by Julia Nobel
“Let’s get one thing straight. When I started the year, that door only had one name on it: mine. Victoria Stuart-Bevington. I wasn’t supposed to have a roommate this year. As far as I’m concerned, I still don’t have a roommate this year.” She wrenched the door open and marched out, pulling off Emmy’s nameplate as she went.
Emmy shoved a pile of clothes off the bed and threw herself down. Well, this was lovely.
• • •
Emmy heard lots of voices floating up and down the hallway, but she didn’t see anyone else that afternoon. By the time five thirty rolled around, she figured it must be dinnertime, even if her jet-lagged stomach didn’t agree. She flipped through the school handbook until she found a section called Dining. Apparently, everyone ate in a room called the Hall, which was actually an old cathedral that the school had renovated. That must be why the school reminded her of a church. It used to be one.
The Hall was part of the main building, and Emmy didn’t need the handbook’s map to find it. As soon as she got close, she heard voices and cutlery echoing off every stone wall. She grabbed a few things off the food table and sat in the quietest corner.
After dinner she came back to an empty dorm room. She could go down to the common room and try to make some friends, but what was the point? She’d just say the wrong thing. Besides, Wellsworth wasn’t the first school her mom had sent her to so she could get a “top-notch education,” and it probably wouldn’t be the last. She’d figured out a long time ago that friends never stuck around when she switched schools, so why bother making new ones?
She started rummaging for her pajamas and found her soccer cleats instead. Maybe soccer might give her a friend or two. She’d never fit in on her teams at home because she always played with older girls, but that might be different here. Then again, she might not even make the team.
She sighed and pulled out her father’s box. Had he ever been to a school like this in England? Had he made friends easily? Emmy’s mom was always so bubbly, like some kind of delicious drink, but Emmy…well, she was more like a soda can that had gone flat. Maybe she was more like her dad. Or maybe she was just an anomaly. An evolutionary blip that would disappear as quickly as she had come.
She slid the box under her bed—Victoria didn’t seem like the kind of roommate who would understand about her dad. She opened up her laptop and typed “Thomas Allyn” into her web browser. She’d searched for her dad a thousand times, but she’d never found anything. This time was no different.
She closed her laptop and slipped it back into its case. There must be a reason someone had sent her that letter now, right before she got to England, but she had no clue how to figure that reason out. How could she find information about someone who seemed to have been erased?
Emmy jumped. Her cell phone was ringing. She pulled it out of her backpack. “Hello?”
“Hello, darling!” her mother said. “How are you? Did you have a good flight?”
“Yeah, it was fine.”
“How are you getting settled in? Have you met your roommate? Are you making lots of friends already?”
“Uh…”
“Never mind, I guess you just got there, but I’m sure friends will come easily enough.”
Emmy didn’t say anything. When had she ever made friends easily?
“Listen, darling, I can’t talk long, I’m having dinner with Gretchen, but there was one tiny thing we didn’t get to discuss before you left.”
Emmy’s whole body got stiff. Any time her mother said they had to talk about something, it rarely turned out to be tiny.
“Wellsworth has very challenging academic standards, and I think it’s best if you don’t take on any extracurricular activities that aren’t directly related to your studies.”
“What do you mean?”
Her mother cleared her throat. “I think it’s best if you focus on schoolwork. You can’t afford to be distracted by anything extra, like clubs, or sports, or—”
“You mean soccer.” Emmy’s heart hammered against her ribs. “You’re saying I’m not allowed to play soccer.”
“That’s right.”
Emmy’s voice seemed to have disappeared. She had a million things to say, but she couldn’t spit any of them out.
“I know that might be a bit disappointing, but—”
“Disappointing!?” Emmy blurted. “Soccer’s one of the most important things in my life, Mom! You can’t just take that away from me!”
“Emmy, don’t be so dramatic. I know soccer is important to you, but it’s just a game. You’re almost twelve; you need to start focusing on what really matters. These next few years of school will shape the course of your life. You can’t afford to be distracted.”
“It’s never been a problem before.”
“But now you’re at a much more rigorous school. It’s not like we can move you somewhere else if you run into trouble.”
“But Madam Boyd said I could go somewhere else if Wellsworth was too hard.”
“Emmeline, do you have any idea how humiliating it would be if you had to leave school?”
“You’ve moved me to new schools before.”
“Yes, but boarding school is different.” She paused and took a deep breath. “I was doing an interview yesterday, and the reporter asked whether sending you to a boarding school showed good parenting skills. I have to be careful about this. Can you imagine how damaging it would be to my career if I sent my daughter to boarding school and she couldn’t cope? The press would have a field day with me, with both of us.”
Emmy’s jaw went tight. So that’s what this was really about. Her mom’s career. It was always about her mom’s career.
Her mom sighed. “We’ll have to finish this conversation later, I’m going to be late. I love you.” The phone went dead.
Emmy clicked the red button on her phone. No soccer. The one thing she was looking forward to. The one thing that mattered. The one place Emmy mattered. But that didn’t matter to her mother.
• • •
Emmy hadn’t been asleep that long when her alarm started blaring the next morning. She rubbed her eyes. Victoria was nowhere to be seen. Probably got up early so I couldn’t ask her for help.
Emmy’s school uniform wouldn’t be ready for a few days, but she had a gray skirt and a sage green sweater that might blend in. Her first two classes were economics and biology, and they were every bit as hard as Madam Boyd had warned. The economics teacher kept sneezing, which made him lose his train of thought and change topics in the middle of a sentence. After class he dumped a stack of homework sheets on Emmy’s desk and walked away before she could ask any questions. The biology teacher was more helpful, but he spent so long going on about natterjack toads that she missed lunch. When the bell rang, she had to race to her fine arts class, where she was bowled over by the smell of moldy fruit.
“We need to sketch the fruit in various states of decay,” the teacher drawled. “It draws us closer to the very essence of the peach!”
After madly taking notes on oil spills in geography, she checked her after-school schedule. She was supposed to talk about a plan for learning Latin with a teacher named Master Larraby. She followed the map to the Classical Studies wing, found the right office, and waited. And waited. And waited. She checked her schedule again. Latin tutorial, Master Larraby’s office, Classical Studies department. She was definitely in the right place, but there was no teacher to be found.
An hour later, she threw her bag over her shoulder and stomped back down the hallway. What a waste of time. At least if she went back to her room, she could get a little homework done before dinner.
She slipped into the common room and nearly bumped into a group of girls who were crowded around a fancy-looking shoebox.
“Where did you get them, Jaya?” an older girl asked.
“Mum just sent them from Milan,” ans
wered a willowy girl with dark hair and eyes. “I hope they fit; she never gets my size right. She’s so self-involved, it’s like she forgets who I am.”
“That’s nothing,” said another girl. “When I turned fifteen, my mum sent me a ‘Happy Seventeenth’ card and gave me a car.”
“Did you hear about Malcolm Galt?” said the girl called Jaya. “He jumped off the chapter house and broke his arm.”
Somebody laughed. “What else is new? He never could resist a dare.”
“I hear Dev Masrani was there, too,” an older girl said. “He’s still in the medical center.”
Jaya’s jaw dropped. “Is he hurt badly?”
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “He didn’t go to the hospital, so I guess it can’t be that bad.”
“Then why is he still in the medical center?”
The girl shrugged. “Beats me.”
Emmy slid past the girls and ducked her head. People were starting to stare.
“Has anybody talked to her yet?” someone whispered.
“How did she get in after term started?”
“Maybe she has famous parents.”
“I bet they just sent her with a big fat donation.”
“Honestly,” said a black-haired girl on the couch, “if you want to know who she is, why don’t you bloody well ask her?” She jumped up, marched over to Emmy, and stuck out her hand. She was shorter than Emmy, but her handshake was so powerful it made Emmy wince. “I’m Lola Boyd. Who are you?”
“Uh, Emmy Willick.”
“Good, then,” Lola said. “Now, do you want to sit with us or would you rather stand here and feel like an idiot?”
Emmy had no clue what to say to that. At least Lola was talking to her. Lola had been sitting with a boy who was fiddling with a music player. He had dark eyes and skin, and everything about him was messy—his hair, his shirt, even his tie. Then he looked up and smiled. It was the first smile Emmy had seen in two days. She tucked her hair behind her ear and sat down.
Lola slumped down on the couch and threw her feet up on the coffee table, her thick black boots clunking heavily on the wood. Emmy smiled. Those boots definitely weren’t part of the uniform code. Lola had an accent, too, and this time Emmy was pretty sure it was Scottish.
“Don’t worry about those gossiping harpies,” Lola said. “Their barks are worse than their bites.”
“I’m Jack.” The boy pulled out one of his ear buds. “Jack Galt.”
Galt. Like the boy who had broken his arm. Maybe they were related.
“I’m Emmy Willick.”
“Wow, American,” Jack said. “We don’t get a lot of you at Wellsworth. Parents scarpered, have they?”
Emmy blinked. “Huh?”
Jack shook his head and smiled. “It means they took off and left you here. You’ve never been to a school in the UK, have you?”
Emmy shook her head.
A group of older boys walked past them, laughing and talking loudly. One of them had his arm in a cast. Jack’s whole body went stiff.
“Have you talked to him yet?” Lola asked.
“Nope.”
“Are you going to?”
Jack shrugged. “What’s there to say?”
“I don’t know, maybe, ‘Sorry you broke your arm while you were being a stupid show-off, Malcolm. Hope it doesn’t hurt too much.’”
The boy laughed while he tried to balance a stack of books on his cast. He looked a lot older, probably in his last year at school. “Is that the kid who jumped off the roof?”
“Something like that,” Jack said. “That’s my brother, Malcolm.”
Emmy looked back at the boy. His skin and hair were so much lighter than Jack’s. It was hard to believe they shared the same DNA. “He doesn’t really, um, I mean, you don’t exactly look alike.”
“Yeah, everyone says that. My dad’s white, and Malcolm takes after him. I look a lot more like my mum—she’s from Sri Lanka.”
“Is Dev still in the medical center?” Lola asked.
Jack nodded. “I don’t think he’s too badly hurt, just shaken up. I went to see him this morning.”
“What was he doing with Malcolm?”
Jack rolled his eyes. “Latin Society.”
“Jeez, can’t they get those Latin Society blokes under control? They think they’re bloody invincible, and then somebody ends up in the medical center for two days.”
Emmy rubbed her fingers together. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be part of this Latin Society.
“Can’t the principal do anything about it?” she asked.
“Principal?” Lola said. “You mean the headmaster?”
Emmy nodded.
“We don’t see him much. He’s always busy with teachers or school governors. The housemasters and housemistresses are the ones who really run things. It was probably the same at your old school.”
“We didn’t have housemasters or housemistresses at my old school.”
“No?” Lola picked up a soccer magazine. “Who took care of the boarders?”
“I didn’t go to a boarding school. I lived at home with my mom.”
Lola raised her eyebrows.
“You’ve never been a boarder?” Jack asked.
Emmy shook her head. Jack and Lola looked at each other.
“What?” Emmy’s chest was tightening up again. “Is it really that bad?”
Lola shrugged. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“On lots of things.” Suddenly Lola slammed her magazine shut and stared at Emmy. “Wait, who’s your roommate?”
“Some girl named Victoria.”
Jack groaned, and Lola winced. She shook her head and opened her magazine again. “They’re not even giving you a fighting chance.”
CHAPTER 4
Humanities and Latin
The next day’s classes were just as hard, and the jet lag wasn’t helping. She was late for two classes, which earned her some pretty good glares from the teachers. She ducked down a flight of rickety steps that were supposed to lead to the Howard Room for her last class of the day: humanities.
She paused. Was she in the right place? It looked way older than the rest of the school. It had a dank, musty smell, like no one had opened a window in years. Actually, there were no windows at all. Just flickering light bulbs and the occasional security camera. The ceiling was held up with wooden beams that hung so low a tall person might have to duck.
The hallway meandered a long way. The sound of voices echoed around a corner, and they finally led her to the Howard Room. She shoved the heavy door open and blinked. This was no ordinary classroom. It was a perfect circle lined with round benches. A steep stone staircase led down to a scuffed platform where a teacher might give lectures. It was like being at one of those old colleges—like Harvard or Yale. Emmy swallowed hard. Even the classroom felt way over her head.
She slid into a bench at the back, and someone cleared her throat. “You’re in my seat.”
Emmy turned around. Victoria was sneering at her, along with another girl who smirked like a cat that had seen a mouse.
“Sorry.” Emmy picked up her bag. “I didn’t know these seats were assigned.”
“They’re not.” A man strode into the room carrying a stack of books and papers. “And as such, I’m sure Miss Stuart-Bevington would be more than happy to find her own seat rather than usurping someone else’s.”
Victoria flashed a tight smile, like she was supposed to be happy about eating lima beans. Emmy cringed. She would pay for this later.
“Uh, that’s okay, I don’t mind,” Emmy said, “I’ll just—”
“Miss Stuart-Bevington and Miss Gray could do with a change of scenery,” the man said. “I think their recent quiz results suggest that a trip to the front row would do them a worl
d of good.”
Victoria pressed her lips together. “No problem,” she said in an ultrasweet voice. “Come on, Arabella.” The two girls grumbled all the way down to the front row.
“You must be Emmeline,” the man said.
“It’s Emmy.”
“Nice to meet you, Emmy. I’m John Barlowe. I assume you’ve never taken a humanities class before?”
Emmy shook her head.
“Not to worry, we’ll get you sorted out.”
He turned and stepped lightly down the steps to the platform below. Lola and Jack came racing through the door and squeezed next to Emmy just as the second bell rang.
“Nicely done,” Lola commended. “How’d you get the harpies out of the back row?”
“Very brave for your second day,” Jack leaned closer and whispered, “I wouldn’t have had the guts.”
“All right, let’s get started.” Master Barlowe didn’t have to say it very loudly. His voice bounced off the old wood and stone like it was magnified by magic.
“Now that we’ve finished our introductory unit, we can start delving into British history and culture. In your first two years, you should have covered the Roman period, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Plantagenets. Today we start examining the Tudor period.”
Emmy stifled a groan. She didn’t even know who the Plant-ee-geniuses were, let alone how they fit into British history.
“I should warn you,” Master Barlowe continued, “the Tudor period is not for the faint of heart. It was marked by intrigue, betrayal, and terrible violence. Monarchs were assassinated, people were murdered because of their religions, and women had absolutely no legal rights. And yet, at the same time, public education was born and some of the most beautiful pieces of English literature were penned.”
Emmy sat up a little straighter. She was used to spending history lessons memorizing names and dates, but Barlowe made it sound like this class might be interesting.
“It was a time of great contradiction, and as you will see, many of the most important things that happened were carried out in secret. Secret marriages, secret alliances, and secret plots that led to the undoing of Britain’s most powerful men and women.”