Dead Beautiful

We barely spoke during class. The sky was overcast, and Professor Starking switched off the lights and turned on a projector. Suddenly an image appeared on the wall. It was a photograph of outer space, of a rust-colored cloud of dust cresting upward like fingers.

“The Pillars of Creation,” Professor Starking said. “This is what stars look like before they’re formed. They’re called celestial nebulas.”

He flipped to the next slide, and then the next—each of different nebulas, their otherworldly forms projecting onto the darkened wall of the Observatory.

“What did you want to tell me?” I whispered to Dante.

“I can’t tell you here,” he replied, studying the images. “It’s too important.” In the blue light of the projector, his face emerged out of the darkness like a ghost. I tried to imagine what it was he wanted to say to me. He’d profess his undying love. Renée, he would say, I love you. Run away with me. We’ll go north into the wilderness and live desperately, dangerously. And I would say yes. Or maybe that’s not what he had planned at all. If it was, why couldn’t he just say it here, in the darkness of the Observatory? Things said in private were usually bad things: things that were too shameful, too embarrassing to declare in the light of day, in front of other people. If he loved me, wouldn’t he want to tell me as quickly as possible? I self-consciously adjusted my skirt. Maybe he’d changed his mind. It had been dark in his room last night; maybe now he could see flaws he hadn’t noticed before—blemishes, the scar under my chin, the way my ears always seemed too large.

Professor Starking stepped back to admire the nebula projected on the wall. “At first glance, they may seem strange and alien,” he said. “But all of us are made of the elements you see here. Their beauty lies in confusion. It gives them a kind of energy that fully formed stars don’t have.”

While the slides were shifting, Dante inched closer to me and slipped his hand into mine. I trembled at his touch, his palms cool and dry.

Neither of us dared to look at the other. Instead, we remained stoic, keeping our eyes trained on the pictures. I shifted closer to him, pressing my leg against his. To the rest of the class we looked like a boy and girl sitting side by side. But beneath the surface, everything within me was trying to burst out into a swirling cloud of particles, ephemeral and constantly changing, like stardust.

By curfew Eleanor still wasn’t back. It was unusual: she always came back before lights-out, but I was too excited about meeting Dante to dwell on her absence. She was probably in the library, asleep in one of her books, or out working on the school play for the Humanities department. I would see her when I got back tonight, and then I could tell her everything.

I sat on my bed, hovering over my books but not looking at them. Instead, I was gazing impatiently at the clock, counting down the minutes until I would see Dante. When the hands finally reached 10:45, I opened the flue, pulled myself into the chimney, and began to climb down to the basement. I was still wearing my school clothes—a herringbone skirt, black tights, and an oxford shirt with an overcoat on top to keep me from getting sooty.

The climb didn’t seem so bad now that I had something to look forward to at the end. I was so anxious to see Dante that I barely noticed the cobwebs and dust and crumbling brick. But when I reached the bottom of the chute, something wasn’t right.

The flue was only partially open, just enough for me to squeeze my body through. Instead of the normal hissing sounds that the furnace gave off, it was completely silent. In the distance, I could hear water trickling. And then drips, like a faucet leaking into a bathtub full of water.

I climbed down a rung, and then another, until I was almost completely out of the chimney. But as I lowered my foot to the last rung, my leg became submerged in water. I pulled it back and leaned out the bottom of the chute to see what was going on.

The entire basement was flooded with water, which had risen to just feet below the ceiling. I sighed, only now remembering what the maintenance workers had said to Mrs. Lynch outside the girls’ dormitory. The water was dark and placid, barely rippling from the disturbance of my foot. The hanging lights reflected dim yellow orbs in its surface, like beams of flashlights shining up from beneath.

For some reason I felt pulled to the room, as though an invisible force were towing me down. I scanned the basement, searching for some way to get outside, but it was useless. Reluctantly, I climbed back into the chimney. My left shoe was soaked, and squeaked as I ascended, each step taking me farther and farther away from Dante. When I got back to my room I called his landline, but the phone rang and rang and rang, and I went to bed imagining him waiting for me in front of the chapel, leaning against the stone beneath the gargoyles, his face slipping into the shadows.

It took ten days to drain all of the water from the basement. The Maine winter crept up on us early, preserving the entire campus in a thin layer of ice. It was early December and the ground outside was hard and impenetrable, so they pumped the excess water into the lake, using long floppy hoses that trailed across the pathways like the arms of a jellyfish. Every morning I stepped over them as I walked to class, unaware that the water inside was freezing, preventing them from emptying the basement sooner. If it had been eight days, or even nine, things might have turned out differently. But numbers are strange and uncontrollable; they operate under their own set of rules. And as I would soon discover, ten was an entire rule unto itself.

In the meantime, we used the boys’ bathroom every morning at eight a.m., and every evening at eight p.m. But the problem in the basement was more than just an inconvenience. It meant that I could only see Dante in class. The basement was the only way out of the dorms at night, or at least the only way that I knew of.

But let me start from the beginning. On the night that I discovered the flood, I had trouble getting to sleep. I paced around my room, staring at the fireplace, waiting for Eleanor to climb through it, but she never did. Eventually I gave up and collapsed in my bed. Pulling the covers over my head, I fell asleep, dreaming about Dante and our night together, and hoping that he was dreaming of me too.

But the flood was just the beginning of a strange chain of events that was taking place at Gottfried.

Eleanor didn’t come back the next morning. I woke up from a dream only to be sobered by the sight of her unruffled bed. I immediately went next door to Maggie and Greta’s room. Maggie opened the door with a yawn. She hadn’t seen Eleanor since Grub Day, which was already two days ago. I went to see Bonnie and then Rebecca, and finally Genevieve. They hadn’t seen her either.