“They switched me out,” Eleanor said. “Now I’m in something called Elementary Advanced Tongues. What does it even mean for a class to be elementary and advanced at the same time?”

“I was in that last year,” Nathaniel said, giving her a quizzical look, while I gave him a quizzical look. Was he Undead too? I ran through the criteria in my head, my mouth forming a tiny pink O as he spoke. His skin was cold, his senses were terrible, yet he was incredibly smart. “It’s Latin. Sort of.” He was fluent in Latin.

Eleanor rolled her eyes and collapsed back into her chair. “Great. When they said I didn’t have to take Elementary Latin, I thought they were giving me a break after what happened in the basement.”

I had been trying to figure out if Eleanor knew she was Undead. So far, the verdict was no.

Nathaniel and I went quiet at her mention of the flood, waiting to see if she would talk about it. I hadn’t talked to Nathaniel about it. I thought about telling Miss LaBarge, but assumed that the school knew, especially since they had switched Eleanor’s courses. I tried calling my grandfather, but he was away. So instead I tried to stay up as late as I could with Eleanor every night so she would have someone to talk to, hoping that when she did learn what she was, she would confide in me. Plus, it wasn’t exactly easy sleeping in a room with someone who I knew had the urge to kill me.

Eleanor looked between us. “What? You’d think a near-death experience would at least exempt me from the most boring class of all time.”

Slowly she smiled. I did too, as did Nathaniel, which quickly degenerated into laughter, and for the first time in a long while, even if just for a moment, I felt carefree again.

I didn’t see Dante again until last period. When I got to Crude Sciences, he was already sitting at our lab bench, looking statuesque as he leaned back in his chair, his tie and oxford artfully crinkled around the musculature of his neck. In front of him was a tray, upon which a neat row of medical tools was arranged: a scalpel, a pair of tweezers, a needle and hook, and a spindle of string.

Without a word, I sat down next to him, trying with all my will to keep my eyes on the board. Dante turned to me. “Renée, I meant to tell you, but every time I tried, something always interrupt—” Ironically, before he could finish, the bell rang and Professor Starking walked in carrying a large plastic tub. He set it on his desk.

“Life sciences,” he said. “Otherwise known as Scientiae Vitae, the counterpart to Disciplina Mortuorum, or Science of the Dead.” He hoisted the tub from his desk and walked down the aisles. Using tongs, he fished around inside until he emerged with a dead frog.

“I tried to stay away from you,” Dante said. “The beginning of the year. I kept my distance because I didn’t want to put you in danger.”

“We can’t study life sciences until we study death,” Professor Starking said while he walked. “I have given each of you a frog. This is your vessel.”

“But I couldn’t stay away. I still can’t stay away from you. I wanted to tell you, I planned on telling you, but I didn’t want to lose you.”

I blinked back angry tears as I stared at our frog. It gazed back at me with glassy eyes. It wasn’t fair. Maybe it wasn’t Dante’s fault that he was dead, but it was his fault for involving me when he knew what he was.

“Renée? Say something.”

“Who can tell me what some of the characteristics of decay are?” Professor Starking looked around the room.

“Cold skin,” I whispered to Dante, looking at him from the periphery as I steadied my voice. “Stiff limbs. No sensation. Disconnected from the rest of the world.”

“Living people can have those characteristics too,” Dante replied.

“The paper cut? The séance? You knew and you let me second-guess myself all semester.”

“I tried to tell you—”

“You make me feel alive?” I said, repeating what he had told me that night in Attica Falls. “I thought that was so romantic. I didn’t realize you were being literal.”

“Why does that have to make it mean less?”

“Have you killed anyone?” I asked quietly.

“No,” he said. “Of course not.”

“Will you kill anyone?”

“No.”

My lip quivered. “Will you die?”

Dante didn’t say anything for a long time. “Yes. But one day you will too. It isn’t so different.”

“Everything is different,” I said loudly. In the background, Professor Starking had stopped lecturing and was telling us to quiet down, but I didn’t care. “You’re... you’re …” I looked at the frog. “I don’t even know what you are.”

The class erupted in murmurs. Professor Starking anxiously tried to calm everyone down and get the class under control.

“I’m still the same person I was before—”

“You’re not a person!” I said, my eyes watering as they searched his for an answer that would help me understand what he was. Suddenly the room seemed incredibly silent. The entire class was looking at us.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Professor Starking said nervously from the front of the class, “but you can figure out your differences in work detail.”

We walked in silence to the headmistress’s office, me three paces ahead. The secretary asked us to wait outside while she fetched Headmistress Von Laark, so I sat on the far side of the bench, arms crossed.

The office door opened. “Come in,” Headmistress Von Laark’s voice said soothingly. “Both of you.”

When we were seated in front of her, she asked us what happened. After a moment, we both spoke at the same time.

“He provoked me.... I was answering a question and he interrupted me,” I said.

“I provoked her,” Dante said. “It was my fault.”

Surprised at his selflessness, I suddenly felt embarrassed for blaming him. But it was his fault, I reassured myself. He did provoke me. If he hadn’t been dead, and if he hadn’t kept it from me, we never would have been in this situation. I crossed my arms, trying to convince myself that I was right, but quickly felt overwhelmed with guilt.

“I see,” the headmistress said. “Still, since you disrupted class together, you will both have to serve a work detail. Five o’clock tonight. The fifth floor of Horace Hall. Room eight, north wing.”