She scrambled out of bed, tripping over her still-packed duffel bag, and yanked another boring black sweater from the top of a stack of boring black sweaters. She tugged on yesterday's black jeans, winced as she caught a glimpse of her disastrous bed head, and tried to run her fingers through her hair as she dashed out the door.
She was out of breath when she reached the waist-high, intricately sculpted wrought iron gates of the cemetery. She was choking on the overwhelming smell of skunk cabbage and feeling far too alone with her thoughts. Where was everyone else? Was their definition of "crack of dawn" different from hers? She glanced down at her watch. It was already six-fifteen.
All they'd told her was to meet at the cemetery, and Luce was pretty sure this was the only entrance. She stood at the threshold, where the gritty asphalt of the parking lot gave way to a mangled lot full of weeds. She spotted a lone dandelion, and it crossed her mind that a younger Luce would have pounced on it and then made a wish and blown. But this Luce's wishes felt too heavy for something so light.
The delicate gates were all that divided the cemetery from the parking lot. Pretty remarkable for a school with so much barbed wire everywhere else. Luce ran her hand along the gates, tracing the ornate floral pattern with her fingers. The gates must have dated back to the Civil War days Arriane was talking about, back when the cemetery was used to bury fallen soldiers. When the school attached to it was not a home for wayward psychos. When the whole place was a lot less overgrown and shadowy.
It was strange—the rest of the campus was as flat as a sheet of paper, but somehow, the cemetery had a concave, bowl-like shape. From here, she could see the slope of the whole vast thing before her. Row after row of simple headstones lined the slopes like spectators at an arena.
But toward the middle, at the lowest point of the cemetery, the path through the grounds twisted into a maze of larger carved tombs, marble statues, and mausoleums. Probably for Confederate officers, or just the soldiers who came from money. They looked like they'd be beautiful up close. But from here, the sheer weight of them seemed to drag the cemetery down, almost like the whole place was being swallowed into a drain.
Footsteps behind her. Luce whirled around to see a stumpy, black-clad figure emerge from behind a tree. Penn! She had to resist the urge to throw her arms around the girl. Luce had never been so glad to see anyone—though it was hard to believe Penn ever got detentions.
"Aren't you late?" Penn asked, stopping a few feet in front of Luce and giving her an amused you-poor-newbie shake of the head.
"I've been here for ten minutes," Luce said. "Aren't you the one who's late?"
Penn smirked. "No way, I'm just an early riser. I never get detention." She shrugged and pushed her purple glasses up on her nose. "But you do, along with five other unfortunate souls, who are probably getting angrier by the minute waiting for you down at the monolith." She stood on tiptoe and pointed behind Luce, toward the largest stone structure, which rose up from the middle of the deepest part of the cemetery. If Luce squinted, she could just make out a group of black figures clustered around its base.
"They just said meet at the cemetery," Luce said, already feeling defeated. "No one told me where to go."
"Well, I'm telling you: monolith. Now get down there," Penn said. "You're not going to make many friends by cutting into their morning any more than you already have."
Luce gulped. Part of her wanted to ask Penn to show her the way. From up here, it looked like a labyrinth, and Luce did not want to get lost in the cemetery. Suddenly, she got that nervous, far-away-from-home feeling, and she knew it was only going to get worse in there. She cracked her knuckles, stalling.
"Luce?" Penn said, giving her shoulders a bit of a shove. "You're still standing here."
Luce tried to give Penn a brave thank-you smile, but had to settle for an awkward facial twitch. Then she hurried down the slope into the heart of the cemetery.
The sun still hadn't risen, but it was getting closer, and these last few predawn moments were always the ones that creeped her out the most. She tore past the rows of plain headstones. At one point they must have been upright, but by now they were so old that most of them tipped over to one side or the other, giving the whole place the look of a set of morbid dominoes.
She slopped in her black Converse sneakers through puddles of mud, crunched over dead leaves. By the time she cleared the section of simple plots and made it to the more ornate tombs, the ground had more or less flattened out, and she was totally lost. She stopped running, tried to catch her breath. Voices. If she calmed down, she could hear voices.
"Five more minutes, then I'm out," a guy said.
"Too bad your opinion has no value, Mr. Sparks." An ornery voice, one Luce recognized from her classes yesterday. Ms. Tross—the Albatross. After the meat loaf incident, Luce had shown up late to her class and hadn't exactly made the most favorable impression on the dour, spherical science teacher.
"Unless anyone wants to lose his or her social privileges this week" — groans from among the tombs—"we will all wait patiently, as if we had nothing better to do, until Miss Price decides to grace us with her presence."
"I'm here," Luce gasped, finally rounding a giant statue of a cherub.
Ms. Tross stood with her hands on her hips, wearing a variation of yesterday's loose black muumuu. Her thin mouse-brown hair was plastered to her scalp and her dull brown eyes showed only annoyance at Luce's arrival. Biology had always been tough for Luce, and so far, she wasn't doing her grade in Ms. Tross's class any favors.
Behind the Albatross were Arriane, Molly, and Roland, scattered around a circle of plinths that all faced a large central statue of an angel. Compared to the rest of the statues, this one seemed newer, whiter, grander. And leaning up against the angel's sculpted thigh—she almost hadn't noticed—was Daniel.
He was wearing the busted black leather jacket and the bright red scarf she'd fixated on yesterday. Luce took in his messy blond hair, which looked like it hadn't yet been smoothed down after sleep… which made her think about what Daniel might look like when he was sleeping… which made her blush so intensely that by the time her eyes made their way down from his hairline to his eyes, she was thoroughly humiliated.
By then he was glaring at her.
"I'm sorry," she blurted out. "I didn't know where we were supposed to meet. I swear—"
"Save it," Ms. Tross said, dragging a finger across her throat. "You've wasted enough of everyone's time. Now, I'm sure you all remember whatever despicable indiscretion you committed to find yourself here. You can think about that for the next two hours while you work. Pair up. You know the drill." She glanced at Luce and let out her breath. "Okay, who wants a protegee?"
To Luce's horror, all of the other students looked at their feet. But then, after a torturous minute, a fifth student stepped into view around the corner of the mausoleum.
"I do."
Cam. His black V-neck T-shirt fit close around his broad shoulders. He stood almost a foot taller than Roland, who moved aside as Cam pushed past and walked toward Luce. His eyes were glued to her as he strode forward, moving smoothly and confidently, as at ease in his reform school garb as Luce was ill at ease. Part of her wanted to avert her eyes, because it was embarrassing the way Cam was staring at her in front of everyone. But for some reason, she was mesmerized. She couldn't break his gaze—until Arriane stepped between them.