Truly Devious (Truly Devious #1) - Maureen Johnson Page 0,46

you too.”

“I just have to take a breath,” Janelle said, plucking a lip gloss from the side of her bra, blindly and perfectly applying a coat, and tucking it back in place. “We just got here. Maybe this is some kind of . . . I don’t know. Gotta keep my head in the game. I have a machine to make, and this schedule I got this morning is nuts. I love math, but this scares me. Differential equations in the morning, calc in the afternoon, physics in the middle.”

“That’s nothing for you,” Stevie said.

“I like your board,” Janelle said.

“Everyone needs a conspiracy wall,” Stevie said.

“No,” Janelle said, pointing. “You came here to do this. I’ve heard you talk about this. You got me interested, and I don’t care about this stuff. You and me, we have this. And no matter what, we’re going to stick together this year. I’m going to make my machines and you’re going to solve a crime.”

When Janelle left, Stevie eased down onto her back and looked up at the ceiling.

She had Janelle. And yes, she would solve her case. But now she had another one. Who was David? There was something there. She could feel it under her skin.

Stevie had no fears of the dead. The living, however, sometimes gave her the creeps.

11

THE NEXT MORNING STEVIE SHUFFLED TO THE WINDOW, WIPING SLEEP out of her eyes, and peeled back the edge of the curtain to look out on a green sky. Had she believed in omens, she might well have taken this as a bad sign for the first morning of classes. But Stevie did not believe in omens. A green sky was a meteorological oddity, and maybe something for Instagram. Not a sign.

Stevie brought an umbrella.

Her first class, anatomy, was in the unsubtly named Genius Hall. There were only six people in the class. It helped that Pix was the teacher—at least something felt familiar.

“Welcome to Anatomy and Physiology,” she said. “We are going to talk about the human body without any skin, about the body of muscle and bone and organs. Over here . . .”

She walked over to the skeleton hanging at the side of the whiteboard and picked up its hand.

“. . . are the two hundred and six bones of the human body, fully articulated. One of the first questions I get about the skeleton is . . . is it real? Usually they’re plastic, but this one is the real deal. It was a private donation to the academy, and every year, someone attempts to steal it. It is alarmed. Don’t steal the skeleton. His name is Mr. Nelson. Be nice to Mr. Nelson. He’s here to teach you about what’s inside of you, inside of all of us.”

Mr. Nelson, the real skeleton, grimaced at them with his big, empty eyes.

“The bones themselves have their own geography, peaks and valleys where they associate with muscle and tissue. You are going to learn the relationship of these things, all of these systems—skeletal to muscular, nervous and endocrine, digestive, reproductive, excretory, integumentary, cardiovascular, respiratory. Once you learn what these things are, you will learn how they work.”

There was talk of quizzes and tests (there were a lot), labs (twice a week), and dissections (far too many for Stevie’s comfort). Teacher Pix was a lot more hardcore than house Pix.

As Stevie stepped onto the green, the rain began, and in a moment, she was in a hailstorm with chunks the size of marbles crashing around her. She put up the umbrella, but the battering was too severe. She ran. She made it as far as the cupola on the bottom end of the green, where she found herself stranded for a few minutes. When the hail got to the point where it was unlikely to pound her to death, she made a sprint for Eunomia, where she was to meet Dr. Velman for her one-on-one on criminology and sociology.

Dr. Velman looked to be about seventy and, after reading off the list of books he wanted Stevie to get—and finding she had read two of the major textbooks already—proceeded to spend half an hour talking about the art and craft of the hangman, and how the best of them knew how to tie a knot just at the right location so that the victim’s neck was broken quickly instead of suffocating. The next half hour, he talked about the breeding of dachshunds.

After class, Stevie lingered for a moment outside the building, the