Life Eternal
Page 19As the class fell silent, a shudder crept through my body. All at once I felt cold and sweaty, my heart palpitating against my ribs, its beat quick and irregular. Fear—it was in me, overwhelming me, as if I knew what the professor was talking about.…
“Hey, are you okay?” Brett whispered to me. “You look kind of pale.”
Before I realized what I was doing, I blurted out the answer. “The Île des Soeurs.”
All heads turned in my direction. Confused, I slid lower in my chair. What had I just said? Something in French? I barely even knew French, and whatever phrase I had said was one I had never known before.
Monsieur Orneaux studied me. “What did you say?”
I pulled at the neck of my shirt, which suddenly felt damp and far too tight. “I—I can’t remember,” I said. The words I had just spoken were gone, as if someone else had said them.
Across the room, Clementine answered, an eyebrow raised as if challenging me. “She said, the Île des Soeurs.”
The professor studied me. “That is correct.”
“What is it?” Brett asked, looking at me and then at the professor. I let my hair fall across my face, not wanting to reveal that I had no idea what I meant.
“It’s the island just outside of—” Arielle began to answer, but Monsieur Orneaux held up a hand to silence her.
“Island of the Sisters, to Monitors,” Monsieur Orneaux translated, “Or Nuns’ Island, to regular Canadians. It is an island just outside of Montreal, known in Monitor history as the place where they used to send the Undead to be punished.
“It was a barbaric place. Run solely by female Monitors, who operated out of an old convent. They did terrible things. Torture, seclusion, exorcism. They bled the Undead with leeches, they probed them with medical equipment in an attempt to cure them of their evil….” Monsieur Orneaux’s face remained utterly calm as he recounted all the ways the early Monitors attempted to “cure” the Undead.
“It has a reputation among the Undead, though few Monitors are aware of it.” His eyes met mine, as if trying to understand how I had known the answer. “It’s one of the reasons why the Undead rarely come to Montreal. Along with, of course, the fact that Montreal is historically a Monitors’ city.”
“I’ve heard of it,” a boy with a French accent said. “The convent is still there; it’s now abandoned. In primary school there used to be a rumor that it was haunted, though I never knew why. The story was that any child who passed through the gates would disappear forever. We used to dare each other to go inside—”
Monsieur Orneaux cut him off. “That’s enough. This is not a history course.”
He was about to return to his lecture on Latin and what it told us about the Undead when Clementine raised her hand. Monsieur Orneaux ignored her until she finally just spoke up.
“Why was it run only by female Monitors?” she asked, holding the end of her pencil up to her lips.
Monsieur Orneaux clenched his jaw. “Female Monitors are not my area of expertise. If you’re interested in the Nine Sisters, go to the library in your free time.”
Monsieur Orneaux blinked, looking like he wished he could take back his last words. “That’s enough,” he said again, raising his voice for the first time. “Latin. Back to Latin.”
And picking up his class notes, he continued his lecture on roots and verbs and declensions, the Undead, and how the way they spoke could teach us about how they behaved.
I spent the rest of the afternoon gazing out the windows of my various classes, hoping I would sense Dante.
“When you restrain an Undead, the most important step is to protect your mouth,” Headmaster LaGuerre said in Strategy and Prediction, during a lecture about the art of burial. On the board he had drawn a series of diagrams of a Monitor attacking an Undead from behind, pinning him to the ground as he secured his arms and legs, and finally wrapping his head with gauze to prevent a kiss. On each of them, I mentally superimposed Dante’s head, and shuddered. How could everyone else in the room be taking notes on this? Didn’t they realize we were learning how to kill people?
“Renée?” Headmaster LaGuerre said. “Do you know what the primary cause of Monitor death is?”
Sitting up straight, I felt my cheeks flush. “I—um—no.”
“Trying to speak to the Undead in the process of burial,” Clementine said, shooting me a smug grin.
I don’t belong here, I thought. I don’t belong here.
When the last bell rang, I made my way downstairs and through the school gates. I had hours of homework to do, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t sure where I was going, exactly, only that St. Clément was the last place I would find Dante, which meant that if I wanted to see him, my best chance would be out in the city.
I only made it a few blocks before I caught a glimpse of a gray Peugeot, just like the one I’d seen Miss LaBarge in the other night. Or someone who I thought was Miss LaBarge.
“Wait!” I said, watching as the car turned down the street ahead of me. I pushed through the people on the sidewalk.
It all happened before I could move out of the way. I stepped into the intersection, not realizing the light was still red. From the curb, an old woman yelled at me to stop. The brakes of a car squealed, muffling her voice, and I turned just in time to see something metal hurl itself toward me. This is it, I thought; just as Zinya predicted. I am going to die before I can even say good-bye to Dante.
A sharp pain shot up my right side as a bicycle and a bouquet of flowers flew into the air. Covering my face, I fell over and landed on something soft.
After a long moment, I sat up. To my surprise, the ground beneath me groaned.
I was lying on top of a boy. A tall, lean boy. I looked closer. A cute boy. Yellow daffodils were crushed into the ground around us. He groaned again, and I jumped off of him.
“Are you all right?” he said, wincing as he looked at his palms, which where scraped from the pavement. His bicycle was a few feet away, its front wheel still spinning.
I nodded. Save for what was probably going to be a big bruise on my right thigh, I was fine.
“I’m so sorry.”
“About saving my life?” He smiled. He had three artfully placed freckles. One under his eye, one on his chin, one on his neck.
“Oh—oh, no,” I said. “Wait, what do you mean?”
“I didn’t see the red light. If you hadn’t blocked me, I would have run it and been hit by that car.”
“Oh,” I said, blushing. “It was an accident.”
He laughed and helped me up.
“You’re warm,” I said, accustomed to Dante’s coldness.
He took me in. “You’re the girl who can’t die.”
“You go to St. Clément?” I asked, surprised.
“I sit three seats down from you in Strategy and Prediction. And in History and Latin. I held the door for you today?”
“Oh.” I felt my face grow red as his features grew familiar. I was used to seeing only the side of his head.
He smirked. “It’s okay. You’re the famous one.”
I looked away and brushed off my skirt. “Those are just rumors.”
“Or maybe some of your immortality just rubbed off on me.”
I smiled. “Then I guess you owe me one.”
“Owe you one what?”
“I won’t know until I want it.” The words came out of my mouth automatically. What was I saying? Was I flirting with this boy?
“I’m Renée, by the way,” I said.
“Noah Fontaine.”
He held out his hand, and I hesitated, staring at it and thinking of Dante. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, looking at his scratches and then wiping his hand on his jeans.
I looked at my feet and fidgeted with the buttons on my sleeve.
Bending down, he picked up his bag and the remains of the bouquet of flowers he had been carrying, which had spilled out around us, coating the road in crushed petals.
“I’m sorry about your flowers,” I said.
“Oh, it’s okay. She probably won’t even notice,” he said, holding up a wilted stem.
And even though I had no idea this boy existed until a few seconds ago, for some reason, as I watched him collect the loose flowers, my heart sank imagining the girl he had bought them for.
He stood up. “Do you believe in fate?” he asked.
“No,” I said quickly, and then reconsidered. “Well, maybe.”
“My thoughts exactly,” he said. And with the grace of a cat, he picked up his bicycle and pedaled off, grinning at me over his shoulder before he vanished into the crowd.
Chapter 6
ACCORDING TO MADAME GOûT, FRENCH WAS AN irregular language, a secretive language; the language of Monitors. The last three letters of almost every word were silent, which had the strange effect of making all words sound alike, regardless of their meanings. Everything was about accent, pronunciation, performance; as if the entire language were a disguise, designed to make us blend in with everyone else.
The other girls called it romantic, but I thought it insincere. The Latin Dante spoke made his love for me feel ancient and timeless, as if it could never die. What I didn’t realize until later was that French had depth, too; the trick was to hear the words that weren’t spoken.
Our classroom was in the attic, where it was oppressively hot, comme un état Vichy, our professor joked, saying it would improve our throaty accents.
Madame Goût was a slender woman in her fifties who wore high heels and belted dresses. She had a gap between her front teeth and spoke with a thick French-Canadian accent. Her favorite word was “Non,” which she said in a definitive kind of way, to make sure we all knew when we were wrong.