We emerged on the roof. Dozens of other chimney stacks poked out around us.
“The ladders were for the chimney sweeps,” Eleanor explained, counting three stacks to the right, and then two down. “This one,” she said before climbing inside.
Descending was faster than going up. Eleanor counted to herself as she stepped tenuously down the rungs—15, 14, 13, 12—and then stopped.
“I thought Genevieve Tart was on the Board of Monitors,” I said. “Aren’t they supposed to follow the rules?”
Eleanor glanced up at me. A finger of soot was smudged across the right side of her forehead. “Exactly. Lynch would never suspect Genevieve.” Eleanor tapped the flue twice with her foot. After a moment, it creaked open. “And besides,” she said just before squeezing her body through the narrow hole leading to the fireplace, “this was her idea.”
Genevieve’s room was lit by candlelight. Seven candles were positioned in a broken circle on the floor, and seven girls were lounging about the room. I knew some of them from my classes; a few others were friends of Eleanor’s. The rest were juniors who I had seen around campus but never met before. There were legs everywhere—Maggie’s thin calves draped over a bed frame as she talked to Katherine; Greta’s athletic thighs crossed on the carpet, cradling a magazine; Charlotte’s pale knees, which she hugged while Rebecca braided her hair; Bonnie’s ankles, just visible beneath her nightgown as she opened the windows; and Genevieve’s long, tan legs, which stemmed from a pair of blue shorts.
“Finally,” Greta said, closing her magazine.
Eleanor wiped her hands on her thighs. “Are we the last ones?” she asked, lighting our candles and placing them on the floor with the others.
Charlotte nodded. Charlotte was Genevieve’s roommate. She had large eyes and banana curls that bounced when she walked. The walls above her bed were plastered with posters of actors and musicians, the most prominent being David Bowie, whose hollowed face stared back at me over the foot of her bed.
In contrast, Genevieve’s side of the room was pink and neat and bespoke an obsessive attention to order. Everything was placed in a careful arrangement: the makeup on her dresser in perfect symmetry, the notebooks and folders on her desk all organized by color, the photographs on the wall framed and centered.
Eleanor nestled herself between the girls and introduced me. “Everyone not in the know, this is Renée. She’s my roommate.”
Genevieve gave me a fake smile. “We know who she is. Why do you think she was invited?” Then she looked at me. “The headmistress is always talking about you. She says you’re one of the best students in your year in Horticulture.”
I gave her a confused look. I hadn’t met the headmistress. How could she be talking about me? But Eleanor cut me off before I could say anything.
“And she’s dating Dante Berlin.” She smiled, her blue eyes growing wide as everyone in the room looked at me with new interest.
Genevieve cocked her head. “Really?”
I blushed. “We’re not dating. We’re just friends.”
Eleanor rolled her eyes. “She’s being modest. Dante is practically obsessed with her. He’s even tutoring her in Latin.”
“That’s not true. I mean, he is tutoring me, but it’s just because I’m terrible at it. And the headmistress couldn’t have said that about me. I’ve never even met her.”
This didn’t seem to bother Eleanor. “Professors talk. Maybe Professor Mumm told her about you.”
“And you shouldn’t be so sure that you and Dante are just friends,” Charlotte said, tossing her curly hair over her shoulder. “Latin is a Romance language, isn’t it?”
“Don’t be stupid, Charlotte,” Genevieve snorted. “It’s a Latinate language.”
Charlotte looked stung by her remark. “But aren’t the Romance languages based on Latin?” she asked.
“The language is dead,” Genevieve said with a hand on her hip. “Just like the people who spoke it.”
A rigid silence fell over the room, and Genevieve stood up and cleared her throat. “Okay, is everyone ready?”
She opened a leather-bound book titled Talking to the Dead and began to call out instructions. “Sit in a circular formation. Position a candle in front of each person, thus forming two concentric circles.”
It took me a few seconds to realize what we were doing, but when I did, I had to suppress a groan. “A séance? Really?” I mouthed to Eleanor after we sat down. She was right; I did think it was stupid. Nonetheless, I couldn’t leave now. We sat in a circle around the candles. Eleanor was to my right, Genevieve to my left. Our shadows flickered across the walls.
“The sacrificial flesh, when burned, should form a triangle,” Genevieve read.
I pinched Eleanor.
“Ow!” she squealed. Genevieve squinted at her.
She passed around a pair of metal scissors, and we each snipped off a lock of hair and held it over the flame of our candle until it ignited. Instantly, the room was filled with the stench of burning hair. Eleanor winced. I coughed and wafted the smoke from away from my face, but Genevieve didn’t flinch. Without asking, she took the top sheet from Charlotte’s bed and laid it on the floor. After all the hair had burned out of her candle, she took it and dripped wax across the sheet so that it formed a large triangle within the circle of candles.
Charlotte gasped.
“Relax,” Genevieve scolded. “It’s just wax; it’ll come off. Now, we all have to concentrate on our ‘object,’ or, in other words, the dead person, which Charlotte and I have decided will be the first headmaster of Gottfried Academy, Bertrand Gottfried.”
Before she continued, Eleanor interrupted. “Why do you get to decide?”
“Because I organized it. And we have to see if it will even work.”
“But I don’t want to talk to him.”
“Do you have a better suggestion?”
Eleanor went silent. “What about a celebrity or something.” She winked at me. “Or how about Benjamin Gal-low?” Now I understood why Eleanor made sure I came. I gave her the beginnings of a smile.
Genevieve rolled her eyes. “What, so you can ask him how he died? We all know how it happened, Eleanor. He had a heart attack.”