Where the Drowned Girls Go(Wayward Children #7)(19)

Sumi twitched like she was going to start scavenging the abandoned waffles. Cora reacted without thinking, clamping her hand around Sumi’s wrist.

“No,” she hissed. “A matron will see you.”

“But—”

“No,” echoed Stephanie. “We’re your dormmates. We’ll teach you the rules.”

Emily was waiting at the door. Sumi only glanced back once as Cora dragged her to the other member of their sudden alliance, and then they were moving into the hall, merging smoothly with the tide of students. By the time the bell rang again, the hallway was empty, and the Whitethorn Institute was at peace.





9?MICE IN THE WALLS


THE CLASSROOM MIGHT AS well have been a medical exam room, or a cardboard box exaggerated beyond all reason. The walls were devoid of anything, even educational posters or homework charts; the fluorescent lights had no covers, and hummed quietly to themselves as they illuminated the barren, institutional desks and their solemn, empty-handed occupants. No one drew on the desktops or used their protractors to etch initials into the wood: no one even breathed without permission from the matron at the front of the room, who was droning on about the history of the world, pausing occasionally to remind them that this was the only history that mattered, this was the only history that could be believed in.

It took most of Sumi’s attention to keep herself from interrupting, pointing out how it was funny how “real” history seemed to be all about white men doing important things while everyone else barely existed except when they needed to be shown the errors of their ways. It made sense that the self-made heroes would have written history to make them look as good as possible. It didn’t make sense for everyone else to be expected to believe it. It was like saying water was dry and the sky was red, and somehow making that the law of the land.

Sometimes she felt like the world where she’d been born was the most nonsensical of them all. Sure, gravity always worked and clouds didn’t talk, but people told lies big enough to block the sun, and everyone just let them, like it was nothing to revise the story of an entire world to make yourself feel better.

Cora sat next to her, hands folded, attention on the teacher. Sumi tried to study her without being obvious about it. The rainbows on her skin were faded, almost gone, and the blue-green of her hair had lost some of its impossible luster. She looked more like a girl with a questionable dye job than a mermaid. Sumi wanted to be angry at her. This was what she’d wanted, somehow. This was what she’d been looking for.

All she succeeded in feeling was tired. Tired of this place, tired of Cora’s trauma; she’d barely been at Whitethorn for an hour, and she already felt overwhelmed and exhausted. This place was a vampire. It would drain her dry if she let it.

The school was built like a fortress, thick-walled, forbidding. From what she’d seen so far, the doors were alarmed; when someone opened one of them without first entering the correct code, they would screech and raise a ruckus, making any quiet exit impossible. Most of the windows were bolted shut. The few that did open had bars bolted to their frames, and not even Sumi could wiggle her way between them. If she had been able to, she wouldn’t have been able to get down; none of the windows below the second floor were on the list of possible escapes.

Even Antoinette hadn’t been able to find blueprints for the building online, and there were no convenient widow’s walks or bits of decorative moulding. It was like the people who’d designed this school had never read a single story that depended entirely on a heroic escape.

Or maybe they’d read them all, and used that knowledge to build the perfect academic mousetrap, capable of containing the perfect academic mice.

The grounds were no better. The wall Sumi and Cora had both seen on their way in circled the entire property, lined on the inside with razor wire and electrically charged mesh that hadn’t been visible from the road. Touching the stone meant drawing blood, taking a shock, or both. Cora had seen a dead deer hanging off the wall during one of her physical education nature walks. Its antlers had been tangled in the wire, and its eyes had been gone, replaced by hollow craters.

“That’s why we don’t touch the wall, children,” the matron leading the group had said.

The matron at the front of the room paused, looking at Sumi expectantly. Sumi realized, heart sinking, that she’d been asked a question without hearing a single word—and more, that everyone in the room was looking at her. Some, like Emily and Stephanie, were sympathetic. Others, like Rowena and the girl without a name, were on the verge of gloating, clearly delighted by her predicament.

Sometimes the only way out was through. Sumi sat up straighter, tilted her head to the side, and asked, in an utterly guileless tone, “What was the question again?”

“Do you think woolgathering is the best use of your time, Miss Onishi?” asked the matron. “You’ll be expected to rejoin the real world as a functional adult soon enough, and this sort of behavior will not be tolerated.”

“I know plenty of functional adults who do a lot worse than staring off into space, and no one punishes them,” said Sumi. “Why do you keep calling this the real world when you know it’s not the only world there is? Is this a ‘no other gods before me’ somehow turning into monotheism situation? Because I didn’t agree to go to seminary school. I’d make a terrible nun. No one would ever listen to any scripture I tried to share, and then we’d all wind up frustrated and probably start throwing things at each other. Better not to start, don’t you think?”