by Eva Chase
She straightened herself up just as abruptly and walked out without a glance at me or the girl at the bed next to mine, although it was easy to see she was favoring her foot on her scarred side. Did her wounds extend that far and I just hadn’t looked closely enough to notice? Christ, she had to be made of steel to keep up that stoic front.
My neighbor was perched on her bed, a compact open in one hand while she applied a sheen of lipstick with the other. It was the only make-up I’d seen her wear, making her mouth stand out like a third eye in her pale face. Her red hair, the shade my artificial orange only dreamed of being, fell softly around her face in its pageboy cut. She snapped the compact closed.
“Don’t even try making nice with Violet,” she said with a hint of a sneer, her glance toward the bed across from us making it clear she was talking about the scarred girl. “The stuff she did before she got here—she’s a real degenerate. I know that much.”
The girl—Violet?—looked more like someone had done awful things to her than the other way around. “What happened to her?” I had to ask.
Miss Lipstick shrugged. “Karma, presumably. It catches us all.” Her lips twisted into a tight grin as if she’d made a joke she didn’t find entirely funny herself.
I couldn’t say I enjoyed her attitude, but this was one of the few times any of the students here had voluntarily spoken to me. Mostly they avoided me as if I were some kind of degenerate. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.
“I’m Trix, by the way,” I said, figuring any questions I wanted to ask would go over more smoothly if I offered a little politeness first.
“Delta,” the other girl said in a bored tone. The tight grin remained. “Quite the school, isn’t it?”
“It’s definitely… interesting.” I sank down on my own bed, creasing the blanket I’d tucked straight. “I don’t suppose—you seem like you’re pretty familiar with the place—do you remember a guy who started at the beginning of the school year named Cade?”
Delta let out a laugh that sounded more exasperated than anything else. “You never give up, do you? How many people have you asked that already?”
Her dismissive response brought my hackles up. My voice came out tart. “It’s just a question. He’s the whole reason I’m here at all, so yeah, I’m going to ask people about him.” She must have overheard me questioning a few of our classmates—or maybe she’d seen Ryo when he’d been taking up my cause.
“Don’t have a conniption,” she said with an equally dismissive wave of her hand. “If I could tell you anything about him, I would. But I’ve got nothing.”
Each time I got a non-answer like that, my frustration grew. Cade must have been here for long enough for someone to have paid attention. The proof was hanging in the hall downstairs. Even when I’d dragged a couple of students over to the painted portraits, neither of them had been able to tell me anything about who’d painted the one with Cade’s symbol in the corner.
Even if he’d faded from everyone’s minds like he had back home, the evidence wasn’t completely gone. I just had to find more—something that would wake people up or point me in the right direction.
Something that would explain why this place was so strange and what part it had played in his disappearance.
In the meantime, to stay in the dean’s good graces and get a better idea of exactly what Cade would have been through here, I had to keep up my “studies,” if that was even the right word for the classes here. I tugged out the printed timetable that had been delivered to my bed on my first evening and looked it over. The college’s approach to scheduling was as bizarre as just about everything else here. I was on a two-week rotation with some classes twice and others only once in that time, as well as my various maintenance duties.
For my third full day at Roseborne College, I was starting with my first stab at Composition class.
Delta had moved on from our conversation, pulling a notebook out of her bedside table and tucking it into her gaping yellow purse, but I might as well make as much use of her as I could.
“Hey,” I said. “What should I expect from Composition?”
“Oh, are you heading there too?” She made a face, and I thought I saw a brief tremor quiver through her body. For the first time, I really considered her as a whole. The pallor of her skin didn’t exactly look healthy. She was thinner than I’d noticed at a glance too. The tendons stood out in her neck, and her elbows jutted against her sleeves at sharp angles.
She shook herself, and any momentary weakness that had come over her fell away. “Come on, let’s get breakfast before we deal with that. I’ve got Composition first thing too. You’ll see what you’re in for easier just going than me trying to tell you.”
Wonderful. I gave the laces on my boots a quick tug to make sure they’d hold and followed her downstairs.
After a dreary breakfast of greasy scrambled eggs and dry toast, which Delta ate without a word, we headed to the class. The Composition classroom was the smallest I’d been in so far, but still nearly twice as big as our joint bedroom. Two rows of student desks stood in a semi-circle facing a lonely podium; the professor, who turned out to be the same woman who’d accused me of overstaying my welcome on my first day, sat at a larger desk off to the side near the door. According to my timetable, her name was Professor Hubert.
Several students were already in their seats, none of them anyone I’d exchanged more than a word or two with before. I sat at one end of the back row, near the windows and away from the teacher’s desk, and Delta, to my surprise, opted to take the desk next to mine. I couldn’t tell if that was an attempt at friendliness or her not bothering to pick a better spot.
After a couple more students trickled in, Professor Hubert got up from her desk and glided to the podium. When I’d first met her, I’d thought it was the lack of light that had given her an ashen quality. Now, under the harsh artificial illumination that compensated for the gloom beyond the windows, I realized she actually looked more wan in the brighter light, with a blueish-gray cast to her skin like ice over deep water. Her dark hair and large, equally dark eyes only made her pallor starker in contrast.
“All right, class,” she said in the clipped, nasal voice I remembered. Nothing pale about that forceful tone. “Last time you were assigned a piece on shame. I expect we’ll have time to get through them all.” Her gaze rested on me for a moment. “Miss Corbyn, you’re exempt this once due to missing the original assignment.”
I nodded, with a rush of relief I wasn’t prepared for—possibly prompted by nervous twitches and stiffened shoulders that had gripped my classmates when she’d first started speaking.
“Let’s get started.” The professor stepped back from the podium. “Mr. Taylor, why don’t you start us off?”
The young man got up to make his way to the spot she’d just vacated. Within a matter of seconds after he started speaking, it became clear that the assignment hadn’t been just “shame” but specifically “a time when you felt ashamed.” Shifting his weight from one foot to another behind the podium, he related in a flat voice how one time when he was eight, he’d knocked an ice cream cone out of a younger kid’s hand at a playground and how his parents had scolded him after.
When he finished, Professor Hubert, who was now propped against her desk, frowned. “I don’t think you really went deep there, Mr. Taylor. The key to an effective composition is delving into the most meaningful moments you can offer. Cowardice doesn’t do you any favors.”
That was a not particularly academic analysis of his work. But the criticism appeared to hit the guy hard. He winced, his mouth drawing tight, and went to sit back down with his arm tucked around his belly as if he had a stomachache.
The girl Hubert called up next shot her a look I could only call defiant before launching into a story about a time she’d skipped volleyball practice to hang out with a guy she liked and almost—but not actually—been cut from the team. After the first run-through, I wasn’t surprised to see the profes
sor still frowning.
“Come on, people,” she said after she’d sent the girl back to her seat with similar remarks, clapping her hands. “I need to see you’re willing to put in the work here. We didn’t bring you into this program so you could simply coast through it.”
The girl who’d just read her piece hunched over her desk, looking as pained as the first boy had. She aimed another glare at the professor.
Hubert either didn’t notice or chose to ignore it. She turned to scan the room. “Miss Savas, what have you got for us?”
Delta stood up, her notebook clutched in both hands. She walked slowly but steadily up to the podium. Her lips parted with a shaky exhalation before she started to read.
“When I was in junior year, a new girl started at my school. Her father had transferred for work from another city. Right from her first day, she went around telling everyone she ran into how horribly allergic to shrimp she was. How we all had to be so careful not to poison her with it. As if a high school cafeteria is usually going to be serving seafood for lunch.
“The teachers all fawned over her and were constantly reassuring her that they’d watch out for her. She soaked up the attention so gleefully, I started thinking she probably wasn’t allergic at all. She’d picked something easy to avoid and talked it up everywhere to get special consideration. As far as I could tell, it was pathetic, wanting everyone to be focused on her because of something like that instead of anything she’d actually done.”
Delta drew herself straighter and dragged in a rough breath before continuing. The rest of us sat, frozen and silent, as she laid out the plan she’d made to “prove” that the new girl was faking, the stealth with which she’d sprinkled the crumbs of a crushed shrimp chip into the girl’s soup one lunch hour—and the horrifying colors the girl’s face had turned as her throat had closed up and her skin had broken out in massive hives.
“I could have killed her,” Delta finished, her voice wavering. “If the ambulance had gotten there even a minute later, it might not have been in time. That’s not what makes me most ashamed, though. What’s really shameful is that I didn’t regret it at the time. I told myself it was her own fault for flaunting her allergy in the first place. When I think back now to the way I thought then and the things I did because of it, it makes me feel sick. I want to shake myself, or slap my own face, but I’m not sure that would have made a difference.”
The last words faded out. Her tense posture faltered, her shoulders curling slightly as she stared down at the page as if she was bracing for the lash of a whip. I couldn’t help staring at her as the rawness of her confession and her current regret sank in.
I couldn’t say it made me like her more, but there was obviously more going on beneath that haughty surface than I’d have guessed.
Professor Hubert pushed herself off her desk and gave a light round of applause. She was beaming, as if she saw Delta’s wrenching story as something to celebrate.
“Now that’s what I want you all to aspire to,” she said, with an encouraging nod to my roommate. “Dig right to the heart of the matter and show us who you really are. Excellent, excellent. I hope our next speaker can follow Miss Savas up with similar honesty.”
That was her goal with this class? To bully her students into admitting to the most horrible moments in their lives? A shiver ran through my body as I watched her pick her next target while Delta slipped back into place beside me.
Just when I thought this school couldn’t get any more fucked up, it upped the ante. What the hell would the classes I hadn’t attended yet hold?
Chapter Five
Elias
Of course, Trix Corbyn would turn up in my class. Everyone ended up there eventually. I’d caught glimpses of her defiantly orange hair and her leather jacket in the halls over the past few days and heard disgruntled murmurs from some of the guys in the dorms. Now here she was, perched at her desk along with the eleven other students I wished I wasn’t teaching.
At least she’d opted for a seat at the back, where I could let my gaze skim over her without it being obvious I wasn’t letting myself so much as look at her.
The class was an hour of absurdity, stating it mildly. I knew that. All of the students in front of me knew that, except presumably Trix. Still, I’d had to go ahead and try to teach them today’s math problem, and they’d had to go ahead and do their best to learn it, because if we didn’t play our parts, the real staff of Roseborne College would crack the metaphorical whip.
The really sad thing, though, was that even after the years I’d spent here, as soon as I stepped in front of those watching faces, the urge to do this right gripped me. I had to prove I was up to the challenge, that I deserved the responsibility given. Elias DeLeon didn’t back down.
Never mind that it was more a torture device than a responsibility, or that as far as I’d been able to tell, the challenge was impossible.
“Well,” I said in my best professorial tone, managing not to glare at the traitorous numbers on the chalkboard beside me. “It seems we’re working with power substitutions now. As some of you probably remember, we bring that strategy to bear when dealing with antiderivatives…”
The faces in front of me went tense with uneasy concentration as I lectured. Maybe they picked up a little of the theory even if they never really got to apply it? Not that I could take any pride in that fact when the knowledge wasn’t going to do them any good anywhere else for the rest of their lives either.
Today’s calculus equation was one of the more complex ones we’d tackled. I hadn’t taken advanced mathematics on this scale before I’d come here, but I’d studied the textbook until I understood how it all came together. No one else will put the work in for you if you don’t, my grandfather would have said. I’d managed that much. I just couldn’t maintain whatever authority I’d taught myself while I had anyone else looking on.
Ryo Shibata leaned over to murmur something to Trix as I wrapped up my explanation. Part of me prickled at the disrespect, but that irritation rode on a wave of relief that he seemed to have redirected her from noticing the expected but eerie interference with our problem-solving.
“Who’s willing to take a stab at this next stage?” I asked.
One of the guys in the front row offered. He gripped the piece of chalk I handed him determinedly and grimaced at the chalkboard’s current display, and we continued on with our roles.
When the clock ticked over to ten to the hour, the problem was sprawled in a mess across the board, and we hadn’t yet come up with the answer. “Better luck next time,” I said, like I always did. The best part of the class was sweeping the eraser over that board to wipe the whole headache away. Until tomorrow.
One class a day, five days a week, never quite enough time to shake off the pressure before it descended on me all over again. Maybe I wouldn’t have minded as much if I’d still had more to do in between, but now that I’d worked through the initial hurdles, being allowed to attend regular classes where I could have achieved a goal or two would have been too welcome a distraction, no doubt. These days all I had were my assigned teachings, maintenance duties, and twice weekly “counseling” sessions.
Most of the students were already getting up, but Trix had simply sat up straighter in her seat, raising her hand. My chest tightened. When I pretended to be so occupied straightening the stack of textbooks on my desk that I hadn’t noticed her, she got up, waving off whatever Ryo said to her, and strode toward me.
Hell, no. I’d promised myself no more investing in pointless causes. I didn’t need any reminders of how epically I’d already failed in the areas that mattered most, no matter what other emotions her determined air stirred up inside me.
I grabbed one copy of the textbook to prep for tomorrow’s lesson and ducked out of the room without so much as a glance her way.
Even with the heavy book tucked under my arm, my feet didn’t stop walking until they’d carried me right out of the school. The clouds congealing
in the sky glowered down at me. I resisted the momentary desire to give them the middle finger—A DeLeon is never uncouth, my grandfather’s voice admonished me from the back of my head—and let myself wander all the way down to the main wall with its draping of thorny brambles.
I didn’t have to follow it far before I reached the scattered trees at the edge of the denser forest that would hide me from anyone watching from the main school building. There, my pace slowed. I considered the blooms I passed, stopping and studying the ruddy petals. This one looked fresh and healthy enough. This one was wilting along the edges. And this one—the outer petals were already half shriveled, threads of brown rot seeping down to the base. It wasn’t holding on much longer.
That was the way of things. Some beings thrived and others wasted away. There was only so much potential to go around.
I could tell myself that over and over, like the mantra it’d been since my childhood, but I couldn’t say I completely believed it anymore. This place had beaten the faith out of me. I couldn’t even believe it’d been the right faith to base my life around in the first place.
Although that epiphany I couldn’t credit to the school.
The book I was holding twitched against my arm. I held it out in front of me, and the cover swung open of its own accord. At this point, the sight of the pages flipping as if in a sharp but deliberate wind was familiar enough not to be disturbing. After a brief ruffling, the book settled open to page fifty-four. Behold, tomorrow’s problem. At least, tomorrow’s problem as this book felt like presenting it right now. Who knew how it might change once we got into it?
My body balked for just a second. Then I sighed and sat down on the patchy grass with my back against an oak’s trunk. Why put off work you can get done right away? That was the lazy route, and DeLeons weren’t slackers.