Part 6 (1/2)

I stared at the paisley patterns in the carpet to avoid his gaze. How had I dreamed of the hospital when I'd never actually been there? It seemed alarmingly similar to my dream of Miss LaBarge.

He studied me with one eye while the other wandered off to the right. ”I unsettle you,” he said, his lip curling into a frown. ”It's this.” He motioned to his eye. ”I don't blame you; it makes most students uncomfortable.”

”Oh, no. I, um-” I stammered, feeling suddenly guilty. ”It's not that. It's just, well...” He waited for me to finish, but I let my sentence trail off.

His expression softened. ”Just a moment ago, you were patting your pockets. Did you lose something?”

The rubbing. The dream had been so vivid that when I woke up, I thought I might still have it in my pocket. ”Oh, it was just...nothing.”

He raised an eyebrow, but then let it drop. ”Do you have any preexisting neurological conditions or a history of brain trauma?”

”No.”

”Have you ever fainted like this before?”

”No.”

”Do you remember anything that might have triggered the event this morning?”

I thought of the slide of the hospital, of how I was overwhelmed with the need to know what was behind the building's walls. ”No.”

Lowering his pad, Dr. Newhaus tried to meet my eyes, but I looked away. ”I'm not your enemy,” he said. ”I'm here to help you.”

”I've had a lot of bad doctors in the past.”

”I understand,” he said. ”So have I. That's why I decided to become one.”

He smiled, one eye resting on me, the other on the trees swaying outside the window. He seemed trustworthy.

”Can you remember what happened before you fainted?” he said. He crossed his legs, revealing mismatching striped socks.

For some reason, they put me at ease. ”I remember Mr. Pollet telling us about the founding of Montreal and its tunnels. I remember him showing us slides of a bunch of old buildings. The last one I saw was of the Royal Victoria Hospital, before everything went black.”

He s.h.i.+ned a flashlight into my eyes and asked me to count backward from ten. When I was finished, he asked, ”And you don't remember anything in between then and now?”

Wringing my fingers together, I thought about my dream of Miss LaBarge, about all the sleep I'd lost, and all the mornings I'd woken up in sheets drenched in sweat.

But at least those dreams had happened at night. Pa.s.sing out in cla.s.s was different; it was abnormal, intrusive, and frightening. ”I had a dream,” I said, looking at my feet. ”Or something like one. I'm not really sure.”

”Of what?”

”Of the Royal Victoria Hospital. I was walking through it to a certain room, looking for something. Everything was so clear and detailed, like I'd been there before.”

”Have you?”

I shook my head.

”Can you describe what you saw?”

I told him about the hospital waiting room, about going to the pediatric ward and entering the boy's room and making a rubbing beneath the bed.

He looked unnerved. ”That's startlingly accurate,” he said. ”The layout, the interior of the hospital-that's all correct. Are you sure you haven't been there before?”

I nodded.

The doctor frowned. ”Have you had other dreams like this?”

I swallowed. ”At night, yes. In each of them, I'm searching for something.”

He took notes as I told him about the nightmares I'd had all summer. When I was finished, he made me stand up and walk across the room. He then tested my balance, my vision, and my hearing.

”Physically, everything seems to be fine, though your body is exhausted and sleep deprived. I'm going to schedule you for some tests, just to make sure everything inside is okay.” He leaned forward. ”But if I may speak candidly, you've been through a lot in the last year, and I think you'd benefit from a little help. I'd like you to consider coming in to see me regularly.”

I wiped off a dusty mark on my stockings, which must have been there from when I fell out of my chair.

”You can think about it if you'd like. In the meantime, these may help you get some sound sleep.” He jotted something down on a pad and tore off the prescriptions for two kinds of pills.

”What are they?” I asked, trying to sound out the names in my head.

”One is an antianxiety medication. The other is an antidepressant.”

”But I'm not depressed.”

”That may be,” he said, in a way that made me think he was humoring me. ”However, for now, this medication should put an end to these dreams of yours, and hopefully help you relax and get some much needed sleep.”

”But what if I don't want to stop them? What if I'm seeing them for a reason?”

”And what reason would that be?” he asked, puzzled.

I let my hands drop into my lap. ”I don't know.”

I spent the rest of the day undergoing tests and scans of my brain. When they all came back normal, Dr. Newhaus reviewed my chart one last time and let me go. By then it was already late afternoon, the shadows s.h.i.+fting over the courtyard as the sun sank in the sky. Cla.s.ses were over, and students poured out of the buildings. Keeping my head down, I clutched my bag to my chest and hurried through the columns that lined the perimeter of campus. A group of girls was sitting on the stoop of the dormitory, Clementine LaGuerre's voice ringing above the others.

”Apparently she had some sort of seizure in cla.s.s today,” she was saying, popping her gum as if to punctuate her sentence. ”I heard from one of the fourth-years that she wasn't even that good of a Monitor at Gottfried,” she added, turning to April and Allison and three other girls who had lived down the hall from me last year.

I hid behind a column and watched them. ”She was good,” April said, looking to her sister for approval.

”Well, she wasn't that good,” Allison corrected. She was only distinguishable from her sister by the mole on her chin and her haughty tone. ”She just made a big show whenever she found a dead animal. I bet in reality she was only a little bit above average.” The other girls nodded in agreement.

”So how did she do it?” Clementine asked, her voice calm. ”How did she survive the kiss of an Undead?”

I leaned closer, trying to hear Allison's response, when her eyes met mine. Her face dropped and everyone turned.

Swallowing, I raised my chin and pushed through them, using all my courage to act like I didn't care. I was almost at the doors when Clementine slipped off the ledge, her legs bare and smooth beneath her wool skirt. ”So are you going to answer my question? Or are you keeping it a secret because you know you're a fraud?”

A fraud? Her words tripped me midstep. Maybe they stung so much because somewhere inside me I agreed with her-I didn't know how I had gotten first rank, and I didn't know what was happening to me. All I knew was that it was real-it was all real, and it was separating me from the person I loved the most-Dante. Slowing, I turned around. ”Or maybe the truth is too painful to relive,” I said. ”But of course you wouldn't think of that because all you care about is your own ego.”

A hush fell over the girls as Clementine struggled to respond, but I was already through the doors and up the stairs to my room. Opening my dresser, I rummaged through my underwear drawer until I found a half-burned candle left over from Eleanor's stash last year. Even though it was still light out, I lit the wick and set it on my desk, feeling suddenly better as I stepped back and stared at it, imagining I was still at Gottfried.

Before the wax could even melt, a gust of wind came in through the window and blew the flame out. Except it didn't feel like wind, exactly. Approaching the candle, I held my hand up, letting the black smoke coil around my fingers. The breeze had a smell to it, a taste, a wetness, as if it were the long cold breath of someone I had known in a previous life. Dante.