“If you’re looking for incriminating information, I don’t have any. He was dead. In the woods. A heart attack, like they said.”
I studied him, trying to figure out if he was telling the truth.
“So why were you spying on Gideon that night in the library?”
“I wasn’t spying; I was studying.”
“In that exact spot in the library?”
Dante straightened out his tie. “As I recall, you were there too.”
He was right. How had I happened to find them? It was a little coincidental. So fine, maybe he had a point. But there were other things that I still had questions about.
“They mentioned Eleanor and her brother. I heard that Brandon doesn’t like you, or Gideon. Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe out of a personal distaste? Do you know why people dislike you?”
“Who dislikes me?” I said forcefully. I was a nice, considerate person. Why would anyone dislike me?
Dante grinned. “It was hypothetical.”
I blushed. “Oh. Well, how come you never talk to Eleanor, even though you sit next to her in assembly?”
“She never talks to me.”
Frowning, I leaned forward. Was he mocking me? He had legitimate answers to all of my questions; questions that I was sure would force him to reveal the truth about Benjamin and his old friends. But what kind of admission was I expecting?
“Why do you live off campus?”
“I don’t like shared bathrooms.”
“Why are your hands so cold?”
“Poor circulation.”
Sighing, I pushed my hair out of my face and collapsed back in my chair.
Tapping his fingers on the desk, Dante gave me a pensive look. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”
“Why am I the only one you talk to?” I asked softly.
Dante hesitated. “Because you’re impulsive. And stubborn. And too quick to judge. You question everything and you can’t keep your thoughts to yourself, even when you’re wrong.. ..”
Incredulous, I gaped at him and was about to interrupt, when he cut me off.
“And you’re sincere. And searching. And challenging. Even when you’re angry, you’re so full of life that it spills out of you. You think that nobody understands you,” he said gently. “But it’s not true.”
My lips trembled, and I was unsure of whether I wanted to laugh or cry. “You didn’t answer my question,” I said, trying to hide the quiver in my voice.
Dante smiled. “I talk to you because you make me laugh.”
I told Eleanor everything. Which was that I had found out nothing. And upon her advice I put my investigation on hold. The only thing I didn’t tell her about was the last bit, partly because I wanted to keep it for myself, and partly because she wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise. Eleanor had a crush on our History professor, Mr. Bliss, and couldn’t stop talking about him. So maybe he was young and sort of good-looking for a teacher, but in reality, he was closer to our parents’ age than he was to ours, and he smoked out the window before class, and he ate a weird sandwich every day for lunch that made him smell like onions.
“But it’s not just the way he looks,” Eleanor said, licking the oatmeal off her spoon. “It’s what he says. He’s brilliant.”
I rolled my eyes. We were in the dining hall, eating breakfast before class.
“Like that thing he said the other week. What was it?”
I shrugged and played with the crusts of my toast.
“Oh right, I remember,” Eleanor exclaimed. “He said, ‘The truth is generally seen but rarely heard.’ Isn’t that just so true?”
A few months ago I would have agreed with it, but now I wasn’t so sure. Nothing that I had seen in the past month had seemed like the truth. How had my parents died? How had Benjamin died? I was beginning to doubt that the truth even existed. “Ironic that he said it out loud,” I muttered.
“You’re just in a bad mood because of your Latin test.”
She was partially right. I did get a C on my exam, but that was intentional and I wasn’t about to admit it to Eleanor. Regardless of Latin, I was still convinced that most of the things Professor Bliss taught us were made up. “Okay, so what about that time he told us that Napoleon was actually a little boy? Or his theory that ghosts actually exist?”
“He’s just a spiritual person,” Eleanor said. “And how do you know who Napoleon really was? You weren’t alive back then.”
I sighed. Thankfully, it was time for class. And lucky for Eleanor, we had History.
Professor Lesley Bliss was in his late thirties. “Call me Mr. B.,” he had said on the first day. To my surprise, he was the same professor who I had walked in on teaching Advanced Latin on my first day of school. As a result, I thought he would be cold and brooding like the students he taught, when in fact he was exactly the opposite.
He was a grown-up boy, with a goofy smile and free-flowing hair that flopped in front of his eyes while he lectured. He always wore hiking clothes to class—zip-off pants and khaki shirts rolled up at the sleeves—which made him look like he had just come from digging in some exotic location.
“Burials,” he began, and approached the board, drawing several images in chalk. The first was a pyramid, the second was a funeral pyre, and the third was a coffin, just like the one I had seen on the board in Advanced Latin. I looked at it again. In Horticulture, we were also studying burials, though of course there we were using bulbs.
“Why do we bury our dead?” His nose was dented in at the bridge like a sphinx; the cause of which I could only imagine had been a freak archaeological accident.
I thought about my parents. They had requested in their will that they be buried side by side in a tiny cemetery a few miles from our house. “Because it’s respectful?”
He shook his head. “That’s true, but that’s not the reason we do it.”
But that was the reason we buried people, wasn’t it? After gazing at him in confusion, I raised my hand, determined to get the right answer. “Because leaving people out in the open is unsanitary.”
Mr. B. shook his head and scratched the stubble on his neck.
I glared at him, annoyed at his ignorance and certain that my responses were correct. “Because it’s the best way to dispose of a body?”