First serialized in 2011.

First edition published March 2011.

Copyright © 2011 by Isabel Kunkle

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Candlemark & Gleam

LLC, Bennington, Vermont.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination

or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

LOC Data:

ISBN: 978-1-936460-02-1

Book design by Kate Sullivan

Typeface: Chaparral Pro

Cover art and design by Kate Sullivan

Editors: Kate Sullivan Ellen Harvey Ray Stilwell

www.candlemarkandgleam.com

Hickey of the

Beast

By Isabel Kunkle

To my grandparents,

Helen and Gerald Kunkle and

Robert and Margaret Burke

-ONE-

Amanda, You're not going to believe any of what

comes after this. Okay, slight exaggeration. I'm sure you're

going to believe some of it, because I have to explain some normal stuff to get to the weirdness, and I don't think you're going to be sitting there all "...she bought new sneakers? NO! IT CAN'T BE!" like some kind of late-night movie villain. But the normal stuff is the details. Like the chocolate sauce on a sundae. The main part? The ice cream? You're so not going to believe that. I still kind of don't, and I was there. It's true, though. I swear. And all that weirdness is why I'm sending you a giant

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letter and not IMing you or emailing like a normal person.

Also? It's nothing like ice cream. Really. For me, everything started with a dream. I was in our living room. Not the den, where

there are old sofas and the TV and we're allowed to eat drippy snacks and put our feet up—the living room, which I almost never go into, on account of not wanting to die. Technically the whole house belongs to Springden Academy, but most of the other rooms just have our furniture and stuff in them, so we're fine as long as we don't write on the walls. (My big brother Ernesto did, once, and he had to spend a whole weekend sanding and painting. Dork.) But Springden paid to furnish the living room, and it shows. The sofas and chairs are all fluffy and pastel, there's a piano in one corner, and the carpet is, I swear to God, white. Which is just asking for it, if you want my opinion, even if you never ever let your kids in there. Gravity works on adults, too, especially when they drink as much as they do at faculty parties.

Anyhow, we have some of our own stuff in there, but it's all fancy. Big coffee-table books with pictures of the mountains, statues from South America...and the vase. It's huge, it's blue and white, and it's kind of Chinese. I don't think it's actually Ming or anything—we're not

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millionaires—but Mom loves it. Some student's parents gave it to her back when she was teaching history in Ohio, so there's the sentimental thing, too.

All of that is why I got really, really freaked when I saw the following:

1. My kid brother, Julio, was standing

beside me. 2. He had his baseball bat in one hand. 3. He was staring right at the vase.

I put out a hand to grab the brat—five

years of watching him means I know evil when I see it, thank you very much—but he was even speedier in the dream than he is in real life. He darted forward. And, of course, while I was watching, he lifted the bat and took a big old swing at the vase.

I don't know if I screamed right then. Mostly I was wondering how fast I could get away and what kind of jobs a fourteen-year-old could get in, like, Delaware. But I started screaming right afterwards. See, the bat didn't shatter the vase like it should have—dream, right?—but it did open up an enormous crack down the middle, and that let out a swarm of bugs. Like mosquitoes, but the size of base-balls. I mean, they shouldn't all have been able to fit in the vase, or through the crack, but that

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was so not my concern right then. Seriously, Amanda, I woke up and I just

wanted to hurl. And while I was lying there blinking and catching my breath, doing that whole thing where you realize that it was just a dream and that didn't actually happen and oh thank God, I heard Julio yelling from down the hall. Screaming, really. I scrambled out of bed, but Mom was already in the hall by the time I opened the door. She saw me standing there and waved a hand at me, all reassuring and impatient at the same time: It's okay, honey, I've got this, now go the hell back to bed. So I did. Right then, I didn't actually think a whole lot about it.

Yeah, it was a weird dream, and it was weirder that Julio and I both had nightmares about the same time, but...you don't want to start assuming that every bizarro coincidence Means Something, you know, or you end up like one of those people who never goes out on the thirteenth. Sometimes stuff just happens. I believe that even now. Besides, everyone knows stress causes bad dreams, and Julio and I both had plenty of that. He'd been in kinder-garten for two days and wasn't loving it, and I was about four hours away from my first day at high school—at Springden.

I told you my mom runs a boarding school, right? I don't really remember. Mom seems all

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weird and baffled that I don't really know what my friends' parents do—like I'm so sure she knew about that when she was my age, or cared—but we've been hanging out for two summers, so I guess it probably came up. Maybe during lanyards. Ew.

In case it didn't, or in case the fascinating memory of braiding plastic has driven it totally out of your mind, Mom's the Head of School.

That's the official modern gender-neutral title, anyhow. Most prep schools use it these days, though when the Head's a guy, pretty much everyone goes ahead and calls him “Headmaster” anyhow. Nobody calls Mom "Headmistress," though. It sounds too much like she should be dressing in all black and making orphans sleep in the attic. She answers to the Board of Trustees—a bunch of old white guys who mostly went to Springden back during the Great Depression and now send their grandkids here—but on campus, she's kinda in charge of everything. Faculty, stud-ents, staff, you name it.

Everyone who'd been at Springden already knew I was her kid. Everyone who didn’t would find out soon enough. They'd be expecting either a total goody-goody or a complete nutcase.

To make matters worse, I still had giant square Band-Aids on both my arms. I'd flipped

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my bike over in the garden behind the old school chapel and absolutely shredded myself on the rocks beside the path, which...not abnormal or anything, but gross, and not exactly awesome either. Plus, the worst of it was on my wrists, and that wouldn't exactly do anything for the not-a-total-nutcase argument, you know? Mom would smack me for talking that way, and don't get me wrong, I know having a few...issues...isn't anything to be ashamed of, but I didn't want the whole freshman class to think I did.

At least it was going to be mostly new kids for the first week. The dorms open a week before classes, but almost nobody shows up until right beforehand except for freshmen, prefects—upperclassmen who live in the dorms and help out—and a couple of kids whose parents are traveling or whatever. I was really okay with that. I mean, I liked the upperclassmen and all, but they'd all been around for at least two years, which meant they'd seen me when I was twelve. You remember when we met, the first year I went to camp? Yeah, that was me at twelve: braces, zero boobs, and a haircut that made me look like a goddamn French poodle. The fewer people around with that mental image, the better.

Oh, sure, I knew a couple people going in.

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None of the other faculty kids were the right age—Matt Bergstrom, whose dad is the head of the math department, would have been in my year, but he decided to go across the country to school and sometimes I think he was onto something—but Jennifer Wingate lives in town, and I'd been friends with her since basically forever, or at least since we joined the same dinky-kids Girl Scout troup. Daisies, or whatever. I knew that, and I knew that other faculty kids had gone to Springden and not been total outcasts—or my brain knew it, anyhow. Right before the first day of ninth grade, though, my brain doesn't count for jack.

So basically it was a freaking miracle that I slept at all that first night, dreams or no dreams. I got up the next morning, put on the t-shirt and jeans I'd spent three hours picking out, tried to eat cereal, and had almost completely forgotten about the whole thing by the time I headed out to the first orientation activity.

You probably know what I'm going to say about the first couple days: They weren't actually bad. Jenny and I hooked up right away—she's a short white girl like you, but her hair's spiky and she dyed it bright green over the summer, which makes her really easy to spot in a crowd—and just having her around made me feel a little less like a volcano of suckitude just waiting to erupt. We walked at

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the back of our group while Marlene O'Brian gave everyone the tour of campus and ex-plained everything about fifty times more than necessary: Hi, we're freshmen, not stupid. When we got to the dining hall, Jenny raised her hand and asked, all solemn, "What do we do here?"

Everyone cracked up—except Marlene, who gave her this stone-cold "How dare you mock the Sacred Campus Tour, infidel?" glare for just a second before remembering that she was supposed to be the Cool Authority Figure and managing a fake little laugh. Jenny completely shrugged it off, because, really, it's Marlene, and she may be a prefect and all, but there's still no way we're taking her seriously. I mean, she sat at my mom's table for Wednesday night dinners when she was a freshman, and she used to take her retainer out and just leave it by her plate, not even in a case or anything, until Mom had "a little talk" with her.

About then, I realized that the faculty brat thing went both ways: Sure, the upperclassmen might remember Skinny Poodle-Era Connie, but I remembered plenty of stuff they probably hoped I wouldn't bring up, some of it pretty hot. Mom and Dad try to keep the discipline stuff confidential, and they never talk about it with me in the room, but I have lived in this house since I was six, and our heating vents are

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practically a PA system, especially if you've got an empty water glass. So I know a lot of stuff. Like how Jackie Ann Reaves might look like Miss College Prep these days, being student body president and lead violin and all, but she was hauled up before the discipline committee for shoplifting when she was a freshman. A Skor bar, of all things. Knowing that killed off half the butterflies in my stomach.

We went around and did all the useful orientation stuff, and then the cornball-o-rama crap like trust falls. Trust falls off the edge of a little wooden platform. Seriously. Nobody was going to break their neck or anything, but still. This one really tall brown-haired girl tried three times and couldn't do it at all, and after the third time, she just looked like she wanted to cry. Marlene mumbled something that was supposed to be encouraging and sort of pushed her to the side so the next person could go up. I felt sort of bad for her, so I said, sort of joking but really not, "Hey, looks like someone has survival instincts."

And Jenny looked over and laughed. "But falling off a ledge backwards is a vital skill."

That got her another Look from Marlene, and a fifteen-minute explanation about how the point of this was to build confidence in ourselves and each other blah blah blooey blah. But the tall girl smiled and came over to stand

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by us. Her name was Autumn Kozinetski, and she was from Iowa, specifically some town small enough to make Greendale look semi-urban. We went through the rest of the day together, with Jenny and I filling Autumn in on the parts of school Marlene wouldn't talk about. Like the chapel gardens, actually: Isaiah Springden, who founded the Academy, was big into religion and nature and stuff, and he left a bunch of in-structions in his will about how the grounds around the old chapel were to be left intact, so they go on for about half a mile and are really like a forest in places. Marlene mentioned that part; what she didn't mention was that every kid in the damn school goes there to smoke, drink, or hook up, unless it's rainy, when they go to one of the boring floors of the library.

This is useful information, you know? By the time we got to dinner, I was kind of

enjoying my role as Native Guide, giving out bits of advice. Like: Wednesday nights, everyone sits down for formal dinner at six, there's a faculty member at every table, and you have to wear nice clothes, but you can get away with anything that's not jeans and a t-shirt. (Even though Mom always made me wear a dress and patent leather shoes, which I absolutely hated until last year.) Like: The shepherd's pie is actually a lot better than it looks, but the roast beef will make you feel like you swallowed a

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whole bottle of cooking grease, and new bread comes out Monday so on Sunday you could pretty much kill someone with a dinner roll. (Faculty kids eat dinner—and lunch and break-fast on weekends—in Commons, which is probably the only way my folks managed to keep all three of us fed when Ernesto was at home. Guy's like a black hole with legs.) Kinda fun, you know?

And then there were the upperclassmen. Not a whole lot of them, like I said, but a few. Now that we didn't look quite so dazed, the prefects had grouped up with each other, and with the three or so other upperclassmen who'd just come back early, and were catching up.

"Who's that?" one of the girls sitting with us asked, in the sort of voice that meant she'd just spotted something tasty.

I looked where she was carefully not pointing. Oh. "Spencer Andrews." Tall, dark, and hot. "Really, really gay," I said. "Came out at All-School Meeting last year. Total sweetie, but..." I saw about three faces fall, including Autumn's.

Spencer is a whole world of awesome, though; he plays center forward on the varsity soccer team, and he let me practice with him back when I was just learning how to play. Didn't laugh at me or act like an asshole

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because I was eleven and a girl or anything. Mom caught so much hell for making him a

prefect this year, you wouldn't believe it: Last spring, people would call up and say the most vile things. (I was kind of listening on the downstairs line. It sounded interesting, and it's not like eighth grade was a pit of excitement.) Like it was bad enough that she was the first woman Head—we've only been co-ed since about 1970—and that our last name's Perez instead of Stanton or Greene or something, but now she was putting a homosexual in charge of a boys' dorm and what would she do next in her liberal godless Communist blah blah blah.

And that wasn't the worst. Mom was looking really tired for a while; once, I came downstairs and she was just staring at her computer screen.

"You okay?" I asked, which was really weird, because that's...not a question you ask your mom, you know? Parents are always okay. It's like their job.

But she wasn't in Total Mom Mode either, because she laughed sort of tiredly and said, "Trying to figure out the polite words for 'go piss up a rope', sweetie. You know any?" Mom doesn't swear much, so I think my eyes got really big, and after a second or two, she sort of recovered and said that I hadn't heard that and why wasn't I in bed, anyhow? But it was weird,

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and I'm glad that's mostly stopped now. I sort of did look to see if anyone was

making the "ew, liberal godless communist school" face, and was really relieved when I didn't see it—did not need to get into a fight the first day, really—so I changed the subject to the other cute guys at the table real quick.

"That's Raj Jayaraman, he had a girlfriend in spring," which people looked more hopeful at, because spring was three months back and you never know, "and that's Edward Tinsley. I'm pretty sure he's single."

Mostly because Edward hadn't looked, like, half as good last year. He'd gotten biceps over the summer, his hair was way less oily, and his face didn't look all ratlike anymore. That happens a lot, actually: One of the good parts about growing up around high school students is realizing pretty early that there's a far side to puberty. I had to admit that I didn't know either of the guys particularly well, but Autumn and the other girls seemed glad just to have the descriptions and Jenny, of course, didn't care.

So the whole day turned out pretty well, and after that...well, the start of school is like one of those moving sidewalks at the airport. Once you're on, you don't have a lot of time to stop and think: I had to go to tryouts for the JV team, and get my class assignments, and we all had to wait in line for like two hours

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downtown to get our textbooks. (Seriously, Amanda, the line goes around the block. The guy down at the bookstore takes a picture every year—he's got a whole wall.) And then there were classes, which were even kind of fun right then, because everything was shiny and new and interesting.

No big surprise that I didn't think about the dream, huh? Everything was going really well, so it wasn't like I had anything to worry about. The only thing that creeped me out was when Mom came into my room on Saturday and told me she wanted to keep Rainbow, our cat, indoors for a couple weeks longer than usual. We don't let her out when the students are arriving—too many new people in cars—but we'd always been good after the first weekend, so I asked what was up.

Mom got this sort of having-to-touch-something-gross look on her face. "One of the maintenance staff found a rabbit the other day." She glanced back at Julio, who'd followed her up to my room. "A D-E-A-D one, I mean. They're a little worried that there's a fox or a coyote around—maybe even someone's abandoned dog—and that it's...sick."

I'm not scared of dogs generally, but the thought of having a pit bull or a Great Dane or something running around without an owner was a little freaky. Plus, I knew Mom meant

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rabies. I really, really didn't want to get bitten by anything with rabies. I hear you have to get about seventeen shots, and they're all in your stomach. "Where'd they find the...rabbit?" I asked.

"Near the old chapel. I'll send an email out to the student body tonight." She patted me on the shoulder. "Don't worry, sweetie. If there's something out there, maintenance will find it in a day or two." Which they didn't, but what-ever: rabies is fatal, right? Besides, nobody got bitten, and the whole thing was Mom's job, and maintenance's, not mine. My biggest worries right then were making the JV soccer team, getting a birthday present for Autumn, and the fact that first period bio was going to make us dissect worms at nine in the morning.

That was pretty much how it went for the next week or two. And then Abby Martell went crazy.

-TWO- I wasn't there, of course. Abby's a

junior, she was in class, and I'm not taking any of the advanced courses.

Autumn and I were in the Pit—the Pierce Student Center, officially, where the mailroom and day student lockers and vending machines live—and I was looking over the history paper I'd gotten back: a 4, which didn't make my week or anything, but was solid. (Springden grades 1 to 5 instead of D to A, I guess because it makes us feel special.) It helped that we were starting with mythology, and most of that stuff was pretty neat—all about who was sleeping with who and who was pissed off about it. Like The O.C. but with superpowers. Autumn had

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gotten a 3 on her English paper, which, like I told her, wasn't really fair: She had Mrs. DeGorgio, who's taught here for about fifty years, and is in a perpetual bad mood. Dad's in the department, so he has to deal with her a lot, and...well, I've heard lots of stories.

"Seriously," I was saying, "she's so hardass I'm surprised she can sit in regular chairs. I mean—"

"Holy shit, you guys." It was Becky Lewis. She lives in Autumn's dorm, and I knew it was really Autumn she was talking to—it didn't hurt that I was standing there or anything, though. "The weirdest thing just happened."

I gotta tell you, Amanda, that perked me right up. I mean, I didn't know what had hap-pened, and it was ten-thirty on one of those icky gray drizzly mornings when the whole world seems boring, so anything that would make Becky Lewis freak out was something I wanted to hear. So the three of us grabbed a squashy blue couch upstairs—they keep a room with them for the actual day students, the ones who don't live on campus and some-times have to wait around to get picked up—and I dug a bag of Pringles out of my backpack.

"So I was in math," Becky said, "and every-thing was totally normal, and then this chick started freaking out. I mean seriously; she started screaming and everything. Waving her

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hands around too—in front of her face." She demonstrated, moving her arms sort of like windshield wipers. "And Steve grabbed her shoulder to calm her down, and she turned around and I swear she tried to claw his face off, and then Mr. Wilson tried to, like, restrain her, and she kicked him—"

"Oh my God, she kicked a teacher?" Autumn asked.

"Well, not badly." Becky sounded kind of disappointed. "And I don't think she was aiming—she was really spastic by then. Anyhow, he got two of the seniors to help hold her down, and one of the girls called Emer-gency Health on her cell phone. She had to be sedated. The crazy girl, not the one with the cell. Obviously."

"Wow," I said, eating a chip. "Bizarro. Do you know who she was?"

Becky shook her head. "One of the upperclassmen." Becky's in the advanced math classes, the kind where you do...I don't know, logarithms? "Kinda short, kinda busty. Long blonde hair. Abby something?"

So I knew who it was, and suddenly I didn't want the chips anymore. Abby was a junior, so it wasn't like we'd ever been best friends or anything, but she'd spent two years watching me and Julio when Mom and Dad went out at night. She'd painted my nails, we'd watched

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trashy movies, and I liked her. "Well, crap," I said.

At which point Becky and Autumn seemed to remember, Oh, right, faculty brat. Autumn put her arm around my shoulders, but Becky got this pretend-sympathetic-but-actually-curious look on her narrow little face. "Do you guys hang out?" she asked.

I shook my head. No way was I explaining this to Becky. No way, in fact, was I using the word "babysitter" in reference to a student—not around Becky, not around anyone at Springden. A world of ew. "I knew her from around," I said, and shrugged. "She's cool. It's sad, is all."

"Oh," said Becky, and leaned forward a little. "What's going to happen to her?"

I shrugged. "How should I know? I'm not a doctor. They'll probably take her to the real hospital—Dalton's not really equipped for anything that serious." The Frances Dalton Memorial Infirmary—if you've noticed a pat-tern in our buildings, you're totally right—basically exists for checkups, the three squillion kinds of flu and colds we get every year, first aid, and birth control. Mostly they hand out Sudafed and Tylenol, which I'm pretty sure you'd get if you went in there with your head under your arm. "They'll want to do...tests and stuff, I guess."

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"Drug tests?" Becky asked. "I don't know. Maybe." "I think they need a warrant to do those

specifically," Autumn said, saving my ass. "I've got to go—next period starts in ten, and I have English over in Lindsay." Lindsay Hall is on the campus which used to be Sherbrook, Spring-den's sister school before the whole place went co-ed in the Seventies, and the founders put in about half a mile of space to keep the boys and girls apart. "See you at dinner, Connie."

"For sure," I said, and took off myself. I wasn't so crazy about hanging around talking to Becky for her own sake, and now I didn't much want to talk about Abby with her either.

They probably would do drug tests—Autumn was right, but I was pretty sure that a general blood test would show most things anyhow—but I couldn't believe she'd been on anything.

Don't get me wrong: Springden isn't some island of purity. We kick people out for drinking or drugs—eventually, though you get probation first—and everyone knows it, but two or three kids leave every term after someone catches them. (Sometimes they OD. Then they call the infirmary and get what we call "sanctuary," where they get to stay, they get counseling, and Mom has absolutely no spare time for the week afterwards.) They probably figure they won't

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get caught, and most of them don't. Even I've heard stories. Mostly it's alcohol—including cough syrup, if you're absolutely pathetic—but everyone in Rockford (one of the smaller boys' dorms) is a total stoner, just about, and there's harder stuff around: Mom busted a kid for E a year or two back, and everyone knows that Christian Greene brings back a year's supply of coke every year after spring break—which I guess you can do if your dad's in the diplomatic corps over in Algeria or someplace like that.

Abby just didn't seem the type, that was all. Yeah, I know there's no type, you can't judge a junkie by her cover, blah blah blah. I've taken the classes. Plus, you know, last summer. The thing with Sonya. (And really, if I looked that much like Pippi Longstocking, I'd probably keep mason jars of rum in my bunk, too.)

It just didn't seem like her, though. For one thing, the kind of girl who babysits the faculty kids isn't generally the kind of girl who gets invites from people like Chris Greene. Just like I'm not. And you don't have to be in the popular crowd to get booze or pot, but last I heard, neither of those made you flip out during math class.

Of course I asked my parents about it when I got home that night. The head doesn't know every time one of us gets in trouble—if you're out past sign-in or cut too many classes, that's your

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dorm dean's problem, because every kid at Springden who's not a total zombie does that a few times—but anything involving drugs or alcohol gets kicked up to her, even the really routine stuff. And this wasn't: This was drama city.

Mom and Dad were in front of the TV when I asked, and CSI was on. It relaxes my parents to watch people getting killed and cut up, which probably says a lot about their jobs. I sat down on the arm of the sofa and waited until the commercial, when Dad looked up at me. "Something wrong, Consuela?"

I shook my head. Then I shrugged, because... well, duh. "Nothing wrong with me," I said, to clear things up. "Is Abby gonna be okay?"

Mom sighed. "I should have known word would get around by now," she said. The lines around her eyes and mouth seemed deeper, which they do whenever she's tense. She reach-ed over and took my hand. "I don't know, honey. I hope so. I drove over to Central to see her this afternoon, and she woke up for a little while this evening. She seemed more...well, more lucid then, but she was still pretty heavily sedated."

"Oh," I said, and swung my legs against the side of the sofa while I tried to think of what to say next. Dad didn't tell me not to, and he didn't tell me to be careful about the arm, either, so I knew things were serious. "Do you know why?

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She wasn't...on anything, right?" "Your mother couldn't tell you if she was,"

Dad reminded me. "So it's not really fair of you to ask, is it?"

Screw fair, I thought; I wanted to know. But even though Dad was talking gently—

which meant he knew I was freaking out and he wasn't really mad or anything—he meant what he said. Plus, he said it so Mom wouldn't have to, but I knew she would have. Part of growing up is knowing when there's no point bugging your parents. So I said okay, and asked them to let me know if anything happened and tell Abby I said hi and all that, and then I went upstairs and listened with my door open until Dr. Eisen came over.

I knew he would. Mom's meetings take place in our house half the time, because it's not like emergencies wait for business hours, and a student having a mental breakdown is not the sort of thing you want to talk about over the phone. Plus, if I'd already heard about Abby, everyone else would have, too, and Mom would want to have all the facts as soon as she could. Before people's parents started calling.

So I noodled around on my math problems until I heard the doorbell ring, and then voices from downstairs. I recognized Dr. Eisen's voice in about two seconds—he was giving me my yearly checkups when I was six, and he's not

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exactly a quiet guy. He, Mom, and Dad stood around for a little while near the door, and I heard Mom say, "Great way to start the year, huh, John?"

"We've had worse," said Dr. Eisen. Mom kind of laughed. "Yeah, don't remind

me." I didn't know what they were talking about—we lived here a lot of years before I really knew what was going on, after all. You know how you are when you’re a kid. "Come on in and get settled. Want a drink?"

They went into the living room. I closed the door, gulped down the rest of my Coke, and then took the glass over to the radiator. Not just in time—they did a lot of small talk about me ("Adjusting well, thank God," Dad said) and Julio's issues with kindergarten and Dr. Eisen's wife and dog—but it didn't take very long. It never really does.

"Well," said Dr. Eisen, "she has no idea what happened."

"She doesn't remember?" Mom asked. "Oh, she remembers something. Sitting in

math class and starting to hallucinate, mostly. She didn't want to talk about most of it, but it sounds like a really bad trip."

"Dios mio," said Mom. "We've got acid now? What were you saying about having had worse?"

"I'm sure it's not the first time, Linda," Dad

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said. "The school's been around for three hundred years, and that included the Sixties."

"Yes, but I wasn't Head in the Sixties." The main problem with being a boarding-

school teacher, let alone Head of School, comes down to three little words: In loco parentis. That's Latin, which I'm not taking, but I'm pretty sure it translates to something like "the little shitheads are your problem now, suckers." See, if some normal kid huffs glue or sets fires in trashcans, that's sad and all, but it's a problem for his parents, and maybe the police, unless he does it on campus. For board-ing students, though, the campus is their entire world unless they're on vacation. If they screw themselves or the world up in the nine months when school's in session, Springden can get it in the neck. And by "Springden," I mean "Mom."

I mean, I was pretty sure she was also worried about Abby, but the woman was seeing the big picture, and I couldn't blame her for that.

"I might as well start with the good news, then," Dr. Eisen said. "Nothing showed up in the tests. No drugs, no alcohol—she had a fair amount of caffeine in her blood, but that was about it."

Even from upstairs, I could hear Mom letting her breath out. I relaxed, too, but not as much. My ass hadn't been on the line. Besides,

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even if Abby hadn't been on drugs, she'd still flipped out. After a couple moments—and, I guessed, a pretty big sip of whatever she was drinking—Mom got to the same place I was. "So—"

"I don't know. There's no evidence of a head injury, and Abby herself doesn't remember anything like that. She says she'd been feeling run-down since she got back to campus, but not that she'd been under more stress than usual, or that she'd had anything particularly trau-matic happen. Self-reporting is pretty un-reliable in these cases, but it's what we have to go on." Dr. Eisen sighed. "I hate to do it so early in the year, but I'd recommend medical leave, and a full workup by a neurologist. Psychotic episodes can have some pretty nasty causes—she's at the right age for schizophrenia to show up, for example."

Mom made some appalled noises. I felt like making a few myself. Now I almost wished it had been drugs—not that I've ever taken LSD, but I bet it's a lot easier to stop than it is to get rid of schizophrenia or a brain tumor.

I put down the glass, stood up, and took a trashy novel to bed with me. Mom would go along with Dr. Eisen's suggestion, and there wasn't much else to find out. I kind of wished I hadn't heard what I had.

Mom took me to Central Valley Hospital

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the next day, after class. Everyone was talking by then, but not all of it was the kind of talking Becky did. Not many people could go to the hospital, since we're not allowed to have cars on campus, but at least a couple of the day students had already been. When the nurse let me into Abby's room, I saw a big vase of flowers by her bed, and a couple of cards beside it. That made me feel a little less bad.

All the same, I didn't know what to say. You never do around people who've been really hurt, or sick, or whatever, plus I knew all this stuff about what might be happening in her brain, stuff she might not even know. Stuff she definitely didn't know I knew. So it was really awkward. I wiped my palms on my jeans—they were sweating like anything, and it was kind of gross—smiled at her, and said "Hey."

I tried not to stare. It was pretty easy, actually. Abby looked

basically normal. Tired, and sort of zonked—they were probably still keeping her on some kind of drugs—and in hospital clothes, but you wouldn't look at her and think sick, or crazy.

"Hi there," she said back, like she'd always done. Maybe a little slower, but, like I said, basically normal. "How's it going, Connie?"

"Oh, you know," I said, and shrugged. "School." Then I wondered if I should be reminding her about school, since she couldn't

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go back for a while or anything. "Um. How are you?"

Oh, hey, it was the question everyone else had asked. She was good about it—smiled and everything—but I could see her looking even more tired. Way to go, Consuela: You're, like, the master of tact. Mistress. Whatever. "Doing better," Abby said.

"Cool." I looked over at the table. "Nice flowers."

"Thanks. My grandparents sent them." She waved a hand at one of the cards. It had a puppy on the front, looking sad. "The girls in Stonecourt sent that. Can you tell them thanks for me? I'm sure you've got some of them in your classes."

Abby had been a prefect, too. I'd forgotten about that. No wonder Mom was looking so frazzled. "Sure thing," I said. Then I couldn't think of anywhere else to go with the con-versation. I looked down, away from her eyes. There was a big black bruise on her neck, and I wondered if that had been where someone had to hold her down or where they'd stuck the needle or what. "I hope you feel better soon."

She smiled again, still tired. "Me too."