We stopped outside a wooden door with the school crest set above the nameplate. “Kuykendall” didn’t look the way I expected. It sounded like there was an “r” in it, not a “y.” I was betting nothing here was as it seemed.
Nameless opened the door while I waited to be summoned, tamping down memories of the time I ducked into a restaurant to use the bathroom and the manager evicted me before I even got close. I kept expecting someone to see through the pastel eye shadow and pink lip gloss I’d nabbed from Claire’s room and tell me to get lost, I didn’t belong there.
“Diana Reed to see you, Jane,” she said.
I groaned at the double butchering of my name.
“Go right in, dear,” Nameless said, holding the door until I complied.
Irrational fears aside, I’ll admit that most of my assumptions of what to expect from a private school headmistress came from TV and movies. (Until I was ten, most of them came from knowing that our neighbor, Mr. Dodds, had been kicked out of his house for having a mistress. I didn’t know a schoolmistress was different until I read Harry Potter.) So you can probably imagine my relief when what was on the other side didn’t involve doily explosions, offers of tea, or even (and especially) torture scenarios.
The inside of the office was as dark as the halls had been bright, with plenty of burgundy and blue. Two leather chairs with those heavy brass tack things sat in front of the kind of desk that belonged in a lawyer’s office.
“Diana?” asked the woman standing at a window behind it.
No tail. No horns. No hooves. Just an over-the-thirty-five-year-old-hill, ex-model of a woman whose hair made my shade look downright filthy. She pointed to one of the chairs, and I sat, careful not to let the casters squeak against the carpet when it rolled forward.
“Dinah,” I corrected. “Dinah Powell. Reed’s my uncle’s name.”
“Oh, good, I was worried someone had botched your paperwork. Mrs. Hotchkiss’ hearing is terrible, but it’s easier to deal with than refiling you.” She pulled a slim folder from a drawer in her desk and flipped it open. “I understand you won’t be with us for the entire term.”
“I’m staying with my aunt and uncle for now, but I think they’re hoping I’ll like it and stay for good.”
They’d offered, more than once. Last spring, when Mom announced her anything-but-brilliant idea to pack me and Dad up when I finished tenth grade and trek cross-country, Aunt Helen had tried to get her to let me stay. She’d tried offers of better schools, like Lowry, or concessions of letting me stay with my friends, but Mom said no. The idea that I’d choose Aunt Helen and live in the world she’d stumbled into horrified my mother more than anything.
“I don’t imagine it’s easy to hopscotch from school to school so frequently.” Ms. Kuykendall had an accent, but I couldn’t place it.
I wouldn’t know. We’d only left New England in June. I’d never seen the inside of my school in Oregon.
“My parents expect me to come home once my cousin’s out of the hospital.”
“We were so sorry to hear about her condition. Has there been any sign of progress?”
“No, ma’am, not really.” Headmistress Kuykendall definitely struck me as a ma’am. “She opens her eyes sometimes, but the doctors say it’s more reflex than anything. They don’t say much when I’m in the room, so I don’t know a lot.”
If she caught the lie, I didn’t notice a change in her demeanor.
I knew plenty—more than the doctors or Aunt Helen or Uncle Paul. And I certainly knew more than the people who thought Claire’s stint in the hospital was nothing more than a “condition” of some kind flaring up.
“I’m sure your aunt and uncle appreciate having someone around.”
That’s what people kept telling me. I really couldn’t see how having someone who reminded them of Claire, practically living her life, was anything short of horror movie material. But if they were willing to let me stay, I wasn’t going to question it.
“They told Uncle Paul I could get a uniform shirt here. Claire’s was too big.”
Despite batty Mrs. Hotchkiss’ ramble about me throwing off their student-teacher ratio, most of the problem with me replacing my cousin on the school’s roster seemed to stem from the difficulty of getting a new uniform so quick. Three days didn’t give them enough time to order one, but Claire and I were almost the same size, except up top. Somehow the twerp had managed to steal all my hormones, which meant I was still in a training bra while she could have gotten a gig at Hooters long before she was legal.
The headmistress opened another drawer and pulled out a plastic-wrapped blouse. I slipped it over the blue tank top I’d worn that morning and put the blazer back on. At least my friend Tabs’ mom had been able to alter that into a close imitation of tailored. Plus, it covered the wrapping wrinkles.
“Here’s your handbook and paperwork.” Headmistress Kuykendall handed me a burgundy folder embossed with the school’s crest. “Claire Reed” was printed in gold letters at the bottom.
“Have your aunt or uncle sign the forms, and bring them back to your homeroom teacher tomorrow.”
Thankfully, she’d moved on from any sort of conversation I was supposed to participate in. I was two seconds and half a breath from saying, “If the school’s so hard up for cash you have to recycle a two-dollar piece of folded rag paper, I’ll buy myself a folder and write my name in with a Sharpie.”
I stashed another piece of Claire’s life in my bag, where I could keep it safe, determined to preserve everything I could for her.
“You’re a few minutes late, but Mr. Tarrelton shouldn’t hold it against you, since you were here.”
She walked me to the door and held it open.
“Do I need a slip or something?”
“Abigail will handle it,” she said, then disappeared back behind her door without telling me who Abigail was or where I could find her.
That problem, at least, solved itself once I was back in the main office. Abigail was the girl I’d seen filing papers. As soon as I rounded the partition, she slipped her arm through mine and held on. I pegged her as the kind of person who would add “please” to a “Kick Me” sign on her own back, to be polite, so long as getting kicked meant she got to participate.
“Diana?”
“Dinah,” I corrected.
“Oh! Sorry. People must butcher your name all the time.”
Yes. Yes they do. And I can never find one of those monogrammed ornaments at Christmas with my name on it, either. That always annoys me. Dinah comes out of the Bible, according to Uncle Paul. Christmas ornaments should cover the Bible names; they just should.
“I’m Abigail. There’s not much you can do to that, unless you want to call me Abby, which no one ever does.”
Yep. Definitely overeager. Her crazy curls were as energetic as she was, defying the evil headband to hold them in place.
“I’m the office page for first period. Where’s your class?”
“Um …” I fidgeted, jostling notebooks and pamphlets. “Looks like trig, with Tarrelton, in …”
“Two seventeen,” Abigail-not-Abby finished for me. “I have him next period. He’s fine, except he takes forever to explain things that really aren’t that hard to understand.”
Smart and overeager. Oh, joy. This was not improving my first impression of Abigail-not-Abby, who went on my list of people to avoid, not because of her personality, but because she had found a way to keep her knee socks from falling down without having to half hop as she walked to hoist them back in place.
“Tarrelton’s close to my English lit class. Do you have Greystone?”
“No, it looks like I have—”
She snatched the paper slip out of my hand.
“Looks like you have Tripp for English lit when I have trig. You’re lucky. I have Greystone the Gargoyle—she’s a total troll.”
I smiled and nodded, pretending I didn’t want to staple her mouth shut.
“Mr. Tripp’
s pretty cool. And he won’t make you do the new-kid-introduction speech, either.”
I tried to mimic Abigail-not-Abby’s perma-grin, but the muscles in my face revolted after twenty seconds. If the whole school was this happy, I was in trouble.
Abigail-not-Abby led me through the school’s main floor, our matched heels clicking and clacking in time as she pointing out key features like the cafeteria and the library. With all the doors closed, and all the students behind them, we could have been walking through a white marble tomb, or some old museum where you’re afraid to touch anything because it’ll set off alarms if you breathe too hard. Maybe I could use this for a sociology project when I got shipped back West: Private School, the Total Immersion Experience, or My Life in the Hive.
“You probably figured this out already, but the two hundreds are on the second floor,” she said as we started to climb an actual staircase with carpet and rails, not the cement incline with a retaining wall we had at Ninth Street. “The ones are downstairs, and the threes are in the annex outside. If you have drama or tech theater, then you go out the main doors and take the left walkway all the way to the end. Gym’s down the right walkway, but it’s faster to cut through the building and go in the back.”
I absorbed her words more than I listened to them, too caught up with the possibility that I was about to put a face to the sucking chest wound that had formed in the last week. All I knew about Brooks Walden was that he had dark hair and brown eyes, like about sixty percent of the people I’d seen that morning, and that he was a junior, like me, which meant we could be in the same trig class.
At least, it had seemed possible in the beginning, when I was still thinking of Lowry as “not that big” compared to public school. In reality, the place was huge, and the idea of having to locate rather than bump into him was taking over my mind.
“Here you go, two seventeen.” Abigail-not-Abby knocked, then opened the door before anyone could so much as say “Come in.” “New student, Mr. Tarrelton. Dinah Powell.”
I hung back and took a quick survey of the room.
More windows, which was going to take some getting used to after years of class-in-a-box. None of the faces stood out as particularly evil. There were more guys than girls, and only two of them didn’t have dark hair, which made things difficult. I couldn’t get a good look at their eyes without staring, and I wasn’t about to get myself tagged as the Creepy New Girl Who Stares at People.
One of them glanced up and caught my eye, so I diverted my attention to the board to see if there was any clue to the day’s lesson.
Great. Forget creepy, I was going to be the Stupid New Girl Who Does Math on Her Fingers and Toes.
I’d never been a bad student; most of my teachers considered me smart, even. But apparently public-school smart and Lowry smart didn’t carry the same definition. The writing on the board might as well have been Greek. In fact, some of it was Greek. Sigma or phi or epsilon or one of those other letters I thought wouldn’t enter my vocabulary before freshman rush at college.
It was the first week of a new term. How were they so far ahead?
“Class, this is Miss Powell,” Mr. Tarrelton started. I was beginning to think he’d forgotten me standing there by his desk like an idiot. “She’s just moved here from …”
“Oregon,” I said. “But I didn’t really move. My aunt and uncle enrolled me here while I’m staying with them. Their daughter’s in the hospital, and they don’t know how long she’ll be there.”
My answers sounded robotic, and not at all the way I wanted. I certainly hadn’t intended to say that much.
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that, Miss Powell,” Mr. Tarrelton said awkwardly. He was so flustered that he didn’t make me finish orientation by way of public humiliation. “If you’ll take your seat, we can get back to class.”
He pointed to the only seat not occupied (second row, by the wall), and I did my best not to dive for it to get out from under the weight of every eye in the room. Mr. Tarrelton fell straight back into the roll.
“Courtney D’Avignon,” he called. I was surprised to see one of the dark-haired boys who wasn’t Brooks Walden raise his hand. The only Courtney I’d ever met was a girl.
“You’re lucky,” the guy behind me leaned up and whispered.
“Huh?”
“You missed one of Tarrelton’s famous pop quizzes. Two minutes earlier and you’d have been trapped with the rest of us.”
Pop quizzes in week one—if I hadn’t hated private school already, I would have hated private school.
“I’m Dex.”
When Mr. Tarrelton called out “Jackson Dexter,” he raised his hand.
It was actually a relief to find out he wasn’t Brooks. He had the dark hair and brown eyes but was too friendly. And I think if I’d found out Claire’s personal demon was sitting so close, I’d have blown my chance right there by attacking him with a freshly sharpened #2 Mirado Black Warrior.
“Dinah,” I said back.
Hayden Leung turned out to be a not-Brooks, as did William McHenry. Daley Nifong was a dumpy blond with freckles. The guy in front of me was a not-Brooks named Marcus Norwood.
Channing Pepperidge sat forward on her chair as though it were made of upended tacks, so her weight was off her butt and her toes were overpointed, the way you see models sit in magazines. She was the only one who bothered to say “Here.”
Jordan St. Croix was a paper-thin girl with short black hair that made the uniform headband disappear. That just left one possibility, assuming he was in the room at all.
“Brooks Walden.”
He sat on the far side of the room, fourth row, next to the window. I turned my head, pretending to familiarize myself with names as they were called. His head was down, and he was twirling a pen between his fingers. When he heard his name, he raised his hand and flicked the pen in Mr. Tarrelton’s direction.
Target locked. Game on.
4
By the end of trig, I’d figured out no less than twenty ways to kill Brooks Walden before he left the room. True, not all of them were practical, and half of them were gratuitously messy, but they’d have worked well enough—if I’d wanted him to get off easy.
Claire didn’t get an easy out; neither would he.
I settled for the daydream, trying to keep up with the lesson, and hated Abigail-not-Abby just a little bit more for describing Mr. Tarrelton’s lectures as needlessly slow. He talked like he’d been mainlining caffeine. So rather than pretend I knew what was going on, I copied everything he scrawled on the board and focused on staying awake. Not only would detention have been bad, but I was pretty sure I’d dream of maiming Brooks, and with my luck, I’d talk in my sleep.
At my old school, math had been my best subject, one I liked, but here … ugh. After thirty-one minutes of equilateral something-or-others getting mixed around with isosceles what-chamacallits, I wanted to strangle myself with a hypotenuse. (I’d fallen so far into my delirium, that joke was actually funny.)
Marcus, in front of me, gave up on note taking and drew tiny cartoons of Mr. Tarrelton being eaten alive by psychotic sigmas, and to my left, Jordan’s hands under her desk made the distinct click, click, click of someone texting. Channing half coughed a laugh, so I was fairly certain who was on the other end of the message.
To my horror, when the bell finally rang, I glanced at my notes and couldn’t even read half of them. My brain had disconnected from my hand at some point during the hour and decided that random doodles were a better way to fill my paper.
“It’s not really trig.”
As I shoved my papers into my book and then my book into my bag, a shadow far too tall to be my own appeared on the wall. Dex leaned on the desk that had belonged to Jordan St. Croix, so we were facing each other.
“What’s not trig?” I asked.
“This class,” he said.
“Then why did I just suffer through it?”
He smiled in a way real people shouldn’t
be able, warming the room by at least ten degrees.
“Because whatever passed for trig at your old, and I’m guessing public, school—which actually was trig—wasn’t up to Lowry standards. They changed the curriculum a couple of years ago. The class you’re in now is what most schools call precalculus.”
I really hated private school. And Jackson Dexter wasn’t too high on my list of likes, either. I mentally squished him between the building and Abigail-not-Abby. (She kicked him in the face; it was great.)
“That your subtle way of telling me you know I’m not part of the club here?” I asked.
“No more than I am. I went to Massey Junior High. I was slated to start Ninth Street before I got my scholarship.”
“I went to Ninth Street before I moved to Oregon this summer.”
“It takes a few a days to learn the rhythm, but you’ll figure it out. Trust me.”
Nope, sorry. Trust was a no-go.
“When’d you lose the nose ring?” he asked.
“About two hours after I figured out I’d be going here, so … three days ago. How could you tell?”
“I’m observant. And I’m guessing the lisp means you had one in your tongue, too?”
“Orange barbell.” Sticking my tongue out was a reflex whenever anyone asked about the piercing; it was weird not seeing it.
“Would’ve guessed pink.”
“Not my color,” I said, retrieving my schedule slip to locate my next class.
It was in the annex, so I needed to go out of the main building and into the one behind it. I shifted into the flow of students on their way to the staircase. Dex followed me.
“Where you headed?”
“English lit.”
“Not Greystone.” He cringed.
“Tripp.”
“Perfect.” He reached for my bag, adding it to his shoulder, then grabbed my arm the same way Abigail-not-Abby had in the office. “You’d never have survived the Gargoyle. She loves fresh meat.”
“Um … what are you doing?”
“Being charming and walking you to class. New girl gets a guide, I’m fairly certain it’s in the school charter.”
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