The Last Academy (16 page)

“Mmm-hmm.” Nora was back in the book already. She rubbed her collarbone with her fingertips as she read, and I could almost make myself hallucinate stitches again. Like they were under her skin, scratching her.

I headed for the dining hall to get something to eat, wondering why Nora was acting so wary and what Brynn’s note
meant. I was halfway inside my own head as I marched out of the kitchen with my food and looked for a seat. Mark sat at the far end of the dining hall, eating with Beau. They were in tennis whites, and they were laughing about something.

Mark wolf-whistled when he saw me, and I felt myself go completely red. I’d been avoiding him since he’d come back to campus. My brain was still angry enough not to want to like the guy anymore, but my heart?
I’m in love with him
, I realized as I looked at him across the cafeteria. It knocked me back in my shoes a little.

I didn’t know you could love someone and be so mad you couldn’t stand them at the same time.
Yes, you did
, a small part of me whispered.
Because of Lia.

It must have been the stress from everything, but as I stood there holding my tray, tears welled up in my eyes, and I couldn’t help grinning like an idiot. When Mark waved me over to sit with him, no angry part of my brain could talk me out of going over and giving him the biggest hug ever.

I was more floating than walking when I went through the breezeway between the faculty room and the Rowntree
Room after dinner. Mr. Graham stood with his back to me, studying the sign-up sheet for the spring fling cruise. Most of me was still back in the dining hall, basking in the sunshine of Mark’s attention.

“Give me Brynn’s coin,” he said, as I passed by, almost under his breath. He turned to face me. The skin under his eyes was pale, like he’d been crying, and his nose was red. That cowlick at the back of his head was standing up again, angry-rooster style.

“What?” My brain was a little slow to understand what he’d said. My body knew right away. In second grade, Lia had dared me to chew a piece of tinfoil. The coin zinged my leg like that.

I took it out of my pocket and opened my palm to show him. Mr. Graham stared at it for a long time, his head bent so I couldn’t see his face. Every time he breathed out, warm air tickled my fingertips. I didn’t mind. Showing the coin to someone else felt like a confession. He reached out until his hand hovered over mine, but he stopped and never got any closer.

He said, “I can’t take hers. No matter what I do, I can only take one for myself.”

Anyone could see the guy was struggling not to cry, so I was surprised when he laughed.

“Are you sure this coin doesn’t belong to you?” he asked. A shred of hopefulness twisted across his face. I didn’t know what he was
really
asking, but I did know the answer. I shook my head. He clenched his fist in the air above my hand, until his knuckles went white and he said, “No. I know it’s for her.”

“What do you know?” I asked.

“Your lips are purple.” He swallowed when he said it. Like whatever he meant to say was far more horrible than how it sounded. My mind’s eye flashed to Nora’s caterpillar stitches, but as soon as I thought it, I shook the connection off. My lips probably
were
purple. Everything on me felt numb-clammy cold and I’m sure it showed on my face. I rubbed my hand across my mouth.

“You went to the archives,” I said. It came out like an accusation. He turned away, the hand that couldn’t take the coin still clenched at his side. “What do you know?” I demanded, as he walked off. My voice bounced around, amplified and echoing back at me. Mr. Graham stopped, but he didn’t turn back to me.

“Charon will end you when he finds out you’ve been in there,” he said, over his shoulder. “Your friend, too.” Then he was gone.

A teacher at my school couldn’t possibly have told me another adult was going to harm me. I stuffed the coin back in my pocket. It wasn’t easy, because my hand was shaking pretty bad. A crazy thought fell into my head like a quarter in a slot machine and hit jackpot, with ideas falling out all over the place.

Those stitches I’d seen on Nora weren’t a hallucination. They were a premonition. If I didn’t do something, Barnaby Charon was going to end Nora. Not expel her from school, not put her on work crew until the end of time, but end her life.

When I got back to the library, Nora was already gone, the archives room locked up like it had never been opened. I didn’t knock when I got to her bedroom, just threw the door open and saw it was empty.

My brain was like a blender on high speed, and all the stuff I knew whirled around. Probably, Nora had found something about Barnaby Charon in that archives room.
But what? A confession note? A job application where Barnaby Charon listed “serial killer” under his previous occupations? Plus, how could Mr. Graham know and not do anything?

I sprinted to the dorm bathrooms and called out her name, then ran past the common room. “Nora!” I yelled.

“Shut up,” someone from behind a closed door replied.

I ran back up the hill and checked the dining hall. No Nora. No one had seen her and no one had any idea where I might find her. Maybe she was with Brynn. Trying to figure out the location of any given teenager on campus over the weekend? Might as well get yourself a cowboy hat and take up cat herding. I mean, you’d be less frustrated.

I ran toward the faculty room to tell whatever adults I found what had happened. I was halfway there before I slowed down to a walk. What was I going to do — repeat what Mr. Graham had said? Even if they wanted to believe me, it was only a vague, secondhand threat coming from a teacher. They wouldn’t be looking for Barnaby Charon. They’d be looking for Mr. Graham. I stopped and closed my eyes and breathed until I knew where I was supposed to go.

When I pulled open the heavy doors, the theater was deserted. I fished out my key to the secret room and scanned the seats and stage, making sure I was alone. Above my head, a red
EXIT
sign glowed. Nora had to be up in the secret room, waiting for me, safe behind the locked door she’d made. I took a few steps inside.

Behind me, the theater doors swung open again. I jammed the key into my pocket and turned, hoping to see Nora. Or Brynn. Thatch. Maybe Mr. Cooper.

It was Barnaby Charon.

Neither of us moved. The memory of his fingers around my throat was so strong I could hardly breathe. This was trouble. Could I outrun him? Maybe. I was fast and I was scared and I wasn’t some stupid girl in a horror movie who’d trip over her own shoes. At least, I hoped I wasn’t that girl.

But then Barnaby Charon grabbed my wrist, his hands all bones and leathery skin, and yanked me into the gloaming of the theater.
That’s the end, then
, I thought.
Should have taken my chance while I had it.

“It is time for you to deliver the coin,” he said.

“I don’t have it,” I lied.

“Will you be broken, then, like bread?” he asked. I thought:
Better to go down fighting. Better to
… “Let us check.” He stuck his other hand into my front pocket and pulled it inside out. I screamed. The sound came out all reedy and powerless and flickery, like a cheap birthday candle.
Yell, dummy! Or he’s going to kill you!
I thought. My voice cracked and then came out loud and clear and strong. I yelled until my ears rang and I had to take a big, whooping breath to scream again.

“You freaking monster!” I shouted at him, which was not exactly the international distress call I’d been expecting, but it was what came out of me. Charon started reaching into my other pocket, evidently not caring that I was yelling and twisting and kicking his shins. The doors opened behind us. We both froze.

“I knew you’d be here.” Brynn stood under the glow of the
EXIT
light, watching us. Like it was no big thing to walk in on a kid being mauled by an adult.

“Go get help!” I yelled. Then I bit Barnaby Charon. Right on the hand that held me. It didn’t seem to bother him. I could have been a two-year-old having a temper tantrum.

Brynn limped toward us, which was totally the wrong way to go for help. Her eyes focused on Charon.

“I am the help,” she said.

Brynn stepped closer. I twisted as best as I could, searching the rest of the theater for someone to save us, because it didn’t seem like Brynn was going to cut it.

“Silence.” Charon gave me a shake, making my teeth chatter together. He sounded somehow both cheerful and annoyed. To Brynn he said, “It is your time. This creature has your coin. She was instructed to give it to you, but disobeyed. Come and get it, if you dare.”

“Let her go,” Brynn said. He did. I fell on my butt, crying and still screaming a little bit. All my systems were go for freak-out. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a glimmer of gold as that stupid coin he’d been searching for bounced on the floor next to us.

“She kept the coin, hoping she could protect you. Foolish, yes?” Barnaby Charon asked Brynn, with a sly smile.

“I know what you are. I called you here,” Brynn said to him, her voice shaking.

“I could take her instead.” Charon tipped his head toward me, his tone menacing. He was trapping Brynn somehow, I could tell. I saw her waver. “Make no mistake — I will come back for you. But leave us now, pretend you saw nothing, and let Camden go in your place.” He struck a
bargaining tone. “In exchange, you will have another day at Lethe. But if I’m forced to release her, do not doubt I will take you instead.”

“Brynn, run!” I screamed.

She looked so afraid I was sure she’d bolt. Instead, she straightened her spine and stood her ground. “Let. Her. Go,” Brynn answered. It was like thunder cracking, like she was some superhuman.
I am your friend
, she might have said in the echo.

For a moment, the room went white as lightning, bleaching out my retinas, melting away my ability to see Brynn and Barnaby Charon. Panic pushed me to my feet and I scrambled, half-blind, for the far exit. I ran for a thousand years and got only a little bit closer.

“Hey! Are you OK?” I was so surprised to hear a new voice behind me, I turned midstep, blinking wildly. Thatch stood alone, next to the other exit. No sign of Barnaby Charon or Brynn anywhere.

And sure enough, just exactly like one of those dumb horror-movie girls, I tripped over my own feet and fell. Thatch jogged over.

“You OK?” he asked again, and held out his hand to help me up.

“Barnaby Charon,” I said. “Did you see him? Did he have Brynn?”

“Did I scare you?” Thatch seemed kind of foolishly pleased with himself.

Running back to where the three of us had stood, I shoved open the other door and looked out. Nothing but deep twilight and the sound of crickets outside — no people at all. I sprinted down to the stage. Nothing. Except for me and Thatch, the theater was empty. Barnaby Charon and Brynn had disappeared.

Adrenaline made my mouth sour, and my heart loped around like a deer that’d been nicked by a bullet. I ran back to Thatch. “Barnaby Charon was here with Brynn.” I spun around, searching for the danake. It wasn’t anywhere.

“Oh,” Thatch said. He pointed his finger at me and laughed. “Hey, you dropped your pocket.”

Both my front pockets were turned out, showing white cotton and, in the corner of the left one, a ball of blue lint. “What?” I asked.

Thatch waved the idea away with his hand. “We used to say that all the time, right? Because you can’t drop a pocket.”

I stared at him.

“Take it easy,” Thatch called, as I left.

I
sprinted to the faculty room, the torn-up shreds of what had happened trying to sew themselves into a whole cloth of a story. I rounded the corner of the breezeway and stopped short. Mr. Cooper stood at the threshold of the faculty room. The door was half-open behind him.

“Brynn!” I was breathing so hard from running that I could only cough the word out. I pointed with both index fingers at my inside-out pockets, like I was some crazy gunslinger, or like I thought the pockets could do my explaining for me. Mr. Cooper’s face didn’t change, so I said, “Barnaby Charon attacked me. He took Brynn.”

Behind him, back in the faculty room, glass broke. Mr. Cooper closed his eyes at the sound. I pushed my way past the drama teacher. But instead of me going in, Mr. Graham walked out, his face that ashy white you
mostly see on people right after they’ve tossed their cookies.

“I let her go to him,” he said. “I didn’t try to stop her.”

A tear slid down Mr. Cooper’s face, but he smiled. “I know, Henry.”

“He was going to
end
me.” I shoved Mr. Graham right in the chest. “Just like you said. Just like — and Brynn …” I tried to put together what had happened. “Brynn went instead. Brynn protected me.” Barnaby Charon had asked me, “Will you be broken, then?” I flashed to Jessie’s Ouija board, broken as well. Had Barnaby Charon used me to set Brynn up, somehow? He’d given her a choice. Brynn had gone, and she’d taken her danake. I kind of lost my mental footing, wondering if all that was true. Finally, I decided it was. “He’s got her. Please. Do something.” I shoved him again for emphasis.

“Camden,” Mr. Cooper said, in a voice that was gentle and quiet. “It can’t be helped.”

A bleating, throbbing sound started up in my head. I pushed past the two worthless teachers and went into the faculty room, searching for someone who could do something. There was no one in the room except me. I picked up the phone on the desk, wondering if the ringing was
someone calling. There was nothing but dial tone when I put the receiver to my ear. A broken picture frame lay on the floor next to the desk. Glass shards made triangles and diamonds and stardust and a tiny cluster of galaxies on the wood floor. The picture itself was gone, but I knew what it was, because I had seen the frame before. It was the one of Mr. Graham and his little sister, and it had broken when I’d stood in the hallway and said Brynn was gone. He must have brought it with him. In my mind’s eye, I could see him holding it to his chest, just like my keeping Brynn’s danake close. “I let her go,” Mr. Graham had said.

A cold feeling came over me, that whatever was going to happen to Brynn had already been done. The idea set in my head like concrete, and I stood for a long time, staring at the pretty pieces of glass.

When I walked back to the doorway, Mr. Cooper was still there. “Help me,” I said to him, even though he had never been any bit of use in all the time I had known him. He pointed to the wall, at the flyer Mr. Graham had been studying that morning. It said:

S
PRING
F
LING
C
RUISE
S
IGN
-U
P
S
HEET

H
OSTED BY
: B
ARNABY
C
HARON
, C
APTAIN

And the names, written in the same hand:

J
ESSIE
K
EITA

T
ROY
D
AVIS

B
RYNN
L
AURENT

N
ORA
A
LPERT

H
ENRY
G
RAHAM

Fear wormed its way through my insides.
It only looks like a sign-up sheet
, I thought. But it felt like a secret message, perhaps solely for me. It also felt like a good-bye.

Sad, scared loneliness overwhelmed me, like I’d been playing hide-and-seek in a graveyard, and everyone had been found but me. The bottom of the sheet read:
Nueva Vista Yacht Club, Pier 1.
But there was no time or date for the meet-up, just a map showing how to get there.

I was scared to go back to the theater, but I knew I had to, because of Nora. Because the Nora I knew would never agree to go on a cruise with Barnaby Charon. And mostly because Nora would have come and found me by now.

I opened the theater door and stood in the doorway,
half in and half out of the building, for a long time. Barnaby Charon did not return. I finally realized that if he wanted me, he would have taken me instead of Brynn. Or with Brynn. I mean, what he was doing probably wasn’t like fishing, where you could only catch your limit and then you had to throw the rest back.

So I got my guts set and crept into the building, past the stage, and up the narrow stairway behind the velvet curtain. In a few more steps, I stood in front of the entrance to the secret room. I took out my key and crawled into the tunnel. I turned the corner, feeling my shoulders rub against both walls. When I got to the door Nora had constructed, I fumbled around, holding the key in one hand while I felt for the padlock with my other. It was already unlocked. As my eyes adjusted, I saw it was more than unlocked. Nora’s makeshift door was broken, cracked, and splintered down the center, one hinge ripped out of the wood, the metal twisted from the force of whatever had happened.

“Nora!” I whispered. No one answered. I listened and listened and listened and didn’t hear anything, not even phantom knocking. Then I went in.

The secret room was dark and silent. The only sign of life was the uneven sound of my breathing. I fumbled around
on my hands and knees until I found the penlight. In the zigzag stripes of light, I saw that Nora wasn’t there, and that was good, because when I’d called her name and she hadn’t answered, I’d been afraid she was lying on the floor inside, dead. I sat down and watched the light jitter on the wall until my shakes got smaller and smaller and the light got steady.

There were books on the floor. Nora must have stolen them from the archives. They were all open and piled one on top of another. She must have been up here, studying them. Whatever she had read had made her leave the splintered wreckage of her door unlocked behind her. Even though I was pretty sure I didn’t want to see, my body had its own plan. I sank down to my knees in front of the books Nora had left.

The one on top was opened to a big, glossy photo. It was an oil painting of half-naked people piling into a wooden boat docked on black water. The oarsman stood in rags. Underneath the picture, it said:
Nineteenth-Century Interpretation of Charon’s Crossing
.

On the opposite page, I read:
Charon, the mythological ferryman on the river Styx, carried the newly deceased from the land of the living to the land of the dead….

I pushed the book away. It slid off the top of the pile.
The one underneath was an encyclopedia. The entry on the open page read:
Psychopomps are mediators between conscious and unconscious realms. Their purpose is not to judge the souls, but to protect them on their journey into the afterlife.

The next book read:
Forms of
obolos:
payment for passage across the river Styx.
Underneath that heading were dozens of grainy, black-and-white photographs of coins, each with its own subtitle. Two rows down, I found the coin Barnaby Charon had given me:
Danake, gold (Persian).
At the bottom of the page, the text continued.
Those who died without an obol were required to wander the shore for a hundred years….

I pushed it away, too. On the bottom of the pile, one more book was open to more paintings of Charon crossing the river Styx. In the paintings, there was always a dark figure escorting scared, sad-looking people onto an overgrown canoe. The image of Charon was skeletal, blurred, vague, and anonymous.

But there, sitting in the boat. I recognized
that
guy, despite the toga and old-time flip-flops. The passenger wore the same tear-streaked face I’d seen up in the faculty room. Our drama teacher, Mr. Cooper.

“You knew who Barnaby Charon was all along,” I whispered at his image.

It was the craziest thing, but all I could think of was how the ringing in my head had stopped and how quiet everything was, up here in the dark. And that’s when I knew why Nora had gone. The others, too. I threw the book across the room. It hit Nora’s broken door and crumpled to the floor, like a bird hitting a window, pages fluttering.

Broken.
I thought of Jessie’s broken Ouija board. What about the picture frame in the faculty room? That had been Mr. Graham’s — the picture of his sister. What about Nora’s door?

Everything broken was something important to that person, I guessed. Although exactly how it worked, I didn’t understand. Maybe those things had to be destroyed for the people to get their coins. Had I been Brynn’s important thing? I must have been, since I’d given up her coin. Except I didn’t feel broken. What happened with Brynn in the theater made me feel changed for sure, but not destroyed like the Ouija board.

I crawled out of the secret room, not caring how loud I was. I left the broken door behind me, with the books still open for whoever needed them next. I was ready to meet Barnaby Charon. I knew the directions to find him were back on the spring fling cruise sign-up sheet. The only
problem was that I needed payment for the guy, and I still couldn’t figure out what I needed to break to get my coin. Then I realized I had already broken something.

I went to the squash courts. It was full dark outside by then. The security lights were on, and the pay phone stood in a pool of illumination next to the locker rooms. As I walked up to it, it felt exactly right. This was the place where I had both been broken and broken something. I took a deep breath and jammed my finger into the coin return.

The thing was, I was so sure of what I was going to find that I was practically on my way before I realized there was nothing between my fingers. I bent over, poked the little metal door aside, and peered into the darkness of the coin return. Nothing was in there. Very slowly, I straightened, holding on to the phone booth, where my dad had told me I couldn’t come home. For a crazy moment, I wondered if maybe I had the wrong phone. Or the wrong idea.

I grabbed the phone and put it to my ear. “Dad?” I asked. Nothing but a dial tone. The phone stood there, being nothing more than an ordinary phone in front of me.

“I didn’t want you to have it,” Mark said. I hung up and
turned around. He stood there, trying to smile, watching me like I might be dangerous. It made my skin prickle and tingle to have him look at me like that. “It fell out of the return when I hung the phone up. I put my shoe on it when you started crying.” He stepped forward with one foot, mimicking what he had done.

“You still have it,” I said.

He shook his head no.

The air in my lungs froze into a block of ice that I couldn’t blow out or suck all the way in. Then, very slowly, Mark nodded. And like that, I could breathe again.

“I need it.” I held out my hand. I had a boat to catch.

“No, you don’t, Cam.” He stuffed his hands in his jeans pockets, and I knew he had brought the coin with him, just as I had started carrying Brynn’s around. He stepped back. “You can’t just …” He looked away. “Everyone else leaves. You should stay here with me.”

“I know about Charon,” I said. I opened my mouth to tell him — I had a crazy idea for a second that we could go together.

“Don’t!” he yelled at me. “I don’t want to know what you know.”

“But …”

“I heard what your dad said to you.” He stepped closer and touched my arm. “You are worth something to
me
. I would never want you to leave.”

What he said fluttered around in my ribcage like a living bird. Even if Mark didn’t understand everything, I knew what he was asking me to do. I stepped closer. His breath tickled the side of my neck, and I knew all those little secrets you know about another person when they are very close, like the smell of his toothpaste and deodorant, even the detergent in his clothes. I tried to put every small detail of him into my head, so I could keep them forever.

“Please,” he said, his voice hoarse. “It will break me to let you go.”

A flicker of understanding lit up my mind, about why I’d had Brynn’s coin, and maybe why Mark had mine. I slipped my hand around his neck and pulled his face down to mine, so we were breathing the same air.

“It doesn’t break you. I think it heals you.” It was my coin, not his. The thing that had to break was my heart.

He whispered, “You stood up that day in the chapel. Fearless. I dream about it sometimes.”

“I love you,” I told him, as he leaned down to kiss me.
For an answer, he slid his hand between us and opened his fist. I took the coin.

From Little Quad Lawn, I watched Mr. Graham’s motorcycle circle the parking lot, gain speed, and finally rev up the hill. The wind blew my hair back as he slowed to a stop next to me. I said, “I need to go to the marina. Can you take me there?”

Mr. Graham wiped his eyes like a little kid and gave me a sad smile. “Hop on.”

As he drove, faster and faster, I became a bird, flying low over the crest of the mesa and past the gates of Lethe. In a blur, I saw that strange little meadow. It was certainly a graveyard, and I was escaping it.

Down through the canopy of trees, then the rows of blossoming orange trees, we rode through town and to the darkness of the yacht club pier, where Mr. Graham brought the motorcycle to a purring stop and let me off.

“Are you sure?” he asked. When I nodded, he said, “This you do alone.” I turned for only a moment, just to see if Barnaby Charon was there. But that was all it took. When I glanced back over my shoulder, Mr. Graham was gone.