The Last Academy (8 page)

I
didn’t watch Brynn’s tennis match and I skipped lacrosse. I didn’t look for Jessie or Nora. Instead, I went to the theater and stole Mr. Cooper’s keys.

It was common knowledge that if you searched the theater, you could find three things that belonged to the drama teacher: the coffee cup he always misplaced, a pack of cigarettes he wasn’t supposed to smoke on campus, and a warden’s ring of keys that allowed Mr. Cooper access to the great unknown. Everybody knew about these items, because part of the Freshman Drama curriculum included Mr. Cooper stomping around, cursing under his breath, and asking if anyone had seen his stuff.

The key ring was on the makeup counter, next to a bunch of wigs.

What you are doing?
I asked myself. Except I knew. I was stealing. In my head, that voice laughed from across the lawn:
Hey, I’m asking you a question! Did you do it?

I stood there for a minute, thinking about Nora, and how I hadn’t done the one thing she had asked me and how Jessie was most likely at home with her parents. But also probably laid out on a slab in the morgue. Either way, I had been part of it.

I grabbed Mr. Cooper’s keys and put them in my pocket.

Cool as a cat burglar, I strolled out of the theater, across campus to the school’s parking lot, where I hitched a ride down to town with Mrs. Sibley’s secretary, Jude. I told her I was going to buy emergency Tampax at the grocery. Jude sang with the radio. I didn’t know how she could be so happy when Jessie had possibly killed herself last night.

Downtown, Jude stopped at a red light and I got out. All the shop windows were decorated with orange, painted pumpkins and hand-drawn green vines. The streetlights were wrapped in black tinsel. It was only because Halloween was tomorrow, but it felt like I had been dropped off in an alternate universe.

The locksmith told me he would be happy to do the job. He said it with a sly smile and a thumb rubbed thoughtfully
over the raised directive on each key:
DO NOT COPY
. While I waited, I went across the street to McDonald’s. A bored, middle-aged manager stared somewhere past my head as I ordered a Happy Meal. I took a seat and looked at the tiny sack of fries and uncomplicated hamburger, but didn’t touch them. I felt like Alice in Wonderland, and if I ate the food, I would shrink too small or grow too big. So instead I solved the puzzle on the side of the bag and waited to feel the right size again.

Half an hour later, I picked up my new keys, along with the old ones. Together they felt too heavy for what they were. Like there was magic inside them. Like they were the keys of good and evil. I put them in my backpack, glad not to touch them anymore, and started walking back to campus. It was a long walk, alongside endless rows of orange trees. But the road was straight, and all I had to do was put one foot in front of the other.

After a while, a car honked as it drove by, then slowed and pulled onto the shoulder of the road, kicking up a plume of dust. When I jogged up to the driver’s side, Miss Andersen rolled down her window and said, “Want a ride?”

Her car was cool and quiet and smelled like coffee. It was nice to speed away from the scene of my crime.

“Quick trip into town, huh?” she asked, making conversation the same way she brushed the wrinkles out of her skirt before class started. On her dashboard, a bobble-headed skeleton in a tiny Hawaiian lei nodded at us.

“What happened to Jessie?” I asked, after we had been driving for a few minutes.

“What do you mean?” she asked, her knuckles blanching on the steering wheel. It was just one little thing, but it made me sure there was more to the story. I tried to rephrase, but I couldn’t figure out how to make my question any clearer.

“Well, Jessie’s gone,” I said finally.

“Yes,” Miss Andersen agreed.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Didn’t Dr. Falzone tell you?”

“Yeah,” I said. I slunk down in my seat and stared out the window. I could feel her considering me. I felt glad about the keys then. I didn’t owe her to be honest if she didn’t owe me.

“Well, that’s what happened.” She tapped the steering wheel with her thumb. The skeleton nodded in agreement.

At ten fifteen, after check-in, I went to Nora’s room again. Now she and Brynn both had singles.

The light under Nora’s door was on. Instead of going right in, I went back to my room to get the copied keys. I put them in my pocket and started back to Nora’s. Was that a seam popping? Yeah, I could see how I was going to get kicked out of school: a pile of stolen keys squiggling down my pant leg, landing on my shoe like a big, felonious metal turd, and the sound of someone saying, “Hey, what are those?”

Then I was at Nora’s door. There was no one milling about in the hallway this time. In fact, it seemed even more dark and deserted than usual. I knocked.

“Come in!” Nora yelled. As I walked over the threshold, I shut my eyes and pretended today hadn’t happened. When I looked again, I would see Jessie at her desk and the weight in my pocket would pop like a soap bubble and disappear.

But Nora’s room was empty. Not even Nora was there. She was sitting out on the patio. Already, Jessie’s stuff had a dusty, pharaoh’s tomb look to it. I hurried through the room and out to the patio.

“Where have you been?” I demanded. I expected Nora to be all zombified and spacey like Jessie, like she had caught some horrible brain-eating disease from her roommate. I guess I had forgotten this was übercompetent Nora.

“Crisis counseling.” She jumped out of her seat and paced the patio, stalky as a wet cat.

Suddenly, I didn’t care where she had been. It was Nora! I jumped right on her and bear-hugged her until she grunted. She tried to get away, finally gave up, and hugged me back.

“Ugh, get off of me.” She laughed.

I pushed her to arm’s length. “Are you OK? I was totally freaking when I couldn’t find you.”

She tugged her ear, looking superserious. “So … Do you have …? You know, that thing I asked you for?”

It was like the keys became a live wire and shocked me right on the leg.

“Yeah,” I said. Nora put her hand out and I gave her the keys. It was a relief to be rid of them. At the same time, it was as if I were sealing my fate. They sat in Nora’s palm like a clutch of diamonds.

“What really happened to Jessie?” I asked. “Did she …”

Still studying the keys, Nora said in a loud voice, “I don’t know. When I woke up, she was gone.”

“What do you mean, ‘When you woke up she was gone’? People were talking about an ambulance. They said she killed herself.”

“Look, I don’t know anything about that.” Nora enunciated every word. It was like I was back in the car with Miss Andersen. I wanted to shake her or something. Jessie had been my friend, too.

“But what about all her stuff?” I demanded. “What about her wallet? Are you telling me she just got up in the middle of the night and walked out of your room and … disappeared?”

Nora shook her head furiously at me. I could tell she wanted me to stop talking. But why? Then her eyes got big and her mouth hung open in midshush.

“What?” I asked. She pointed behind me.

Brynn stood at the divider that separated her patio from Nora’s. She was pressed right up against it, holding a piece of lined notebook paper up at eye level. Scrawled across the paper was this:

A man got Jessie.

Goose bumps broke out all over my arms. Brynn ripped the paper. Once. Twice. Into shreds. Then confetti.
She crammed the pieces into her pocket, turned around, and walked back into her room.

“What is going on?” I whispered.

“All I know,” Nora said softly, “is Miss Andersen is going to clean out Jessie’s stuff tomorrow. You know, to make sure it all gets back to her. At home. In Ohio.” She handed me back the keys and frowned. “These aren’t safe here.”

The dorm door swung open. “Eleven o’clock! Get in bed!” Miss Andersen yelled down the hall. She came into Nora’s room, clipboard in hand. “What are you two doing outside? It’s lights-out.”

I fumbled the keys as Nora passed them. They fell to the floor between us. Miss Andersen walked over and picked them up. I heard the dawn of understanding in her voice when she said, “What are you doing with these?”

But only in my mind. Because in reality, my hands were clasped behind me and the keys were stuffed down the back of my pants. Miss Andersen raised an eyebrow at me. “Well?” she asked. “What are you waiting for? Get to your room. Now.”

I prayed the contraband wouldn’t fall out my pant leg. Miss Andersen didn’t even give me a second glance. A
minute later, I walked into my own room and flipped on the lights.

“Ugh. Turn them off,” Tamara muttered, from under her covers.

“In a minute,” I said. She groaned. Too bad — I wasn’t too interested in making her life easier at the moment. In fact, I had an urge to flick the lights on and off a couple of hundred times. But I didn’t.

Someone had left a rubber skeleton doll on my desk. It was like any cheap decoration you could buy in the drugstore. Except the eyes were crossed out with big Xs and red marker dribbled out between its teeth. Underneath, someone had scrawled on a piece of paper:

EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT YOU DID.

YOU SUCK.

It was signed “Mr. and Mrs. Keita.” Jessie’s parents.

I didn’t give Tamara the satisfaction. I tossed it all in the trash and climbed into bed. It was a weird world that the note from Tamara or her dumb boyfriend was not even the most disturbing message I had been sent this
evening. In fact, in comparison to Brynn’s, the bone man was pretty lame. It made me snicker to think that. Tamara huffed and rolled over, which only made me grin harder. It was an odd feeling.

I slept completely dressed, with those keys tucked in my pants. I was afraid to take them out with Tamara in the room.

Who was Brynn talking about? Why did she think a man got Jessie? Did she mean a man from an ambulance? Jessie’s father? Dr. Falzone? I didn’t know any more than I had yesterday.

I woke up in the middle of the night. You know how sometimes you sleep on an idea, and wake up with complete clarity? It was like that. In my mind’s eye, Jessie walked off into the dark with a man. Not with her father, or an emergency medical tech in an ambulance. But a man with an old leather face. Barnaby Charon.

He stayed just offstage as I lay in bed, thinking how crazy I must be to believe it was him. When I drifted off to sleep, he danced out, full center, to show me again what I already knew. In some of these little one-act plays, he
turned to smile as he walked away. Sometimes he was a horrible ghoul, a rotting corpse, a skeleton with Xs over his eyes. I screamed at Jessie to run away. Jessie smiled and left with him, anyway. One time, they held hands. One time, Barnaby Charon turned and pointed his finger at me.

T
he next day was Halloween. When I got to breakfast, Mr. Graham had fake blood dripping down the side of his mouth. His face was chalky white, with big, gray circles under his eyes. He grinned at me with a mouthful of plastic fangs. His usual khaki-pants-white-shirt routine was disrupted with the addition of a black cape.

He sat at the sign-in table, eating breakfast with Mr. Cooper, the drama teacher. Mr. Cooper was four inches taller and balding, so I’m not sure how the two of them decided he would be the one dressed in a yellow-yarn wig and a flimsy red polka-dot dress. On Mr. Cooper’s stubbly neck were two crudely drawn puncture wounds. They dribbled fake blood.

“Happy Halloween,” I said.

“Boo!” Mr. Cooper replied, in a girly squeal, clutching
his hands to his sweetheart neckline. “You know, you get pinched if you’re not dressed up by class time,” he added, motioning to my jeans and white tank top.

“I believe you are thinking of Saint Patrick’s Day and wearing green, Coop,” Mr. Graham said.

“Oh, bite me.” Mr. Cooper grandly gestured to his neck. They both laughed.

“You guys are dorks to the power of ten,” I said, as I signed in. I would never have spoken to teachers back home this way, but there seemed to be a relaxed air between students and faculty here, since we all lived together, more or less.

“Muwha-ha-ha!” Mr. Graham laughed, nearly losing his plastic teeth. “See you in biology!”

“Costume room is open to the public! Grab a costume from the theater!” Mr. Cooper yelled helpfully, as I walked to the kitchen for grub.

Milk was contained in a stainless steel cow of a machine that dispensed moo juice from whole, 2 percent, and fat-free udders. I was milking my cereal bowl on 2 percent when Brynn sidled up next to me, wearing her tennis whites. Guess she had already been up and practicing. She leaned across to fill a glass with nonfat.

“Secret room. Four o’clock.” Her breath tickled my ear.

“What?”

“Nora said to tell you. Four.” She sipped her milk.
A man got Jessie
, I thought.

“Hey, I need to find pictures of people who work here at school,” I said. I was pretty sure I could show Brynn the man who’d taken Jessie, but I needed photographic evidence.

“What is up with you and pictures?” Brynn tucked a stray hair behind her ear. “Did you try the wall of photos I showed you before?”

I shook my head. “I looked there this morning. Any place else?”

Brynn said, “Well, there’s that room in the library. Archives, or something. You might check there. What are you looking for?”

“I’ll tell you when we meet up,” I said.

“Sure.” Brynn nodded, casting a glance around the dining hall. Two junior boys sat at a far table. One winked at her. She sauntered over to their table without so much as a good-bye.

All that day, I raced against my wristwatch, trying to squeeze out five extra minutes to go up to the library and find Barnaby Charon’s photo. I knew that as soon as she saw it, Brynn would identify him as the guy who took Jessie. But the whole world conspired against me with extra homework and teachers running over the bell and not a free minute the whole day.

When I was done with intramurals, it was 3:50 — ten minutes before meeting Brynn and Nora in the secret room. I played victory music in my head on the way to the library. I didn’t know what we’d do when Brynn recognized Barnaby Charon, but at least I wouldn’t have to be alone with my suspicions of the guy anymore.

The library was deserted. Most kids were still at sports, or getting ready for the Halloween party up in the dining hall. I jogged through the library to a room in the back of the building. A very small sign hanging above the door said
ARCHIVES
. It looked like a converted office. Cheap metal blinds were pulled down over all the windows, so I couldn’t see anything that might be inside. I pushed the door. It was locked.

“May I help you?”

I knew the wavering voice belonged to Abby Claremont,
thousand-year-old librarian. She didn’t work in the library so much as haunt it.

I was pretty much struck dumb when I turned. The librarian stood in front of me, holding a silver sword with golden flames curving up the sides. After nearly having a stroke, my mind registered what I was actually seeing — a kid’s foil blade. The prop of a seven-year-old playing superhero. It was just that the light bounced off it funny and blinded me when I turned. Plus, old Abby was so frail and wan I could practically see though her. The gossamer wings and tinsel halo she was wearing made it worse. She was dressed as an angel. Because of Halloween, of course.

“Um …” I squinted at her. “I wanted to check out some old yearbooks and stuff. You know. For fun.” Even I thought I sounded lame.

“Thou shalt not pass!” Her voice didn’t wheeze above a whisper. She lifted the sword and bopped me on the head with it like she meant it as a joke. The effort practically toppled her.

“What do you mean?” I asked, ducking to get away from the sword.

“You need permission from a teacher to access
archives,” Abby said in a normal voice, apparently disappointed that I didn’t dig her fossilized angel humor. “We have books in there that are more than one hundred years old. It’s restricted access unless you are doing some sort of school project.”

“I just want to look for a few minutes. I won’t mess anything up.”

“Sorry,” she said. Her face was lined, ancient. The lady had probably babysat Moses.

“Well … could you give me permission?”

She smiled, like her patience was at its end. “No, dear. It’s my job to keep you out. It’s someone else’s job to try and get you in.” She turned to leave. Her feet were in orthopedic Mary Janes. It seemed like she floated off on her makeshift wings. I kicked the doorjamb of the archives room. But softly, so she wouldn’t hear. Then I jogged to the theater to meet Nora and Brynn.

They were arguing as I inchwormed my way through the tunnel to the secret room. They must have heard me, because they went quiet before I could make out what they were saying.

“Tell me everything,” I demanded, as I tumbled onto the floor. Brynn held out her hand to help me up.

“That night after you told us about your stunt at the chapel,” Nora said, unzipping her backpack, “Jessie cried herself to sleep. Tell you the truth? I was relieved. I got some sleep, too. But in the middle of the night, I woke up to Jessie talking with someone in our room. Except it was just Jessie there. She had that stupid broken Ouija board in her lap. I think she was trying to use it. Fine, whatever, at least she’s talking, right? But then she freaked. I mean, gasping and crying and rocking.”

Nora pulled out a tape measure and started constructing her precious door. Brynn aimed the flashlight so Nora could see while she worked. Unlike Nora, Brynn looked scared. Her eyes were wide, glassy beads. Nora went on.

“I said, ‘What’s wrong, Jessie?’ She whispered, ‘The seat belt,’ over and over. I was lying in bed, trying to figure out what was going on. That’s when Jessie sat up, quit bawling, and called out, ‘I understand about the seat belt.’”

“‘I understand’?” I said. Which was stupid, because I completely didn’t.

“As soon as she said it, a car drove up to our patio, right across the lawn. The headlights lit our room up. Someone came to the door.”

My skin went cold as graveyard dirt.

Nora grunted, twisting the screw into the wood. Her fingertips were white with pressure. “Three in the freaking morning, and I saw the shadow of a man through our curtains.” She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “Jessie got up and went out. She didn’t say good-bye or anything.”

“Who was it — out there?” I asked.

Nora fished another screw out of her pocket and started working again, avoiding our eyes. Finally she looked at me. That’s when I saw it in her face. Nora had been too afraid to watch what happened to Jessie — she probably hid under the covers or pretended to be asleep, so she’d never seen more than his shadow.
You’re putting up a lock so you can hide from him
, I thought. It spooked me even worse that calm, self-confident Nora had been frightened.

“Shut up!” Nora answered, as if I’d said it out loud. “You weren’t there.”

“I saw him,” Brynn said quietly. She took a deep breath. “I saw a man walk up to her patio and stand there. I thought
he was her dad or someone to come pick her up — I knew she’d been having a hard time. Jessie opened the door and put something in his hand.”

“What?” I asked.

Brynn shrugged. “Whatever it was, he was expecting it. It made me calmer, you know, like he was supposed to be there for sure. He took her hand and walked her to his car.”

So that was the end of Jessie
, I thought. The light went a little shaky in Brynn’s hand. She said, “But the weirdest thing was? The man made Jessie get into the car’s driver seat. She didn’t want to, but he made her. He got in on the passenger side, then Jessie put her seat belt on, and that made her cry.”
Of course
, I thought. Buckling her seat belt must’ve reminded Jessie of the day her brother died.

“What then?” My voice wouldn’t go above a whisper.

Brynn shrugged. “She drove away.”

There were lots of upsetting things about Brynn’s story. Not the least of which was that when I’d looked through Jessie’s wallet, she hadn’t had a driver’s license, only an ID card. Why would Barnaby Charon make her drive?

Instead I asked, “Why didn’t you guys get Miss Andersen? Why didn’t you get her when Jessie stopped talking?”

“I
did
tell Miss Andersen.” Nora rubbed her fingertips together. She’d been twisting those screws in so hard she’d given herself blisters. “When she came to our room for ten o’clock check-in. She saw what Jessie looked like — it’s not like I could hide it. I told her everything. When that man showed up later … I figured Miss Andersen had sent him. Or like Brynn said — it was her dad or something. Somebody who was supposed to be there.”

I slumped down to the floor. “What does it mean?”

Brynn said in a quavering voice, “That man knew when Jessie was ready to go. The room’s bugged.”

“That’s totally paranoid,” Nora said. The skin around her eyes was blanched white, she looked so stressed.

“Tell her what happened to you after!” Brynn demanded. “Tell her what you told me!”

Nora went back to her work, despite the blisters. When she finally spoke, it was the quietest I had ever heard her. “After Jessie and the man were gone, I decided to get Miss Andersen. She sat me in her living room, made me tea, told me everything was OK, and went back to her bedroom to make a few phone calls.

“At around five in the morning, she took me up to the headmistress’s office. Dr. Falzone and Mrs. Sibley were
waiting for us. They made me tell them everything that happened. When I was done, they told me to wait there, and they left.

“They left me there the whole day. Mrs. Sibley’s secretary brought me breakfast. Then lunch. I asked her what was going on. She didn’t tell me anything,” Nora whispered.

I thought back over the day. By lunch, Dr. Falzone had already told me about Jessie going home to her parents.

Nora started up again. “Around two o’clock, Dr. Falzone, Mrs. Sibley, Miss Andersen, and two other men came in and I told my story again. When they left, I told Sibley’s secretary I had to get out of there or I was going to go nuts. She went away and came back with a note. It said I had been in crisis counseling all day, and it was signed by the headmistress. She told me to show it to the teachers whose classes I’d missed.”

Nora stepped back. The door was neatly secured to the tunnel’s entrance. She sucked her thumb and looked at the huge blister there. Then she gave us a crooked smile. “What a joke, right? Not one teacher actually read it — they already knew the story.”

Nora took out a padlock and three keys, making sure each key popped the lock open. Then she handed one of the keys to me and one to Brynn.

“What do you think was going on?” Brynn asked her.

Nora shrugged. “Maybe it’s just like Dr. Falzone said.” She ticked off each point on her fingers.

Index: “I told Miss Andersen that Jessie was having problems.”

Middle: “Miss Andersen told the faculty.”

Ring: “Jessie knew they were coming to get her at a certain time, and she got up to meet her dad or her sponsor or whoever.”

Nora looked satisfied, with her three fingers out.

“But why get her in the middle of the night? And why the lie about crisis counseling?” Brynn asked. I wasn’t worried about that. I was staring at Nora’s fingers, particularly ringy there.

Nora smiled at her and shrugged. “C’mon. The most reasonable explanation is probably the right one. I mean, the other options don’t make any sense.”

I said, “Your logic has a big problem. If you were with Jessie all night, and she was spaced out so bad she was barely responding, when would Miss Andersen tell Jessie someone was coming for her? How would Jessie know to get up at a certain time and go with that man?”

Nora frowned. She started to speak and stopped.

I didn’t know what she was thinking, but I was pretty sure of a couple of things: Dr. Falzone had lied about Jessie’s departure, and it did sound like Nora’s room was bugged. Also, Brynn looked like she might puke.

“You guys, what are we going to do?” Brynn asked.

I turned to her. “I know who you saw outside Jessie’s room.”

I told them about meeting Barnaby Charon on the plane and the girl I’d seen with him, and how it seemed like she was Drea Shapiro, Brynn’s would-be roommate. Then I confessed how Jessie’s elusive Mr. Skinny Butt might have been Barnaby Charon, lurking in the back of the chapel during announcements. But I couldn’t bring myself to admit I’d … well, dreamed it was him. Instead, I finished with how I’d tried to get a picture of Barnaby Charon from the archives and had been denied.

“What does he look like?” Brynn asked. “How tall?”

I didn’t know. I had only seen him sitting down at formal dinner and on the airplane. Also, he could have been old with a good plastic surgeon, or middle-aged with a lot of sun damage. I said, “Light hair, cut short. Maybe forty or fifty … or sixty.” Brynn stared blankly at me. “He has luggage skin and cuff links,” I said.