“What did you say to her, exactly?”

“I just asked her, ‘So what really happened last spring with Cassandra?’”

“A little more tact, Eleanor!”

“Well, I wanted to cut to the chase. She’s not exactly easy to talk to. And besides, I thought she wanted to talk about it.”

“Not to us. She probably thought you were making fun of her.”

“Well, I wasn’t, obviously. But now what do we do? There’s no way I can ask her again. She practically ran away when the bell rang. She didn’t even show me the portrait she drew.”

I thought for a moment. “I saw Dante’s file when I was in the headmistress’s office. It was on her desk. She didn’t give me a detention, but she suspects that we’re a couple.”

Exasperated, Eleanor collapsed onto her bed. “Can you please pry your mind away from Dante for just a minute and focus on the problem at hand?”

Ignoring her, I continued. “Do you think everyone has a personal file?”

“I know they do,” she said, staring at the ceiling. “My brother told me.”

I looked behind me to make sure Lynch’s feet weren’t outside the door. “Even dead people?”

Eleanor gazed at me with wonder. “Ingenious! They wouldn’t just throw them away.”

Even though the validity of the séance was suspect, looking up Benjamin’s and Cassandra’s folders couldn’t hurt.

“I didn’t see a filing cabinet, but it’s got to be there. We just need to get into the office.”

Checking the clock, I put on my jacket and grabbed my bag.

“Where are you going?”

“The library,” I said, omitting the fact that I was meeting Dante there.

When I got to Copleston Library, Dante was waiting for me by the entrance, leaning against a stone pillar. A book bag was slung over his shoulder.

“Fancy meeting you here,” I said. He smiled and took my bag, and together we went inside. He led me upstairs to the third floor, which was relatively empty, and set our bags down on a wooden table by the window. I told him about the headmistress and how she had asked me about him.

“The headmistress didn’t mention you at all,” he murmured, gazing at me pensively. “She asked me about how I was feeling and about how my classes were going, then let me go.”

I thought fast. Should I tell him about the séance, about how Cassandra might actually be dead? What if I was wrong? Unlike Eleanor, I decided to go for the tactful route.

“Do you still talk to Cassandra?”

Dante paused and then bent over to open his bag. “Not much,” he said, his back to me.

“But you’ve talked to her since she left?”

He straightened. “Why do you ask?”

“I thought you were friends with her.”

“I was.”

“So you still talk to her?”

He hesitated. “No, not really.”

“Not really, or no?” I asked, growing frustrated.

“No,” he finally conceded. “I told you, things sort of fell apart last spring. None of us keep in touch anymore. Would it be a problem if I did? You seem disturbed by the idea.”

“I’m not jealous,” I said defensively. “If that’s what you’re implying.”

“Right,” he said.

There was a long silence. Was he being intentionally vague, or did he actually not know? Judging by the way he treated his ex-friends here, it didn’t seem out of the ordinary for him to cut off Cassandra too.

“So what do we do now?” I asked, assuming his invitation to the library had some sort of mysterious ulterior motive.

Dante gave me a confused smile. “Study, of course. What else does a person do in a library?”

I blushed. “Oh, I... I don’t know,” I said, fumbling my words in embarrassment. I pulled a book out of my bag and opened it in front of me.

“It’s upside down,” Dante said with a smile, as he tilted back in his chair and tapped my book with his pencil.

“Right,” I said, even more mortified as I flipped it around. And in the light of the oil lamps, we studied together until curfew.

What did it feel like to be dating Dante Berlin? Every time he looked at me, it was like he was seeing me for the first time. Every time I got close to him, he inhaled deeply, as if he were trying to absorb as much of me as possible.... Everyone stared when we were together on campus, pointing when our hands grazed against each other’s in class. “They’re looking at us,” I muttered to Dante as we walked through the library together, trying to block my face with my hair. “I don’t blame them,” he said, pushing the hair away from my face. I blushed. I was as much in awe of us as everyone else was. Every night Dante waited for me during study hall outside the dorm, and every night I met him. He always took me somewhere different—a walk around campus, the library, Horace Hall, the lake. And every night I sat by the window, thinking he wouldn’t come, but then there he was, his tall figure like a pale ray of light in the darkness. Every time I saw his face, it seemed even more beautiful and complex than the day before. Every time he touched me, I shuddered and felt all of my warmth, all of my sensation being pulled toward him. It no longer mattered that I didn’t understand the way I felt around him, or the way he felt around me. One touch from him and everything inside of me blossomed with emotion: excitement, nervousness, anxiety, desire. I had never been in love before. Was this what it felt like?

But Dante wasn’t the only thing on my mind. By the second week of November, almost all of the leaves from the maples and oaks around us had dropped off and were now floating on the surface of the lake like a carpet. Eleanor and I were still trying to find a way to get into the headmistress’s office to get Benjamin’s and Cassandra’s files. The possibility of Cassandra being dead too only made me more suspicious about Benjamin’s “heart attack,” and those files were the only chance I had to figure out how he really died. The only problem was that the headmistress’s office was impossible to break into, and if I got caught, I would most definitely be expelled. Usually when I didn’t know how to solve a problem, I asked my parents, but they were dead. So instead I called Annie.

“Remember what I told you about Cassandra and Benjamin?”