by Anita Oh
“Well, I’m a commoner and I don’t know it. You know why? Because I don’t believe in magic.”
He gave no indication that he was even listening to me. I stood beside him, looking at the statue. It seemed so innocent. Well, offensive to Buddhists, probably, but not like it was going to spring to life and rain chaos down on our heads with pretty blue lights.
There was a brass plaque at the base of the statue that I hadn’t noticed before, with writing in a foreign language. “Japanese proverb,” I murmured, reading the only part of it that I could.
“Yuri wa kegare wo shiranai,” Tennyson Wilde said. Of course he could read it. He could probably read Sanskrit and hieroglyphics as well. “The lily does not know impurity.”
I looked at the water lilies floating on the surface of the clear water.
“The innocent don’t need to lie,” I said.
Tennyson Wilde looked at me in surprise.
“Who was the boy you were talking to in the courtyard?” I asked him. “The one who looked like Sam?”
He shook his head. “Is that why you cast this spell, to find out about Sam?”
“I didn’t cast the spell. I don’t believe in magic.” I was getting sick of saying it. “You don’t even have any evidence that it’s anything to do with me.”
“I don’t need evidence,” he said. “I don’t like you. I find everything about you suspicious, and my instincts tell me that you’re trouble.”
I rolled my eyes and moved away from him. I really did not need this.
“You’re the one who’s suspicious, buddy. Every bad thing that happens comes back to you. You might think it’s fun to hurt people and falsely accuse them and cut off their access to food, but where I come from, that makes you the bad guy. Me? I am not the bad guy.”
I didn’t really want to flounce off in a dramatic exit, because my mike-dropping statement clearly spoke for itself, so I tried my best to walk away gracefully. I stubbed my toe on a rock and stumbled, but apart from that, I got away clean.
“I’ll be watching you,” he called after me. “I’ll find out the truth.”
Chapter 7
Tennyson Wilde had not been joking about watching me. All weekend, no matter where I went, I saw him lurking in the shadows, furrowing his big broody forehead at me. When I looked out my window I could see him standing under the trees, watching the house. I didn’t know what else to do to prove my innocence, but that was kind of secondary to everything else going on anyway.
Things became quiet. Literally. People stopped speaking unless completely necessary. They didn’t know what was happening, but still a general sort of apathy fell over the school. It was the first weekend of term and the weather was nice, but hardly anyone was out on school grounds. I sent off food and water samples, saw the doctor for blood tests, and waited impatiently for all the results to come back. I wasn’t sure what I’d do when they did but at least I’d have more information. Maybe even something to get creepy Tennyson Wilde off my back.
“Just pick anything,” said Hannah as we waited for the house meeting to start on Monday afternoon. “You can change it next semester if you don’t like it.”
I still hadn’t picked an activity. Everything looked either time-consuming or expensive, or I had no clue what it even was.
“What’s the Key club?” I asked. “Unity club? C&C club?”
“Oh, that might be good for you!” said Hannah. “Cooking and crafts! You like food, right?”
I did. I liked food the most. Crafts, not so much, but I could learn to like them if it meant free food. I clicked on the sign-up button.
“Then next semester you can join diet club,” mumbled Fatima, scrolling through her history notes beside Hannah.
The meeting was in a room behind the stairs on the ground floor of the Red House that I hadn’t been in before. All the freshmen gathered around in comfortable-looking armchairs arranged in a semicircle, facing a larger, even more comfortable-looking chair. Except Milo, who huddled in the corner with his hood pulled down over his face like a Sith lord. I wondered if he’d accidentally told someone about his obvious crush on Tennyson Wilde. He really didn’t need to worry about what we thought, but I couldn’t get close enough to him to tell him that. Plus, you never knew what was going on in people’s lives to make them react a certain way. Of all people, I understood that, so I let him have his space.
Mr. Porter breezed into the room and sat in the comfortable chair, crossing his legs and looking around at us all with sparkling eyes. I hadn’t realized he was our House Master – Amaris promoted minimal supervision of students, to “cultivate independence and self-sufficiency,” so we were left to our own devices most of the time.
“Clubs!” he said. “Activities! Have you all signed up for them?”
We all murmured that we had, then went around the semicircle introducing ourselves to the group and telling him what we’d chosen. Hannah was in piano club, Fatima chose math club, and Milo did sailing. I kind of wished I’d picked a club with someone I knew, but none of those were appealing to me.
We spent the hour chatting about general start-of-term sorts of things, like what was expected of us and what to do if we had problems, but nobody really spoke up about anything, just fell into a stupor listening to Mr. Porter talk. He wrapped it up and dismissed us before the end of the hour, but called for me to stay behind. I gave Hannah and Fatima a longing glance as they left me behind to go to dinner.
“Lively bunch,” said Mr. Porter, motioning for me to take a closer seat. “The future is in good hands with them.”
Wow, so sarcasm still worked. Good to know.
“I was just wondering how you were doing,” he said. “You’re not like the other kids here, are you? Are you coping all right with everything?”
I shrugged and picked at a loose thread on my skirt. “Everything is really different, but I can deal with it.”
I could feel that sensation again, more strongly than ever. It buzzed around inside, wanting to force everything out, to tell him all my problems, but I clamped my lips shut. Mr. Porter didn’t need to know about any of that, about Tennyson Wilde or the hallucinations or the bullying. What could he do about it? Big fat nothing.
“Okay, but you tell me if you have any trouble. We commoners have to stick together.”
I looked up to see him smiling kindly at me. I smiled back, feeling like at least one more person was on my side in all this, even if they couldn’t help.
I hurried out of the house to catch up with Hannah and Fatima, but they weren’t on the path through the Red Garden. I thought if I took a shortcut through one of the other gardens, I might be able to catch up with them – I needed Hannah’s access to get my dinner, so I didn’t want them to get too far ahead of me, and the main path wasn’t the most direct route. I ducked off the path and through the flower bushes, hurrying toward the school.
I left the Red Garden and came into a garden I hadn’t seen before – all box hedges and topiary animals that looked bizarrely real in the fading light. Something moved in the corner of my eye, and I started.
There was a wolf. It looked strange, standing beside a hedge T. Rex that was almost too real. My heart thumped. I’d heard howling from the forest, but I hadn’t expected to see a wolf so close to the school, though I was sure I wasn’t in any danger from it. Wolves were rational creatures, with basic needs, patterns of behavior and cultural systems that were inherent to them. You could more or less predict what a wolf would do in a given situation. Not like humans. Who even knew what was going on with humans?
I wasn’t exactly an expert, but I knew enough to know that that a wolf wouldn’t attack a human without a good reason, and I had no intention of giving it one. I stayed completely still and tried to project how nonthreatening I was. The wolf’s posture seemed relaxed; it didn’t have raised hackles or anything, and it didn’t look starved enough to want to eat me.
“Hey, wolf,” I said, keeping my voice soft and friendly. “What’s up with you?
Busy with wolf business?”
It was a large wolf, with a brown coat and massive paws. It cocked its head to the side as if taking in what I was saying, its ears perked up.
“I’m heading to dinner,” I told it. “What’s on the menu for you? Bunnies? I bet there’s some tasty stuff in that forest.”
The wolf turned to walk away. I couldn’t really blame it. It was dinnertime, and my conversation probably wasn’t that interesting to wolves. It had only gone a few steps, though, when it looked back, gesturing with its head toward the forest as if it wanted me to follow.
“You want me to follow you into the woods?” I asked it. “That sounds like a cautionary tale that doesn’t end well for the naive girl.”
The wolf jerked its head more emphatically.
I sighed. “Okay, buddy, but please just note that I think this is a bad idea.”
I followed the wolf out of the topiary garden and through a hidden track deep in the Red Garden. I had no idea what I was thinking, following the advice of a wild animal instead of going to dinner. That just was not who I was, but a wolf had never asked me to do anything for it before, and what if it had an injured cub or something that needed help? I couldn’t just turn around and leave it without knowing what it wanted.
The wolf padded along ahead of me. The path was dark, narrow and overgrown, hard to follow with only the light of the half moon, especially when the garden merged in with the forest and I completely left the school grounds. Eventually I lost sight of the wolf, couldn’t even hear it moving through the trees. I sighed. I’d have to try to find my way back to the school, which would not be fun in the dark. Hopefully I’d make it back in time for dinner.
I edged my way forward on the path, looking around for some sort of landmark to use as a guide, and realizing I knew exactly where I was. It was the glade where I’d first met the Wildes. I could just make out the wall to the Golden House through the trees to my left. The wolf was nowhere to be seen in the clearing, but there was a person sitting on the seat.
Sam.
He looked up when I moved into the glade, though he must have heard me come blundering through the forest.
I pressed the palms of my hands into my eyes but when I looked again, he was still there. My heart pounded. I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t even a lookalike, someone who looked similar in the right light, at the right angle. It was exactly him.
Spots danced in front of my eyes and I was fairly sure I was about to throw up. I was probably having a heart attack. Could heart attacks cause hallucinations? Or whatever was causing the hallucinations and truth telling, maybe that ended in heart failure. Either way, I was probably dying.
“You’re not having a heart attack and you’re not hallucinating,” the hallucination said, as if it read my mind. Which was possible, considering it was a product of my imagination. “Just breathe.” Its voice was exactly like Sam’s.
“Shut up,” I said. “Just stop your talking.”
He looked so real, so solid. Even in the dim light, I could see him in precise detail. The Samness of him. His eyes were the same, green with flecks of gold, shining with an unnatural brilliance in the moonlight.
“It’s me, Lucy,” he said, standing up. “I’m sorry.”
I shook my head and backed away.
“There was a wolf,” I said, trying to focus on what was real. “Where did it go?” I looked around for that little wolfy betrayer who had obviously lured me there under false pretenses and then run off to munch on bunnies. It couldn’t have just eaten me, rather than deserting me with the darkest shadows of my mind?
“I didn’t see a wolf.” He stepped even closer to me, almost close enough to touch. “Lucy…”
I held up a hand to stop him. “Don’t.”
My mind had obviously just given up, given in. It wanted Sam to be there and so he was. It was funny that I couldn’t speak an untruth and yet what I was seeing right in front of me was a lie. So funny. I was laughing a lot. He reached out and touched my arm and I could feel it, the warmth of him, the tangibility.
I couldn’t speak a lie. All I had to do was say it, say that he wasn’t real, say that Sam was dead. But I couldn’t get the words out. They wouldn’t move past the ache in my heart.
“Sam was my best friend,” I whispered, my voice cracking. “I don’t believe he’d do that to me. I don’t believe he’d make me sit through his funeral, not if he were alive.” I looked away from him. I wasn’t crying.
“I’m so sorry, Lucy,” he said softly. “I know it’s hard to understand, but you need to listen to me.” His grip on my arm became almost too tight. “It’s not safe for you here. There are things going on that I can’t protect you from.”
I forced out a laugh. Even for an imaginary and possibly zombified Sam, that was funny. “When have you ever protected me from anything? The way I remember it, you were always the one hiding behind me. ‘Oh, Lucy, that bully Steven Chen stole my Optimus Prime,’ and ‘Oh, Lucy, I lost my math homework and Mrs. Jennings will give me detention.’ So don’t act so tough now just because you’re back from the dead.”
I tried to pull away from him, but he held me fast. I could feel the warmth radiating from his body, could smell his familiar scent. Despite everything, that hadn’t changed, and it reminded me of comforting things, of summer nights looking up at the stars, of watching movies under the covers in winter, of chocolate pudding and stupid jokes. I was close enough to see the scar on the side of his neck that I’d given him that time when we were seven and we’d been playing Gandalf versus Balrog and I’d pushed him too hard into the depths of Moria. A scar in the shape of a heart. More than anything, his voice or his scent or his grip on my arm, that made me believe that he was real. I wasn’t dreaming him up. Sam was there. He was there and real and alive.
Sam Spencer was alive, and he’d deserted me.
“How could you?” I asked him. “How could you let me believe you were dead all this time?”
He shook his head and let me step away from him. “I can’t,” he said. “Don’t ask me.”
“We’re done here,” I told him, wincing when the words came out as truth. “You might not be dead but you aren’t the person I used to know. Go back to your Tennyson Wilde and your secrets. Whatever we were to each other, it’s over.”
He watched me go in silence, not making the slightest move to stop me.
Chapter 8
Nothing made sense anymore. Sam was alive. The results came back clean from the food and water samples I’d sent away. Sam was alive. I was still waiting on my blood tests. Nearly everyone in school had stopped coming to class with some sort of “superflu,” so apparently the results from my tests were delayed because the medical staff were so busy. I knew it wasn’t a flu. Unless it was a flu that caused truth telling, because that was what was making everyone feel so off. It was getting harder and harder to push through the apathy and actually get stuff done. Whatever it was seemed to be building up steam, rather than wearing off, and everyone was suffering from it. Also, Sam was alive. The Golden hadn’t been in class all week and I hadn’t even seen Tennyson Wilde lurking around since I’d talked to Sam, so I couldn’t get any answers there.
That’s why I was super surprised to find Nikolai Volkov at my first C&C club meeting.
The club was held in a disused wing of the main school building. We gathered at one end of a long room, which was divided into two sections – dining and kitchen. The kitchen area was divided into rows of small kitchenettes, filled with state-of-the-art ovens and appliances. I sat in the dining area, at a long table, like from Downton Abbey or something, with fancy candelabras and napkins folded into fan shapes and all that jazz. There were a few other girls right at the other end of the table, who tittered as Nikolai Volkov slipped into the seat beside me.
“You’re in Cooking & Craft club?” I asked in disbelief.
He smirked at me. “I thought I’d find the most needy girls here,” he said, giving the girls at the end of
the table a little wave. “Seems I was right. I thought there’d be more of them, though.”
“You’re disgusting,” I told him. “And they’re probably sick in bed with the ‘superflu.’ If you’d been to class all week, you’d know.”
“Being around other people isn’t a good idea for us at the moment,” he said, toying with a shiny fork. I wondered if he was going to stab me with it like in a gangster movie or something, but he didn’t; he set it back in its place and folded his hands.
“So why are you here?”
He shrugged. “Clubs are compulsory. And I was asked to give you something.”
He took an envelope from his inside pocket and placed it on the table, sliding it toward me.
“It’s an invitation,” he said.
Inside the envelope was a small card, the same as my student card only all gold. I flicked it, but it was just made of plastic, not actual gold.
“That will give you access to our house,” he said. “Tennyson asked for you to meet him there tonight, to talk.”
I wanted to ask him why I should. I didn’t owe Tennyson Wilde anything, especially not my time, and I resented being summoned by him.
“To talk about Sam,” Nikolai clarified.
Before I could ask him anything, the celebrity chef who’d been flown in for our club appeared with a plate of itty bitty tiramisus, and everything else vanished from my mind.
I had said I was done with Sam, and I had no intention of meeting up with Tennyson Wilde. I was considering selling the gold card to the highest bidder. It was probably worth more than actual gold, when I thought about it.
I don’t know if I was on a tiramisu high, or just curious, but later that night I found myself standing in front of the gates to the Golden House. He’d wanted to talk, Nikolai said. Maybe it was my chance to get some answers.
I scanned the gold card at the sensor pad on the gate, though I felt in my gut it was a bad idea. Worse than following a wolf into the forest, even, and look how that had turned out.
