Where the Drowned Girls Go(Wayward Children #7)(11)
The headmaster smiled again, settling his hand on her shoulder. “Most of the work will be yours, but yes,” he said. “We can reconnect you to this world, where you belonged all along. We can set you free. All you have to do is make an effort. We only want what’s best for our little community. We only want everyone to be well.”
“That’s all I want,” said Cora. She was crying again, with relief, not fear. “I just want to be well.”
“That’s all anyone wants, in the end,” he said. “It doesn’t matter why you want it. Here, we don’t require you to be sure. Here, we’re sure enough for everyone.”
He led Cora deeper into the institute, and everything was silent, and everything was still, and the whispers of the Drowned Gods still echoed in the corners of her mind like warnings that she wouldn’t get away that easily.
6?JACK-O’-LANTERN GIRLS
THE ALARM WENT OFF promptly at 5:25 A.M., the same way it did every day but Sunday. Cora, who had been awake since shortly after midnight, groaned and pulled her pillow over her face. The Drowned Gods had been getting quieter since she’d entered an environment that refused to acknowledge their existence, but they were getting more desperate at the same time; over the course of the past two months, the whispers had grown more venomous, and twice as barbed as they’d been when she was at Eleanor’s. Sleep was still a lie she told herself every night when she closed her eyes, and like all lies, it always let her down.
It didn’t help that she had no friends here to offer an alternative to their poisons. A rough hand seized the pillow and jerked it out of Cora’s grasp, flinging it across the room. Any sound it made when it hit the wall was covered by the ongoing alarm. Cora sat up, hair in her eyes, and glared, her hands clenching on the blanket, not quite forming fists, but close enough.
“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.”