“What’s going on?”
“There’s no running water,” Rebecca said.
“What happened? The entire first floor is flooded!”
“We don’t know,” said Maggie. “Lynch is on her way up now to tell us, I think.”
“Have you seen Eleanor?”
Maggie shook her head. She hadn’t put her contacts in yet, and seemed self-conscious in her glasses. “We figured she was with you.”
“Oh,” I said nonchalantly, not wanting to let on that I wasn’t in my room last night. “Maybe she’s still in the room.”
“Or maybe she’s with Genevieve,” Charlotte said. Her hair was pinned around her head in rollers. She was clutching a loofah and shower caddy with dozens of shampoo and cosmetic bottles inside. “She wasn’t in our room this morning when I woke up.”
“She probably had an early Board of Monitors meeting,” said Maggie, almost bitterly. “She’s never around anymore.”
Charlotte shrugged and started talking about her plans for winter break, when the door to the hallway swung open. Mrs. Lynch bounded down the hall, her heels clicking on the wood floors.
“Girls,” she shouted.
Everyone quieted down.
“It seems there’s been a plumbing malfunction in the bathroom. It’s likely that one of the pipes froze overnight and burst. Maintenance should be here within the hour to fix it and drain the water from the first floor. In the meantime, Professor Bliss has generously offered us the bathroom in the boys’ dormitory. He’s in the process of evacuating them as we speak.” Professor Bliss was their dorm parent.
A murmur ran through hall.
“So get dressed and gather your toiletries. We’re heading over in fifteen minutes.”
Stepping into the boys’ dorm was like walking into a parallel universe. The layout of the building was exactly the same, but the walls were painted a deep shade of maroon, and the sunlight seemed to dodge the windows, creating a shadowy atmosphere that would have been more fitting in a cigar shop. Everything smelled faintly of leather. A pair of dirty gym shorts dangled over the banister.
The boys’ bathroom was in the western wing of the second floor, just like our dorm. The door to the showers was propped open, and steam billowed into the hallway. Eleanor hadn’t been in our room when I’d gone back to get my towel and soap. Her bed was completely undisturbed, the pillows puffed and the covers folded and tucked. So where was she? I walked through the rows of showers, listening for her, but all of the voices belonged to other people: first years, second years, third years, but no Eleanor.
After I showered and got changed, I dawdled outside the bathroom door, waiting to see if she’d come out, but after the last girl left, I gave up and went downstairs, out into the white, wintery morning.
When I got back to the girls’ dorm, Mrs. Lynch was standing on the stoop with four maintenance workers. They were all at least a foot taller than her, and dressed in periwinkle coveralls that were soaked from the waist down.
I slowed as I passed them.
“Something went really wrong with the pipes down there,” one of the men said in a gruff voice, wiping the sweat off his temples. Gray stubble climbed up his neck, and a grease-stained rag hung out of his pocket. “It’s impossible to tell where the leak is coming from. We’ll have to shut off the water in the building and drain it. In the meantime, you’ll have to make do with space heaters and the fireplaces. We’ll work on getting enough wood.”
I lingered on the top step to wait for Lynch’s reply, but she must have noticed I was listening, because she glanced up at me and glared. Not wanting to get into any more trouble, I hurried through the doors and went back to my room, unable to shake the three words that kept running through my mind: The Gottfried Curse.
I didn’t tell anyone else about the curse or my night with Dante. I would have told Eleanor, but she never showed up for Latin. Or Philosophy. In fact, she didn’t go to any classes at all. I sat taking notes while Miss LaBarge scribbled something about Descartes on the board. Every so often I forgot that Eleanor wasn’t there, and leaned over to whisper to her, only to be met with an empty chair. But I didn’t think much of it. Finals were coming up in a few weeks, and Eleanor’s grades were terrible. She’d been skipping meals all semester to go to the library.
Without her, classes dragged by, and I grew frustrated with her for being gone when I had so many important things to talk to her about. Eleanor would surely have a theory about the heart attacks. “Radiation below the school grounds,” she might say. “Or a mass murderer equipped with a new kind of weapon that induces heart failure.” And the cloth in both my parents’ mouths and Benjamin’s were used as gags. Maybe they were electrocuted. Maybe someone was out to get Gottfried students. But why them in particular? Nathaniel was right: there was no such thing as curses. Only people and science. So that’s what I focused on, watching the clock, counting down the minutes until the last period, when I would see Dante in Crude Sciences. Last night seemed like a dream, except I could remember every detail—the way my stomach fluttered when he kissed my neck; the way the books fell at our feet, making us stumble around them; the way our bodies left a crescent-shaped crease on his bed. I unwrapped each memory like a gift, letting Dante’s velvety voice envelop me while I drifted off in class or waited on line in the dining hall. It didn’t matter that Professor Lumbar was in a particularly bad mood or that Professor Chortle made us solve proofs for an hour and a half.
When fifth period rolled around, I walked to class anxiously, inspecting my reflection in the windows before opening the door to the Observatory.
Professor Starking bustled in behind me just as the bell rang, carrying a box of films and a messy pile of papers.
Dante was already sitting at our bench, his tie crisp around his neck and his blazer slung around the back of his chair. I approached slowly, watching him from a distance. A lock of hair dangled in front of his face as he wrote something in his notebook.
I walked up the side of the aisle until I was just behind him, and looked over his shoulder. He was writing notes in Latin. Suddenly I felt nervous, as if everything I’d ever wanted in my life was on the verge of happening and I only had to reach out and take it. But just as I lifted my hand, Dante grabbed it without looking away from his notes. I gasped. He turned to me, and with the beginnings of a smile, he brought my palm to his lips and almost imperceptibly kissed it.