The Last Academy (12 page)

“Oh. Hey, don’t cry,” my dad said, which of course made me cry more. He glanced wildly around the room, like he was thinking about running away. Instead, he grabbed a box of latex gloves and blew one up like it was a balloon, pulled a pen from his shirt pocket, and started drawing. He made a whole flock of balloon chickens with finger combs and thumb beaks for me, and made them squawk and chase one another and squeak air, until the
doctor came in and gave me ten stitches. I could still remember how Dad had held my other hand and whispered, “Squeeze as tight as you need to,” when the doctor brought the needle over.

Thinking about my dad and those chickens, and how I’d held on tight, I drifted off, wishing I could call him, and knowing because of the time change, it was too late.

Brynn wasn’t in any classes the next day. After dinner, I stopped by the infirmary. Brynn lay on a hospital bed with her knee in traction. She wiggled her toes at me. Her leg was like a broken kite in a tree, tangled up with tension strings everywhere, dangling from the ceiling. Despite the toe hello, her face was tearstained and she barely smiled.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

She shrugged and nodded to a chair next to her bed. I sat down. Neither of us said anything. Chatter floated in from the small TV in the nurse’s office. There were two empty beds in the room, both with squared corners and clean white sheets. Dividing curtains hung from metal tubing on the ceiling. Everything was shades of sterile.
Brynn looked like a pressed flower inside somebody’s old dictionary.

“Is your knee going to be OK?” I asked.

A tear rolled down her cheek. “Yeah.” I wondered if she would still be a good tennis player or not.

“Those guys are worthless, Brynn,” I said.

“What’s my favorite color?” she asked out of nowhere, her voice angry.

“I dunno.”

“Favorite food? The town I came from? What kind of grades do I get?” Each question was like the slash of a knife. For the first time, Brynn didn’t look beautiful. A vein squiggling down the center of her forehead bulged out, and her lips were pulled back to show her teeth. In a way, it was the first time she seemed real, not like a girl who’d walked off a TV set. She must have seen that I saw, because she turned her face away from me. I prepared to evacuate the premises. That was standard procedure when someone startled me so bad I nearly wet myself.

“What do you know about me?” she asked the wall.

“You play tennis.”

“Yeah. I’m the tennis champion. Since I was six, after my parents divorced, that’s who I’ve been. Two hours of
practice, six days a week. I played every country club circuit my mom could enter me in. You know why?”

I was afraid to move. I couldn’t get over how she looked. Not pretty at all, and crazy for sure. But amazing in the way a volcano going off could be beautiful.

“So my mom could meet rich men. Some of those old guys liked me a lot. She didn’t care. I was her ticket into that life. Without me, she was just a gold-digger divorcée who couldn’t afford a membership.” In my head, I saw that wall of trophies in Brynn’s room, and I felt queasy. “Then I tore my ACL. Surgery and a year of rehab, but I couldn’t qualify for a single country club open. I wasn’t a ticket to anywhere after that. You said those guys I hang out with are worthless? I’m a tennis champ who can’t play tennis. Tell me how I’m different from them.”

She closed her eyes and lay peacefully, like a demon had escaped her. Another tear slid down the side of her face, into her hairline. Finally, I said, “Well, for one thing, you’re not a total jerk.”

“I snuck into Mark’s room one night,” she said. “After I knew you liked him.”

“What?” I tried to breathe. “Why would you do that?”

“Because you liked him.”

It was all I could do not to punch her right in her kneecap. “You snake.” It was what I’d wanted to say to Lia, after our fight at the pool party.
You snake. You pathetic excuse for a friend.

She shrugged miserably. “I figured if Mark was the kind of guy who’d go for me after he invited you to the formal, you’d be better off without him. But he kicked me out. He likes you.”

I wanted to yank her bald-headed. I wanted to giggle over the idea Mark Elliott had turned Brynn down
because he liked me
. Was she twisting her own selfishness into a story that made her look good, or watching out for me in her own warped way? Trying to process made my head spin.

“That’s messed-up logic,” I told her.

“Yeah, well. I’m messed up.”

Brynn tucked her hand under her head. Her eyelids looked bruised. Under the fluorescent infirmary lights, I saw the crisscross of a hundred faded silver lines in the skin of her arm. After a moment, I understood what they were. Cuts.

“Are you gonna hate me forever?” she asked, in a sleepy-little-kid voice.

“Maybe,” I said. But the thing was, I knew I wouldn’t.
There was something about Brynn I liked, despite myself. So I said, “What’s your favorite color?”

“Pink,” she answered, half-asleep.

“Mine’s gold,” I whispered. “So we’re friends now. That means you’ve got to treat me better next time.”

I sat there for a while, wondering if she was going to be OK. Then I remembered why I was even there. I shook her shoulder. “Brynn,” I said.

“Hmmm …?”

“Brynn, wake up for a second,” I said, and I gave her another shake. Her eyelids fluttered. “Do you know what a danake is?” I asked.

“No. What?”

I opened my mouth and then closed it again. I was afraid if I gave her the coin, she’d go looking for Barnaby Charon. Flirting with disaster seemed like it’d be right up her alley. I ran my fingers through my short, dark hair, nervous.

Finally, I said, “It’s nothing,” and started to get up, stopped, and said, “But here’s the thing. You’ve got to stay away from Barnaby Charon. I don’t want to freak you out, but he’s a bad guy. He said …” Brynn’s eyes were kind of vacant, like someone had already switched off the lights in
her house and hadn’t dropped the curtains yet. “He said he’s looking for you,” I finished.

“I don’t know how I can avoid him if I don’t even know who he is,” she mumbled.

“He’s the guy who took Jessie.” After I said it, I considered whether I was telling the truth. I decided I was.

“What does he want with me?”

“He’s bad news,” I said.

“OK,” she said. “OK,” she knew what I meant? “OK,” she would avoid him? “OK,” she was going to go right out and hop in the guy’s lap? Brynn turned her head away and snuggled up to her pillow. Her injured leg swung in its holster. That’s when I realized if Barnaby Charon wanted to talk to her, she was a tractioned duck. Things hadn’t turned out right at all.

L
ater that night, my brain got busy unspooling all the stuff that had happened, and I had no choice but to lie there awake while it did. I added Brynn to the list of kids who were at school because something was wrong at home. Jessie, Brynn, Mark Elliott. Probably Tamara, too, since she knew so much about the topic. I tried to think about home. It was amazing how being away from a place could make all my memories seem like flipping through my great-aunt’s photo album of people I barely recognized.

Like my mom. I couldn’t remember how she smelled — only the way it felt to smell her. Or how hugging her made everything inside me slow down and get calm until I could hear the sound of her heart in my ear.

Or that day in my room, when I tried to tell her I was nervous to leave for boarding school, and how my mom
had said, “You don’t have to go if you really don’t want to.” But also how she had said it, sad and not meeting my eyes. A chilly claw wrapped around my heart and squeezed. My mom had been like one of those pictures where you could see two different things if you looked at it right — an old lady or a young lady, a cup or two faces — but you never saw both at the same time. One second I could only believe what my mom had said, and the next I could only believe how she acted.

It was still dark at 5:30
A.M
., but I put on my clothes. Sneaking out the patio door, I got a whiff from Tamara’s side of the room. It smelled like antiseptic and throat lozenges near her bed. Under that, it smelled like she had a night job as a grave digger. I didn’t know what to think about that, so I grabbed my wallet and left. It was chilly outside, the sky purple with the not-quite sun. I could see the white puffs of my breath as I walked.

The squash courts were in the oldest and most dilapidated building on campus. As far as I knew, no one at school actually played squash anymore, and definitely not this early in the morning. But what the building did have was a pay phone just outside the locker room. And what it did
not
have, unlike by the phone in Kelser, were thirty
freshman girls about to roll out of bed, pad to the showers, turn on their hair dryers, and knock on the booth door to ask if I thought I’d be off the phone soon. At the squash courts, there was privacy.

The square metal buttons were ice-cold as I dialed, and my fingers left foggy prints behind. I put the black plastic handset to my ear.

The phone rang for a long time. Six, seven, eight rings. I calculated the time change, wondering where my family could be and why the answering machine hadn’t picked up.

“Hello?” My dad sounded like he had been asleep. I said hello.

“Camden?” he asked. Guilt knocked me back a little. It was like he barely recognized me. It hadn’t been that long, had it?

“Hi, Dad. I thought I’d call and see how everything’s going at home,” I said, trying to sound like I called every week. You know — casual. My voice got all tight and choked up, though. There was silence on the other end, with only the sound of him breathing to let me know the connection was still good. “Dad? You OK?”

He cleared his throat. “Good, honey. Your mom … Well, she’s sleeping right now. We both miss you like crazy.”

I started crying a little when he said that. So much for my plans to be cool. “I miss you, too, Dad,” I said. My dad made shushing noises on his end of the phone, like he was trying to comfort me. That made me bawl even harder.

“Dad?” I asked. “Daddy, do you think I could come home, maybe?” I didn’t want to be in this crazy place with all these bad things happening. I wanted to be where people loved me and hugged me and took care of me.

My dad’s breathing hitched and he sniffled. I had never heard or seen my dad cry before. Once when I was twelve, we had gotten into a fight. He’d been mad and walked out. Not just out of the room or anything. I mean, he walked out of the house and got in his car and drove off and left me there. He came back two hours later like nothing had happened. It had scared me pretty bad at the time. Hearing him actually crying on the phone was worse.

I realized time had passed, and he hadn’t said I could come home.

“Just for a little while,” I said. “Like maybe a week. A few days, even. It’s just that things are sort of freaky here right now.”

My dad groaned something under his breath. It sounded like maybe he was sobbing, except I couldn’t fit that idea
into anything I knew about who my father was. Maybe he was talking to himself, sorting out what to say.

“Dad?” I asked.

“This is hard for all of us, Camden. You know I love you with everything I’ve got. But this isn’t where you belong anymore. I know that, honey. I know it has to be this way.”

Disbelief so cold it became absolute belief crept up inside me and squeezed my heart until I thought I might die. My head got lighter and lighter, until it floated off my neck and up toward the roof. It got tethered by the phone cord I still held against my ear. Down where the rest of me was, I watched gray concrete under my feet warm to gold as the sun came up and gave me a shadow.

“Put Mom on the phone. I want to come home,” I said.

“Leave your mother alone. Things have changed,” he murmured. “Stay where you are.”

“Put Mom on the phone!” I was standing in front of an empty building, yelling at an old pay phone. My father was gone.

I slammed the receiver into its cradle and waited for something to happen, but nothing did. I picked up the receiver
again and used it to beat the phone as hard as I could:
Whap! Whap! Whap!

Stupid thing was practically indestructible. I beat it with no mercy. A couple of times my hand racked the metal cradle. I couldn’t stop, though. Blood welled up under my skin and left hot blue bruises across the back of my hand. I beat that phone until a tiny part inside me stood back and said:
Whoa, you’re scaring me.
Then I threw the handset. It swung and dangled in midair like it had hung itself. Like whatever part held my father inside it was hanging there dead. It was true, then. My family didn’t want me anymore. The idea kicked me in the stomach so hard I thought I might throw up. Instead, I fell against the wall of the squash court and crumpled to the cold cement.

I didn’t hear the bleat of the disconnected phone until the sound stopped. Mark Elliott stood there, in his jogging clothes, his hand on the hung-up handset.

“You planning to beat the phone to death, or just show it who’s boss?” he asked. It sounded like a serious question. I could hardly look at him. Everything inside me felt wrong.

“No offense, but go away, OK?” I said. The idea of anybody seeing me, after what had happened, was kind of
unbearable. I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for him to leave. When I opened them, he held out his hand. I wanted to scream:
My own family doesn’t want me, and I don’t know why.
I put my hand in his. I couldn’t help it.

We were too close when I stood up. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t step back, either. I could feel how warm his body was, even though he wasn’t touching me. Maybe the jogging made him warmer than normal. Plus I was pretty cold. His breath tickled my collarbone.

I died a little, wondering what he’d heard. Could he guess the rest? Probably. Probably someone who was deaf with a vision problem could have figured out most of the end of that particular phone call, anyway. My chin started in on me, getting all trembly. The more I tried to make it stop, the more these sobs hitched in my chest, until I couldn’t even breathe without them spilling out all over the place. It was worse than if he had seen me in granny panties, picking my nose under fluorescent lighting.

“Please go away.” I tried to talk normally. You know, like I was the announcer on TV when the station goes wonky:
I’m having technical difficulties. Please stand by
Instead, it sounded like I was being strangled.

He brushed hair out of my face.
This isn’t where you
belong anymore
, my dad had said, and the wounds his words had left on me were so painful I wailed. Mark Elliott pulled me into his chest and gave me a hug.

Then I was crying. I mean, those ugly, hoarse brays where your mouth hangs open. I didn’t know if I was going to die of embarrassment or shame or dehydration or what. He smoothed my hair down and rested his chin on the top of my head.

After a while, I took a few deep breaths and watched the rise and fall of his chest from the eye I had pressed up against his shirt. I swear, I could see the thrum of his heart beating. “Sorry,” I said. He didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to look at the guy.
Ever
, if possible. But at the same time, I had to. Even if it turned out that he was disgusted with me. So I gave my nose a wipe and looked.

He had the weirdest expression on his face. It was nowhere close to smiling. Before I could figure out what it meant, Mark Elliott kissed me.

I’d like to say my first kiss was like being at the top of the Ferris wheel at sunset, and it tasted like cotton candy and jujubes. To be fair, it did start out that way, despite the fact that I could hardly breathe, and we bumped noses, and I kind of made a snorting sound once. But still — sweet.
Then there was all this other stuff. Like electricity. And tingles. And crazy-making, seriously impolite impulses. It was totally horrifying, but my knees actually did that romance-novel thing and buckled. He caught me as I slid down the wall and pressed me against it so there was no space between us.

Far, far away, a door slammed. Mark Elliott stepped back. The loss of every place he had been touching me was almost unbearable.

“People will be up soon,” he said. My face got hot. We were no longer in the deserted otherworld of dawn. It was daylight — people were probably on their way to breakfast or their chores.

“Are you OK?” He used his thumb to brush a tear off my face.

“I just kissed Mark Elliott,” I whispered. My whole body was still haywire. His kisses were made of awesome. Awesome, with awesome-flavored filling and iced awesome on top.

“What?” he asked.

“I like kissing you, Mark,” I said, kind of horrified to realize I had blurted out the truth as my cover story. And I’d called him by his first name only. He wasn’t
some fantasy crush “MarkElliott” anymore. Now he was just Mark.

He stepped close again. “Yeah?”

Mark-Mark-Mark-Mark!
my brain babbled, all giddy still.

I nodded and glanced down at our feet. They were in a four-shoe row, because we were taking up the same space on earth. He kissed my cheek.

“We’re gonna get caught if we stay like this,” he whispered in my ear.
Zomigod
— tingles. Everywhere.

He stepped away from me and bent down to tie his sneaker. Of course, he probably wanted to avoid being put on the List. And horror: I had called him Mark Elliott, like he was some sort of rock star. To his face.

“Yeah, better get out of here,” I said, trying to sound casual, feeling the sting of tears in my nose. You know, general sob prep for when he left me there by the hateful, chipped pay phone. I straightened myself and tried to manage my hair back with my hands. He stood up. I waited for him to walk away. Except he didn’t leave. Something stone-cold incredible happened. He held his hand out and smiled. “Let’s get breakfast.”

I took one look at the pay phone. I’d like to say I walked
off all happily ever after and none of the other stuff that happened before mattered. But the truth was, even when I took his hand and we started up to the dining hall together, I couldn’t shake the feeling that part of me was broken, that I’d never go home again.

Gossip on campus wasn’t like wildfire, despite the cliché. Nueva Vista County got a lot of actual wildfires, and so they were always showing them on TV. Those things burned and burned, and if you went to bed, you woke up to the news the next morning and thought,
Holy cow, a lot of stuff burned overnight
. Gossip on campus was not like that. It was like a weapon of mass information. The tidbits landed in the general pool of consciousness and you could almost hear the sonic
Fwoomph!
as they spread. They could get across campus faster than you could get across yourself.

Mark walked with me up to the dining hall and sat next to me for breakfast. He was the first person I’d seen flaunt the time-honored tradition of couples at Lethe pretending they didn’t even know each other by light of day. When the weight of all the stares from our classmates got heavy, he reached over and squeezed my hand.

“You OK?” he asked.

“It’s just … everyone’s looking.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You want me to pretend I’m not interested in you?”

Oh, man. I could barely breathe, my heart was going so fast. I shook my head no, my cheeks still raw from crying. He gave me a slow smile. “Good,” he said.