Free The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman Page B

the Latin names they take. She’s Athena to me.”
    “Hm. That’s not a Latin name.”
    “I know, but I let them pick classical names and this year the girls all wanted goddesses.”
    “That’s very interesting. Are they into goddess worship? Do you talk about that in class? Goddess worship? Pagan rites? Wicca covens?”
    “Wicca covens?
What would that have to do with Latin?”
    Dr. Lockhart shrugs. Her coat slips off one thin shoulder and I see that the blood goes at least halfway down her sleeve. It is hard to imagine how Athena could have lost that much blood and still be alive, but then I remember another white room with blood: It was Deirdre Hall’s room, where Lucy had slit her wrists on Deirdre’s bed. When I first came into that room after Christmas break I thought Deirdre’s mother had sent her a red bedspread for Christmas.
    “You’d be surprised what some teachers—teachers I’m sure must mean well—consider relevant to the curriculum. The digressions they indulge in—”
    “I haven’t been preaching New Age witchcraft to my students, Dr. Lockhart.”
    “I’m not saying that, Jane. I know you care about the girls, but you might not realize how much influence you have over them.”
    “Are you saying that it was something I said to Athena that made her do this?”
    “Why are you getting so defensive, Jane?”
    “I’m upset,” I tell her. “I can’t believe Ellen would do a thing like this.”
    “But you know she tried to kill herself once before. And just yesterday you told me that she leaves drawings of razor blades on the homework she turns in to you. Did it ever occur to you that she might be asking for your intervention?”
    I shake my head. I had thought the pictures were left on her homework by accident, but I can see how lame that would sound now.
    “Did you ever try to talk to her about the scars on her wrists?” Dr. Lockhart asks.
    I remember the conversation I had with Athena before her last exam, when she saw me looking at the scar. She told me that her aunt had sent her here to
dry out from boys.
I had laughed and turned away from her. Then there was this morning’s swim. I realize now that I may have been the last person to see her before she went back to her room, swallowed her roommate’s sleeping pills, and took a steak knife to her arms. Was she afraid I would turn her in?
    I look up at Dr. Lockhart and remember that I had been planning to tell her about seeing Athena in the lake. I will tell her now. It is not too late.
    Only it is. Dr. Lockhart reaches down and touches the collar of my shirt. I flinch as if she had been about to strangle me, but when she draws her hand away I see she has, magicianlike, pulled a long green ribbon from inside my shirt collar. Only it’s not a ribbon, it’s a strand of grass. The kind that grows on the lake bottom.
    “Interesting,” Dr. Lockhart says, holding the long strand in the light from the window so that it glows like a shard of green glass. I notice that the white sky outside has broken apart. It has begun to snow.
    “We found a piece of grass just like this in Ellen’s clothing.We surmised that she might have tried to drown herself in the lake first, but for some reason couldn’t go through with it. I thought it was odd to be brave enough to slit your wrists but not to drown. But then, maybe someone stopped her.”
    She raises one eyebrow and looks at me. I feel the blood rush to my face and for a second I think how the color red must look, in this deathly white room, on her dress and in my face. The nurse comes to the door and Dean Buehl and Myra Todd are with her. I feel caught, as if the blood in my face has something to do with the blood on Dr. Lockhart’s dress and the slim blade of grass she holds in her hand is the murder weapon. What can I do, confronted with such incontrovertible evidence? I tell them about meeting Athena in the lake this morning. I tell them, too, about seeing the girls on the rock two nights