The Sinister Sweetness of Splendid Academy

by Nikki Loftin

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

  STEPMOTHERS

  On Monday morning, I slept in—thanks to Molly not talking to me, which, as it turned out, even included not waking me up—and missed school breakfast. Bryan had gone earlier, and Molly didn’t trust me not to run away between the house and the school, obviously, so she drove me there. In silence.

  I went to class, but my desk wasn’t there. Andrew’s desk was, though.

  And to my complete amazement, so was Andrew.

  “Lorelei?” he whispered. He looked as surprised as I felt.

  “Andrew? I thought you were—”

  “Lorelei Robinson?” Ms. Morrigan was standing there, right by my elbow. “I’m sorry, you must have forgotten your class transfer.”

  “Class transfer?” What was she talking about?

  Ms. Morrigan’s eyes gleamed as she pitched her voice so the whole class would hear. “Yes, dear. Your special class. For children who have special needs? Because of your problems with writing?” She shook her head. “Your test scores place you somewhere around the second or third grade for basic writing proficiency. I’m not sure how you were ever promoted to sixth grade. Negligent teachers in those underfunded public schools, I suppose. But we’ll take care of you here at Splendid.” She pushed me gently toward the door. “You may go to the special workstation I set up for you. Hurry up, now! You have a lot of work to do today, and your tutors are ready to help you learn everything a girl like you can.”

  “Special workstation?”

  “Yes,” she answered, her mouth twitching with laughter. “The one you went to on Friday afternoon?”

  Oh. I got it. The kitchen.

  “Oh, Lorelei,” I heard Allison whisper. She wasn’t looking at me, wouldn’t look at me. She was embarrassed she knew me. “How awful,” she said.

  “You have no idea,” I answered.

  My face was on fire. The whole class was silent, except for Neil Ogden, who whispered “moron” as I walked past him. There wasn’t time to say anything to Andrew. I would have to speak to him later. At lunch, maybe.

  The hallways were silent and empty. That was weird. Usually there were a couple of kids in the halls, dodging whatever part of class they disliked most, or just messing around. Where were they all today? Too full from breakfast to run around anymore? I thought back to Friday, to my ideas about Ms. Morrigan and the food. I had been so certain of what had happened to Andrew—but now he’d come back to school. Maybe I was wrong about a lot of things. Maybe Andrew had been wrong too, about the sand.

  Something tickled the back of my neck. I swatted at it, thinking it was a mosquito, but there was nothing there. Then I realized: There was something. I had just passed the pictures of the other Splendid schools. I stepped back to look at them. I wanted to see if the little girl Vasalisa really did look like the one who worked in the kitchen.

  She did. Her face was still curved into that hideous frozen smile, the one that had the word run! hidden just behind the teeth. She wanted to warn me, I thought.

  “Warn me of what?” I whispered. “Ms. Morrigan? Is she really a witch?”

  I waited, but there was no answer, just the feeling of hundreds of eyes following me as I walked on. I sped up; that hallway was really creeping me out.

  I turned the corner too fast, though, and almost ran into Principal Trapp, who was walking toward me, her hand on the knob of the teacher’s workroom door. I glimpsed just past her arm a gleam of copper. The kettledrum? It had been moved, and it didn’t look exactly like a drum now. I craned my neck to see. The principal shut the door and looked at me, surprised and disappointed, like I’d done something wrong.

  “Lorelei? What are you doing in the hall?” She raised one perfect, dark eyebrow. “Didn’t you hear the announcement at breakfast? Hallway privileges have been rescinded for the duration of the week . . . oh, yes. You missed breakfast today, didn’t you? Do you have an explanation for that?” Her eyes widened. “You weren’t feeling ill, were you?”

  I shook my head. “My stepmom,” I said. “I’m getting the silent treatment. She won’t even say ‘Get out of bed’ to me.”

  “That’s terrible! You must be joking.”

  “I wish. Stepmoms stink.”

  Principal Trapp laughed, and the whole hallway seemed lighter. My chest seemed lighter, too, like there was hope for me, even with a teacher like Ms. Morrigan. Principal Trapp wasn’t my friend, but she was one of those adults who got kids. She really cared; it was there every time she looked at me.

  “Don’t tell anyone, Lorelei,” she said, “but I have a little secret.”

  “What?” Secrets in Splendid? This had to be good.

  “I’m a stepmother,” she said.

  “Really? Who’s the lucky stepkid?”

  “You know her pretty well already,” she teased, “even though she may not be your favorite person right now. I hear she sent you to detention on Friday for something or other. And she told me this morning she’s signed you up for special tutoring to help with your academic problems. I know it’s not fun, but we want to help you, Lorelei. You are so important to us here at Splendid. I know I feel that way anyway.”

  I wanted to melt at her praise, but I was too busy being horrified.

  “Ms. Morrigan’s your stepdaughter?” There went my plans to tell her how evil my teacher was being. How had a woman as nice as the principal ended up with a daughter that monstrous? “I didn’t even know you were married.”

  Her face fell. She looked so sad that I knew something terrible had happened. She leaned back against the wall, as if she couldn’t hold her own weight anymore.

  “He passed on many years ago. Only a day after our wedding, actually. I had so little time with him. But he gave me the most wonderful thing I could ever imagine: his daughter.”

  “You really love Ms. Morrigan, don’t you?” I said, my heart plummeting. It was just like Dad with Molly. They couldn’t see the witch right in front of them.

  There was no way I could tell the principal about her stepdaughter. “You love her . . . like a mom.”

  She nodded.

  “Molly isn’t that way,” I said. That was an understatement.

  “No,” she said. “She lacks that maternal spark, doesn’t she? I hate to say I noticed that right away.” Principal Trapp leaned over and cupped my chin in her hand. “If you were my stepdaughter, Lorelei, I would take better care of you.”

  My eyes prickled. Why couldn’t I have Principal Trapp for my stepmom? Oh, yeah. Because Dad had already married the useless Molly. I didn’t say anything; I thought I might say what I was feeling, and that wouldn’t make me sound very nice. So I kept my lips tight shut. But she looked like she could tell what I was thinking as she stroked my hair. It had been over a year since anyone had done that.

  “I wish,” I said at last. “I wish you could.”

  Principal Trapp hummed tunelessly. “I’ll tell you another secret, dear Lorelei. You’re special. The last time I met a little girl like you, I had to marry her daddy so I could be her mother.” She pushed a stray piece of hair behind my ear, and I shivered. “You remind me very much of her at this age. Stubborn, strong-willed, beautiful—with those same golden curls. But so unsure of herself, as you are. She really needed someone to help her find her calling.”

  As a witch? I thought, but then I knew what she meant. “She really loves teaching, then.”

  “She loves children,” Principal Trapp corrected, and straightened up, patting her hair back into the bun. “She cannot get enough of them. I’ve never seen anyone who cared so much, even feeding them herself to make sure they grow up big and strong.”

  “Yeah, she’s practically stuffing us full of knowledge,” I mumbled, “and cake.”

  This was it. My moment to say something, if I was going to say anything
at all, about the weird way Ms. Morrigan obsessed about the students’ mealtimes. Maybe I should just point out how eating all that junk food wasn’t really good for you?

  “You know, about the meals. They’re not very, um, balanced . . .”

  The corners of her mouth lifted. I guess it was weird, to have a kid complaining about too much junk food. I was about to tell her it wasn’t the type of food, but the quantity, when the door to the workroom swung open.

  Ms. Threnody had been inside listening, I assumed, the whole time.

  “Oh, it’s the little singing girl,” she trilled. “Have you been practicing your reed flute?”

  I tried not to glower at her, but I couldn’t help it. “No. I left it at school over the weekend.”

  “And this is the girl you were so certain would be my star pupil, my dear principal?” Ms. Threnody shrugged. “I will keep trying with her.” She glided toward us, and I looked away from her hypnotic eyes.

  I glanced down at a slight movement. Her fingers were trembling—the way Ms. Morrigan’s had a few days before. The bones and veins on the backs of her hands protruded so much now, it looked grotesque. Had she lost even more weight? She looked skeletal. Weak.

  The principal’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “I’m sure you will, although not today. Lorelei has special tutoring now,” Principal Trapp said and, smiling, warned me to hurry up. “Alva told me she’d set up something unique, and knowing how much she loves children, it’ll be unbelievable. I’ll want to hear all about it. So, hurry!”

  “Yes,” Ms. Threnody said, shaking her hair down over her face. “No dawdling. You have so much work to do today.” Her shoulders shook. Laughing at me. I wanted to smack her in the face with my fist. She raised one eyebrow. Just try it, she whispered into my mind, her lips not moving at all.

  Had I imagined it? I didn’t think my imagination was that good. Frightened, I practically ran down the hall toward the cafeteria. With every step, I doubted myself more. She couldn’t be a witch. Principal Trapp had said she’d known her for years. But if she wasn’t a witch, she was still one of the meanest people I’d ever met. Next to Ms. Morrigan.

  How had Ms. Threnody and Ms. Morrigan both fooled the principal for so long?

  I’d heard the expression that love was blind. I’d seen it in action with my dad and Molly. But this was worse than that. Did love make you a fool, too? Maybe they’d found some way to keep Principal Trapp in the dark, to hide their meanness from her.

  Or maybe she’s so kind she can’t see the darkness in them, any more than she sees the darkness in me.

  Maybe this was all a terrible nightmare. No, my nightmares weren’t this horrible. It had gotten so that the worst my sleeping mind could come up with wasn’t a patch on what was really happening to me during the daytime.

  The cafeteria kitchen was busy with the sounds of pans clanging and water running, but when I walked in, everything stopped. A dozen thin faces took me apart with their sharp eyes. Then, as abruptly as they had stopped work, they started again. No time to waste.

  Vasalisa approached me. “You’re back?” she asked. She was speaking more clearly now, even though she still had an accent. “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  She looked horrified. “You told your parents, yes? What the Morrigan made you do on Friday. They saw your hands. Why would they send you back?”

  I could have told her the truth—that my dad thought I was making it all up, or that I was crazy, that he hadn’t listened to anything I said since Mom fell—but I didn’t. What if I was wrong? Maybe I had made it all up, imagined it into something far worse than it was. Vasalisa seemed okay, but I didn’t know what she’d say if I told her I thought my teacher was a witch, so I just answered, “Because I’m a kid, and no one ever listens to kids.”

  “True,” she said, and handed me a pot scrubber. “But you could have run away. You should have. Washing dishes is the least of the punishments she has devised.”

  I was surprised she was even talking to me. On Friday, I had spent three hours scrubbing the kitchen fixtures, and the staff had treated me like I was a spy. They’d given the term “silent treatment” new meaning, even if it seemed sometimes they couldn’t have spoken if they’d wanted to. “Where would I go?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  I turned to the sink that was full of breakfast dishes and started running hot water over the grease-covered skillets, scrubbing until Vasalisa came to take over. I guess I wasn’t scrubbing fast enough, but it was hard. I was too short to really reach into the sinks.

  “Too slow,” she said, and handed me a towel. “Dry.”

  Those three words were the only ones spoken aloud for the rest of the morning. Every time I started to say anything, one of the kitchen crew shushed me. There were at least a dozen of them, mostly young men, but three girls like Vasalisa, too. They were all silent and scarily thin, but no one snuck a single bite of food the whole morning. And the food smelled heavenly. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, so I was starving hungry.

  Gustav—or Otto, I couldn’t remember which was which—set an enormous platter piled high with spaghetti in front of me while he went back to get a gravy boat full of marinara sauce. The steam from the pasta dampened my face, and I inhaled. Vasalisa was grating fresh Parmesan cheese on the stainless steel counter behind me, and the nearest men were chopping what looked like large hams into paper-thin slices. No one was looking. I took a noodle—just one, and sucked it in.

  “No!” Someone had seen.

  Vasalisa turned white, and her lips opened and closed, like a fish on a bank. “We can’t eat!”

  A few seconds later, the door to the kitchen slammed open, and the quiet grew thick, heavy, and ominous—the atmosphere before a tornado. Colder, too, I thought, and shivered as I swallowed. Colder?

  It was Ms. Morrigan.

  “A little mouse is nibbling at our feast,” she hissed. “Who is it?” She made that strange motion with her fingers close to her lips, and said three words. “You may speak.”

  I swallowed quickly.

  No one answered. No one even looked at her, I noticed. I dropped my eyes, too. It was hard not to look up, when her footsteps rang on the white tile floor, closer and closer to me. The footsteps stopped, right in front of me.

  One noodle. How had she known?

  Magic, my inner voice insisted. It has to be magic.

  “It couldn’t have been you, dear little Lorelei. Not after what I told you on Friday. Surely,” she said, and reached down with one hand to pull my chin up, “you listened to my instructions. What did I tell you?” Her fingers were icicles, and her breath was rank, like rotting meat.

  “You told me to clean,” I said at last. “And not to come out of the kitchen unless you told me to.”

  “And what else?”

  “And not t-t-to eat,” I stuttered. “But I have to eat something!”

  Vasalisa made a tiny, birdlike sound. “Ah!”

  “Oh, you want to eat? How remiss of me. My apologies, dear. I’m sure I can get you something,” Ms. Morrigan said. “We don’t want anything to go to waste, now do we? Yes, I’ll make you a plate. Of course, you’ll have to eat every bite before you can go home today.”

  She slid past me, toward the workstation in the back of the kitchen where two of the men had been shelling crabs all morning for Tuesday’s crab cakes. I rubbed at the places on my chin where her nails had scratched me and watched as she heaped a plate full of crab shells. She dropped the dish down on the counter in front of me.

  “There you go. Your lunch. You eat it all up now. As soon as the last bit is gone—oh, and believe me, I’ll know if a single claw is left uneaten—you may go home.”

  She left the room before I started to cry. Vasalisa wrapped her arms around me, and rocked me until my heart felt as wrung o
ut as a dishtowel. My tears soaked her apron, and after a while I realized the top of my head was wet. She had been crying, too.

  “Why, Vasalisa?” I asked, but she just shushed me, and rocked back and forth. The rest of the kitchen staff ignored us. Lunch was coming, and they had work to do.

  Me? I had shells to eat. And I couldn’t go home until they were gone. The thought made my stomach heave, and I knew I had never been this alone.

  Then I heard the cracking sound right next to me.

  “Vasalisa? What are you doing?” I watched through swollen eyes as she picked up the smallest crab shell on the plate and stuffed it into her mouth. She chewed over a hundred times, her teeth sounding like she was eating glass. I winced as she swallowed. “Stop!” I said, and grabbed her hand when she reached for another crab leg.

  “No, let me,” she said. “I can do this for you.”

  I let my hand fall, my mind spinning, and watched her eat three more crab shells. She took a break to drink some water, and I asked, as softly as I could, “Why?”

  I didn’t need to say any more; she understood. She swallowed, rubbed her throat, and whispered back, “I had a sister. Liliya. She was your age when I was taken. When we were both taken.”

  “Taken?”

  “By the witch.”

  She meant Ms. Morrigan. Maybe I’d been right all along. “Where is your sister now?”

  “Gone.”

  “Gone?” It took me a moment to realize she meant dead.

  “For many years now.” She took another drink, and coughed. “I was unkind to her. Selfish and vain. I called her terrible names and made her feel very bad.”

  “Sounds normal to me,” I said. “I don’t have a single friend who’s nice to her siblings.”

  “It is not normal in my country,” she said, shaking her head. “There we take care of our families. I did not. I chased her into the forest near our home, telling her I would kill her if she stole my wooden doll again.” She stopped talking long enough to choke back a sob. “I sent her into the arms of the witch. When I followed, too late, the evil one took me as well, but made me her slave. I was too thin, she said, to make even a snack.”