A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult) (16 page)

CHAPTER 20

It’s a relief when classes start again. Surrounded by people, always with places to be or things to do, it’s harder to drown in the endless weeping of the drowning sun in my chest. I’m a sophomore this year; I have no classes in common with Dane and Horatio, who are both seniors.

Dinner during the week is a haphazard affair at best. Those of us who live here year-round can choose to dine in the mansion with the other students or eat in the private dining room of Headmaster’s House. Or if one is cowardly and weak, in Father’s study with a tray and a pile of papers that need to be typed. Where other students have laptops and privacy, I have a father whose idea of parental controls involve his being in the room. Consumed with a million details, Father doesn’t notice my self-imposed isolation. Or at least, I think he doesn’t; he might choose to let me keep myself separate for a time, but I don’t believe he could make that decision without comment. Whatever he does, whatever he decides, Father will always have a speech to make on the subject.

It would be easier if I could say that Dane hated me for walking away.

Sometimes I can say that. Sometimes I can feel his eyes on me in the halls, feel the glares that smoke and blaze between my shoulder blades as though with a single glance he could flay all the flesh from my body and leave it to rot. On those occasions, he passes by in sullen silence or even knocks the books from my hands for the simple pleasure of causing me pain.

Sometimes the only way to make a pain bearable is to make others feel it too.

But then there are the days where he acts as if nothing has changed, where he sits beside me at lunch and laces his fingers through mine, where he traps me in corners and kisses me until breath is just a faint memory with no meaning. The days where he drags me into hidden alcoves in the gardens we know so well and traces fire across my skin with hands and lips.

Then there are the days that set everyone to talking.

The third day of classes, Dane swept through the halls in tights; a long, sleeveless leather coat; a blouse with billowing sleeves; a long cape, all black edged in silver; and a gaudy gold crown perched lopsided on his sable hair. He answered all questions put to him quite solemnly, with no indication of a prank or a game or anything at all out of the ordinary.

The next day he spoke entirely in German—not just in the halls but in classes as well, speaking over the professors with rambling, disjointed monologues. Rumors filtered through the lower grades, but Horatio met me in the gardens that night and told me the truth of them. Some of it was poetry, he said, or bits of plays or even operas; and during their Latin test, he stood and delivered an impassioned recitation of large chunks of
The Communist Manifesto
.

He’s had days where he can’t seem to stop talking and days where he hasn’t said a word. One night he walked into a bathroom of the girls’ dormitory and set about his evening ritual like he didn’t notice the thirteen-year-olds shrieking from the shower stalls. Another day he pretended to faint every time someone said his name; another day he assigned everyone the wrong names and genders; yet another day he threw such a violent fit in his literature class that the first-year professor broke down in tears.

Father and Claudius spent hours convincing the poor woman not to quit, finally offering her a raise and promising to cover part of her tuition should she decide to pursue a doctorate in education. They even offered her two weeks of paid vacation to recover her nerves, and it was still a near thing to make her stay.

Three weeks in, as I sit in Old Testament Studies with nineteen other girls, the door slams open. Our steely-haired professor—a born spinster if there is such a thing anymore—drops both chalk and eraser in a pale puff of dust and turns to stare.

It’s Dane, of course, and my heart sinks at the sight of him.

His bare chest gleams with oil, a black bandana knotted around his neck like a bandit at rest. A black Stetson sits at an angle atop his dark hair, and his black jeans couldn’t be tighter if they tried. A coil of rope rests in one hand, a lasso drooping from the other. He catches my eye and winks, tipping the Stetson in my direction. “Little filly,” he drawls.

My face flames, and I look back at my notes amidst a chorus of whispers and growls.

“Mr. Danemark!”

He smiles at my scandalized professor and swings himself over the first row of desks. “Howdy, ma’am. Just checking the herds.” He reaches my row and hops onto the desk behind me, knees to either side of me, and strokes my hair. “Easy there, filly.”

“Mr. Danemark, I insist you leave my class this instant!”

He eyes her sourly, the lasso twirling slowly at his side. “Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin,” he says softly.

You have been weighed in the balance and are found wanting.

My professor is unimpressed. Purple blotches spread rapidly across her narrow face as she stalks toward the call button for the intercom. “Mr. Danemark, leave my class at once, or I will be forced to take you before the Headmaster for your actions.”

Probably not the best thing to say.

Dane leaps to his feet on the desk, and the lasso spins in a blur over our heads. “Time to cull the herd, beauties!” The rope flies forward, the loop dropping over the sputtering woman. When he pulls the slipknot tight, she falls to her knees and scrabbles against the floor as he yanks her inexorably closer. I could almost feel sorry for her. Dane jumps down and hauls her to her feet by the neck of her blouse. “Say good-bye now, ma’am.”

“Mister—”

He seals his mouth to hers, and we all watch in horrified fascination as the colors spread down her neck. She swats at him ineffectually, but then his hands are flying, the rope whipping around, and suddenly she’s back on the floor with her wrists and ankles tied together behind her back. When she opens her mouth to scream, he stuffs his bandana between her teeth.

And none of us move; none of us try to help.

I’m not sure which one we’d help if we weren’t frozen.

Then it’s out of my hands entirely because Dane grabs me, then Kelly Hunter beside me, and drags us out of our desks and out of the room, yelling so enthusiastically that every door in the hall pops open so heads can watch our skidding, drunken progress. He doesn’t let go until we reach the auditorium and the stage, where he interrupts an Advanced Drama class to hurl us into the startled arms of Kelly’s older brother Keith.

Thank God for Keith, who just holds us steady as Dane steals a fresh coil of rope from the lighting closet and races across the velvet-padded chairs and out the door again. Kelly giggles and breathlessly relates it all to her brother. I close my eyes against the tears that make the room swim before me.

How many people understand the writing on the wall?

There’s no way to predict these unfathomable episodes, no apparent trigger or pattern to them. He might appear completely normal at breakfast but explode later in the day, or in the evening, after hours of bizarre behavior, he looks at any who might question him on it like they’ve gone insane. The incidents might be scattered with a few days between or strung so closely together that only the particulars prove that they’re separate occurrences.

The performances are in no way limited to the mansion where classes are held. His frenzied antics continue in the Headmaster’s House so long as there is even a single maid to serve witness to it. One morning I awake to the sound of Father locking my bedroom door; Horatio tells me later that Dane spent several hours wandering nude around the house. He half laughs through the entire story, but his hazel eyes are dark with concern. That same night, Dane bursts into his mother’s room and waltzes her through the hall in her dressing gown, bellowing Wagner at the top of his lungs. Just as Gertrude’s astonishment finally turns to laughter, he drops her hands and walks away with a scowl.

As long as he has an audience, he’s performing, even if the act is to appear normal. There’s a logic to his frenetic activity, a twisted course of thought that eludes me even as I know it should be obvious. That it is an act I’m certain. He warned us; he swore it would all be acting. I have to remind Horatio of this after Dane spends their calculus class fencing invisible foes with two pencils taped together. We know the behavior is forced. What we don’t know is why.

Only around Horatio and me does the act drop away, but he doesn’t discuss it with either of us. Somehow this play at madness is part of his arrangement with his father’s ghost, a cog or a tool or a process. I’m grateful beyond words for Horatio’s love for Dane, for the steady regard that seeks to support him no matter the chaos all around us. It’s not a simple thing by any stretch of the imagination, but it yields a simple result: around Horatio, Dane can be real. He can put away the plots and the plans and allow himself to be exhausted by his grief and fury.

Claudius and Gertrude notice his antics, of course, but other than speaking of it in hushed voices when they think no one else is around, they don’t do anything. Claudius’ inaction is easy to understand, I think; to him, it must seem as though Dane is acting out purely to reflect poorly on his uncle as the new headmaster. After all, if he can’t even control his nephew-stepson, how can he run an entire school? And it’s not as though that line of reasoning would be out of character for a teenager. Claudius’ lofty pretense that there’s nothing going on makes sense to me.

Gertrude, on the other hand, presents a puzzle. She’s clearly concerned for her son. Her blue eyes track his progress through a room, her hands fluttering helplessly at her breast whenever she witnesses one of his episodes. She’s too aware of her reputation to weep in public, but some nights the soft sounds carry through the old walls of the house.

On those nights, Dane flees the second level and comes to me, his dark grey eyes haunted by a pain deeper than just the reflection of his mother’s. Every time, I come face-to-face with the knowledge that I should turn him away. Father’s edict hasn’t changed. I made him a promise. And every time, I come face-to-face with the knowledge that I can’t ever turn him away. I made Dane a promise, too. I’m a liar with every breath.

Whenever he runs away from the muted proof of the pain he causes his mother, I open the door and let him come in. Somewhere within my father is a remnant of the man seduced by a feral beauty half his age, the man who offered to walk away from the job and school he loves because he thought it was the right thing to do. Somewhere in that echo I think—I hope—is a piece that understands why I can’t be a good daughter and close my door in the face of the pain that’s become a living thing.

During the days, Dane vacillates between hating me for walking away and pretending that I never did. Both take a strength he can’t find at night. When he comes to me for comfort, he’s just the boy who’s lost his father, who’s losing his mother. Sometimes it’s enough for him just to hold me, to fall asleep in my arms and know that I’ll still be there when he wakes up in the morning.

Then there’s the Dane who needs, whose teeth and hands summon bruises to my skin, whose lips crash against mine to capture the startled whimpers as his touch hovers between pleasure and pain. No matter which Dane comes to me in the night, I know the next morning I’ll find a letter or small gift tucked into the basket of flowers that Jack sets by my door, and always a flower that hides words behind a meaning. Years ago, Gertrude gave me a book with all the meanings; it’s gotten more use now than ever before. More than anything, those gifts show the Dane I know.

The Dane I miss.

As September passes into October, as his games grow more and more savage, he shows up at my door nearly every night. Horatio stays with him all through the days, and it makes me wonder if perhaps Dane is afraid to be alone. Like a music box wound too tightly, he seems constantly on the verge of flying apart. Sometimes I wish he’d confide his plans with us so we could help him. Other times, more selfish times, I’m glad he doesn’t. Nearly two months he’s been playing his deep-seated game, and so far as either Horatio or I can tell he’s no closer to whatever he seeks. If it’s proof he’s looking for, he’s chosen a very circuitous method of digging for it.

Dane performs and Claudius ignores, a stalemate that seems as though it may never end. One of them will lose his patience before too much longer, but I don’t think any of us—even Dane—looks forward to that moment.

But there’s a day, one single extraordinary day, when I don’t have to worry about Dane or Hamlet or Claudius, don’t have to dwell on the fact that Laertes hasn’t written once since he left for France.

October 26 dawns cold and crisp, with a heavy, drifting blanket of clouds that promises an evening storm. The rain will be half frozen, I think. Summer surrendered early this year, and autumn stands poised to do the same. Color gradually leeches from everything, leaving the school and grounds a study of soft blues and greys. When I leave my room for breakfast, there’s a note from Father on the door excusing me from classes.

I’m sixteen today. Today is the day I was born and the day I died, the day Mama died, the day Father had to watch Hamlet decide which of us to try to save. Father couldn’t swim, won’t learn now, and Mama had weighed herself down while only holding me loose in her arms. I was easy for Hamlet to pull from the water, but to actually save me meant a choice. Save the girl? Or fight to pull out the woman and likely lose them both? I wonder, sometimes, if Father regrets that choice, if he would have been better off if Hamlet had left us both to the gleaming towers and delicate bells of the City of Ys. Every day on this year, Father excuses Laertes and me from classes and spends the long hours locked away in his study with a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of misery to discover which will empty faster.

Always the whiskey.

Laertes usually sticks to my side like a burr in my skirt, but he’s thousands of miles away, and this year, this day, I can do whatever I want, go wherever I want.

Along with my usual basket of straggling hothouse violets and other flowers, Jack’s left me an extra gift: a crown of roses, deep peach at their throat but rusting up the petals to a cinnamon at the edges. It looks faintly ridiculous with the uniform, all midnight and ice blue and perfect pleats, but I wear it anyway. Today is the one day no one will ask if I’ve taken my pills, where I can leave behind shoes and socks and feel the earth beneath my feet, where I can wear flowers in my hair and no one speaks of faeries or madness.