When he kissed her, she waited to feel whatever her mother had felt for her father, the day they met, the spark that lit the fire that burned their whole world down. But she only felt his hand on her waist. His mouth on her mouth. A hollow sadness.
“Don’t you want it?” he’d asked when his hand grazed her ribs.
She wanted to want it, to feel what the other girls felt.
But she didn’t. And yet, Olivia is full of want. She wants a bed that does not creak. A room without Anabelles or matrons or ghouls. A window and a grassy view and air that does not taste of soot and a father who does not die and a mother who does not leave and a future beyond the walls of Merilance.
She wants all those things, and she has been here long enough to know that it does not matter what you want—the only way out is to be wanted by someone else.
She knows, and still, she pushed him away.
And the next time she saw the boy, at the edge of the yard, he was leaning toward another girl, a pretty little wisp named Mary, who giggled and whispered in his ear. Olivia waited for the flush of envy, but all she felt was cool relief.
She finishes skinning a potato and studies the little paring knife. Balances it on the back of her hand before flicking it gingerly into the air and catching the grip. She smiles, then, a small private thing.
“Freak,” mutters Rebecca. Olivia looks up, holds her eye, and wags the knife like a finger. Rebecca scowls and turns her attention to the other girls, as if Olivia is a ghoul, something to be ignored.
They move on from boys, at least. Now they are talking about dreams.
“I was at the seaside.”
“You’ve never been to the sea.”
“So what?”
Olivia takes up another potato, slides the knife under the starchy skin. She is almost done, but she slows her work, listening to them prattle.
“So how do you know it was the seaside and not a lake?”
“There were seagulls. And rocks. And besides, you don’t need to know about a place to dream of it.”
“Of course you do . . .”
Olivia quarters the spud and drops it in the pot.
They talk of dreams as if they’re solid things, the kind you might mistake for real. They wake with whole stories impressed upon their minds, images committed to memory.
Her mother spoke of dreams as well, but hers were crueler things, filled with dead lovers and clawing shadows, sharp enough that she felt the need to warn her daughter they were not real.
But her mother’s warning is wasted.
Olivia has never had a dream.
She imagines things, of course, conjures other lives, pretends she is someone else—a girl with a large family and a grand house and a garden bathed in sun, fanciful things like that—but not once, in fourteen years, has she been visited by dreams. Sleep, when it comes, is a dark tunnel, a shroud of black. Sometimes, right after she wakes, there is a kind of filament, like spider silk, clinging to her skin. That strange sense of something just out of reach, an image bobbing on the surface before rippling away. But then it’s gone.
“Olivia.”
Her name cuts through the air. She flinches, fingers tensing on the knife, but it is only the thin-faced matron, Jessamine, waiting at the door, lips pursed as if she’s got a lemon on her tongue. She crooks her finger, and Olivia abandons her station.
Heads swivel. Eyes follow her out.
“What has she done now?” they whisper, and honestly, she doesn’t know. It could have been the lockpicks she fashioned, or the sweets she stole from Matron Agatha’s drawer, or the chalkboard buried in the cellar.
She shivers a little as they climb the stairs, trading the stuffy kitchen for the chilly halls beyond. Her heart sinks at the sight of the head matron’s door. Never a good sign, to be summoned here.
Jessamine knocks, and a voice answers from the other side.
“Come in.”
Olivia clenches her jaw, teeth clicking softly together as she steps inside.
It is a narrow room. The walls are lined with books, which would be welcoming if they were stories of magic or pirates or thieves. Instead, thick spines bear titles like The Lady’s Book of Etiquette and Pilgrim’s Progress, and a full shelf of encyclopedias that as far as she knows have only been used to enforce good posture.
“Miss Prior,” says the bony figure at the dark wood desk.
The head matron of Merilance is old. She has always been old. Aside from the addition of a few new wrinkles in an already-lined face, she has not changed in all the time Olivia has lived here. Her shoulders do not hunch, her pale eyes never blink, and her voice, when she speaks, is as thin and efficient as a switch.
“Sit.”
There are two chairs in the room. A thin wooden one against the wall, and a faded green one before the desk.
The one against the wall is already taken. A thin little ghoul sits, bent forward, legs swinging back and forth, too short to touch the floor. Olivia stares at the half-formed girl, wondering who would choose to haunt this room of all the ones in Merilance.
The head matron clears her throat. The sound is a bony hand, pinching Olivia’s chin.
The ghoul dissolves back into the wooden boards, and Olivia forces herself forward and takes a seat in the faded green chair, sending up a plume of dust. She stares blandly at the old woman, hoping the expression reads as dull, but unfortunately, the head matron of Merilance has never been polite enough to underestimate Olivia. To take her silence for stupidity, or even disinterest. Laid before the old woman’s blue-eyed gaze she feels unmoored, exposed.
“You have been with us for quite some time,” says the head matron, as if Olivia doesn’t know. As if she’s lost track of the years, the way a prisoner might within a cell. “We have cared for you since you were a child. Nurtured you as you grew into a young woman.”
Nurtured. Grew. As if she were a houseplant. She studies the dusty silk roses that sit on the old woman’s desk, the color leeched by window light, tries to remember a time when they were anything but gray. And then the head matron does a terrible thing.
She smiles.
There was a cat one year at Merilance. A feral little beast that hung around the garden shed, catching mice. It would stretch out atop the tin roof, tail flicking and belly full, its mouth curled in a smug little grin. The head matron wears the same expression.
“And now, your time here has come to an end.”
Olivia’s whole body tenses. She knows what happens to the girls when they leave Merilance, sent to wither in a workhouse or gifted like a prize pig to a middle-aged man or buried in the bowels of someone else’s house.
“There are not many prospects, you know, for a girl in your . . . condition.”
Olivia peels the skin from the words. What the head matron means is that there are not many futures for a high-tempered orphan who cannot speak. She’d make a fine wife, she’s been told, save for her temper. She’d make a fine maid, save for the fact so many take her silence as a sign of some greater ill, or at the least, find it unnerving. What does that leave? Nothing good. Her mind races through the halls, planning an escape; there is still time to raid the matrons’ cupboards, still time to flee into the city, to find another way—but the head matron taps her bony fingers on the desk, calling her back.
“Fortunately,” she says, sliding open a drawer, “the matter seems to have been sorted for us.”