By breakfast, Anabelle’s hair had been lopped short. She looked straight at Olivia, and Olivia stared back.
Go on, she thought, holding the other girl’s gaze. Say something.
Anabelle didn’t.
But she never touched the journal again.
It’s been years now, and Anabelle’s silver-blonde hair has long grown back, but she still touches the braid every time she sees Olivia, the way the girls are told to cross themselves or kneel at service.
Every time, Olivia smiles.
“Into bed,” says a matron—it doesn’t matter which. And soon the lights go out, and the room is still. Olivia climbs beneath the scratchy blanket and curls her spine into the wall and hugs the journal to her chest and closes her eyes against the ghoul and the girls and the world of Merilance.
Olivia Olivia Olivia
I have been whispering the name into your hair so you will remember will you remember?
I don’t know I can’t They say there is love in letting go but I feel only loss. My heart is ash and did you know ash holds its shape until you touch it I do not want to leave you but I no longer trust myself there is no time there is no time there is no time to I’m so sorry I don’t know what else to do
Olivia, Olivia, Olivia, Remember this—
the shadows cannot touch are not real the dreams are only dreams can never hurt you and you will be safe as long as you stay away from Gallant
Chapter Three
Olivia has been buried alive.
At least, that is how it feels. The kitchen is such a stuffy place, in the bowels of the building, the air clogged with pot steam and the walls made of stone, and whenever Olivia is forced to work in here, she feels as if she’s been entombed. She wouldn’t mind it so much, if she were alone.
There are no ghouls down in the kitchen, but there are always girls. They chitter and chat, filling the room with noise, just because they can. One is telling a story about a prince and a palace. One is moaning about cramps, and the other sits on the counter, swinging her legs and doing absolutely nothing.
Olivia tries to ignore them, focusing instead on her bowl of potatoes, the paring knife glinting dully in her palm. She studies her hands as she works. They are thin, unlovely but strong. Hands that can speak, though few at the school bother to listen, hands that can write and draw and stitch a perfect line. Hands that can part skin from flesh without slipping.
There is a small scar, between her finger and thumb, but that was a long time ago, and it was her own doing. She had heard the other girls holler when they hurt themselves. A sharp cry, a long wail. Hell, when Lucy tried to jump between the cots one day and missed and broke her foot, she bellowed. And Olivia had wondered, almost absently one day, if her voice lay on the other side of some threshold, if it could be summoned forth with pain.
The knife was sharp. The cut was deep. Blood welled and spilled onto the counter, and heat screamed up her arm and through her lungs, but only a short, sharp gasp escaped her throat, more emptiness than sound.
When Clara saw the blood, she yelped, a high disgusted noise, and Amelia called for the matrons, who assumed it was an accident, of course. Clumsy thing, they tutted and tsked, while the other girls whispered. Everyone, it seemed, so full of noise. Except Olivia.
She, who wanted to scream, not in pain but sheer exasperated fury that there was so much noise inside her, and she could not let it out. She’d kicked over a pile of pots instead, just to hear them clang.
Across the kitchen, the girls have turned to talk of love.
They whisper as if it’s a secret or a stolen sweet, palmed and kept inside their cheeks. As if love is all they need. As if they have been placed under a curse and only love will set them free. She does not see the point in that: love did not save her father from illness and death. It did not save her mother from madness and loss.
The girls say love, but what they really mean is want. To be wanted, beyond the walls of this house. They are waiting to be rescued by one of the boys who linger at the edge of the gravel moat, trying to lure them across.
Olivia rolls her eyes at the mention of favors and promises and futures.
“What would you know?” sneers Rebecca, catching the look. She is a reedy girl with eyes too small and too close. More than once, Olivia has drawn her as a weasel. “Who would want you?”
Little does she know, there was a boy that spring. He caught her coming from the shed. Their eyes met, and he smiled.
“Come talk to me,” he said, and Olivia frowned and withdrew into the house. But the next day, he was there again, a yellow daisy in one hand. “For you,” he said, and she wanted the flower more than his attention, but still she drifted across the moat. Up close, his hair caught like copper in the sun. Up close, he smelled of soot. Up close, she noticed his lashes, and his lips, with the distance of an artist studying her subject.