Wayward Children 07 - Where the Drowned Girls Go, page 3
“The truth isn’t always kind,” said Cora. “Please. You’re the only one who can help me. You have to help me. Please.”
Eleanor looked at her, and she looked at Eleanor, and neither one of them said anything at all.
After the silence had stretched out too long to stand, Cora rose and walked, still in her damp nightgown, toward the office door. “I know you’ll have to talk to my parents before you can have me transferred to another school,” she said. “Please make sure they understand that this is what I want. This isn’t something that’s being forced on me by someone else.”
Eleanor was silent as Cora turned to leave the room. Only when the girl was standing in the doorway did she place her hands over her face and say, miserably, “But this is something that’s being forced on you, my darling. This isn’t a choice you would ever have made on your own.”
The empty room gave her no answer. Cora was gone. After a long moment of renewed silence, Eleanor lowered her hands before she rose and crossed the room to retrieve the ring of keys Antoinette had carried back to her. The keys gave no answer either, and Eleanor was weeping as she turned back to her desk.
In the hall, Cora walked bathed in sunlight, forcing her chin to stay high when it wanted to sink toward her breastbone, to make her smaller. She always wanted to make herself smaller, to take up less space, to avoid the moment when someone would look at her and say with their eyes that she took up more space than she deserved, than she had earned, than she could possibly pay for. It was a hard impulse to fight, and she had so little energy left for fighting anything, apart from the terrible whispers in the dark. She was shaking and exhausted by the time she reached her room, and ducked gratefully inside.
The room was empty, save for the detritus of two teenage girls forced into a small shared space. Cora made her way to her own dresser, pulling her nightgown off over her head, and went digging for clean clothes.
Once she was dressed, she raked a brush through her hair and moved back toward the door. This was still a school, for all that half its students had no interest in any subjects they could learn here in the world of their birth, and the state had certain requirements around attendance and standardized tests. Their teachers worked as much for the state as for Eleanor, and couldn’t be trusted to cover for students who stopped going to class.
Cora’s legs felt like they were made of lead, almost too heavy to lift. She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in weeks, and she hadn’t had anything to eat, despite having been out of bed for hours. Ploddingly, she made her way out into the hall. There would be time to grab something from the dining hall before she had to go to English class. The thought of trying to analyze the poetry of Emily Dickinson without calories was enough to make her want to cry. Why adults constantly wanted to know what centuries-old poems meant was beyond her. Shouldn’t someone have found the right answer by now? Or at least an answer good enough to accept?
The dining hall was virtually deserted this late in the morning. Only Kade was there, clearing a table that had probably been occupied by the rest of her friends until the bell rang. He looked up at the sound of her footsteps, initially surprised, then smiling.
“Hey, Cora,” he said, Oklahoma drawl softening his words like honey drizzled over a hard biscuit. “We missed you this morning. You still not sleeping well?”
Cora could hide the reason for her nightmares, but she couldn’t hide that they were happening, not with Antoinette sleeping in her room and waking up more often than not to the sound of screaming. Still, she forced a smile and said, “I wanted a bath more than I wanted an early breakfast.” A small untruth, not even entirely a lie, and Kade wasn’t one of the kids who’d come back from his adventures with the ability to sniff out falsehoods like they were rotting meat. She was grateful for that, especially when he laughed and nodded his acceptance of her statement.
“Mermaids and bathtubs,” he said. “I bet they didn’t have strawberry bubble bath in the Trenches, huh?”
“I don’t like the strawberry stuff too much,” she said. “It reminds me of Confection.”
Kade nodded again, more solemnly. Their time in Confection hadn’t been as traumatic as their time in the Moors, but Christopher had still almost drowned, and that sort of thing wasn’t worth dwelling on. “Sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right.” The hot food had already been cleared away, but there were still trays of baked goods and whole fruit. Cora hesitated for only a moment before selecting two pears and a blueberry muffin, all things she could carry with her in a napkin to avoid being late to class. The teachers didn’t care if their students ate during class, as long as they weren’t being actively disruptive. “We can’t make things that happened not have happened by wishing that they hadn’t.” She paused. “Did that sentence even make sense?”
“Enough,” he said. “You’ve got English up first, yeah?”
“Yeah,” said Cora, cheeks flushing softly red under their veil of rainbow. Sometimes she thought Kade might be flirting, with the way he kept track of her schedule and noticed when she missed meals. But he couldn’t possibly be flirting, not when everyone said the last girl he’d shown an interest in was Nancy. Tall, willowy, slender Nancy. He’d never said anything about Cora’s body—or anyone’s, really—but he didn’t have to. Cora had learned long before the Trenches what kind of girls got flirted with, and what kind didn’t.
And one way or another, she was leaving soon anyway.
“I’ll walk you to class,” he said, and fell in step beside her as she left the dining hall and started toward the wing where the classrooms were kept, most of them no larger than the sleeping rooms, none of them set up in the standard, industrial way of her pre-Trenches schools. No plastic seats, no tidy rows of desks. Everything was a comfortable jumble, designed to keep students as comfortable as possible without actually lulling them to sleep.
They walked in an easy rhythm, Cora nibbling at her muffin, Kade filling the silence with amiable small talk about the embroidery project he was working on, which seemed to involve stitching a dizzying array of songbirds onto the back of a denim jacket. In the blinking of an eye and less than half a blueberry muffin, he was saying he’d see her at lunch, and leaving her standing in front of her English classroom door, blinking after him.
The room was only half full. It was easy enough to get her preferred armchair, deep and plush enough not to dig into her sides, close enough to the back of the room to avoid making her a target if the teacher needed to force someone to participate. She settled, nibbling at her muffin, and only half-listened as class got underway.
The teacher was droning on about the iconography of death in Dickinson’s poems when the door cracked open and Sumi stuck her head inside, beckoning to Cora.
“Eleanor-Elly asked me to come get you,” she said.
Cora gathered her things, rose, and went.
4 THE WHITETHORN INSTITUTE
ALL TOLD, TRANSFERRING SCHOOLS was an easier process than Cora would have expected. It helped that Whitethorn was hungry for new students: as long as someone was willing to verify that a student fit their entrance requirements, they were more than happy to have them.
Eleanor had only looked Cora in the eyes once since the process began, her pen hovering over the transfer form. “Your parents have agreed to this,” she’d said, the unspoken “against my advice” hovering over every syllable. “But you have to understand that entering Whitethorn is easy. Leaving is far less so. You might not be able to come home if you change your mind.”
“I won’t change my mind,” Cora had replied, trying not to look at the rainbows dancing over her fingers, poisonous and lovely. “Please.”
Eleanor had sighed then, the sound like bones rattling down in the dark, and signed the paper.
Three days later, the car came for her. She had told no one she was leaving, not even Antoinette, who thought she was simply being transferred to another room at the school; she stood outside, back and shoulders straight, her worldly possessions in two suitcases at her feet, and she did not look back, and she did not cry. For the first time in her life, she was leaving a place she loved because she had chosen to do so, and there was power in that.
The car that would take her to the airport was sleek and black, almost featureless. When she climbed into the back, she found the package containing her new uniform waiting for her. She shied away from it at first, unaccustomed to the idea of wearing clothing selected by someone else, but by the time they pulled up at the terminal, she had the bundle in her lap, ready to change and embark on her new life.
She changed in the airport bathroom. Her ticket, provided by the Whitethorn Institute, placed her in a window seat, and to her immense relief there was no one in the seat next to her. She watched out the window as the land fell away, eyes turned toward the shadow of the wood, and tried to convince herself that she could still see the school, that she wasn’t sneaking away like a coward while her friends waited for her, that she wasn’t running away.
But of course she was. Her eyes drifted shut an hour or so into the flight, and she woke with a jolt when the wheels touched down, jerking her out of her mercifully dreamless sleep. A man was waiting for her at the baggage claim, holding a sign with her name on it, wearing a jacket whose insignia matched the one now stitched above her right breast. Cora went with him willingly, climbing into another black sedan and leaning back against the seat, ready for her new life to begin.
The first thing she noticed as they drove out of the city and approached the Whitethorn Institute was the wall. Not content to circle the school and its associated grounds, it had been expanded, one careful brick and land acquisition at a time, to enclose a full three miles of forest. The trees loomed dark and foreboding above it, their branches locked together as if they sought to make a second wall, this one to bar the birds, the wind, the very sky itself.
Made of thick gray stone, mottled with moss and lichen, the Whitethorn Institute’s wall gave every impression of having grown up out of the bedrock. It was immoveable, unbroken, ten feet high and utterly featureless. There was no razor wire along the top, no floodlights; they weren’t necessary. She could tell just by looking at it that no one had ever successfully escaped from the grounds. She would learn later that the few students who had managed to reach the wall had proven unable to scale it, and even if they had, they would have found themselves in the middle of nowhere, far from any chance of rescue.
The car slid smoothly down the road, paralleling the long gray line of the wall. Cora kept her eyes on the window, tracing every detail of her new landscape. The wall was ominous, but she’d seen worse; it was only a pale echo of the menace contained in the smallest outhouse in the Moors. In the moment, her shoes seemed like a far greater problem than the wall.
They pinched. Everything else was sized perfectly, but the shoes were too tight. It was a simple, monochrome uniform: black shoes, white socks, gray skirt, white shirt with black tie, and over the top of it all, a black jacket with a stylized W and I ringed with a chevron of thorns stitched above her right breast. The insignia should have seemed silly, even childish. Instead, it seemed like a threat. Try to run, and you would bleed; try to get away, and you would be ensnared.
The gates of the institute swung open. The car turned down the driveway, and the Whitethorn Institute swallowed another incoming student alive.
PART II
THE STUDENT BODY
5 A WORLD WITHOUT RAINBOWS
THE FRONT HALL OF the Whitethorn Institute seemed to have been designed by a team of people dedicated to stamping out all hints of imagination. The walls were polished oak; the floor was gray marble, lined with industrial rugs to keep students from slipping. Cora stepped onto that floor, tight new shoes clicking against the stone, and swallowed, her hair suddenly feeling like some huge and unspeakable offense. It was a color that didn’t belong here, had never belonged here, and should have been washed away before she brought it to sully this pristine place.
The conviction that she didn’t belong here was beginning to coil in her chest, tight and heavy as the Serpent. She swallowed, forcing herself to keep breathing through the first stirrings of panic, and walked on, waiting to hear her driver’s footsteps echoing her own.
She heard no such thing. The man who had brought her to the school’s gates, helped her bring her suitcases to the door, was not following. He had retreated back to his car as soon as his duty was done, leaving her to move onward alone. This was her school now. This was her home. She might not belong here yet, but she would. She had to.
She’d signed all of her choices away.
The hall was straight and easy to follow, leading inexorably toward a single conclusion. Cora took a deep breath and kept walking, summoning the courage that had seen her go from drowned girl to mermaid to Drowned Girl, capital letters and all. She had been swept into the Trenches because she needed them, and she had become a hero there because heroism had always been in her, a hard core of sharpened coral as strong as steel tempered in her soul. It was that core she gathered around her now, and used to keep herself moving forward.
The only thing that made her courage shiver and try to shrink away was the cold that filled the hall, gray and unforgiving, inimical to the silver glitter of the depths. There was no glitter here, and every breath was another kind of drowning. Cora shivered, tightening her fingers on the handles of her suitcases, and kept walking. If she stopped moving here, she would never start again.
And she had come of her own free will. If anyone was at fault here, it was her. No one was coming to save her.
This was how she saved herself.
The hallway ended at a tall mahogany door, unmarked, like the person on the other side knew without a doubt that anyone who made it this far would know who they were. Cora stopped, blinking silently, and waited for something to happen. The echoes of her footsteps faded, until all that remained in the hall was an absolute, swallowing silence. The door swung open. The man on the other side regarded her with quiet sympathy, eyes going first to her hair, and then to her waistline, and finally to her face—a progression she knew all too well. Cora bristled, but said nothing.
He was tall, not only in relation to Cora herself, but in relation to the world around him; he made the man who had picked her up at the airport look like he’d been built to a slightly different, considerably more reasonable scale. He was neither old, like Miss Eleanor, nor young, like Cora, but somewhere in the measureless, interminable middle, where he could have laid claim to almost any age and been believed. A scar ran from the right side of his jaw and down the length of his neck, vanishing into the starched collar of his white button-down shirt. It was the only truly eye-catching thing about him. Terrifying as he was—more through the weight of his presence than through any single aspect of his being—Cora felt as though she could forget him in an instant, as though taking her eyes off of him for a second would be to risk losing track of him forever. There was nothing about him to hang a memory on.
Nothing except for that scar.
“Thank you for coming here so promptly,” he said, eyes remaining settled on her face. It was like being pinned under glass, held somehow captive. The sudden urge to run seized her, almost uncontrollably strong. She was here because she wanted to be, and she still wanted to run. Even if she didn’t make it to freedom, she’d know she’d tried. She’d have that much to hold on to.
“Miss Miller,” said the unremarkable man.
Cora froze.
“It’s an admirable thought,” he continued. “Most of our students think to run, but relatively few think to try it during intake. I’m impressed. Attention on me, please.”
Cora swallowed hard and fixed her eyes on the unremarkable man’s face.
He smiled. It was a pleasant, paternal expression that did nothing to render him more memorable. “I am Headmaster Whitethorn; welcome to the Whitethorn Institute. I’ve read your file. I’m thrilled you’re going to be joining us. I think you’ll be an excellent addition to the Whitethorn family, and I believe we can help you. The first step is always admitting you need help, and you’ve already taken that step by requesting a transfer into our company.”
Cora let go of her suitcases and started, for some inane reason, to curtsey. She caught herself before she could complete the gesture, freezing with her hands on the skirt of her uniform, feeling utterly foolish.
“I made a mistake,” she said, and her lips were numb, and her tongue was too big for her mouth. But this place, this place was so big and so cold, and this was just a different way to drown. The Drowned Gods would still be able to find her here. If traveling to a different world hadn’t been enough to break their hold on her, why would she think that a few miles would make any difference at all? All her bravery had been spent on making it this far; she had no more left to spare. Voice small and pockets empty, she managed to continue, “I’m sorry to have wasted your time. I want to go home.”
“Miss West is a trifle eccentric, and her teaching standards fail to align with our own, but she has never struck me as incompetent,” said the headmaster. He fixed her with a steely eye. “Are you saying that she sent you here without signing the transfer papers?”
“N-no,” stammered Cora. “I signed everything, but—”
“And your parents, Miss Miller. I believe they signed the papers as well? And those papers included detailed information regarding this school’s legal obligation to our students?”
“Yes,” said Cora, voice still small.
“Then I’m sure you understand that this is your home now, and this is where you belong, by your own choice and admission. You signed the paperwork. You are allowed one call off-campus a week, on Friday afternoon; if you wish to call your parents then and begin the process of removing yourself from our custody, that is your right.” His lips drew back in what someone less afraid might have called a smile. Cora flinched. There was something disturbing about the expression, almost disturbing enough to make him memorable. Not quite, though. She knew that if she looked away, or even blinked too long, she’d forget everything about him.
