by Elle East
I pulled open the door and turned away from Grayson to walk inside the office.
I was met with a loud chorus of shrieks.
Chapter 3
What the hell?
I froze in shock and confusion. I couldn’t see anything, the room in front of me was pitch black, but I could hear it was full of people because they were all yelling at me. I snapped out of it and tried to shut the door but a teacher was already barging out.
“Didn’t you see the sign?!” she yelled at me.
“What sign??” I asked desperately, but I looked over and—sure enough—in big, bold red letters were the words “DO NOT ENTER WHEN IN USE”.
My heart sunk. How did I miss that?
I looked over at Grayson as the teacher continued to berate me, but he was gone.
“You just ruined their projects! Detention! I’m giving you detention! Come with me to the headmaster’s office. Right. This. Minute.”
I had only been in the school for fifteen minutes and already I was in trouble, this didn’t bode well for the rest of the year.
I followed behind her sheepishly as she took off. The outraged voices of the students became muffled as the door closed and we disappeared down the hall. The teacher’s flats clacked against the floor angrily. She was a very tall woman in her mid-forties and I had to jog slightly just to keep up with her.
She opened a seemingly random door and walked in without knocking. As I followed her I noticed a small brass placard on the wall that said “Administration”. Oh, come on, I thought in exasperation, there was no way I would have been able to find that. Why didn’t they have better signs??
“Sit,” the teacher commanded as she pointed to a waiting area, before walking over to an office door and entering after knocking.
I sat down in the expensive wooden chairs in a daze. Grayson did that on purpose.
Why? He said they knew everything about the school so there’s no way that was a mistake. Could it be that he was suspicious about why I was here? But there was no way he could know.
There was a receptionist sitting behind a fancy desk, but she ignored me. I did what I always did when I wasn’t sure what to do; I pulled out my phone. I sat deep in thought while scrolling absent-mindedly.
The unease I had felt earlier returned with a vengeance. I texted Dean back, “Thanks!” I started typing out what had just happened, but then I stopped. Dean and I had gotten closer over those two weeks I had stayed with him and his dad but we weren’t close friends yet. I wanted him to like me, not think I was some crazy person who overreacted to everything and couldn’t handle life. I deleted the message and exited the app.
After what felt like hours, but was probably only ten minutes, the teacher opened the door and came out. She crossed the room in a couple long strides and then she was gone without a single glance towards me.
“You can see Headmaster Mullgrave now,” the receptionist said without looking up from her computer.
I got up and went over to peek into the office that the teacher had just come out of.
“Come in, Ms. Baker,” an authoritative voice called out to me.
I walked into a beautiful, large study. Three of the walls were lined with hundreds of old, fancy books while the other wall was made up of windows that overlooked a courtyard. The room was filled with leather and brass. Behind a massive mahogany desk, that was so clean and free of clutter that I would have felt comfortable eating off of it, sat a dignified-looking man in his fifties. Without reading the metal nameplate on the desk that said “Headmaster Mullgrave” I knew who this man was. He had an unmistakable air of authority.
He motioned for me to have a seat and I sunk down into one of the leather chairs across the desk from him. The windows were behind him and cast him in shadow, which only served to make him even more intimidating. When he started speaking I could tell he wasn’t a man who rushed his words or raised his voice—he didn’t have to.
“Ms. Spence, the photography teacher, has informed me you opened the door to the school’s dark room while other students were developing their photographs for their final assignments.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t see the large sign affixed to the door indicating that you should not enter?” he asked evenly.
I looked down at his hands, which were interlocked and resting on the desk, so I didn’t have to look into his face.
“You ruined several of those students’ end-of-term projects,” he informed me.
“Wait, but it’s the beginning of the term?” I asked, confused.
“Crestmoore runs several summer intensive courses, one of them being photography. Those students had spent the last month working on those projects and they’ve been destroyed. They are going to receive zeros.”
“What?! But it wasn’t their fault!”
“The academic standards here are exceedingly high, much higher than I’m sure you’re used to in public school,”—he said the word public like it was a swear word— “We take educating our pupils very seriously and an education at Crestmoore means something in the world because of that. How are we to know what those students were going to hand in? Are we just to provide them with a good grade based on nothing? For all we know you could have been hired by one of them to do what you did because they were in danger of failing the assignment.”
“I wasn’t,” I argued feebly.
He waved me off with a slight flick of his hand. His power seemed so absolute that he could dismiss me with such a small movement. “There’s no way to know. Those students will be given the opportunity to repeat the course and their final grades will be changed to reflect the new mark that they earn, regardless of whether it’s better or worse.”
Those students will hate me, I thought miserably. My first day and already I was making enemies.
He gave me a quick lecture on expectations, both academic and behavioral. A passing grade at Crestmoore was 70% and if you fell below that mark you were immediately assigned a student tutor and given detention until you brought it back up. Students were allowed one school-issued laptop, that was to be used for research and note-taking purposes only. Curfew was strictly enforced at ten p.m. on school nights and midnight on the weekends.
He asked for my cellphone and I handed it over before he told me that phones weren’t allowed on campus and that I would get it back during holiday breaks. I was shocked at the news. My phone was my lifeline and I wouldn’t be able to text my friends or Dean while I was here, I was truly alone.
He finished the lecture by telling me, “This is your first day and already you are getting in trouble.”
I looked down sheepishly.
“Don’t let that trend continue. I don’t want to see you in here again unless it’s for more positive accomplishments. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ll place a call to Ms. Fisher’s teacher and ask that she come here after class is dismissed. She can help you find your room. She is another scholarship student.” I didn’t love the way he said “scholarship student,” and seemed to think we should stick to our own. “You may wait in the reception area for her. Pick up your welcome package from the office manager before you leave. Good-day.”
Before I even left he had already picked up an old-fashioned phone from his desk and was dialing.
I sat in one of the reception chairs, my welcome folder and a new laptop sitting next to me. I was drawing in my sketchbook, without my phone there was nothing else for me to do while I waited for the other student to come.
After about half an hour I heard a bell ring. A few minutes later a cute girl with shoulder-length blond hair came into the office holding her books in front of her chest. She walked right up to me and smiled.
“You must be the new scholarship student. I’m Cecily, nice to meet you.”
She held out her hand, and I transferred my pen into my other one so I could shake hers.
“Yeah, I’m Maddy, nice to meet you.”
I smiled back.
“Those are really cool.” She motioned to my sketchbook.
I was in the middle of drawing an intricate, stylized scene with a large tree in the middle, its branches hugging a melting sun and its vast root system tearing up the ground.
“Oh, thanks,” I said as I shut the book and put it back in my backpack. “I like drawing. I probably spend too much time on it.”
“No, it’s really cool, I wish I could do that. Anyways, should we head out? Want me to carry anything?”
“I’m good. Thanks though.”
“Let me see your room assignment.” She took a sheet out of my welcome package and scanned it. “Wow, ok.”
“What?”
“You’ll see when we get there.”
I shouldered my backpack, picked up my new stuff and followed her out the door. I was happy to be out of the oppressive, formal atmosphere of the office.
Classes must have let out because the halls were full of kids. Cecily and I weaved our way through the crowds while talking. She asked more questions about my drawings and surprisingly I felt comfortable telling her. I had always been self conscious about my work, ever since my fourth grade teacher had told me I couldn’t make money as an artist and that I needed to move on.
I liked Cecily right away; she was friendly and bubbly in a way that wasn’t over-the-top or fake. I told her about wanting to become a tattoo artist and apprentice in Japan where they were developing this cool new style of tattooing. And about how I wanted to use my good education to develop a business that would help tattooing be seen as a legitimate art form. She didn’t react like I thought someone who had worked their ass off academically to get into a private school would.
“That's so cool!” she said sincerely.
I learned more about her as she took me through the indecipherable maze of hallways. She was from Boston and it was her second year at the school.
“I don’t know if this is rude, but you don’t have a Boston accent,” I said.
“Yeah, I taught myself to talk without it, using clips from the internet. I was worried people wouldn’t take me as seriously with it—but it was wick’d haaawd,” she said in the thickest Boston accent ever.
We both burst out laughing and a couple other students in the hall gave us looks. I saw that she covered her mouth quickly and tried to suppress the giggles, but she couldn’t.
Eventually we came to an archway in one of the quieter hallways. There were narrow stone steps behind the archway that led upwards to a landing. There were stone walls so you couldn’t see up or down, just the flight that you were on.
I followed Cecily up… and up and up. Every floor had a short hallway that stretched away from the stairs, we didn’t go down any of them but kept climbing.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“This is the Bell Tower, it’s where they house the scholarship students. My room is on the second floor and I can introduce you to the others later. The rooms are actually really nice, we think what happened is that they built this place for the regular students but then none of them wanted to stay here when they realized how loud it was. So they put us here instead because what are we going to do? Complain?” she laughed. “We’re all on shaky ground as it is, so we try to draw as little attention to ourselves as possible—it’s the best way to survive.”
“Wait, this is a working bell tower?”
“Yup! The bells go off four times a day—wake up, lunch, end of class, and curfew. It’s pretty loud in our rooms every time they ring because the bells have to be heard across the island, but it will be the loudest in yours, you have the penthouse suite. Your place is actually really really nice, I’ve been in it once before when Jenny lived—” she stopped herself.
“What happened to Jenny?” I asked.
“She lived there last year.”
“Where’d she go? Did she graduate?”
“Here’s your room!”
The stairs ended, and we arrived at the top landing. There was no hallway, only a single door.
“You have your keys, right?”
“Yup,” I said as I pulled them from my pocket and stepped over to the door.
The key was one of those long, old-fashioned ones and made me feel like I was in the distant past as I slid it into the lock and turned. The door swung open, and I was immediately in awe. This was my room??
I stepped into the large, open area with ceilings so high that they were a couple floors above us. The room had an open layout with only a closed-off area for the washroom in one corner. There was a bedroom section, a living room and a study area. In one corner there was an open-style closet, and I realized that there was no way I would be able to fill even a quarter of the shelves with the meager amount of clothes I had.
I could tell that all the furniture was expensive in that understated way that rich people decorated. They used a lot of grays. There were a couple colorful rugs covering the stone floor which added a bit of warmth to the place.
There was a table with chairs in one corner and on top of it I saw a pair of heavy duty earplugs—looking up, you could see why they were provided. Far above our heads, past exposed wooden beams, were several large bells. They were still at that moment and seemed deceptively quiet.
There were small, round windows at eye level all around the room but light was streaming down from the very tall and very narrow windows up by the bells. Based on the size of the room, it looked like I had the entire top part of one of the towers I had seen when I was looking up at the building from the harbor.
“Wow,” I mumbled.
“Nice isn’t it?” Cecily stepped into the room. “You’re going to need those though.” She motioned to the earplugs.
“I don’t get why they would build a dorm here. It would obviously be loud,” I said while staring up.
I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, this room was gorgeous, but it seemed like a dumb decision.
“I think they tried to insulate it from the sound, see those beams up there? Didn’t work though, and I guess they just thought, whatever, just tear down the ceiling and put the poor kids here.” Cecily shrugged.
“Where do the rest of the students stay?” I asked.
“There are a couple other dorm buildings on the other side of campus, next to the forest. If you think these rooms are nice, you should see those. Kitchens and ocean views, those places are sweet—not that I’ve ever been invited inside but I’ve seen them in the brochures.”
I walked over to the table to place down my backpack. I saw that my suitcase was sitting on the floor in the closet area, looking lonely and small in the middle of all those shelves and hangers.
“Are you hungry?” Cecily asked.
“Starving.” I had left New York very early that morning and hadn’t had time to eat anything all day.
“Great, change into your uniform and then lets head down to the dining hall.”
Cecily went to wait on the stairs—the open floor plan didn’t offer much privacy. I changed into my new uniform; it was the first time I was trying it on. The new material was thick and even though the clothes were still stiff with starch from never being worn, they were comfortable.
The girls’ version of the uniform was similar to the guys’, except with a skirt. I pulled on a white long sleeve collared shirt, then my pleated skirt with the subtle, dark tartan pattern, then my thigh-high opaque black stockings and black blazer that hugged close to my body. The girls were given the choice of wearing a black cross tie or a slim black tie. I had no idea how to tie a tie so I chose the cross tie. When I was done I looked at myself in the three full-length mirrors in my closet that gave me a 270 degree view.
I spun around and my skirt twirled up. This uniform looked like someone’s schoolgirl fantasy, I smirked. I didn’t hate how I looked though. Staring at my reflection, I felt like this was where I was meant to be. I felt like I had come back to where I belonged after being gone for a long time.
Cecily knocked on the door.
“Coming!” I called.
I threw on my sneakers, because they were mostly black and my new Oxfords were still buried deep in my bag—and probably uncomfortable—and ran out the door.
Chapter 4
On our way to the dining hall Cecily told me more about the school and then warned me about the other students.
“Everyone here is very competitive and you have to be on your guard at all times, if they see a weakness they will pounce. And they do not like scholarship students so we have to be extra careful. The best thing you can do is lay low, don’t attract any attention to yourself and hope that no one notices you exist. Even if they are nice to your face, they are mean and ruthless behind your back,”
I mumbled that I may have already experienced a beautiful-faced snake as I thought about my interaction with Grayson in the entrance hall. Maybe that had been a misunderstanding? He had seemed so happy to see me. Only a psychopath could be that good of an actor, and I knew Grayson, I had grown up with him; he wasn’t a psychopath… I didn’t think.
When we reached the dining hall, Cecily turned to me, her hand on the large wooden door. “Seriously, Maddy. Be careful.”
“Ok, I will,” I said, but I thought, could it really be that bad? It’s just a school after all, not a prison like where my mom was right at that moment. My stomach twisted painfully as I thought of my mom locked up and I renewed my determination to get her out.
We stepped inside and my breath was taken away again for what felt like the millionth time that day. The dining hall was a long, narrow room with a clear path down the middle and dozens of tables along the walls. There was carved wooden paneling that turned into white stone and stretched up to the cavernous ceiling which was covered in ornately carved wood and stone panels. Along each side of the room were about a dozen large, tastefully simple chandeliers that hung down over the tables. At the opposite end of the room from where we stood the entire wall was made up of tall windows that let filtered sunlight into the room.
