Dead Beautiful

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.