“Is that why your family sent you here?” asked Sumi.
“Sent me?” asked the dainty girl, disbelievingly. “No one sent me. This old lady dressed like a circus clown tried to talk me into going to her school, and I would have had to be stupid not to realize she was talking about a place where everyone was going to wallow, forever, in how sad it was that their doors went and closed, even though that was the best thing that could have happened to them. I told her no, and Headmaster Whitethorn showed up the next day. He said I could come here and forget. He said I could be free. So yeah, this place is mean, but it’s mean because it has to be. If someone doesn’t want to wake up, you have to shake them.”
She stuck her nose in the air, like she thought it would somehow make her taller, and stalked out of the room. After a moment’s apologetic pause, Rowena followed her. The sound of the door closing behind them was very loud.
Sumi shook her head, looking after them. “That’s a girl with a whole lot of angry where her heart’s supposed to be.” Then she turned back to Cora. “I’m very mad at you, you know. But you need hugs more than you need yelling at, so: hugs?”
Arguing with Sumi was like trying to fight the wind: frustrating, endless, and ultimately pointless. Cora wrapped the smaller girl into a hug, and asked, “Are you the only one here?”
“Of course, silly,” said Sumi. “Confection wants me to come home, so this is almost safe for me, or safe as anything gets. Everyone else is back at school, waiting for me to bring you safely back.”
“I’m not coming back,” said Cora.
Sumi pulled back and stepped away, looking at her with wounded confusion. “But we miss you! You have to come back.”
“The Drowned Gods still whisper to me in the night,” said Cora. “I have to stay here if I want to be free of them. I can’t come back to school.”
There was a small cough from the side. Sumi and Cora both turned. Emily was standing there, a faint, almost hopeful smile on her still only half-familiar face, like she thought she might see someone she recognized, like she wasn’t entirely sure.
“Do you really think your door’s still there?” she asked.
“I know it is,” said Sumi. “I’ve met my daughter, and she hasn’t been born yet, and that means Nonsense is going to take me home when it’s ready for me.”
“The matrons…” Emily grimaced. “They want us to say things we know were weren’t, and things we know weren’t were. They say it’s how we break our dependence on delusion. I asked once how it could be a delusion when every one of them knows it really happened, when we were recruited to attend here because of where we went, and they said … they said…”
She stopped, throat moving soundlessly. Stephanie stepped up next to her, sighed, and said, “They said it didn’t matter what we thought the truth was; when the truth isn’t something you can see, it’s malleable, and because we’re still legally children, our parents get to decide what’s true for us. They get to say they want their ‘real’ kids back, the ones they wanted, and not the ones they ended up with.”
“Minnie and Cora aren’t the only ones who chose to come here—and you, I guess, Sumiko—but there aren’t many of them,” said Emily, getting herself back under control.
“Minnie?” Sumi cocked her head.
“That’s not really her name,” said Stephanie. “We don’t know much about the world she went to, but we know it had to do with rats, and something about being there stole her real name, so she can say it, but no one hears it. If you knew it, and you said it with her in the room, no one would hear you, either.”
That was a terrifying, fascinating thought. “There’s not a lot of magic that can make it through the doors and keep hurting you once you’re here,” said Sumi, glancing to Cora. “Not having a name sounds like it would be really difficult. How could anyone tell you when your pizza was ready?”
“That’s why we call her ‘Minnie,’ but only when she’s not in the room,” said Stephanie. “Anything people call her to her face starts getting the silence stuck to it. Someone really wanted her to be forgotten.”
“We need to get to breakfast,” said Emily. “It’s your first day, and they won’t be happy if we’re late. I just wanted to ask about your door and thank Cora.”
“Thank me? For what?”
“People don’t stand up for each other around here. It’s not safe.”
“If we wanted safe, we wouldn’t have gone through the door in the first place,” said Sumi. She loosened the tie on her uniform and flashed the other girls a winsome smile. “Let’s go. Maybe we’ll get ice cream sundaes for our breakfast.”
They did not get ice cream for breakfast.
Cora got her expected eggs and turkey bacon. Emily got real bacon and sliced strawberries, which she looked at with clear and obvious revulsion. Sumi, who had received a bowl of oatmeal, began stealing them one by one, hiding them in her own beige breakfast. Stephanie received an actual omelet, oozing with cheese, which she pushed away untouched.
“Look,” she whispered, nodding to a table on the other side of the room. “They let her out.”
Cora glanced in the direction Stephanie indicated. Her glance became a stare as she realized what she was looking at.
Regan was back at the table where she’d eaten breakfast every day since Cora’s enrollment in the school. Her head was bowed and her shoulders were slumped, but she was there, not locked away in solitary or hidden in some cavern of punishment. There wasn’t a single piece of vegetable matter on her plate. It was all bacon, ham, and cheese, worked into a complicated scramble that would probably taste more like butter and grease than anything else.
No one was talking to her. No one was even looking at her.
“Man,” said Stephanie admiringly. “She almost pulled it off, too.”
“Pulled what off?” asked Sumi blankly.
“Regan almost graduated this morning,” said Cora.
“If she’d been able to keep her cool a little longer, she’d be out of here,” said Stephanie. “She would have gone home with everyone thinking she was better, and no one would have known otherwise until the day they woke up and she wasn’t in her bed anymore. If she’d just stayed calm a little while longer—”
“I heard a rumor that we were going to be allowed to play cricket when the weather turns,” said Emily abruptly, voice loud and bright. “Do you think it might be true?”
Sumi blinked, and was about to ask why cricket mattered, when the matron behind her said, in a cool voice, “Spending time on rumors is a waste of yourself and others. Have more pride, Emily.”
“I’m sorry, matron,” said Emily, looking suitably chastened. “I was just excited by the idea of playing an organized sport during physical education. Running laps isn’t as challenging as a good game.”
The matron considered this, expression thoughtful. Cora held her breath. Sometimes thoughtful people weren’t thinking about what you wanted them to be thinking about. Sometimes thoughtful people were thinking about all the ways you could be punished for daring to question what they knew was true.