“Oh, no,” said the girl who stood next to her bed, arms crossed and eyes narrowed. She was tiny, the smallest girl in their dorm, barely four-foot-eleven, with bones like a bird. Cora towered over her when they stood side by side. In the moment, they were almost eye-to-eye. “Punch me if you want, but I’m not letting us get any more demerits because you’re too selfish to stop hiding your body glitter and too lazy to get up when the alarm goes off. Out of bed, now. We haven’t been inspected in a week. It’s our turn.”
Cora immediately turned her eyes away, shrinking in on herself, doing her best to vanish behind the curtain of her hair. “M’sorry,” she mumbled. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“You never sleep well,” said the girl, almost sneering.
Cora couldn’t think of a counter for the absolute truth, and so she stood. The rough cotton nightgown she’d been issued along with the rest of her official Whitethorn Institute paraphernalia swirled around her knees, and her skin crawled at the touch of it, like her body was trying to escape from itself. That was nothing new. Her body always felt like it was trying to escape from itself, except when she was in the water. In the water, she felt finished, perfect, whole.
The Whitethorn Institute had a swimming pool. She wasn’t allowed to use it, wasn’t allowed to sign up for any physical education classes that would take her close enough to smell the chlorine, but she still caught whiffs of it on the other girls’ skins, and she yearned for its embrace as she had wanted very little else in her life. She wanted to swim. She needed to swim. Everything would start making sense if she could just go swimming …
But according to the headmaster, if she went swimming, if she even had a bath, instead of endless showers, all the ground they’d gained against the Drowned Gods in the last two months would be erased, and she’d be back where she’d started. The rainbows that had been fading from her skin day by day, accusations of hoarded body glitter aside, would come surging back, and she would be lost. The precipice she balanced above was deep, and she needed to be careful.
The dainty girl in front of her sniffed. “Make your bed, and hurry. The alarm’s almost over.”
As if on cue, the blaring sound stopped, and the pleasant, TV-ready voice of their headmaster came through the intercom.
“Welcome to another beautiful day at the Whitethorn Institute. I trust you’re all awake and ready to put all your energy into learning, growing, and becoming better citizens of the world in which we live. It’s the only one we have, so we have to take care of it.”
The other girls in Cora’s room kept straightening their pillows and pulling on their uniforms, not acknowledging the words pouring from the loudspeaker. Cora had been there for two months—far less time than the rest of them—and even she could have recited most of the headmaster’s speech from memory. It rarely changed. When it did, the changes were never good. In this place, change never was. “Stability lends serenity” was one of the school’s mottos. They were all expected to live by it, and if they didn’t want to, there was always someone close at hand to change their minds.
“Get dressed,” hissed one of the other girls, slanting a quick, almost panicked look at Cora. “We can’t afford any more demerits. We’re already at the bottom of the chore list for the next semester.”
“And whose fault is that?” sneered the dainty girl, tucking the last corner of her blanket under, so that it formed a military-crisp seal, like the whole thing had just rolled off the showroom floor. She cast a quick, venomous look at Cora, who was struggling to get her nightgown over her head with one hand, the other already fumbling for the pieces of her uniform. Her cheeks flared red with the stress of standing naked before the others, but she’d learned the hard way that she didn’t have a choice. “We were doing fine until she came along.”
“We were not,” said the first girl. Her voice took on a strident tone. “We were always on the bottom of the middle. One person isn’t enough to drag us down. We rise and fall as a team.”
“Keep telling yourself that, Emily,” said the dainty girl, and stepped away from her bed, falling into position at the foot with almost military precision.
Cora fastened her bra and yanked her uniform top on over her head and looked quickly around the room, fingers moving on autopilot to do up her buttons. She still had to tie her tie before she’d be considered anything less than naked, but at least this was a start. It was more than she’d had a moment before.
“Hurry,” hissed another girl.
Cora set herself to dressing even faster, afraid, as she was every morning, that she would rip something or lose a button in her hurry. She hated the fact that they were expected to dress immediately upon getting out of bed, when their turn at the showers wasn’t until after breakfast; it was unhygienic, and even though the rule applied to all of them equally, the consequences of walking around the school smelling of sweat and sleep weren’t applied equally to all members of the student body. Cora had learned that the hard way in her pre-Trenches middle school. If a thin, pretty girl smelled bad, it was because she smelled bad that day. If Cora smelled bad, the other girls would say it was because she was fat, would say all fat people smelled bad, all the time. Reminding them about the shower rules wouldn’t erase the sneers from their faces.
But her discomfort wasn’t going to change anything, not here, not in this place where the needs of the student body as a whole were put ahead of the needs of any individual. And as the daily routine dulled the rainbows on her skin more and more, and quieted the whispers of the Drowned Gods in her ears, she found it easier and easier to forgive and dismiss the parts that rubbed her wrong.
The headmaster was still talking, although he seemed to be winding down. He had already made his usual points about academics—important—and athletics—also important, even though the nature of the school meant they couldn’t compete against anyone else, and needed, instead, to compete against each other, dorm fighting dorm, like school was some sort of gladiatorial competition most of them would never stand a chance of winning; all that remained was today’s inspirational message, whatever that was going to be.
“We here at the Whitethorn Institute understand that you are going through a difficult period in your lives. Childhood is confusing. Adulthood is even more so. We know that you’re fighting against an endless cascade of contradictions. That’s why we provide you with a structured environment tailored to help you remember what it means to be a citizen of the world. This world, the only one that should ever matter to you. You are home. It may not feel like it right now, but I promise you, one day, you’ll remember all the parts of your life that made it so fulfilling before you were led astray.”
The girls in the dorm stood perfectly straight and perfectly still at the foots of their beds, arms at their sides, chins lifted, staring at the wall like it was going to reveal all the secrets of the universe.
“I am overjoyed to be able to tell you all that one of our own is going to be graduating today. Regan Lewis has finally put the past behind her, and will be returning to her family, where she will be able to rejoin society. Regan, did you want to say something to the student body?”