Wayward Children 07 - Where the Drowned Girls Go, page 11
“Of course,” said Miss Lennox, sounding distracted, like everything around her was simply too much, like it had to be absorbed one slow beat at a time. “I’m your teacher. You have to ask me questions if you’re going to learn.”
“When did you graduate?”
“I didn’t,” said Miss Lennox automatically. Then she froze, the animation draining from her face until she looked like a statue of flesh and bone. The girls all turned to look at her, sensing, in the way of bored teens, that something interesting was about to happen.
Miss Lennox clutched the sides of her head and began screaming.
It was a high, shrill sound, like the wail of an animal with its leg caught in a trap, or the screaming of a child who’d just realized they were somehow horribly, inexplicably alone in the world. Miss Lennox dropped to her knees, still screaming. Rowena stumbled backward. Stephanie moved more smoothly. Emily seemed to root in place, becoming an unobtrusive part of the environment. Even Regan and the nameless girl moved, putting distance between themselves and something they instinctively recognized as dangerous.
Only Sumi moved toward the sound. She put a hand on Miss Lennox’s shoulder, bearing down slightly, so that her presence would have both weight and immediacy.
“It’s all coming back to you, isn’t it?” she asked, glancing to Cora as she spoke. Many people would have been surprised by the gentleness in her voice, the understanding; she sounded like a general trying to talk a foot soldier back from the edge. The scattered, sometimes incomprehensible girl was gone, replaced by someone who had seen too much, and would never be able to forget it.
Many people would have been surprised, but almost as many wouldn’t have been. They knew what it was to bury yourself in dreams to escape from the nightmares. They knew what it meant to survive.
“If you didn’t graduate, then you weren’t willing to let go,” Sumi continued. She began stroking Miss Lennox’s hair with one hand. “There was something waiting on the other side of the door, and all you could think about was finding a way back there, back to them. Friends or lovers or family, it doesn’t matter, because they took your name and they didn’t let you go home, and now you’re here and everything is strange and it hurts. I know. I’m sorry.”
Miss Lennox kept screaming.
Sumi had trouble guessing the age of adults sometimes: they got mad when you guessed too high, and sometimes they laughed when you guessed too young. Still, she could tell Miss Lennox wasn’t a teenager, and probably hadn’t been for quite some time. She was probably somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties. More than a decade from her graduation date. More than a decade from home.
Footsteps pounded along the path. Sumi turned to see three more matrons running toward them, cheeks flushed and eyes bright with panic. A decision had to be made. Sumi stepped forward, projecting innocence just as hard as she possibly could.
“We were looking at that plant over there”—she pointed to the flowering bush—“and she started screaming. I think maybe something bit her? I don’t know. Can you help us?” She took a hiccupping breath, allowing her eyes to fill with frightened tears. It was easy to pull her fear forward, to wrap it around herself like a blanket. If this didn’t work, if they didn’t get away …
Cora moved to stand next to Sumi, a reassuring wall of girl, offering comfort through her presence alone.
The matrons slowed to a stop, looking from the still-screaming Miss Lennox to Sumi, and finally to the other students, who weren’t faking their confusion or dismay. Regan looked like she was on the verge of hyperventilating. The nameless girl was half-hiding behind Stephanie, eyes filled with vivid terror.
“None of you said or did anything to trigger this response?” asked one of the matrons. She pointed to Regan. “She isn’t part of your class.”
“She doesn’t have a class, ma’am,” said Cora. “She didn’t graduate, and now the other girls from her dorm don’t want her around. Our matron said she could come on the nature walk, so her education wouldn’t be underserved.”
It was clear from the looks on the matrons’ faces that they didn’t believe her. It was equally clear that something had to give. Miss Lennox was starting to whine between screams, a high, agonized sound that made the hairs on the back of Cora’s neck stand on end. Nothing healthy should make a sound like that one. Nothing sane.
“Fine,” said the tallest matron, voice tight. “All of you, return to your dorm at once. We will send someone to fetch you for supper.” She turned her attention to Miss Lennox. Just like that, they were dismissed.
“Come on.” Cora grabbed Regan by the hand and began dragging her along the path, away from the matrons, away from Miss Lennox. She felt a pang of regret at that. She would have liked to save her. “All of you, quick.”
“Where are we going?” asked Regan. The rest of the girls followed, so schooled in the ways of quick obedience that it was clear they hadn’t considered doing anything else.
“Different places. Come on.” Cora kept walking until they reached the end of the path, where it widened out onto the grassy field, ending at the terrible structure of the school. She let go of Regan’s hand, took a breath, and turned to face the others.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “I’m leaving, and I’m taking Sumi with me, and we’re not looking back. Rowena, I know you want to stay here. That’s your choice. I need to know whether you can be quiet and let the rest of us go.”
Rowena looked from Cora to the others, her normal arrogance melting into uncertainty. “I haven’t told on you yet.”
“We haven’t done anything yet. We’ve talked about doing, and we’ve talked about being unhappy, but we haven’t done. Now is where we start doing. If you can’t let us do, you need to say, so I can put you out of the way.”
Fear sparked in Rowena’s eyes. “You mean kill me?”
“I mean put you out of the way. I don’t think this will take long enough for you to really be hurt. I think it’s all going to happen very quickly now.” Cora looked at her levelly. “I don’t kill innocent people. That’s not what a hero does. But I don’t stand back and let people endanger my friends. That’s not what a hero does, either. You can’t say ‘my hands are clean, that means I’m a good guy’ when you let people stand behind you with knives, ready to slash at everyone you say you want to save.”
Rowena held her breath. So did Stephanie, and the nameless girl. Regan, Emily, and Sumi said nothing at all. Finally, Rowena looked away.
“I’ll be quiet,” she spat. “I want to stay here, but that doesn’t mean I want to hurt—” Her mouth worked soundlessly, unable to find a name to fix on, until she gestured angrily to the nameless girl. “—my friend. I don’t want to hurt my friend. The rest of you can go screw yourselves.”
“Thank you,” whispered the nameless girl.
Cora only nodded. “Okay. Regan.”
“Yes?”
“No one’s keeping track of you right now. That’s a good thing. I want you to go into the woods, as far as you can, and find a deer. Ask them to show you how to get out of here.”
“She can talk to deer,” said Emily. “Of course she can talk to deer. Nothing else makes sense about today, so why shouldn’t she be able to talk to deer?”
“What am I supposed to do if I find them?” asked Regan.
“Wait in the woods.” Cora managed a smile. It wasn’t a very encouraging one. “We’ll be out by moonrise.”
Then she turned and walked toward the building. The others followed, and Regan was left outside, alone.
14 THE POWER OF NAMES
EMILY MANAGED TO HOLD her tongue until they were back in their dorm with the door closed. As soon as they were safe, she rounded on Cora, demanding, “What’s your plan? How are we getting out of here?”
“Tell me about your door,” said Cora.
Emily blinked. “It was … I found it in one of those janky haunted houses people set up around Halloween,” she said. “It was next to the exit. It said ‘be sure’ on it in these dripping blood letters, so I figured it was the way to get to a bigger scare. Instead, it led to a world where it was always harvest, where it was Halloween every night, and I danced with monsters and sang with scarecrows, and I was happy.”
“Uh-huh,” said Cora. She turned to Stephanie. “You?”
“Dinosaurs,” she said. Her tone turned beatific. “I went where there were dinosaurs.”
“Right.” Cora turned to the nameless girl. “You?”
“I already told you.”
“You told me how it ended. How did it begin?”
The nameless girl took a breath. “There was a door in the foundation of our house. I’d been … My father had been drinking, he’d been hitting my mom, all I wanted was to get away. So I got away.”
“Yeah.” Cora turned to Rowena. “You?”
“I’m not part of your little gang,” said Rowena. “I’m here because I want to be.”
“That isn’t—”
“I’m eleven.” Rowena spat the words out like they tasted sour. “Okay? I’m eleven. I was missing for three hours, and when I found my way back through the veil of clocks to the door, I looked like I was six years older than I was supposed to be. I fell through the door when I was six and I came back out physically twelve. My parents don’t believe I am who I say I am. I’ve been here for five years and I could graduate tomorrow, if I had anywhere to go. You can all go running back to your happy little fantasy worlds. If I went back through my door, I’d be dead of old age in less than a month. So leave me out of this.”
Cora nodded. “You’re making the right choice,” she said. She paused. “The veil of clocks … can you do anything with time?”
“What? No.”
“It was worth asking.” She turned back to the others. “Now that we all know what we’re watching for, we leave tonight. I honestly expect at least one of those doors to show up as soon as we’re clear of the grounds.”
“How?” asked Stephanie. “The doors are locked, the grounds are walled, and the matrons are everywhere.”
“The false headmaster gave us the key, even if he didn’t mean to,” said Cora. “When he gave Miss Lennox back her name, he broke whatever hold this place has over its graduates. He brought her back to herself. The matrons will be distracted, trying to help her.”
“Why do you call him the false headmaster?” asked Emily.
“No one remembers him when they’re not looking at him,” said Cora. “He can’t build anything. He’s a nasty man, full of nasty thoughts, and most of them are about being forgotten. I think that’s why he gave Miss Lennox her name back. To punish her for what we did. He wanted her to remember, even if it was only for a little while, that she was going to be forgotten. His door … wasn’t kind to him.”
None of the doors were kind, not really, not even when they gave people exactly what they wanted. The Trenches hadn’t been kind to her. They had given her the freedom to figure out who she was. But they had also given her a war, and a hundred drowned sailors, and the smell of blood mixed with saltwater. They had given her nightmares that would be with her until the day she died. They had given her scars, and only some of them were visible.
“So?” Rowena folded her arms. “Being headmaster doesn’t make you a nice person.”
“What’s the name of the school?”
“The Whitethorn Institute. Don’t be stupid.”
“If the man we’ve met is the headmaster, and he’s completely forgettable, how do we know the name of the school? If it’s his name, too, we should forget it. It hasn’t been stolen from him, but the things he went through on the other side of his door stole it from everybody else.” Cora spread her hands. “We haven’t met the headmaster. We’re being lied to. We’re being lied to and held captive and I’m done. We leave tonight.”
“How?” asked Emily.
Sumi grinned, seizing the dialog. “Nonsensically.” She turned to the nameless girl. “You’re good at fitting in little places. Go find a way into the matrons’ quarters. See what happens when they take Miss Lennox’s name away from her. See where they put it. And then come back here, and we’ll smash everything we have to smash, and we’ll go find Regan and her deer, and they’ll lead us out of here.”
“Are you sure?” asked the nameless girl timidly.
“No,” said Cora. “But it’s the only chance we’ve got.”
15 TWO SIDES OF THE STORY
REGAN WALKED THROUGH THE forest as if it were the most familiar, beloved place in the world; as if she knew every inch of it, and every inch of it knew her. The creatures of the wood reacted in kind. They didn’t flee at the sound of her footsteps, but inched closer, moving through the brush to watch her as she came. One particularly bold blue jay dropped so low that his wings brushed her hair as he flew by, and her laughter was all the brighter because she hadn’t laughed in so very, terribly long.
She had always been a solemn child, slow to make friends, slow to trust anyone’s intentions. She’d had her reasons—of course she’d had her reasons; most adults even agreed that they made sense, even as most children called her stuck-up and arrogant and weird when they thought she wasn’t listening, even as the girl she’d trusted most in the world had shared a secret that wasn’t hers to share and broken Regan’s heart in half—but all the reasons in the world can’t change the end result. She’d been lonely, she’d been angry, and when a door had appeared where a door had no business being, she hadn’t hesitated.
In a way, she supposed she was one of the lucky ones. She’d come back from her adventures to a family that loved her, even if they couldn’t understand who she’d become. That was all right. They hadn’t been able to understand her before. They’d loved her and they’d cared for her and they’d blamed themselves for the way she was and they’d blamed her for not mysteriously becoming different, and when they’d told her that she was going away to boarding school in order to “get over her ordeal,” she’d packed without complaint, because she’d assumed that anything had to be better than walking through a house filled with cool, accusing shadows.
She’d been wrong, of course. Home at least had the horses, had the trees behind the house, had the kids who’d treated her like an outsider for most of her life and at least couldn’t find anything new to torment her about. School was an unfamiliar country, filled with adults who wanted her to deny everything she knew to be true, and kids who were torn between a deep, angry denial of their situation and an even deeper, even angrier desire to find their doors, to go home. All any of them wanted was to go home. It was just the shape of the idea that changed.
Regan stepped into a clearing, her feet as light on the forest floor as the hooves of any wild thing, and stopped in her tracks at the sight of a single stag cropping at the ground. He wasn’t the sort of deer who gets stories written about him: no one from the Disney Corporation was going to cast him in their live-action remake of Bambi. One of his antlers was broken. His coat was moth-eaten, mangy, and things moved in it, a density of fleas and parasites so high that they were visible to the naked eye. He was favoring his right hind leg over his left, and when he raised his head to look at her, the insides of his ears were caked with grime, and the corners of his eyes were thick with mucus.
He was the most beautiful thing she had seen in so long that she thought her heart might break from it.
“I don’t feel the need to run from you,” said the stag. “Why is that? Humans are a menace.”
“I’m halfway yours,” said Regan. “The other half of me is human, and that’s useful, because thumbs.” She held up her hands and wiggled her thumbs at him in illustration.
“My name is Lord of the Forest,” said the stag.
Regan nodded. Every stag she’d ever met had been named Lord of the Forest, even when there was another stag only a few feet away. Deer didn’t understand irony. “My name is Regan,” she said. “In the name of the Great Alliance of Hooves and Hands, I greet you.”
The stag flicked an ear. “That’s a name I haven’t heard since I was a fawn,” he said. “What do you want from me, Regan of the Alliance?”
“The wall around this wood was built to hold human children, not Lords and Ladies of the Forest,” she said. “My friends and I need to find a way out.” Inwardly, she was rejoicing. I’m talking to a stag, she thought, and it was light and lightning in her veins, it was joy beyond comprehension. It all happened. I was right the whole time. It happened.
“Why should I help you?”
“Because you know what agony it would be to have your freedom taken away, and you’re too good, too gracious, to allow that to happen to anyone else.” Regan bowed her head. “Please.”
The stag flicked an ear, considering her. Finally, sounding almost bored, he said, “Follow me.”
Regan straightened, smiling bright as a prairie sunrise, and let the stag lead her deeper into the wood.
16 SIDES CHOSEN, CHOICES MADE
EVEN AS REGAN WAS remembering what it meant to breathe, the girl who no longer had a name crept along the edge of the hall in the main building of the school, her back bent and her head hunched, willing herself unseen. She knew where the cameras were, thanks to weeks and months of observation, and she knew how to flatten herself out, to fit into their blind spots. It was a necessary skill to possess, especially when living with the daily fear that eventually dwindling would become shrinking would become regressing. The day she was more rat than girl, she would need to be ready to go into hiding, to find a way into the walls in order to save herself from an exterminator’s hands. The headmaster—fake, real, it didn’t matter—would never tolerate vermin sleeping in a bed like a real person. It didn’t matter that she was real, that she had always been real. She’d die for the crime of not wanting to love a monster.
Back when she’d been—and even the thought of her name turned to roaring static, making her wince and almost straighten into the path of a camera’s lens—before, she’d been happy enough, if unchallenged and unfulfilled. She’d walked in a world of low expectations, too pretty to be clever, too clever to be kind, a pig-in-the-middle girl with her future mapped out for her by the adults who smiled indulgently whenever she tried to ask a question. She would graduate from high school, go on to college for a nice, safe degree, something that would make her better equipped to be a good wife one day, a good helper for a man who was a little less attractive and a little more clever, and maybe both those things were a matter of opinion, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that she get good grades, wear the right brands, say the right things, and always, always be on display.
