Where the Drowned Girls Go(Wayward Children #7)(40)
“Is everyone all right?” she asked, before pulling a gumdrop out of her hair and popping it casually into her mouth. “No broken bones?”
“You’re standing on my hair,” said Cora.
Sumi skipped lightly down from the pile of shifting, groaning bodies, turning to offer her hand to the nearest of them. “We’re safe now. Or, if not safe, at least less unsafe. Eleanor-Elly will be thrilled to meet you all.”
Julia Lennox, who had snapped fully back to herself while crossing a gingerbread plain studded with carbonation geysers, pushed herself to her feet. “Even us?” she asked, gesturing to Carrie, who was helping Emily up.
“Even you,” said Sumi firmly. “Like you said, years are only numbers. They don’t matter here, unless we let them, and I don’t think I want to let them anymore.”
The nameless girl took Sumi’s hand. She was taller now; had grown almost six full inches in the week and a half since they’d fled the school for the forest, and then through the door to Confection that Sumi had seen tangled in a twist of ivy clinging to an old oak. Of the lot of them, her absolute conviction that Confection would never let her go had apparently been the strongest, capable of moving mountains, capable of changing worlds.
Stephanie’s door had appeared two days later, in the middle of a forest where the trees had cookies for leaves, spreading so wide they almost blocked out the sun. She’d looked back long enough to shout a quick farewell and then she’d been gone, diving through into a world of lush greenness, the sound of prehistoric reptiles echoing on the wind. The rest of them had kept on walking, kept on searching for something none of them had ever expected to be searching for: a door back to the world where they’d started.
Cora’s door hadn’t appeared, but her hair was full of rainbows, and she wasn’t worried. The Trenches would take her home when it was time.
The nameless girl paused, eyes bright with unshed tears. She looked at Sumi, still holding her hands, and said, “Your door’s closing.”
“Eh.” Sumi shrugged. “I’m not ready to be a wife and a mother and a story for the historians yet, so it’s not my time to go back to stay. I know I go home. I can spend a little more time here before that happens.”
“Are you all right?” asked Regan, focusing on the nameless girl. “You look like you’re going to be sick.”
The nameless girl looked at her and smiled, brighter than it seemed she had ever smiled before. She pulled her hands out of Sumi’s and placed them to either side of her own neck, fingers spread, like she was giving herself a hug.
“My name is Marian,” she said. “That’s my name.”
The door of the house banged open as a beautiful boy in a hand-stitched vest burst onto the porch. “Sumi’s back!” he yelled. “She’s back, and she’s got Cora with her!” Kade ran down the porch, cutting across the lawn as several more students piled outside, pointing and yelling. Cora ran toward them, leaving Sumi with the girls from Whitethorn. She and the boy met in the middle of the lawn, wrapping their arms around each other and spinning like pinwheels in the sun. So many things were still broken; so many things still needed to be done. But in that moment, there was victory, and the sound of Marian’s joyful sobbing, and a haven to be harbored in.