The answer shocks me enough to sit up, so fast I almost bump the top of my head on the antechamber’s low, arched ceiling. “You’re supposed to be at the airport by eight! Why didn’t you wake me up earlier? I wanted time to say good-bye.” I feel like a little girl again, needing that red thread around my wrist so I can let her go.
Mom pats my hand. “It’s okay. I called and got my flight changed. I’m going to stay till the end of the week, to catch up with Lottie and to do a little sightseeing on my own. I can buy a few outfits to wear while I’m here. Maybe I’ll even find the perfect wedding dress, yeah?”
“Mom . . . you should be back home with Ned, planning the wedding.” Newly engaged, and he’s all alone at our house instead of spending quality time with his fiancée.
She shakes her head. “You’re my priority, Rune. I just don’t feel good about leaving yet. Your spell was . . . different this time.”
Her unspoken I’m worried you might be going completely bat-monkeys like Grandma Lil echoes in the silence. The lava lamp makes a soft burbling sound and the fluorescent light casts everything in eerie shadows. Mom looks like half of her face is gone.
I cringe and roll my shoulders to alleviate the sense of dread and confusion rising around me like the freezing water in my dream, adding to the guilt I’m already wrestling with over so many things—including making Mom stay longer, all because I faked fainting yesterday.
Not only did she have to call the airport, she had to notify her boss at the house-cleaning service, too. Now she’s using up vacation days that should be saved for her honeymoon. She must be really upset to disrupt her life like that.
And to think, she doesn’t even realize how screwed up I am.
“Let’s get a move on.” She nudges my left knee with her palm, almost touching the scar that’s exposed by my lace-trimmed shorty pajamas. “The seniors have last breakfast while the juniors start their classes. It’s the perfect time to meet the kids you’ll be graduating with.”
I cringe. After the “fainting” incident yesterday, I stayed in my room the rest of the evening and was able to avoid meeting any of the students other than Sunny. However, most of the teachers breezed through for introductions.
Professor Diamond Tomlin—the youngest of the staff at age twenty-five, and instructor of all things theatric and scientific—came in, having just returned from a weekend gig in Paris with his alternative punk band. Other than his tweed jacket and pleated pants, he looked the part of a drummer, with his dark beard and wiry build. But his hair sticking up in thick, brown waves all over his head and the sharpness of his inquisitive blue eyes gave him more of a young, rebellious Einstein vibe, which fit with what Sunny had told me: that he likes to perform science experiments in his dorm after lights-out, resulting in strange orange flashes beneath his door.
Principal Norrington came in behind the professor and shook my hand, saying he looked forward to having me in his financial-literacy and career-planning classes second semester. With his accent and weathered good looks, I was convinced there was a British spy hidden behind his stuffy sweaters and wire-rimmed glasses. Confirmation came when he unintentionally bumped into Madame Harris—school librarian, classical lit teacher, and counselor in a curvy, blond-haired, gray-eyed package—on the way out of my room. As he helped her pick up the papers she’d dropped, their eyes locked, and a 007/Miss Moneypenny vibe passed between them.
Their romantic moment shattered when Madame Bouchard—instructor of historical musicology, vocal pedagogy, and all around scariest staff member at the academy—appeared. Bouchard fit perfectly inside this gloomy, haunting place with her stiff-as-iron poise, thin-lipped, heavily painted face, and straight white hair bleeding to a hot-pink dye job before falling to her waist. She was something fresh out of Bride of Frankenstein. Yet from what Sunny told me, Bouchard is more mad scientist than monster. Her favorite pastime is taxidermy. She’s even transformed one of the empty dressing rooms on the second floor into her workshop and personal exhibition hall.