“Is this seat taken?” I went over to her and asked.
She ignored me. It took me a second or two to realize that she wasn’t snubbing me. She was wearing earbuds. I hadn’t been able to tell because her giant aurora of dark curly hair, shot here and there with streaks of bright purple, hid them.
She looked up from the screen of her cell phone when I tapped her on the shoulder, then said, “Oh, sorry,” and moved her legs for me to get by.
“Thanks,” I said, and collapsed into the seat next to hers.
I should have known, of course, that it was going to go like this. Not just after last night — I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure any of that had happened, even after Alex’s story about the poinciana blossoms. The storm had swept most of them away by the time I got up — but after getting to school and seeing that I was one of the only girls wearing a skirt that wasn’t a mini. Mine, in accordance with the IHHS student handbook, which Mom and I had pored over, especially the section marked Student Dress Code, was exactly no more than four inches above my knee, just like the handbook specified.
How was I supposed to know that the dress code was in no way enforced — particularly the ban on “bare midriffs and low-riding or sagging pants or slacks” — when I hadn’t met any people my own age from Isla Huesos until today? What time I hadn’t spent biking around the cemetery in the past week before school started, hoping to catch a glimpse of John, I’d spent hanging out on the couch with Alex and his dad in front of the TV at Grandma’s.
And Alex, a typical guy, had answered, “I don’t know. Clothes,” when Mom and I asked him what girls at IHHS wore to school.
The girl next to me — lip and eyebrow piercings — turned back to the screen of her phone as soon as I’d sat down. Some people might have thought it impolite to eavesdrop on what she was doing. Not me. True, to an outsider it might have looked like I was snooping…maybe because I myself had no cell phone.
But actually, Tim, the head of the New Pathways program, had taken mine away before school. He said I could have it back at the end of the day. He thought that I’d focus better and “interact more” if I couldn’t go online.
I didn’t bother arguing. I knew from what had happened at my school last year that everything he was saying was true.
I’d told my best friend, Hannah, the day I’d come back after my accident that I’d protect her from the evil.
But I hadn’t. Instead, hurt by the fact that she had called me crazy, still numbed by what I’d seen John do in the jeweler’s shop, and worried he’d come back someday and do it to me next time, I’d just lain back inside my glass coffin and waited for my handsome prince to come rescue me.
That’s how I hadn’t noticed the evil. Not the kind people like to pretend is real, the kind they tell ghost stories and make horror movies about.
But the real evil that had been roaming the halls of the Westport Academy for Girls, looking for the sweetest, most innocent victim it could find.
By the time I finally realized there are no handsome princes — that it was all up to me…that it had always been up to me — it was too late.
Hannah was dead.
And unlike me, she was never coming back.
Broke the deep lethargy within my head
A heavy thunder, so that I upstarted,
Like to a person who by force is wakened.
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto IV
In a way, I’m grateful to Mr. Mueller, who started teaching at the Westport Academy for Girls last year, when I was a junior. He gave me the one thing I was beginning to think I’d never have: that interest outside of academics in which to “engage” that Mrs. Keeler recommended my parents find for me after the accident.
Mr. Mueller skyrocketed to instant popularity with both the student body and their parents at the Westport Academy for Girls after being hired as the new basketball coach and taking the team to the state finals.
As if that were not enough, he also began offering free private tutoring sessions after school for his “special” students…even those of us who, like me, had been moved to all “alternative” classes, thanks to what had finally been diagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, predominantly inattentiveness.
Of course, being the only young, good-looking male instructor at a K–12 girls’ school — not to mention an athletic coach — Mr. Mueller probably would have been popular anyway.
But the free tutoring helped.
I seemed to be the only person in the entire school who was suspicious of Mr. Mueller and his motives right from the start. Maybe it was because one of my dad’s favorite expressions was “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” No one is that self-sacrificing, especially when all he’s getting out of it is homemade cookies from his students’ grateful moms.
It was only when a crumb from one of those cookies fell onto my bare knee as Mr. Mueller was bent over my desk, helping me with a particularly difficult algebra problem during class one day, that I first noticed anything strange about him, aside from his stunningly good looks and apparent overabundance of free time.
“Oops,” Mr. Mueller said, pressing the crumb into my knee with his finger. He then lifted his finger to his mouth and sucked the piece of cookie off it. Then he smiled down at me. “Sorry about that!”
Maybe a girl who hadn’t died and then ended up getting followed around by a disturbingly large, silver-eyed guy who’d once tried to force her to live with him might have said to herself only Huh. That guy must really like cookies.