If the worse thing I have to worry about is a nosy old woman, then I was living a nightmare every day I set foot on my front steps at home. This place will torment me for entirely different reasons.
Sophia continues the tour as we enter the dorm's grand foyer, with Ashton's added "translations." She takes me into the Quiet Room across from the foyer where we can study. It's also, Sophia says, the only room boys are allowed in. Ashton rolls her eyes and shakes her head behind her back. There's a dining hall on the other side of the foyer where only breakfast is served during the school year, and maybe on special occasions, like "ice cream socials." Her words. Ashton's translation, "Where you can find the best munchies when you're craving in the middle of the night."
With every lavishly decorated room, Sophia lists rules. And every time she does, a heavy weight grows in my stomach. This world that I'm being forced to participate in is overrun with rules. Despite the gourmet meals and beautiful grounds, it's confining. Restrictive. Barred with expectations I have no desire to meet.
Every message I've received today, whether from the judge, or Niall, or the Warden, has demanded something more of me. Something I'm not. Letting me know that who I am is not good enough.
When we reach the common room on the second floor, I'm only half-listening to Sophia gush about how much fun they have on movie nights--but making sure to add what time everyone is expected to be in their rooms.
"I think I'm going to go to my room," I say, heading toward the stairs. "But thanks for showing me around."
"Oh. Okay." Sophia sounds surprised, and even a little disappointed. "You're on the fifth floor. I can show you--"
"That's alright," I insist, desperately needing to be alone right now. "What room number?"
"Eleven."
I turn to say goodbye to Ashton, but she's nowhere to be seen. I can't recall when she disappeared.
"Thanks. Maybe I'll see you tomorrow." I should smile, but I can't fake it. "Is there an elevator?"
"Not for us. It's freight only, unfortunately." She watches as I start up the red carpet with gold scrolling that lines the massive stone stairs. "It was nice to meet you, Lana."
I nod weakly and continue up the stairs. By the time I reach my room, my legs feel like they're about to give out and my heart is pounding in my chest. The weight in my stomach has combusted into a fiery ball. The weight of it is nearly too much to bear.
When I locate room eleven, I scan my phone over the electronic lock and enter Slumping back against the door, I squeeze my eyes shut. I bite back the lump in my throat, urging me to scream--or maybe cry.
This entire day unravels around me in a whirl ... The sentencing in court. Being forced to pack and leave everyone behind. Only to arrive here. A place so foreign, I may as well be in a different country.
It's not that I'd prefer juvie, but it's familiar. I know how to get by. Here, nothing's real. No one is who they truly are. Not the girl who tries too hard to be perfect. Or the one who acts like nothing bothers her. Forget about the Queen of lies who oversees us all. This is not where I belong.
I chose to remain silent to protect my friends. But it was a choice I should never have been forced to make. This is not what I wanted. I'm not supposed to be here. And the only reason I am is because Vic is still out there.
I clench my jaw so tight, my teeth feel like they might crack.
Just thinking about Vic intensifies the inferno in my gut. I inhale deeply, trying to squelch the flames. He'd better hope I never see him again. I breathe in a calming breath and blow him away, then slowly open my eyes.
The room's ... white. And I mean, everything's white--the walls; the pedestal sink and the ornate oval mirror hung above it; the counter and cabinets next to it; the fur covered beanbag on the plush throw rug; the long, narrow desk next to the bookcase; the chiffon scarf draped along the top of the windows; and the ruched duvet covering the full-sized bed in the corner. It's all pure white. Except ...
I walk over to the bed and shove my bags aside. Sitting on a pillow is a zebra. An adorable stuffed zebra with huge sparkly, blue eyes. I find a note tied to its neck when I lift it from the pillow.
"Please forgive me."
That's it. Just three words. But I guess that's all he needed to write. When did this get here? With Niall? And why does Joey care if I forgive him? I'm not planning on seeing him again.
I toss the animal in the trash beneath the desk. Yes, the trashcan's white too. Unbelievable.
I flop down on the bed among the sea of throw pillows and stare at the ceiling. Rolling on my side, I can't avoid the huge blue eyes peering up at me from within the trashcan. I groan and shift my gaze to the bookshelf instead. A square glass vase of fresh cut white roses sits next to framed pictures. I sit up so I can get a better look. One of the pictures is of me and my mom. She's resting her head on my shoulder while sitting on a blanket at the park she loves down the street from our house. And there's another of me with Tori and Nina, laughing hysterically so our eyes are squeezed shut and our mouths open wide. I've never seen these pictures in print before.
The more I look, the more details I notice.
I push off the bed and examine every surface. Little touches of personalization are everywhere. Tucked in the corner under the desk is a fridge. I open it to discover it's filled with bottled waters and blue raspberry Mt. Dew, which is my favorite. On the desk, next to the white lamp with the feather shade is a small, square framed picture of me and my grandmother when I was little. I'm sitting on her lap while she's reading me a story. She used to read to me a lot--mostly fairytales. The real, gruesome ones. Not the Disney versions.
But I've never seen this picture before. Ever.
Inside the desk drawer are all of my favorite snacks--gummy bears, Twizzlers, Lindt chocolates, and popcorn chips. Someone went to a lot of trouble to personalize this room. To make it feel welcoming, although it's not exactly my style. I know there's no way Niall decorated it himself. And it wasn't the guys or my mother. But someone did. And whoever it is found out a lot about me.
Glassy, heart-crushing eyes peer up at me from within the canister.
"Fine," I huff, picking the zebra up. Before I place him back on the bed, I untie the ribbon and drop the note back in the trash. "I don't forgive you."
I heft my bags onto the bed and unpack. In the far corner, near the door, is a Narnia-sized armoire. I can barely reach the empty hangers lining a wooden bar. There are already a few items suspended from it, wrapped in white plastic. Must be the uniform I'm expected to wear during the regular school year.
I look up at the shelves at the top. I'm never going to be able to reach them. So I stuff everything I can in the drawers stacked in the bottom half.
When I'm done, I roll up the duffle bags and toss them on the top shelves of the armoire, since I can't use them for anything else. I'm jumping in the air, trying to shove the last one in, when someone knocks on the door. The bag falls on my head. I growl in frustration as the knocker persists. Simultaneously tossing the bag on the shelf and shutting the closet doors, I hope it doesn't fall back on me again when I open them back up. They knock again. Seriously?
Yanking the door, I snap, "What?" Still irritated by, well ... everything.
No one's there.
I step into the hall and look right. About a dozen rooms line this side, all with their doors closed. I turn around. The hall extends past the common room and grand stairs, to the end of the building. But I don't see anyone, although the lighting is pretty sketchy and every shadow could easily be a person hidden within a doorway or alcove. Remaining perfectly still, I listen. Not a single sound. The silence makes the hairs on my neck stand on end.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone were locked away in a tower. Or a dungeon. If I hear screaming at night, I'll know why.
A beep screeches from within my room. I spin, clutching my chest.
When I walk in, I notice the phone screen is flashing red. That can't be good.
"
Shit." I rush to pick it up.
I press the green button to accept the call. Dr. Kendall appears on my screen, her snow-white smile prominent.
"Lana!" she exclaims merrily. "How are you getting along? Have you settled in?"
"Uh, I guess," I reply, disturbed by her exuberance.
"I can see here that you're in your room," her eyes shift to look at something off-screen, "which is good. We'll expect you to stay in for the rest of the night. Usually the curfew is midnight on weekends, but with there being so few of you, we're asking everyone to be in their rooms now."
"Okay." It's not like I had plans or anything.
"Have a good night's rest. You'll be starting your work assignment tomorrow morning."
The screen goes black. I sigh, vaguely remembering Niall saying something about being required to work off my fines and court fees. Apparently, I start tomorrow. Fan-fucking-tastic.
I turn and almost scream.
Ashton is leaning against the door frame. I guess I didn't close it when I came back in to answer the phone.
"Holy shit. You scared me." My heart has barely recovered from the phantom knock earlier. This place is going to give me a heart attack before the weekend's over.
Ashton saunters past me without being invited in. In addition to her leather pants, she now has on a long sleeved top and thick heeled boots. Her make up is freshly done up and hair styled. It's like she's ready to go out. But where? Especially since we're supposed to be in our rooms for the rest of the night ... except she's not.
"Wow, you're room is so ... white."
"Yeah," I reply with a disgruntled sigh. "It was like this when I got here. It's not really ... me."
"You've got to be kidding me." She clicks a switch on a cord suspended along the wall. I cringe when my name appears lit up in white letters above her. How did I miss that?
"Holy shit. That's obnoxious," I say, my mouth agape.
Ashton slowly circles the room, trailing a finger over every surface. There's something about the way she's casually invading my space, picking up and examining everything, that reminds me of Nina. I'm either going to hate this girl or she's about to become one of my best friends.
Ashton flops down on the fur covered beanbag. "So, what do you really want to know?"
I hesitate. "About what? The school?"
"Anything. I'll tell you. You might as well know what you're getting yourself into since they just abandoned you on the doorstep with a note attached to you."
I shrug, because that's pretty much what happened. "And what do you want in return?" Honesty always has a price, and that's assuming she'll tell me the entire truth.
Ashton lets out a small laugh like she thinks I'm funny. "Nothing."
"Really?" I don't believe her. She tilts her head innocently. I decide to ask only what I can afford to offer in return. "Where are you from?"
"New York. Manhattan. You?"
"A shitty town in central Massachusetts." Naming it won't mean anything to her. I choose a question that I doubt she'll answer, just to see if she will. "Why don't you like your parents?"
"You like yours?" she scoffs.
"It's just my mother. And I can't fault her for me being who I am."
"That's big of you. I can't say the same. My father's a musician in a rock band, and my mother's a supermodel. I am absolutely who I am because of them." She hesitates, silently contemplating. "You should probably know that almost everyone here is a spawn of a celebrity, politician, musician, well, basically anyone who's anyone. We're their embarrassments. They shipped us off to the middle of nowhere so we don't disgrace them further, even though most of them do so much worse."
"That's why everyone keeps talking about security and privacy?" I conclude.
"You won't find any cameras beyond the main gate. Our parents don't want to be concerned about us making headlines at school like we do in the real world. Which is one of the reasons they chose Blackwood with its military security and high-tech tracking devices. But that doesn't mean they can keep the drugs out of the addicts, the food in the anorexics, or secrets from being exploited."
"So everyone's fucked up?" Now I understand why I was sent here, except that I'm not newsworthy, and neither is my mother. I guess every private school has to have their token scholarship kids.
"Pretty much. I think it's a requirement for admittance, honestly. And if we get kicked out, our parents financially cut us off. It's in the agreement they make with the school. That way everyone has something to lose. And, trust me, no one here wants to give up their designer handbags or private jets. So, we're forced to actually succeed. The rest of the world believes the school's respectable, graduating top collegiate contenders. But it's not like we have a choice."
"I know about that," I mutter.
"What?"
"Not being given a choice."
"So they really didn't tell you anything?" This seems to be a point of fascination for her, that I walked through the doors completely blind.
"Nope. Only that I was being sent somewhere better. But I don't come from money."
"So what do you have to lose?"
I stop to think about that for a minute. It's either here or juvie, and if they think that juvie is "losing," then they don't know me very well. Granted, I don't want to spend the next six months in a red jumpsuit, going to group sessions where we're taught life skills, anger management or whatever bullshit the counselor reads from a workbook. But it could be worse.
"Nothing."
"Then you're going to be fun to have around," Ashton says with her enigmatic Cheshire smile. She pulls her vape out of her pocket. "Want some?"
I smile back. "Desperately."
Ashton walks over to the windows and slides them open all the way. "They have super sensitive smoke detectors."
"Blackwood goes through all of this trouble to know where we are, how do they not know you left your room? Don't they have sensors or something?"
"They used to have motion detectors in the halls and sensors on the doors and windows. But that was a nightmare because no one stays in their rooms and someone always has a window open. So, they decided to focus on keeping us in the buildings with security patrolling the outside. Without our phones, they can't detect where we are, but that's why they have Ms. See-er lurking the halls at all hours. It makes it harder to sneak around after curfew." With a mischievous quirk of her eyebrow, she adds, "But not impossible.
Ashton inhales from the vape before offering it to me. I breathe in the contents and hold it in my lungs for a moment, craving the escape I've needed all day. We each blow out through the screen, our smoke drifting like a cloud into the dark.
"What else do you want to know?" she asks, leaning on her elbows. I take another hit.
"How long have you been here?"
"This is my third year. I'm supposed to graduate in June. Although I have no idea how."
"Not into school?"
"Not into being who I'm not. And I'm an artist. I don't give a shit about any of this."
"I can help you, if you want."
"With school?"
"Yeah. It doesn't bother me, really. It's not like I try, but it's not that hard either. I did my best friend's work for her all the time."
"Thanks," she says sincerely. "But they have tutors, life advisors, and other ways to make sure the work is ours. They're not really grade driven here as much as choice driven."
I shake my head, still trying to understand what the hell that means. "So you can fail a test, but as long as you made the choice not to cheat, you're okay?"
Ashton laughs. "No. Failing is not an option. But they provide you with whatever help you need to pass. It's not a huge school. There's only like three hundred students here during the school year, and barely fifty during the summer. They have a ton of staff, and they get paid a shit-ton to make sure we understand what they teach us. Most of them live on campus during the school year so we have access to them whenever."
"Explain this
choice thing they keep preaching about."
Ashton inhales from the vape, her eyes flicker as she tries to put words around her thoughts. "We're here because our parents couldn't be parents, and I guess we failed at being us.
"Blackwood's life advisors customize a plan that forces us to make better choices, whether it's random drug tests, therapy, meditation, or tracking our caloric intake at each meal."
"That's what that screen was for when we ordered dinner?" I ask. When I scanned my phone to order dinner earlier, a screen on the tablet displayed allergies, food restrictions and my macronutrient intake for the day. I didn't think much of it at the time, other than it was weird.
"There's more eating disorders here than anything. You have to remember, we come from a world where image is everything. And that's hard to let go of, no matter how far we are from the spotlight."
Ashton hands me the vape. The edges of the room begin to soften around me as my body eases into the mattress.
"Do you believe in it? What they're doing here?"
I'm still very skeptical. And maybe it's because Dr. Kendall is a living illusion. How can I be convinced that what I see is real when there's a maze within the courtyard that's sole intent is to get us lost?
Ashton hesitates again, tucking her vape back in her pocket. "I don't know. I guess it doesn't matter because I'm stuck here whether I believe or not. But don't trust anyone. That's the best advice I could probably give you. Nothing is what it seems."
"It's kind of my life motto already."
Ashton winks. "Which is another reason it's going to be good to have you here. And don't worry, it only feels like a prison. It's really not. There's always ways to break the rules, if you're willing."
"I have nothing to lose!"
Ashton laughs.
"Meet you downstairs for breakfast? I'm training you at work tomorrow."
"Sounds good." I watch her leave. Just as she closes the door behind her, I realize I didn't ask her where we worked. Guess I'll find out when we get there.
I collapse against the pile of throw pillows and stare at the ceiling, allowing the mellowness to seep into me. It's so quiet. I don't know if I'll ever get used to it. I lift my head, searching for something that plays music. I spot a small, decorative box sitting on the corner of the desk.