, the one he was looking at, said: I like this boy. A lot. I feel so free I could fly with him. I wanted him to see that. I wanted him to understand what I could never say out loud.

  He turned to me. “Draw on me.”

  “What?”

  “Draw on me. Tomorrow we’ll be in classes. Apart. And who knows when I’ll get you to hang out with me again. I want to have you there with me.”

  After he said that, he took his shirt off. His body was perfect. I don’t mean “six-pack” perfect. I’ve never understood why girls even liked that so much. No, Malcolm’s body was perfect in a different way. His shoulders were broad and strong, from rowing I guess. But he was skinnier than I’d expected. Lanky. Not much hair on his chest. And his skin was like warm cream—smooth and soothing—except for a single mole on his right shoulder just beyond the clavicle. I guess his body was perfect the same way every other part of him was perfect, in that it wasn’t. His flaws perfected him.

  I chose a plum-colored Bristol marker. “Are you sure you want to be my canvas?” I asked in a French accent for no particular reason.

  “Oui,” he replied.

  I laughed. “It won’t come off for days.”

  “Good.”

  I paused. “Will you draw on me, too?”

  “If you want me to.”

  I nodded. So he reached over and selected a marker—a deep green. “Like your eyes,” he said. I looked down, and my face went hot. No boy had ever noticed the green in my eyes before. On first glance they appear brown, and I guess most guys had only ever given me one glance.

  I positioned him on his back on the floor, like a patient on the operating table. And I stretched out on my stomach, propping myself up on my elbows right at his shoulders.

  He looked straight up at the ceiling. “I can see us,” he said.

  “I do that, too, sometimes. It’s like I fly out of myself and hover, watching.”

  “No, I mean I can literally see us,” he said, chuckling and gesturing above.

  I looked up and there we were, a faint reflection. I lay on my back next to him and put my arms over my head. “Look, it’s like we’re flying. Superman style.”

  “It is.”

  I noticed our reflections were speckled with the stars that shone through the glass ceiling. “Or like we’re nothing.”

  “Just vapor,” he added.

  Then I turned back onto my stomach and started to draw. I had to start at the mole. I placed the marker right on it and wrote vapor up across his shoulder. Then I wrote invisible down his upper arm, moving the word with the curve of his muscle, defined but not bulging. Solid. I gently leaned on top of him, and a wing took shape across his chest and bloomed—not into a bird as I’d first intended, but into an angel. Rather than have the angel spread her wings across his chest, I made her kneel, one wing pulled into herself. A resting angel. Banksy frequently did those.

  He couldn’t really see what I was doing. He looked up at the reflection to get a clue, but it was too far away for him to decipher much. “Is it you?” he asked.

  “Maybe.” I kept drawing. Words folded into wings. A tree sprouted, poised on a cliff that hung over water. And in the water were his hands. His strong fingers. Eventually everything I associated with Malcolm figured across his chest. Our story. I worked slowly and he lay still, receiving. He trusted me. He watched my face and seemed to enjoy feeling every mark, as if each one was a stroke of affection. And each one was.

  When I finished, I lay down on my back next to him. “Thank you,” he said and turned on his side to face me.

  I turned my head and looked into his eyes. They were an almost unreal, saturated blue as if painted by Yves Klein himself.

  “I really want to kiss you right now,” he said.

  “I really want to kiss you, too,” I confessed, not even embarrassed to say it. But, just then, we heard the footsteps approachin
g, padding across the concrete studio floor. I sat up. It was Ms. Benson.

  “I saw the light on. You’re just about to miss curfew. You need to go. Both of you. Now.”

  She saw his shirtlessness. It was a major infraction—to quote section 4, part 2e of the student handbook: “Under no circumstances should a student disrobe in the presence of a student of the opposite sex.” But Ms. Benson just said, “Interesting canvas, Liv. However, not exactly what I meant when I said your art should live and breathe.”

  MINUTES LATER MALCOLM AND I were briskly walking across campus along with many other Wickies rushing to make curfew. But I doubt any of them had just drawn all over the chest of someone they were falling in love with.

  Suddenly we were at Skellenger. Abigail stuck her neck out, looking for latecomers. She pretended not to see me—or him—and stepped back inside.

  “Let’s sneak out,” he blurted.

  I hesitated. Wickham Hall’s campus security was omnipresent.

  “Not tonight. But when the time’s right. Then I can draw on you.”

  He held up the green marker, which he hadn’t had time to use. He’d pocketed it. But I was still reluctant.

  “It’s the only way to have any time together. Alone.”

  “Okay,” I said and then turned to run into my dorm, not looking back.

  I wanted to know more about the Wickhams, specifically how and why they’d ended up with a William Blake. So I did some research. The Wickham archives were preserved at Old Homestead and all the school records were maintained at the Headmaster’s Quarters, but there was a tiny section in the library dedicated to the early history of the school.

  Minerva Savage met Wallace Wickham in 1849. Wallace was thirty-four and Minerva twenty-four, which was already considered an old maid back then. Wallace was a lot higher on the social spectrum than Minerva, and so his family was not pleased. They’d chosen another woman for him, but Wallace loved Minerva and insisted on marrying her. Apparently it was so scandalous it even made the cover of the Sunday edition of News of the World. (Yes, News of the World was already peddling gossip way back when.) Wallace’s parents practically disowned him, but because he was their only son, he received his inheritance when they passed anyway.

  Wallace married for true love. And truly love he did.

  Among their papers—mostly handwritten notes on curriculum and school traditions—was a series of love letters. I’d read some pretty good love letters in my sixteen years. None addressed to me of course. I’d never received anything more elaborate than a drugstore valentine from Doug Caswell in the fifth grade. But I’d read letters by Van Gogh and Beethoven and dozens of poets—yes, I know, I spent far too much time on the Internet—and these Wickham letters ranked right up there. They were written when Wallace set off to the United States in search of land for a school. They desperately missed each other and constantly referenced lines from their beloved poets. In one letter, Wallace listed numerous names of poems for Minerva to read—Lord Byron’s “She Walks In Beauty,” “Love” by Wordsworth, and Keats’s “A Thing of Beauty”—almost like an old-fashioned playlist for her.

  In the letters, Wallace and Minerva detailed their dream of creating a school steeped in nature and wilderness. A place to study the humanities—poetry, literature, the fine arts—and embrace Romanticism. A place where they could seek peace from his overbearing family. A place where society wouldn’t disdain them for their choices.

  Wallace found this land in 1859 and purchased it immediately. He wrote to Minerva, calling it “a wildlife sanctuary where ideas could be explored and minds opened.” I imagined them hiking through the nature preserve and being the first to discover the mountain and its glorious view over the lake. I wondered if they’d kissed there or jumped off the cliff.

  And, finally—when I’d practically forgotten what I was looking for—I came across a reference to the Blake. Minerva’s father, a blacksmith, had been Blake’s neighbor when Blake moved to Felpham in Sussex. They’d become friendly. Minerva’s father had done some work for Blake, and Blake paid him with the drawing, a sketch for Milton, which he wrote while in Felpham. Minerva had always loved the drawing and, in one of her letters to Wallace, instructed him to “please build a small chamber for its viewing” in Old Homestead.

  Minerva died in an accident ten years after founding the school, so she never saw Wickham Hall rise to its place as one of the top preparatory schools in the country. And poor Wallace didn’t last long after her death. One article mentioned that he “continued to talk to her and to write her love letters until the day he died.” He believed that her spirit lingered and that he communed with her. Apparently he’d even attempted to take pictures of it. It was sad but somehow beautiful. The poor guy really couldn’t bear to live without her.

  Their only child, Elijah, became a teacher at Wickham Hall. He took over the school until his own death many years later. There were numerous articles about the awards Elijah had won, details about how he’d brought the school into the twentieth century—embracing technology and instigating Wickham Hall’s rigorous academic testing.

  What would the Wickhams think of their school now? Sure, it still had the nature preserve, but it now stood against everything they had believed in. It had become the most elite of the elite. It was the society that disdained people like them: people foolish enough to marry for real love. There was no time to enjoy nature. No time to stand in awe. No time to find that person you couldn’t live without.

  There were no Minervas here. I might have been close, but I didn’t belong.

  I ARRIVED IN MY studio the next day and found a large canvas, freshly stretched and gessoed. Oil paints and solvents were already placed on a palette nearby. I could smell the turpentine from five feet away.

  Ms. Benson stood nearby looking quite proud of herself.

  “Subtle hint,” I said.

  She chuckled but kept her eyes trained on me, urging me to approach the giant canvas.

  “Go on! Make it big and messy! Give me some heart, some life!” she cackled.

  I paused. Then she moved closer to me and got quite serious.

  “You are so talented. Do you understand? Your skill is exceptional. If you unleash and add true emotion to your work, it will sing, Olivia! It will fly!” She started to walk away but then paused. “I understand it’s hard. From what I know of your past, your story’s not so different from my own. But if you don’t do this—explore your emotions and truly open yourself up and put yourself out there—well, then, you’re not truly alive.”

  The studio door shut behind her.

  I stared at the canvas. I tried to pretend I didn’t know what she meant. But I did know. I understood her completely. I just wasn’t ready yet.

  AT OUR MONTHLY WORK-STUDY meeting, Mrs. Mulford kept me and Gabe waiting while she updated and dispatched all the other duos. Once we were alone with her, she finally told us that, yes, we were still assigned to the bricks in the catacombs. I could feel the anxiety mounting in Gabe, so I tried to see if good ole Pitchfork Lady would cut us a break.

  “I was wondering, Mrs. Mulford, if maybe you might want to assign us to a different task?” Gabe shot me a “shut-up” look, but I continued, “Considering the laptop incident and everything. Maybe we’d be more productive in a different environment.”

  “No way!” Gabe protested. “We love our job, Mrs. M! Best job ever.”

  She flashed a brittle smile. “Good. Because this task must be completed before Fall Festival. No discussion. With regards to the laptop, I’ve temporarily procured Mr. Nichols’s personal computer as part of his punishment. And as for you, Miss Bloom, I spoke to the headmaster. Consider yourself officially notified of your First Warning. You are now excused.”

  WE ENTERED STUFFY NAMES from years past—more unreal tones like Elias Higgenbotham and Edward Britteridge. I tried to entertain Gabe, acting like I had before, like everything was normal. But he wouldn’t laugh, so I stopped.

  “What exac
tly do you see?” I asked. I was curious.

  “Just stop. I know you don’t believe me.”

  “But I’m trying to understand. Do you see one right now?” I demanded.

  “No. If I saw one right now, we wouldn’t be here. She’s usually down the hall in that nook place.”

  “She stays there?”

  “It’s the only place I’ve ever seen her. But I can hear her other places sometimes.” He started to say more but stopped himself, biting his lip as if to hold himself back.

  “But not right now?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” I kept reading names: “Herbert Carver, 1874. Elizabeth Brewster, 1873.” And then, “Balthazar Astor, 1885. Wait, do you think he’s related to Malcolm?”

  Gabe scowled at me. “Duh.”

  “It says ‘V.P.’ at the bottom. Was he like vice president of the school?”

  “Guys like that aren’t vice anything. They’re presidents. I bet it stands for Victors President.”

  “What’s Victors?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Seriously?”

  “Come on, I’m new, remember?”

  “The Victors. It’s a secret society. And your friend Malcolm belongs.”

  I winced. “What do they do?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, it’s secret. You think they’d tell me?” He shook his head, disgusted. “I’ve heard they have rituals. But I’m not kidding, it’s all seriously secret. They take oaths and shit.”

  “Oaths?”

  “Yeah.”

  I shivered. Oaths. That’s what Malcolm had said. Suddenly, it all made sense: all that talk about him having to be a part of things, those mysterious “things” he couldn’t talk about.

  “And Malcolm’s definitely in it?”

  “Um, yes. If there’s one person I know is in it, it’s him. And that’s proof right there,” he said, gesturing to the brick. “That’s how you get in, supposedly—blood. You have to share blood with someone who was in before.”