by Lauren Kate
“What about the reds?” Luce asked, glancing around with the knife in her hand. There were bound to be cameras somewhere out here.
Arriane shook her head. “I refuse to associate with pansies. Can you handle it or not?”
Luce nodded.
“And don’t tell me you’ve never cut hair before.” Arriane grabbed the Swiss Army knife back from Luce, pulled out the scissor tool, and handed it back. “Not another word until you tell me how fantastic I look.”
In the “salon” of her parents’ bathtub, Luce’s mother had tugged the remains of her long hair into a messy pony-tail before lopping the whole thing off. Luce was sure there had to be a more strategic method of cutting hair, but as a lifelong haircut avoider, the chopped-off pony was about all she knew. She gathered Arriane’s hair in her hands, wrapped an elastic band from her wrist around it, held the small scissors firmly, and began to hack.
The ponytail fell to her feet and Arriane gasped and whipped around. She picked it up and held it to the sun. Luce’s heart constricted at the sight. She still agonized over her own lost hair, and all the other losses it symbolized. But Arriane just let a thin smile spread across her lips. She ran her fingers through the ponytail once, then dropped it into her bag.
“Awesome,” she said. “Keep going.”
“Arriane,” Luce whispered before she could stop herself. “Your neck. It’s all—”
“Scarred?” Arriane finished. “You can say it.”
The skin on Arriane’s neck, from the back of her left ear all the way down to her collarbone, was jagged and marbled and shiny. Luce’s mind went to Trevor—to those awful pictures. Even her own parents wouldn’t look at her after they saw them. She was having a hard time looking at Arriane now.
Arriane grabbed Luce’s hand and pressed it to the skin. It was hot and cold at the same time. It was smooth and rough.
“I’m not afraid of it,” Arriane said. “Are you?”
“No,” Luce said, though she wished Arriane would take her hand away so Luce could take hers away, too. Her stomach churned as she wondered whether this was how Trevor’s skin would have felt.
“Are you afraid of who you really are, Luce?”
“No,” Luce said again quickly. It must be so obvious that she was lying. She closed her eyes. All she wanted from Sword & Cross was a fresh start, a place where people didn’t look at her the way Arriane was looking at her right now. At the school’s gates that morning, when her father had whispered the Price family motto in her ear—“Prices never crash”—it had felt possible, but already Luce felt so run down and exposed. She tugged her hand away. “So how’d it happen?” she asked, looking down.
“Remember how I didn’t press you when you clammed up about what you did to get here?” Arriane asked, raising her eyebrows.
Luce nodded.
Arriane gestured to the scissors. “Touch it up in the back, okay? Make me look real pretty. Make me look like you.”
Even with the same exact cut, Arriane would still only look like a very undernourished version of Luce. While Luce attempted to even out the first haircut she’d ever given, Arriane delved into the complexities of life at Sword & Cross.
“That cell block over there is Augustine. It’s where we have our so-called Social events on Wednesday nights. And all of our classes,” she said, pointing at a building the color of yellowed teeth, two buildings to the right of the dorm. It looked like it had been designed by the same sadist who’d done Pauline. It was dismally square, dismally fortresslike, fortified by the same barbed wire and barred windows. An unnatural-looking gray mist cloaked the walls like moss, making it impossible to see whether anyone was over there.
“Fair warning,” Arriane continued. “You’re going to hate the classes here. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t.”
“Why? What’s so bad about them?” Luce asked. Maybe Arriane just didn’t like school in general. With her black nail polish, black eyeliner, and the black bag that only seemed big enough to hold her new Swiss Army knife, she didn’t exactly look bookish.
“The classes here are soulless,” Arriane said. “Worse, they’ll strip you of your soul. Of the eighty kids in this place, I’d say we’ve only got about three remaining souls.” She glanced up. “Unspoken for, anyway …”
That didn’t sound promising, but Luce was hung up on another part of Arriane’s answer. “Wait, there are only eighty kids in this whole school?” The summer before she went to Dover, Luce had pored over the thick Prospective Students handbook, memorizing all the statistics. But everything she’d learned so far about Sword & Cross had surprised her, making her realize that she was coming into reform school completely unprepared.
Arriane nodded, making Luce accidentally snip off a chunk of hair she’d meant to leave. Whoops. Hopefully Arriane wouldn’t notice—or maybe she’d just think it was edgy.
“Eight classes, ten kids a pop. You get to know everybody’s crap pret-ty quickly,” Arriane said. “And vice versa.”
“I guess so,” Luce agreed, biting her lip. Arriane was joking, but Luce wondered whether she’d be sitting here with that cool smirk in her pastel blue eyes if she knew the exact nature of Luce’s backstory. The longer Luce could keep her past under wraps, the better off she’d be.
“And you’ll want to steer clear of the hard cases.”
“Hard cases?”
“The kids with the wristband tracking devices,” Arriane said. “About a third of the student body.”
“And they’re the ones who—”
“You don’t want to mess with. Trust me.”
“Well, what’d they do?” Luce asked.
As much as Luce wanted to keep her own story a secret, she didn’t like the way Arriane was treating her like some sort of ingénue. Whatever those kids had done couldn’t be much worse than what everyone told her she had done. Or could it? After all, she knew next to nothing about these people and this place. The possibilities stirred up a cold gray fear in the pit of her stomach.
“Oh, you know,” Arriane drawled. “Aided and abetted terrorist acts. Chopped up their parents and roasted them on a spit.” She turned around to wink at Luce.
“Shut up,” Luce said.
“I’m serious. Those psychos are under much tighter restrictions than the rest of the screwups here. We call them the shackled.”
Luce laughed at Arriane’s dramatic tone.
“Your haircut’s done,” she said, running her hands through Arriane’s hair to fluff it up a little. It actually looked really cool.
“Sweet,” Arriane said. She turned to face Luce. When she ran her fingers through her hair, the sleeves of her black sweater fell back on her forearms and Luce caught a glimpse of a black wristband, dotted with rows of silver studs, and, on the other wrist, another band that looked more … mechanical. Arriane caught her looking and raised her eyebrows devilishly.
“Told ya,” she said. “Total effing psychos.” She grinned. “Come on, I’ll give you the rest of the tour.”
Luce didn’t have much choice. She scrambled down the bleachers after Arriane, ducking when one of the turkey vultures swooped dangerously low. Arriane, who didn’t seem to notice, pointed at a lichen-swathed church at the far right of the commons.
“Over here, you’ll find our state-of-the-art gymnasium,” she said, assuming a nasal tour guide tone of voice. “Yes, yes, to the untrained eye it looks like a church. It used to be. We’re kind of in an architectural hand-me-down Hell here at Sword & Cross. A few years ago, some calisthenic-crazed shrink showed up ranting about overmedicated teens ruining society. He donated a shit-ton of money so they’d convert it into a gym. Now the powers that be think we can work out our ‘frustrations’ in a ‘more natural and productive way.’”
Luce groaned. She had always loathed gym class.
“Girl after my very own heart,” Arriane commiserated. “Coach Diante is ee-vil.”
As Luce jogged to keep up, she took in the rest of the grounds. The Dov
er quad had been so well kept, all manicured and dotted with evenly spaced, carefully pruned trees. Sword & Cross looked like it had been plopped down and abandoned in the middle of a swamp. Weeping willows dangled to the ground, kudzu grew along the walls in sheets, and every third step they took squished.
And it wasn’t just the way the place looked. Every humid breath Luce took stuck in her lungs. Just breathing at Sword & Cross made her feel like she was sinking into quicksand.
“Apparently the architects got in a huge standoff over how to retrofit the style of the old military academy buildings. The upshot is we ended up with half penitentiary, half medieval torture zone. And no gardener,” Arriane said, kicking some slime off her combat boots. “Gross. Oh, and there’s the cemetery.”
Luce followed Arriane’s pointing finger to the far left side of the quad, just past the dormitory. An even thicker cloak of mist hung over the walled-off portion of land. It was bordered on three sides by a thick forest of oaks. She couldn’t see into the cemetery, which seemed almost to sink below the surface of the ground, but she could smell the rot and hear the chorus of cicadas buzzing in the trees. For a second, she thought she saw the dark swish of the shadows—but she blinked and they were gone.
“That’s a cemetery?”
“Yep. This used to be a military academy, way back in the Civil War days. So that’s where they buried all their dead. It’s creepy as all get-out. And lawd,” Arriane said, piling on a fake southern accent, “it stinks to high Heaven.” Then she winked at Luce. “We hang out there a lot.”
Luce looked at Arriane to see if she was kidding. Arriane just shrugged.
“Okay, it was only once. And it was only after a really big pharmapalooza.”
Now, that was a word Luce recognized.
“Aha!” Arriane laughed. “I just saw a light go on up there. So somebody is home. Well, Luce, my dear, you may have gone to boarding school parties, but you’ve never seen a throw-down like reform school kids do it.”
“What’s the difference?” Luce asked, trying to skirt the fact that she’d never actually been to a big party at Dover.
“You’ll see.” Arriane paused and turned to Luce. “You’ll come over tonight and hang out, okay?” She surprised Luce by taking her hand. “Promise?”
“But I thought you said I should stay away from the hard cases,” Luce joked.
“Rule number two—don’t listen to me!” Arriane laughed, shaking her head. “I’m certifiably insane!”
She started jogging again and Luce trailed after her.
“Wait, what was rule number one?”
“Keep up!”
As they came around the corner of the cinder-block classrooms, Arriane skidded to a halt. “Affect cool,” she said.
“Cool,” Luce repeated.
All the other students seemed to be clustered around the kudzu-strangled trees outside Augustine. No one looked exactly happy to be hanging out, but no one looked ready to go inside yet, either.
There hadn’t been much of a dress code at Dover, so Luce wasn’t used to the uniformity it gave a student body. Then again, even though every kid here was wearing the same black jeans, black mock-turtleneck T-shirt, and black sweater tied over the shoulders or around the waist, there were still substantial differences in the way they pulled it off.
A group of tattooed girls standing in a crossed-armed circle wore bangle bracelets up to their elbows. The black bandanas in their hair reminded Luce of a film she’d once seen about motorcycle-gang girls. She’d rented it because she’d thought: What could be cooler than an all-girls motorcycle gang? Now Luce’s eyes locked with those of one of the girls across the lawn. The sideways squint of the girl’s darkly lined cat-eyes made Luce quickly shift the direction of her gaze.
A guy and a girl who were holding hands had sewn sequins in the shape of skulls and crossbones on the back of their black sweaters. Every few seconds, one of them would pull the other in for a kiss on the temple, on the earlobe, on the eye. When they looped their arms around each other, Luce could see that each wore the blinking wristband tracking device. They looked a little rough, but it was obvious how much in love they were. Every time she saw their tongue rings flashing, Luce felt a lonely pinch inside her chest.
Behind the lovers, a cluster of blond boys stood pressed against the wall. Each of them wore his sweater, despite the heat. And they all had on white oxford shirts underneath, the collars starched straight up. Their black pants hit the vamps of their polished dress shoes perfectly. Of all the students on the quad, these boys seemed to Luce to be the closest thing to Doverites. But a closer look quickly set them apart from boys she used to know. Boys like Trevor.
Just standing in a group, these guys radiated a specific kind of toughness. It was right there in the look in their eyes. It was hard to explain, but it suddenly struck Luce that just like her, everyone at this school had a past. Everyone here probably had secrets they wouldn’t want to share. But she couldn’t figure out whether this realization made her feel more or less isolated.
Arriane noticed Luce’s eyes running over the rest of the kids.
“We all do what we can to make it through the day,” she said, shrugging. “But in case you hadn’t observed the low-hanging vultures, this place pretty much reeks of death.” She took a seat on a bench under a weeping willow and patted the spot next to her for Luce.
Luce wiped away a mound of wet, decaying leaves, but just before she sat down, she noticed another dress code violation.
A very attractive dress code violation.
He wore a bright red scarf around his neck. It was far from cold outside, but he had on a black leather motorcycle jacket over his black sweater, too. Maybe it was because his was the only spot of color on the quad, but he was all that Luce could look at. In fact, everything else so paled in comparison that, for one long moment, Luce forgot where she was.
She took in his deep golden hair and matching tan. His high cheekbones, the dark sunglasses that covered his eyes, the soft shape of his lips. In all the movies Luce had seen, and in all the books she’d read, the love interest was mind-blowingly good-looking—except for that one little flaw. The chipped tooth, the charming cowlick, the beauty mark on his left cheek. She knew why—if the hero was too unblemished, he’d risk being unapproachable. But approachable or not, Luce had always had a weakness for the sublimely gorgeous. Like this guy.
He leaned up against the building with his arms crossed lightly over his chest. And for a split second, Luce saw a flashing image of herself folded into those arms. She shook her head, but the vision stayed so clear that she almost took off toward him.
No. That was crazy. Right? Even at a school full of crazies, Luce was well aware that this instinct was insane. She didn’t even know him.
He was talking to a shorter kid with dreads and a toothy smile. Both of them were laughing hard and genuinely—in a way that made Luce strangely jealous. She tried to think back and remember how long it had been since she’d laughed, really laughed, like that.
“That’s Daniel Grigori,” Arriane said, leaning in and reading her mind. “I can tell he’s attracted somebody’s attention.”
“Understatement,” Luce agreed, embarrassed when she realized how she must have looked to Arriane.
“Yeah, well, if you like that sort of thing.”
“What’s not to like?” Luce said, unable to stop the words from tumbling out.
“His friend there is Roland,” Arriane said, nodding in the dreadlocked kid’s direction. “He’s cool. The kind of guy who can get his hands on things, ya know?”
Not really, Luce thought, biting her lip. “What kinds of things?”
Arriane shrugged, using her poached Swiss Army knife to saw off a fraying strand from a rip in her black jeans. “Just things. Ask-and-you-shall-receive kind of stuff.”
“What about Daniel?” Luce asked. “What’s his story?”
“Oh, she doesn’t give up.” Arriane laughed, then cleared her throa
t. “No one really knows,” she said. “He holds pretty tight to his mystery man persona. Could just be your typical reform school asshole.”
“I’m no stranger to assholes,” Luce said, though as soon as the words came out, she wished she could take them back. After what had happened to Trevor—whatever had happened—she was the last person who should be making character judgments. But more than that, the rare time she made even the smallest reference to that night, the shifting black canopy of the shadows came back to her, almost like she was right back at the lake.
She glanced again at Daniel. He took his glasses off and slid them inside his jacket, then turned to look at her.
His gaze caught hers, and Luce watched as his eyes widened and then quickly narrowed in what looked like surprise. But no—it was more than that. When Daniel’s eyes held hers, her breath caught in her throat. She recognized him from somewhere.
But she would have remembered meeting someone like him. She would have remembered feeling as absolutely shaken up as she did right now.
She realized they were still locking eyes when Daniel flashed her a smile. A jet of warmth shot through her and she had to grip the bench for support. She felt her lips pull up in a smile back at him, but then he raised his hand in the air.
And flipped her off.
Luce gasped and dropped her eyes.
“What?” Arriane asked, oblivious to what had just gone down. “Never mind,” she said. “We don’t have time. I sense the bell.”
The bell rang as if on cue, and the whole student body started the slow shuffle into the building. Arriane was tugging on Luce’s hand and spouting off directions about where to meet her next and when. But Luce was still reeling from being flipped the bird by such a perfect stranger. Her momentary delirium over Daniel had vanished, and now the only thing she wanted to know was: What was that guy’s problem?
Just before she ducked into her first class, she dared to glance back. His face was blank, but there was no mistaking it—he was watching her go.
TWO
