Dead Beautiful

Nurse Irmgard turned her attention to me. “Just a little prick,” she said, and inserted an IV drip into my forearm.

“You’ll have to stay on this for twenty-four hours in order to replenish all of your water content.”

“Okay,” I tried to say, though no sound came out. My mouth was dry and frothy. I took one last look at her and let myself drift into sleep.

I woke up after dark to a flickering fluorescent light. The nurses’ wing was the only place on campus that was permitted to have artificial lights after sunset. At ten o’clock a nurse checked on me one last time, then retreated to her office for the night. I waited until I heard her door close, and saw the lights switch off, and then pulled the IV out of my arm and stood up. My clothes were piled on the countertop. I rummaged through them until I found my jacket, and took Nathaniel’s glasses out of the pocket.

I walked down the hall in my hospital gown, my bare feet slapping softly against the tile floor. Every time I passed a room I peeked through the window in the door. Finally I found Nathaniel’s room. Trying to keep quiet, I pushed open the door.

When I stepped inside, I was met with an odor so acrid that I had to steady myself against the wall before continuing forward. The burning hair at the séance had given off a similar smell, though this was stronger and more concentrated. The smell of decay. Was this what happened when an Undead was buried? I opened the windows. A draft floated in, and my hospital gown billowed around me.

Nathaniel was lying in bed. The outline of his frail body jutted out under a thin white sheet. A fly circled above him.

I swatted it away. Traces of soil still stained the edges of his face, and his eyes were closed. Without his glasses he looked tired and old—much older than he actually was. The skin on his cheeks sagged, and purple bags hung under his eyes. A folding chair was positioned by his bed, and I sat down in it, watching him shift around in bed, the closest he would ever get to dreaming.

“Renée?” he said in a small voice, squinting at me.

I jumped. I didn’t think he was conscious. “It’s me.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I ate a bottle of salt.”

Nathaniel tried to ask a question, but could only mouth it. “Why?”

“So I could see you.”

“That’s a little extreme.” His voice cracked. “They’re going to let me go in a few days.”

I highly doubted that. I wasn’t even sure if he could sit up.

He patted around the nightstand for his glasses. “Salt is a preservative, you know.”

Typical Nathaniel, lying on what could have been his deathbed, talking about the chemical properties of salt. “I have them,” I said, holding up his glasses. “I found them on the lawn.”

“Thanks,” he said. His fingers trembled as he pushed them onto his nose.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just tired.”

I looked at him in disbelief. He didn’t look fine. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice weak, as if he barely had breath to speak the words. “It’s just a little dirt.”

I sat back in my chair. So he was still denying the fact that he was Undead. “Nathaniel, you were buried. We both know what that means for you. You don’t have to lie. I know what you are and it doesn’t matter to me.”

I touched his arm, but he pulled away.

“Fine,” I conceded. “You’re fine.”

Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. Eventually I broke the silence. “So what happened?”

“After you showed me the files you found in Gideon’s room, I got interested. I wanted to go back and look through them again, but they were already gone. I was sure Gideon had followed you to the library and taken them back. So I snuck into his room to look for them.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know. I’m just not like you, Renée. I don’t really tell people things.”

I fidgeted with the tail of my hospital gown.

Nathaniel lapsed into a fit of coughing. I offered him a glass of water, but he refused. “I’m not that good at snooping, so it took me a while to find anything. But eventually I found the files. And Eleanor’s diary.”

I shook my head. “What?” I had completely forgotten it had even been stolen.

“I found it in Gideon’s room. And inside, there were all these notes in Latin about where she went and what she did and at what time. Parts of her schedule were circled, like he was memorizing her routine.”

So it was Gideon who killed Eleanor, I thought, my mind racing. But why? “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I asked, incredulous. “Do you still have it?”

“No. I only found it yesterday. The night before the play. I took it from his room and was running to the headmistress’s office to show her, when I ran into Brandon Bell on the green. I figured I might as well just show him, since he was on the Board of Monitors. But when he saw Eleanor’s folder and diary, with all the notes in it, he went totally berserk. He started accusing me of attacking Eleanor. He kept asking me why I killed her.

“I tried to tell him that she was still alive, but it just made him angrier. Then I told him that it was Gideon who had taken the diary, but he was too angry to listen.

“He brought me to the boys’ dormitory and locked me in a broom closet. When he let me out, he was carrying a shovel and a burlap bag. I tried to get away, but he was stronger. He stuffed my mouth, put the sack over my head, and pushed me across the lawn.

“He said, ‘I’m going to make an example of you, the same way you made an example of Eleanor. Then you people will finally see what happens when you kill innocent girls.’

“Then Brandon brought me to the green. And you know what happened next.”

I was speechless. Brandon buried Nathaniel alive? That meant that Brandon knew about the Undead. He knew that Eleanor was Undead and he knew that Nathaniel was Undead. Either that or it was a huge coincidence that he chose to bury him. “But how? Why? Why would Gideon kill Eleanor? He barely knew her.” I almost confused myself saying it.

“I don’t know,” Nathaniel said meekly. “But Brandon has her diary now, and all of the folders.”

That must have been what he was flipping through when I saw him earlier today with the headmistress.