THE FIRST WEEK OF SCHOOL ONLY ADDED TO THE strange events that had been occurring over the past few weeks. It started in Latin.
Horace Hall, where almost all of our classes were held, was the size of a small Victorian castle, with stone towers and large wooden doors hammered with iron. They were so heavy I could barely open them. Ivy climbed up the face of the building, meandering around the windows that looked out onto the green.
The doors opened into a foyer with red carpeting, stained wooden walls, and high ceilings supported by oak beams. The windows were framed with heavy blue drapes, their folds gathering on the floor. Behind them, heaters hissed. In the middle of the foyer was a wide staircase with polished banisters that led to the outer wings of the building.
Our Latin class was somewhere inside. It was first period, and Eleanor was running late and had stopped by the dining hall to pick up breakfast before class, so I was left to find it by myself. A few minutes before the bell rang, I was still standing in the foyer, staring down at my schedule as students rushed past me.
Elementary Latin M W F 8:00 am
EW, II, VII, Horace Hall
I was pretty sure that meant east wing, second floor, seventh room. Or maybe it meant east wing, second room, seventh floor. Or maybe EW were the initials of my professor. I tried to ask for help, but everyone pushed past me in a rush to get to class, a swirling haze of pressed shirts, cuff links, ties, and penny loafers. This place couldn’t be that hard to navigate; I just had to think. I had a gut feeling that it was on the seventh floor, so in a somewhat arbitrary decision, I made my way up the stairs to the east wing.
I found the room just as the bell rang. Breathless, I pushed open the door and flung myself inside, a flustered, sweaty mess. The entire class turned in my direction, and I knew I’d made a mistake. It was a small group; everyone was sitting around a single wooden table, hunched over their books when I interrupted. They all looked older and somewhat unwelcoming, particularly a brooding boy with short auburn hair that was neatly combed and parted down the side. He was wearing a black suit, far fancier than anyone else in the class, and tortoiseshell glasses. Next to him was a girl who could have been his sister. I couldn’t decide who was more handsome. She was also wearing a man’s suit, though hers was tailored to her slender frame. Her short black hair was parted and slicked back, as if she were a wealthy financier from the 1920s.
The professor was a robust young man with sandy hair that reminded me of a golden retriever. He was lecturing in a language I didn’t understand. It was probably Latin, though I was sure this wasn’t the class I was supposed to be in. The professor stopped speaking and gave me a questioning look. I could feel my face turn red.
“Is this Elementary Latin?” I asked stupidly.
The person in the seat closest to me turned around, and to my surprise, it was Dante. He raised an eyebrow, a beautiful eyebrow, and stared at me with amusement. Seeing him again, I felt embarrassed and excited all at once. He was leaning over the back of his seat, his collared shirt pulled tightly around his broad shoulders. His wavy brown hair was pulled back with an elastic band, a few stray locks dangling just below his chin. I imagined myself running my fingers through it.
We made eye contact, and I felt myself blushing.
“No,” the professor said, taking off his glasses. Behind him, the board was covered in notes written in Latin. The only words I recognized were Descartes and Romulus et Remus. A simple six-sided figure was drawn over and over again in different iterations and dimensions. Confused, I looked at it again. It couldn’t be anything other than the image that had been haunting me for the last two weeks: a coffin.
“I … I’m sorry,” I murmured, and began to back out the door, when Dante stood up and walked toward me, his eyes never leaving mine. I fumbled with my things, and he reached behind me, his hand grazing my skirt as he opened the door. And giving me a barely discernible smile, he breathed, “Second floor. Seventh room on the left.”
I was late for Latin. When I walked into the classroom, it was the same thing all over again, all heads in my direction, and silence—a dead, pitying silence. Eleanor’s eyes were wide and terrified for me. “What happened?” she mouthed, curling a ringlet of hair around her finger nervously. But I didn’t dare respond. The professor stopped lecturing.
“I... I’m sorry I’m late. I got lost.”
“I don’t want you to speak; I want you to sit,” she said, as if I should have known.
Trying to keep a low profile, I hugged my bag and made my way to the back of the room.
Our Latin professor was a fortress of a woman, wearing a wide, shapeless dress and a thick pair of glasses. Professor Edith Lumbar was written on the board in wobbly cursive.
Edith Lumbar. She was the woman my grandfather had told me to contact if I ever needed help. I closed my eyes and sighed, wishing I hadn’t already gotten on her bad side.
“To continue where we left off, while you are in my classroom, there will be a number of rules. First, there shall be no slouching.”
The sound of shuffling filled the room as people sat up straight.
“Practitioners of Latin must pay close attention to precision in all facets of life if they wish to master the subtle science of the language.”
She began pacing about the room. “Second, you are not to speak unless you are called upon.
“And third, and this is by far the most important of all the rules, you are never, under any circumstance, to speak the language of Latin.”
How could we learn a language that we were never allowed to speak? And what was the point of learning it in the first place?
“Why?” I blurted out before I could stop myself.
Professor Lumbar turned around and looked at me with surprise. “Were you not listening when I mentioned rule number two?” she asked, though it clearly wasn’t a question. “What is your name?”
“Renée Winters,” I said.
She gazed at me for a moment and then repeated, “Renée. To be born again. An old name, derivative of the Latinate and French verb naître, to be born, and shared by the great thinker René Descartes. While you clearly possess his proclivity for argumentation, it’s evident from your rash behavior that you lack his patience and wisdom to follow a logical progression through to its end.”
I barely had time to process her diatribe before she continued.
“So, Renée, what is it that don’t you understand?” Her tone was polite yet rife with sarcasm. The room was so silent I could hear my stomach growling.
I swallowed. “I was just … I was wondering why we can’t speak a language that we’re trying to learn.”
“That’s an interesting question. Does anyone want to answer her?”
A boy in the front row raised his hand.
“Yes,” Professor Lumbar said. “What is your name?”
“Prem,” he said.
“Prem, what do you think?”
“Is it because Latin is a dead language?”
“Latin has been considered ‘dead’ for centuries. Yet it is quite alive. Historically, Latin has been a language of the elite. Only select people were able to read it, write it, and most important, speak it. In this class we will study the legends surrounding the people Latin chose to speak through. Since this is an elementary class, it is obvious that no one in this room has been blessed with a Latinate tongue. To attempt to speak it out loud would thus be an act of hubris.
“However, if you choose to exercise your minds, I can teach you how to communicate the unspeakable. How do you describe the briefest sensation? A smell you haven’t experienced since you were a child? The ecstasy of seeing an animal being born? The immeasurable grief we feel when faced with death? We can’t even begin to communicate these complex emotions to each other. But Latin can illuminate sensations you never realized you had.”
All eyes were glued to the professor. Suddenly, Latin became interesting. Even as a child I had felt isolated in my thoughts. I was sure that nobody knew the real me, the full me, even my parents. And now that they were dead, I was completely alone. How could I explain all the things I was feeling to another person? Maybe Latin was the answer.
Professor Lumbar picked up a piece of chalk and began to scrawl something on the board. Latinum: lingua mortuorum. I copied it in my notebook.
“Now, open your books to page twelve,” she said, and proceeded to make us copy out verb conjugations until the period was over. Once out of class, I flipped through my dictionary to try and decipher what she had written. After writing out the translation, I looked around suspiciously.
Latin: The Language of the Dead.
The rest of the day went by in a blur. We were herded from one classroom to the next like cattle, lugging our books up and down the rickety old stairs of Horace Hall with just a short break for lunch. It had been so long since I had been at a new school that I had forgotten how difficult it was to be the new girl. I had no friends, and everyone at Gottfried acted like they’d stepped out of a polo match in the British countryside with the Prince of Wales. And considering that Gottfried actually had a polo team, and one of the upperclassmen was distantly related to the Duchess of Kent, some of them probably had. Eleanor was clearly one of the most popular girls in our grade, and fluttered from group to group chatting about her summer. Because she was only in two of my classes and there was barely time to talk in between, we agreed to catch up at dinner.
Left to my thoughts, I wondered what my friends at home were doing. Annie would be in biology, sitting in the back row, passing notes to Lauren while Mr. Murnane lectured about the body. And where would Wes be? In U.S. History, or maybe English Lit. Daydreaming about Wes used to be something I looked forward to, but now it just made me sad. Was he still thinking about me, or had he already moved on? The thought of him with another girl was too unpleasant for me to bear, and I pushed it out of my head, resolving to focus on my classes. It was the only way I’d be able to get through the first day of school without losing my mind.
I was just about to head to Philosophy when I heard something drop. Behind me, a frail girl with stringy brown hair was kneeling on the ground, frantically trying to pick up the papers and pencils and books that had fallen from her bag.
Feeling her embarrassment, I set my bag down and approached her. She looked rumpled, with puffy eyes and a glazed-over gaze, as if she had just woken up.
“Do you want some help?”
She turned to me with gratitude and nodded. Her brown hair stood up in the back with static, and she had a run in her nylons that started at the heel and traveled all the way up to the hem of her skirt.
“I’m Renée,” I said.
“Minnie,” she said timidly.
Before I could respond, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
A woman with a yardstick was standing behind me. She was short and squat, with thick calves and an oversized blazer with a peacock brooch on the left lapel. Her hair was a dull brown and was cut close to her head in a no-nonsense style.
Minnie’s face contorted with fear and she stuffed the rest of her belongings into her bag and scurried away to the corner of the foyer, leaving a few stray pencils on the ground.
“Stand up,” the woman said to me.
Upright, I towered over her, my eyes meeting the top of her head.
“What is your name?”
“Renée,” I said, resentful of being ordered around and asked my name when all I’d been doing was helping a girl pick up her things. Professor Lumbar I could understand, since I had been late, but this was unnecessary. “What’s yours?”
She stared at me, horrified at my impertinence. “The audacity—” she said, almost to herself. “My name is Mrs. Lynch. But don’t busy yourself trying to remember it; in time it will ring familiar. An insubordinate child like you, I suspect, will be seeing a lot more of me in the future.”
She took me by the elbow and led me to the foot of the stairs.
“What are you doing?”
“General procedure.”
“But I haven’t done anything wrong!”
“Kneel,” she barked.
Startled by the abnormality of her command, I dropped to the ground in front of the staircase, trying to convince myself that teachers no longer beat students with rulers. Did they? Around us, a crowd of students had begun to gather. A group of girls pointed at me and whispered. I tried to ignore them, though I could feel my face growing red. The grainy wood floor was rough against my bare knees, and I shifted my weight uncomfortably.
Mrs. Lynch circled me, her brown clogs clicking against the floor like a timer. “No stockings,” she murmured, dragging the end of the ruler across the back of my legs.
“Untucked shirt,” she continued. She dropped the yardstick, its butt hitting the ground with a thud. A hush ran through the crowd of students. I winced, waiting for her to hit me, but instead she bent down and held the stick against my thigh. She looked at my skirt and frowned. “Two and one-quarter inches above the knee. The dress code stipulates that skirts can be no more than two inches above the knee.”
“But it’s only a quarter inch!”
“Nevertheless, you are out of dress code,” Mrs. Lynch sneered, showing a row of tiny yellowed teeth.
I glared at her and stood up, pulling at my skirt. How was this possibly punishable?
“You will go back to your room and change.”
“But I have to go to philosophy—”
She ignored me. “And on the way you’ll pay a visit to the headmistress’s office.”
“I have class now!”
“You’ll have to miss it,” she said, and began to walk away.
“But it’s the first day!”
She turned to me. “Young lady, you’re lucky it’s the first day. Otherwise your punishment would have been far more severe.”
I hoisted myself up and was wiping off my knees when I heard a woman’s voice behind me. “Excuse me,” she said to Mrs. Lynch. Startled, she turned around.
The woman was thin and plain, with straight brown hair and a linen skirt. She was about the age of my mother, and had creases around her eyes from smiling. “This is one of my students. I’ll deal with her.”
I had never seen her in my life.
Mrs. Lynch gave her a suspicious look. So did I.
“I only mean to escort her,” the woman said, studying me as if she had seen me before. “She’s new.”
Mrs. Lynch grunted in reply and went back to her office, her yardstick tapping as she walked. When she was gone, the woman turned to me. “Come.”
The crowd in the foyer of Horace Hall parted, and I held my head high as I walked, avoiding eye contact with anyone, to hide my mortification. Once we were outside, she stopped and glanced around us. “Go back to the dorm and change.”
“What about the headmistress?”
“Do you really want to see her?”
I shook my head.
“That’s what I thought.”
I didn’t know who she was or why she was helping me. “Why—” I started to say, but she interrupted me.
“Don’t get caught out of dress code again.”
With a nod, I ran back to the dormitory. I went through all of my mother’s clothes until I finally found a more modest pleated skirt. I put it on, along with a pair of stockings. Then I tucked in my shirt, slipped on my cardigan, and stood in front of the mirror. I could barely recognize myself. If Annie saw me now she would have walked right by me. Yet for some reason the woman who had just saved me from the headmistress’s office had looked at me as if she’d seen me before. Who was she? Sighing, I ran a hand through my hair and pinned it back with my mother’s barrette.
By the end of the day I had met up with Nathaniel, and together we walked over to our last class, Crude Sciences. It was in the Observatory, a tall spindle of a building in the center of campus. On the way, I told him about how I’d walked into the wrong class before Latin, and about Minnie and Mrs. Lynch and the mystery woman who had intervened.
“Yeah,” Nathaniel said. His poorly knotted tie was too long, and swung against his chest as he struggled to hold his books and keep up with me. “Lynch loves watching people squirm. She’s always on me for having too much facial hair.” He fingered the three or four lone whiskers that had sprouted from his chin. “I don’t even own a razor!” His voice cracked, and he blushed. “And next time don’t worry about Minnie. She’s always tripping over things and dropping stuff, which doesn’t really help the fact that everyone here thinks she’s crazy.”
“Why do they think that?” I asked, gripping my book bag.
“She had this outburst last year in the dining hall. I don’t really know what it was about. I wasn’t there.”
I shrugged. “Speaking of crazy, what was that class that I walked in on? There were all these morbid drawings on the board, and the teacher was speaking Latin, I think. And everyone looked miserable. Though I guess I would too if I had to stare at drawings like that all day.”
Nathaniel wiped the sweat beading on his forehead with the end of his tie. “I don’t know. It’s not that weird. It was probably one of the Advanced Latin classes.”
“Okay. But what about the drawings on the board? And Dante was in it. He’s in our year. Shouldn’t he be in my Latin class?”
Nathaniel pushed up his glasses. “No. I’m in an Advanced Latin class too,” he said proudly. “They group us based on ability instead of year, since there aren’t that many of us. And as for the drawings, maybe they were just using them to learn vocabulary words.”
I gave him a skeptical look. “A chapter on coffins? I highly doubt that.”
The inside of the Observatory was much larger than its small frame suggested. The walls were white, and a single spiral staircase led up to the glass dome of the roof. When we made it to the top, we were in a laboratory with long concentric counters lined with beakers, scales, and metal instruments. Bottles of brightly colored liquids and vials of powder lined the walls. In the center of the room, a giant telescope faced up into the sky.
Nathaniel and I sat at an empty bench in the back row. The professor was standing in the middle of the classroom, a position that emphasized his potbelly and disproportionately skinny legs. He wore spectacles and had the spacey look of a mad scientist who believed in conspiracy theories and aliens. Pens stuck out of his shirt pocket, and frizzy tufts of hair sprouted in a ring around the crown of his head. He glanced at his watch and flipped the lights on and off to signal the start of class.
I was about to ask Nathaniel more about his Latin class when I felt someone’s eyes on me. I looked up and saw Dante. He was sitting on the far side of the classroom, the afternoon light bending around his silhouette. His dark hair was strewn carelessly about his face, making his skin look ashen and smooth in contrast.
Our eyes met, and I tried to smile, but Dante didn’t waver. Instead he gave me a curious, almost troubled look. What was he thinking about?
The professor flipped the lights on and off one last time, making Dante’s face disappear and then reappear like the flash of a ghost. When the lights came back on, he was still staring at me. A prickly feeling of anxiety crept up my spine. I shuddered and looked away.
“Professor Starking is my name, though this is but a formality. The details of our identities are quite insignificant in the complex system of forces that comprise our universe.”
He patted the shaft of the telescope and glanced up through the glass ceiling. Clouds floated carelessly across the sky. A small flock of birds flew beneath them.
“But before we look into the outer realms of the cosmos, we must revisit this world. Thus we study the crude sciences. Biology, physics, chemistry—we will master these before we move on to the stars and planets.”
Professor Starking tilted his head down and studied the class over the top of his glasses. “In our time together I will attempt to reshape your Galilean brains. You may experience discomfort. Expanding the mind can often be painful.”
I glanced back at Dante, unable to help myself. Everything about him seemed irresistible—the waves of his hair, the stubble on his chin. I could look at him all day and still not have all of the contours of his face committed to memory.
“We’ve learned from history that we are more efficient when we work together,” Professor Starking said. “Plato had Socrates, Galileo had Archimedes, Doctor Frankenstein had Igor.” He let out a chuckle, which degenerated into a fit of coughing.
“So,” he continued, clearing his throat, “everyone has been assigned a lab partner, who you’ll be working with for the entire semester.”
He began to read off names. Please, I thought, read my name with Dante’s. Please.
“Nathaniel Welch and Morgan Leicester.” Nathaniel shrugged and stood up.
“Greta Platt and Christian Treese. Paul McLadan and Maggie Hughes.
“Renée Winters and Dante Berlin.”
Surprised, my body went rigid. In California, I always seemed to be partners with Oily Jeremy, the boy with terrible body odor, or with Samantha Watson, who was only interested in talking about her nail polish. A chair scraped against the floor, and Dante walked across the room and took the empty seat next to me, his shoulder blades shifting underneath his shirt like tectonic plates as he leaned on the table.
After studying me for a few moments, he turned and faced the professor without even acknowledging me. Shocked by his rudeness and unsure of what to do, I turned my attention to the board and pretended to ignore him. We sat in silence until the professor finished calling off the names.
“The Laws of Attraction.” He approached the board.
His voice was drowned out by the noise of rustling paper.
“The First Law of Attraction states that attraction and repulsion are two sides of the same force.”
And as Professor Starking talked about physics and magnetism, I turned to Dante.
“Why do you keep staring at me?” I muttered under my breath.
He glanced around to make sure no one was listening and then leaned toward me. His voice was hushed. “You have pen on your face. Here,” he said, touching the space by his nose.
“Oh.” I felt my face go red as I wiped my cheek with my hand.
“That and you remind me of someone I know. Or once knew. But I can’t place who it is.”
“I thought you didn’t have any friends,” I challenged.
Dante smiled. “I don’t. Only enemies. Which doesn’t bode well for you, considering the fact that you must resemble one of them.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You know, you’re really good at compliments. Actually, it’s surprising that a person with charm like yours has any enemies.” The words came out before I could stop them. At this rate I would never be able to ask him about Benjamin Gallow, and it didn’t help that every time he looked at me I wanted to melt.
“So you think I’m charming?” Dante countered, mocking me. “Is that why you keep staring at me?”
“Alarming, not charming. And no, I’m just curious.”
“Curious?” Dante gave me a bemused look and leaned back, draping his arm over his chair. “About what?”
“Why don’t you talk to anyone?”
“I thought that’s what we were doing.”
“To anyone else.”
“Talking isn’t the only way to communicate. I speak when I have something to say.”
“Then you must be pretty boring, judging from what everyone says about you.”
Dante let out a laugh. “And what are they saying?”
“That you won’t talk to anyone at school because you think you’re superior.”
“And what if I am?”
I narrowed my eyes. “You’re not. You just think you are.”
Dante smiled and leaned toward me. “So now you can read my thoughts?”
I swallowed. “No. I can just tell.”
“Really? What am I thinking now?” he said, lowering his eyes to mine.
It was difficult to act normal with him staring at me so closely, so intensely. My voice wavered. “You’re...you’re wondering where I’m from.”
Dante’s face softened. “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” he said, studying me. I wasn’t sure if he was joking.
“Somewhere green, I’d guess,” he continued. “With a lot of sun.”
“How do you figure that?”
Without touching me, he traced his fingers through the air along the top of my cheeks. “Freckles.”
I blushed. “California. And you...you’re from—?”
“Here and there,” he said, brushing off my question. “Nowhere, really.”
I gave him a suspicious look. What did that even mean? Though, admittedly, I couldn’t imagine him being from anywhere. He was too handsome, too mysterious to come from a place.
Before I could ask him another question, Dante continued. “So why did you come here? You don’t seem like the average Gottfried student.”
“Why?” I said, taking offense. “Because I don’t have a trust fund and a summer home?”
“Because you say what you think.”
“Oh,” I said, averting my eyes. “And people at Gottfried don’t?”
“Not like you did to me at the Awakening. Or to Mrs. Lynch this morning.”
I sighed. He saw that. “I’m not used to so many rules. My old school was more...laid back.”
“So your parents sent you here?”
I shook my head. “My grandfather. ..” my voice trailed off.
I felt Dante’s eyes on me, examining my face.
“Do you have parents?” I asked, before realizing how stupid a question it was. Everyone had parents.
Dante hesitated. “No, not really.”
“What do you mean not really?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s...just, never mind.”
I rested my chin in my hand, considering his aloofness. “What’s the big secret?”
“No secret,” he said with a smile. “Just nothing to tell.”
I gave him a coy frown. “Or nothing you want to tell.”
Around us, everyone was flipping through the pages in their textbooks as Professor Starking recited something about forces. I shuffled through the pages haphazardly, more aware of Dante’s presence next to me than the vectors in the book.
He gave me the beginnings of a smile. “Look, I think we got off on the wrong foot. Can we start over?” He held his hand out beneath the desk. “I’m Dante,” he said.
I studied the creases in his palms, the veins running up the contours of his arms, before responding. “Renée,” I said quietly, slipping my hand into his.
His skin was cold to the touch, and I felt a tingling sensation in my fingers, as if they had just begun to go numb. Our eyes met, and my face became warm and flushed, my insides fluttering like a cage of small birds. It was alarming; nothing like this had ever happened before, and I didn’t understand why I felt so strange. It wasn’t just nerves or butterflies. I’d felt those with Wes; but this was different —frightening, almost supernatural. I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out.
He pulled his hand back quickly, and the sensation in my fingers slowly returned to normal, the warmth seeping through my skin like ink. I blinked once, and everything except for Dante seemed muted and distant. I stared at him—horrified, confused, excited—at his lips, parted and drawing breath into his body as he tried to understand what had just happened, and I knew that nothing would ever be the same.