The Unseemly Education of Anne Merchant (27 page)

“I need a doctor or a dentist,” I say, panting. “Do you know any?”

“Dr. Zin,” he says. I glower at him. “Anne, the village is empty. No one here ever seems to get sick.” He shakes his head and throws his hands in the air. “There’s no one that can help you. I’m sorry.”

The skies open above us as we stand on the road to the village. I’d be a fool to go back there anyway, considering what happened to Molly when we broke the rule.

“I just want answers,” I say, a sob escaping my lips.

Softly, Pilot nods and pulls me to him. I’m surprised at how quickly I cling to his warm, muscular body and how tightly I hold him. I can’t help but wonder why—
why!
—just when things were going well with Ben did he have to prove, once and for all, that I’m not good enough for him, that I’ll never be good enough for him? Pilot would
never
do that to me.

“Sometimes there are no answers,” Pilot offers as a consolation. “What if you stopped torturing yourself with so much looking? What if you just accepted that, although things don’t make sense in a traditional way, everything’s fine and your life here can be wonderful?”

Nodding, I back away and take Pilot’s hands in mine, smiling at him through the rain. “It could be wonderful,” I agree, sniffling. “You’re right.”

If I’d accept Pilot’s affections instead of resisting and seeking something that truly moves me, I’m sure life here would be a breeze.

As I work to convince myself of this, I glance down at our hands in the rain and notice they seem melded somehow. Meshed. But not in that romantic way you read about in romances. The edges of his hands are plainly blurred around mine, like the lightness surrounding blotches of paint in a watercolor. I squint and he notices.

Grimacing, he pulls his hands away and stuffs them into his pockets.

sixteen

THE MANY LIVES OF THE GIRLS OF CANIA CHRISTY

WITH THE NUMBER OF CANDLES BURNING IN MY ROOM,
you’d think I was holding a séance or re-creating the Festival of Fire and Life. But I am doing neither. It’s been a long, hard day—wait, who am I kidding? It’s been an endless,
anguish
-filled couple of weeks, with new homes, new schools, friends made and lost, more punishments than I’ve ever received in my life, and the cruelest sort of kindness from a boy I should never have looked at twice. It’d be traumatic for anyone.

So I’ve done what any warm-blooded American girl would do. I’ve gathered every candle I could find, put a depressing CD on a stereo I’ve hauled up from the living room, replaced my school uniform with comfy sweats, and curled up in bed with a book. Not just any book. The scrapbook I swiped from the dorms earlier.

I trace my fingertips over its title:
The Many Lives of the Girls of Cania Christy.

The cottage is quiet. The lights are out. Gigi already shouted her goodnight to me, and Teddy left my room after his final assessment of the night ten minutes ago. Even Skippy has stopped yipping and settled on Gigi’s big brass bed. It’s so quiet, you can almost hear the cover of the scrapbook creak when I open it.

Inside, I see the same photos, scraps, and stickers I saw at lunchtime. Plum singing. Lotus smiling; I pause again on her page, taking time to read a newspaper clipping pasted under her freshman-year school photo:

Kidnapping Turns Tragic

The body of Lotus Jane Featherly, daughter of Lord Marshall Featherly, was recovered early this morning from the Thames, just six days after Miss Featherly was abducted from her London mansion.

Confused, I turn the page and see Tallulah Josey smiling at me. A note card that looks like a party invitation is placed to the right of her photo; I open it to discover that it’s no party invitation. I should have recognized it instantly. I’ve helped my dad fold thousands of these.

“A funeral program.”

Hiltop P. Shemese is next, but her page is empty. There’s just a photo of her in uniform, smiling softly. No stories, no clippings, no photos of a past life.

Agniezska is a few pages down. Bright, colorful photos of her in
The Nutcracker
and
Swan Lake.
She’s breathtaking—a little too thin, but stunning onstage. I’d feel a twinge of jealousy if I didn’t quickly spy a magazine clipping with the headline, “Anorexia Claims Prima Ballerina Agniezska Kytian, Dead at 70 Pounds.” In the story, Agniezska’s mother-slash-manager is referenced as pushing her daughter to the brink, forcing her to be thin at all costs.

I flip back to Plum’s page. There, I see newspaper clippings in Thai layered over photos of her rushing through throngs of fans, bodyguards all around. Everything is in Thai, so I can’t read the details. One of the photos speaks plainly to me, though: Plum and a much older man, sprawled across a velvety chaise longue, champagne bottles and glasses smashed around them, a powder-covered mirror on the table. It’s her and her dad’s friend. It’s the scene she described taking place before she came to Cania.

A candle flickers next to my bed. My breathing halts.

I flip to Harper’s page. In her largest photo, she looks depressed. She has acne. She weighs at least twice as much as she currently does. Her hair is stringier, not at all the silky red hair I envy today. I can’t breathe as my eyes dart over the many clippings on her page and land on the label of a pill bottle—a prescription for Vicodin. And then on a note card with a speech on it, the number 4, presumably the fourth card of the speech, at the top:

       
What can we make of my baby girl’s last moments? We might look at the lasso she’d tied around the neck of Misty, my wife’s prize stallion, and we might assume she had ill intent. Did she think she could strangle Misty? Did she feel so voiceless in her own home or so desperate for the thing she wanted most
—
not the pink Hummer, but my attention
—
that she was brought to such a lowly state? I’ll never know. All her stepmother and I will have is the vision of finding her the next morning, on our return from the city, with that unfathomable gash on her head where Misty kicked her.

The card ends there.

The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck are standing at attention. A shudder has been running up and down my spine repeatedly since I read Lotus’s clipping, running like a car on a never-ending roller coaster. I don’t know how many more death announcements, eulogies, and funeral programs I read. I don’t know if I close the book or not. I don’t know anything. The one thought I have hasn’t quite reached me yet. It moves through the darkness of my room slowly, deliberately, like the Grim Reaper wading through a sludgy pond to reach me, like he’s been wading toward me for days, has jerked his way up the stairs, and is finally here, his slender, long arms extending toward me. I want to back away from him, from my one unavoidable thought, but he keeps approaching, nearer and nearer until I’m in his cold, wet grasp.

It can’t be.

Breaking the silence is a knock at my door; startled, I scream
loud.
I hear my door swing open, and I know Teddy’s rushing up the stairs, so I stuff the book under my duvet and do my best not to look
as fucking crazy
as I suddenly feel. I can’t handle him being here. I need to be alone. To think.

Because it can’t be. What the scrapbook was telling me can’t be true.

“What?” I shout at him. “Teddy, get out of my room!”

“Don’t talk to me that way.”

“Get out!”

“Why did you scream?”

“Get
out
!”

“Have these candles been burning all night?” he demands. I glance at the clock. I’ve been sitting in stunned silence for hours. “You’re going to start a fire.”

Fine by me. I’ll start a fire. I’ll burn this whole place to the ground and it won’t matter.
Because.
I can’t finish the thought. Teddy goes from candle to candle, puffing each one out and taking his time as he does it.

“Please leave,” I beg.

“With your attitude,” he says as he walks back to the stairwell in the darkness, “you’re never going to be valedictorian.”

Valedictorian? As if that matters!

“Can you
please
leave now?” I implore through gritted teeth.

“Not until you lie down.”

I throw myself down on the bed. “Now?”

There’s a creak on the stairs. The door clicks closed. I’m alone again, in the dark, with this book of death in my quivering grip.

In the time it took for Teddy to blow out all the candles in my room, the thought—that one thought—has made its way into my mind. That doesn’t mean it’s
sunk
in yet, but I’ve realized it.

The perfect-looking students at Cania. So angelically untouched by acne, fat, and everything else normal teenagers endure.

The tuition. Only for an
extraordinary
purpose would people like Manish beg and offer anything to get their children into this place.

The isolation from the rest of the world. We are all alone here. No visitors allowed. Only the villagers are here with us, and they’ve made a pact with Villicus, they’ve been bribed into secrecy. Secrecy about something hugely valuable. Something that’s so clear to me now, so horrifyingly clear.

Molly died. But she was in my room, in the flesh, that night; and she was in her mother’s arms that night. It wasn’t until a body—her body—wrapped in cloth, was cremated and, as her grandpa said, her spirit was freed that she disappeared.

She was dead. And yet she lived again. On this island.

Lotus died, too. So did Harper, Plum, Agniezska, Tallulah—everybody at Cania Christy. Augusto went off a cliff before he came here; was it a skiing accident? Emo Boy leapt onto that dancer’s cage and ended up at the hospital; could he have gone to the morgue? Pilot tried unsuccessfully to rescue a girl from a house fire; could he have died in that very fire? Could it be?

It must be. Every other half-ass theory I’ve had fails to piece together like this one does. It must be.

Every single student at Cania Christy is dead.

“But…But wai…” I don’t want to think about what comes next. But it’s too late. My brain rushes there instantly. And what I realize next hits me with a powerful
whoosh
that plasters me against my bed.

Every single student at Cania Christy is dead. And so am I.

seventeen

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

“ANNIE, YOU LOOK REALLY TERRIBLE,” PILOT SAYS FOR
the eight-hundredth time today.

He has no idea what I know or why I look at him so strangely, like I’m seeing him for the first time every time.

“I can’t believe you’re still pissed at Ben. Your smile looks awesome. I’m no big fan of the Zinanator, but you should thank him.”

You’re dead
, I think, staring at him, knowing I have enormous rings around my eyes from the most sleepless, unimaginable night ever, a night spent fixating on my new reality.
I’m at a school for dead kids.

But I can’t say that. Not to Pilot. Not to anyone.

All day, my mind has turned over so many possibilities, I’ve barely noticed a thing going on around me—and yet, at the same time, I’ve noticed everything. Their translucent skin. Their flawlessness. I spent ten minutes in the cafeteria today just staring unabashedly at a skinny freshman with bright blue eyes and long blonde hair, a perfect angel without the wings. I watched her move. Wondered how she got here, how she died. The scrapbook she’s probably in is under my pillow at home, but I didn’t pay any attention to her last night. I was too caught up in the death stories of the people I know here.

I’ve spent the day wondering if this is purgatory. Or Hell. Or Heaven.

I’ve wondered how exactly I died. Because I can’t remember. Is that normal, to be unable to remember how you die? Is that why they made that scrapbook, why they clipped those stories and pasted in pieces of their eulogies?

I’ve wondered if my dad’s dead, too. How else did I talk with him on the phone? And am I still on earth? I must be. The parents are all coming this weekend. Surely they’re not dead, too. Surely that’s not how Heaven works: kids die, parents die, and only on select weekends are they allowed to see one another.