The Lake of Dead Languages Read Online Free Page A

the stack of black-and-white notebooks inside.
    There are three of them. I started them in the ninth grade when I first met Matt and Lucy Toller, and faithfully kept a new one each year through our senior year at Heart Lake.
    I count them as if hoping that the fourth one will have miraculously rejoined its companions, but of course it hasn’t. I haven’t seen the fourth notebook since spring semester senior year, when it disappeared from my dorm room.
    At the time I thought someone in the administration had confiscated the notebook. I spent that last term at Heart Lake sure that it was only a matter of time before I was called into the dean’s office and confronted with the truth of everything that had happened that year, and what I had said at the inquest. But the summons never came. I attended the graduation ceremony and the reception on the lawn above the lake, standing apart from the other girls and their proud families, and afterward I took a taxi to the train station and a train to my summer job at the library at Vassar, where I had a scholarship for the fall. I decided that the notebook must have gotten lost. Sometimes I told myself that it had slipped out of my book bag and fallen into the lake and the lake had washed away all the blue-green ink until its pages were as blank as they were on the first day of senior year.
    I open the first notebook and read the opening entry.
    “Lucy gave me this fountain pen and beautiful ink for my birthday and Matt gave me this notebook,” I had written in aflowery script that tried to live up to the fancy pen and ink. There were blotches, though, where the pen’s nib had caught the paper. It had taken a while to get used to that pen. “I’ll never have any other friends like them.”
    I almost laugh at the words.
Other friends.
What other friends? When I first laid eyes on Matt and Lucy Toller I had no other friends.
    I take out the folded paper and smooth it out next to this page. The handwriting is surer and blotch-free, but the words are written in the same beautiful shade of blue-green.
    I go outside to watch the moon rise over Heart Lake. I think, not for the first time, that I must have been crazy to come back here. But then, where else had I to go?
    When I told Mitch I wanted a divorce he laughed at me. “Where will you go? How will you live?” he asked. “For God’s sake, Jane, you were a Latin major. If you leave this house you’ll be on your own.”
    And I had thought of Electra’s line, “How shall we be lords in our own house? We have been sold and go as wanderers.” And right then I knew I’d go to the only homeland I’d ever had: Heart Lake.
    I started to work on my Latin, which I hadn’t touched in years. At night I studied from my old Wheelock textbook, picking away at case endings and verb conjugations until the unintelligible jumble of words sorted itself out. Words paired up like skaters linking arms, adjectives with nouns, verbs with subjects, inscribing precise patterns in the slippery ice of archaic syntax.
    And always the voices I heard reciting the declensions and conjugations were Matt’s and Lucy’s.
    When I had reread Wheelock twice, I applied for the job at Heart Lake and learned that my old science teacher, Celeste Buehl, had become dean. “We’ve never really been able to replace Helen Chambers,” she told me. I remembered that Miss Buehl had been good friends with my Latin teacher. No one was sadder than she when Helen Chambers had been letgo. “But then we’ve never gotten an old girl in the position.” “Old girl” was how they referred to an alumna who came back to teach at Heart Lake. Celeste Buehl was an “old girl,” as were Meryl North, the history teacher, and Tacy Beade, the art teacher. “Your generation doesn’t seem interested in teaching. I haven’t interviewed a graduate since I became dean, but I can’t think of anyone better to take the job than one of Helen Chambers’s girls. Luckily my old cottage is