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"Dante"

Eleanor looked at her feet and then took a step away from my bed "Youher Finally I spoke "What was it like?"

"Being reborn?" She closed her eyes "It felt like being woken up from a dream Like the way you feel when you take a nap in the afternoon, and you wake up and you’re not sure where you are or what day it is, and the line between yesterday and today and toh, and there was a long silence as we both considered everything that had happened I i alone in the baseot to exist," Eleanor said I knew she wasn’t referring to life literally, but an emotional life after death She looked at

"Yeah, I think it does"

This seemed to put Eleanor at ease "So ould you do if you only had a few days left to live?"

She waited for s I wanted to do--backpack through the Himalayas, see the pyramids, take a road trip across America, learn Spanish, live in the city and then in the country, write a novel--the list seemed endless "I think I would try to spend as much time as I could with the people I cared about"

Eleanor considered it "Me too"

I curled up beneath the covers I told her about the files, about Cassandra and how she had accidentally killed Benjamin, and finally about Dante "What do you think happened to Cassandra? Do you think the school buried her, like Minnie said?"

Eleanor looked troubled "No"

"Yeah," I said quickly, "they wouldn’t do that"

We lay there until the early hours of the s anted to do, the places anted to go, the kind of people anted to be

By the middle of March--the ides, as Professor Urquette ominously called the to melt As the water trickled down the sides of the pathways, the carass, soggy and matted down; the benches and statues and fountains that punctuated the natural landscape; and the occasional Frisbee or garden spade or mitten

I had barely seen Nathaniel since break; he was busy with the school play, in which he had one of the leading roles as Electra Sometiined that he’d be interested in acting; it always seelish But when he took off his glasses and delivered his lines, he transformed into a suave, confident hero, his voice deep and rich and entirely not his own Otherwise, the only real tiether was in class We had math in room π, commonly referred to as "the Pi Roo hall

Professor Chortle was round and cherubic, with thin lips and rosy cheeks that bespoke an uncorrupted innocence that he could only have obtained by spending all of his forinary Nuinary numbers are numbers that exist in a different world than ours As a result, we can only sense their existence" All of his lectures had a drea it seem like his natural habitat wasn’t here, but in some Renaissance landscape, where he would spend his days sprawled out on the grass, nibbling an apple and pondering theof infinity

I chewed on lued to the board

"For exae, it usually inary years behind them," the professor explained

I tore off a corner of my notebook paper

Do you think Eleanor is okay?