Chapter 2 #2
Mr. Phillips nodded in agreement and moved on to the next student, asking a similar question. I tried to pay attention but was too distracted to really take in the lesson.
“I’m Alaric. Didn’t you say your name was Mari?” Alaric asked, sliding in his seat to face me more fully.
I nodded while furiously writing notes. I had come into the school year late, and the last thing I wanted to do was get farther behind. Or in any more trouble.
I was shocked when Alaric grabbed my hand that was writing notes. A bolt of electricity passed from him to me. My breathing became shallow.
“Don’t worry,” he whispered while taking my pencil. “I’ve got the notes. You can borrow them.”
I snatched my pencil from him. “Thanks, but no. I can do this myself.”
He flinched as if slapped, turning his body back to face the front of the room. I did the same and continued to take notes. But it was impossible to ignore Alaric as he continued to glance at me throughout the rest of the period. But he didn't speak to me again.
I found myself a table in the courtyard of the fancy new school, sitting underneath the canopy of a tree that seemed so out of place in this concrete jungle.
I sat alone, my lunch of soup getting colder as I pushed it around with a spoon in my right hand, while reading a book with my left.
I didn’t have much of an appetite, and I just wanted to escape the world around me for a little while.
While the courtyard was chilly, the cafeteria was bursting at the seams with students, making the air feel suffocating.
So I shivered in the cold, where I could actually take a deep breath and read.
That’s what books did for me. While Nana was working, the only reprieve would be my books. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. Melville, Chopin, Hawthorne, Plath, Hemingway. Anything to help me escape when life was too much to take.
“Fitzgerald, huh?” A voice broke through my reprieve.
I glanced up to find a tall, dark-skinned girl around my age. Her hair was braided intricately and styled long down to her waist as it hung close to her ebony complexion. Her brown eyes, wide with interest, bore into mine.
I stared, embarrassingly too long, as I took in her beauty and stature. She was not one to be messed with.
“The book,” she continued, nodding her head to my left hand, which still clung to the paperback, as she sat down across from me. “The Great Gatsby. It’s good, but I favor The Last Tycoon.”
“Fitzgerald never finished The Last Tycoon. He died before it was finished,” I replied, still reeling from this brazen girl and her sitting casually across from me like she had known me for years. It was unsettling.
“Yeah, but my mother works for Fitzgerald’s publisher, and that has its perks beyond having absent mother syndrome,” she winked. “I can get my hands on all the manuscripts. I’m Sara-Kate, by the way.”
She stuck her hand out, and I tentatively took it.
“Mari.”
“So, Mari. What brings you to Windsor Academy? You don’t seem like you’re from around here.”
I sighed heavily, picking up my book again. Another student interested in the Southern Belle.
“It’s that obvious?”
“Pretty much,” she said, tilting her head. “Not many people bring real books to lunch. It’s like spotting a unicorn.”
I laughed, in spite of myself, slowly closing my old copy and putting it carefully back in my bag.
“I just moved here from Georgia,” I explained quietly, peeling the skin off my orange as I pushed my now chilled soup to the side.
“Where in Georgia? I have some family in Atlanta,” Sara-Kate asked, her deep brown eyes locking with mine in genuine interest. I wasn’t used to someone actually caring about me.
At least not at Windsor Academy. So far, the other girls I had interacted with preferred to whisper and giggle in my general direction.
No one besides Alaric from first-period chemistry had taken the time to actually talk to me.
“Appling,” I replied, quickly adding. “It’s right outside Augusta.”
“Oh, I’ve been there. Ages ago. Don’t remember much.”
For once, someone didn’t mention golf, and I sighed in relief.
“Why did you move to New York? Dad got a fancy new job?” She asked brightly before taking a giant bite out of her shiny red apple.
I cleared my throat and tucked my blonde curl behind my ear awkwardly. “Um, no. My Nana died, and my closest living relatives are an aunt and uncle who live here.”
Sara-Kate’s eyes widened as she very loudly swallowed her apple.
“Damn. I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to bring up bad shit.”
I laughed uncomfortably, desperately trying to find a new line of conversation. “It is what it is. No point complaining.”
Sara-Kate smoothed her blazer as she discreetly changed the conversation.
“Okay, redirecting before I stick my foot in my mouth again. What do your aunt and uncle do? Because clearly, this Hogwarts knockoff isn’t cheap,” she motioned to the front of the archaic school, its sign and building a dark contrast to the modernist buildings surrounding it.
“My uncle is an ADA to the District Attorney in Manhattan. My aunt is an interior designer,” I replied, my eyes lingering on the old gothic architecture of the gargoyles that seemed to guard the entry into the school.
It never even occurred to me that Uncle Dan and Tiffany were spending a lot of money just to send me to high school.
Why didn't they just put me in public school?
“Shut up,” Sara-Kate exclaimed, claiming my attention immediately. “Is he working on the Nelson case?”
“What case?”
Sara-Kate rolled her eyes in response. The bell signaling the end of lunch rang, and both of us stood and threw our plates away as we headed back into the hallowed halls of Windsor Academy.
“Only the most scandalous case to have ever happened here in our very own school,” Sara-Kate continued as she walked with me down the hall. “What class do you have next?”
“PE,” I replied, already dreading the locker room with all the perfect-looking rich girls who would likely continue to whisper and giggle in my general direction. I had a feeling that finding friends here at Windsor would be just as difficult as it was back in Georgia.
“Perf,” she smiled. “Me too. I can fill you in on all the gossip.”
Sara-Kate easily hooked her arm in mine as she led me towards the gymnasium, as if she and I had been friends for years rather than two strangers who had met five minutes ago.
It was as if she could sense I was alone and that I needed someone, but it wasn’t out of pity.
It was as if she saw something in me that resonated with something in her.
Maybe making a friend wouldn’t be so hard after all.
“So, tell me more about this Nelson drama?” I whispered as Sara-Kate and I changed out of our school uniforms and into our gym uniforms. Apparently, they have uniforms for exercise too.
“Oh my god, it was the craziest thing,” she began. “We are actually standing at the scene of the crime.”
It was slightly concerning that Sara-Kate began rattling off details of the case as if it were her grocery list in the very spot where someone had died.
A shiver rattled through me as I finished slipping on my tennis shoes.
I glanced around the locker room, my eyes darting from the laughing faces of girls as they moved to and fro, seemingly undeterred by the memory of a murder that had occurred in this very room.
“Are you serious?”
“Yes,” she continued, slamming her locker shut as she and I headed out of the locker room. “There was a senior, Michelle Nelson, beautiful, smart, great cheek-bones, President of the Asian-American Students club, who had just been accepted to Harvard on Early Admission. She was killed. Here.”
I tried not to sound too desperate for more details when I implored, “What happened?”
“Girl tries to dump her boyfriend; turns out he’s not exactly the poster child for stability. He followed her after wrestling practice into the locker room and . . .” she mimed a quick squeeze around her own neck, eyes wide. “Strangled her.”
She ended the story so abruptly, I felt a bit disappointed.
Not that what had happened wasn’t heinous or awful, but that Sara-Kate was so sure and so nonchalant about the death of a girl only a few years older than us.
It also didn’t really sit right with me.
From the moment I had walked into the locker room, I had felt a perpetual cold chill that clung to my skin; a deep throbbing that began at the base of my skull.
However, the teacher immediately put us to work running laps and doing pushups. I wasn’t able to ask Sara-Kate for more information until after class.
“Why did she break up with him?” I asked as soon as we walked out of the locker room, heading to our last period, which we thankfully also had together. “Did he go here?”
“Slow down, Nancy Drew,” Sara-Kate chuckled as she hooked her arm through mine again, leading me up one of the winding staircases to our English classroom. “Are you like a true crime girlie or something?”
I blushed, even wondering to myself why I was so interested in this. There was just some deep pull, an incessant itch that wanted more information.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I smiled, looking for an excuse. “I’ve just never walked into an episode of Pretty Little Liars and I'm curious.”
Sara-Kate chortled, “She’s well-read and funny? Now I’m really glad my drama club lunch meeting got canceled.”
I laughed with her as we walked to the back of the class, scooting our seats closer.
“Yes, her boyfriend did go here.” Sara-Kate continued her story. “Jake was on the wrestling team and on a scholarship here at Windsor. I think they had been dating for like six months when shit hit the fan.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, urging her to continue as I took out my notebook and a pen. “Like he just went crazy one day?”
“No, it actually wasn’t him acting weird.
At least not until the murdering rampage,” she continued, voice falling soft as if not wanting people to overhear our conversation.
“It actually was Michelle. One day, she’s captain of the cheer team with so much pep it actually made you sick, to the next day becoming Miss Misery, wearing all-black, and going all loner wolf on everyone. ”
“You see, her older sister passed away a few weeks before that,” Sara-Kate’s copper-brown eyes glistened with empathy.
“I mean, she had been sick with cancer, so it wasn’t a huge surprise, but obviously Michelle took it hard.
She withdrew from her friends, cheerleading, and school.
Michelle broke up with her boyfriend, but then Jake went crazy over that. Stalking her, never leaving her alone.”
“That’s scary,” I mumbled in response, my eyes falling to the front of the class as the teacher began his lesson.
“Yeah, but no one was expecting Jake just to lose it like that,” Sara-Kate replied. “Like to murder a girl is just crazy.”
I nodded as the conversation fell away in favor of listening to Mr. Kling’s lecture on the poetry of grammar and syntax.
But even as I studiously took my notes, the goosebumps that had appeared when listening to Sara-Kate still hadn’t disappeared.
While everyone else at Windsor was content to move on, leaving Michelle and Jake as tragic notes in the school’s history, I couldn’t shake the feeling there was more to the situation.