Good Girls Lie(27)

“Camille?”

“Mmm?”

“Are you all right? Camille?”

Camille’s eyes are glassy, her face flushed. I instinctively put a hand on my roommate’s forehead.

“Whoa. You are burning up. Come on, up you go. Let’s get you to the infirmary.”

“No!”

Camille jerks back, shrinking into the cushions. She’s holding a heating pad to her stomach, disguised under a throw pillow.

“Camille, you’re sick. You need to go see the nurse. I don’t want to catch whatever you have.”

“You won’t,” she mutters. “It’s that time.”

“Your period gives you a fever? Come now, you need to be seen.”

“Sometimes it does. I just want to sleep.” She manages to focus on me. “How was your audience with the queen?”

“Changing the subject won’t deter me. You need to be seen.”

“If the fever hasn’t broken by morning, I’ll go, I swear.”

“Fine.” I take a seat next to her. “She wanted to elucidate my manner of insults. She felt I was being illogical by calling her a daft cow as she’s neither stupid nor fat.”

Camille laughs softly, wincing at the effort.

“Then she invited me to breakfast.”

“With the seniors? Whoa.”

“Yes. Now that I’ve been properly chastised, if you won’t see reason, I’m going to bed. Can I get you anything? Hemlock?”

“You are so strange. Maybe just some Tylenol? It’s in my bag.”

Camille’s purse hangs from the back of her desk chair, easy to find. I start to dig in, but Camille says, “Wait. Just, hand me my purse, would you?”

I hand it over, and her clear, reusable water bottle with the school crest labeled on the side, half-full.

“Thanks.” She digs in her bag, pulls out the white-and-red bottle, swallows down the pills. “Listen, Ash. I know this place is weird. Just stick it out. It gets better. The first couple of weeks in a new school are always difficult. Goode is exceptional. You’re going to fit in fine.”

I collapse onto my bed with my worn copy of The Republic. “I admit to wondering if I should have been focusing on Machiavelli instead of Plato.”

“Stop making me laugh, Ash. It hurts.” Camille giggles and snaps off the light.

The darkness bleeds around us, sweet and velvet, and I think back to the strange sense I’d had in the Commons as if someone were watching me. I’ve been chalking it up to being surrounded by 199 other girls and the teachers, maids, groundskeepers on-site, all of us shoved into the tiniest fishbowl imaginable, but now I wonder if there’s something more. This school is old for America; these buildings stretch back hundreds of years. The area is isolated; the mountains whisper secrets on the breeze. Places have memories, especially when there’s been bloodshed. A walk along any battlefield will confirm that.

My mother would love it here. Would have done, that is.

My parents are dead.

A small voice from the ceiling pulls me away from the sharp pain that floods my chest at the thought of my mother’s soft, lined face, worn and gray and riddled with worms. The notes from Grassley’s Bach fugue rise in my mind.

“What’s her room like?” Camille’s question chases away the scene in the parlor, Father on his back. Mother, gray and lifeless.

“Becca’s? Don’t know. They took me to a big room that overlooked the mountains.”

“The Commons?”

“Yes.”

Camille’s disembodied head appears over the side of the top bunk. “Holy cow, Ash.”

“What?”

“The Commons is where you go if you get tapped.”

“I thought you didn’t know about any of that?”

“I know a few little things. I mean, my sister...”

Humblebrag, humblebrag. Camille is just so good at it.

“It’s supposed to be a really weird spot.”

“I’ll admit, it was a bit odd. In the dark, it feels like the room is suspended in midair over the mountains. I would like to see it during the daytime.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t. There’s a closed-off stairwell from it—now this is part of school lore, I’ve never seen it—but it’s called the red staircase because a girl committed suicide there after her boyfriend was killed in a car accident. He was coming to see her and never made it. She hung herself from the banister, but she also cut her wrists, so the blood dripped down the staircase. She was in there over a break, but no one knew about it because the school thought she’d gone home. When they finally looked and found her, the blood had soaked in so deeply they had to paint the stairs red to cover it up. Supposedly, one of the secret societies makes you spend a night locked in the stairwell.”

“And I thought I left all the crazy ghost stories back in Oxford.”

“Piper told me she warned you about the arboretum, too.”

“Oh, she did. It seems Goode has had its fair share of student deaths over the years.”

“There are a ton of legends here, some true and researchable, like the girl in the arboretum, some harder to verify. But I think that’s true of any boarding school, don’t you? There are prerequisites—the school must have a dark past, be haunted, suffer a terrible tragedy—I mean, you’ve read all the books, I’m sure.”