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fire. The school painted over everything, but it’s still haunted.”
    â€œI don’t think it was a ghost,” Yseult said. “I think it was Monsieur Crespeau.”
    â€œMore like Monsieur Creepo,” Louis said.
    â€œHe went to this school?” I asked.
    â€œSort of,” Georges said. “His parents were the caretakers, so he was allowed to take courses here. When his parents died, he took over for them a few years later.”
    â€œHow did his parents die?” I asked.
    â€œHe killed them,” Yseult said in a deadpan voice.
    Louis broke into maniacal laughter.
    â€œDon’t listen to them,” Jean-Claude said to me. “They are trying to scare the new girl with their stories.”
    â€œI know,” I said, forcing a smile. But stories had to emerge from somewhere. And there was the unpleasant business of the mirror . . .
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    Later that afternoon, I sat in French literature class, listening to Madame Boulanger lecture about Candide . I tried not to think about Yseult’s tale. Clearly, Elise and I were the American interlopers infringing on her territory, and Yseult was going to have a little fun at our expense. But I was no stranger to supernatural occurrences, and something about her story carried the ring of truth.
    My final class of the day was Opera I. The teacher was originally from Kenya but had been adopted by a French family when he was six years old. His name was Lucas Odumbe, and he insisted we call him Luke. Unlike the other teachers, who were fairly strict and serious, Luke wore dreadlocks and layers of brightly colored shirts over faded jeans with high-top sneakers, and he never stopped moving as he lectured. He had that magnetism of people who truly love what they do. And he spoke French so differently from Madame Boulanger, slowly and deliberately, like he was making love to each word.
    â€œMy wife is jealous,” he said in French. “She says opera is my mistress, and she is partly right. I sing my favorite arias in the shower, and when I finish sometimes I am weeping. Where else can you get catharsis like that? The first time my parents took me to the opera, I was nine years old. We saw La Bohème . Since then, I have seen it fourteen times. And each time it is different. And each time I am transported. Love, loss, magic, madness. It is all there on the stage. And it doesn’t matter what language the opera is written in. A good opera needs no translation.”
    Those first weeks of class were all about storytelling, with Luke trying to get us as excited about opera as he was. He played us his favorite arias: “Dido’s Lament” from Dido and Aeneas , which Dido sings before throwing herself on her own funeral pyre; the final arias from La Bohème and La Traviata, in which both heroines succumb to tuberculosis; and finally, the Liebestod or “Love-Death” aria from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which ends with a suicide pact between lovers.
    â€œWhy do so many operas end in death, you might ask?” he said. “What could be more romantic than a love so immortal it transcends every obstacle, including death?”
    He informed us that as members of this class, we were going to have the opportunity to participate in a Young Artists’ libretto competition hosted by L’Opéra Bastille. We would work in teams, and our finished librettos would be due before the end of term. The top two librettos chosen by a panel of judges would advance to round two, in which the teams would develop their librettos into one-hour operas to be performed in L’Opéra Bastille’s Studio space. The winner of round two would have their opera performed by a professional opera company next year!
    Elise glanced at me, her eyes flickering with excitement. She thrived on any kind of competition. Maybe for once we would work together on something rather than being pitted against each other as rivals.
    After class I