Free The Last Academy by Anne Applegate

sockets.Scabbed-up lips stretched across her teeth. It was worse than seeing a corpse, because she was still alive somewhere inside there. She’s the Golden Mummy Girl.
    I heard my own voice say, “He sounds like a loser. Good riddance, right?”
    Then it was normal old Tamara sitting there. Except something in her eyes let me know she was still the Golden Mummy Girl underneath. It was a certifiably unhinged thought. I stumbled and caught myself. I was going to completely lose it. Freak out or start laughing until the school nurse came and shot me full of horse tranquilizers. Then the tiny boss in my head pulled some kind of switch I didn’t even know I had. It shut the crazy thinking down, but it hurt my brain to have it happen.
    “ You’re calling him a loser?” Tamara laughed. She straightened her spine and tossed her head. “You don’t know anything. I’m not surprised. You’re too ugly to get noticed on this campus, anyway.”
    A minute ago, I had been wiping her nose for her. Now any hope for becoming friends lay like broken shards of glass between us. Honestly, any hopes of me not seeing her as the Cryptkeeper was a bad bet.
    “You know why you’re here, loser?” she asked. Mymouth dropped open, but no sound came out. “Your parents don’t love you. You’re here because they didn’t want you anymore.”
    “What?” I stumbled back. Dawn was breaking and the room was getting lighter now, by little shades of sunlight each few minutes. I could see Tamara growing a shadow. It looked like rage.
    “You got sent to boarding school because your parents didn’t want you. Right now your family is sitting at breakfast in your old home, and they don’t miss you at all. Their life is better without you.”
    “That’s not true.” I was afraid to turn my back on her. Now it was clear what was going on: Tamara was the one who was crazy, so insane it made me sick. I backed toward the doors.
    “You’re here. I’m here. We’re all here. Go ask your friend Barnaby Charon why,” she yelled. “You go ask him why your parents sent you to a place like this.”
    I bumped against the patio doors, knocking them open, and ran out in my pajamas. Everything was gilded in the dawn sun. The lawn and the buildings and even the sidewalks glinted gold. But all the superoxygenated air had burned off with the dew. This new air was too thin and I couldn’t breathe.

I started keeping to myself. I did homework during announcements instead of talking to anyone in the seats near me. I went up to the lacrosse field and watched boys scrimmage instead of going to see Brynn play tennis. I brought a textbook to the dining hall and sat alone. After, I’d go to the library.
    I needed the time to think. My roommate hated me. A junior had branded me as a rat and I’d broken a pretty serious school rule. Plus, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I had seen, heard, and thought things that seemed pretty mentally unbalanced. It was a lot to process.
    But what kept coming back to stick in my mind was what Tamara had said about my parents not wanting me anymore. I mean, I knew it was a lie. But I couldn’t let it go.
    Why had they sent me to boarding school? I’d been a good student, never the kind of kid who needed a strict, away-from-home kind of environment. It was weird, but now that I was here, I could barely remember the summer, when the decision had been made. Had I been so consumed by my issues with Lia, my life, and my friends that I’d somehow missed something bad happening between me and my parents?
    Wondering about it made me feel like I was some stupid dog a family didn’t want anymore and so they drove out to the woods and let it go. The family tells themselves the dog is going to be all happy chasing rabbits and frolicking and stuff. The dog doesn’t even know what’s going on until the car is out of sight.
    Half a dozen times, I picked up the phone in the dorm hallway to call my parents and disprove my roommate’s