My teacher assures me that the cemetery was reserved for the royal family who owned the opera house, and the only unmarked grave belonged to a baby. However tragic that is, it doesn’t explain sightings of a guy who wears outdated fashions and hides half his face.
Later that night, while I’m on the chaise lounge watching Mom sleep with the bed curtains open, I wonder if she’s heard any rustling inside the vent this week. I try to stifle my phantom superstitions by looking at things from her cynical perspective. Maybe it was the elderly caretaker in the garden that first day, after all. I haven’t met him yet, so I don’t know what he looks like. Maybe the mist, along with my nerves, made me imagine him as someone younger. And maybe that supposed sighting fueled my imagination to feverish heights, until I thought I was seeing him in the mirrors. It’s possible this whole time I’d been catching people’s reflections behind me and blew it out of proportion.
Of course my superstitions conjured him. I want with all my heart for my fantasy maestro to be real—even if by some impossible twist he’s the phantom—because if anyone could help me defeat my song sickness, it’s him. On that thought, I close my eyes and find my dreams. He’s already there with the violin, waiting to take away my pain.
8
OMENS
“She failed to see a shadow which followed her like her own shadow, which stopped when she stopped, which started again when she did and which made no more noise than a well-conducted shadow should.”
Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
On Thursday morning, it finally looks like I might have a chance to get out in the garden later in the day. But the rain has already started again as Quan and I walk from breakfast to our shared first-period class.
Professor Tomlin’s science room is everything you’d expect from an ecologically minded rock-star Einsteinian who dabbles in theatrics. There’s a genuine skeleton in one corner dressed in a Shakespeare costume, spindly legs spray-painted blue in lieu of tights to match its velvet tunic and hat. A sign hangs under its fake beard that says: RESPECT THE BARD. Test tubes line several shelves, each filled with water and seeds, some already blossoming into plants. A picture of a wrecked motorcycle in a standup frame occupies one corner of the professor’s desk, seated beside a deeply dented helmet. Tomlin hit a brick wall a few years back at high speed and was thrown off his bike, yet he survived. Rumor has it he uses that story to demonstrate Newton’s law of inertia. Macabre, but memorable.
The students’ table surfaces are slick whiteboard, and each of us has our own set of dry-erase markers to work out formulas and theories, then erase them once we’ve jotted down our answers, to prevent the need for scrap paper.
Tomlin always schedules labs on Thursday, and this morning’s is on how “external force can alter the energy of a given system.” He’s separated everyone into groups of four and sent us to our tables where a steel-hooked weight sits beside a two-foot plank of wood balanced atop some books in the center. The idea is to make a ramp and alter the number of books beneath for different heights. Then we’ll drag the hooked weight up and down to measure force.
It has to be some kind of sick joke that he paired Quan and me with Kat and Roxie. There’s no love lost between Quan and the diva duo, considering how they treated both Sunny and Audrey last year. And they certainly haven’t welcomed me with open arms. A genius professor can’t be that clueless, can he?
Things are even worse ever since first-tier auditions for Renata’s role yesterday afternoon. Of course I couldn’t stop myself from leaping up and singing her aria, and despite that I fell back into my chair fatigued the instant I delivered the last note, my rendition was pristine enough it won me one of the three spots for final Renata tryouts, alongside Audrey and Kat, should I so choose. I’m already planning to develop infectious laryngitis that week and be quarantined to my room. But Kat and Roxie don’t know that tidbit.
“In your lab journals, copy down and record your data for these questions,” Tomlin says with his back turned, scribbling on the chalkboard. A few of the students have their gazes trained to his tight buns. I’ll admit he’s the hottest teacher at the school, even in a nerdy, two-piece wool suit. “And be sure to include the incline variations of your ramp from each run-through.”