Chapter Twenty-Four Not one before another
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Not one before another
THE SAINT JAMES ESTATE WAS a manor house slightly removed from campus. I’d passed by the building once on my way back from classes. Vivian had pointed it out as the faculty housing, and yet, here was the home Kasem and Jojo had spent most of their lives in.
“My family has the bottom floors,” Kasem explained. “They converted the manor so faculty live on the first, second, and third floors.”
We were in his bedroom, or what I assumed to be his.
The bed was sprawling, with a gold-leaf headboard and frame intricately embellished by whoever had crafted it.
A tiny alarm clock sat on a side desk, and against the wall, someone had painted a fake window that looked dangerously realistic.
Canvases were stretched in every corner of the room, some of them half painted, others unfinished sketches.
It was a stark contrast from hours before at Theta House, where I’d witnessed a student nearly jump from a window before being rescued by the only friend I’d made at Westfield—who, it turns out, was a ghost.
“I know this is a lot, the hauntings and ghosts and deaths… all of it,” Kasem began.
“Oh, is it?” I said, practically hysterical. “How long have you known Vivian’s a ghost?”
“Since I was a kid,” Kasem admitted. “I used to think that I was special, that only I could see her on the campus grounds, but then I enrolled at Westfield and realized she moonlights as a student pretty much every other generation. Honey, Jojo, and Alaster used to tease me about it constantly.”
“And she died because of the curse?” I asked.
“I don’t know. She doesn’t talk about it. A lot of students died here, Sianna. Some because of the curse, others through accidents that no one can explain. Even if I don’t understand it, I want to end it. I don’t want this cycle to continue.”
“So, how many more of my classmates are also dead?”
“Hey, I’m also learning all this too. Besides rush, Theta rarely has Sigma as a part of their rituals. I’ve never seen a banishment go as wrong as this one did.”
I swallowed, looking away from him to the paintings in the room. If we spoke any more about ghosts or curses, I might lose my mind. So, I changed the subject. Cowardly, yes. But I was drunk and lightheaded and not used to all of this.
“Did you paint these?” I asked.
“My father did. They were his unfinished work. I’ve just been restoring some of them.”
“But you paint?”
“A little.” More than a little by the looks of it, and from what I’d gleaned when we’d run into Kasem’s ex in the School of Business.
“And you’re a finance bro?”
“With an undergraduate degree double majoring in fine arts and history, and a minor in music theory,” Kasem said, as if that absolved him of the sin. “Besides, just because I’m in the School of Business doesn’t mean I’m a finance bro. I literally have a marketing and management concentration.”
But even he couldn’t help but smile at my teasing.
Kasem had always been handsome. But when he grinned, he looked so boyish and sweet. It was different from Jojo. More earnest, as if Kasem harbored a shyness about him.
“Give me a tour,” I said.
“After you get some rest,” he said. “It’s been a long night, and you’re drunk.”
Despite his protests, I dragged him through the different rooms, making him explain each one.
There were books throughout the suite; they were packed in corners, stacked in cabinets where spices should be, and crammed into drawers.
Everything from leather-bound books of poetry to plays resided here, from Shakespeare to Keats, to Emerson and Du Bois, to Langston Hughes, August Wilson, and Maya Angelou.
And then there were textbooks about the arts and sciences, politics, history, folklore.
Books about Reconstruction and the South during the Civil War, books about spiritualism and hoodoo, and ghosts and supernatural entities.
“Some of these were Jojo’s,” Kasem explained. “He never took them with him when he left Westfield.”
I laughed, the sound bitter and broken against my ears. “An artist and a scholar. I see why the two of you don’t get along now. Why’d you keep them if he left?”
Kasem shrugged. “It’s not like I was going to throw them out.”
From the corner of my eye, I spotted a small room.
It was nearly empty except for a grand piano that was covered with sheet music.
The pages of music were painted over with landscapes of Westfield, from oil paintings of its swampy depths to acrylics and watercolors of classrooms and courtyards with ghostly apparitions looming in their frames.
Some of them were unfinished pieces he’d painted with intricately fine detail.
“That room’s off-limits—” Kasem began, but I’d already pushed past the door and stepped inside.
Across from the piano, crammed at the end of the room, there was a rectangular bed with an IV and monitoring machine connected to it.
I spun to face him, searching for answers.
“I was going to tell you,” he said. “I just didn’t know how.”
“Are you still recovering from the stabbing?” I asked.
“Something like that,” he said. “I, uh…” He swallowed. “I didn’t exactly wake right up after the stabbing. I mean, they treated my body, and they couldn’t find anything wrong with me—I mean, obviously except for the stab wound. But I was in a coma for a bit.”
“For a bit,” I repeated. “How long is ‘a bit’?”
He gave me a rueful smile. “Three months and, I’m assuming, not long after you arrived on campus.
That’s when the sleep paralysis started, right after I woke from the coma.
So, Angelica has been monitoring me.” He pointed to a small laptop that I hadn’t noticed.
“If there’s anything abnormal while I sleep, she checks on me.
It’s either that or have the Board conclude that I’m not healthy enough to take over Westfield. ”
Kasem’s eyes scanned my concerned expression, and with a soft smile he added, “Don’t worry. The curse can’t get me that easily.”
He took a seat at the piano bench and patted the empty space beside him for me to join. “Shall we play something?”
“I don’t really play in front of people,” I said.
“Lies,” Kasem said.
“What?”
“That’s a lie. I saw you play. At Center City Mall.”
Startled, I gave him a look. I’d played briefly that day. But I had no idea that he’d seen or heard me. He must have been there not long before the stabbing, before my last break in the evening when I’d witnessed Jojo and his bodyguard arguing in the parking lot.
“That’s different,” I said. “No one was really there, and the ones who were didn’t care who I was or expect anything from me.”
“Maybe that’s true for them. But I don’t want to hear Baby Mozart play,” Kasem said. “I want to see Sianna.”
He ran his hands along the piano keys and I laughed, instinctively leaning against him in surprise. He wasn’t that bad. His form was half decent, his finger work light, playful yet measured all at once.
Despite myself, I sat beside him. I must have still been drunk, because I leaned closer to him and started playing too.
As my fingers ran across the smooth surface of the piano keys, memories surged in my mind.
Kasem, earlier that day, playing to drown out the footsteps and voices of the faculty from upstairs.
The vision jumped back in time, to a young Kasem and Jojo taking lessons while their mother watched and cheered them on.
She was beautiful, a tall woman with thick, coily hair and a face that was all soft lines, as welcoming as she was regal.
Kasem was playing wrong, and Jojo was trying to hide his annoyance by patiently explaining the notes to Kasem again.
But his younger brother was too busy smashing the keys and singing a song he’d made up.
“Sianna,” Kasem whispered. “Do you want to stay with me in the present, or are you all right there?”
I shook my head, realizing my eyes had been wide open when I’d been accidentally channeling. I pressed them shut and whispered, “I want to be here. With you.”
Kasem gave me a little squeeze. I focused on the certainty of his touch, on the firmness, how it grounded me in the present as I played. Slowly, I was drawn out of the vision completely, even as the burnt skin of my fingertips touched the keys.
Music anchored me to the present, to this moment with him, and his touch was my lifeline.
When, finally, I finished the song, I turned to Kasem, beaming.
“That was lovely,” he said. “Really.”
My smile widened, but I shook my head, blinking as a wave of nausea overcame me.
And then, I vomited all over the keys.