Possessions (15 page)

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Marlwood is a very old, very fine school,” she said suddenly. “We have a lot to live up to.”

“Oh.” That surprised me. I felt like I should have known that. “It was a girls school before the Civil War,” I said frantically. “I mean, after.” I forced myself not to glance at her desk.

“Yes. A fine school.” She smiled at me. Maybe. “We have a reputation to maintain.”

“Yeah. Yes. Got it,” I promised.

She didn’t react. Then she pushed back slightly from her desk, indicating I was dismissed.

“Thank you for coming to see me,” she said graciously. Ms. Shelley will give you a pass to get you back into class.”

I turned to go.

“Lindsay,” she said suddenly.

I turned back around.

“I like what you’ve done with your hair,” she said. There was no warmth in her voice, or on her face.

“Thank you,” I blurted, and fled.

I came back out just as Rose stood, smoothing her black skirt. I mouthed,
Good luck
.

Then Ms. Shelley gave me my pass, and I had to leave. I didn’t know what to think. What was that book doing on her desk? I wished I had had time to check out her laptop . . .

. . . And to read more of that book.

There’s so much more going on here than I can even take in
, I thought.
Secrets and more secrets.

sixteen

I spent the rest of the day
in knots, rehashing my thirty seconds alone with Dr. Ehrlenbach . . . and wondering about that book . . . and thinking about what Rose had said about Mandy.

“You did fine,” Julie kept saying over and over. It was late, and we were both in our pajamas. She sat with her sore leg stretched out on her bed, cradling Caspian, while I paced, ignoring the white head, whose angle had changed again, and the face that might or might not be in Mandy’s window. Her drapes were open, and so were ours, but I refused to look in her direction. I just didn’t have the nerve. But I needed to have the nerve, if I was going to find out what she was doing. And I needed to know. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night until I figured it out.

Julie continued. “I’m sure she knew how nervous you were.”

Julie would be devastated if she knew Rose had been invited to a séance and she hadn’t. She’d defend Mandy in a duel to the death if I told her about my—our—suspicions that Mandy was on her way to bonkersville. After all, we were the two scholarship students. What did we know?

We’re outsiders
, I thought.
We’re on the outside looking in.

“Let’s go to bed,” she said, yawning.

My shoulders sagged dejectedly. “I’m a wreck.”

“I have something that will help you sleep. Do you want it?” She was curling Caspian’s eyelashes with her fingers.

“It’s not anything weird, right? I mean, it’s over the counter, or something I could take if I have allergies,” I ventured.

She gave me a look. “No, Mandy didn’t give it to me.”

Mandy, Mandy everywhere. I hadn’t even told Julie about the one-sided conversation at the lake. I kept telling myself I didn’t know how to go about it, but the truth was, I was afraid she’d tell Mandy. The result being that Mandy would be more careful, and then all future opportunities to find out what was up with her would be lost.

Julie reached into her dresser and rummaged around, then came back with something blue in her hand. “It’s mild,” she said. “We got them in France. It’s very safe. If you want, I’ll take one, too.”

“You’re sure they’re the ones you brought with you?”

“Light blue, with a D on them,” Julie said, holding it up.

I still hesitated. She popped it into her mouth, dry-swallowing.

“I didn’t mean to imply—” But of course I had.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“So I’d like one,” I told her.

She got me another and handed it to me.

“I’m going to get some water,” I said.

I went down the hall and flicked on the bathroom light. I looked at the stalls and the row of sinks, the showers and the claw-footed bathtubs. The tubs were so enormous. And there were marks on the rims, as if at one time there had been some kind of fastener or lid that went over each one. Were they the original hot tubs?

The moon glowed on them; I could almost imagine girls lounging in them, chatting.

Come to me
.

I dropped the pill in a toilet, flushed. I looked at my hands—not at the mirror—and cupped some water. Drank. Left.

Julie was waiting for my return; when I crawled into my bed, she turned off her lamp, throwing the room into moonlit gloom. I thought about getting up to close the curtains, but I could feel myself going soft if not from medication, then exhaustion.

I began to sink into sleep, letting go, floating along as if I were on a river . . . or a lake. Spinning in a slow circle, as the cold water washed over my head . . . as my nightgown weighted me down . . . going deeper . . . down, down . . . and someone was calling my name . . . looking for me . . . if only someone would look down,
look!
into the lake, the black, cold grave of a lake . . .

And I forced myself up from the dregs of the dream, pushing like a drowning woman through the currents and the icy hands that tried to keep me there.

Keep me there.

I couldn’t sleep after that. I got up and went into our common area and sat in one of the overstuffed nice-hotel-chain chairs, pulling a lap robe around myself, jumping at every creak of the building. The floor moaned and I thought of Julie’s ghosts, the ones who walked up and down the halls past all the bad art. Maybe I should have taken Julie’s pill after all.

I watched the clock; on school mornings, the early risers got up at seven thirty. I waited, huddled and miserable, checking and rechecking the clock, glancing at the doorway, jerking each time I began to doze off.

The shower went on.

Finally
, I thought, surprised that I had actually gotten some sleep. I unfolded myself and toddled down the hall back to our room. Quietly, I pressed the latch and pushed it open. Sunlight was beaming into the room, washing away the traces of things that went bump in the shadows.

Julie’s arm was thrown across her face, to keep the sun out of her eyes. I walked to her bed, feeling a rush of friend-tenderness, and whispered, “Rise and shine, Jules.”

She grunted. “I like Jules. Not yet.”

I chuckled and crossed the room to stand at the foot of her bed. I shook the mattress with my knee.

She moaned.

“Come on,” I began. “You’re going to—”

I stopped when I noticed the pile of thick white material on the side of her bed facing the wall. Frowning, I walked over to it and gathered up a piece. It was thick and there were pieces of a satiny beige fabric mixed in with it.

“Julie,” I said.

Something in my voice must have told her I needed her. She pulled back her arm and opened her eyes, looking up at me as I silently showed her what I’d found. She took it from me as I knelt beside her bed. A wad of it hung from beneath the fitted top sheet of her cloud sheets.

I pulled up the sheet.

Four deep gouges ran through the side of her mattress, as if someone had taken some kind of gardening tool and raked it. The stuff I’d found was the innards.

“Look at this,” I said.

She leaned over the side of her bed, gasped, and scrabbled off in the opposite direction. Then she limp-hopped around to my side, standing beside me, as together we surveyed the damage.

“Oh God, do we have rats?” She landed hard on my bed and yanked up her feet, groaning as she clutched her injured ankle.

“It’s not rats. They did it,” I said. “They must have come in here while we were . . . asleep.”

“They.” She frowned at me.

“Julie. You know it’s them. They’re hazing you.” I gathered up more wadding. “Messing with your head.” And possibly escalating the violence, just like Rose said.

Her gaze went from the fluff in my hands to my face and back again. “Are you that desperate to keep me from being friends with her?”

“Julie.” I was stunned. “I would never do something like this. Are you kidding? I’m here on scholarship. The last thing I would do is ruin school property for a prank.”

She wouldn’t look at me.

“Julie, come
on
.”

But you did fall asleep in the common room,
I reminded myself.
Maybe you sleepwalked in here and—did something kind of crazy yourself.

I’m not crazy,
I told myself.
I never was. I just had a little breakdown.

Still, my hands were shaking; and she was scared, too. She stared at the mattress, then glanced at Jessel through our open curtains.

“Okay, maybe she—they did. But it doesn’t mean anything. They’re just . . . letting me know I’m part of the gang.”

“Nice. You could get in trouble for this,” I pointed out.

She sniffed. “I have to get ready for breakfast.” Looking away, she skirted around me and left the room.

I walked to Julie’s window and looked out at Mandy’s turret. The curtains were open.

I saw the face. A white oval in the center of the window, with two dark eyes. The mouth was a smaller circle of black.

And it
was
there, right? Or . . . was I losing it? Was I seeing things?

“Hey, Julie,” I said, when she came back into the room, tow eling her hair. And then I realized I was afraid to ask her. If she didn’t see it . . . she might think I’d ripped up her mattress. My best friend. While she was knocked out from her French sleeping pill.

“Yes?” Her voice was clipped, formal.

I looked out the window. “Do you think it’s going to rain? Should we take our umbrellas?”

I counted off the seconds before she reacted. She came up beside me. She cocked her head. And then she waved.

I glanced sharply at her. She was looking down. I followed her eyeline. April, our dorm mate, was standing below us in the quad. Dressed in black jogging clothes striped with dark pink, she bounced around in a little circle, then headed toward our front door.

I looked back at the face.
Please, Julie, look
, I pleaded.

“Maybe we’ll see what Mandy’s going to wear,” I said, gesturing to the window.
The face. See the face.

“You shouldn’t spy on her like that,” Julie snapped. Then she turned her back and went to her closet, pulling out clothes without another word.

“I didn’t do it,” I said. “To your mattress, I mean.”

“Okay,” she replied.

I dressed as fast as I could
, faster than Julie. I stomped to the commons; it was starting to drizzle, and I hadn’t brought my umbrella.

I walked in, taking attendance at the various oval tables with dark-green wood chairs. Brass pots spewed green houseplants.

Mandy and the others weren’t there yet, but Rose was, getting some coffee. She was wearing brighter colors again—purple, orange, chartreuse.

“Hey,” I said. “They . . .
she
. . . is pumping up the volume.” I told her what had happened with the mattress. “And Julie thinks
I
did it,” I concluded.

“She was knocked out. And you were out of the room.” She opened up a little plastic creamer and dumped it in her coffee. There were three such packages on the stainless steel coffee warmer.

“What?” she said when I raised an eyebrow. “I like creamer.” She stirred and sipped her coffee, her eyes hooded. “I wonder what they would have done if you’d been in the room.”

I made a face. She made one back.

“Plus there was this book on Ehrlenbach’s desk,” I said. “Did you see it?”

She shook her head. “Wasn’t looking.”

“It was about lobotomies. And there was a sketch of that head Julie found.”

“Lobotomies. Brain surgery. Ehrlen-stein showed it to you?” Rose asked, taking another sip.