She’s also staring directly at me.
I nod. Her ears go red and she quickly faces forward. I follow her gaze. She’s not looking at the headmaster, I don’t think. She’s focused on what’s behind him—the Gothic wood carving that hangs above the altar. Supposedly, a group of students made it over a hundred years ago, back when the school was all girls. It’s dedicated to the founding headmistress. She’s the one who rescued this tiny clapboard chapel from demolition and had it moved piece by piece all the way up the mountain and reconstructed on the campus grounds. As the story goes, each girl chiseled a specific letter, one at a time. It must have taken them forever because the thing is huge. Today it’s kept well oiled, a massive mahogany glow that serves as the backdrop of every gathering we have in here, and although the school is secular, the quote is from Corinthians. It’s meant to be sacred, but it’s really just stupid.
Love never faileth?
Yeah, right.
chapter
six
antimatter
This I really didn’t understand.
Our family was cultured. If and when we traveled, we spent our days visiting museums and galleries, our nights in theaters or lecture halls. We didn’t do rural. Which was why it didn’t make sense that an entire Saturday in late November had been set aside to visit Semper Liberi, a hokey-sounding animal preserve located in West Virginia.
What I did understand was that it was a good two-and-a-half-hour drive to the place—a twisty ride that would take us into the depths of the Monongahela National Forest. I didn’t want to go, for numerous reasons. Besides the obvious car dilemma, I did not enjoy zoos or aquariums or anything related. The animals always smelled or hid, and I generally just didn’t care. But I had no say in the matter.
I survived the road trip in the family Volvo by skipping breakfast and getting drugged up on Phenergan, the only medication with the power to suppress my motion sickness. It also knocked me out cold. Keith had to shake me awake as we pulled into the parking lot of the preserve. I flailed and tried to hit him. I wanted to continue sleeping. I wanted to remain unwoken.
I stepped from the car into the frigid autumn air. A huge puddle of drool smeared across my cheek and all the way down my neck. The echo of familiar nightmares rattled in my head, and my limbs felt weak and unreliable. I lagged behind my family, shadowed by the crunch of gravel beneath my feet and lost in my own internal fog. A bitter wind howled off the hillside with locomotive force and I stumbled, once, twice, over the untied laces of my Nikes. But I caught myself. Kept going.
Nothing looked real. Nothing felt right.
I heard my name bounce around in the breeze like a Wilson double core on clay and looked to see Keith beckoning me with one arm. My brother smiled calmly, a beatific look. He stood at a split trailhead with beech and black cherry trees towering above him in their newly bare autumn glory.
“Come on!” he called.
“Why are we here?”
“Come on,” he repeated. “We’re going to see the wolves.”
We took the left-hand trail and hoofed it down into the dark woods. The sharp scent of birch oil hung in the air. My brother’s body fairly thrummed with excitement, and I struggled to keep up. I was no match for his long legs or bright-eyed eagerness.
“You all right?” He ducked down once to squint at me. His red-brown hair flopped over his forehead, and he’d recently taken to wearing button-down shirts that reminded me of our father’s favorite students. The ones who stopped by our house to drink with him at all hours of the night. The ones our mother hated.
“I’m fine,” I mumbled, although this wasn’t quite true. Phenergan residue left me with a pounding headache and dry mouth, like playground sand, which I sometimes ate. “What did you say about wolves?”
“They have them here at the sanctuary. Pretty cool, huh?” Keith jutted his chin in the direction of our parents. “It took forever to convince them to bring us. You know how Dad is with the whole animal rescue thing. I had to promise to get straight A’s and not convert you into a vegetarian, but I wanted you to see it.”
So Keith had been to this place before? And coming again had been his idea? That was news to me. He shouldn’t have bothered. I was in no danger of becoming a vegetarian.