Wayward Children 07 - Where the Drowned Girls Go, page 2
Instead, she’d collapsed in the middle of the afternoon on Thursday of the third week, too exhausted and malnourished to move, and the call to child services had been made anyway, by the school nurse, who assumed her parents had been starving her.
Her mother’s expression of genuine shock and horror when she arrived at school had probably gone a long way toward keeping Cora’s feared consequences from materializing. Instead, she’d received a thorough checkup, a firm order to eat her dinner from now on, and a referral to a therapist who specialized in childhood eating disorders.
There was nothing wrong with her diet. She ate healthy foods, in reasonable amounts, and sweets and candies, in the same amounts as her peers; she just had a body that wanted to hold on to things a little tighter, keep them a little closer, in case of some future famine or struggle. She was active on the playground and in youth sports when her parents enrolled her, finding joy first on the soccer field and then on the swim team, where her size was nothing compared to the strength of her arms and her ability to propel herself through the water.
There was nothing wrong with any part of her. She was healthy, and happy, and fat, something which everyone who met her was quick to point out, some in tones of gleeful disgust, others in tones of shameful condemnation. Did she not know that she was fat, perhaps? Had she missed that essential fact of her own physical reality, and needed it explicitly explained to her? There was nothing wrong with her, but she was smart enough to know that everything was wrong with her, and even the fact that her parents and her doctors said that dieting would only do her harm didn’t change the fact that if she didn’t find a way to magically become thin, she would never be accepted.
Even people who were quick to say that certain words shouldn’t be said because they were like throwing rocks at people over things they couldn’t help were happy to laugh when the fat kid fell down on the blacktop, even if she stood up bleeding. “You could choose not to be fat,” they would always say, when she called them on it. “If you just had a little self-control, there’d be nothing to make fun of you for. We’re doing you a favor.”
So she’d eaten less and less, even as her doctors and parents tried to get her to eat more, she’d learned to sit so as to take up as little space as possible, and when the laughter and the cruelty had echoed so loudly in her ears that she couldn’t hear anything else, she had given herself over to the water, which had only ever cared for her, had only ever welcomed her home.
When she had filled her lungs with water and felt her body start to drift away on a sweet, liquid tide, her last thought had been that she was finally going home, finally going to a place where everyone would be able to see that there was nothing wrong with her. Then everything had gone black, and when she had woken up again, it had been, not in a hospital bed, but in the tangled kelp forest of the Trenches, and everything had changed.
“See, that’s how we know you really went through a door, and didn’t just have a near-death experience that felt like going through a door,” Kade had said, when she first came to the school, still unsteady on the legs she no longer thought of as her own, unable to shake the feeling that she was going to suffocate in the endless emptiness of the open air. “The other lifeguards at the beach where you went into the water told everyone your body was swept away by the current.”
Cora had seen their Facebook updates about the “tragedy” of seeing their “beloved classmate” drown. Some of them had managed to make digs at her weight and how ridiculous it was to think the currents could work fast enough to disappear her enormous bulk, even as they’d claimed to have been her closest friends and confidants. She was reasonably sure that if she had actually had that many friends, she would never have tried to drown herself.
“The Trenches would have found another way to have you if you’d been happy enough to keep dry,” Sumi had said, practically, when Cora had confessed her suicide attempt. “My door tried to get me three times before I finally pushed it open, and it would have kept on trying for as long as I was suited to Confection. They know what we need.”
“But how?”
Sumi hadn’t had an answer to that one.
Cora had been in the Trenches for a year and a half, diving deeper every day, fighting the Serpent of Frozen Tears with the other mermaids, flirting with sirens and chasing currents for the glory of the queen. Then had come the dreadful day when she was swept into one of the Serpent’s whirlpools, and the reaching hands of her sisters hadn’t been enough to anchor or to save her, and she’d woken on a beach back in the world of her birth, tail split down the middle into two familiar, unwanted legs, scales gone, fins and gills and freedom gone. All she’d been left with was her hair, which now grew in a deep blue-green, a perfect complement to the fins she no longer had.
She’d staggered up the beach naked and starving and half-delirious, unsure where she was or how she’d gotten there, and the first tourists to see her had called the local police, convinced that she had been attacked. The police, in turn, had called her parents, and they’d come laughing and crying down to the station to collect her, asking her over and over again where she’d been. But she’d already heard the officers snickering at the naked fat girl, and she already knew that telling her parents she’d tried to drown herself and turned into a mermaid instead wasn’t going to get her very far, so she’d turned her face away and stammered excuses, claiming not to know, not to remember, not to understand.
She’d lasted three months in the wreckage of her old life, suddenly sixteen, suddenly remarkable because she’d disappeared, because her hair stood out in a crowd, because she had somehow learned the trick, during the time she claimed not to remember, of dyeing her eyebrows.
Then one of the other girls on the swim team had broken the silent agreement not to look at the fat girl during post-pool shower time, and the news that Cora cared enough about her “new look” to dye her pubic hair had spread around school before the end of the day. She’d gone home mortified and crying, and when the next morning came, she had simply refused to get out of her bed.
The next day, Eleanor West had been on their doorstep, pleasantly dotty in a knee-length rainbow raincoat over a bright peach dress that somehow managed to skirt the color “pink” in all but implication, a smile on her face and a pamphlet about her school for children like Cora in her hands.
Cora’s parents had been reluctant to listen to a sales pitch for sending their daughter away from home when she’d only just returned from an adventure she still steadfastly insisted she didn’t remember, but Cora had looked at Eleanor and seen something familiar in the older woman’s eyes, something that spoke to understanding where she’d been and what she’d been through. At Cora’s insistence, her parents had allowed Eleanor to explain what she had to offer, and when offered a fresh start, with no one who remembered who she’d been before she disappeared, Cora had leapt at the chance to go.
She’d believed she was never going to see her family again when she’d given herself over to the Trenches, had mourned them and buried them in the hallowed ground of her heart, where they could rest. Leaving them a second time was a promise kept, not a loss. And for them, she was their miracle girl, returned by the sea, and they knew she didn’t dye her hair, and they knew that she was miserable, and they knew that whatever was broken inside her was something they couldn’t fix, and so they let her go.
Cora Miller walked away from her childhood home with her head held high and her knees barely shaking, convinced that she had finally found the place where she belonged.
Now, as she stood outside Eleanor’s office with her fist raised to knock on the door, unable to quite commit to finishing the gesture, she felt the last of her conviction crumbling away, washed out to sea by the constant erosion of her fear.
The door swung open, still untouched. Cora shrank back.
Eleanor, standing framed by the narrow opening, offered her a wan smile.
“It’s all right, dear,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you. I suppose you had best come inside.”
3 FULL FATHOM FIVE
ELEANOR’S OFFICE WAS THE only room in the school designed more for the comfort of people who hadn’t been to the other side of an impossible door than those who had. The main foyer boasted a chandelier made of crystals that had once been Eleanor’s own tears; the kitchen looked like it had been ripped half from an industrial cafeteria and half from a medieval recreation village. Every other room in the house had been touched by the reality of its residents, but in Eleanor’s office, it was possible to pretend that this was just another boarding school, one for students who had survived and started to recover from personal tragedy.
Eleanor herself smiled warmly at Cora as she walked around the bulk of her desk and settled in her leather-backed chair, gesturing for Cora to sit in one of the more modest chairs on the other side of the desk. Cora settled without a word of complaint, her still-damp nightgown sticking to her skin, while her hair sent rivulets of water down her back. The upholstery might get wet, but Eleanor wouldn’t care about that. Caring about things getting wet wasn’t very nonsensical, and Eleanor’s devotion to the Nonsense still waiting for her on the other side of her own door was one of the school’s few true constants.
(No one knew the name of Eleanor’s world, not even Kade, who would inherit the school on the day when she finally felt her grasp on reality had grown flexible enough to allow her to return to her beloved Nonsense to die. But Eleanor’s door was one of the rare stable ones, and everyone did know that she could go back whenever she felt the time was right.)
“So,” said Eleanor.
“So,” echoed Cora, and that was where her courage deserted her. All the words she’d been working her way toward saying dried up on her lips, and she looked down at her hands, folded neatly in her lap, dry and unwebbed and dancing with oilslick rainbows.
The rainbows never left her anymore. She would never have believed that she could hate color as much as she did.
“They still speak to you?” asked Eleanor.
Cora’s head snapped up. “Every night,” she whispered. “They … they want me. They think I belong to them because they held me for a few minutes. They won’t leave me alone.”
“And you think that it’s because your door is still propped open, just that little crack, that sliver held by hope. You think if you could let it close, they’d have to let you go.” Eleanor pursed her lips, agony in her eyes. “You’re wrong, you know. The doors never completely leave us. Even the ones who lose all desire to resume their journeys, even the ones who forget, they’re always more vulnerable—”
But Cora wasn’t listening anymore. She had seized on the only part of Eleanor’s speech that mattered, leaping to her feet and reaching across the desk for Eleanor’s hands. “Yes, forget,” she said. “I want to forget. I want to be normal again. I want my hair to be brown and the air to feel natural and to go home and sleep in my own bed and see my parents every morning when I wake up.” She stopped there, waiting for Eleanor to reply. Seconds slithered past, the silence unbroken until Cora herself took a deep breath, and said, “You’ve always said that there was a second school.”
Eleanor pulled her hands away. “The Whitethorn Institute. Cora, you can’t intend—”
“You said they steal your students sometimes. That when you’re not fast enough, or when the children are having a harder time adapting to life in this reality, that sometimes Whitethorn gets there first.” She sat up straight, giving Eleanor a challenging look. “You said it was where students go when they want to believe that everything that happened on the other side of the door was just a dream, or a delusion, and not a real thing at all. Please. I want to wash the Moors off my skin. I want to drain the Drowned Gods out of my soul. I can’t do either of those things here, where I’m expected to dwell and dwell and dwell on what happened. Please. You have to let me go.”
Eleanor was silent for a moment, eyes wide and frightened. Finally, she asked, “Have you discussed this with the others?”
Cora didn’t need to ask who Eleanor meant by “the others.” They had been viewed as a unit by the rest of the student body since their return from the Moors—a third trip through a door that hadn’t been meant for most of them. The first had been to the Halls of the Dead, and the second to Confection, where they’d arranged for Sumi’s resurrection. Sumi sulked sometimes, because Confection was her door, and so she was only looked at with the awe afforded to someone who had died and come back again, and not with the awe that was directed at her fellow travelers.
But still, they were a unit now, a posse, a gang in the teen-movie sense of the word, friends bonded by common adventure and experience. Cora, Kade, Christopher, and Sumi. And now here, in this office, Cora was alone.
She shook her head. “No,” she said miserably. “The Moors don’t want any of them, even though they all have hooks the Drowned Gods could use if they wanted to try.” Sumi had been dead. Christopher loved the dead. Kade had no door to go back through, even if he’d wanted to; Prism had rejected him completely. He could have given himself over to the Moors, and the Drowned Gods could have taken his loyalties without a fight. But they had chosen Cora. The Moors had chosen Cora.
She understood some things about the Moors, in a half-formed way that was almost impossible for her to articulate. She understood that they were a single organism, a great factory whose purpose was transformation, and they made all they owned over in their own image.
The Moors made monsters. Cora was already a mermaid. She didn’t want to wake up one day as something worse.
Cora shuddered. “I haven’t discussed this with them. Please. I can’t live like this. I need to forget. I need the Drowned Gods to let me go.”
The tension in the room was like a sheet of glass, thick but fragile, easily shattered and capable of becoming a weapon when it did. Eleanor took a breath, opening her mouth, and Cora tensed against the hammerblow that was about to land.
Someone knocked at the door.
Eleanor froze. Cora did the same. Then, as if cued, they turned in uneasy unison to look toward the source of the sound. “Yes?” called Eleanor, voice surprisingly steady, as if she hadn’t been in the middle of an emotionally charged conversation about Cora’s entire future.
The door creaked open and a girl poked around the edge. Her face was too thin, too narrow, and too pointed, seemingly made entirely of angles and bruises waiting for the chance to happen. Her hair was a wild mop of carroty curls, too orange to fit any modern definition of “attractive,” too bright to be overlooked in a crowd. Her eyes were equally bright, hazel trending toward yellow; she looked like the consequence of some misguided wizard deciding that the fox kits in his backyard would be happier as human children, without taking their desires into account in the slightest. She looked roughly Cora’s age, somewhere in her late teens, in that timeless, breathless pause between childhood and adulthood, when anything was possible, when anything could happen.
“I lost my roommate again, but I found your missing keys.” Antoinette held up something so crusted with mud that it looked more like a clod of dirt than anything as useful as keys. If Cora squinted, however, she could see the curve of a keyring, the angle of a filthy, rotted rabbit’s foot, now half-skeletal from its time spent in the ground.
Eleanor startled in her seat, sitting up straighter, eyes brightening. “I lost those twenty years ago,” she said. “However did you…?”
“I can find anything,” said Antoinette, looking briefly, completely peaceful as she put the keys down on the table nearest the door. “I found your keys, and see, there’s my roommate. And I wouldn’t have had an excuse to knock and find her if I hadn’t already found them, so it all makes sense if you put it in a line.”
“We know, dear,” said Eleanor. “But Cora and I are in the middle of something important right now, so if you don’t mind…”
“Oh.” Antoinette blinked. “All right. I’ll see you in class, Cora.” She slipped out of the room, closing the door again behind herself.
Cora returned her attention to Eleanor. The tension in the room was broken now: they were just two people, a teacher and a student, having a long-overdue conversation about that student’s future. Cora knew how to navigate those conversations, had been in them time and time again, when she’d wanted to be a lifeguard and the swim coach had come to argue her case to the park administrator who’d wanted to claim her size would be a liability; when she’d wanted to try out for the spring musical, and the drama teacher had tried to gently imply that she might be better off behind the scenes. Being a fat child meant knowing how to be your own best advocate, and Cora advocated very well indeed.
“Whitethorn is…” Eleanor trailed off. “It’s different. It’s very different. I haven’t been there in years, and I view it as a personal failing every time I lose a student to them. I never thought that you would be at risk.”
“Miss West, please.” Cora shook her head. “I can’t go back to the Trenches as I am now. The Drowned Gods have too much of a hold on me, and if they followed me…” She shuddered. If they followed her into those warm, sunlit waters, she would be bringing a doom far greater than the Serpent down on the heads of those who had never done anything but show her kindness and welcome her home.
By saving Jack’s future, she had sacrificed her own. The rainbows dancing over her skin were proof enough of that.
Eleanor took a sharp breath. “We can’t be sure that the Whitethorn Institute would be able to sunder you from the Drowned Gods, even if they were to try,” she said. “Divinity is a terrible thing, and we try to avoid offending it when we can.”
“We have to do something. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, even swimming hurts me. Please.” Cora looked Eleanor in the eye. “I’ve already tried to kill myself once. If they keep whispering to me, I’m going to try again, and this time, I’m going to succeed.”
Eleanor was silent for a long moment before she said, in a small voice, “That was a low, mean thing to say, Cora. I thought better of you.”
