Wayward Children 07 - Where the Drowned Girls Go, page 4
“You know all about running away, don’t you, Miss Miller?” he asked. His voice was soft and lilting as he continued: “There was a door. Your file doesn’t go into detail as to its nature—psychiatrists always forget the most essential parts of the story, I find—but there was a door where a door wasn’t meant to be, in a wall or in the pattern rain makes on the sidewalk, etched in chalk or scrawled in shadow. There was a door, and it called to you somehow. It knew you. It wanted to be opened, and you, poor child, poor, innocent child, you were naïve enough to open it.”
Cora felt as if her blood had been replaced by seawater, cold and thin and sluggish in her veins. She couldn’t move. She could barely breathe.
“I know it will take time for you to trust me enough to tell me what you found on the other side of the door. I know it was a world where the rules were different, or where it seemed like there were no rules at all. A world where you could live your most ridiculous, decadent dreams. I think all children dream of finding a place like that, a place without bedtimes, or lessons, or rules. But children crave structure as much as they crave freedom. They start to dream of it if they go without for too long, and then those beguiling, alluring worlds, those whimsical fantasies, they turn cruel. Yours did, didn’t it? It cast you out.”
He leaned closer. The smile was gone. For the first time, he was memorable. He was memorable, and he was terrible, and Cora, who had been a hero, who had saved the Trenches, bit the inside of her cheek to keep from crying out in fear.
“It told you to be sure, and it changed you—your hair, your skin, everything you thought immutable about your self—and yet somehow you still weren’t sure, and now you’re here. You’re finally safe, Miss Miller. Everything you experienced happened in another world, in another life, to someone you aren’t going to be anymore. We’re going to help you.”
“How?” whispered Cora.
“We’re going to teach you how to forget,” said the headmaster, and nothing had ever been so terrible, and nothing had ever been so wonderful.
“I didn’t … I didn’t go through only one door,” said Cora. A tear ran down her cheek, so hot it was scalding. “I followed a girl with lightning where her heart was supposed to be through another door, and while I was there, I caught the attention of some … some things I shouldn’t have. They want to take me and make me their own. I asked to come here because you could help break me free of them. Can you really make them let me go?”
The headmaster smiled again, settling his hand on her shoulder. “Most of the work will be yours, but yes,” he said. “We can reconnect you to this world, where you belonged all along. We can set you free. All you have to do is make an effort. We only want what’s best for our little community. We only want everyone to be well.”
“That’s all I want,” said Cora. She was crying again, with relief, not fear. “I just want to be well.”
“That’s all anyone wants, in the end,” he said. “It doesn’t matter why you want it. Here, we don’t require you to be sure. Here, we’re sure enough for everyone.”
He led Cora deeper into the institute, and everything was silent, and everything was still, and the whispers of the Drowned Gods still echoed in the corners of her mind like warnings that she wouldn’t get away that easily.
6 JACK-O’-LANTERN GIRLS
THE ALARM WENT OFF promptly at 5:25 A.M., the same way it did every day but Sunday. Cora, who had been awake since shortly after midnight, groaned and pulled her pillow over her face. The Drowned Gods had been getting quieter since she’d entered an environment that refused to acknowledge their existence, but they were getting more desperate at the same time; over the course of the past two months, the whispers had grown more venomous, and twice as barbed as they’d been when she was at Eleanor’s. Sleep was still a lie she told herself every night when she closed her eyes, and like all lies, it always let her down.
It didn’t help that she had no friends here to offer an alternative to their poisons. A rough hand seized the pillow and jerked it out of Cora’s grasp, flinging it across the room. Any sound it made when it hit the wall was covered by the ongoing alarm. Cora sat up, hair in her eyes, and glared, her hands clenching on the blanket, not quite forming fists, but close enough.
“Oh, no,” said the girl who stood next to her bed, arms crossed and eyes narrowed. She was tiny, the smallest girl in their dorm, barely four-foot-eleven, with bones like a bird. Cora towered over her when they stood side by side. In the moment, they were almost eye-to-eye. “Punch me if you want, but I’m not letting us get any more demerits because you’re too selfish to stop hiding your body glitter and too lazy to get up when the alarm goes off. Out of bed, now. We haven’t been inspected in a week. It’s our turn.”
Cora immediately turned her eyes away, shrinking in on herself, doing her best to vanish behind the curtain of her hair. “M’sorry,” she mumbled. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“You never sleep well,” said the girl, almost sneering.
Cora couldn’t think of a counter for the absolute truth, and so she stood. The rough cotton nightgown she’d been issued along with the rest of her official Whitethorn Institute paraphernalia swirled around her knees, and her skin crawled at the touch of it, like her body was trying to escape from itself. That was nothing new. Her body always felt like it was trying to escape from itself, except when she was in the water. In the water, she felt finished, perfect, whole.
The Whitethorn Institute had a swimming pool. She wasn’t allowed to use it, wasn’t allowed to sign up for any physical education classes that would take her close enough to smell the chlorine, but she still caught whiffs of it on the other girls’ skins, and she yearned for its embrace as she had wanted very little else in her life. She wanted to swim. She needed to swim. Everything would start making sense if she could just go swimming …
But according to the headmaster, if she went swimming, if she even had a bath, instead of endless showers, all the ground they’d gained against the Drowned Gods in the last two months would be erased, and she’d be back where she’d started. The rainbows that had been fading from her skin day by day, accusations of hoarded body glitter aside, would come surging back, and she would be lost. The precipice she balanced above was deep, and she needed to be careful.
The dainty girl in front of her sniffed. “Make your bed, and hurry. The alarm’s almost over.”
As if on cue, the blaring sound stopped, and the pleasant, TV-ready voice of their headmaster came through the intercom.
“Welcome to another beautiful day at the Whitethorn Institute. I trust you’re all awake and ready to put all your energy into learning, growing, and becoming better citizens of the world in which we live. It’s the only one we have, so we have to take care of it.”
The other girls in Cora’s room kept straightening their pillows and pulling on their uniforms, not acknowledging the words pouring from the loudspeaker. Cora had been there for two months—far less time than the rest of them—and even she could have recited most of the headmaster’s speech from memory. It rarely changed. When it did, the changes were never good. In this place, change never was. “Stability lends serenity” was one of the school’s mottos. They were all expected to live by it, and if they didn’t want to, there was always someone close at hand to change their minds.
“Get dressed,” hissed one of the other girls, slanting a quick, almost panicked look at Cora. “We can’t afford any more demerits. We’re already at the bottom of the chore list for the next semester.”
“And whose fault is that?” sneered the dainty girl, tucking the last corner of her blanket under, so that it formed a military-crisp seal, like the whole thing had just rolled off the showroom floor. She cast a quick, venomous look at Cora, who was struggling to get her nightgown over her head with one hand, the other already fumbling for the pieces of her uniform. Her cheeks flared red with the stress of standing naked before the others, but she’d learned the hard way that she didn’t have a choice. “We were doing fine until she came along.”
“We were not,” said the first girl. Her voice took on a strident tone. “We were always on the bottom of the middle. One person isn’t enough to drag us down. We rise and fall as a team.”
“Keep telling yourself that, Emily,” said the dainty girl, and stepped away from her bed, falling into position at the foot with almost military precision.
Cora fastened her bra and yanked her uniform top on over her head and looked quickly around the room, fingers moving on autopilot to do up her buttons. She still had to tie her tie before she’d be considered anything less than naked, but at least this was a start. It was more than she’d had a moment before.
“Hurry,” hissed another girl.
Cora set herself to dressing even faster, afraid, as she was every morning, that she would rip something or lose a button in her hurry. She hated the fact that they were expected to dress immediately upon getting out of bed, when their turn at the showers wasn’t until after breakfast; it was unhygienic, and even though the rule applied to all of them equally, the consequences of walking around the school smelling of sweat and sleep weren’t applied equally to all members of the student body. Cora had learned that the hard way in her pre-Trenches middle school. If a thin, pretty girl smelled bad, it was because she smelled bad that day. If Cora smelled bad, the other girls would say it was because she was fat, would say all fat people smelled bad, all the time. Reminding them about the shower rules wouldn’t erase the sneers from their faces.
But her discomfort wasn’t going to change anything, not here, not in this place where the needs of the student body as a whole were put ahead of the needs of any individual. And as the daily routine dulled the rainbows on her skin more and more, and quieted the whispers of the Drowned Gods in her ears, she found it easier and easier to forgive and dismiss the parts that rubbed her wrong.
The headmaster was still talking, although he seemed to be winding down. He had already made his usual points about academics—important—and athletics—also important, even though the nature of the school meant they couldn’t compete against anyone else, and needed, instead, to compete against each other, dorm fighting dorm, like school was some sort of gladiatorial competition most of them would never stand a chance of winning; all that remained was today’s inspirational message, whatever that was going to be.
“We here at the Whitethorn Institute understand that you are going through a difficult period in your lives. Childhood is confusing. Adulthood is even more so. We know that you’re fighting against an endless cascade of contradictions. That’s why we provide you with a structured environment tailored to help you remember what it means to be a citizen of the world. This world, the only one that should ever matter to you. You are home. It may not feel like it right now, but I promise you, one day, you’ll remember all the parts of your life that made it so fulfilling before you were led astray.”
The girls in the dorm stood perfectly straight and perfectly still at the foots of their beds, arms at their sides, chins lifted, staring at the wall like it was going to reveal all the secrets of the universe.
“I am overjoyed to be able to tell you all that one of our own is going to be graduating today. Regan Lewis has finally put the past behind her, and will be returning to her family, where she will be able to rejoin society. Regan, did you want to say something to the student body?”
“I absolutely do, Headmaster Whitethorn.” The new voice was sweet, happy, bland. If oatmeal were a person, it would sound like that girl. Cora resisted the urge to close her eyes.
Once, Regan Lewis had been as bright and alive as anyone. She had been bright and alive enough to break the rules, to be branded a bad girl and a transgressor and a flight risk, bright and alive enough to find herself walled up in the living tomb of the Whitethorn Institute, where she could never have done anything but die.
“Hello, everyone. My name is Regan Lewis, and I’m going to graduate today. I’m going home to my family and my parents, and I’m going to finish high school with the rest of my class. I’m going to stand next to kids I’ve known since kindergarten, and it’s going to be hard, because they’re still going to think of me as the weird girl who spent all her time daydreaming about unicorns, and not the mature citizen that I’ve become. I’ll have to work. The work doesn’t end just because I leave. I’ll have to—”
She stopped, seeming to struggle with her next words, like they had become stones, like they were sticking in her throat.
“Regan? Are you all right?” The headmaster’s voice was gentle, even compassionate. He did care about them, in his way. It was just that his care didn’t help them the way he liked to pretend it did. A jack-o’-lantern might be beautiful, but it was still something that had been cut open and hollowed out because someone wanted it to suit their idea of what a pumpkin ought to be. It wasn’t its own self anymore.
Cora couldn’t wait to be a jack-o’-lantern. Anything that meant she was still Cora in some way, and not the puppet of the Drowned Gods. She listened to Regan and she yearned, wishing with everything she had to be in the other girl’s shoes.
Regan laughed. The sound was loud and wild and free, was bright and alive, and every head in the room snapped up and swiveled toward the loudspeaker. Emily clapped her hands over her mouth. The dainty girl, whose name Cora still didn’t know after sharing a room with her for months—Cora wondered if the school had taken it away somehow, as a punishment—looked like she was about to cry. The other two girls, Rowena and Stephanie, looked as if they’d seen a ghost.
“I can’t do it. I’m sorry, and I never wanted to be a hero, but that doesn’t mean I’ll let you turn me into a villain.” Regan was suddenly shouting, voice rendered huge and booming by the intercom. “I won’t lie to everyone I care about just because you want my story to have a different shape, and I won’t pretend to be something I’m not. I wish I could, but I can’t. I did see unicorns, and I did change the world, even if they never needed me to save it, and I’m going to find my door, and I’m going to go home, I am, they can’t stop me, they can tie me up and try to break me, but I know a bridle when I see one, and they can’t—”
The intercom cut out in the middle of her sentence. A single tear rolled down the dainty, nameless girl’s cheek. Not a single one of them said a word.
It didn’t feel like there was anything for them to say, and it was almost time for inspection, after all: better not to make trouble, not now. Not when there were demerits on the line.
Cora stood as still as the rest of them, and wondered how much longer she had before she would start forgetting.
7 CANDY-COATED NIGHTMARE
DAYS AT THE WHITETHORN Institute always followed the same pattern, as perfect and predictable as a spider’s web.
First, the morning alarm, followed by inspection of the dorms, to make sure the girls were out of bed, dressed, and ready to begin their day. Cora wasn’t sure what happened in the boys’ dorm: the student body was mostly female, and the three male students kept almost entirely to themselves, insular and suspicious and unwilling to talk to anyone they saw as an outsider. She guessed things must be pretty bad for them. There were so few of them, after all.
Or maybe that made things better. When the school wasn’t policing the students, the students policed each other. Fewer people in the dorm meant fewer spies and fewer enforcers. The boys might have a level of freedom she didn’t. A level of freedom she’d never have again, a level of freedom she had voluntarily surrendered, in exchange for the return of her own future.
After the alarm, they all filed into the cafeteria for breakfast, which was perfectly nutritionally balanced, and assigned according to each student’s individual needs. All the meals at Whitethorn were prepared the same way, perfectly tailored, unexchangeable. Cora ate her unsalted eggs, applesauce, and turkey bacon without complaint. She wasn’t losing any weight on this industrial diet, but at least the other students couldn’t blame that on her. Some of them looked legitimately baffled by the fact that her size hadn’t changed, having assumed—often aloud, where she could hear them—that people her size were as big as they were because they lived on nothing but cupcakes and candy, not because their metabolisms were geared for size.
Some of those same students still said terrible things in her hearing, as if their own breakfasts of waffles dripping with honey and butter and whipped cream and even sprinkles were somehow healthy because they belonged to skinny people. Cora hadn’t thought about how much she’d miss the brief respite she’d had at Eleanor West’s school, where the students had all, by some unspoken consent, restricted their teasing and name-calling to things they’d done or places they’d gone, never targeting people for who they were.
She reminded herself over and over that it was worth it, it had to be worth it, it had to be worth enduring the whispers of her classmates if it meant muffling the whispers of her nightmares.
On Cora’s third day, one of the waffle-eaters had tried to trade trays with her, and looked baffled when Cora had responded by pulling her oatmeal defensively closer to herself.
“Take it, silly,” the girl had said. “We both know you’re dying for the sugar. So take mine, and give me yours, and we can both live happily for another fifteen minutes.” Clearly the girl expected her offer to be accepted. She had still been holding out her tray when the heavy hand of one of the school matrons had fallen on her shoulder. Another had fallen onto Cora’s, and both of them had been whisked away for a stint in solitary. Cora’s skin still crawled when she looked at that particular girl.
