Dead Beautiful (12 page)

“Isn’t this a little morbid?” I said to Eleanor, keeping my eyes on the professor, who was demonstrating how to hold a trowel correctly.

“What makes you say that?” a deep voice replied.

Startled, I turned around. Eleanor had moved closer to the chapel, and was now whispering to one of the twins. Standing in her place was the cute Wes impersonator.

“I’m Brett,” he said with a grin.

Suddenly I felt very shy. “Renée.”

Brett was tall and athletic, and looked like he had just come from playing rugby. His features seemed exaggerated, giving him a dashing and overly masculine look, which I had only attributed to characters in fairy tales.

“So who did you mean to talk to before I so rudely interrupted?”

“My friend Annie. I mean Eleanor. My roommate Eleanor.”

“Annie, Eleanor, which is it?”

“Eleanor. Eleanor Bell.” I pointed to where she was standing. “Sorry, my friend Annie is from California. I mean ...that’s where I’m from too. I just moved here. I’m still trying to keep everything straight.”

“A California girl. Aren’t you supposed to be blond?” He flipped a lock of my brown hair with his fingers.

I could feel myself starting to blush, and tucked my hair behind my ear. Brett seemed like the kind of guy who could get any girl; who plays Frisbee with his shirt off and his pants cuffed at the ankle, whose sweat actually smells good; the kind of guy who I never imagined would talk to me. Just like Wes. Yet here he was, standing next to me, doing what I could only identify as flirting.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Maine.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be a bearded farmer?”

Brett laughed. “So that’s what you thought it’d be like here? It must have been a huge disappointment.”

“Devastating,” I replied, and we both fixed our attention on Professor Mumm, who was motioning for us to follow her into the “garden.”

“Each of you has a different kind of flower bulb—woodland, climbing, perennial, annual, or arboreal. Now, what I want you to do is find the most suitable soil for planting your particular bulb, and shovel it into one of these bags,” she said, holding up a handful of cloth satchels.

One of the twins raised her hand. “But we don’t know what kind of bulb we have. How are we supposed to know what kind of soil is best if we don’t know what our bulb is?”

Professor Mumm gave her a wise smile. “Intuition. That is the first rule of horticulture. Intuition. Follow your gut!” she said, clicking her heels together. “And remember what we recited. H-E-R-B-S: Handle, Eat, Rub, Burn, Smell. Now, don your gloves and man your trowels!”

Brett and I parted ways as everyone in the class started wandering aimlessly around the graveyard. Eleanor found her way to me and pinched my arm from behind. “Hey,” she said, the twins beside her.

I jumped. “A graveyard is not the place to creep up on people!”

Eleanor laughed. “It’s broad daylight! Besides, I wasn’t the only one who crept up on you.” She glanced at Brett.

April butted in. “He does that with all the girls,” she said. Her sister Allison nodded in confirmation.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t look,” Eleanor replied.

We all watched him bend over to pick up his trowel. As he stood up, he turned to us and smiled. Embarrassed, I looked away. Eleanor, on the other hand, responded by giving him a coy wave.

“I think I’m going to go ‘test the soil’ closer to Brett,” she said. “I never get tired of his dimples.”

I laughed as Eleanor skipped away, trying to inconspicuously follow Brett to the left side of the “garden.” Around me, dozens of gravestones peeked out of the grass, their faces so faded that I couldn’t read the inscriptions. My parents were like these people now, reduced to epitaphs, tombstones, coffins. Shaking the thought from my head, I picked up my bulb and turned it around in my palm. It was brown and bulbous like a ginger root. I held it up to my nose, but it just smelled like dry dirt. Intuition, I thought, and began to walk.

I didn’t know where I was going, but I stepped forward, changing directions every few minutes as if I were being pulled by an invisible force. Every so often I bent over to sift through the soil.
H-E-R-B-S,
I repeated to myself.
H
for
Handle
as I felt its weight in my hand.
E
for
Eat
as I raised the soil to my mouth and tasted it.
R
for
Rub
as I pressed the soil into my palm, comparing its color and texture to that of my bulb.
B
for
Burn,
though none of the soil was oily enough to ignite when I struck a match to it. And
S
for
Smell
—confusing smells of apple and grass and walnut, but none of them seemed right. Every batch of soil was either too dry or too gritty; smelled too much like pastrami or tasted too bitter.

Eventually I found myself a good distance away from the rest of the class, in a patchy area by a collection of trees. I bent over to pick up a handful of soil, which was cool and so moist it almost felt oily. I smelled it. Nothing. What had the professor said while I was talking to Brett? If the soil was grainy and smelled of smoked meat, it was best for woodland bulbs. If the soil was dry and tasted of salt, it was high in minerals and best for annuals. Or was that perennials? I couldn’t remember.

Reluctantly, I pressed a finger into the soil and raised it to my mouth. At first it just tasted gritty. And then slowly, it took on the faintest aftertaste of molasses. I examined my bulb, which was stringy and dry, and had the same brownish-red hue. For some reason, it felt right. Bending down, I shoveled a handful into my sack.

No one else seemed to have finished. Some were meandering through the weeds; others were crouched low to the ground, feeling around in the soil, dirt smeared on their cheeks. Professor Mumm was walking around examining our progress while offering tips about trowel technique. But instead of going back to the group, I walked on, inching closer to the forest. I didn’t know why I was doing it, only that it felt as if I had just remembered something very important that I had forgotten to do, and that something was in the trees.

I pushed through the grass, which was wild and as tall as my knees. A lazy bee hovered over a bunch of wildflowers. Behind me, I heard Eleanor calling my name. “Renée! Where are you going? Did you figure out what bulb you have?” I glanced over my shoulder to see her running to catch up with me.

“No,” I said. “Just looking around.”

The morning sun was hot and beat down on the back of my neck. Ducking under the shade of a tree, I stopped. Was there something in the grass? Something brown that looked like a stick, but wasn’t. Wiping the sweat from my forehead, I bent down. I heard Eleanor approach as I pushed the wildflowers aside with my trowel. And there it was, the thing that I now knew had been pulling me toward it. Behind me, Eleanor screamed.

It was a fawn, dead and curled up in the grass. Its limbs were contorted in unnatural angles. Flies buzzed around its head, its fur still a soft, spotted brown.

In seconds, the entire class had gathered around us, all staring at me and the fawn. Professor Mumm zigzagged through the group. When she reached me, she took off her hat and looked at the fawn and then at me.

“I... I just found it,” I said. “I was looking for soil....” Even though that wasn’t the truth.

Professor Mumm’s face softened, and she took me by the shoulders. “Come away, dear,” she said. “No use in looking at it. There’s nothing we can do now.”

She led us back to the chapel, where she collected our bulbs and bags of soil, murmuring comments as she sifted through each sack—none of which were the right match.

When it was my turn, she took my bag and shook it around. “An unorthodox pairing,” she said, almost to herself. “Crocuses normally thrive on dry soil, cool and salty ...though this might work. Yes...interesting. Very interesting. The mixture of the red clay and oil...that would definitely work.”

Professor Mumm’s eyes swept over me, curious. “Class dismissed.”

As everyone dispersed, Eleanor ran up next to me. “What just happened?”

“I was just walking around when I found it,” I said, knowing that even at Gottfried it wasn’t normal to be pulled by an invisible force to a dead animal.

“Weird. It looked like you knew where you were going.”

“Well, I didn’t,” I said quickly.

“How did you figure that out about your soil, by the way? That was pretty smart.”

“I don’t know. The soil that I picked just seemed to complement the bulb. They had the same coloring, and the bulb was dry and the soil was kind of greasy.” I shrugged. “It seemed right.”

“Intuition!” Eleanor said, mocking Professor Mumm’s voice. “Your gut!”

I laughed. “She seemed pretty freaked out.”

“She teaches
gardening.
She needs a little excitement in her life.”

Just as we were about to head over to Philosophy, Brett ran over to us. “You’re a natural,” he said to me.

“Hi, Brett,” Eleanor said with a smile, and leaned toward him to wipe the dirt from his face with her thumb.

“Now you really do look like a farmer,” I said.

He laughed. “Is it that bad?”

Eleanor smiled. “A cute farmer.” I rolled my eyes as Brett grinned. His resemblance to Wes wasn’t just physical. He had the same easygoing walk, and spoke with the same flirty yet vacant banter; he even had the same teeth. That should have made me like him more, but instead it made him seem ordinary and unexciting.

“So, girls, what next?”

“Philosophy,” I said, even though Horticulture started so early in the day that we had a short break before breakfast. But just as I spoke, Eleanor said, “Oh, nothing.”

“Nothing?” Brett said. “Maybe we should make that a something. Breakfast?”

Unable to contain myself, I laughed, and then tried to cover it up with a cough when Eleanor gave me a threatening look. How many girls had he used that line on? Eleanor smiled. “That would be great. Renée was just saying how hungry she was,” she said, elbowing me in the ribs.

“Um, yeah. Famished.”

As we entered the Megaron, Brett talked about his classes and his family and his friends from home. At times I actually forgot that we were talking to Brett, and spoke to him as if he were Wes. So I wasn’t surprised to discover that their lives were almost identical. He was the oldest of three and played on the rugby and soccer teams before coming to Gottfried, where he was disappointed that neither sport existed. Now he was the captain of the track-and-field team. He had a yellow Labrador, which he liked to play Frisbee with in the summer; his favorite color was blue; he liked any music except for country; and his favorite author was Hemingway (typical), or so he claimed, though I doubted he had read anything by him other than whatever was assigned at school. By the time breakfast was done and we were walking through the double iron doors of Horace Hall, Eleanor’s eyes were glazed over with admiration.

“He’s so dreamy,” she said while we climbed the stairs to the third floor. “So manly. So American. So...tan.”

“So rehearsed,” I said, opening the door to Philosophy.

The classroom had high-beamed ceilings and two windows that overlooked the green. A few people were already sitting down, talking or shuffling through their papers. We took seats in the front, and I couldn’t help but scan the room for Dante. He wasn’t there.

Nathaniel scurried in behind me, his skinny frame hunched under the weight of his backpack, making him look like a turtle. He sat down in the desk next to mine just before the bell rang.

“Hi, Renée,” he said, winded and sweating. He pushed his hair out of his face and adjusted his glasses. “Did you finish your essay? I stayed up almost all night doing it. I had to rewrite it four times before I got it right.”

A wave of queasiness passed over me. “Essay?” I looked to Eleanor, hoping it was news for her too, but she pulled hers out of her notebook.

“Yeah, about a myth that we want to believe in. You didn’t do yours?”

“No, I had to miss class because Mrs. Lynch sent me home to change. Remember?”

“Oh, right …” Eleanor gave me an apologetic look. “Sorry. I thought you knew. You looked so busy during study hall that I figured you were working on it.”

I sighed and tried to figure out what to do. “No, it’s my fault. I should have asked.”

“I have a couple of my drafts,” Nathaniel said. “They’re not that good, but you can use one if you want.” He handed me a few crumpled sheets of paper.

It was a sweet gesture, but I wasn’t keen on cheating. Plus, even though everyone knew Nathaniel was a math prodigy, I wasn’t so sure that his brilliance transferred to writing. “Oh no, that’s okay. I’ll just explain what happened to the professor.”

But Nathaniel wouldn’t let me refuse. “I really don’t mind,” he said earnestly, holding the essays in front of me. We both stared at them. With nothing else to do, I took them and began to read.

His handwriting was messy and there were smudges of eraser marks all over the pages. The first one was titled, “I Want to Believe in Myself.” I flipped to the next draft. “I Want to Believe that Calculators Can Replace the Human Brain.” And “I Want to Believe in Imaginary Numbers.” The last one was the most promising, though it looked more like a math proof than an essay, and it didn’t really fit the assignment.

I bit my lip. “These are really...good,” I said, handing them back to him, “but I’d feel bad passing in your work. I’ll just talk to the professor after class. Hopefully he’ll understand.”

Nathaniel shrugged and stuffed them back into his notebook. “It’s a
she.
”

As if to complete his sentence, a woman entered the room, carrying an armful of papers. She set them on the desk and walked to the front of the class, holding a book. I gazed at her in awe. It was the same woman who had saved me from going to the headmistress’s office.

Annette LaBarge wasn’t beautiful. In fact, she was quite plain. Her clothes were functional and basic, comprised mostly of earth tones: today a linen skirt that exposed her slender ankles and cork clogs. I pictured her in one of those women’s catalogs, posing on a rocky beach while holding a long twig or a piece of driftwood.