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

“Whitethorn is…” Eleanor trailed off. “It’s different. It’s very different. I haven’t been there in years, and I view it as a personal failing every time I lose a student to them. I never thought that you would be at risk.”

“Miss West, please.” Cora shook her head. “I can’t go back to the Trenches as I am now. The Drowned Gods have too much of a hold on me, and if they followed me…” She shuddered. If they followed her into those warm, sunlit waters, she would be bringing a doom far greater than the Serpent down on the heads of those who had never done anything but show her kindness and welcome her home.

By saving Jack’s future, she had sacrificed her own. The rainbows dancing over her skin were proof enough of that.

Eleanor took a sharp breath. “We can’t be sure that the Whitethorn Institute would be able to sunder you from the Drowned Gods, even if they were to try,” she said. “Divinity is a terrible thing, and we try to avoid offending it when we can.”

“We have to do something. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, even swimming hurts me. Please.” Cora looked Eleanor in the eye. “I’ve already tried to kill myself once. If they keep whispering to me, I’m going to try again, and this time, I’m going to succeed.”

Eleanor was silent for a long moment before she said, in a small voice, “That was a low, mean thing to say, Cora. I thought better of you.”

“The truth isn’t always kind,” said Cora. “Please. You’re the only one who can help me. You have to help me. Please.”

Eleanor looked at her, and she looked at Eleanor, and neither one of them said anything at all.

After the silence had stretched out too long to stand, Cora rose and walked, still in her damp nightgown, toward the office door. “I know you’ll have to talk to my parents before you can have me transferred to another school,” she said. “Please make sure they understand that this is what I want. This isn’t something that’s being forced on me by someone else.”

Eleanor was silent as Cora turned to leave the room. Only when the girl was standing in the doorway did she place her hands over her face and say, miserably, “But this is something that’s being forced on you, my darling. This isn’t a choice you would ever have made on your own.”

The empty room gave her no answer. Cora was gone. After a long moment of renewed silence, Eleanor lowered her hands before she rose and crossed the room to retrieve the ring of keys Antoinette had carried back to her. The keys gave no answer either, and Eleanor was weeping as she turned back to her desk.

In the hall, Cora walked bathed in sunlight, forcing her chin to stay high when it wanted to sink toward her breastbone, to make her smaller. She always wanted to make herself smaller, to take up less space, to avoid the moment when someone would look at her and say with their eyes that she took up more space than she deserved, than she had earned, than she could possibly pay for. It was a hard impulse to fight, and she had so little energy left for fighting anything, apart from the terrible whispers in the dark. She was shaking and exhausted by the time she reached her room, and ducked gratefully inside.

The room was empty, save for the detritus of two teenage girls forced into a small shared space. Cora made her way to her own dresser, pulling her nightgown off over her head, and went digging for clean clothes.

Once she was dressed, she raked a brush through her hair and moved back toward the door. This was still a school, for all that half its students had no interest in any subjects they could learn here in the world of their birth, and the state had certain requirements around attendance and standardized tests. Their teachers worked as much for the state as for Eleanor, and couldn’t be trusted to cover for students who stopped going to class.

Cora’s legs felt like they were made of lead, almost too heavy to lift. She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in weeks, and she hadn’t had anything to eat, despite having been out of bed for hours. Ploddingly, she made her way out into the hall. There would be time to grab something from the dining hall before she had to go to English class. The thought of trying to analyze the poetry of Emily Dickinson without calories was enough to make her want to cry. Why adults constantly wanted to know what centuries-old poems meant was beyond her. Shouldn’t someone have found the right answer by now? Or at least an answer good enough to accept?

The dining hall was virtually deserted this late in the morning. Only Kade was there, clearing a table that had probably been occupied by the rest of her friends until the bell rang. He looked up at the sound of her footsteps, initially surprised, then smiling.

“Hey, Cora,” he said, Oklahoma drawl softening his words like honey drizzled over a hard biscuit. “We missed you this morning. You still not sleeping well?”

Cora could hide the reason for her nightmares, but she couldn’t hide that they were happening, not with Antoinette sleeping in her room and waking up more often than not to the sound of screaming. Still, she forced a smile and said, “I wanted a bath more than I wanted an early breakfast.” A small untruth, not even entirely a lie, and Kade wasn’t one of the kids who’d come back from his adventures with the ability to sniff out falsehoods like they were rotting meat. She was grateful for that, especially when he laughed and nodded his acceptance of her statement.

“Mermaids and bathtubs,” he said. “I bet they didn’t have strawberry bubble bath in the Trenches, huh?”