“I absolutely do, Headmaster Whitethorn.” The new voice was sweet, happy, bland. If oatmeal were a person, it would sound like that girl. Cora resisted the urge to close her eyes.
Once, Regan Lewis had been as bright and alive as anyone. She had been bright and alive enough to break the rules, to be branded a bad girl and a transgressor and a flight risk, bright and alive enough to find herself walled up in the living tomb of the Whitethorn Institute, where she could never have done anything but die.
“Hello, everyone. My name is Regan Lewis, and I’m going to graduate today. I’m going home to my family and my parents, and I’m going to finish high school with the rest of my class. I’m going to stand next to kids I’ve known since kindergarten, and it’s going to be hard, because they’re still going to think of me as the weird girl who spent all her time daydreaming about unicorns, and not the mature citizen that I’ve become. I’ll have to work. The work doesn’t end just because I leave. I’ll have to—”
She stopped, seeming to struggle with her next words, like they had become stones, like they were sticking in her throat.
“Regan? Are you all right?” The headmaster’s voice was gentle, even compassionate. He did care about them, in his way. It was just that his care didn’t help them the way he liked to pretend it did. A jack-o’-lantern might be beautiful, but it was still something that had been cut open and hollowed out because someone wanted it to suit their idea of what a pumpkin ought to be. It wasn’t its own self anymore.
Cora couldn’t wait to be a jack-o’-lantern. Anything that meant she was still Cora in some way, and not the puppet of the Drowned Gods. She listened to Regan and she yearned, wishing with everything she had to be in the other girl’s shoes.
Regan laughed. The sound was loud and wild and free, was bright and alive, and every head in the room snapped up and swiveled toward the loudspeaker. Emily clapped her hands over her mouth. The dainty girl, whose name Cora still didn’t know after sharing a room with her for months—Cora wondered if the school had taken it away somehow, as a punishment—looked like she was about to cry. The other two girls, Rowena and Stephanie, looked as if they’d seen a ghost.
“I can’t do it. I’m sorry, and I never wanted to be a hero, but that doesn’t mean I’ll let you turn me into a villain.” Regan was suddenly shouting, voice rendered huge and booming by the intercom. “I won’t lie to everyone I care about just because you want my story to have a different shape, and I won’t pretend to be something I’m not. I wish I could, but I can’t. I did see unicorns, and I did change the world, even if they never needed me to save it, and I’m going to find my door, and I’m going to go home, I am, they can’t stop me, they can tie me up and try to break me, but I know a bridle when I see one, and they can’t—”
The intercom cut out in the middle of her sentence. A single tear rolled down the dainty, nameless girl’s cheek. Not a single one of them said a word.
It didn’t feel like there was anything for them to say, and it was almost time for inspection, after all: better not to make trouble, not now. Not when there were demerits on the line.
Cora stood as still as the rest of them, and wondered how much longer she had before she would start forgetting.
7?CANDY-COATED NIGHTMARE
DAYS AT THE WHITETHORN Institute always followed the same pattern, as perfect and predictable as a spider’s web.
First, the morning alarm, followed by inspection of the dorms, to make sure the girls were out of bed, dressed, and ready to begin their day. Cora wasn’t sure what happened in the boys’ dorm: the student body was mostly female, and the three male students kept almost entirely to themselves, insular and suspicious and unwilling to talk to anyone they saw as an outsider. She guessed things must be pretty bad for them. There were so few of them, after all.
Or maybe that made things better. When the school wasn’t policing the students, the students policed each other. Fewer people in the dorm meant fewer spies and fewer enforcers. The boys might have a level of freedom she didn’t. A level of freedom she’d never have again, a level of freedom she had voluntarily surrendered, in exchange for the return of her own future.
After the alarm, they all filed into the cafeteria for breakfast, which was perfectly nutritionally balanced, and assigned according to each student’s individual needs. All the meals at Whitethorn were prepared the same way, perfectly tailored, unexchangeable. Cora ate her unsalted eggs, applesauce, and turkey bacon without complaint. She wasn’t losing any weight on this industrial diet, but at least the other students couldn’t blame that on her. Some of them looked legitimately baffled by the fact that her size hadn’t changed, having assumed—often aloud, where she could hear them—that people her size were as big as they were because they lived on nothing but cupcakes and candy, not because their metabolisms were geared for size.
Some of those same students still said terrible things in her hearing, as if their own breakfasts of waffles dripping with honey and butter and whipped cream and even sprinkles were somehow healthy because they belonged to skinny people. Cora hadn’t thought about how much she’d miss the brief respite she’d had at Eleanor West’s school, where the students had all, by some unspoken consent, restricted their teasing and name-calling to things they’d done or places they’d gone, never targeting people for who they were.
She reminded herself over and over that it was worth it, it had to be worth it, it had to be worth enduring the whispers of her classmates if it meant muffling the whispers of her nightmares.
On Cora’s third day, one of the waffle-eaters had tried to trade trays with her, and looked baffled when Cora had responded by pulling her oatmeal defensively closer to herself.
“Take it, silly,” the girl had said. “We both know you’re dying for the sugar. So take mine, and give me yours, and we can both live happily for another fifteen minutes.” Clearly the girl expected her offer to be accepted. She had still been holding out her tray when the heavy hand of one of the school matrons had fallen on her shoulder. Another had fallen onto Cora’s, and both of them had been whisked away for a stint in solitary. Cora’s skin still crawled when she looked at that particular girl.
The girl didn’t look at Cora at all.
After breakfast came classes, all of them moving from room to room, learning facts and figures from one set of teachers, learning the way the world worked, learning the way to think and act and be.
It had been a shock for Cora, on her first day, when she’d walked into one of those classes and seen a poster hanging in front of the whiteboard, labeled the compass in large, stark letters. They named the dimensions differently, called Nonsense and Logic “Delusion” and “Compulsion,” called Wickedness and Virtue “Recklessness” and “Austerity,” but the pattern was the same. All the old familiar branches and divides, twisting out into infinity, like the branches of a tree. Somewhere in that pattern were the Trenches; somewhere in that pattern was her home, her promised place, where she would be able to sleep easy for the rest of her life.