by Lauren Kate
She would not cry in front of any of these horrible people. She swallowed hard, got to her feet, and took off. She rushed toward the nearest door, eager to feel some cool air on her face.
Instead, the southern September humidity cloaked her, choking her, as soon as she got outside. The sky was that no-color color, a grayish brown so oppressively bland it was difficult even to find the sun. Luce slowed down, but got as far as the edge of the parking lot before she came to a complete stop.
She longed to see her battered old car there, to sink into the fraying cloth seat, rev the engine, crank up the stereo, and peel the hell out of this place. But as she stood on the hot black pavement, reality set in: She was stuck here, and a pair of towering metal gates separated her from the world outside Sword & Cross. Besides, even if she’d had a way out … where was she going to go?
The sick feeling in her gut told her all she needed to know. She was already at the last stop, and things were looking pretty grim.
It was as depressing as it was true: Sword & Cross was all she had.
She dropped her face into her hands, knowing she had to go back. But when she lifted her head, the residue on her palm reminded her that she was still coated in Molly’s meat loaf. Ugh. First stop, the nearest bathroom.
Back inside, Luce ducked into the girls’ room just as the door was swinging open. Gabbe, who appeared even more blond and flawless now that Luce looked like she’d just gone Dumpster diving, squeezed past.
“Whoops, ’scuse me, honey,” she said. Her southern-accented voice was sweet, but her face crumpled up at the sight of Luce. “Oh God, you look terrible. What happened?”
What happened? As if the whole school didn’t already know. This girl was probably playing dumb so Luce would relive the whole mortifying scene.
“Wait five minutes,” Luce replied, with more of an edge in her voice than she meant. “I’m sure gossip spreads like the plague around here.”
“You want to borrow my foundation?” Gabbe asked, holding up a pastel blue cosmetics case. “You haven’t seen yourself yet, but you’re going to—”
“Thanks, but no.” Luce cut her off, pushing into the bathroom. Without looking at herself in the mirror, she turned on the faucet. She splashed cold water on her face and finally let it all out. Tears streaming, she pumped the soap dispenser and tried to use some of the cheap pink powdered hand soap to scrub off the meat loaf. But there was still the matter of her hair. And her clothes had definitely looked and smelled better. Not that she needed to worry about making a good first impression anymore.
The bathroom door cracked open and Luce scrambled against the wall like a trapped animal. When a stranger walked in, Luce stiffened and waited for the worst.
The girl had a squat build, accentuated by an abnormal amount of layered clothing. Her wide face was surrounded by curly brown hair, and her bright purple glasses wobbled when she sniffed. She looked fairly unassuming, but then, looks could be deceiving. Both her hands were tucked behind her back in a way that, after the day Luce had had, she just couldn’t trust.
“You know, you’re not supposed to be in here without a pass,” the girl said. Her even tone seemed to mean business.
“I know.” The look in the girl’s eyes confirmed Luce’s suspicion that it was absolutely impossible to catch a break at this place. She started to sigh in surrender. “I just—”
“I’m kidding.” The girl laughed, rolling her eyes and relaxing her posture. “I snagged some shampoo from the locker room for you,” she said, bringing her hands around to display two innocent-looking plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner. “Come on,” she said, pulling over a beat-up folding chair. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Sit here.”
A half-whimpering, half-laughing noise she’d never made before escaped from Luce’s lips. It sounded, she guessed, like relief. The girl was actually being nice to her—not just reform school nice, but regular-person nice! For no apparent reason. The shock of it was almost too great for Luce to stand. “Thanks?” Luce managed to say, still feeling a little bit guarded.
“Oh, and you probably need a change of clothes,” the girl said, looking down at her black sweater and pulling it over her head to expose an identical black sweater underneath.
When she saw the surprised look on Luce’s face, she said, “What? I have a hostile immune system. I have to wear a lot of layers.”
“Oh, well, will you be okay without this one?” Luce made herself ask, even though she would have done just about anything right then to get out of the meat cloak she was wearing.
“Of course,” the girl said, waving her off. “I’ve got three more on under this. And a couple more in my locker. Be my guest. It pains me to see a vegetarian covered in meat. I’m very empathetic.”
Luce wondered how this stranger knew about her dietary preferences, but more than that, she had to ask: “Um, why are you being so nice?”
The girl laughed, sighed, then shook her head. “Not everyone at Sword & Cross is a whore or a jock.”
“Huh?” Luce said.
“Sword & Cross … Whores and Jocks. Lame nickname in town for this school. Obviously there aren’t really any jocks here. I won’t oppress your ears with some of the cruder nicknames they’ve come up with.”
Luce laughed.
“All I meant was, not everyone here is a complete jerk.”
“Just the majority?” Luce asked, hating it that she already sounded so negative. But it had been such a long morning, and she’d already been through so much, and maybe this girl wouldn’t judge her for being a little bit gruff.
To her surprise, the girl smiled. “Exactly. And they sure give the rest of us a bad name.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Pennyweather Van Syckle-Lockwood. You can call me Penn.”
“Got it,” Luce said, still too frazzled to realize that, in a former life, she might have stifled a laugh at this girl’s moniker. It sounded like she’d hopped straight off the pages of a Dickens novel. Then again, there was something trustworthy about a girl with a name like that who could manage to introduce herself with a straight face. “I’m Lucinda Price.”
“And everybody calls you Luce,” Penn said. “And you transferred from Dover Prep in New Hampshire.”
“How’d you know that?” Luce asked slowly.
“Lucky guess?” Penn shrugged. “I’m kidding, I read your file, duh. It’s a hobby.”
Luce stared at her blankly. Maybe she’d been too hasty with that trustworthy judgment. How could Penn have access to her file?
Penn took over running the water. When it got warm, she motioned for Luce to lower her head into the sink.
“See, the thing is,” she explained, “I’m not actually crazy.” She pulled Luce up by her wet head. “No offense.” Then lowered her back down. “I’m the only kid at this school without a court mandate. And you might not think it, but being legally sane has its advantages. For example, I’m also the only kid they trust to be an office aide. Which is dumb on their part. I have access to a lot of confidential shit.”
“But if you don’t have to be here—”
“When your father’s the groundskeeper of the school, they kind of have to let you go for free. So …” Penn trailed off.
Penn’s father was the groundskeeper? From the looks of the place, it hadn’t crossed Luce’s mind that they even had a groundskeeper.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Penn said, helping Luce shampoo the last of the gravy from her hair. “That the grounds aren’t exactly well kept?”
“No,” Luce lied. She was eager to stay on this girl’s good side and wanted to put out the be-my-friend vibe way more than she wanted to seem like she actually cared about how often someone mowed the lawn at Sword & Cross. “It’s, um, really nice.”
“Dad died two years ago,” Penn said quietly. “They got as far as sticking me with decaying old Headmaster Udell as my legal guardian, but, uh, they never really got around to hiring a replacement for Dad.”
“I’m
sorry,” Luce said, lowering her voice, too. So someone else here knew what it was like to go through a major loss.
“It’s okay,” Penn said, squirting conditioner into her palm. “It’s actually a really good school. I like it here a lot.”
Now Luce’s head shot up, sending a spray of water across the bathroom. “You sure you’re not crazy?” she teased.
“I’m kidding. I hate it here. It totally sucks.”
“But you can’t bring yourself to leave,” Luce said, tilting her head, curious.
Penn bit her lip. “I know it’s morbid, but even if I weren’t stuck with Udell, I couldn’t. My dad’s here.” She gestured toward the cemetery, invisible from here. “He’s all I’ve got.”
“Then I guess you’ve got more than some other people at this school,” Luce said, thinking of Arriane. Her mind rolled back to the way Arriane had gripped her hand on the quad today, the eager look in her blue eyes when she made Luce promise she’d swing by her dorm room tonight.
“She’s gonna be okay,” Penn said. “It wouldn’t be Monday if Arriane didn’t get carted off to the nurse after a fit.”
“But it wasn’t a fit,” Luce said. “It was that wristband. I saw it. It was shocking her.”
“We have a very broad definition of what makes for a ‘fit’ here at Sword & Cross. Your new enemy, Molly? She’s thrown some legendary fits. They keep saying they’re going to change her meds. Hopefully you’ll have the pleasure of witnessing at least one good freak-out before they do.”
Penn’s intel was pretty remarkable. It crossed Luce’s mind to ask her what the story was with Daniel, but the complicated intensity of her interest in him was probably best kept to a need-to-know basis. At least until she figured it out herself.
She felt Penn’s hands wringing the water from her hair.
“That’s the last of it,” Penn said. “I think you’re finally meat-free.”
Luce looked in the mirror and ran her hands through her hair. Penn was right. Except for the emotional scarring and the pain in her right foot, there was no evidence of her cafeteria brawl with Molly.
“I’m just glad you have short hair,” Penn said. “If it were still as long as it was in the picture in your file, this would have been a much lengthier operation.”
Luce gawked at her. “I’m going to have to keep an eye on you, aren’t I?”
Penn looped her arm through Luce’s and steered her out of the bathroom. “Just stay on my good side and no one gets hurt.”
Luce shot Penn a worried look, but Penn’s face gave nothing away. “You’re kidding, right?” Luce asked.
Penn smiled, suddenly cheery. “Come on, we gotta get to class. Aren’t you glad we’re in the same afternoon block?”
Luce laughed. “When are you going to stop knowing everything about me?”
“Not in the foreseeable future,” Penn said, tugging her down the hall and back toward the cinder-block classrooms. “You’ll learn to love it soon, I promise. I’m a very powerful friend to have.”
THREE
DRAWING DARK
Luce meandered down the dank dormitory hallway toward her room, dragging her red Camp Gurid duffel bag with the broken strap in her wake. The walls here were the color of a dusty blackboard—and the whole place was strangely quiet, save for the dull hum of the yellow fluorescent lamps hanging from the water-stained drop-panel ceilings.
Mostly, Luce was surprised to see so many shut doors. Back at Dover, she’d always wished for more privacy, a break from the hallwide dorm parties that sprang up at all hours. You couldn’t walk to your room without tripping over a powwow of girls sitting cross-legged in matching jeans, or a lip-locked couple pressed against the wall.
But at Sword & Cross … well, either everyone was already getting started on their thirty-page term papers … or else the socializing here was of a much more behind-closed-doors variety.
Speaking of which, the closed doors themselves were a sight to be seen. If the students at Sword & Cross got resourceful with their dress code violations, they were downright ingenious when it came to personalizing their spaces. Already Luce had walked by one door frame with a beaded curtain, and another with a motion-detecting welcome mat that encouraged her to “move the hell on” when she passed it.
She came to a stop in front of the only blank door in the building. Room 63. Home bitter home. She fumbled for her key in the front pocket of her backpack, took a deep breath, and opened the door to her cell.
Except it wasn’t terrible. Or maybe it wasn’t as terrible as she’d been expecting. There was a decent-sized window that slid open to let in some less stifling night air. And past the steel bars, the view of the moonlit commons was actually sort of interesting, if she didn’t think too hard about the graveyard that lay beyond it. She had a closet and a little sink, a desk to do her work at—come to think of it, the saddest-looking thing in the room was the glimpse Luce caught of herself in the full-length mirror behind the door.
She quickly looked away, knowing all too well what she’d find in the reflection. Her face looking pinched and tired. Her hazel eyes flecked with stress. Her hair like her family’s hysterical toy poodle’s fur after a rainstorm. Penn’s sweater fit her like a burlap sack. She was shivering. Her afternoon classes had been no better than the morning’s, due mainly to the fact that her biggest fear had come to fruition: The whole school had already started calling her Meat Loaf. And unfortunately, much like its namesake, the moniker seemed like it was going to stick.
She wanted to unpack, to turn generic room 63 into her own place, where she could go when she needed to escape and feel okay. But she only got as far as unzipping her bag before she collapsed on the bare bed in defeat. She felt so far away from home. It only took twenty-two minutes by car to get from the loose-hinged whitewashed back door of her house to the rusty wrought iron entrance gates of Sword & Cross, but it might as well have been twenty-two years.
For the first half of the silent drive with her parents this morning, the neighborhoods had all looked pretty much the same: sleepy southern middle-class suburbia. But then the road had gone over the causeway toward the shore, and the terrain had grown more and more marshy. A swell of mangrove trees marked the entrance into the wetlands, but soon even those dwindled out. The last ten miles of road to Sword & Cross were dismal. Grayish brown, featureless, forsaken. Back home in Thunderbolt, people around town always joked about the strangely memorable moldering stench out here: You knew you were in the marshes when your car started to reek of pluff mud.
Even though Luce had grown up in Thunderbolt, she really wasn’t that familiar with the far eastern part of the county. As a kid, she’d always just assumed that was because there wasn’t any reason to come over here—all the stores, schools, and everyone her family knew were on the west side. The east side was just less developed. That was all.
She missed her parents, who’d stuck a Post-it on the T-shirt at the top of her bag—We love you! Prices never crash! She missed her bedroom, which looked out on her dad’s tomato vines. She missed Callie, who most certainly had sent her at least ten never-to-be-seen text messages already. She missed Trevor …
Or, well, that wasn’t exactly it. What she missed was the way life had felt when she’d first started talking to Trevor. When she had someone to think about if she couldn’t sleep at night, someone’s name to doodle dorkily inside her notebooks. The truth was, Luce and Trevor never really had the chance to get to know each other all that well. The only memento she had was the picture Callie had snapped covertly, from across the football field between two of his squat sets, when he and Luce had talked for fifteen seconds about … his squat sets. And the only date she’d ever gone on with him hadn’t even been a real date—just a stolen hour when he’d pulled her away from the rest of the party. An hour she’d regret for the rest of her life.
It had started out innocently enough, just two people going for a walk down by the lake, but it wasn’t long before Luce started to feel t
he shadows lurking overhead. Then Trevor’s lips touched hers, and the heat coursed through her body, and his eyes turned white with terror … and seconds later, life as she’d known it had gone up in a blaze.
Luce rolled over and buried her face in the crook of an arm. She’d spent months mourning Trevor’s death, and now, lying in this strange room, with the metal bars digging into her skin through the thin mattress, she felt the selfish futility of it all. She hadn’t known Trevor any more than she knew … well, Cam.
A knock on her door made Luce shoot up from the bed. How would anyone know to find her here? She tiptoed to the door and pulled it open. Then she stuck her head into the very empty hallway. She hadn’t even heard footsteps outside, and there was no sign of anyone having just knocked.
Except the paper airplane pinned with a brass tack to the center of the corkboard next to her door. Luce smiled to see her name written in black marker along the wing, but when she unfolded the note, all that was written inside was a black arrow pointing straight down the hall.
Arriane had invited her over tonight, but that was before the incident with Molly in the cafeteria. Looking down the empty hallway, Luce wondered about following the cryptic arrow. Then she glanced back at her giant duffel bag, her pity party waiting to be unpacked. She shrugged, pulled her door shut, put her room key in her pocket, and started walking.
She stopped in front of a door on the other side of the hall to check out an oversized poster of Sonny Terry, a blind musician who she knew from her father’s scratchy record collection was an incredible blues harmonica player. She leaned forward to read the name on the corkboard and realized with a start that she was standing in front of Roland Sparks’s room. Immediately, annoyingly, there was that little part of her brain that started calculating the odds that Roland might be hanging out with Daniel, with only a thin door separating them from Luce.
A mechanical buzzing sound made Luce jump. She looked straight into a surveillance camera drilled into the wall over Roland’s door. The reds. Zooming in on her every move. She shrank away, embarrassed for reasons no camera would be able to discern. Anyway, she’d come here to see Arriane—whose room, she realized, just happened to be directly across the hall from Roland.
