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chapter 6 me

ONE OF THE THINGS THAT HAD BEEN INTIMIDATING about heading to Manderley was its boast that almost every student had a 4.0 GPA. My 3.2 was pretty good, but who knew how that would translate from a public high school in a beach town to a private New England boarding school.

I suspected “not so well” when I sat down on my first day in my first class.

“Good morning, everyone.” The teacher was a small woman with black, beady eyes and hair that looked like it would feel like straw. Her voice was a bit low and booming. “I am Professor Van Hooper. Welcome to English. I’ll tell you now that this class will not be easy. Expect a C to be a good grade.”

I got a chill as I imagined what we’d have to do to stay afloat. As if she’d read my thoughts, Professor Van Hooper went on.

“Every two weeks, we will begin another book. At the end of those two weeks, you will owe me a paper written on your own choice of topic. The only restriction is that you must find something worth investigating in the book and write about it.”

A girl in front raised her hand. “Like a book report?”

“No. Not like a book report.” The way she responded made me sure I’d be keeping my hand down as much as possible. “For example, this week, we are reading To Kill a Mockingbird. You may, for instance, choose to theorize on how the main character, Scout, grew through her experiences in the book. Or you might get a little bit more creative, and talk about her relationship with her father or brother. It’s up to you to write something I want to read. It’s up to you to find something about the book that isn’t on the back cover. Now. Let’s talk about basic formatting. Times New Roman, one-inch margins …”

There was a sudden shuffle as people dug through their backpacks for pens and notebooks. At my school back home we’d pretty much started using laptops, but the brochures had made it perfectly clear that they were not allowed in class. Stupid rule. I have terrible handwriting.

She switched on the overhead, and it hummed into life.

She sped through what she expected technically from us, and skipped straight into finding the deeper meaning in the classics. I loved to read, so I wasn’t dreading it.

“I assume you’ve all read To Kill a Mockingbird, yes?”

There was an uncomfortable shuffle from the students who I guessed had skimmed through it and used Spark Notes.

“So as you read it this second time, I want you to start thinking more about the underlying themes. Yes, we know it’s about prejudice and the struggle between right and wrong—but what else is there? What else did Harper Lee bury within her pages?”

World History demanded a lot more prior knowledge than I had. The teacher started off the class by asking us what we knew about the religious beliefs of the Neanderthals. I sank in my seat and hoped to God I wasn’t called on.

Math, which was always my worst subject, started off with a quiz. Really? Day One of Algebra II and we’re taking a quiz? Just to see what we know, but still. It’s a quiz. Everyone else around me seemed to know what was going on, making my inability to follow along stick out like a sore thumb.

And then I walked into the huge concrete studio on the top floor of the main building. The windows went from floor to ceiling, and there were big black filing cabinets with wide, skinny drawers lining the walls. There were about thirty easels standing on the hard, cold floor, which was splattered with the paint of a million masterpieces gone by.

The room echoed the music that came out of a silver MacBook Air on one of the black cabinets. It wasn’t until then that I realized I’d gone almost three days without hearing music, and thought how unusual that was for me.

There were a couple of people there already, sitting on stools and talking to each other. I sat down on an empty one and stared at the floor while people filtered in for the next five minutes. I didn’t talk to anyone and they didn’t talk to me. Maybe I was being paranoid, but as their whispers echoed throughout the room, I heard a lot of “she,” and I automatically and self-pityingly felt sure they were talking about me.

Professor Crawley walked in as the clock struck three, marking the beginning of my last class of the day, and smiled at us. He’d been the first teacher to crack a smile all day long.

“How’s everyone doin’? Good first day?”

Silence.

“Yeah, me, too.” He sat on a stool and looked down at the papers on his clipboard. He ran through attendance, reading our last names and waiting for the small murmur of acknowledgment.

“… Francis? Gordon? Hanover? Holloway?” He looked up and around. I did, too. Had I not noticed him somehow? “Nope, no Holloway. All right, Langston? Marconi?”

My stomach dropped. I didn’t know why, but I was disappointed he wasn’t there. Maybe he was just late.

As Professor Crawley reached the end of attendance, everyone’s heads turned toward the door. I followed the collective gaze to see—

“Mr. Holloway, there you are. Don’t let your tardiness become a habit. You go by Max?”

He nodded his head and sat down on the stool next to mine. I looked straight ahead, suddenly unable to feel natural.

“So on to class, then. Welcome, all of you. Some of you I know, some of you I don’t.” Professor Crawley looked at me. “But I’m absolutely sure we’ll get to know each other in no time. I’m Professor Crawley. You can just call me Crawley while we’re in the classroom. Too many syllables otherwise. So how many of you have any experience in painting? Or art of any kind, really? Drawing, sculpting, maybe just doodles in your biology notes?”

A few people raised their hands. He smiled at them. “Right after piano lessons and right before tennis, huh?”

There was a small titter of appreciative laughter.

Crawley went on. “I’m just going to assume, for the sake of starting on the same foot, that we all have no experience, which is totally fine.”

I breathed a sigh of relief, and felt Max’s eyes shift to me. I glanced at him, and saw the smallest trace of a smile. I quickly looked away.

“So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to pair you guys up, and you’re just going to start painting, see what comes out. This is your Gamsol.” He held up a glass pot with a lid. “You rinse your brushes in here. It’s like turpentine, except I’m not allergic to it.”

Another titter from the girls.

“You’ve got your brushes, your oil paints, your palette, your palette knife and a rag. Make sure you rinse your brushes thoroughly or all of your colors will go muddy. Squeeze out only the smallest amount of paint. I assure you, this stuff goes far.”

He paired us off. In this kind of situation I usually ended up partnerless and had to work with the teacher. But not this time.

“All right, so go ahead and grab a canvas and an easel and then stop off with me to get your box of supplies.

Once we were set up and sitting across from each other, I gave the boy in front of me an awkward and probably very unpretty smile.

“Max,” he said, holding out a hand. “We met by the boathouse.”

Oh, did we? I hadn’t recalled …

“Yes, I remember, I nearly fell to my death on those stairs.”

With a sickening lurch, I realized what poor taste that had been in. I wanted to say something to make up for it, but before I got the chance, he just nodded as he squeezed out some blue paint and said, “But here you are.”

“Here I am.”

I squeezed out a couple of colors and blended them until it resembled Max’s tanned skin tone.

“So are you any good?” he asked.

“Good?”

He nodded at my canvas. “At painting.”

“Oh.” I laughed nervously. “I doubt it, I’ve never really done it before. I helped paint a mural back at my old school, but it was basically like painting in between the lines. Like a huge coloring book.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

“St. Augustine. In Florida.”

“Did you grow up there?”

“Yeah.”

He gave a small smile. “You’re in for a hell of a winter, then.”

I took a deep breath and said, “Oh, I’ve heard.”

“Ever seen snow?”

I shook my head.

“You’re gonna see a lot of it here.” He furrowed his brow at his canvas and looked at me.

“Are you any good?” I asked, indicating his canvas.

“Not at all. Don’t be insulted by my portrait of you. I just took this class because I needed an elective and Crawley is awesome.”

“He seems cool, yeah.”

We settled into a silence I struggled not to fill with stupid rambling. I mixed up some more color to match his dark hair. I laid the brush on the canvas with the blackish color I’d mixed up. But it wasn’t quite right. There was a small tinge of another color in there somewhere. I sifted through the paint tubes and found Alizarin Crimson. I added a tiny bit. Yes, that was a lot better.

“Look at me for a sec,” he said.

I looked up. “What?”

He squinted and leaned toward me. “Green, okay. But …” He stood and came over to me. He put his hand under my chin and lifted up my face. My heart skipped.

“Trust me,” he said with a smile. “I’m an artist.”

“Paint me like one of your French girls.”

Oh, the words spilled from my mouth before I could stop them. I was too used to my group of friends. My cheeks turned hot.

He dropped his hand and looked at me. “Did you just make a Titanic reference?”

“Maybe.”

He smiled and raised an eyebrow. “My older cousin Sarah watched that for the entirety of a family trip at the Outer Banks once. And if I remember correctly, in that scene, he wasn’t just painting her face.”

“Well, we probably won’t be asked to do that in here.”

“Probably not.” He smiled. “Now look at me, I need to look at your eyes.”

He tilted my head so that my eyes caught the light.

“They’re not just green. They have some brown in them, too. Right in the middle.” I looked at him as he studied my eyes.

“Really?” I said, even though I fully knew it.

“There’s also …” He narrowed his own eyes. “Also some blue. They’re like the color of … a pond or something.”

I laughed, and it echoed in the otherwise silent room. Everyone looked at us. I bit my lip and looked around apologetically.

Max smiled. “What?”

“A pond? So, like, the brown is mud and the green is pond scum?”

He laughed, too, sitting back down. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

I laughed and focused back on my canvas.

The end of class came, and we were able to reveal our paintings to each other. I actually kind of liked mine. It didn’t look like a photograph or anything, but it really looked like Max.

“You ready?” I asked him.

He furrowed his brow once again at his painting and said, “I guess.”

We turned around our paintings. I don’t think I’d laughed so hard in weeks. I was one big circle with pink tinge in my cheeks, little dots for freckles, and huge blue-green-brown eyes. I had no eyelids, and my lashes were like little black spiders.

“All right, all right, so I’m not an artist.” He put his canvas back on the easel. “But at least I got your eyes right.”

The rest of the week passed by in a frenzy of getting situated in classes and talking about the year full of work that lay before us. I could already tell that the huge studio was going to be my sanctuary, because as far as the other classes went, it was looking like the year wouldn’t be an easy one. Manderley had block scheduling, so one day we’d have four classes, and then the next day we’d have four different ones. Fridays we had all of them, but they were cut in half. On A days, I had English, World History, Algebra II and Painting. On B days, I had Gym (a bummer because at my old school we didn’t need to take it in senior year, and also because it’s at freaking 8:00 a.m.), Biology, French II (a breeze, since my Paris-born mother had mostly taught me the language) and study hall (which I could hardly believe was a real thing).

A couple days into this schedule, I approached Blake in the dining hall as we slathered bagels with cream cheese, and she assured me things would settle down soon.

“It’s always like this,” she said. “It’s superbusy and then teachers cool off. Trust me, two weeks from now it’ll be ten times better. It’s like they sprint and then get tired and drag their feet for the rest of the year.”

I saw her and Cam every day in the hallways and a few times during meals. They were clearly a very happy couple, and I got along with both of them. I saw a few other people in the halls that I’d met, but no one said much more than a passing hello. I didn’t see Max as much as I wanted to, but when I did, he was usually coming in from lacrosse practice with slightly flushed cheeks and a sheen of sweat on his sculpted cheekbones.

It was odd for me to be mostly solitary. Back home I was out all the time and did something at least kind of social every day even if it was just watching TV with Leah. I was missing home more each day. Every memory I had of home was suddenly set in a perfect sunny day, whereas Manderley was set to the backdrop of gray rain and cold drafts that seeped through ancient walls.

I was alone and cold, and since the food was nothing like my mother’s or what I was used to, I was hungry. Even the salad, usually a safe go-to, tasted like nail polish remover.

It was really hard to stay positive. And that’s normally a talent of mine.

Unable to simply quit school or even tell my thrilled parents about the mild disappointments of the past week, I sat by myself and read or did homework during meals, went to class alone, and then headed to my room where Dana would look disappointed to see me and then ignore me. Sometimes I wanted to just kick her in the shins and tell her to stop being such an unpleasant cloud of gloom, but then I’d remember Becca—it was hard not to, when my side of the room still displayed a wallpaper of her pictures—and feel guilty again.

So that put me in the dining hall at nine at night on my first Friday evening. I was filling my travel mug with hot chocolate. I’d decided I wasn’t ready for bed and that I didn’t want to spend time in the same room as Dana quite yet. I figured I’d read To Kill a Mockingbird and try to find the deeper motifs in the rotunda until I got tired.

It was meant to be a social place, but the chairs were clearly not built with comfort or extended sitting in mind. They were all stiff, and some of them were mysteriously itchy. The rotunda itself was pretty noisy, what with the entrance hall directly beneath us, but it was better than my room.

My hot chocolate looked thin and watery, but it was deceptively delicious. I turned to see Blake putting a piece of bread in the toaster.

I summoned the nerve and then said, “Hey, Blake.”

She looked up, and took a second to register. “Oh, hey! I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were there.”

“That’s okay, I just walked up.”

She smiled kindly. “I’m just taking this up to my room or I’d sit with you.”

“Oh, me, too,” I said, not wanting her to think I was desperate. “I’m just getting some of this and then reading a little for English.”

“I suggest reading on the second floor of the library. Have you been up there yet?”

“Not yet.”

“There are some spiral stairs near the back of the library that lead up to a bunch of study rooms. Go into the room right across from the landing.”

“What is it? Am I allowed?”

She giggled. “Yes, it’s the senior study room. There’s a gas fire in there, and a bunch of armchairs. It’s really nice. It’s empty a lot at night. Most of these kids do their homework right after classes.”

“I’ll go check it out, thanks.” I brought my hot chocolate to my lips.

“Oh, and hey,” she added quickly, “we’re going down to the boathouse tonight, you want to come?”

“Um …” I scrunched up my face in consideration.

“I know you can. Harper Lee can wait until tomorrow.” She looked knowingly at me. “You just don’t want to go. Well, look, it’ll be better this time. Last time you went, it was just a little weird. The last party we had last year was the one when … Becca went missing. Not only that, but she was the one who kind of … started the parties down there.”

“Oh …” Then the question I’d been waiting to ask all week fell from my lips like an anvil. “What … what happened to her?”

Blake’s toast popped up in the toaster. She removed it and concentrated on smothering it in butter and jelly. “She and Max got into a fight about something to do with Johnny … and it was right after Dana and she’d had a fight … and then the next thing we knew she was just gone. So was the training sailboat.” Her hand slowed on the knife. “It was really strange. There was a horrible storm brewing, so it doesn’t make sense for her to think she could go out in the boat … that would be suicide. But maybe that’s what it was … or maybe she was pushed out onto the boat. Or maybe she just left, and the boat thing was a coincidence. It’s really not clear what happened.”

Blake went silent, and it was clear to me that she’d spent a lot of energy trying to figure this out.

“That’s awful.”

“It was also the last night though, so she might have just called a cab and left for the summer. She had her purse on her. And her family is incredibly rich. I don’t know … It just doesn’t make sense. I’m sure you’ve heard all of the talk about it. All the theories.”

I shook my head. “No, not really. People talk about her a lot, but … what do you mean by theories?”

She sighed and took a bite of her toast. “She’s been missing for so many months now that it’s kind of … the longer she’s missing, the more likely it is she won’t come back.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

“So I guess …” Blake went on, “I guess people are starting to wonder if she was killed.”

“Killed? Really? By someone—by a student?”

She nodded somberly. “Yeah. It’s hard to believe, but the whole thing is so surreal.”

“Who do they think did it?”

“You know how it is—everyone became a suspect at one time or another, really. Rumors are like that. Since she and Max were a thing, he became the most consistent rumor….”

I felt like my blood had frozen. I pictured Johnny, asking me to play beer pong, and smiling at me with blond hair almost touching his bright eyes. I thought of Dana, so deep in mourning she couldn’t seem to see straight.

And of Max. Max looking into my eyes. I’d looked into his, too. He wasn’t capable of murder; surely I would have seen it. I knew that wasn’t true—I didn’t even know him. But still, I couldn’t imagine it.

“But she’s not even necessarily dead,” she added quickly. “A lot of people think she’s alive. That’s just as likely.” She looked at her toast for a quiet moment. “So you’ll come?”

“Come?”

“To the party tonight.”

No. No. Say no. “Sure.”

“Great! Any time after eleven.” She gave a small smile and then walked back out of the hall.

I set off for the library a moment later, and as I walked, my mind reeled as I thought about the missing girl. No one knew what had happened to her, and yet this time last year she’d been walking the same halls as me. It had been her first year, too. Had everyone been as chilly toward her? Probably not. She was probably why they were like that toward me. They all hated me for coming along.

I was like the new baby sibling that everyone resented.

The study room was empty when I arrived. The lights were off, and I had to feel around the walls until I found a switch. But rather than turning on a fluorescent overhead as I’d expected, it turned on a floor lamp in each corner of the room. They illuminated a smallish, cozy room paneled in dark wood, with comfy-looking armchairs and couches filling the place. Along one wall, there were desks with those old-fashioned green bankers’ lights with the gold, beaded pull string. Right in the middle was a huge ornate mantel, with a modern electric fireplace. I flicked on a light switch and fire burst into life.

This, I supposed, was the charm of Northern states and cold places. It was a different type of charm and warmth than I was used to, but as I read for the next few hours with the fire warming my bare feet and I drank my hot chocolate, I could see that this wasn’t bad, either.

I fell asleep and into another strange dream, as I had on my first night.

I was standing on the beach again. Someone was yelling at me. It was a male voice. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t let myself. I felt determined and strong, but sick and weak all at once. Everything was blurry, as if I was looking through the water of a chlorine pool.

My chest stung and my head pounded. I wanted to hit him, whoever he was. I wanted to scream back at him. But no … I didn’t need to. He was wrong. He’d see. I wasn’t like he thought I was. I could be better. I would be from now on….