“Yeah, why don’t you start that rumor up again, Wynne? I haven’t heard it in a while.”
He shepherded the two other students from the room and shut the door firmly behind them before turning back to me with a shaking head.
“I swear, next time Sanders uses his administrative key to get into our room, I’m going to make sure that it accidentally falls down the drain in the bathroom ...”
He sighed and plopped back down on his bed.
“Do you think Julian’s right?” I asked after a moment. “About the police looking for another missing girl?”
“No. He probably just made that up hoping that Sanders would tell him the real reason – but obviously neither of them knows anything.”
“Right,” I said, oddly disconcerted all the same.
“I mean, it’s like I said last night: if a girl went missing, why would the police be searching the Bickerby campus? They’d do better hanging out by the beach, wouldn’t they?” He reached over to his bedside table to get a cigarette in lieu of breakfast. “Besides, why would they conduct a search party at night, anyhow?”
“To find the girl before it’s too late?”
“Nah. Like Barker cares about a local girl who went missing. I’m telling you, Nim, he had that search party out there to look for whichever of us threw the girl, and he did it at night so it wouldn’t draw any negative attention to the school.”
I scratched my hairline absently as I considered what he had said.
“You really think someone killed her?” I asked him at last.
“I know. Of course, it’s probably something completely dull and unexciting ... Next week we’re going to hear that some guy attacked her and threw her body off the cliffs, and no one will be surprised. That’s what happens when you lock hundreds of teenagers inside an all-boys school and tell them to behave.”
“I wonder how Barker will talk his way out of that one,” I mused.
“Easily. Who do you think would care about some no-name local girl over the son of an important, rich stockbroker?”
“The locals might.”
“Yeah, they might. Or they might be perfectly happy to forget the whole thing when Barker writes them a check for more money than they’ve earned in a lifetime.”
He gave me a look before finishing his cigarette and going back to bed. I wanted to do the same, but a nagging voice in my head reminded me that I still had homework to finish for class that afternoon. Pulling up my bag, I set to work despite the tiredness dragging down my eyelids.
Sanders came to inform us that we were free to leave the building midway through the morning. I stirred Jack from his sleep with my foot and we both donned our warmer jackets and scarves before heading outside. The sunless gray sky would do nothing to keep the cold away.
Outside, the weather had only worsened. The rain had brought with it the end of the autumn season: the nipping chill in the air was a sure sign of winter. Beside me, Jack was pressing his hands to his ears to ward off the cold. I looked down at my hands to see that they had turned a blotchy red and that the fingertips were a purplish-blue. I clenched them to keep warm.
When we reached the dining hall, I learned with frustration that no coffee had been made that morning. Tipping the thermoses over my cup in a futile attempt to get a drop of coffee from the previous night out, I finally gave up and joined Jack at an empty table.
“So what do you think?” he asked me as I sat down.
“About?”
“About the murder.”
“I think I’m going to murder someone if I don’t get some coffee soon.”
“Hopefully it’s Sanders or Wynne,” Jack said with a cackle. “But what about the dead girl? Who do you think killed her?”
The pounding in my skull was louder than his voice; I paused to press my head into my hands.
“How would I know?”
“You wouldn’t, I just wanted your best guess.”
“I don’t have a guess,” I told him. I hadn’t liked hearing about the girl in the first place and wanted no reason to talk about her more. “Why would you want to think about something like that?”
He shrugged and took a bite of his English muffin.
“I can’t help it, Nim – I love a good mystery.”
His eyes were alight and mischievous. I could almost see the conspiracies forming in his mind behind the dark irises, undoubtedly searching for alternatives to the mundane theory we had settled on just hours before.
“I know you do,” I said. “But check one out of the library – don’t go looking for them.”
“Like I’d ever go to the library,” he said. “But it does have me thinking ...”
“What?” I asked warily.
“We should go to the boathouse.”
“What? How do those two thoughts even go together?”
“Think about it, Nim: it’s the perfect time to break the rules.”
“How is it the perfect time? The police are swarming the place.”
“Hardly,” he said. “Did you see even one officer on campus this morning? They’ve all cleared out.”
“Only because Barker’s hoping that no one will know what’s going on,” I countered. “I bet they’ll be back tonight after we’re all in our rooms.”
“Alright, forget the police, Nim – it’ll be fun.”
Even his most earnest of expressions couldn’t convince me to sneak out to the boat house and steal one of the rowing boats again. We had done it a few times in the past, of course, to feed his insane idea that it was possible to row all the way to the mainland and escape Bickerby, but we had certainly never achieved the feat.
“No.”
“Why not?” he pestered. “We haven’t done anything fun all semester.”
“We haven’t been in trouble all semester, either,” I said. “And I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Why? It’s not like we’ve ever gotten caught before. Besides, I hear Barker’s in the market for a new stadium to match that nice sporting field he had installed ...”
“Karl will kill me. Besides, it’s too cold to go out to the ocean. We’ll freeze to death.”
“Better than dying of boredom,” Jack muttered, but he let the idea drop all the same.
The week passed in a constant drone, broken only by the occasion reprimand or reminder of how poorly I was doing that semester. Upon entering Latin on Thursday morning, Albertson slid the make-up exam from the previous week onto my desk. I didn’t have to turn it over to know that I had failed: the red ink from his pen showed through the back of the page, circling and underling my numerous mistakes.
To make matters worse, Thomas had resumed his seat next to me in Calculus and had taken to glancing at me repeatedly during class. I wished that Mrs. Beake would tell him to go back to the other side of them room, though since he wasn’t technically doing anything wrong there was no reason for her to do so. I wasn’t certain what to make of his silence, but I didn’t want to break it to ask. When the final bell rang for the day and I stood to leave, however, he stopped me.
“Enim, wait up,” he said breathlessly.
I paused as he spoke and the rest of the boys went around us to the door. I watched them go with the fleeting wish that I had left a little quicker. Thomas toed the ground with his shoe as he thought of what to say.
“You know, I was really sorry to hear about your mom,” he said suddenly.
I looked at him uncertainly, suddenly glad that the rest of the students had left.
“Right. Thanks.”
“I didn’t know,” he went on, “you know, that she died and all.”
“Right ... and all.”
He nodded absently and I pulled at my collar uncomfortably.
“So what happened?” he asked after another drawn out pause.
“Sorry?”
“To your mom. How’d she die?”
I ran my tongue over my teeth as I debated my answer.
“It was ... cancer,” I sa
id.
“Oh, that’s horrible.” He looked thoughtfully down at his hands. “So is that why you were gone a few weeks after the holidays last year?”
“Yes.”
“Oh ... I thought you were just on vacation or something.”
“Nope. Not on vacation.”
“Right ...”
He paused again and I glanced at the door, anxious to leave and end the conversation.
“So she died right around Christmas? That must be awful.”
“Pretty awful,” I responded expressionlessly.
“But at least you knew it was coming.”
“No, it was pretty sudden.”
He gave me an odd look.
“I thought you said she had cancer,” he asked. “So ... didn’t you expect it?”
My tongue felt heavy from the lie and I struggled to find a way to cover myself.
“Right, well ... we thought she had longer,” I said unconvincingly.
“Oh. Of course.” He looked as though he was going to say something more, but I quickly cut him off.
“Actually, I’ve got to get back to my dorm,” I said. “But it was ... nice talking to you.”
As I turned to go, he got up the nerve to speak again.
“Say, Enim ... would you maybe want to study with me tomorrow? There’s that Calculus test on Friday, and I didn’t really get that thing that Mrs. Beake said about the integral logarithms ...”
He watched me expectantly as I failed to answer. Despite the pleading in his tone, though, the thought of spending any more time crammed at a table with him locked in a conversation about matters that ought to have been private was too much to bear.
“Actually ... I don’t think so, Thomas,” I said. “I’m kind of busy right now.”
His stare turned cold.
“Oh. Right.”
“But ... I’ll see you around,” I concluded awkwardly as I stepped towards the door.
“Yeah. You will.”
His glare seemed to follow me all the way down the hallway and to the door, and once I stepped outside I broke into a brisk walk just to put some distance between us. His wavering moods were highly unsettling, and I wasn’t sure if it was worse to be his friend or his enemy.
“His friend, definitely,” Jack resolved when I relayed the conversation to him an hour later. “I mean, what are you afraid he’ll do if he doesn’t like you? Sit on you?”
“That, or kill me in my sleep,” I said, taking a seat on my bed.
Jack swiveled around in the desk chair with a cigarette clenched between his teeth.
“Ah, come on, Nim – that won’t happen. I have tons of enemies, it’s never hurt me.”
I gave him a disbelieving look.
“Says the guy who looks like that,” I said blatantly, indicating to his massively bruised face.
“Right – good point. But this is Porker,” he said, waving off my concern. “He’s more likely to just mope about you and eat his feelings. Don’t worry.”
“All right,” I agreed halfheartedly. “But you didn’t see him ... He looked pretty upset.”
“That’s because you worry too much,” Jack said. He took another drag from the cigarette before letting his arm drop down to the desk, but his expression was far from unconcerned, as well.
“How was your day, then?” I asked.
“Dull as usual.”
“Even French?”
“Especially French,” he said. “Miss Mercier’s still out. It’s been nearly a week – can you believe that? And the Foreign Language meeting was supposed to be tonight.”
“Well, I guess her friend’s pretty sick,” I reasoned. “It’s not like she’d go see someone if they just had a cold.”
“Ugh, great,” Jack said exasperatedly. “What if they’re on their deathbed? She might not be back for a month. Some people take forever to die.”
I slowly lowered my bag to the ground; Jack looked horrified at his word choice.
“I mean –” he began apologetically.
“Forget it.”
We sat in silence for a long moment. The room was simultaneously chilly and stuffy and I couldn’t decide whether or not to take my jacket off. Jack looked down at his hands, a guilty look mixed in with the worry on his face.
“Maybe we should do something,” I said suddenly.
“What?”
I chewed the side of my mouth as I stared out into the distance. Across the campus, just visible through the tree line, was the darkly glistening water. It looked so silent and unassuming from my spot behind the window, and it hardly seemed possible that it had drowned the girl from town. I imagined her being pulled under over and over again, her lungs filling with fluid instead of air as she struggled to breathe, before her body finally grew too weak to fight and sank beneath the surface. It seemed like an easy way to die – and yet, not quite easy enough.
“Maybe we should get out of the room for a bit,” I suggested. “You know, do something fun.”
“Really?” Jack asked skeptically. “Fun as in go to the library and watch you study, or fun as in go to the boathouse?”
I tore my gaze from the window.
“Fun as in boathouse.” As his face lit up spectacularly, I glanced at the clock with the sudden reminder of my appointment with Beringer that night. “Only, we’ll have to go after eight or so.”
“That’s great – it’s better to wait until it’s late anyhow, so no one will see us leaving.”
With his mood restored, he spent the good part of the next few hours chattering on about something he had read in history about the founding of Bickerby which had added to his belief that the place had once served as a jail. Though entertaining, I once again found my assignments were left completely undone for the next day.
After filling up on multiple cups of coffee at dinner, we left the dining hall and broke off to go our separate ways. I headed over to the Health Center in the already-dark sky, half-heartedly wishing that I had one of the police flashlights to light my way rather than the failing lights on the sides of the buildings. The secretary waved me past her desk upon entering and I wandered down the hallway to Beringer’s office. After a light knock on the door, he called me in.
“How are you, Enim?”
“Fine.”
I eased myself down into the chair across from him, readying myself to deflect his questions and come up with lies to cover my untold truths, and both feeling very certain that it was all for the best but particularly guilty about it all the same.
“Is there anything in particular you’d like to talk about today?” Beringer asked.
I shook my head as I always did and gave a weak smile, wishing that I could just tell him something that would ease his mind and make him think that the sessions were at all worthwhile. The idea that he came so far out of his way just to see me made me feel worse for always avoiding important subjects.
“How has your week been so far?”
“It’s been ... fine.”
“And classes?”
“Fine.”
He smiled a bit as he paused, so used to hearing the response and yet not at all accustomed to it, and looked down at the file lying open on the desk in front of him. After a moment he folded his hands over it and looked back up at me.
“Why do you think you’re here, Enim?”
“Here with you, you mean? Or in general?”
“Here with me.”
I moved my eyes to the darkening view outside the window.
“Because my father wants you to fix me.”
“Oh?” Beringer said. “What makes you think that?”
“I don’t think it, I know it.”
“How do you know? Has he told you?”
I scraped my tongue over my teeth as I waited to respond. My father and I had had few conversations that consisted of more than formal pleasantries or outright arguments, and he had certainly never opened up enough to tell me his reasoning behind any of his decisions, but I had known exa
ctly what he meant when he hired Beringer to come out to the island to see me: he wanted to put me back into place and to right me before I could commit any further wrongs.
“Why else would you be here?” I said.
“Do you think that that’s why I’m here, Enim? Because I want to fix you?”
I made no motion to respond. Beringer gave me a contemplative look beneath a frown.
“I have no desire to ‘fix’ you,” he said, pausing in thought. “Do you want to be fixed?”
“No.”
“Do you think that you need to be?”
“Isn’t that the same question?”
“Does it have the same answer?” When I failed to respond, he said, “I know that you don’t take your medicine, Enim.”
I looked back over to him quickly.
“What? No, that’s ... I ... I take it.”
He wasn’t convinced of the lie. Giving me a slight smile, he said, “You forgot to pick up the prescription last week.”
I sighed and looked down at my hands. Though Beringer had begun prescribing me medication months before, I had never so much as opened a bottle. The pills were stockpiled beneath my mattress, all lined up in orange rows: sometimes I could hear them rattle as I tossed and turned in the night.
“Believe me when I say this, Enim,” Beringer said quietly, “I only prescribe it to you to help you, not to change you in any way.”
“I know, I just ... I just don’t know, Dr. Beringer.”
“It’s only to help you sleep and increase your appetite. I think that if you were to take it, you might feel considerably better.”
“Right. Or at least my father would feel better.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing, just that he ... he’s afraid that I’m ...”
“Go on.”
“He’s afraid that there’s something wrong with me. Because of what happened.”
“I see.” Beringer peered at me more closely. “And ... what did happen, Enim?”
I turned to face him again, wary that he might be trying to trick me with his words, but his expression was as straightforward as the question had been.
“You know,” I said. “It’s written in my file, isn’t it?”
“Your file says what happened to your mother; it says nothing about what happened to you.”
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 7
