THREE
When Ms. Corby appeared a minute or so later, she had a man in a business suit with her. “Miss White, with me. Master Spears, with Mr. Devon,” she said with detached pleasantness. “The Young Ladies’ Wing is to the right, the Young Gentlemen’s to the left.”
For a moment, Spirit felt a flash of panic. Loch was the only person in this whole place she knew! But then she forced herself to be calm. It wasn’t as if they were being incarcerated, and after that interview with Doctor Ambrosius, it was pretty clear that being separated from Loch was the least of her worries. The four of them walked back beneath the balcony to where there was a perfectly ordinary set of double doors—a far more ordinary set than those that led into Doctor Ambrosius’s sanctum.
“Are you teachers?” Spirit asked, as Mr. Devon held open one door for them.
Ms. Corby looked faintly amused. “Certainly not. Mr. Devon and I assist Doctor Ambrosius directly. He has more to deal with than just this school.”
“Are you—” Loch hesitated over the word.
“Magicians?” Ms. Corby asked, sounding more than amused now. “Mr. Devon is, I am not. But everyone here knows what Doctor Ambrosius is, and what you youngsters are.” She turned her head slightly, arching her eyebrow at him. “It would be rather silly to try and hide it from the ones who work here.”
Spirit felt a little rattled at that. Either everyone here was in on some kind of massive deception, or—
Or it was real. And she couldn’t help thinking, with a feeling of icy fear, about what she had seen just before the accident.
They were at an intersection. Ahead were glass doors leading into what could not by any stretch of the imagination be called a “cafeteria.” Not when it was full of long wooden tables covered with snowy linen tablecloths, lined by plain, if elegant, chairs. To the right and left were more double doors like the ones they’d just come through.
“As I said,” Ms. Corby interrupted her thoughts, “Young Ladies to the right, Young Gentlemen to the left.” She walked off—again, without beckoning to Spirit or looking to see if she’d followed—and Spirit hurried after her.
The hallway was decorated like the Entry Hall. It was the rich man’s version of “rustic,” lit with deco-Egyptian cast bronze lanterns. It looked like the hallway of an expensive hotel, except that each of the doors had a little engraved plaque with someone’s name on it.
“We assumed you would prefer to be on the ground floor,” Ms. Corby said, as if she didn’t care one way or the other what Spirit preferred. “If not, just e-mail me. There are empty rooms on the second and third floors and we should be able to move you in a day or two.” She paused beside one of the last two doors before a staircase.
“Ground is fine,” Spirit said vaguely. How many kids were there in this school? There must have been twenty doors on this hallway alone.
Nodding, Ms. Corby opened the door.
Spirit wasn’t really expecting a room just like the one in the brochure. And she was right.
This was better.
The color scheme was pretty neutral, and even though the dorm-wings had obviously been built after the house itself, it had still been decorated in the “rich man’s rustic” style (and the school colors), with the addition of some pink. Just standing in the doorway she could see a dresser, a desk, a bed (so she’d have a room all to herself!), a huge closet . . .
“Your school uniforms are in the closet,” said Ms. Corby, as if she was reading Spirit’s mind. “There’s a copy of the Oakhurst Code of Conduct in the desk; we expect you to become familiar with it quickly. The uniform for Young Ladies is blazer and skirt during classroom hours; trousers may be worn by special arrangement with your instructor. The computer here is for your personal and academic use. The music library is networked on the school server and other media is available in the library. Attempting to download material from the Internet is in violation of the Code of Conduct. I’ll leave you to make yourself comfortable. Dinner is in two hours; you will need to be in uniform. Welcome to Oakhurst.”
“Thanks,” Spirit said. I think.
Ms. Corby turned away and walked briskly off down the hall. Spirit walked carefully into the room, trying not to hold her breath, although she felt as if she should.
Everything since she’d left the hospital this morning seemed utterly unreal, and this might be the most unreal thing of all. This was a huge room, more like an efficiency apartment than a room. It contained a mini-fridge and microwave, a gleaming laptop, and a mini entertainment center with a flat-screen TV.
There was a set of wireless speakers—so she wouldn’t be stuck with the tiny tinny ones laptops had if she wanted to listen to the school music library—and a set of high-quality in-ear earphones if she didn’t want to use the speakers. And through a door to the right, next to the desk, she could see her bathroom. She’d never had her own bathroom; there’d only been one for the whole family.
She turned away quickly and opened the closet. It was only half full, and it still contained more clothes than she’d ever had in her whole life. And not all of them were in Oakhurst brown and gold—she saw some of the things that she remembered had come to the rehab facility. It looked like someone had brought her stuff to her room and unpacked it while she’d been . . .
. . . being turned into a mouse and told she was a magician whose life was in constant danger.
Spirit walked over to her bed and noted in sheer disbelief that the gold chenille bedspread had the school’s coat of arms as its central design. She sat down and looked out her window. From here she could see a vast sweeping expanse of . . . nothing.
Oh it was pretty, and green, but it was like having suddenly been dropped into the middle of Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth. Or Narnia. Or some other green weird empty place where the whole world had been turned upside down. This was nothing like Indiana, and the sheer difference suddenly made Spirit realize all over again how much of her life was just gone. And now she was in a place so strange that she felt completely lost in it. Even the hospital room had been more familiar.
She choked back a sob.
“Don’t tell me they set you up with a playlist preloaded with Polka Dance Party. I’d cry over that, too.”
She turned, startled. There were two girls about her age in the open doorway, both of them in the school uniform. At least, more or less, because one of them was wearing a lacy black blouse under the brown blazer, black tights, and black boots, while the other looked like she’d stepped out of an English boarding school, with a starched white shirt, chocolate tie, white tights, gold blazer, plaid pleated skirt, and brown Mary Janes.
The Goth-y one had flaming red hair—cut very short and spiked up—and vivid green eyes, and was wearing more makeup than Spirit was willing to bet was allowed in the Oakhurst Code of Conduct. The green-eyed Goth was so skinny she was on the edge of being too skinny. She had a sardonic little smile on her face, and something about that face reminded Spirit of a cat.
The other girl was her opposite in every way. Her hair was black—a true black, the kind with blue highlights—and it was completely straight, with straight bangs, and looked really long. Her eyes were a warm brown. If she’d been blonde-haired and blue-eyed, she would have looked just like every picture Spirit had ever seen of Alice In Wonderland, down to that faint little knot of stubbornness at the side of her mouth. She was several inches taller than the redheaded Goth, and sleek to the point of being plump.
“I’m Muirin Shae,” said the Goth-girl. “You do not get to call me ‘Murray’ or ‘Rin-Tin-Tin’ or any other cute names you can think of, because you will really regret it. This is Adelaide Lake. You can call her Addie, because everyone does. We’re supposed to get you oriented, show you around, keep you from slitting your wrists, all that stuff. You aren’t going to slit your wrists, are you?”
“Um. No.” Spirit eyed Muirin dubiously, unable to tell if the other girl was joking or not.
Muirin let out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Well good. It makes an awful mess and Addie and me’d get our butts kicked. That’s one out of three.” She walked into the room, pulled out the chair from behind the desk, and flopped into it. “So what’s your sad story? We all have sad stories here. I have a Wicked Stepmother.”
Spirit blinked. “You do?”
“She does.” Addie rolled her eyes, following Muirin into the room and closing the door behind her. “I just have a trust fund.” Addie did have a faint accent, too faint for Spirit to tell if it was English or not. “Do you mind if I—?” She gestured at the couch.
There was a couch—a love seat, really—and two chairs, forming a little seating group around a coffee table. “Yes, please,” she said, getting up off the bed to join Addie.
Muirin promptly got out of the desk chair to sprawl on the bed, rolling onto her stomach and kicking her feet in the air. “But don’t be shy! I know you want to hear all about my fascinating life—and that way I can ask you all about yours. Once upon a time I was a normal, happy child—”
Addie snorted rudely and Spirit was startled into a stifled giggle.
“Quiet!” Muirin said imperiously. “Then Mummy Dearest shuffled off this mortal coil—propelled by booze of course. Daddy Darling promptly married the Trophy Wife, then wrapped himself around the nearest tree in his little red sports car, leaving me at the mercy of my Wicked Stepmother.”
“It gets better,” Addie murmured, as Muirin paused dramatically.
“A little sympathy,” Muirin said. “I was only a baby.”
“Fourteen,” Addie explained.
“And had led a very sheltered life—”
“In and out of every progressive warehousing school Mummy and Daddy Dearest could find,” Addie footnoted.
“Who’s telling this?” Muirin demanded.
“Oh, you are,” Addie said. “Go on.”
Muirin heaved a theatrical sigh. “All right then! My Wicked Stepmother planned to lock me up in yet another boarding school while she took off for Europe to spend Daddy Darling’s fortune. Too bad—how sad—that Daddy Darling wasn’t as well-fixed as he’d looked.” Muirin smiled sweetly, but there was a wicked glint in her eye.
“First Wicked Stepmother tried to hand me off to a relative. Only neither Mummy Dearest or Daddy Darling had any. Then she figured she’d save money and keep me in public school instead of sending me off to another facility for troubled teens. Except that meant I was around, and by then I’d been . . . learning things, so whenever she tried to pretend she was in charge, I’d just show her who was really the boss.” Muirin sighed dreamily. “So of course when Oakhurst offered to take me off her hands, no charge, she couldn’t sign the papers fast enough.”
Muirin rolled over on her back and stretched herself like a cat, then held out her hand, palm-up. In rapid succession, a glowing ball of blue light, then a flame, then a tiny human figure appeared on it, before she closed it again. “I do illusions. Adelaide’s a Water Witch. What do you do?”
“Nothing,” Spirit said, still staring at Muirin in shock. “I mean, I don’t know, I—”
“Don’t let her tease you. Most of us aren’t as precocious as Murr-cat,” Adelaide said kindly. “You should get into a uniform though. They don’t like us to be out of uniform until after supper—no matter how many demerits some people want to collect.”
“Oh Addie! What are they going to do—send me home?” Muirin said mockingly.
“You know they won’t. But you wouldn’t like to be locked out of the music subdirectory, or lose your library privileges, or be restricted to your room when you aren’t in class,” Addie said reasonably. “So I’d consider being a little more careful in the future. And I think Spirit should be here at least a week before she starts collecting points. Where are you from?” she asked.
“Indiana,” Spirit said.
Addie nodded. “So you’re probably freezing.” Without waiting for either Spirit or Muirin to reply, she walked into Spirit’s closet and began rummaging through it. When she came out, she was holding a brown wool blazer with the school crest on the pocket, and a pair of matching wool pants. She handed them to Spirit and went over to her dresser, coming up with an ivory-colored turtleneck and a gold-colored pullover sweater.
“There,” she said, holding them out. “You should be warm enough in these. It’s after class so it doesn’t have to be a skirt.”
Feeling as if things were getting away from her, Spirit took the clothes and went into the bathroom. She was about to put them on when she glanced at the long, deep, bloody scratch on her arm again. Why hadn’t Addie or Muirin mentioned it? She didn’t want to think it was because injuries like this were too familiar to them.
She ran water in the sink and dabbed at it gingerly with the washcloth from the rack. It mopped up the blood, but it stung a lot, and she didn’t want to get blood on the ivory turtleneck. Without thinking, she opened the medicine cabinet over the sink. In addition to toothbrush, toothpaste, and all that sort of thing—all new, not the half-used items from the hospital—there were Band-Aids, gauze squares, a roll of gauze, adhesive tape, antibiotic cream, spray antiseptic, and bandage scissors. It only took Spirit a minute or two to squeeze salve along the scratch, cover it with squares, wrap that in gauze, and tape the gauze into place. It looked much worse than it actually was when she was done, but she was confident the bandages would hold.
Then she put on her new clothes, and she had to admit that she finally felt warm for the first time today. And she had to admit, even the blazer didn’t look nearly as dorky on as it did on the hanger. It was actually kind of cute, if you went in for that sort of thing. She brushed out her hair with the hairbrush and put it back in the drawer of the vanity, and when (on a hunch) she opened the top drawer on the other side, she saw a selection of barrettes, headbands, and hair-ties. Stupid place thinks of everything, Spirit grumbled to herself, before selecting a hair-tie and whipping her hair back into a quick ponytail. When she came out, Addie was getting a pair of brown loafers out of a box.
“Here,” she said, handing Spirit the shoes. “Socks are in your top drawer, but the ones you have on will do fine. As uniforms go, these aren’t bad—as long as you like brown, gold, and white.”
“Makes me feel like a box of caramels,” Muirin said with a snort.
Spirit stepped into the shoes. Everything fit perfectly, but that was hardly a surprise, since Oakhurst had bought all of the clothing she’d worn in the hospital and rehab. They ought to know her sizes by now.
While Spirit had been in the bathroom getting dressed, Muirin had gone to Spirit’s laptop and turned it on. The Oakhurst crest was on the screen, surrounded by icons. Spirit walked over and looked over her shoulder.
“You’re always connected to the intraweb, but assume the nannies are watching, because they always are. You can put on anything you want as wallpaper”—Muirin moused over the icons, talking as she went—“anything you can download, anyway. This goes to the school e-mail. Your default password’s your birthday—six numbers, so if your birth month’s before October it’s zero-something, and ditto if you’re born before the tenth of whatever. If it’s blinking you better check it, because it might be from a teacher or the admin. This is our school intraweb portal.”
She clicked on the small copy of the Oakhurst coat of arms, and another page of icons sprang open. “IMs, music library, electronic library, class stuff, yadda. You can reserve physical stuff at the bricks-and-mortar library from here if it’s not on the server. Some Oakhurst weirdness. This is the gateway to the real Internet, but don’t get your hopes up: we’re not allowed to have Facebook or LiveJournal or a Hotmail account or anything like that. If they find out about it—and they will—it’ll get nuked and your ass will be grass.”
Spirit blinked at that. “But—why?”
“Because they’re fascist pigs,” Muirin said.
“It’s a school rule,” Addie said, shrugging. “Murr-cat knows perfectly well there are a lot worse rules Oakhurst could have.”
“They made me cut my hair,” Muirin said darkly.
“It was blue,” Addie explained to Spirit. “And it looked really awful. They did their best with it, but it was cooked—you know darn well it was, darling Murr, don’t glare at me—and the Code says you can’t have dyed hair or extensions. So all they could do was cut it really short and keep cutting it until they got all the dyed bits out. I don’t see why you ever dyed it, really. It’s such a gorgeous color.”
“Easy for you to say,” Muirin said sulkily. “Anyway, Addie’s going to say we should give you the tour now, so let’s go.” She bounced to her feet and strode toward the door. “Well, come on! What are you waiting for?”
Spirit shrugged. Addie had already gotten to her feet, so Spirit followed the two of them out into the hall, and found herself whisked around a tour of the grounds and school buildings.
Behind the original mansion—she’d thought it was part of it until Addie said it was an addition—was the classroom building. While on the outside it was the same architecture, on the inside it was completely modern. Clearly no expense had been spared. Spirit wondered why they’d gone inside at all—Muirin and even Addie didn’t strike her as being the type to go into raptures over homework. Then they reached the end of the hall, and instead of going up, they went down.
“All the good stuff is down,” Muirin said, and laughed.
One side of the basement had doors just like on the floor above (except that these didn’t have panes of glass in them so you could see what was inside); but the other had doors spaced much closer together, as if the rooms were much smaller. Each of those doors had little lights above them, and about half of those lights were glowing red.
“These are the magic practice rooms,” Addie explained. “People aren’t always good at control.” A muffled thud from inside one of the rooms emphasized what she had just said. Spirit felt her eyes widening.
The rest of the tour included what she had seen from the train—the gym, the theater, the indoor pool, the stables, the tennis courts, the athletics field. It also included something she hadn’t seen from the train—an indoor and outdoor shooting range. That also made her eyes widen a little. She thought of Loch’s opinion of guns and hoped that shooting wasn’t mandatory.
“Why all the sports stuff?” she asked, as they headed back to the main building.
“Well, it’s not like we have the usual sort of teams that play against other schools,” Muirin replied with a smirk. “That’s partly because we’re kind of too isolated to play any other private schools, and I think the public school over in Radial doesn’t want to play against us. Doctor Ambrosius is serious about being fit and about encouraging competition though, so we play against ourselves.”
Spirit could well imagine why the Radial public school wouldn’t want to play against a school like Oakhurst. Oakhurst even taught fencing! There’d been four people in white outfits and disturbingly android-looking masks fighting in there when they’d passed the door. It was the first time Spirit had ever seen a fencer in person.
In between bits of explanation, Addie and Muirin filled her in on most of the rules. Except in the worst winter weather, uniforms were mandatory during school hours except for sports. For sports you either wore the special gear—like fencing stuff, or riding stuff—or sweats in Oakhurst colors. For most classes, skirts and blazer were required for girls, but there were several different styles and colors of skirts—including the plaid-with-pleats that Addie was wearing—and if you were doing something where you might end up rolling around on the floor or getting dirty, you wore trousers. On any day you were studying Grammery, you wore trousers.
“And that’s at least two days a week, so the Dress Code doesn’t suck as much as it could,” Muirin said. “They hate you wearing makeup, though.”
“That isn’t true,” Addie said. “Light makeup is okay. They just don’t want you Gothing out during school hours. Now. Breakfast is seven to eight, lunch is noon to one, dinner is six to seven. You can have food in your room, but not junk food, of course.”
“They check,” said Muirin mournfully. “You can kiss any idea of privacy you ever had good-bye, so if you used to keep a diary? Don’t. The only thing they let you get away with is soda, but they ration it. You can have all the bottled tea and juice and water and health drinks you want, but they only let you have seven cans of soda a week.”
Seven cans a week? Spirit made a face. She had the feeling she was going to go through serious Diet Pepsi withdrawal.
“Well, popcorn,” Adelaide amended. “You can have popcorn.”
“Lights out at eleven,” Muirin said, taking over from Addie. You weren’t supposed to be outside the dorm after ten, but the way that Muirin said “supposed to” made Spirit pretty sure that there were ways around that. Like, if you wanted to meet a boy.
No more than two people (besides you) in a dorm room except by special arrangement. “We’re supposed to use the lounges for more than two, so people in their rooms can study,” Addie said. “Otherwise, there might be too much noise. But the lounges are really nice.”
And apparently there was a lot to study—magic stuff (Grammery, Spirit tried to remember they called it here) along with the regular high school courses. And everyone was supposed to have at least one sport they did regularly.
“Don’t you have time for any fun?” she asked, feeling desperate.
Adelaide and Muirin exchanged amused looks. “You’ll get used to it,” said Adelaide, as they reached the dining room. People were already filing in the now-open doors. “Oh, is that the guy you came in with?”
With a feeling of relief, Spirit saw Loch standing with a tall, broad-shouldered guy who practically looked like two of him. Loch spotted her at the same time and lifted a hand.
“Yeah—” she began, when Muirin interrupted.
“Oh good, he’s with Burke! We can all sit together and you can introduce us.” She grinned. “He’s cute. And new. We can keep him to ourselves.”
So Spirit found herself sitting between the tall guy—whose name was Burke Hallows, and who was brown-haired, brown-eyed, and cute in a Boy Scout way—and Muirin, feeling just a bit intimidated. There hadn’t been more than a handful of times in her whole life that she’d sat at a table with a white linen tablecloth, white linen napkins, porcelain plates, and real silverware made of real silver. And never had she had as many kinds of silverware as there were here. Her folks’ idea of a restaurant generally involved a buffet.
Burke saw her confusion. “You work from the outside in,” he said, kindly. “Don’t worry too much about it.”
Spirit said, frustrated, “Only rich people eat like this. . . .”
Burke shrugged. “You aren’t the only one here who’s not rich,” he replied. “We’re supposed to get used to this, though. Doctor Ambrosius expects us to be movers and shakers out there.” He waved his hand vaguely as if to indicate the world outside the walls. “Just relax, nobody’s grading you on eating. It’s probably the only thing they don’t grade us on,” he added in an undertone, and Spirit wondered if she’d been meant to hear that.
It was hard to relax when people in uniforms were serving you. She felt awkward and uncomfortable, and very out of place. It didn’t help her feel any better that Loch was casual and comfortable, asking questions, even making jokes. Still, it was hard not to notice that the food, like the snacks in the plane, was light-years beyond any school cafeteria or even family-night-out restaurant food she’d ever had. It was all so fancy, though, that she found the meal exhausting. Nothing was familiar: the lettuce in the salad wasn’t regular lettuce and tasted odd, the mashed potatoes weren’t exactly mashed potatoes, she had no idea what kind of roast bird she’d been served—except that it wasn’t either turkey or chicken—and even dessert had looked like chocolate pudding but turned out not to be.
She would have been perfectly ready to go back to her room and just collapse after that, but the other four insisted she come along to the lounge to get acquainted. They were like a wave that washed her along with them, where she sat in a big comfortable chair next to a fireplace and listened to the others talk. A bunch of the other kids from the dining room had followed them to introduce themselves and find out who they were, but names and faces were kind of a blur. There was Seth Morris—who Muirin seemed to know well—and Nick and Marc and Andrew and Troy. Everyone’s names and faces seemed to run together—she couldn’t for the life of her remember whether Camilla or Jenny had the short curly hair, and if it was Claire or Kristi who had the long braids and carried the sketchbook. She just curled up in the chair and listened to Muirin and Loch and Burke talk. Now that she wasn’t running interference between Muirin and Spirit, Addie didn’t talk much, but she listened so intently you felt as if she was saying more than she did.
Loch wanted to know what sorts of magic they all did, and Muirin demonstrated again, this time with a larger illusion, a copy of herself that she made do some gymnastic flips. Addie poured a glass of water from the pitcher on the sideboard and made a fountain in it. One of the other boys took the glass when she was done—Spirit wasn’t sure whether it was Nick or Troy—and the clear glass turned opaque and sort of grayish brown.
“Transmutation,” Muirin said, and he grinned and tossed it at her.
Some of the others had kinds of magic that you couldn’t show off easily or safely—one of the girls said she was learning Transformation, which apparently wasn’t the same as Transmutation, and one of the other boys said he was a Fire Witch. Burke just shrugged.
“Combat magic,” he said, with the smallest of grimaces. “Give me a weapon and I can use it right away; give me a couple weeks with it, and I’m an expert. Takes me about two months to get pretty good at about any martial art. Already got a black belt in three. Right now I’m learning sword stuff.”
Spirit’s jaw dropped. “That’s—amazing!” she blurted.
Burke snorted dismissively, but his smile was kind. “Yeah, but it’s not like I can compete at it. It’d be cheating. It’s the magic doing it, not me.”
Muirin laughed up at him. “You and your ethics!” she said mockingly. “No one would ever know!”
“I’d know,” Burke said stubbornly. “And it’d be cheating people who worked for years and years out of the reward they earned.”
Muirin made a face when she saw Addie, Loch, Spirit, and a couple of the other kids nodding in agreement with him. “Doctor Ambrosius says that it’s no different than a genius competing with ordinary people in college, or in business,” she answered, sounding certain of her ground. “Really, why should it be? For that matter, we’ll be using our magic to compete with them in things like business. So how is that any different?”
Burke set his jaw. He seemed to struggle for a moment for words, then said, “It just is.”
“I’m not all that impressed with Doctor Ambrosius anyway,” Spirit said softly, and winced a little when half a dozen people turned to stare at her, including all four of her new friends. Then she decided to stand her ground. “I’m not,” she repeated more firmly. “Especially not if he says things like that.” She held Loch’s gaze and spoke directly to him. “I think he could have showed us that magic was real today without attacking us and hurting me. That’s just bullying, and just because he owns this school and has magic powers, it doesn’t make it less like bullying. And how about all of you? Don’t you think you should have been allowed a choice in whether you came here or not? Was that fair?”
Muirin laughed sharply. “Since when is life fair?”
“The only people that say that are people who don’t want it to be.” It was Spirit’s turn to set her chin stubbornly. “And I don’t think that because we can do things, it always means we should.”
Muirin rolled her eyes, but Addie smiled, Burke beamed at her with approval, and Loch winked at her. She immediately felt better.
“I suppose you’ll all tell me we should all rush out to save the world or something,” Muirin said, and wiggled her fingers. “Buh-bye! You do that, kids. I’ll be over here, trying to pass algebra.”
“Of course not, goofus,” Burke retorted good-naturedly. “Weren’t you listening to Spirit? Just because we can do something, that doesn’t mean we should.” He rubbed the back of his head broodingly. “Besides, all that would happen to me if I went out and became Captain America or something is that the Army’d probably grab me and try to figure out how to make more guys like me. Which isn’t going to happen, but I’d never see the light of day again.”
“I knew you weren’t as dumb as you look, Burkesey,” Muirin replied, mollified. “Hey. Did anyone hear anything more about whether we’re having a Halloween dance or not?”
In a lot of ways, the change of subject was a tremendous relief. Spirit didn’t particularly like thinking about this magical power she was supposed to have. It made her feel as if everything in the world was just a thin skin stretched over a reality that was too scary to contemplate for very long.
The discussion of a Halloween dance—Halloween was a little less than two months from now—occupied everyone until one of the older students showed up to tell them the lounges were closing. He wore an armband with a badge on it that Burke said made him something called a “proctor.” You could become a proctor once you were eighteen, and they did a lot of stuff that had to do with running the school, and when they were wearing their armbands you had to do what they said the same as if they were one of the teachers.
In the hallway outside the Refectory—Spirit had finally remembered what it was called—they split up, boys going one way, girls going the other. Apparently the lounges closed half an hour before you had to be back in your room—she didn’t have a wristwatch, and she wondered if she could get one here—so there were a lot of kids drifting back to their rooms. Addie and Muirin had rooms on the second floor, so they took the stairs to the second floor, leaving Spirit to make her way back to her room on her own.
“It’ll be the one without a nameplate on it,” Muirin told her helpfully. “Just keep opening doors until you find it.”
“Check your computer,” Addie added. “Your class schedule will be on it.”
Spirit nodded, and walked off down the hall. One of the other girls from the lounge—Camilla, Spirit remembered, the girl who said her power was Transformation—was on the first floor, too.
She said she’d lived at Oakhurst for three years, and that it was a lot nicer than the place she’d come from. “You grow up in a Florida trailer park sharing a beat-up doublewide with half a dozen sproggs and your Mom and your no-account brother and his girlfriend and their brats, and a place like this is going to look damned good to you, even if they are a little touched in the head,” Camilla said, setting her jaw. “Didn’t help none that they was—were always trying to beat the Devil out of me either.” She smiled a little sadly.
“I’m sorry,” Spirit said. What else could she say?
“Not that I’m not sorry they’ve passed,” Camilla said. “But I was sure as heck glad that Oakhurst came along before I ended up going on the county. And here you are,” she added, pushing open the door. “You’ll have a nameplate on it by tomorrow, and then you won’t get lost anymore. Mine’s right down the hall. Camilla Patterson, if you need anything. Don’t worry too much about the demerits—they go easy on you the first week.”
“Thanks,” Spirit said. She pushed open her door and stepped inside, closing the door behind her.
Following Adelaide’s advice, the first thing she did was check her computer. A tap on the spacebar cleared the screen-saver—it was the school coat of arms again, only now it was rotating—and sure enough, the e-mail icon was blinking. She sat down in her chair and clicked on it. It prompted her for her password, and she had a moment of panic before she remembered what Muirin had said, and typed in her birthdate: 070895.
There were only two e-mails. One was pretty much the same orientation that Muirin and Adelaide had walked her through, with a reminder to read through the Oakhurst Code of Conduct for more information. The other was her class schedule. It looked pretty standard: Science and Math and English and History and Physical Education—and (of course, since this was apparently Hogwarts West) Grammery. Her schedule was organized like a calendar, so it took her a moment to make out that her classes didn’t start tomorrow, they started the day after. Tomorrow—tomorrow she was scheduled for just one thing.
Testing.