Part 7 (1/2)

Serena stepped out from behind Ash and squinted around in confusion. ”What's going on?” she asked, her soprano voice projecting clearly through the parking lot.

Then she whispered to Ash, ”I'm not getting kidnapped again, am I?”

83.

BLUE FLAME.

Frida y Ashline's Friday morning was a train wreck, and showed none of the signs that portended a good weekend. She had slept a total of three and a half hours- restless, all of it-and had barely made it to trigonom-etry on time. In third-period French she awoke halfway through the cla.s.s to Monsieur Chevalier pounding his fist on her desk and shouting ”Pamplemousse!” over and over again in her face. A rude awakening, to say the least.

Then, of course, the dreaded chemistry exam. It wasn't that she didn't know the material. But it was impossible to concentrate, between Dr. Hammersby's occasionally scathing glances from her desk, and the sympathetic looks from Jackie. (Darren had smartly hidden his car out beyond the front gates, to be retrieved later, and they'd successfully snuck back onto campus with the other Blackwood kids. The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds). As she held the pen in her hand and reread for the fifteenth 84 time the chemical equation she was supposed to be balancing, she could feel the reservoir of knowledge frothing somewhere in the back of her brain, but the bridge connecting all of those thoughts to her pen had been brutally obliterated.

Later, after school, she found herself sitting in a circle of chairs with Lily, Ade, Rolfe, and Raja, faces that had become overwhelmingly familiar. Ash s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably in her seat. Half of her b.u.t.t had fallen asleep, which caused her to lean painfully on the other, and the unforgiving mahogany of the chair was doing her no favors in the comfort department.

”So . . .” Rolfe, who was twiddling his thumbs anxiously, broke the silence first. ”This is kind of like a really s.h.i.+tty version of The Breakfast Club, huh?”

”To put it lightly,” Lily said.

”What sort of punishment can we look forward to?”

Ash asked. ”Toothbrushes and soap to scrub the hallways on our hands and knees?” Even after her own brushes with trouble back in Scarsdale, she had no idea what to expect from boarding school discipline.

Raja sighed. ”With the new headmistress we'll be lucky to get graveyard s.h.i.+fts was.h.i.+ng dishes in the dining hall.”

Ade's eyes explored the room. ”And yet our little visually challenged friend is nowhere to be found.”

”Like Headmistress Riley is going to punish Serena,”

Raja replied. ”h.e.l.l, maybe if we all tell her that we were sleepwalking too, she'll let us off the hook.”

85.

Ash had also noticed the empty sixth chair in the waiting room. ”No one wants to talk about Serena? Anyone else interested in how a blind girl who seems to keep completely to herself ends up the victim of a kidnapping in the middle of one of the quietest, most boring towns in America? How an entire bar full of people couldn't hear her screams?”

”Except for us,” Lily added.

Ade turned his attention to the office door's opaque window. ”I'm just curious what she confessed to the headmistress. If she told her about the kidnapping, then we should be getting some sort of medals, or plaques.”

”Or our choice of women in the senior cla.s.s,” Rolfe added.

”Pig,” Raja muttered.

”Sorry, babe.” Rolfe patted Raja's knee. ”You've got another year to go before you're ripe enough for me. But I'm willing to wait.”

Raja cracked her knuckles. ”Which one of your two b.a.l.l.s would you like to keep?”

Lily quickly picked up a magazine and began to leaf through it.

The door to the foyer sprung open, and there in the door frame stood the headmistress herself. The five students immediately sat upright in their chairs, their feet coming together as if they were off-duty soldiers surprised by a visit from the general.

At just over six feet, Abigail Riley stood taller than all 86 of them, except for Ade, who as a rule dwarfed most people. She was an Amazon of a woman who commanded respect from all, like her or loathe her. Ash hadn't heard much about her predecessor, only that he had been fairly earthy-crunchy, loose about school rules, and even looser when it came to rules forbidding ”close” relations.h.i.+ps with students.

Headmistress Riley, on the other end of the spec-trum, was a beacon of justice and school policy, without being completely draconian. When she arrived at Blackwood, curfews were set earlier, to the chagrin of all lovers and romantic hopefuls on campus. Penalties for all school rules-curfew violations, cheating, copying, dis-respect, vandalism, disorderly behavior-were made no harsher for the first offense. For all subsequent offenses, however, the gloves came off and the axe came down.

During Ashline's entrance interview, the headmistress had shared her philosophy with Ash very succinctly.

”Everyone messes up,” she had told Ash. ”You're in high school-it's going to happen. All I ask of my students is that they learn from their mistakes. But a student who repeats her follies is selfish, incorrigible, and-worst of all-cannot be taught. And a student who cannot be taught through the simplest of life lessons has no place at this inst.i.tution.”

At the same time, Headmistress Riley, despite her authoritative nature, had the presence and compa.s.sion to make regular visits to the dining hall to get to know her 87 students. Of course, in situations like this, having that sort of friendly relations.h.i.+p with the headmistress made it all the more shameful when the guillotine dropped.

”Mr. Hanssen,” she announced, and pinned her eyes on Rolfe.

Rolfe looked like his favorite surfboard had just been fed through a wood-chipper. He wiped his clammy hands on his cargo shorts and followed her into the office. As he reached the threshold, he whispered to Ash, ”Tell my parents I want an open casket.”

Ash attempted unsuccessfully to stifle her laughter, and even Raja couldn't help it when the corners of her lips perked up.

The next half hour pa.s.sed in near silence as they were, one at a time, called in to face the firing squad.

The door to the headmistress's office, complete with its unsettling frosted window, let out just enough sound that they could hear the m.u.f.fled but still firm voice of Headmistress Riley as she pa.s.sed her sentences. And as each student exited, they walked silently past their cla.s.smates, divulging nothing about their punishment.

After Lily followed Rolfe, Ade pa.s.sed through the foyer looking grim and simply said ”You're next” to Raja before he disappeared out into the hall, probably off to take an epic afternoon nap.

The chair in the office squeaked, announcing that the headmistress was on her way to collect her next victim.

”You want a blindfold?” Ash asked the girl across from her, and offered a sympathetic smile.

88.

”I'd prefer a flask, if you have one,” Raja said. Then she added, ”Though I suppose that would be distasteful, given the reason we're here on a Friday afternoon.”

The headmistress appeared in the doorway and summoned Raja with a flash of her hand. The door snapped closed behind them.

It seemed like no time at all before Ash heard the groan of chair legs against the hardwood floors the footsteps plodding across the room. Raja stealthily slipped through the door and out into the hallway without casting Ash so much as a sideways glance.

Ash was still watching Raja scurrying around the corner when she sensed the presence behind her.

”Ms. Wilde.”