The Unseemly Education of Anne Merchant. Joanna Wiebe

| Circling Vultures

       Excerpt from the sequel, The Wicked Awakening of Anne Merchant

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

one

       WORMWOOD ISLAND

      HERE’S SOMETHING NOBODY TELLS RICH PEOPLE: THEY die, too.

      There’s this sense, you know, this misconception that wealthy people are invincible. Like when Fortune 500 execs get cancer or something equally awful, they think they can coerce a massive, aggressive, bumpy tumor straight out of their body by throwing bundles of cash at it. As if you can swipe a black American Express card through your armpit, and—ch-ching!—you’ve just paid off the Grim Reaper, you’ve gloriously extended your life of leisure…and you’ve been given a bump in your Air Miles account to boot.

      Idiotic.

      But strangely common thinking among the wealthy.

      In lovely, sunny Atherton, California—the most expensive neighborhood in America and my home up until, oh, yesterday—this notion that rich people are invincible is so prevalent, people go into a state of absolute shock when someone in our fancy 94027 zip code gets sick. Or crashes their Bentley. Or accidentally inhales Beluga caviar (which happens way more often than you’d think). I see it every day.

      Scratch that. I saw it every day.

      I saw it before my dad shipped me across the country to doom-and-gloom central, aka Wormwood Island, Maine, for what one might call a “fresh start.”

      I saw those delusional richies on a regular basis, back when I would sit quietly in the shadows at the top of the stairs and, with my sketchbook in hand, observe black-veiled parades marching somberly through the hallways of my house. See, our home is the second story of the Fair Oaks Funeral Home, where my dad’s the lowly mortician and terribly paid funeral director and where we Merchants have the distinct pleasure of being the only broke-ass family for miles.

      Yes, that means I’m that girl.

      I’m the weird mortician’s daughter. The creepy girl the kids at school call Death Chick or Wednesday Addams. The eerie girl they shy away from whenever I wear black or look unusually pale. The poor girl raised with dead bodies in the basement, zombies scratching at the cellar door, and ghosts around every corner. I’m that girl.

      “No, you were that girl,” I remind my reflection as I adjust a blue-and-gold tie over the crisp white shirt of my new school uniform. “Now you’re just Anne Merchant, a junior at the Cania Christy Preparatory Academy. No one knows anything about you, which means—” I pause to tweak the tie so it draws a little less attention to my chest “—you can rewrite your history.”

      I am standing in front of a small mirror, which is on top of a small dresser in the small attic bedroom of the small cottage that’s going to be my home for the next two years. I’ll be here until I graduate from Cania Christy. Fingers crossed: I’ll graduate as valedictorian. Becoming valedictorian is a critical part of my plan—my future hinges on it. If I don’t graduate at the top of my class, I won’t qualify for the scholarship money I’m going to need. But if—no, when—I graduate as the valedictorian, I’ll be almost guaranteed a full scholarship to the school of my dreams, Brown. From there, my life is perfectly plotted: spend four years in undergrad, open a gallery in New York City, promote my own art while discovering new artists, and make enough money that my dad can leave behind his life of death to come out east for a fresh start of his own. Since I first put chalk to paper as a toddler, I’ve known my life’s purpose: to create art. Art that presents a different version of the world to the world; art that looks closer. I lost sight of that vision over the course of the last two years, but it’s back now. In full force. And to realize that vision, I’ll need to be valedictorian. Which shouldn’t be too hard. After all, I spent the first sixteen years of my life at the top of my class—the upside of being shunned as Death Chick is that you have plenty o’ time to study.

      Stepping back from the mirror, I assess myself. Turn left, turn right. And give up. I shake my head at my uniformed reflection.

      “You look like some sort of anime floozy.”

      Everybody on earth has something they don’t like about the way they look; for me, it’s always been my one crooked tooth (which I’ve learned to mask with a closed-mouth smile) and my wildly curly blonde hair. That’s usually what I’m up against. But today, I’ve discovered two new problems that had never seemed like problems before: my breasts. It’s like they doubled in size overnight. This would not be a bad thing if I had a closet of clothes to choose from for my first day of school, but it is a significant issue given that I have only the uniforms that were waiting for me when I arrived here late last night. Uniforms that are decidedly form fitting. By which I mean they are decidedly three sizes too small.

      Giving up, I button a cardigan over the shirt, trace my fingers along the golden Cania Christy emblem on it, mentally untie the knots in my stomach, and turn to fiddling with my wonky curls.

      “Who would you like to be?” I ask myself lightly. “The daughter of a zillionaire turned yogi? The fabulously wealthy love child of a famous ballerina and a recluse artist?”

      As if to drive home the point of who I really am and where I really come from—and the inescapability of both—a glint of sunlight shines through the attic window and reflects off my late mother’s barrettes, which sit atop my dresser, sending a beam of light at my eyes. As if my mom’s trying to get my attention from above. As if she refuses to be forgotten.

      As if I could ever forget her.

      It only takes the span of a breath, it only takes the lightest touch of my fingertips on those silvery barrettes, for visions of my beautiful mother’s last moments to come rushing at me. The quiet desperation in her glassy stare when I found her on the kitchen floor. Her frail body hanging loosely in my arms as I rocked her and begged God for her life. The dampness of her lovely face as my tears rained down on her. I discovered her body when I was fourteen—well over two years ago—but the pain is so raw and the ache in my chest feels so bright red, it’s as if she died yesterday.

      My dad disapproves of my style of mourning. Particularly the length of time I’ve been in mourning and the life I’ve turned away from since she died. That’s why I’m here. Because I can hardly breathe when I think of her. And because he is so used to death, he can’t understand what’s taking me so long to get back to my old overachieving self.

      I pull my hand away from my mother’s barrettes.

      The sun disappears behind the clouds, leaving me to stare into the whiteness of the endless sea of fog separating me from the mysteries—the distant school, the sprawling campus, the teachers, the other students, the people on this island—that lie in wait.

      Unlike rich people, poor folks know all about death. I know everything there is to know, from the temperature of the refrigerator they keep the bodies in to the weight of the thread they use to stitch eyelids tightly closed. I know that embalming fluid can be used for a cheap high. I know you instantly lose twenty-one grams of weight when you die. I even know the superstitions, like it’s bad luck to have a mirror in a funeral hall because it traps the spirit of the dearly departed. If anyone should be comfortable with the idea of death, it’s a mortician’s daughter.

      But nothing can prepare you for losing your mother.

      Nothing can prepare you for the suddenness of a constant source of love and support vanishing so quickly. And so permanently.

      “Annie!” my housemother, Gigi Malone—who, may I add, is certifiably crazy with a certifiably crazy dog—shouts