Go away, she thinks, and perhaps it can hear her thoughts, because it flinches and draws back into the dark again, leaving her alone in the grim little shed.
Olivia leans back against the wall.
When she was younger, she liked to pretend that this was her house, not Merilance. That her mother and father had just stepped out and left her to clean up. They would be coming back, of course.
Once the house was ready.
Back then, she’d sweep away the dust and cobwebs, stack the pot shards and make order of the shelves. But no matter how tidy she tried to make the little shed, it was never clean enough to bring them back.
Home is a choice. Those four words sit alone on a page in her mother’s book, surrounded by so much white space they feel like a riddle. In truth, everything her mother wrote feels like a riddle, waiting to be solved.
By now, the rain has slowed from pounding fists to the soft, infrequent tapping of bored fingers, and Olivia sighs and abandons the shed.
Outside, everything is gray.
The gray day is beginning to melt into a gray night, thin gray light lapping against the gray gravel path that surrounds the gray stone walls of Merilance School for Independent Girls.
The word “school” conjures images of neat wooden desks and scratching pencils. Of learning. They do learn, but it is a perfunctory education, spent on the practical. How to clean a fireplace. How to shape a loaf of bread. How to mend someone else’s clothes. How to exist in a world that does not want you. How to be a ghost in someone else’s home.
Merilance may call itself a school, but in truth, it is an asylum for the young and the feral and the fortuneless. The orphaned and unwanted. The dull gray building juts up like a tombstone, surrounded not by parks or rolling greens but the gaunt and sagging faces of the other structures at the city’s edge, chimneys wheezing smoke. There are no walls around the place, no iron gates, only a vacant arch, as if to say, You’re free to leave, if you have somewhere else to go. But if you go—and now and then, girls do—you will not be welcomed back. Once a year, sometimes more, a girl pounds at the door, desperate to get back in, and that is how the others learn that it’s well and good to dream of happy lives and welcome homes, but even a grim tombstone of a place is better than the street.
And yet, some days Olivia is still tempted.
Some days, she eyes the arch, yawning like a mouth at the gravel’s edge, and thinks, what if, thinks, I could, thinks, one day I will.
One night, she will break into the matrons’ rooms and take whatever she can find and be gone. She will become a vagabond, a train robber, a cat burglar, or a con artist, like the men in the penny dreadfuls Charlotte always seems to have, tokens from a boy she meets at the edge of the gravel moat each week. Olivia plans a hundred different futures, but every night, she is still there, climbing into the narrow bed in the crowded room in the house that is not, and will never be, a home. And every morning she wakes up in the same place.
Olivia shuffles back across the yard, her shoes sliding over the gravel, with a steady shh, shh, shh. She keeps her eyes on the ground, searching for color. Now and then, after a good hard rain, a few green blades will force their way up between the pebbles, or a stubborn sheen of moss will latch onto a cobblestone, but these defiant colors never last. The only flowers she sees are in the head matron’s office, and even those are fake and faded, silk petals long gone gray with dust.
And yet, as she rounds the school, heading for the side door she left ajar, Olivia sees a dash of yellow. A little weedy bloom, jutting up between the stones. She kneels, ignoring the way the pebbles bite into her knees, and brushes a careful thumb over the tiny flower. She’s just about to pluck it when she hears the stomp of shoes on gravel, the familiar rustle and sigh of skirts that signal a matron.
They look the same, the matrons, in their once-white dresses with their once-white belts. But they’re not. There’s Matron Jessamine, with her tight little smile, as if she’s sucking on a lemon, and Matron Beth, with her deep-set eyes and the bags beneath, and Matron Lara, with a voice as high and whining as a kettle.
And then, there’s Matron Agatha.
“Olivia Prior!” she booms, in a breathless huff. “What are you doing?”
Olivia lifts her hands, even though she knows it’s futile. Matron Sarah taught her how to sign, which was well and good until Matron Sarah left and none of the others bothered to learn.
Now it doesn’t matter what Olivia says. No one knows how to listen.
Agatha stares at her as she shapes planning my escape, but she’s only halfway through when the matron flaps her own hands, impatient.