by Eva Chase
Hubert had gotten today’s class to do some of their writing on papers separate from their notebook so she could evaluate them ahead of the presentations, and she was looking through those now with an impatient shuffling. I read over the list she’d offered up again, inspiration slowly coming together.
If I wanted to better understand her, and through her the rest of the staff, I should steer her toward a topic she’d have her own fairly deep feelings about. What did I know about the beings who ran this school? They lived to punish people and steal away their lives. Sometime in the past, I was pretty sure they’d engaged in enough violence to leave those bloodstains on the floor down below. That violence had probably helped them gain the powers they had now.
How could I work that into a Composition subject?
I mulled it over a minute longer and then said, “They’re all awfully depressing, aren’t they?”
The professor glanced up at me with an arch of her eyebrows. Again, that eerie sense of recognition ran through me, comparing the sharpness of her gaze to the girl in the photographs I’d spent hours studying.
“The most honest emotions come from our most difficult moments,” she said simply. “You can’t learn to express yourself fully until you’re willing to delve into even those matters that are difficult to think about.”
I nodded as if I agreed. “But still, I can’t help wondering what you’d get if you had everyone write about a happier topic just once, now that they’re used to all this.”
Hubert’s eyes turned thoughtful. Had she ever attempted that? To be honest, I was kind of curious how my classmates would respond. But I doubted she’d go for my suggestion as it was.
After a moment, she shook her head. “We still have much work to do. An easy assignment could interfere with the progress many students have already made. You’ll have to trust my experience on this.”
I sucked my lower lip under my teeth and nibbled at it, pretending to reconsider even though I already knew where I was going from here. “What if you combined the two—happiness and things that are difficult to admit? Like… writing about a time when we felt happy, but it was at someone else’s expense?”
The professor didn’t let her expression shift much, but she brightened a little at the idea. She rubbed her mouth, her gaze going even more distant than before. When she dropped her hand, I thought I saw it tremble for just an instant before she clenched it.
Had something about the suggestion bothered her even if she’d liked the thought of it too?
As I watched her, a niggling sensation crept up in the back of my mind, like one of those fragments of memory from my past times here drifting up from the deeps. I blinked, and an image flashed behind my eyes. Cool spring air, sunlight bright on the grass by the badminton courts. The girl with the dark hair and piercing eyes waving a long, curved object at her far side while she grinned sharply—at me. Can you imagine, when they realize…
I felt the sun’s beams, tasted the fresh grassy scent in the air, heard her clear voice ringing in my ear as if I’d really been there, and then it was gone. I was nowhere but the hard chair in Professor Hubert’s classroom, waiting for her to deliver a verdict on my proposed topic.
I swallowed hard, grasping the sides of the chair to steady myself. What had that been? It couldn’t have been from my times here. The photos of those students had been from ages ago. As far as I could tell, the sun never shone on Roseborne now. The girl had been wearing one of those burgundy uniforms I’d never seen on campus other than in the photographs and the portraits based on them.
The tap of Hubert’s finger against her desk brought me fully back to the present. “You know,” she said, “there might be some value in that. I like the complexity of it.” She studied me as if wary of taking any suggestion I made, which considering how much trouble I’d given the staff in times past wasn’t surprising. “Are you sure you’d like to write on this subject?”
“The longer I’m here, the more I realize how much I still have to figure out about myself,” I said in as genuine a tone as I could manage. “Maybe digging into past events will help me figure out what’s happened to my brother now.”
That answer appeared to satisfy her. She nodded and shuffled the papers in front of her. “Since the idea came from you, I expect to see particular effort from you with your own composition. This will not be the time to be slack in your commitment.”
Her tone held an implicit threat. I’d already seen the pains she inflicted on students she felt had taken a cowardly approach to an assignment. I sat up a little straighter to show I’d caught her meaning. “Of course. Thank you for letting me look over all this. I feel like this is the one class here that really makes sense to me, even if it is going to be hard.”
She couldn’t stop the pleased smile that curved her lips at the compliment. She might still be wary of me, but not so much that having her ego stroked didn’t affect her. “Go on then,” she said, but not too brusquely. “I’ve got to finish up with these—and my marking system is going to stay private.”
I was scheduled for lunchtime kitchen duty anyway. When I reached the cramped room with the old food scents that always hung in the air, Jenson and another guy were already there. The other guy was rinsing vegetables at the sink while Jenson chopped the ones already cleaned for a salad. I glanced at the meal list posted by the door and grimaced.
“Wieners and beans,” the guy at the sink confirmed, seeing my expression. “The cans with the baked beans are in the pantry and the hotdogs are in the fridge, if you want to get started on that.”
“Apparently the professors are sending us back to elementary school,” Jenson said wryly with a deft swivel of his knife. “I feel fifteen years younger already.”
The other guy chuckled and scrubbed at the carrot he was holding. “Maybe it’ll be a little enjoyable in a nostalgic kind of way?”
“Knowing this place? Don’t count on it.” Jenson looked up with a sly glint in his eyes. “If you want to make things interesting, what do you say to adding some chili flakes to the salad dressing?”
“Hey,” I protested even as my lips twitched with amusement. “I’d like to actually be able to eat that stuff. Whatever isn’t already going rotten.”
Jenson tsked and tipped his head to the other guy. “She’s just a spoilsport.”
I couldn’t take much offense to the criticism when the fact that he’d been able to state it meant he didn’t actually believe it. Rolling my eyes, I went to the pantry to grab the beans.
The viscous mess that poured from the cans gave off a pungent smell that made my nose wrinkle, and the hotdogs—a day past their best before—slid slimy out of the plastic packages, but after giving them a quick rinse and getting everything cooking in a couple of the kitchen’s biggest pots, it at least appeared to be edible. Jenson kept up his casual banter with the other guy as we worked, occasionally shooting a grin or a wink my way.
He seemed to be able to hit it off with any of our classmates. I’d never seen him antagonize anyone the way he had me when I’d first arrived, and no matter who was around, he’d have them smiling and hanging off his words within a minute or two. Which was exactly the kind of thing that would have made me suspicious of him no matter what context I’d met him in. But with the things I knew about Roseborne now, I couldn’t help wondering who he’d been before he’d ended up here. What crime did the staff feel he’d committed—and why had they chosen lies as his punishment?
I couldn’t really ask him, even in a roundabout way, when he literally couldn’t form an honest answer. So I just watched, absorbing this charming side of him with a tickle of attraction rising up alongside my curiosity.
When we’d finished, I wolfed down my own portion of the lunch quickly so I didn’t have to worry much about how it tasted and then hurried back to the kitchen to get the clean-up over with. Taking over the washing meant I got to get out of here first.
There wasn’t a whole lot of progress I could make on my m
ain plan during the day, but in my search of the maintenance shed, I’d found an opportunity for a subtle show of defiance—and something that would let me pass the time here a little more pleasantly. Once I’d ducked into the small structure, I grabbed a trowel from the tool shelf and dug out the faded seed packets that had fallen into the corner beside that shelf.
I had no idea how old the marigold and columbine seeds were, and it was totally possible that none of them would sprout at all. I hadn’t seen any flowers growing around the school other than the roses on the wall. But just knowing I was going to make the attempt energized me. Obviously at some point there’d been some sort of garden here.
I’d already picked out my spot: a stretch where the grass already grew thinner along the edge of the abandoned swimming pool, far enough from the school building that its shade wouldn’t interrupt what meager sunlight penetrated the constant cloud cover. Sitting on the cracked tiles that surrounded the pool, I dug the trowel into the ground. Roseborne might have warped a lot of things, but it couldn’t diminish the pure, heady scent of freshly turned earth.
Jenson must have come looking for me after he’d finished up in the kitchen. I was about halfway through clearing the stretch of dirt for the planting when he came ambling across the lawn. He stopped at the edge of my cleared area with a cock of his head.
“What are you up to now, Trix?”
“Seeing if I can get us a little more variety in flowers instead of just roses,” I said with a brief motion to the seed packets lying beside me. “It’s a longshot, but I figured, what the hell.”
“Who can argue with that attitude?” He hunkered down across from me. “Any way I can pitch in, or is this a solo mission too?”
The reference to my dismissal by the laundry room prickled over me. I caught his eye. He didn’t look concerned, but then, the more time I spent around him, the more sure I was that a lot more than just his words tended to lie.
There wasn’t any reason I had to do this alone, though. “I’m going to need water after I plant the seeds. Do you know if the hose around the back of the school still works?”
“Let me find out for you right now.”
He scrambled back up, loped across the lawn, and returned a minute later with the unspooling hose, its rusted nozzle gleaming with droplets. “Why not fill the pool while we’re at it?” he said with a rueful smile that suggested he didn’t really mean that suggestion.
“Sadly, I didn’t bring a bathing suit.”
“Oh, surely you can think of ways to get around that?” His gaze skimmed over me—briefly but with enough interest to spark heat under my skin.
I shot him a pointed look. “You can fill it up if you’re willing to jump in first.”
He laughed and sat back down to watch as I finished clearing the grass and turning the soil. “Is this something you do a lot?” he asked when I moved to the actual planting.
I guessed that hadn’t come up in the past conversations that I couldn’t fully remember. “Gardening kept me busy and out of the house,” I said. Away from foster parents and siblings I’d preferred to avoid when I could. “I like that it reminds me that you can take the shit that’s been thrown at you and use it to make something beautiful grow.” I paused and looked up at him. “What did you get up to before you came here?”
Maybe I couldn’t expect a clear answer, but I wouldn’t get any at all if I didn’t ask. I could tell from the twitch of Jenson’s expression that he knew I meant specifically what he’d done to bring him here, not just in general. He tugged at a tuft of grass at the edge of my newly constructed garden. “Do you really want to get into that?”
“You know more about me than I can even remember telling you. Let’s call it balancing the scales.”
He let out an amused snort and lay back on the grass to look at the clouds. “I had a charmed life,” he said breezily. “I got whatever I wanted whenever I wanted it.”
I eyed him as I covered another seed. “Did you?”
“Assume that’s how I liked to think about it, anyway. Can a little smoozing and smooth-talking get you everything?”
“I guess not,” I filled in for him. “But in your case it got you a lot.”
He didn’t argue, which presumably meant I’d understood him. “And of course I was always completely truthful when nudging people toward the things I wanted from them.”
He’d lied, probably quite a bit, to manipulate the people around him? I could picture that, with a sinking sensation in my gut.
The curse he carried would be fitting for that, wouldn’t it? He must have screwed someone, maybe a lot of someones, over with lies, and now he couldn’t express anything directly even if he needed to.
“People got hurt?” I ventured quietly.
Jenson shrugged as well as he could with his back on the grass. “People can only blame themselves for not using their brains a little more to avoid falling for it in the first place,” he said, and then winced. He’d obviously come to realize that justification wasn’t actually true. “Don’t worry about that, Trixie. Why should you when you’ve never fallen for it?”
His voice had gone raw in a way that made my earlier uneasiness fade. “No wonder I irritated you so much, then.”
Jenson was silent for a stretch. He must have been figuring out the best way he was capable of responding. Finally, he propped himself up on his elbows so he could meet my eyes.
“Is it that hard to see that you’re the only person I actually like?”
A lump filled my throat, so sudden and potent I couldn’t come up with any words. It didn’t matter anyway, because Jenson was pushing to his feet a moment later, brushing off his slacks with jerky movements as if he wasn’t entirely comfortable with what he’d just admitted.
“I’d hate to miss being used for target practice in Archery,” he said briskly, and gave me a jaunty salute. “Keep up the good work without me.”
He sauntered off toward the school building, leaving me even more uncertain about how to feel about him than I’d been before this conversation.
Chapter Eleven
Jenson
For whatever reason, in all their wisdom, the wonderful staff of Roseborne had packed my afternoon jammed-full. I got out of the infirmary with my arm patched up where my Archery partner had clipped it just in time to start my shift on this week’s bathroom-cleaning crew.
The last thing I was in the mood for was scrubbing down shower stalls and urinals. Checking the list of tasks under my name, I grabbed a rag and got started on the sinks, going with the least offensive option first. As I worked, I eyed the three guys who’d gotten the same assignment. From years of habit, my mind automatically skimmed through any useful detail I’d picked up about them.
Useful to me, that was. The pudgy guy named Jackman who was wiping the mirrors seemed like my best bet. It was only in the last few months that I’d had classes where I’d learned much of his story, but I knew enough to push the right buttons.
I let my sleeve fall back to reveal the bandage and “accidentally” stepped close enough to the other guy that his elbow bumped me when he lowered his arm. I jerked back with a pained flinch, even though the contact had only stung a little.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said nonchalantly as he turned to check on me. “Can’t complain when the arrow could have gone right through my arm.”
Jackman’s eyes widened, probably with the experience of encountering an arrow that intimately before. He’d been here a while longer than me, so he’d had plenty of opportunity to enjoy all Archery had to offer. “Sorry,” he said, despite—and most likely partially because of—my preemptive reassurance. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Never been better! And delighted to get right back to work a half hour after I was bleeding all over the floor. Nothing better for building character, am I right?”
I said it with a joking lilt, and one of the other guys snickered, but I saw Jackman’s shoulders stiffen like I’d thought they might.
Whatever sin had drawn Roseborne’s attention to him, it had something to do with being a total slacker. I’d gathered from his offerings in Composition class and Literary Analysis that his carelessness had meant he’d missed out on a lot—and disappointed a lot of people. From the way his voice shook whenever he talked about responsibilities he’d evaded, he’d been here long enough to believe he deserved this place.
And hopefully to want to be “better.”
“They should have given you a break,” he said. Not quite there yet, but guilt was one of the easiest emotions to hook.
“Ah, I don’t mind,” I said. “Putting in my time keeps me honest.”
Jackman’s expression tightened, and then he was blurting out on cue, “You’ve put in enough for today. I’ll take over the rest of your duties in here.”
I stared at him as if shocked. “I don’t mind pushing through. I’d never ask—”
“You shouldn’t have to. It’s fine.” He gave me a light shove toward the door, which was propped open to let out the fumes of the cleaning fluids. “You’ll be doing me a favor. I’ve got more character-building to do.”
He managed a small smile to go with the remark. I wavered for a second and then said, “Well, if you’re sure…?”
“Absolutely. It’s all covered. Go rest your arm.”
Don’t mind if I do. I gave him a grateful wave and stepped out of the bathroom to find Elias lurking in the hall just outside.
One look at his face told me he’d heard that entire conversation and had worked up some professional-level indignation about it. He crossed his arms where he was standing by the wall and gave me an authoritative glower.
“Problem, teach?” I asked. His slight wince at that blasé nickname always made it worthwhile.
“That’s taking quite a risk, getting someone to do your work for you, isn’t it?” he said.
I held up my hands, all innocence. “Hey, it wasn’t my idea. I’d have happily kept going. How is it my fault if it makes someone else even happier to take the load off my back?”