Where the Drowned Girls Go(Wayward Children #7)(3)

If her hair could keep growing in blue as the depths of the ocean, if Seraphina could still walk through life in a perfumed cloud of her own grace, who was to say that the Drowned Gods couldn’t reach through whatever gap allowed those things to happen? Who was to say they couldn’t claim what they already thought of as their own?

Cora sped up as the door of the bathroom came into view ahead of her. She pushed it open with a fast, vicious motion, relieved to see that the bathroom was as empty as the rest of the school. The floor was covered in candy-colored tile, and some past student had painted rainbows along the walls, up onto the ceiling, turning the room into a swirl of vibrant, living color. The window was thick carnival glass, red and blue and green and yellow. There were no curtains, because they weren’t needed even a little bit: no one trying to look in would be able to see anything aside from color. It was peaceful. It was perfect.

The thought of climbing into the massive bathtub was enough to turn Cora’s stomach, but the dryness in her skin and throat told her that she didn’t actually have a choice. She needed to spend a certain amount of time soaking every week or risk drying out, which had consequences far more immediate and unpleasant than the minor panic attack that came along with actually taking a bath. She shut and locked the door before peeling off her nightgown and starting the water pouring into the bathtub, taking her time adding three types of sweet-scented bubble bath and two kinds of soaking salt to the bath.

Once the bathtub was full—hot and sweet-smelling and mounded with bubbles, a universe away from the salty, brackish depths that haunted her dreams—she climbed into the water, heart pounding from the conflict between “the water is safe, the water is home and harbor, the water will not hurt you” and “the water is filled with monsters who are only waiting for their opportunity to drag you down.” She sank down amid the bubbles until only her face and the blue-green shock of her hair remained uncovered, the rest of her body concealed by the mountain of bubbles that filled the air with rising and falling perfume as they began to pop.

There was always plenty of bubble bath in this particular bathroom, which was also Sumi’s favorite, and after her time in Confection, where the ocean was made of strawberry soda and the rivers ran with thick undercurrents of chocolate syrup, Sumi couldn’t stand water that smelled or tasted like water. Cora had been judgmental before their time in the Moors, and now she was grateful.

She wasn’t as fond of the scent of water as she used to be, either.

Slowly, the heat from the bath sank into her bones, warming them, chasing away the shadows of the Drowned Gods, reminding her that she was a mermaid, and for a mermaid to be afraid of drowning was ridiculous. This was where she belonged. This was where she’d come from, and where she would eventually go, when the Trenches saw how sincerely she wanted to come home and swung their watery doors open for her a second and final time. This world wasn’t hers to keep. She wasn’t staying here.

Cora’s eyes fluttered shut as sleep reclaimed her, and in the soup of bubbles and slowly cooling water, she slipped under the surface, down to where it was warm, and sweet, and welcoming. She was a mermaid, after all.



All she needed was a little more time, and she’d be going home.





2?ECHOES OF THE UNHEARD


CORA KNEW THAT THERE was nothing wrong with her. She’d been hearing it since she was in preschool, and when you hear a thing often enough, you start to understand it, even if you’d rather not. Sometimes she thought she would have been happier if there had been something wrong with her, if there had been something she could chase after and fix.

But no. There was nothing wrong with her. She was the inevitable result of generation after generation of people struggling to live through starvation, to keep the fat from their rare times of plenty on their bones for long enough to coax a little more living from a land that was all too frequently hostile to their needs. She had been a chubby baby, and a chubby child, and the first time someone had called her “fat” in the tone of voice that made it perfectly clear they were trying to insult her more than they were trying to describe her, she’d been barely five years old.

She’d gone on her first diet when she was eight years old. All the books she’d read since then said children shouldn’t be on diets when they were still growing, that all she’d done by trying to fix the shameful reality of her existence was slow her own metabolism and make her fatness even more of a foregone conclusion, but she’d been a little kid. She’d been lonely, since the other kids were getting more and more reluctant to play with her, as if fat was somehow contagious, and she’d been scared—not of her size, which was normal and natural and didn’t slow her down in any way, but of the way the world was responding to it. She’d heard one of the student teachers talking to a playground attendant in the low, hushed voice of an adult who assumed she wasn’t in earshot, saying that what her parents were doing to her was child abuse.

Cora came from a loving home, but she knew what happened if someone accused your parents of abusing you. She even knew why it had to happen, because Johnny from her kindergarten class used to come to school with bruises shaped like boots in the middle of his back, black and purple and terrifying. But she didn’t want to be taken away because someone thought her body was broken and didn’t bother to ask her what she ate at home before they made a phone call that set a terrible thing into motion. So she decided to take the problem into her own hands.