God, I hoped not.
“I like your tat,” Violet ventured unexpectedly, nodding to the vine on my forearm just before it disappeared under the sleeve. “Do you have any others?”
I shook my head. “I was meaning to get more—but there were other things I was saving up for first.” That apartment Cade and I had been going to share. A real college, if I’d decided it was worth going after all. I paused and then decided to take advantage of my roommate’s new willingness to talk. “How long have you been here?”
Violet looked away, her lips slanting downward as if the question pained her. “A couple years,” she said. “After a while, there didn’t seem to be much point in keeping track.”
And I was going to assume the school didn’t offer winter holidays or summer break or any other chance for the students to slip away and never come back. Had the people Violet once knew forgotten her as utterly as everyone back home had lost their memories of Cade? They must have, right? If not, there’d be relatives and friends banging on the gate out of the same concern that had brought me here.
What was the point of all this torture for anyone, even the staff? Somehow I doubted they laid it out in clear detail for the students.
“How did you end up here?” I asked Violet instead.
“I got a scholarship invitation, like it sounds like your brother did. Things weren’t… so great, back home. I thought it’d be a chance to try being someone else or whatever.” Her laugh came out bitter.
“Do you have any idea why you?”
Her gaze came back to me, steady and solemn. “It’s not that hard to figure out. Everyone they brought in has to know, I think, at least after the first few months. You can’t bury yourself that far in denial. I know you think the classes are horrible, but—they do bring a lot of things to light.”
Ryo had said something about how nothing I’d done could be worse than his own past. I’d thought he was just trying to make me feel better, but maybe he really felt that way too.
“You can’t really think there’s any way you could deserve to be treated like this,” I said.
“I don’t know. Maybe you just can’t think of all the things people are actually capable of.” She studied me. “Roseborne didn’t pick you. You picked it. I don’t know what that means.”
I knew I’d been capable of crimes it made me sick to remember. But I didn’t want to lay those out for this girl any more than I could expect her to spill her guts to me. We were practically strangers.
Before I could think of the right thing to say next, Delta breezed into the room. At her arrival, Violet swiveled away from me. Remembering the way the other girl had described her to me—a degenerate—I couldn’t blame her for retreating.
Delta didn’t seem to notice. She nodded at me approvingly with a swing of her smooth hair. “Good. You’re up.” She held out a piece of paper to me. “You missed Literary Analysis. Professor Carmichael gave me your first assignment to pass on.”
I stared at the paper incredulously as I took it from her. A sputter of laughter broke from my throat. “And they’re still giving me homework.”
“They don’t really go for excuses to skip out on the work,” Delta said. Her legs wobbled just for an instant before she sat down on her own bed. I noticed again how emaciated she looked—had her features gotten even sharper, her hands even more skeletal, since I’d first wondered about her health?
How many rounds of Tolerance had she gone through since she’d first “enrolled”?
“Why don’t you just say no?” I had to ask, glancing at Violet to include her in the question. “Refuse to play along? If you don’t give them what they want…” Maybe the people running this place would let them go? Without even finishing the sentence, the optimism turned sour in my mouth. I didn’t really believe it could be that easy.
For good reason, apparently. Delta guffawed. “Right. I’d rather not deal with those consequences, thank you. You should have gotten a pretty good taste of what they’re capable of by now.”
Consequences. It clicked in my head the way it hadn’t quite before—the piercing headaches, right after I’d snooped in the dean’s office and then again when I’d defied the professor. I’d known they were connected but not necessarily a direct cause and effect.
If the school or the staff in it had the power to punish us that way, how much worse could things get if we kept up any sort of defiance? Vomiting a few times every two weeks might not seem so bad in comparison.
We shouldn’t have to make that awful choice in the first place, though. There had to be a way out. I just needed to find it.
I didn’t say that out loud. I’d learned enough to be wary of admitting to any resistance, even if it was blaring in my head.
“Yeah.” I waved the assignment paper in the air. “I guess I should get started on this, then.”
Delta eyed me as I got up, obviously not completely buying my shift in attitude. “Be careful,” she said. “Anything you’re thinking about, someone’s already tried it—and realized trying wasn’t worth it at all.”
Well, the people here were about to find out that Trix Corbyn didn’t give up that easily.
There were too many students—potential witnesses and even informers?—still wandering around in the halls for me to feel comfortable poking into the mystery any further at this exact moment. My stomach grumbled briefly about the dinner I’d missed, but I couldn’t summon any enthusiasm about going down to the cafeteria to pick through whatever was left of what probably hadn’t been an enjoyable meal even when it’d been fresh-cooked and hot. Instead, I headed to the library.
I hadn’t done any work in there before, only explored the expansive room over the weekend and determined it didn’t have any clues I could decipher. As I stepped inside now, I unfolded the paper Delta had given me.
Corbyn was written at the top, followed by a book title and author name, neither of which I recognized. Read chapter twelve and deliver a thematic analysis of at least five minutes next class. Be sure to touch on both plot and character significances that are apparent.
I already didn’t like this professor just from the way they wrote. If I had my way, I wouldn’t be here in another two weeks when my next Literary Analysis class came around, but I might as well check out the reading and see if I could determine how it might be significant to the situation I’d found myself in. Everything the staff asked of us seemed to have some underlying agenda.
It took me a while just to find the damn book. The volumes on the shelves were arranged in alphabetical order by author last name but also grouped into categories that weren’t obvious to me. I had to search through five different spans of Ls before I stumbled on it.
The fabric-coated cover felt gritty under my fingers. I slid the book out, double-checked the title, and looked around for somewhere to sit. Apparently the people who ran this school didn’t think students should be doing their library reading in the actual library, because the only furnishings were the bookshelves themselves.
Down one aisle, I found a footstool to allow the shorter students to reach the higher shelves. I perched on that and flipped through the book to the requested chapter.