Where the Drowned Girls Go(Wayward Children #7)(20)

The silence that filled the classroom was so profound that Sumi could hear the blood rushing in her ears, a soothing personal ocean slowly pulling her away from the shore.

Moving deliberately, the matron put down her eraser.

“Miss Onishi, you’re new here, and I think you misunderstand your role at this school,” she said, voice stiff and diction precise. “You’re not here to argue with adults. You’re not here to confuse your peers. You’re here to learn from them. You’re here to be better.”

“Better than what, though?” asked Sumi. “You know this world isn’t the only one.” It seemed suddenly important, suddenly essential, that she get the matron to admit that. “The headmaster said so when he let me into the school. You know the doors are real. You know it’s all real. So why?”

The matron opened her mouth to reply. Then she caught herself, and really looked at Sumi, and she smiled.

It was a terrible thing, that smile. It was filled with shadows more dangerous than any wicked queen, more deadly than any sword, and Sumi drew away from it, as far as the limits of her chair would allow.

“Class, we’re very fortunate today; we’re witnessing a breakthrough in our newest student,” said the matron. “We know the doors exist, because every one of us has had an encounter with them. We’d be fools to pretend they weren’t threats. But that doesn’t mean we have to grant them the privilege of becoming ‘real.’ Miss Carlton, what is ‘real’?”

“Real is something you can see and touch and take comfort in,” said Emily, in a lilting, artificially high voice, like she was trying to make sure every syllable was perfect.

“Is a dream real?”

“While you’re sleeping, it can seem that way,” said Emily. “But when you wake up, your bed, that’s real. The morning sunlight, that’s real. The dream just … goes away, back where it belongs.”

“What would happen if you refused to let go of your dream? Anyone?”

The girl without a name put her hand up. The matron nodded to her, and she said, in a tight, piping voice, “You’d die. You’d starve while you were sleeping, or you’d get an infection from bedsores, or you’d just stop breathing. You can’t be a person and live in dreams.”

“So dreams can be dangerous, if you treat them like nourishment.”

The nameless girl looked to Emily, who nodded. Her face was pinched, and there was a hectic brightness in her eyes that spoke, silently, of tears. The matron ignored the signs of discontent in order to focus on Sumi.

“If a parent tells a child that something is poison, that something isn’t good food, is it the place of the child to argue, or to listen? After all, the parent knows more. The parent has had more time to learn the ways the world can destroy something delicate and lovely.”

“You’re not my parent,” said Sumi. “They’re dead. Both of them. You’d have to be a corpse, and maybe then you wouldn’t be lecturing me on whether dreams are real things or not. My door isn’t a dream.”

“It isn’t a dream, but it isn’t good food, either,” said the matron. “We are here, in this wonderful place, because we went through a door and into a world that shouldn’t have been there, a world that wasn’t good for us. You must not look at goblin men, you must not buy their fruit. A very wise woman said that. What do you think she meant?”

“I knew a woman who’d been to the Goblin Market, and she always said Rossetti was a well-intentioned hack,” said Sumi. “She died after I did. I guess she’s stayed that way, though, or she’d probably be here too, and we could all be miserable together.”

“Sumi, hush,” hissed Cora.

“You know she’s telling lies,” said Sumi. “You know you’re a mermaid. I’m sorry you felt like you had to run away to be safe, but no one gets to dry you out for their own sake. No one gets to hurt you like this.”

The matron’s lips pressed together into a thin, bloodless line. “We aren’t here to hurt you, Miss Onishi. We’re here to prepare you to live in the world where you were born. We’re here to teach you how to survive.”

“Died once, didn’t like it, not going to do it again,” said Sumi. “There. That’s survival. Can I go home now?”

“You can go to the headmaster’s office,” said the matron. She pointed to the door. “Now. Miss Miller will escort you there.”

Sumi rose. Her legs wanted to shake and her knees wanted to knock together and she didn’t let them. She was proud of that.

Cora rose less gracefully, face so pale that she looked like she was going to be sick. She walked to the door, waiting there for Sumi to catch up.

Together, the two girls walked out of the room, leaving the well-lit, oppressive classroom for the dim, equally oppressive hall.

More rooms lined the hallway than could possibly be in current use. Cora didn’t have a clear idea of the size of the student body—they were kept too isolated from one another, aside from mealtime and classes—but she was sure it was less than three hundred, which still made it considerably larger than Eleanor’s school. The matrons liked to imply that the majority of the students were voluntary enrollments, yearning to forget the weight that had been placed upon their shoulders by the worlds they’d been called upon to save. Cora wasn’t sure she believed them.