That was one of the few rooms in the school I hadn’t gotten any sort of look at yet. If I could even take a peek…
I strolled over and knocked lightly on the door, expecting a professor to answer. All I got was silence. I waited, my ears pricked for any sign of movement from the other side, and knocked again.
Nothing. Hmm. I hadn’t heard a professor leaving the room either. Were they just ignoring me? I tried the doorknob gently and felt it catch against a lock.
I debated, glancing up and down the hall, and slipped my trusty reward card from my pocket. I’d have to palm it quickly, but I could easily give the same excuse I had with the dean’s office—that the door had actually been unlocked. It wasn’t likely anyone in there was paying enough attention to realize I’d already tested it.
In a furtive motion, I slid the card in by the frame and performed the same operation that had served me well on two doors here so far. Just like before, the lock disengaged, and the knob rotated in my grasp. I curled my fingers around the card to hide it and eased the door open, braced for a glare or a shout of dismay.
Neither came. The room on the other side was completely empty. It was easy to be sure of that because it held nothing at all except a single wooden chair in the middle of the space. The floor was the same dark hardwood as the rest of the building, the walls starkly white.
What the hell kind of “counseling” happened in here? And where had the counselor disappeared to?
I eased farther into the room and ran my fingers along the walls to confirm there wasn’t some sort of hidden doorway. The only way in or out appeared to be the entrance I’d come through. I stood there for a couple of minutes, and then sank into the chair to see if that would provoke something.
The walls stared blankly back at me. Maybe “counseling” worked like some kind of sensory deprivation? If I sat here long enough, would the boredom of it all leave me shaking and crying?
I turned my head—and the wall beside me seemed to flash with the brightness of headlight beams. My pulse lurched automatically. When I looked at it straight on, it was just the same plain wall it’d been before. My mind was playing tricks.
More tricks than just that. As I scanned the room again, the impression of falling snow tickled the edges of my vision. Then the glint of broken glass. My muscles started to tense. Then—it must have come from the back of my head, but it sounded like it was coming from beyond these walls—the distant bark of a dog reached me.
Okay! Obviously whatever this room was normally used for, it was stirring up unfortunate associations for me. Or maybe those impressions were another sort of punishment for overstepping the school’s boundaries. Either way, I’d had my fill. I sprang out of the chair and ducked out into the hall.
Outside, surrounded by the now-familiar dark wood paneling and the murmur of students’ voices from around me and above, my nerves settled. My gaze slid down the hall past the professors’ rooms to the door at the end. Bushfell. The one with its flight of stairs and the padlocked door at the bottom.
I should focus on that. It was the largest mystery I’d encountered in this place and the only one I hadn’t been able to explore at all.
My fingers itched to fully distract myself from the unsettling flashes in the counseling room by riffling through the dean’s office again, but I’d managed to get caught at that even in the middle of the night. He was probably in there during the day. And besides, I’d done a pretty thorough search the first time and not turned up any keys.
If he carried the one that opened that basement padlock, he must keep it on him. Or else in his private room? How much trouble would I get into if I managed to sneak in and poke around in there?
I didn’t have time to find out right now. Checking my phone, I realized I’d ended up lingering in the counseling room for longer than it’d felt like. This week’s Composition class was starting in five minutes.
I hustled up the stairs, looking around in case Delta might have recovered enough to emerge from the bedroom. I wasn’t sure if she even had this Composition class with me too. It definitely didn’t seem like it’d be good for her health to talk about some other horrible experience from her past. No doubt it was too much to hope that today we’d be writing about rainbows and kittens.
If Delta was supposed to be in the class, she didn’t make an appearance. Professor Hubert made no remark on any absences as she surveyed the classroom from beneath her pile of brown hair. I inspected her clothes as surreptitiously as I could, checking for any hint of a key she might be carrying on a chain or in a pocket. Did the staff go down into their secret lair a lot?
Nothing revealed itself. Hubert rubbed her hands together and gave us a thin smile. “I wanted you to work on your next assignment with me here in class because many of the offerings last time left much to be desired. I don’t want to see us become complacent. Let us plumb those depths! For today’s theme, I’d like you to write about something that broke, whether through your actions or someone else’s.”
Glass shattering. Shards slicing through flesh to provoke that horrible wet gasp. My pulse stuttered, and my fingers clenched hard around my pen.
No way was I writing about that. She wanted something painful? Well, I’d watched a hell of a lot of things get broken over the years. I just had to narrow it down to something else.
My mind slipped back through time to the hand-me-down Barbie doll I’d treasured when I was six, even though her previous owner had chopped her hair close to the scalp and doodled all over her legs with permanent marker. It’d been the only toy that was actually mine back then.
I’d been playing with her in the living room when my foster mother had yelled at me to come help her cook dinner right that second, and I’d returned to my foster father’s reddened face as he stomped his foot down on the doll.
We don’t leave our things lying around on the floor—or we lose those things. Crunch. Snap. Face bashed in. Limbs snapped in half. Yeah, I had some depths to plumb there without touching on anything still raw.
I dove into those depths with the determination to milk the event for every drop of angst I could. I’d made it through a page of my school-issued notebook when Professor Hubert came up beside my desk.
“May I look over what you’ve got so far, Miss Corbyn?” she asked in a way that wasn’t a question but an order.
I handed the notebook over and spun my pen between my fingers while she read. Maybe she’d think it was inconsequential because the broken thing had been a toy, even though I’d emphasized how meaningful it’d been to me to set up the horror that came after. Hopefully she’d give me a little slack on my first time going through this process.
The professor set the notebook on my desk with a humming sound I couldn’t decipher. “You have a solid grasp on dramatics,” she said. “But I can’t help feeling there’s a larger story you’re avoiding here.”
A shiver ran through my chest. “That’s the whole story that has anything to do with the toy getting broken,” I said.
Hubert gazed down at me steadily with her piercing eyes. “No,” she said. “I mean there are other broken things that still have their hold on you, Miss Corbyn. We’ll uncover them as we go.”
She moved on to the next desk, leaving her words hanging in the air like a promise and a threat wrapped into one.