by Eva Chase
Trix
When I went up to the dorms after lunch to grab my jacket, Delta was still huddled under the covers like she had been since yesterday morning. I hesitated by my bed, my legs locking.
Everyone kept reminding me that I didn’t belong here. I’d intruded on her room and her classes and taken as much help as she’d been willing to offer me… Had some of the consequences I’d faced rubbed off on her? Or was it just a coincidence that in the less than two weeks since I’d arrived, she’d gone from looking a little fragile to languishing in her bed?
Whatever strangeness possessed this school, it had its own balance, and I had to have sent that out of kilter.
I’d been going to wander through the campus woods again and see if I could pick up on anything I’d missed before, but instead, when I reached the main floor, I found myself walking over to the dean’s office.
What was the point in pretending this school’s set-up was at all normal? The staff knew what they were doing, and they had to realize that by now I’d have figured out something supernatural was going on. Playing along and hoping the pieces would fall into place hadn’t worked out so well so far. Maybe it was time to take the bull by the horns.
My hand dropped to my right forearm, tracing the lines of my starburst scar that matched Cade’s birthmark to gain a flicker of determination. Then I knocked on the door like I had that first day when I’d only had the barest idea what I was getting into.
Dean Wainhouse opened it a moment later and considered me from his great, gawky height. “We meet again, Miss Corbyn.”
I might have smiled at the dry remark if his expression hadn’t been so sour otherwise. He definitely didn’t look happy to see me.
“I have some concerns about the school,” I said. “I figured you’re the best person to bring them to.”
One of his silver eyebrows lifted. “Seeing as you’re not officially enrolled at Roseborne, I’m not sure you can expect to have much sway over how we run things here.”
Even he wanted to rub in the whole “you don’t belong” mantra. The memory of my argument with Ryo yesterday flitted through my head with a clench of my gut. I forced myself to smile anyway. “Well, it does affect the ‘official’ students too. Do you want to discuss this in the hall or should I come in?”
His lips twitched with the faintest hint of a grimace, but he stepped back to let me in and closed the door behind me. As I walked over to his desk, I scanned the room as quickly but thoroughly as I could, just in case I’d missed something here the last time. If anyone had continuous access to that locked basement area, I had to think it’d be the dean.
My gaze settled on an aged wooden box at the corner of his desk. It was so small I hadn’t paid much attention to it during my furtive nighttime search—it obviously didn’t hold any kind of records. But from the lines and joints that marked its surface, it appeared to be a puzzle box, the kind you could only open with the right combination of movements and pressure points. The kind of place you might hide something small but important if you’d rather not keep it on your person?
Or just a diversion that had nothing to do with the school’s main mysteries?
I couldn’t get away with poking at it right now. I sank into the chair across from the desk and waited while the dean took his spot on the other side. He didn’t bother to sit down. Did he think he was going to intimidate me like that? I leaned back in the chair, shifting to make myself more comfortable.
“One of my roommates is sick,” I said. “She’s too weak to even get out of bed. She’s officially enrolled and all that. I haven’t seen any of the staff doing anything to help her.”
Wainhouse showed no sign of surprise. “I assure you that Miss Savas’s condition is being monitored, and we’ll attend to her as is necessary.”
Such warmth and compassion. I eyed him. “I’ve gotten the impression all of you don’t necessarily mind when the students aren’t feeling well. I mean, hell, you have a class that’s basically for poisoning us and one for shooting arrows at each other. Is this a kind of extended punishment because she didn’t perform exactly to a professor’s liking?”
“We prefer not to discuss any student’s status at the school with their peers for the sake of privacy,” the dean said. “If Miss Savas wishes to share her personal situation with you, I’d imagine she’s capable of doing that.”
“Not if she thinks she’ll get in even more trouble.” I waved my hand toward the front of the school and the gate beyond it. “She can’t even get to classes anymore. Why don’t you let her just go home?”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
I pushed forward in my seat. “Why not? What’s the point of this place, anyway? Do you just get off on making people miserable? What have any of them done to deserve this?”
Dean Wainhouse’s face stayed impassive. “As I said, we don’t discuss students’ personal situations. As to the running of the college, that’s within our sole discretion. We are quite satisfied with the results so far. Is that all you had to complain about?”
He asked the last question as if I’d been whining like a petulant child instead of raising major concerns about my classmates’ well-being. I should have known this wouldn’t get me anywhere.
I shoved back the chair and stood up. Anger burned in the back of my throat, but I couldn’t see any point in letting that out either. What could I say to him? He didn’t care what I thought of him or his school. I couldn’t even claim that assholes like him would get what they deserved in the end, because I’d seen plenty of assholes get off scot-free.
I didn’t manage to keep my mouth completely shut, though. “Everyone has a weak spot.”
A glimmer of a smile crossed the dean’s lips. “And that applies to you as much as it does anyone. Have a good day, Miss Corbyn.”
That was a threat if I’d ever heard one. I walked out fighting a shiver, just as Jenson came sauntering down the hall toward me.
He glanced at me and then the office I’d emerged from, and his mouth tightened at a crooked angle. “Did you figure you’d get anything useful out of him?”
His tone wasn’t as mocking as it’d often been before. I hesitated, weighing my response. Something had shifted in the tension between us over the last few days. The last time I’d talked to him, after deciding I wasn’t going to take anything he said seriously, he’d responded to my calm retorts with an attitude that had started to feel more playful than accusing.
And then he’d taken off as if I’d slapped him in the face. It’d been pretty weird all around, really, but it suggested there was more going on behind those bright blue eyes than he’d shown earlier.
It was becoming pretty clear there was more going on with everyone in this school than I could assume from initial impressions.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” I said warily. “Leave no stone unturned. And whatever other clichés apply.”
The corners of his eyes crinkled with momentary amusement that I didn’t think I was imagining. It disappeared a moment later with a shadow that crossed his face.
“When are you going to learn to let it go?” he said, his voice so gentle that I blinked at him, half expecting to realize I was talking to someone else altogether.
“Let what go?” I said. “People are getting hurt. I still don’t know what happened to my brother. I know it pisses you off that I’m here, but I can’t just walk away from that.”
“I— That wasn’t—” He made a strangled sound, as if I was somehow being unreasonable. “Just look at how things have gone so far. Think about what they’ve already put you through. Do you really think it can’t get worse?”
“Of course not,” I said with rising irritation. “I’m taking that chance. Which is up to me, by the way.”
“And I’m so sure you’re going to save us all. You’re never going to find him. He’s gone. Why do you think I keep telling you that you should go too?”
“Because you’re a jerk who doesn’t kn
ow how to keep his opinions to himself?” I retorted, taking a step closer to him. “Where’s Cade gone? If you know what happened to him, why don’t you tell me?”
Jenson’s expression wavered and then hardened. “I just know he’s gone,” he said. “Why can’t you listen for once?”
“I might when you give me a good reason to.” I spun around and stalked toward the front door. I still had another ramble through the woods to make, and at least I had a small hope of getting some kind of useful answer there.
Maybe it was Delta’s soft but ragged breaths in the bed next to mine, or maybe it was my frustration that I still felt so far away from Cade after all the time I’d spent here—including another fruitless wander through the woods—but the college’s atmosphere was especially eerie that night. In the darkness, a burst of sobs carried through the wall from the room adjacent to ours. The roof creaked. A thump sounded outside, close enough that it might have been just beneath our window. The moaning howl rose up, mournful and ghastly as ever.
I pulled my blanket over my head like Delta had, but the sounds trickled in anyway. Every exhalation turned the air around me uncomfortably humid.
At least an hour must have passed without me getting any closer to sleep when someone in the room let out a choked sound.
At first, peering through the darkness, I couldn’t make out which of the beds it’d come from. A breath hissed through gritted teeth, and then Violet sat up, shoving off her covers. She slipped across the room and out the door, favoring her right leg with a more prominent limp than I’d seen before.
Was she getting more messed up too? It’d figure, since other than Ryo, she and Delta were the only students who hadn’t outright shunned me. Although I’d gotten the sense she was avoiding me since she’d directed me to the shed the other day. She’d managed to never linger in the same room as me any time I would have had the opportunity to ask questions.
So, I couldn’t say it was for entirely selfless reasons that I eased out of bed myself and padded after her.
The hall was empty, but it wasn’t as if there was anywhere to go other than into a different bedroom or downstairs. The faint squeak of the bottom step reached my ears, and then a rasp I thought was the bathroom door springing free from its frame. I slunk after her.
Light glowed beneath the bathroom door. I pushed it open tentatively.
Violet’s head jerked around. She was standing by the sinks, holding a damp washcloth to the burnt side of her face. When she lowered her hand, ruddy marks had dappled the white fabric. She was bleeding.
“What are you doing here?” she snapped. “I don’t need an audience.”
She was so obviously in pain that her rebuff didn’t sting that deeply. I took a step back, resting my hand on the door. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. Do you need anything for that?”
“There’s nothing you can get that’ll help. This is what I have to live with. Why do you care anyway?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because I’m trying to be a halfway decent human being.”
She glowered at me. “Well, none of the rest of us here are even halfway decent, so you can save the Good Samaritan act for someone else.”
All my aggravation with the school and this whole situation boiled over. “Who the hell is such a horrible person they should have to walk around with open wounds on half their body for their whole life? This place is sick, and it’s messing with you. You can’t just—”
Violet lowered her hand with the cloth to the edge of the sink with a smack that cut me off. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. You want to know what I did before I came here? Will that shut you up?”
The vehemence in her voice startled most of the rancor out of me. I still answered truthfully. “I can’t promise I’ll shut up, but yeah, I’d like to know.”
She sighed and turned on the faucet. Cold water streamed over the cloth for several seconds before she turned it off again and returned the cloth to her cheek. She looked at herself in the mirror and then down at the sink.
“They didn’t really do this to me,” she said in a detached tone. “I did it to myself. My decisions, the people I hurt…”
She was silent for a moment before going on. “There were so many kids at my high school who looked down on me and laughed about my clothes and my hair behind my back, who’d ignore me if I ever tried to talk to them… After a while I got so mad I didn’t give a shit about any of them. I looked up on the internet how to make a bomb big enough to take out half the cafeteria, and I put it all together, and I planted it right in the middle of where the worst of them usually sat…”
Her free hand trembled. She gripped the edge of the sink. “Sometimes I still think they deserved that, even if I deserve this too. It didn’t work exactly the way I wanted it to. No one died. But a bunch of them were in the hospital for weeks. And I wasn’t far enough away. Part of the blast caught me too. I thought it would heal eventually, but no such luck. I’m stuck with it, just like I’m stuck here, because that’s who I am.”
I stared at her. There’d been plenty of kids who’d hassled me at one school or another, but I couldn’t imagine getting to the point where I’d actively have tried to murder them. Even the accident—
I jerked my mind away from that thought. I’d had Cade most of that time. Maybe my mind would have gotten more twisted up if I’d been on my own.
“Is that how it is for everyone?” I ventured. “You all hurt people, or whatever, and that’s why you’re here? They’re punishing you for that?” Delta’s story about the girl with the allergy wavered up from my memories. What was Ryo here for? Or Jenson?
Or Cade? My stomach knotted. I knew the most likely answer to that, and I was also the only person who might know he shouldn’t really be blamed. It shouldn’t have happened at all.
Violet shrugged. “That’s one way of looking at it,” she said noncommittally.
From the way she and the others always talked about what went on here, I wasn’t sure she could give a more definite answer than that.
What have any of them done to deserve this? I’d asked Dean Wainhouse this afternoon, and maybe now I had my answer, even if the punishment still seemed to overshadow the crime.
“And you’ve been stuck here for two years?” I said quietly, remembering what Violet had told me before. Had she been bleeding for her wrongdoings, never allowed to heal, for all that time?
“That’s right,” she said. “We’ll see how much longer I make it.”
Those words hung ominously in the silence between us. I wet my lips and couldn’t help switching to the other subject that’d been on my mind. “The shed—Cade—was that his punishment?”
It couldn’t be, could it? If it was, then he’d still be using it. Unless he hadn’t “made it” as long as Violet had, whatever that meant.
“Everyone has their own burdens to bear,” she said. “He made his decisions.”
Her use of the past tense niggled at me. “Is he still here, somewhere? You don’t have to tell me where, just— If I knew I still had a chance…”
She turned her full gaze on me, the one eye sunken within the mass of scars, the cloud of hair turned even more rumpled by her attempts to sleep, adding an additional wildness to her appearance. “No one has a chance to get out of this. Except maybe you. But I’m starting to think you’re too stupid to take it.”
The insult didn’t bother me as much as it might have from anyone else, in any other context. I wasn’t sure she was right about my chances, though. From what she’d just said, I might belong here more than Cade ever had. Yes, I’d come of my own accord, but since then, had the staff realized what crimes I’d committed? Would I find myself faced with some everlasting torment once they’d decided on one that was fitting?
Maybe that was the real reason I’d been allowed to stay here in the first place. Roseborne’s staff might have uncovered my past right from the start and decided I deserved this as much as anyone else they’d drawn i
n. For all I knew, they’d spent the last several days observing and considering the best punishment to inflict on me.
The impulse gripped me to tell Violet, to spill the whole damn thing that I’d never admitted a shred of to anyone. Fragments of the memories I’d tried to bury so deep raced through the back of my mind: the shadowy courtyard, the dog’s vicious bark, the gasp, the shattering glass.
My hands fisted by my sides, and my stomach balled just as tight. If I opened my mouth, vomit might come out instead. I hadn’t really meant to—
But I had. I’d wanted to hurt someone just as badly as Violet had admitted to, and not someone who’d ever hurt me even a little bit.
A wave of dizziness washed over me. I closed my eyes and swallowed down the urge and the memories, and when I opened them again, all that remained was a dull nausea.
“Not stupid,” I said, because I felt the need to answer her somehow. “Just stubborn.”
She rolled her eyes, but without any real hostility now. “A lot of the time those seem to be the same thing.” She shifted the cloth against her face and winced. “If you’re done with the interrogation, I’d really rather look after this alone.”
“Right. Of course.” I didn’t have any reason to hang around watching her. Lord only knew how hard it’d been for her to make her own confession to me.
Coming out of the bathroom, I should have turned toward the third-floor stairs, but my feet had ideas of their own. A tug in my chest drew me over to the grand staircase and down, then out under the dark sky with its mix of clouds and stars.
The cold grass nipped at my socked feet. I darted around the building to the shed.
The cot was still there where I’d left it. I sank onto it and pulled the ratty blanket up over me. The hint of Cade’s scent tickled into my nose.
When I closed my eyes, I could almost feel his arms around me, like in our secret place in the backyard, like careening on his sled, like the last time he’d really hugged me more than a year ago.
I’m going to find you, I promised him silently as my mind drifted toward sleep. I won’t let them make you pay for what I did.
