The Last Academy (18 page)

Charon smiled. “Every student has a mortal wound. An injury that is echoed throughout their time here, until it is resolved. Tell me, what was Brynn’s?”

I felt sick, trying to imagine what kind of mother Jenni Laurent must have been. And then, of course, I thought about how Brynn had gotten egged. “People who were supposed to care for her used her.”

Charon nodded. “The thing that has damaged you, Camden, is the thing you must face.”

The shadow of how this theory might apply to me slunk into my ear and hung out in the back of my brain. Examining it would have been like squeezing a tube of understanding
toothpaste — there’d be no going back once it was out, and I got the feeling it was going to make a big mess, too. I shook my head, my short hair brushing against my neck.

“Is that what happened in the theater?” I asked.

He nodded. “Jenni Laurent once stumbled upon Brynn at the hands of a terrifying ghoul, much as Brynn discovered you and me in the theater. That woman turned a blind eye, forfeiting her daughter for her own selfishness. To receive her coin, Brynn had to do what her mother could not. She refused to sacrifice you, and broke free of becoming like her own mother.”

“Why did I have her coin?” I asked.

Charon’s voice turned sharp. “Do not ask that to which you know the answer.” He tapped the center of his chest, where a person’s heart would be, and I knew. Brynn and I, we’d learned how to be friends. When Charon’s finger pressed the linen of his shirt, I saw the smooth bones of his ribcage. His finger tapped once more and then turned and pointed at me. I blotted away tears.

“Mr. Graham knew what you were, and he knew I had Brynn’s coin. Why didn’t he try and save her?” I asked. But then I remembered Mr. Graham told me:
I let her go.
Mr. Graham’s obituary was next: a motorcycle accident in the
rain. The question of suicide threaded through the words, unasked, as the article revealed that Mr. Graham struggled to cope with his sister’s murder, three years prior. On the next page,
DNA Analysis Links More Victims to Serial Killer John Darcy,
along with a photo array of twelve girls. In small print, a list of names started:
Likely victims include Janine Graham, previously reported as a runaway.
Mr. Graham’s sister was the girl in the top left square. In the picture, too, she reminded me of Brynn.

Mr. Graham was the only suicide I’d seen. Remembering something Mr. Cooper had said to me, I flipped through the book, searching for other teachers.

The next teacher who caught my eye was Miss Andersen. A cold chill ran down my spine:
Poison Peggy Found Dead
, her headline blared. The article read,
Peggy Andersen was found dead in her home Tuesday morning of apparent natural causes. Andersen had been awaiting trial for the murder of her sister, Beatrix. Andersen famously answered, “Just a little,” when police asked if she’d poisoned her sister.

I looked up. “Mr. Cooper was trying to tell me something that night at the dance, wasn’t he?” Charon didn’t bother to answer, and I was already flipping through the book. Dr. Falzone’s article was easy to miss. Guess they
didn’t allot too much page space for drunks who drove into a car full of teenagers and later died of cirrhosis. I remembered how Dr. Falzone had squeezed my shoulder after I’d gotten in trouble, and how he’d come looking for me the morning Jessie disappeared. It was hard to believe his old life had been so full of despair.

“Have all the teachers killed someone?” I asked.

Charon paused before answering. “For teachers, the requirements to obtain a coin are more stringent. In the past, they proactively intervened to change fate, usually by taking a life. They unbalanced the universe with their actions. To leave Lethe, they must repay what they have taken. They must help students cross, but they must not proactively interfere. As psychopomps, they are required to wait until the right set of circumstances allows them to pay their debts.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

“During his life, Henry Graham suffered survivor’s guilt, believing he did not deserve to live while his sister was dead. Eventually, his mind twisted until he thought his own death could pay his sister’s coin; that to sacrifice himself, he could retroactively save her.”

“That’s why he couldn’t take Brynn’s coin.”

“Yes. He must not pay for anyone’s life but his own. Mr. Graham’s penance was not only to stand by as students passed, but to help one go. As it happened, you were the one. He could help because you asked.”

I thought of Mr. Graham, what it must have taken out of him to deliver me into the hands of death. I wished I could go back and tell him I was OK.

Unlike most of the other obituaries, Mr. Cooper’s disappearance and presumed death were discussed on a glossy magazine page, apparently a national interest story. Our drama teacher had been spelunking in a New Mexico cave. His whole party had gotten disoriented deep below the earth. “Our compasses may have malfunctioned due to a geologic anomaly — a large portion of metal ore nearby,” one of the surviving explorers was quoted as saying. “But I can’t think of any cause for the lanterns to fade in and out.”
Against the advice of the group, spelunker Gregg Ross rappelled into a crevasse. When he did not reappear, George Cooper followed to assist. Minutes later, both returned. “I’ll be right back,” Mr. Cooper was reported to have said, as he went back into the crevasse alone. He was never seen again. His rope was retrieved,
severed. For twenty-four hours, firefighters, policemen, and volunteers attempted search and rescue. No member of the rescue team reported compass or light malfunction. Mr. Cooper was never located. When interviewed, Mr. Ross was unable to recall any detail of the spelunking trip.

“Mr. Cooper’s different,” I said. Charon nodded. “He helps people figure out they’re dead, doesn’t he?” I asked. “I saw him on your boat in one of the pictures.”

Charon shrugged. “Yes, he is unlike the others. Cooper is my assistant. Long ago, he made a pact with another, and this put him out of my grasp. Over time, he has seen the error of his agreement. Now he watches the others as they learn and go, hoping to find a way for himself.”

“Another?” I asked, but Charon did not answer. Dread, like ice water, trickled down my spine as I considered what kind of supernatural creatures could be waiting in the cracks of the earth for an unlucky traveler. What creature could cheat death? What price had Mr. Cooper paid? I turned the page.

Nora Alpert.
Nora had been brushing her teeth when a weak spot in an artery blew like a bald tire. My friend had been dead before her body had hit the ground, her awesome brain drowned in blood. Her coin-collecting dad
pounded at the door, but her body blocked it closed. That was why she’d been so set on locking the secret room.

The brain obscures the events of death
, Charon had told me. Maybe part of Nora believed she’d locked that bathroom door, instead of dying against it, like Jessie, who believed she’d buckled her seat belt. Suddenly, I remembered the day of Brynn’s egging, how horrified Nora had been. “The door’s locked,” she’d said about the balcony doors. But then she’d changed to say, “It’s blocked.” Had seeing Brynn trapped behind that door helped Nora start to figure it out, then?

I touched her obituary and missed her like crazy. Nora’s whole life was so short there on the page, not at all saying how cool she was, how her runner’s legs had been so strong they had taken her wherever she needed to go. I blew my nose.
Good-bye, Nora, I’ll miss you
, I thought.

The next obituary was one of those weekend edition articles. It had a photograph of a swollen and frail girl in a hospital bed, surrounded by family and flowers. My fingers felt cold on the paper, and I remembered what Charon had said. “Usually, by the time a person meets with me, they have completely passed.” I pointed at the book. “She’s not dead.”

I guess Charon didn’t need to peer over to see who I was talking about. He said, “She is here but not dead.”

The first article was a request for donations. The family’s oldest daughter had died of illness, the article said, and a few months later, their younger daughter was diagnosed with the same disease.

“She’s going to fight it,” her father was quoted as saying.

The next article about her:
Hope Remains Strong for Family of Illness-Struck Girl.

Then:
Local Charity Raises 100K for Treatment of Ten-Year--Old Tamara Stratford
.

The next one:
Valiant Efforts Fade as Girl Slips into Coma.

From a magazine, instead of a paper:
Right-to-Life Battle Wages in Small Town
. It read:

The two quotes were separated by a grainy black-and-white photo of my roommate. Not the snarky girl I knew, but pale and slack-faced, bald in spots from rubbing against her pillows. By chance or not, the photographer had caught a glimmer of a smile on Tamara’s face as she lay there, surrounded by family.

“How is she here if she’s also there?” I asked.

“She is both places and neither. More like a weekend visitor than a full-time resident in either life. She fights to live. But there is not much for her in that hospital bed. She comes here to grow and learn as a normal child would.”

I glanced down at the picture again. Two teenage boys sat on the empty hospital bed next to Tamara’s. They were identified in the print as her cousins.

“They were in my room.” I jabbed my finger at one of the boys. “She told me they weren’t, but they were.”

“The reality around Tamara is warped. What you saw that night were living boys bleeding through into our world. Just as when you sat too close to Tamara, you perceived the hospital and her illness, the vortex into her other world. It made you sick. It makes her sick as well. She smells death on you.”

Ew. I didn’t want to smell like death. I gave my pit a discreet sniff. I didn’t smell anything. Still, I felt bad. I thought about the night I had hugged Tamara, the antiseptic smell floating around her.

“Will she die?” I asked. Charon didn’t reply. After a moment I realized the answer. Of course. Everyone dies.

T
he next page was mine. I knew before I even read it. The article was no more or less ordinary than any other I had seen:
Minor in Grave Condition After Pool Party Tragedy
. Below, it read:
Police and EMS were summoned to 113 Peacock Circle at nine o’clock yesterday evening in response to a drowning. Reports indicate horseplay resulted in the victim being pushed into the Jacuzzi, where her long hair was drawn into the drain, trapping her underwater. Rescue and resuscitation efforts were performed by minors in attendance. The victim was transported to Community Hospital and is listed in grave condition. Drug use or foul play do not appear to be factors, although a toxicology report is pending.

For a moment, I am there again.
“… go swimming,” she says. The shove knocks the wind out of me. I spy the first star in the sky. Then bubbles in the water. The hard scrape against my butt as I hit the underwater bench, and still I’m falling. Water up my nose …

On the next page I saw:
Camden Fisher, fourteen, died Monday due to complications from a near drowning earlier this month. Services will be held at Goode & Sons on Thursday, from ten to noon.

You might think seeing that kind of thing would be a terrible shock. But it wasn’t. It was like part of me that was suffocating could breathe again. At least once I knew the truth, I could go from there. I had drowned. My funeral was on a weekday.

Sitting in the gold-and-navy-striped club chair, I opened my mouth. Instead of words, a gush of water spilled out. It was the weirdest thing — not like throwing up, when your stomach muscles get all sprung. It was my lungs squeezing the water up and out. I tried to shut the book in my lap, horrified I’d ruin it. Well, as much as a person can be horrified while she is coughing up Jacuzzi water. It spilled all over my obituary. And disappeared. Ghost water, I guessed. The pages stayed dry. I gagged up another waterfall. I should have known better than to think Charon would try and help me or anything. He stared over my head, out the window, at the black sea and moonlight.

When my lungs were clear, they stung something awful. And then it was like I was really breathing. Like somehow, I had been walking around with pneumonia or half a lung
without even knowing it. I took a deep breath and laughed. I guess I was high from the extra oxygen. I thought:
This must be what newborn babies feel like, getting air for the first time. I always thought they were crying, but I bet if it’s like this, then they’re trying to laugh
. Everything smelled a thousand times wonderful.

And then something made me want to start bawling all over again. It was the smell of my mother. I looked all around, expecting to see her. There was no one but me and the boatman.

“My mom told me I didn’t have to go if I didn’t want to.” Even though I was sitting there in that comfy club chair at sea level, everything inside me was also standing at the open door of an airplane. I was in that moment before you jump out and slip into weightlessness, right before you cannonball into gravity.
Do I have a parachute?
All this time, Charon had been leading me to the edge, and now here I was, pinwheeling my arms and not able to scream because everything inside of me knew that this was what I came for. I closed my eyes and fell.

It was a memory. The first thing I saw were my mom’s hands on a brown storage box. I was home, packing for
school. Except it wasn’t exactly a memory at all, because the box wasn’t in my room. It was on a hospital bed. And I was in the bed, and there was something in my mouth and all the way down my throat. I waited for my mom to show me that dorky picture of me and Lia. The only thing I heard was the mechanical hiss of a ventilator. The memory of sitting in my room with my mom, packing for boarding school, got peeled apart and I saw what had happened.

My mother had brought the box to my bedside during the week I had been between dead and alive. It was full of my old stuff — pictures, that teddy bear my dad had won at the fair for me. I had never told her about my airplane dream. Instead, she’d brushed my hair and held my hand and I said nothing at all.

And then something happened. First, machines started to beep, all irregular and alarmlike. Then the sharp squeak of nurse shoes on the floor. I tried to concentrate on the warmth of my mom’s hand on mine, but it felt like I was floating away from her.

My whole arm smarted like a bee sting. The feeling crawled up to my shoulder and into my chest. Everything went bright-colored flowers behind my eyelids, and my heart thumped hard. The beeping got steady. After a while,
I could hear the slow squeak of nurse shoes departing. Until at last only my mom was still there, holding my hand. I tried to squeeze back. In my mind’s eye, I could see her sitting next to me. She looked like a vacuum and I had tripped over her cord and unplugged her from the wall.
This is just a dream
, I wanted to tell her right away. Anything to make her feel better. She stared down at the carpet, the way she did when she had lots of things on her mind and was trying to figure out which one she wanted to say.

Mom scooched her chair close to the bed so she could put her forehead on my forehead, and she brushed my hair with her fingers. I heard her sniffle, and felt her tears on my cheeks. I could smell the good mom smell of her. It made my scared feelings go away. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her.

The monitors started to beep again, urgent and erratic and far away. My mom whispered in my ear, “Well, Camden. You don’t have to go if you really don’t want to.”

And that’s how we both knew I was going for sure.

It was still night when I woke up. Charon was gone, and there was an old quilt thrown over me. My eyes were crusty
and swollen, but it felt like all the tears were out of me. My spine popped from the small of my back all the way up to my neck when I sat up. I wrapped the quilt around me and stepped out of the building onto the dock. Charon stood in the moonlight. He turned to me and every little cell in my body suddenly wanted to jump off the dock and swim away.
Little late there, survival reflex
, I thought.
Where were you in the Jacuzzi?

“So what happens now?” I asked.

“Do you have passage?” he asked.

I felt in my pocket for the gold coin. “Yeah.”

When he turned back to me, his face was terrifying and skeletal. “It is time for you to fulfill your requirement. Think on everything I have shown you, and make your visitation.”

I shivered. “What if I can’t? I mean, if I’m not ready?” I asked.

Even though he was a little bit away from me, it felt like he was also right there, breathing on my skin. I got the crazy idea that he was barely restraining himself, like in a moment, he would cross the distance and grab me up against his old-paper body and suck the soul right out of my body, ship or no ship, ready or not. He didn’t, though.
Instead, he said completely the opposite of what I expected. “You may go back to school if you feel you have more to learn. I can make it so you do not remember that you are dead. You will rediscover it eventually and experience this night again. Some of your classmates have chosen to do this instead of crossing. A few have done so many times.”

He said the last so casually that I wondered if maybe I had already been here and chosen to forget. I could not imagine wanting to ever do this again.

There was an old pay phone against the wall of the clubhouse, and I knew what I was supposed to do, but I couldn’t move.

“I can’t,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”

He said, “This is not for you. It is for her.”

As soon as I put the phone to my ear, the line started ringing. It rang and rang. A gentle wind blew in my face, salty and damp.

“Hello?” Lia asked, over the phone line. Hearing her voice was like getting punched right in the nose. My eyes stung and my head was full of stars. There were a million things I wanted to say. They logjammed in my head.

I guess she knew it was me, though, because she started bawling. My cheeks felt cold and I realized I was crying, too.

“Hi,” I said.

“You’re not really here,” she said. “I’m making you up.”

“That’s funny,” I said, into the phone. “I was thinking the same thing about you.”

She laughed and sniffled, all together, like it was one thing. “I waited so long, and nothing. I thought if …” Her voice broke. “You would come back and let me know it was OK. You know. After.”

I thought about all those times I’d wanted to call her and had been angry instead, and when I’d called her and listened to her breathe on the other end of the line.

“I got here as quick as I could,” I said.

“Tell me something. Like a message that I couldn’t make up on my own, so I know it’s you.”

I thought about it. Then I said, “The summer we were ten, we dressed your dog up in your old baby clothes, put him in a stroller, and walked him around the neighborhood.” I choked up.

“I hate you!” Lia yelled into the phone. I guess she must have believed it was me then. “How could you die on me? You ruined my life!”

“
I
ruined
your
life?” It was all that I could do not to hang up. She was alive. And I was in a strange place, away from my family and friends, dead. All because of her. Who did she think she was?

“I’m the girl who killed my best friend!” she screamed.

The first star in the sky. Then the bubbles in the water. The hard scrape against my butt as I hit the underwater bench, and still I’m falling. Water up my nose. The back of my head hits bottom. Ouch. I try to flail my way to the surface, but something down here yanks me back.

“My hair got caught,” I whispered, running my hand through what was left on my head. Not a sleek little bob at all, but hacked and ripped out of my scalp, by the feel of it. “The drain?” How many times had Lia and I tickled our toes on the suction there?
Up there in the breathable air of the end-of-summer party, they are still laughing. I thrash my legs and pull at my hair, but I’m caught. Lia’s legs plunge in. She yanks my arm. “Ouch,” I try to tell her, but I can’t. Her hands grope down over my face, into my hair where it connects to the drain. Through the water, I can hear her yelling, screaming, “Something’s wrong. Turn off the power!”

More legs splash in, churning up so many bubbles I can almost
breathe down here. They yank me, but still, I’m stuck. Kevin starts bailing water out with his two cupped hands, like he thinks he’s gonna empty the Jacuzzi before I drown down here. Somebody’s knee comes down on my stomach and I puke air bubbles. Reflexively, I gasp, and when that chlorinated water comes in, it stings. I cough it out, but my stupid lungs keep sucking it back in
. I’m drowning,
I think. Where’s Lia? The worst is she’s not in the Jacuzzi anymore. How could she leave me like this?

And then there’s a huge splash. “MOVE!” Lia shouts. She plunges a big, serrated knife through the water. I know what it’s for. It’s to cut cake, after hamburgers.

What’s she doing? I’m not cake,
I think. Everything is weirdly funny, and the need to breathe has passed. I must be a mermaid
.
Lia’s down here with me now, too, and in the water, her face is crumpled in sobs.
Hey, don’t cry,
I try to say.

And then my best friend takes the knife to the back of my head and starts sawing my hair. It feels like my head is a giant, wiggly tooth. She has to go up once, twice, to breathe. The last strands pop, and I am free, coming up, in Lia’s arms. And when I break the surface, everyone is screaming.

“You saved me,” I whispered into the phone.

“No, I didn’t.” Her voice sounds like she was the one who drowned. “You died anyway.”

I held the phone to my ear and said, “Dork, you totally did. It was the water that got me.”

“I don’t hate you,” she whispered, after a few moments.

“I knew that,” I said. Lia laughed and sobbed, like she was stuck inside an emotion blender, and all the things I loved about her were coming through the phone line as soup. My heart swelled up like a new bruise to hear them. When she was done, I listened to her breathe. It felt good to hear the
ticktock
of her body.

“Tell me something else about us,” she said. “You know, some secret.”

The wind shifted and the waves lapped against the dock posts under my feet.

“I had a secret crush on Kevin Meyers,” I said out loud before I even thought it.

It surprised a laugh out of her. “I knew that,” she said, echoing my tone. Then she sobbed like I had stepped on her fingers until the bones broke, but that wasn’t the worst. The worst was that her voice was getting faint, like someone was turning the volume down. I pressed the phone hard against my ear. “You were worth a million of that guy. I’m so sorry.”

I knew what she’d done. One stupid, impulsive thing.
She’d also been my best friend since second grade. “I forgive you, on one condition.”

“Anything,” she said.

I thought about Mark, still stuck back at school. It felt like my chest opened up and the wild bird that’d been trapped inside flew out, free. I said, “You have to forgive yourself. You have to let me go.”

“I can’t.” She wailed.

“I know who you are,” I said. “Promise me.” For a long time, it was only the sound of her crying, and I was scared for her.

But at last she said, “OK,” and I knew by her promise it would be.

There were a billion more things I wanted to tell her, but the phone was getting more static with every second. I said, “Tell my parents I’m safe and good. Tell them, I’m … um … I’m graduating.” I was shouting into the phone.

From very far away, I heard Lia say, “I’m graduating, too.” It stole my heart out of my chest. In real time, in alive time, had all of high school passed? I was going to miss Lia’s whole life.

In the last few seconds that I knew she was on the line, I searched my head like mad to give her something good. I
finally realized there was only one thing I had to say. “I love you,” I yelled.