Where the Drowned Girls Go(Wayward Children #7)(8)

“I don’t like the strawberry stuff too much,” she said. “It reminds me of Confection.”

Kade nodded again, more solemnly. Their time in Confection hadn’t been as traumatic as their time in the Moors, but Christopher had still almost drowned, and that sort of thing wasn’t worth dwelling on. “Sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right.” The hot food had already been cleared away, but there were still trays of baked goods and whole fruit. Cora hesitated for only a moment before selecting two pears and a blueberry muffin, all things she could carry with her in a napkin to avoid being late to class. The teachers didn’t care if their students ate during class, as long as they weren’t being actively disruptive. “We can’t make things that happened not have happened by wishing that they hadn’t.” She paused. “Did that sentence even make sense?”

“Enough,” he said. “You’ve got English up first, yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Cora, cheeks flushing softly red under their veil of rainbow. Sometimes she thought Kade might be flirting, with the way he kept track of her schedule and noticed when she missed meals. But he couldn’t possibly be flirting, not when everyone said the last girl he’d shown an interest in was Nancy. Tall, willowy, slender Nancy. He’d never said anything about Cora’s body—or anyone’s, really—but he didn’t have to. Cora had learned long before the Trenches what kind of girls got flirted with, and what kind didn’t.

And one way or another, she was leaving soon anyway.

“I’ll walk you to class,” he said, and fell in step beside her as she left the dining hall and started toward the wing where the classrooms were kept, most of them no larger than the sleeping rooms, none of them set up in the standard, industrial way of her pre-Trenches schools. No plastic seats, no tidy rows of desks. Everything was a comfortable jumble, designed to keep students as comfortable as possible without actually lulling them to sleep.

They walked in an easy rhythm, Cora nibbling at her muffin, Kade filling the silence with amiable small talk about the embroidery project he was working on, which seemed to involve stitching a dizzying array of songbirds onto the back of a denim jacket. In the blinking of an eye and less than half a blueberry muffin, he was saying he’d see her at lunch, and leaving her standing in front of her English classroom door, blinking after him.

The room was only half full. It was easy enough to get her preferred armchair, deep and plush enough not to dig into her sides, close enough to the back of the room to avoid making her a target if the teacher needed to force someone to participate. She settled, nibbling at her muffin, and only half-listened as class got underway.

The teacher was droning on about the iconography of death in Dickinson’s poems when the door cracked open and Sumi stuck her head inside, beckoning to Cora.

“Eleanor-Elly asked me to come get you,” she said.

Cora gathered her things, rose, and went.





4?THE WHITETHORN INSTITUTE


ALL TOLD, TRANSFERRING SCHOOLS was an easier process than Cora would have expected. It helped that Whitethorn was hungry for new students: as long as someone was willing to verify that a student fit their entrance requirements, they were more than happy to have them.

Eleanor had only looked Cora in the eyes once since the process began, her pen hovering over the transfer form. “Your parents have agreed to this,” she’d said, the unspoken “against my advice” hovering over every syllable. “But you have to understand that entering Whitethorn is easy. Leaving is far less so. You might not be able to come home if you change your mind.”

“I won’t change my mind,” Cora had replied, trying not to look at the rainbows dancing over her fingers, poisonous and lovely. “Please.”

Eleanor had sighed then, the sound like bones rattling down in the dark, and signed the paper.

Three days later, the car came for her. She had told no one she was leaving, not even Antoinette, who thought she was simply being transferred to another room at the school; she stood outside, back and shoulders straight, her worldly possessions in two suitcases at her feet, and she did not look back, and she did not cry. For the first time in her life, she was leaving a place she loved because she had chosen to do so, and there was power in that.

The car that would take her to the airport was sleek and black, almost featureless. When she climbed into the back, she found the package containing her new uniform waiting for her. She shied away from it at first, unaccustomed to the idea of wearing clothing selected by someone else, but by the time they pulled up at the terminal, she had the bundle in her lap, ready to change and embark on her new life.

She changed in the airport bathroom. Her ticket, provided by the Whitethorn Institute, placed her in a window seat, and to her immense relief there was no one in the seat next to her. She watched out the window as the land fell away, eyes turned toward the shadow of the wood, and tried to convince herself that she could still see the school, that she wasn’t sneaking away like a coward while her friends waited for her, that she wasn’t running away.

But of course she was. Her eyes drifted shut an hour or so into the flight, and she woke with a jolt when the wheels touched down, jerking her out of her mercifully dreamless sleep. A man was waiting for her at the baggage claim, holding a sign with her name on it, wearing a jacket whose insignia matched the one now stitched above her right breast. Cora went with him willingly, climbing into another black sedan and leaning back against the seat, ready for her new life to begin.