Читать книгу The Wicked Awakening of Anne Merchant - Joanna Wiebe - Страница 10
ОглавлениеTHIS IS THE PART WHERE I DIE.
“Anne, I moved really fast once before,” Ben says, his tone pleading but firm. “And, God help me, I’d love to repeat that mistake right now, but it would be a mistake. I’d never forgive myself.”
I am standing with my hands still in the air, positioned where his top button was. I am a statue memorializing the purest moment of rejection any girl has ever known. A plaque rests at my feet: The Easy Girl. Somehow, this is what I’ve become, what he’s made me. Somehow, the boy is telling the girl she’s moving too fast. I’m that girl. Even though I’m not.
I drop my hands.
Embarrassment heats my skin, making me feel so hot all over, I’d take his blazer off if he wouldn’t think I was trying to seduce him. If I could die, I would be dead right now. Death by sexual shaming.
“Anne, please don’t take that the wrong way.”
It’s a line he’s made famous for me. Don’t take my cold shoulder the wrong way. Don’t take the implication that you’re a total slut the wrong way. He repeats my name, but he keeps his distance. I shake my head like it’s no big deal. I need to disappear. I need to rewind to the moment he first appeared at the top of the cliff and do this all over again, but this time I’ll make him feel like a sexual deviant.
“You’re angry.”
I shake my head again. “It’s cold. I should go find my room. Unpack. And stuff. I’m really sorry you got Garnet for a Guardian, Ben.”
“A-Anne.”
“Please don’t,” I whisper, stepping past him and shaking him off when he reaches for me. “I wasn’t suggesting what you think I was. I just liked… It doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t leave,” he says, following me. “I don’t know why you’re taking this so poorly.”
You wouldn’t know, I think. You’re always the one doing the rejecting; I’m always the one receiving it.
“Good night, Ben.”
“Anne, please!” he shouts after me.
My head is in a daze as I rush down the hill, cross the quad, and run toward the girls’ dorm. All I can think about is Ben with Garnet. Sure, he talks like she was a proxy for me, but I’m damn sure that he got a lot closer to my would-be understudy than he’s willing to get to me.
I reach the girls’ dorm before he can catch up with me. I shove the door to the squat stone building open and dart inside, closing it behind me to distance myself from him. The whole way here, I could hear his breath as he ran a timid five or so paces behind me. He could’ve overtaken me at any point, but evidently he’s smarter than that.
The lights are dim inside the dorm. The stained-glass windows won’t let me see if he’s still outside.
“Doesn’t matter,” I whisper. I stare at the wall next to me. And then lean into it.
Here, with my forehead pressed against a copy of the Cania Christy Code of Student Conduct—featuring BS rules like no fraternizing with the villagers, who are basically gone now anyway—I close my eyes and see Ben with Garnet. Doing everything he says he doesn’t want to rush into with me. I relive the time I cowered at the edge of the Zin property and watched as, standing with Ben in his kitchen, Garnet lifted his hand to her mouth; there was nothing innocent about that. I’d be more than a little naive to believe they never slept together. Ugh. They totally did. They def-in-ite-ly did. Ben slept with Garnet. And the mechanics of it! I can’t help torturing myself with each painstaking step in a process I’m unqualified to imagine. The taking off of clothes. The selection of a suitable location. The spoken or unspoken agreement that this is going to happen. I squeeze my eyelids until I see bright orange dots instead of two intertwined bodies. Where I’d be a tense, awkward mess, they probably weren’t even shy about it. Garnet’s so damn confident, and Ben’s so impossibly gorgeous. They slept together. Naked. Skin to skin. Probably more than once. Oh, God. Probably a lot. In a bed. In his bed. Where else? Anywhere else? Everywhere else.
“Wake up, loony bird,” Harper calls down to me, her twang thicker than ever.
I glance up to see her leaning over the railing of the second floor and snickering at me. Her long bangs are pinned back perfectly, and she’s wearing pajamas that look more comfortable and less overtly sexy than I would have expected.
“Not sure how y’all do it in Broke Assville, California,” she says and drums her fingers impatiently on a newel post, “but here we sleep in actual beds, not leaning against walls. So haul ass up here and make yours.”
I trudge up the creaky wooden stairs, worn in their centers by decades of dead girls coming and going. Most of the bedroom doors, which are nine feet tall, intricately molded, and heavy-looking, are closed, but some are ajar just enough that I can hear a girl practicing the violin down by the second-floor bathroom and another girl reciting Shakespeare just across the way. I round the top of the stairs and glance away from Harper, who’s tapping her foot like I couldn’t be more irritating if I tried, to see steam flooding out of the bathroom. It’s Sunday night. Back to school tomorrow. Since the last time I sat in a Cania classroom, everything has changed, yet nothing is different.
“Don’t look so excited. This isn’t the beginning of a lifelong friendship, Murdering Merchant,” Harper says. She points to the door behind her. “We’re in here.”
She saunters into our room ahead of me. I step warily through the open doorway as she grabs a hairbrush from a dresser, flops back on her fluffy duvet, brushes the ends of her red hair, and watches me like I’m some sort of half-trained monkey.
The room is just as I’d expect the room of a privileged daddy’s girl to be, or at least her side of it is; it’s the antithesis of my bedroom growing up, which I frankly loved but which was so far removed from this, it could have been a different species. Divided into two sides that are mirror images, though Harper’s side has started creeping into mine, our room is all cream, purple, and sparkling glass. Two chandeliers hang from the coffered ceiling, shedding glimmers of light across the large lavender area rug in the center of the hardwood floor. Harper’s side is closest to the door. Her four-poster bed, puffy with more pillows than we had in our entire house back home, is against the violet-and-cream striped wall in which her closet, packed so full the doors can’t close, is set. Next to her bed are a desk and chair, both of which are in front of a dormer window. On the wall with our door, a marble fireplace sits unlit in the corner near my bed, beside two antique-looking dressers.
“I had it done exactly like my bedroom at home,” she says as she runs the brush through the ends of her hair. A Hermès scarf is draped over her nightstand lamp. Gold-framed affirmations and vision boards make a neat row on her side of the room. I can see from the doorway that she’s filled not only her closet with Tory Burch and Chanel’s latest but half of my closet, too.
I feel her gaze zero in on me as I step into my barren new space. My attic bedroom at Gigi’s was too narrow and slanty to be anything more than the Before shot in a home reno magazine, but at least it was wholly mine. No roommate. Now, on closer inspection, I see that my bed, which has been stripped bare, is paint-chipped; the wall it’s pushed against is stabbed with nail holes and bruised by bare patches left behind by hastily pulled tape. A low stack of pale painting canvases are on my mattress, as are two boxes of my stuff and the flat pillow, thin sheets, and patchwork quilt I used at Gigi’s. The desk under my dormer window is beat up. I look closer: someone’s etched Murdering Merchant into the desktop. Gee, I wonder who could have done that?
“Don’t unpack,” Harper says. “If I have my way, you’ll be back in California before the week’s up.”
“One can hope.” I move the boxes to the floor. “Who used to live here?”
Harper groans. Because evidently the sound of my voice puts her over the edge. I look over my shoulder and wait for her to reply, which, with a huge eye roll, she finally does.
“Tallulah Josey.”
“Your friend?”
She arches an eyebrow. “Tallulah thought she was slyer than a cat in a fish factory. When the teachers were all up in arms today, she took it upon herself to sneak into the front office and call her old boyfriend, who wasn’t even that good-looking. Anyway, she got expelled this afternoon.”
I stop unpacking.
“Who caught her making the call?” I ask.
She keeps brushing her hair.
“Who turned her in?”
She clears her throat.
“You know that expulsion means death, right? Harper?”
She flings her brush down at her duvet and scowls at me. But she doesn’t say anything.
“I see,” I say and start making my bed. “But I’m the murderer.”
“I guess we’ll both be sleeping with one eye open.”
AFTER BARELY SURVIVING the onslaught of glares and whispers in the bathroom Monday morning, I leave the dorm to find Ben leaning against a tree. He’s wearing his cardigan because his blazer’s up in my room. He looks at me and smiles apprehensively. And I forget why I was angry with him last night.
Then I remember.
And now I have to decide if I want to stay mad at him to prove some sort of point or let it go so I can feel what it’s like to hold his hand as I walk to my first-period workshop. Which is instructed by Garnet. Which makes me think he probably shouldn’t show up there with me. Which means it’s pointless to hold hands because it’s only a thirty-second walk to the Rex Paimonde building.
“Still mad?” he asks.
I shrug. I’m undecided.
Out of nowhere, Pilot comes flying at us. It looks like he’s going to crash right through us, but he stops short, grinning in his nasty way. Ben and I grab hands on instinct; I hadn’t realized we had an instinctive need to connect. Decision made: I’m not mad at him.
“Bonnie and Clyde,” Pilot says to us. “What’s it like to look the guy you killed in the face?”
“Kinda like I imagine Superman feels when he destroys a villain,” I reply.
Ben tugs my hand. “Come on, Anne. He’s never been worth it.”
As we’re walking away, Pilot grabs my arm.
“Not so fast,” he says. “Voletto wants to see you in his office.”
“And he sent you to tell me?” I shrug free. “Doubtful.”
“I’m your Guardian. So yeah. He wanted you there ten minutes ago.”
“Fine. I’ll be right there.”
“I’m not leaving without you. Come on.”
I glare at him. “Could you give me a second with Ben?”
“Oh, right, Clyde needs to kiss Bonnie good-bye.” He gives Ben the finger but takes a few steps away.
“What would the headmaster want with you?” Ben asks me.
“Who cares? Listen, Ben, I hope you gave some thought to this Garnet situation.”
“I did.”
“Tell me good news.”
He kisses me and smiles. “Great news: I’m sticking with you. I told her last night.”
Crestfallen, I watch Ben as he tells me not to worry and struts happily away. I turn to follow Pilot to Goethe Hall, where we sit and wait outside Dia’s office. I try to clear my head of the frustration of knowing Ben’s giving up a future with me in exchange for the present; I stare blankly ahead as the janitor, Lou Knows, scrapes black letters spelling HEADMASTER VILLICUS off the cloudy window of the door. When he notices Pilot and me, he scowls at Pilot and hands him a stencil pack, black paint, and a thin brush.
“You’re my assistant,” Lou says, and starts away. “Not the other way ’round.”
Pilot tugs off his jacket, revealing the coveralls I saw yesterday. So that’s his role here. Not just my Guardian but also an assistant janitor.
The door to the office swings in. Hiltop stares at me.
“You’re late,” she says to me.
“You?”
But just then a smiling, dazzling Dia appears at Hiltop’s side. He’s a wearing a linen tunic that’s partly tucked into leather pants, which hug his long legs. His feet are bare. His sleeves are rolled up. He seems to have more tattoos, brighter tattoos, than he had yesterday. I can clearly read Dia + Gia = 4Ever on one of the larger ones. I see also tiny tick marks representing his thousands of followers, like Teddy mentioned.
“Anne!” Dia declares, swinging the door further open and elbowing Hiltop aside as he does. “You’re finally here. Don’t mind Mephisto—what a grouch, hey? Come in, come in!”
“Enjoy it while it lasts, Dia,” Hiltop says with a sneer.
“As long as Anne’s around,” he says, “I can depend on you being constantly outsmarted, Meph.”
I step by Hiltop and follow Dia inside, where I find Invidia lounging on a raised divan and watching me as I enter the room, which has been completely renovated in the mere hours Dia has been headmaster.
“Please, sit,” Dia says, swinging a thickly cushioned chair on its swivel and stopping it just as it faces me. “It’s comfortable. Go on.”
I’m sure it’s comfortable. Everything in Dia’s office is inviting. He’s taken what was once an oppressively hot gothic-styled room filled with war medals, lit by fire, and hidden from sunlight, and transformed it into a whitewashed study you’d read a great novel in while sipping hot tea on a rainy day; he’s even filled the bookshelves with what, I squint to see, are art books—thousands of them. Soft light glows in twinkling sconces and chandeliers hanging from the molded tray ceiling and falls on dozens of mirrors in all shapes and sizes, which hang on the newly painted panel walls. Pale white sculptures of Aphrodite, Helen, and Salome look both bashfully and knowingly at me, while toppling stacks of oversized ivory-colored cushions rest uncertainly against the walls behind them, layers of sheepskin blankets beneath. A dozen enormous canvases and an easel rest against the side of Dia’s desk, where he’s gesturing for me to join him.
Invidia stands. I swallow as I watch her move across the room to Dia’s side with such elegance she could teach elegance a thing or two. Her emerald-colored silk blouse floats with each step. I am transfixed by her and helpless to it. Dia, too, appears enthralled by her as she leans against him and strokes his arm gently, though he still watches me. Only Hiltop looks at Invidia like she’s some sort of foul beast.
Suddenly I remember! Teddy said Mephisto lost one of the Seven Sinning Sisters. Invidia must be that goddess. In the fallout of my escape, she must have chosen a new master over Mephisto: Dia Voletto. I wonder about the other six members of the Seven Sinning Sisters. Who are they? Where are they? And is Mephisto struggling to keep them?
As soon as I sit, Dia swivels me to face both him and Invidia fully, stopping the chair with his bare foot. I glance at his foot—or, more accurately, at the few inches of his naked calf that are now exposed. I shift my knee away from him and fix my gaze on my hands, which are gripped together over my uniform skirt.
“Are you okay, Anne?” he asks.
His hand passes under my eyes, and I feel his finger under my chin. He lifts my face until we’re eye to eye. Life on Wormwood Island was easier when the devils looked like devils.
“Just a little nervous, I guess, to be called to the office.”
“But you shouldn’t be surprised,” Dia guesses.
“No, not surprised.”
Hiltop joins the two others standing in front of me. Under the weight of their three stares, I ought to be sliding into the chair and disappearing entirely, but something about the way they’re looking at me makes me feel…the opposite. Light, not dominated. Invidia’s jade gaze on me is especially empowering. But just for a moment. Just until I remember my mortality and their eternal darkness.
“You know what you did this past weekend was wrong,” Dia begins, swinging my chair lightly with his foot. “You destroyed the life of Pilot Stone.”
“And I was punished when he was assigned as my Guardian,” I say, “among other punishments.”
“Mr. Stone as your Guardian is a far cry better than Ted Rier.”
“Do you have something against Teddy?”
Dia and Invidia chuckle knowingly but don’t bother answering me. They can probably sense he’s a good soul, and they don’t like that.
“More importantly,” Dia continues, “you almost jeopardized this school’s reputation. We’re a place of hope. And possibility.”
“Is that what you’re selling this place as?”
Invidia smirks, and even Dia looks amused. But Hiltop’s thin lips curl just enough to make a frown.
“The world nearly found out about Mephisto and his,” Dia unsuccessfully hides a smile as he and Invidia look Hiltop up and down, “various embodiments.”
At that, both Invidia and Dia grin. Hiltop doesn’t flinch and, for a second, I feel bad for her. Until I remember she’s evil incarnate. And she can take care of herself; my pity, even disguised as empathy, is unnecessary.
“Well, I wasn’t trying to expose anyone,” I explain. “I just wanted to go home.”
Dia and Invidia look at Hiltop. “That’s a good point,” Dia says to Hiltop.
I realize then why Hiltop’s here: because no one else knows how to run Cania. It’s a complex place, where secrets and lies are land mines you must carefully tiptoe around. Hiltop is pointing out the land mines. And it turns out I’m one of them.
Hiltop turns her flat gaze on me. “Give us your word you will not run amok with your stories of underworld führers and our followers.”
“Give me your word my dad can leave you the moment I get away from Cania Christy and Wormwood Island,” I reply.
Clearly, nobody saw that coming; even I’m a little surprised at myself. They all lean back. Invidia tilts her head like she’s seeing me in a new light.
“Tit for tat,” I say, staring at all three of them. I cross my arms. Invidia, too, crosses hers. “Isn’t that the law of the land here? Oh, and, just to be clear—I know how tricky you guys can be—whether I live or die, he’s free once I’m gone.”
Dia and Invidia wait for Hiltop to make a call.
“I would have thought,” Hiltop begins, “you’d have asked for the release of your dear, sweet love, Mr. Ebenezer Zin.”
I hadn’t realized that was an option! I hadn’t even thought that she’d consider my request for my dad, never mind Ben. I was just experimenting, just trying to see if I could get under their skin.
“Very well,” she says. “It is agreed.”
I’ve just made my first deal with the devil.
It doesn’t feel as awful as I might have expected.
“You’ll say nothing to the students of Cania Christy,” Hiltop clarifies.
“What about those who already know?” I ask. Like Ben.
Dia chimes in. “Anne, if the only thing you and the ‘people who know’ have to talk about is what we’re doing, maybe you need to find someone new to talk to.”
Dia instructs Invidia to round up the Guardians for a meeting; she glides out of the room, leaving me alone with Hiltop and Dia. When she leaves, I feel stronger and weaker; stronger because the raging jealousy she makes me feel follows her out, but weaker for reasons I can’t understand.
I rise to go, too, but Dia shakes his head at me.
Just then, someone knocks at the door. It swings in, and Kate Haem enters with three people in tow: an adult couple and Dr. Zin. He’s back from his travels already.
“Dr. Zin with the Smith family of Boston, here for the vivification of Damon Smith,” Kate says and, on her way out, sticks her tongue out at me.
I look at Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And I look at Dr. Zin. And I stop breathing when I see his face.
Oh, God. Oh, God. What have they done to Dr. Zin’s face?
