It took most of Sumi’s attention to keep herself from interrupting, pointing out how it was funny how “real” history seemed to be all about white men doing important things while everyone else barely existed except when they needed to be shown the errors of their ways. It made sense that the self-made heroes would have written history to make them look as good as possible. It didn’t make sense for everyone else to be expected to believe it. It was like saying water was dry and the sky was red, and somehow making that the law of the land.
Sometimes she felt like the world where she’d been born was the most nonsensical of them all. Sure, gravity always worked and clouds didn’t talk, but people told lies big enough to block the sun, and everyone just let them, like it was nothing to revise the story of an entire world to make yourself feel better.
Cora sat next to her, hands folded, attention on the teacher. Sumi tried to study her without being obvious about it. The rainbows on her skin were faded, almost gone, and the blue-green of her hair had lost some of its impossible luster. She looked more like a girl with a questionable dye job than a mermaid. Sumi wanted to be angry at her. This was what she’d wanted, somehow. This was what she’d been looking for.
All she succeeded in feeling was tired. Tired of this place, tired of Cora’s trauma; she’d barely been at Whitethorn for an hour, and she already felt overwhelmed and exhausted. This place was a vampire. It would drain her dry if she let it.
The school was built like a fortress, thick-walled, forbidding. From what she’d seen so far, the doors were alarmed; when someone opened one of them without first entering the correct code, they would screech and raise a ruckus, making any quiet exit impossible. Most of the windows were bolted shut. The few that did open had bars bolted to their frames, and not even Sumi could wiggle her way between them. If she had been able to, she wouldn’t have been able to get down; none of the windows below the second floor were on the list of possible escapes.
Even Antoinette hadn’t been able to find blueprints for the building online, and there were no convenient widow’s walks or bits of decorative moulding. It was like the people who’d designed this school had never read a single story that depended entirely on a heroic escape.
Or maybe they’d read them all, and used that knowledge to build the perfect academic mousetrap, capable of containing the perfect academic mice.
The grounds were no better. The wall Sumi and Cora had both seen on their way in circled the entire property, lined on the inside with razor wire and electrically charged mesh that hadn’t been visible from the road. Touching the stone meant drawing blood, taking a shock, or both. Cora had seen a dead deer hanging off the wall during one of her physical education nature walks. Its antlers had been tangled in the wire, and its eyes had been gone, replaced by hollow craters.
“That’s why we don’t touch the wall, children,” the matron leading the group had said.
The matron at the front of the room paused, looking at Sumi expectantly. Sumi realized, heart sinking, that she’d been asked a question without hearing a single word—and more, that everyone in the room was looking at her. Some, like Emily and Stephanie, were sympathetic. Others, like Rowena and the girl without a name, were on the verge of gloating, clearly delighted by her predicament.
Sometimes the only way out was through. Sumi sat up straighter, tilted her head to the side, and asked, in an utterly guileless tone, “What was the question again?”
“Do you think woolgathering is the best use of your time, Miss Onishi?” asked the matron. “You’ll be expected to rejoin the real world as a functional adult soon enough, and this sort of behavior will not be tolerated.”
“I know plenty of functional adults who do a lot worse than staring off into space, and no one punishes them,” said Sumi. “Why do you keep calling this the real world when you know it’s not the only world there is? Is this a ‘no other gods before me’ somehow turning into monotheism situation? Because I didn’t agree to go to seminary school. I’d make a terrible nun. No one would ever listen to any scripture I tried to share, and then we’d all wind up frustrated and probably start throwing things at each other. Better not to start, don’t you think?”
The silence that filled the classroom was so profound that Sumi could hear the blood rushing in her ears, a soothing personal ocean slowly pulling her away from the shore.
Moving deliberately, the matron put down her eraser.
“Miss Onishi, you’re new here, and I think you misunderstand your role at this school,” she said, voice stiff and diction precise. “You’re not here to argue with adults. You’re not here to confuse your peers. You’re here to learn from them. You’re here to be better.”
“Better than what, though?” asked Sumi. “You know this world isn’t the only one.” It seemed suddenly important, suddenly essential, that she get the matron to admit that. “The headmaster said so when he let me into the school. You know the doors are real. You know it’s all real. So why?”
The matron opened her mouth to reply. Then she caught herself, and really looked at Sumi, and she smiled.
It was a terrible thing, that smile. It was filled with shadows more dangerous than any wicked queen, more deadly than any sword, and Sumi drew away from it, as far as the limits of her chair would allow.
“Class, we’re very fortunate today; we’re witnessing a breakthrough in our newest student,” said the matron. “We know the doors exist, because every one of us has had an encounter with them. We’d be fools to pretend they weren’t threats. But that doesn’t mean we have to grant them the privilege of becoming ‘real.’ Miss Carlton, what is ‘real’？”
“Real is something you can see and touch and take comfort in,” said Emily, in a lilting, artificially high voice, like she was trying to make sure every syllable was perfect.
“Is a dream real?”
“While you’re sleeping, it can seem that way,” said Emily. “But when you wake up, your bed, that’s real. The morning sunlight, that’s real. The dream just … goes away, back where it belongs.”
“What would happen if you refused to let go of your dream? Anyone?”
The girl without a name put her hand up. The matron nodded to her, and she said, in a tight, piping voice, “You’d die. You’d starve while you were sleeping, or you’d get an infection from bedsores, or you’d just stop breathing. You can’t be a person and live in dreams.”
“So dreams can be dangerous, if you treat them like nourishment.”
The nameless girl looked to Emily, who nodded. Her face was pinched, and there was a hectic brightness in her eyes that spoke, silently, of tears. The matron ignored the signs of discontent in order to focus on Sumi.
“If a parent tells a child that something is poison, that something isn’t good food, is it the place of the child to argue, or to listen? After all, the parent knows more. The parent has had more time to learn the ways the world can destroy something delicate and lovely.”
“You’re not my parent,” said Sumi. “They’re dead. Both of them. You’d have to be a corpse, and maybe then you wouldn’t be lecturing me on whether dreams are real things or not. My door isn’t a dream.”