by Eva Chase
I slipped my hand around hers, as easily as if I’d been doing it for years. Trix’s fingers tightened against my knuckles. She wet her lips, her stance rigid, her gaze fixed on my face.
“Oh, fuck it,” she said, and leaned in to kiss me.
Yes, thank all that was holy. I touched her cheek with my other hand, drawing her closer as I kissed her back, careful not to outright demand anything. Her mouth was soft and buttery-tangy from the French toast. The pleasure it stirred was as dampened as the enjoyment I’d taken from the meal, but as far as I was concerned, that was all the Heaven I ever needed.
Chapter Nine
Trix
The box on my schedule simply said, 2A. Tolerance. Marsden. It was the only “Tolerance” class on my two-week schedule, and I hadn’t met Professor Marsden yet. What the hell were they going to teach us there? How to be kind and loving to one another?
Somehow I didn’t think so, or else they’d been incredibly ineffectual at conveying that lesson to most of the students here so far.
The classroom was at the back of the second floor, one I hadn’t been in before. As I walked over, a couple of the other professors came stealing up the stairs—Hubert and a man whose name I didn’t recall who’d instructed us in seemingly random sketching techniques during my art class last week. Hubert glanced over at the art professor and brushed a sprinkling of pale gray dust she must have just noticed off her shoulder.
I knew that stuff. It ended up sprinkled on my clothes every time I went down to the basement for laundry duty.
Why would any of the professors have been mucking around in that dank space? I hadn’t poked around in the basement much because it’d seemed to be all maintenance-related rooms, nothing really to do with the students, but apparently I should give it a closer look when I had the chance.
For the moment, I had to focus on discovering what “Tolerance” meant at Roseborne College. I walked into the classroom and wavered just past the threshold, re-evaluating my expectations.
The room wasn’t set up like most with their rows of desks, or even like the art room with its larger tables shoved close together. This was a science lab. The high, black-topped tables with their little sinks and the stools poised behind them made that obvious, even if they were an older style than we’d had at my high school back home.
Why shouldn’t we have some kind of science class? I guessed that would make for a well-rounded education. But this wasn’t what I’d been picturing from the class name at all.
A few students were already perched on the stools. I took one at a free table, not sure whether there’d be enough of us that we’d need to share. Violet came in, glanced around, and picked the table next to mine, giving me her unburnt side in profile. Her expression was tight, but I didn’t think I’d ever seen her relaxed, so I couldn’t draw any conclusions from that.
“Hey,” I said. She’d bothered to talk to me a little before—maybe she would again. “What’s this class about, anyway?”
Violet turned to look at me, revealing the ravage down the middle of her face. Under the classroom lights, it was even more obvious that some of the smaller patches remained raw red. They weren’t just scars but not-yet-healed wounds.
“Just one more thing to trudge through,” she said. “You’ll get used to it.”
At that moment, the professor swept in. She was a petite woman with a full skirt that rustled over the floor, her salt-and-pepper curls pulled back from her rounded face by two tortoiseshell clips. She bent down by the desk that stretched most of the front of the room, twice as long as any of ours, and set out a row of plastic trays on its glossy surface.
“Let’s see how you all fare today,” she said with a brightness that felt more sharp than warm. “Come up and collect your supplies. As always, we’ll proceed by order of experience from least to most, so Miss Corbyn—” Her gaze found me from across the room. “You’ll begin. Your instructions and observation sheet are on your tray.” She tapped the one at the beginning of the row.
The other nine students got up as I did. I approached the front desk warily, but the contents of the trays didn’t reveal a whole lot. Mine held just a vial of clear liquid and a packet of beige powder. Most of the others had multiple vials or packets, none of them labeled. I guessed we were doing some kind of experiment.
My sheet was marked with the class and my name, followed by a chart for me to note the date and any observations I made at each of the numbered stages. Today was number one, obviously, and my very brief instruction sheet was labeled with a corresponding 1.
Mix the powder into the water. Swivel vigorously to mix (do not shake). Drink the entire contents and note any physical sensations that emerge after five minutes.
I was supposed to drink this stuff? My body balked before I’d even sat back down at my table. I hadn’t been counting on experimenting on myself. And what effects did Professor Marsden expect this mysterious powder to have on me?
“You may proceed, Miss Corbyn,” the professor said pointedly.
I opened the cap on the vial and then the powder packet with deliberate care to give me time to consider while I went through the motions. A sniff of the powder didn’t give me any concern—all I got was a faint salty whiff. It could have just been lightly colored, finely ground salt. Tolerance: a test of what unknowns we were willing to accept from the teachers rather than refusing?
If these were regimented steps like Marsden had indicated, then everyone else in this room had passed through this stage before with no obvious harm done. The guy at the table in front of mine was on the back side of his observation sheet, with the chart filled all the way to stage forty-seven. How bad could it be?
In a matter of seconds, the powder dissolved into the water with my swirling of the vial. The water looked just as clear as before. I gave it another sniff and set my jaw. I’d drunk, smoked, and snorted stuff from uncertain sources plenty of times in the past. Was I really going to chicken out and let the jerks around me think I really was the “tourist” Jenson had claimed?
Without letting any more doubts creep in, I tossed back the mixture.
It wasn’t a large gulp—all down in one swallow. The light salty flavor lingered in my mouth, noticeable but not unpleasant. Professor Marsden motioned to the clock beside the door. “Five minutes,” she reminded me. “Mr. Frum, you may proceed.”
A guy at the far end of the room who barely looked old enough to be in college poured the contents of one of his two vials into the other and then used a little wooden stick to stir in a white powder. He hesitated for a second and then threw it back like I had. From the grimace he made, its flavor had been worse than mine.
The next student got down to work. The minute hand on the clock was almost at my five-minute mark, and a faint tingling sensation spread through my stomach. Maybe that was just anticipation or a psychosomatic effect? The feeling sank a little deeper, morphing into mild queasiness, but nothing I couldn’t have ignored if I hadn’t been paying close attention to my bodily functions. I noted it down on the chart, since that was the only thing I had to report.
There. That hadn’t been so bad.
The boy who’d gone after me still had his mouth set in a grimace. As my queasiness faded, nearly as quickly as it’d come on, he scratched at the back of his neck and then his arms. His concoction had made him itchy? This had to be the weirdest class yet. I still didn’t get what the purpose was. To test how we tolerated various minor discomforts?
I hadn’t been paying much attention to the order the other students were working in. A girl at the front of the class, who I thought had gone third, jerked her hand to her belly, her shoulders going rigid. She held herself stiffly in place while I watched. A flush crept over her skin. After a few minutes, whatever she’d experienced appeared to fade. Her posture started to relax. She grabbed her pen and started to write on her chart.
And then the boy next to her started to wheeze.
All of us turned to look except Violet, who was mixing her
various ingredients at the moment. The guy’s back shuddered with each wracking breath, which sounded as if the air was being dragged into his lungs through the thinnest and rustiest of grates. He wobbled on his stool, a bluish cast coming over his cheeks. My own lungs tightened in anxiety.
“Hold steady through it,” Professor Marsden said in a perfectly calm voice. “The effect will only be temporary.”
That didn’t look like it was going to help the guy now. He swayed so far with one strangled gulp of air that he slipped right off his seat. He managed to land on his feet, staggering and then doubling over with even more desperate wheezes.
I was already half off my chair, torn between going along with everyone else’s inaction and the concern that was gripping me, when the girl across from Violet knifed over and retched into her sink. Whatever she’d had for lunch came up with a sputter and a splatter. She sucked in a ragged breath, braced herself, and then sat back with a swipe of her hand across her mouth.
It was as if that one response set off a chain reaction. The boy in front of Violet lurched forward to hurl the contents of his own stomach into his sink, coughing and gagging and then spewing more with a horrible groan. He was still hunched over the sink when Violet followed suit, just barely yanking her hair back with one hand before she ejected a flood of vomit into her sink.
My own stomach churned at the noises filling the room and the sour stench congealing in the air. My gaze snapped to the professor, but she was watching all this with a dispassionate expression.
“Don’t forget to record your observations as accurately as possible,” she said over the choked sounds. “And keep an eye on the time so you can report how long the symptoms lasted.”
Was she fucking serious? Violet shuddered and puked again. The boy who’d been wheezing had managed to climb back onto his stool, his breaths evening out, but the guy in front of me had just flung himself toward his sink, all but clawing at his mouth. He sprayed water from the faucet over his face and then gagged and spat, his whole body shaking as if in the grips of a seizure.
The horror of the scene around me clenched my innards so tightly that it took me a moment to break through my shock. Then I was sliding off my stool and marching to the front of the room as fast as my feet would take me.
“What the hell is this?” I demanded, planting myself right in front of Professor Marsden. “Making us sick isn’t a class. You can’t do shit like this to people.”
She considered me without any more hint of concern than she’d had for her other students. “We’re teaching you your limitations and how to recognize the signs that you’ve reached them,” she said smoothly, as if that explanation made the sickening chaos around me any better. “So many of you have gone through life never realizing the damage you could be doing.”
What was that even supposed to mean? “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “You’re torturing us.”
“How much do you know about educational processes?” Marsden asked haughtily. “Back to your seat, Miss Corbyn. I’ve heard enough.”
As if I was going to listen to anything she said after what she’d just done. I spun toward the door instead, rushing out and down the stairs, the sickly stink still lingering in my nose and the sounds echoing through my mind.
The thump of my pulse chased one other thought in circles through my mind. I couldn’t just stand there and let this crap happen to people. Whatever hold the school had over them, whatever power the professors might be exerting, there were limits. I’d get out of here, I’d walk the roads until I reached a town or my phone got reception again, and then I was bringing the police out here to treat these jackasses like the psychos they were.
A headache like the one I’d gotten last night cracked through my skull as I burst out the front doors. The pain expanded through my head with each hurried step toward the gates. I gritted my teeth and pushed on.
Maybe it was a coincidence; maybe the school was doing it to me somehow—it didn’t matter. I couldn’t give in. I had to get away from this place and force the assholes who ran it to face what they deserved.
Ignoring the throbbing blaze behind my eyes as well as I could, I gripped the heavy latch on the gate and yanked it down. At least, I meant to yank it down. The metal lever jarred in my hands. I shoved at it again and then stared at it as intently as I could through the haze of pain.
No lock held the latch in place. Nothing should have prevented it from opening. It simply… refused to.
“No,” I muttered. “No, no.” I wrenched at the latch again, slamming my shoulder against the wrought-iron bars at the same time. The metal joints clattered, but the gate didn’t budge. The impact shot up my neck and rattled a fresh burst of pain across my skull.
The headache was starting to mess with my balance. I stumbled backward and found myself tipping over onto my ass. My tailbone twinged as I hit the ground. My fingers dug into the cool grass beneath that gray, ever-clouded sky.
A girl had been walking along the wall. She stopped several feet from me. Her voice reached me as if from an ocean of agony away.
“There’s no point. We come in, but we don’t go out.”
“No,” I mumbled once more, my body swaying backward. As the back of my head hit the grass and my mind dimmed, one final thought rose up.
If no one ever left, then Cade had to still be here, somewhere, one way or another.
Chapter Ten
Trix
I woke up in my bed in the dorms with a vague echo of the headache lingering at my temples. Otherwise, I felt pretty normal physically, but the second my mind slipped back to the events that had brought me to this spot, my stomach clenched up in a ball of horror.
I was literally stuck here in this psycho college that was becoming more like a literal torture chamber by the minute. So were all the other students, I had to assume. And my foster brother had gotten caught up in the whole crazy situation somehow or other…
If the things I’d seen were how they treated the students actually attending classes, how much worse off was Cade? Was he even still alive?
That question made my stomach twist even tighter. I sat up on the bed, swiping my rumpled hair back from my face.
The overhead light was on, the view outside the window dark. It must be evening if not total night now. I’d been out for a while.
Not so long that my roommates had come to bed, though. The only other person in the room was Violet, sitting cross-legged on top of her blanket with her back to me as she wrote in that notebook of hers.
“Hey,” I said, and she turned, glancing down briefly to add one more note. “Are you okay?” I asked.
I meant after the ordeal in Tolerance class, but as soon as I’d said the words, they felt ridiculous. How could anyone be okay here?
She lifted one shoulder in a partial shrug. “Same old, same old.” Her expression was a little less tight than I remembered it being before. Did she appreciate that I’d tried to stand up to Professor Marsden on everyone’s behalf, or did she just pity me for my failure to get anywhere with that cause?
A cool draft trickled through the room. I shivered and reached for my leather jacket, slung on the corner of the bedframe. The worn material that by now was perfectly molded to my body always comforted me, like an extra layer of defensive skin, when I pulled it on.
I’d wondered before why the dean had let me stay on at the school, if maybe he’d meant to prove a point to me. After everything I’d seen, I was starting to think it was the other way around. The staff got off on tormenting the students however they could—and most of my classmates acted more irritated by me than anything else. Had Dean Wainhouse let me stick around just to add an extra layer to their discomfort, like I was nothing more than a new tool in the school’s arsenal?
God, I hoped not.
“I like your tat,” Violet ventured unexpectedly, nodding to the vine on my forearm just before it disappeared under the sleeve. “Do you have any others?”
I shook my head. “
I was meaning to get more—but there were other things I was saving up for first.” That apartment Cade and I had been going to share. A real college, if I’d decided it was worth going after all. I paused and then decided to take advantage of my roommate’s new willingness to talk. “How long have you been here?”
Violet looked away, her lips slanting downward as if the question pained her. “A couple years,” she said. “After a while, there didn’t seem to be much point in keeping track.”
And I was going to assume the school didn’t offer winter holidays or summer break or any other chance for the students to slip away and never come back. Had the people Violet once knew forgotten her as utterly as everyone back home had lost their memories of Cade? They must have, right? If not, there’d be relatives and friends banging on the gate out of the same concern that had brought me here.
What was the point of all this torture for anyone, even the staff? Somehow I doubted they laid it out in clear detail for the students.
“How did you end up here?” I asked Violet instead.
“I got a scholarship invitation, like it sounds like your brother did. Things weren’t… so great, back home. I thought it’d be a chance to try being someone else or whatever.” Her laugh came out bitter.
“Do you have any idea why you?”
Her gaze came back to me, steady and solemn. “It’s not that hard to figure out. Everyone they brought in has to know, I think, at least after the first few months. You can’t bury yourself that far in denial. I know you think the classes are horrible, but—they do bring a lot of things to light.”
Ryo had said something about how nothing I’d done could be worse than his own past. I’d thought he was just trying to make me feel better, but maybe he really felt that way too.
“You can’t really think there’s any way you could deserve to be treated like this,” I said.
“I don’t know. Maybe you just can’t think of all the things people are actually capable of.” She studied me. “Roseborne didn’t pick you. You picked it. I don’t know what that means.”