The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls (5 page)

Be careful.
Twice in two days, someone had said that.

“And what, exactly, am I supposed to be careful of?” Victoria said to herself.

It must have stormed overnight, because Victoria kept having to step around puddles. The street was even dirtier
than it had been yesterday, with black mud piled here and there between the cobblestones, like something had been digging around. The sky churned. The sick black and yellow light made it impossible to tell the hour. It could have been dawn or dusk or noon. The only color on the street was a dot of red by Six Silldie Place. Victoria frowned to see Mr. Tibbalt’s dog and started to turn away, but then she noticed that the dog was sitting in utter silence
outside
Mr. Tibbalt’s yard, which he had never done before. He stared down the street toward the Home. The wind blew dirty leaves at him, but he didn’t even twitch an ear.

Victoria paused, scolded herself for being stupid, and walked toward the dog anyway. She stopped beside him, curling her lip in disgust His scruffed neck all bristly, he looked up at her and growled, almost as though
he
were disgusted with
her
.

“Yes, I hate you too,” said Victoria.

The dog turned away and pricked his shaggy ears down the street.

Victoria followed his gaze toward the Home’s gate, which stood half open. The open part swayed in the wind and banged against the latch, over and over in a pool of black light. A particularly harsh gust of wind slammed it shut at last. The bang rattled Victoria’s nerves.

The dog jumped to his feet and yapped down the street at the gate, bouncing around like a toy. Victoria frowned at his ugly, whiskered face and turned away.

“Stupid dog,” she muttered, and resumed walking toward Lawrence’s house, thinking about her dilemma.

Maybe she could forge one of her parents’ signatures, but that thought made her palms sweat. Forging was lying, and Victoria didn’t lie. Lying was breaking the rules. Besides, to forge a signature, she would have to sneak into her father’s study, find a signed document, and trace it and copy it over and over till she got it right. The Academy had devices to tell a fake signature. They took forgery very seriously. And Victoria wasn’t used to sneaking anywhere. In fact, she pointedly avoided it. Sneaking was for people who did wrong things, people who, for whatever reason, couldn’t just do as they were told. And this Victoria just could not understand.

At least, she had never understood it
before
. Now, however . . .

No.
She shook her head.
No. I do as I’m told. I follow the rules. That’s how I’m the best.

Maybe she could talk with Professor Carroll and ask him to change her grade. She would do a year’s worth of extra credit, she would clean the pianos using a toothbrush, she would recopy every piece of music in the Academy archives
by hand and in her own blood, if that’s what it took.

She needed that A more than she needed the beautiful colored schedule above her desk, more than her lovely wall of boxes, more than family or friends.

Victoria thought about that last one.
Friends.
Well, she only had one, but it was something. Maybe Lawrence could actually come in handy in this situation. He could go with her to speak to Professor Carroll, and Professor Carroll would quite possibly do anything Lawrence asked. He doted on his little prodigy in a way Victoria considered pretty sickening, really.

Why hadn’t she thought about this before?

Feeling much better about things, Victoria reached the Prewitt house and rapped with the knocker. A minute passed and no one came. Victoria tapped her foot against the porch. Lawrence had probably overslept or something. Of course.

She knocked again. She knocked three times. She knocked
four
times.

Victoria frowned at the door. She tried to look in the side windows, but the drapes and blinds were closed. She looked around the corners of the house into the ivy gardens. A hose had been left on, streaming water into a soggy mess of ruined flowers and overturned gnomes. Victoria wrinkled her nose
at the smell of gook and slime, and turned off the spigot.

She went back to the porch and shouted, “Hello.” She ignored the knocker and pounded on the door with her fist.

The door glided open, and the person standing there stared down at Victoria in silence.

Victoria raised her eyebrows. “Mr. Prewitt?”

Mr. Prewitt smiled at Victoria like someone had pins in the corners of his mouth and was slowly pulling them back toward his ears. It looked just like a smile should look. In fact, it looked better—wide and bright and shining.

“Hello, Victoria,” Mr. Prewitt said. “How nice to see you. What can I do for you today?”

Victoria blinked. “What do you mean?”

Behind him, Mrs. Prewitt appeared, stirring something in a bowl.

“Hello, Victoria,” she said, in the same crisp, cheerful tone as Mr. Prewitt. “How nice to see you. What can I do for you today?”

Victoria took a step back and narrowed her eyes. “I’m supposed to meet Lawrence and walk to school, of course.”

Mrs. Prewitt nodded and stirred. Mr. Prewitt said, “I’m sorry, Victoria. Lawrence isn’t here.”

“Well, where is he?” said Victoria.

Mrs. Prewitt paused her stirring. Mr. Prewitt tapped his
finger against the door. Cold raced past Victoria, and she couldn’t tell if it was from outside the house or inside the house. Either way, she pulled her coat tighter.

“He’s visiting his grandmother upstate,” said Mr. Prewitt at last. “She’s gotten sick. Pneumonia, you know. Poor thing. She loves little Lawrence.”

“She
loves
him,” added Mrs. Prewitt, smiling. She started stirring again.

Victoria tried to inspect their faces, but they looked pretty normal: Mr. Prewitt distinguished and bald, Mrs. Prewitt, striking and dark headed. Victoria couldn’t put her finger on what, exactly, made her think something was very wrong.

“Well, when will he get—?” Victoria said, but before she could finish, Mr. Prewitt took her by the shoulders and helped her off the porch. His hands pinched her skin.

“Off with you,” he said, flashing his grinning teeth. Behind him, Mrs. Prewitt smiled and stirred. “You wouldn’t want to be late for school, now, would you?”

“But—”

“Be good,” Mr. Prewitt said, patting her head. The last things Victoria saw before the door clicked shut were the Prewitts’ flashing smiles.

Victoria stood there for a long time, frowning at the doorknob.

“What was that about?” she said, but no one answered. It was quiet. It was
too
quiet. The porch gleamed with fresh white paint and bright red flowers, and for some reason, Victoria didn’t find it pretty at all.

“Good-bye,” a muffled voice said—Mr. Prewitt, tapping on the window over and over. Beside him, Mrs. Prewitt smiled and waved.

“Good-bye,” said Victoria, waving back. She walked away quickly, a sharp, sick feeling tickling her insides.
Why
she didn’t know. Mr. and Mrs. Prewitt
looked
normal, except perhaps for those too-bright, too-perfect smiles. But they could have just been very happy today. Maybe it was nice to have some peace and quiet without Lawrence banging around with his Mozart and Bach. Victoria wouldn’t blame them for that.

All the same, an unsettled feeling rolled around in her stomach. It felt like when Beatrice stacked one of Victoria’s boxes the wrong way after dusting; Victoria could always tell something was off, the moment she stepped in the room.

At the street corner, she looked back over her shoulder. The Prewitts hadn’t followed her; Mr. Tibbalt’s dog must have gone inside; the Home’s gate remained shut. Nothing was there except for a pair of those same big black bugs, skittering across the street toward the Prewitt house. Victoria wrinkled her nose and turned away.

On the way to school, Victoria thought about what the Prewitts had said. Old people
did
get pneumonia. Victoria seemed to remember something about a grandmother a couple of Christmases ago. It all added up. Mostly.

So, she had to walk to school alone. Well, there had been days before when Lawrence was sick or something. It was nothing to worry about.

Soon enough, she stopped wondering about the Prewitts and how long Lawrence would be upstate. Instead, for the rest of the week, she thought about her dilemma.

On Wednesday, when she allowed herself to reconsider forgery, she had to spend lunch trying not to be sick in the restroom.
Forgery.
The word sounded dirty. She had never thought she would turn criminal. It was messy to be a criminal.

On Thursday, Victoria noticed two things:

1. Professor Alban’s hair seemed more frazzled each day, like he had been experimenting with electrical currents. (Normally Professor Alban looked very
together
. Victoria wrinkled her nose to see him so decidedly
apart
. His eyes kept darting all around like he was trying to hide from something.)

2. Donovan O’Flaherty was absent.

To most of the students, this was particularly tragic.
Donovan defied the Academy’s zero-tolerance policy on sweets to sneak in Mallow Cakes on Thursdays and cram as many into his mouth as possible during seventh-year lunch. Everyone thought it a spectacle of grand and entertaining proportions (except for Victoria, who thought it merely repulsive). The administration had tried every form of discipline, but nothing fazed Donovan. He got chubbier and chubbier every year till bits of flesh had recently started poking out of his clothes, but he still crammed the cakes in every Thursday. The seventh-year students laughed and cheered him on as sugar and icing dribbled down his face, but not because they liked him.

But at lunch that Thursday, no one said, “Where’s O’Flabby?” or made disappointed noises because they had no disgusting display to watch and laugh about.

In fact, no one said a word about Donovan O’Flabby’s absence. No one seemed to notice, except for Victoria.

Probably ate himself to death
, she thought savagely.
And good riddance.

A small part of Victoria’s mind thought it a bit of a coincidence for Lawrence and Donovan to be absent at the same time. Donovan never missed a Thursday, after all. Victoria knew that because every Thursday, she would sit stewing in fury as everyone made fools out of themselves to give him
the Mallow Cakes
they
had snuck in, to make sure he had enough.

Then Victoria thought about Jacqueline being gone too. The more she tried to focus on these thoughts, however, the fuzzier they became. She could not quite remember what Jacqueline looked like. And Donovan—what did he like to eat again? Who was Donovan? The harder she tried to think about them, the faster she lost her grip. It was like trying to hold on to a slippery bar of soap.

But when Lawrence’s face popped into her mind, it was clear and steady. She had no trouble focusing on the memory of his face and how he shuffled alongside her when they walked together in the mornings and how he hummed to himself when he was happy.

After thinking about Lawrence, she found that she could think about Jacqueline and Donovan better too—Donovan with his white, shiny face and crumby lips, and Jacqueline with tangled hair in her eyes and pen ink scribbled across her arms.

I’m just nervous because of the report
, she told herself firmly, frowning at her lunch tray and trying to ignore the panicky feeling in her throat.
I’m not losing my memory, I’m only stressed is all. That stupid B is making me lose focus.

All the same, a niggling bother of a thought kept scratching
at the corner of Victoria’s mind as she chewed her sandwich. She scanned the room, past the table where she sat alone. It seemed to Victoria that the cafeteria was emptier than usual, at least by a few heads. Of course, she couldn’t say for sure; she’d never really paid enough attention to who sat where and with whom and all that foolishness, and anyway, it was too noisy for her to concentrate.

Still, something was not quite right. It was that same box-stacked-the-wrong-way feeling. Victoria put down her sandwich and pushed it away.
Bad batch of lunch meat today
, she decided.

On Friday, Victoria knocked on the Prewitts’ door just like she had for the past three days. Again Mr. Prewitt opened the door with a smile and patted Victoria’s head. Again Mrs. Prewitt stood smiling and stirring. And again Lawrence was upstate.

“But—” Victoria said, getting frustrated. She needed Lawrence to go with her to Professor Carroll’s office that morning. If Professor Carroll didn’t change her grade, she would have to show her parents the report. She couldn’t forge their signatures; she just couldn’t commit a criminal act. It had kept her up the last few nights, as had the tree outside her window with its strangely metallic taps.

“Lawrence’s grandmother loves him so much,” said Mrs. Prewitt reassuringly.

“But when will he be back?” Victoria insisted, and she stamped her foot before she could stop herself.

The stamp must have triggered something. Cold rushed in, blowing the door open. For a flash of a second, Mr. and Mrs. Prewitt’s pretty smiles changed into enormous, wolfish grins. Mrs. Prewitt’s fingers clutched her bowl so hard that it smashed into pieces. Hundreds of fat black berries rolled across the floor like bugs. Victoria stared and wondered if they really were bugs, because some of them seemed a bit . . . 
leggy
.

“Lawrence will be back as soon as he’s ready,” said Mr. Prewitt, his voice strangely quiet, his smile stiff and bright. Mrs. Prewitt stepped next to Mr. Prewitt, her shiny shoes squashing the berries. They stank like food gone bad, burning Victoria’s nose.

“It’s so nice of you to ask, Victoria,” said Mrs. Prewitt. She smiled, folding her hands at her waist. Her face and eyes were sharper, harder. “Lawrence is lucky to have such a caring friend.”

Victoria refused to be frightened by them and their rotten berries and their strange, wolfish smiles. Instead, she said, “Thank you
so
much, I’m
so
sorry to be a bother, please
do
tell Lawrence I miss him,” and smiled and shook their cold, hard hands just to be extra polite. Then she walked away with her head held high.