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Finding her room had been quite the experience. She didn’t have any idea where she was going (she didn’t really have any idea of the layout of the school aside from the infirmary and what was attached to it), and she hadn’t wanted to ask questions (she was pretty sure that she hadn’t been doing any question asking lately, and she didn’t want to give any one any reason to think that anything had changed). She didn’t have much of a plan, but the school could only be so big. She had to stumble across the dormitory section at some point, right? She had figured that she would wonder around for a while and that she could always plead lightheadedness or a dizzy spell if it became necessary to come up with an excuse (i.e. she got busted somewhere that she wasn’t supposed to be).
It ended up being a little creepy. She had had these sudden notions that she should turn at certain places or walk down certain hallways and before she knew it she was standing in front of a door labeled with her name. That was disconcerting, but it was not an altogether unwelcome development (she did need to be able to find her way around after all). Hopefully, something in her would know where she was going when the time came, and she wouldn’t be wandering around completely lost. That would probably be suspicious. Her room seemed okay enough (if decidedly impersonal). She didn’t have a roommate. She had no way of knowing whether that was standard here or if it was something special that Meri had arranged. At the moment, she was just grateful that she had a place to go where she wasn’t under any scrutiny.
The nurse (she had heard one of the other girls call her Miss Ludlow) had given her a cup of pills to take before she left the infirmary. She still hadn’t offered any explanation as to why she was supposed to be taking them. Lia did the same thing that she did the day before (which was that she swept them to the side with her tongue while she swallowed down her drink of water and spat them out as soon as she got the chance). Nobody seemed to notice. It wasn’t occurring to the nurse that she needed to check to be sure that she had swallowed them. She thought that meant that the school didn’t have any reason to believe that she would be combative about taking them. She did think that she had heard the woman mutter something about “simpler this way” as she was turning away from her, but she didn’t know what that was about or even if it was in reference to her.
She had received explicit instructions that she was to keep to her room for the next 24 hours, and she fully intended to do so. She needed the distraction free time to figure out what she was going to do.
She found herself in the position of appreciating a good round of personal reflection. Looking back, she was willing to admit that she had underestimated the potential fallout of what she had been doing. Anna had been both right and wrong when she had admonished Connor that she and Kyle didn’t know what it was that they were signing up to do. She couldn’t really speak for Kyle (although she thought she knew him well enough to make a very accurate educated guess), but she had known. She had known in a theoretical lay it out in your head kind of a way.
What she hadn’t understood was the practical reality of what it could be to be on the receiving end of the backlash. The concept of any type of serious backlash from Meredyth directed at her was something that she hadn’t processed as a possibility. It was Meredyth. She had spent the past few years being decidedly apathetic about Lia, and Lia had cultivated that apathy. She had known that she didn’t want to draw Meri’s notice. She had known that she was taking a chance of doing just that. She had had thoughts of it being unpleasant if Meredyth found out, and she had the same foreboding feeling that she had had since childhood that it was never a good thing to have Meri focused on you. She knew all of that. She understood all of that.
But that Meredyth would do to her what it was becoming increasingly impossible to argue against that she had done, was not something that she would ever have thought. Anna had been absolutely right about her lack of understanding there. She understood now. She had a front row seat, right smack dab in the middle of it all, no choice but to be up close and personal with the results view of what could happen. She was living it. Yes, she understood now. She understood too well.
She had a suspicion that it wouldn’t make Anna happy to know that. Anna would have preferred her and Kyle staying out of the line of fire over receiving the proof that she had been right to worry. Lia had met Meri’s announcement of her imminent departure with a determination that it could change the parameters without ending her resistance of her sister’s machinations. She had been certain that she would find a way. She had been riding a wave of righteous indignation after her elicit file viewing, and she had been all caught up in a “good would prevail despite all obstacles” moment.
She wasn’t completely naive. She had known that she was going to have to work at it, and she had been determined to do the work. She had been sure that she could reevaluate and find some way to continue despite the change of location and circumstances. Meri would have her small victory (or whatever it was that she thought she was gaining through her removal), but it would ultimately make no difference.
Those were pretty thoughts, but they failed to come to fruition. She hadn’t been challenging Meri. She hadn’t been working to solve problems. She hadn’t been finding a way around the obstacles that Meredyth had placed in her path. As a matter of fact, she did nothing of consequence (she did not even create plans) for months. Meredyth had effectively neutralized her (and she still wasn’t even sure that Meri actually knew that there was anything to be neutralized in the first place).
There was, of course, a very good reason for her lack of action. It hadn’t exactly been because of a sudden onset of apathy on her part (well, it had, but that hadn’t really been her fault). She hadn’t been able to do quite literally anything in the time that she had been at school. It was already the middle of September. She had spotted the calendar in the nurse’s office, and she had barely bitten down on the yelp that she had been about to let out in time. She had lost months before she had woken.
That sounded odd (even in the confines of her head), but she knew of no other way to explain the experience. The circumstance of waking up seemed to be the best comparison that she could provide -- not that her ability to provide an accurate comparison really mattered as there was no one to tell. The ones who would care to hear the explanation were out of her reach, and the people that she could converse with were certainly not to be trusted with the information that she had figured out how to snap out of it. Even when the malaise had first begun to break and she had still been rather foggy headed, she had been together enough to know that she needed to keep her mouth shut.
That wasn’t to say that there hadn’t been a temptation to let loose her temper when she had strung together the gist of what had happened, but the moment had quickly passed. There was nothing simple about the situation in which she found herself, and she had to make her decisions accordingly. Strategy trumped righteous indignation. She had been granted an advantage, and she wasn’t going to fritter it away for no gain but the venting of her own hurt feelings.
The months she had spent in this school of Meredyth’s choosing were all covered with a strange haze that prevented any of her thoughts from being accessed clearly. There was no good way to explain what it was like to be trapped like that. She hadn’t even realized that she had been trapped. When she let herself ponder over that, she couldn’t determine whether it was better or worse for it to be that way. If she had been capable of recognizing what was going on, then she might have tried to fight the effects. She might also have simply been further caught in the depression of knowing that things were not right and not being able to do anything about it. It didn’t matter. It was merely an academic pondering. That wasn’t what had happened. She hadn’t noticed.
She hadn’t noticed much of anything at all. She had stumbled from day to day without processing much of what she had been doing. She went whe
re she was told when she was told to go there. She did what she was told when she got there. She went away again when she was told that it was time to do so. Hour drifted into hour, day drifted into day, and week drifted into week. The cycle repeated, but she was too out of it to know that there was a cycle. It was no wonder that checking up on her swallowing her pills didn’t seem to have entered into the question. She had been a pretty docile little puppet (as best as she could manage to recall) for the entire time that she had been at this school. They had never seen her do anything other than what she had been told (and maybe, as mortifying as she found the thought, sometimes falling asleep in class).
She followed directions without asking (or even wondering) why they were given or why she should be following them. She didn’t wonder, she didn’t process, and she didn’t think. She just was, and there wasn’t much of her present in any case. There was no reason for there to be. She (the thinking, pondering, processing, questioning her) was not needed in the arrangements that her sister had made for her. She rather thought that that had been the point.
There was a lot to be learned about Meredyth in the studying of that design if she cared to pursue the implications. She didn’t. She didn’t, at least, at present. She wasn’t ready. She thought that there was something missing from her calculations, and she preferred to wait until whatever it was fell into place before she tried to piece together her picture of Meri again. This move, the whole boarding school set up, had caught her by surprise, and she didn’t care to repeat the experience of being caught off guard. It hadn’t ended well, and it wasn’t a pleasant reflection.
It caused a headache to try to focus on making any of her hazy memories clearer, but she pushed through it in an attempt to syphon out what she could. It was important that she manage to act the same as (as far as the people here were concerned) she always had. It wouldn’t do to have someone reporting back to Meredyth that she had undergone some sort of behavioral change.
That would be her first order of business. She would figure out what she needed to do to keep up appearances and do it. The next couple of days were spent doing just that. The hallways and classrooms had become familiar to her without holding any real recognition. It was an eerie sort of knowing where she was going without really knowing where it was until she got there that was bred from weeks and weeks of habit of going where she was told until the motions were automatic. She supposed that it really wasn’t different on a basic level than the automatic way you picked a route to your classes in the normal way. Except, of course, for the part where a normal person could make a conscious decision to deviate from that routine, and her brain seemed to have been stripped of the ability to introduce a concept like choice into the equation. That bothered her more than she was willing to admit. The fact that she still couldn’t manage to get any completely clear memories from the last few months left her with knowing that she had essentially had her mind erased for a while while her body had been left behind to go through the motions. There was nothing good to come from dwelling on that knowledge, so she didn’t.
She had worried that people would notice that she didn’t know what to call them, but it proved to be a nonissue. That was apparently part of her normal for here. It seemed that names had been told and repeated but never seemed to catch. She was pretty sure (it was hard to tell through the foggy glaze that coated all of the memories) the she had simply stopped trying to use names at all. It hadn’t seemed important at the time that she try to anchor the matching word to the face that it identified, but there hadn’t really been anything that seemed important in any way.
She had only one close call (if you could even call it that). One of the teachers had given her a curious glance when she had begun to fidget with her necklace chain. She may have even imagined that it was a curious look, but the woman had noticed something was different. She had to avoid that, so she made a concerted effort and kept her hands off her pendant.
She had no idea how she had faired with the school work that seemed to have made up most of her days, and it wasn’t as though she could ask to check her GPA. She suspected that the answer wasn’t a favorable one. She knew that she had read textbooks and completed papers, but she never seemed to know what it was that she had been studying afterwards. It, like everything else during those days, had seemed to slip through her grasp like some sort of intangible vapor that was determined to drift away from her as quickly as it had appeared.
Moreover, she hadn’t really cared. Caring required effort on her part, and effort was something that she couldn’t be bothered to dredge up to the surface. It would, ironically, require too much effort. Mostly, she had just wanted to sleep. That seemed to be the only activity that held her attention. It was the only thing she looked forward to doing. It was the only direction in which her thoughts had drifted when they were left without formal direction.
If she tried really hard, then she could call those scattered bits and pieces to mind. There wasn’t much there to try to sift through for something worth finding. Anything that was there didn’t feel like her when she found it. It was unsettling to know that it was her even if she couldn’t recognize herself in it. For all intents and purposes, months of her life were just gone. That thought always brought her back to her sense of being erased, and she always found a different track for her thoughts to take as quickly as she could. It was all very strange and most decidedly unnatural.
Deciding that everyone inside of the school was untrustworthy saved her the hassle of trying to determine if anyone would be able to help her. She was on her own. That attitude also spared her from getting her hopes up about any sort of rescue that she didn’t orchestrate herself. She was stuck here, and she had to figure out what she knew and what she needed to do all on her own.
If nothing else, then she was quite sure that no one in the school posed any danger to Meredyth’s continued spinning of whatever stories she decided to spin. They all had a firmly cemented picture of her in their heads of a rather lazy, fairly dim witted girl who required massive amounts of medication to even begin to function. It was all rather really nicely played (if she were in the position of being an impartial observer of a chess match, which she was not).
Sadly, she couldn’t even grant herself credit for the end of her internal imprisonment. She owed that to something also completely outside of her control. She owed it to a really bad case of stomach flu. Apparently, the virus had swept through the school, and she had gotten a particularly bad case. She hadn’t managed to keep anything down (including water) for three days. There was nothing like having your first moments of clarity in months occur while you were dry heaving. She supposed, however, that she should be grateful that clarity had come at all. It was all about perspective. Who knew that stomach flu could be the recipient of her eternal gratitude?
She was choosing to lay the blame for her lack of immediate understanding of the situation on the combination of residual haziness and dehydration (that and the fact that she had felt nothing short of awful). When the school nurse had handed her the pills and a glass of water, she hadn’t swallowed them simply because the thought of swallowing anything solid when she was still mildly nauseous had been so grossly unappealing. She hadn’t brilliantly deduced the danger, she hadn’t been suspicious, and she hadn’t done anything proactive about the matter at all. She, again, owed the positive outcome to chance.
She had been drugged. She repeated it to herself from time to time because there was something that was still so surreal about applying those words to herself despite the fact that each day that she continued to avoid taking her daily dose of medication and her mental clarity continued was just another piece of proof that it had, in fact, happened. It was blatantly obvious when all of your brain cells weren’t attempting to function through a medication induced lowering of your basic reasoning skills. That sounded a little bitter, even when unspoken to anyone but he
rself, but she didn’t bother to try and correct the thought. She had decided that she was allowed just a very little bit of bitterness. It would help to remind her not to be complacent.
Meri had obviously dropped her off with a prescription and instructions. It had taken her a couple of days to fit the puzzle together. It worked in her favor that the staff was so used to her docility that it never occurred to them to do a thorough check of her medication taking habits (plus, they had their hands full with all of the other students who were still passing the virus around). She didn’t give them any reason to reconsider their habits. She refrained from asking questions. She never so much as looked askance at the nurse when she handed her the little cup with her daily dosage. She merely took it, tipped it back, drank some water, and waited for a clear moment to spit them out. She was turning it into an art form.
She couldn’t remember any pill taking during her “hazy” time, and she thought that would have been something that would have a memory associated with it somewhere. She didn’t really have any proof of what exactly had happened, but she did have some conjecture. She decided that Meredyth must have instructed them to dose her food in some manner. It fit in with what she did know for sure. It made sense with how she had come out of it. If she had been being dosed via what she was eating, then that hadn’t been an option after she had gotten sick. The nurse (being under the impression that the medication was vitally important and unconcerned about how it got taken) had merely given them to her straight out in response to the change in circumstances. The staff had made no move to change that procedure in the days since she had recovered. It was, after all, probably much simpler for everyone to go about things this way. That tied her theory in nicely with the words that she had heard the nurse muttering the day she had been released from the infirmary.
She wasn’t going to question it too much. It worked out in her favor. Her energy was now directed at trying to behave as though nothing had changed. She didn’t talk to anyone unless she was spoken to -- that much was easy enough to accomplish. The school work was more difficult to judge. It took a bit of trial and error to find what seemed to be the correct mixture of sloppiness and inaccuracy. Everyone had gotten so used to her general level of inattention that she was able to pick up comments here and there that gave her a better (if still incomplete picture) of what Meredyth had told them.
She had, according to the sporadic whispers of the staff, inherited some psychiatric issues that needed careful attention and intervention. It was a (again from that position of an unbiased observer that she didn’t have) brilliant move on Meri’s part. The fact that something had been wrong with their mother was common enough knowledge in certain places. Their father had made a habit of letting his spokespersons (never himself) allude to their family tragedy when it proved expedient to do so. It was also a particularly sleazy move on Meredyth’s part (not that there was anything above board about any of this).
If she hadn’t made herself acquainted with her mother’s medical history through various means previously, then those whisperings amongst the staff might have actually given her a moment’s pause. It wasn’t as though she had spent her childhood never wondering why she didn’t have a mother like the other children. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t been raised in a house that had a staff that did their own fair share of whispering on the subject. It wasn’t as though her father had ever noticed whether she was listening or not. There had been times in her childhood that she had wondered.
She had heard things in bits and pieces when she was little, and she hadn’t always understood what it meant. She had struggled with the mishmash of information and the lack of straight communication from her family members, and she had gone through a phase where she had been petrified that everyone she knew would “go wrong in the head” and disappear from her life like her mother had. Meredyth knew that. She had shaken off the childhood memories of Meri comforting her through a teary confession of things she had overhead when she was seven (eavesdropping was her vice of choice). It tarnished them somehow to know that that was what Meredyth had chosen to use as part of her cover for this sudden upheaval of Lia’s life. It cut deeper than the knowledge of the drugging even though it likely shouldn’t.
Given that Meri had comforted her (and reassured her that no one else was going anywhere) without really explaining what had happened to their mother at the time, she had done her own digging when she was older. Thus, the speculation about her mental state didn’t stick as it might otherwise have done. As it was, she was fairly confident that she was in no position to have inherited her mother’s post-partum depression.
Other whispers from other people gave her other pieces of the picture. She wove it together and thought she had a decent overview. The story went that a combination of resentfulness of her family’s attention to her mental health and a standard period of teenage rebellion had combined and resulted in her attempting to be as self-destructive as possible. She had, apparently, most disastrously fallen in with a group of inappropriate peers who had introduced her to a whole host of illegal activities (none of the whispering staff seemed to have a clear idea of what those activities might have been).
This, of course, required careful monitoring of her mail (to prevent the reintroduction of these severed influences, and, some of the staff supposed, to prevent the receipt of a variety of illicit substances). It also required that she be banned from online communication and making telephone calls. She supposed that they figured that her netbook wasn’t good for anything but typing without an internet connection. It was still in her room and appeared to have been used to type one incredibly poorly written essay for her literature class (so poorly written, in fact, that she wasn’t sure what the topic was actually supposed to have been). There was no wireless internet available, and the connection in her dorm room had been removed instead of just disabled (she wondered how much Meredyth had paid for that). The possession of the netbook remained, however, a tangible possibility for outside communication so she tucked it away in the asset column of the list she was busy composing in her head.
There were other obvious avenues that she had had to dismiss as impractical. The fact that Meri had stranded her without any access to pocket money was a severe detriment to most of what options she would normally have had. Despite the antisocial and unapproachable vibe that she had managed to create among her schoolmates, a little careful observation revealed which girls would have let her “borrow” their internet connection or mail letters for her for a price. She didn’t think they would respond well to being asked to extend a line of credit.
In the end, she decided that her best bet was to bide her time until the middle of December. She was going back for a week for Meredyth’s wedding and attendant activities. She would have more options available to her then. After all, Meredyth would be, presumably, busy getting married. That had to provide at least some level of distraction for her normally incredibly focused sister. Didn’t it? Besides, something from Meri’s current status quo had to change. She couldn’t be counting on keeping her drugged up for the wedding festivities.
It was one thing to attempt to pull that off in this school where no one had ever met her and couldn’t know anything had ever been different. (She did, upon occasion, wonder if anyone here had actually read her records from her other school and processed the fact that she had dropped from strictly average to questionably passing.) It was entirely different to try to keep it up in front of people that knew her. Meredyth was smarter than that. Lia had been around Wyatt’s parents enough in the past for them to notice if she had suddenly become a zombie. (She had never been so grateful to have been forced into family dinners with Wyatt. Who knew bonding time with Wyatt could be a blessing?) There would be awkward questions from Mr. and Mrs. Walsh if she was no longer coherent when they saw her.
That didn’t mean that she could count on any further help from that
quarter. Trying to tell them that she was being held at school against her will while Meredyth drugged her to keep her quiet and nonthreatening wasn’t exactly the most believable of stories. The irony wasn’t wasted on her. What was that saying? The difference been reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense? Yeah, she figured pleading her case to the Walshes would only give Meredyth ammunition for that mentally unstable story she was spinning with the school. Lia didn’t need that spreading any further.
She would just plan on getting what she could reasonably expect from the Walshes -- a period of time when she wouldn’t have to worry about faking being drugged in front of Meri because Meri wouldn’t be drugging her in front of them. Then, there was Will. She was kind of counting on Will. He hadn’t been cooperative with whatever it was that Connor had requested from him previously, but he was hardly in cahoots with Meri and Wyatt. He would have to be around for the whole wedding process (she knew Mrs. Walsh well enough to know that he wouldn’t be able to get out of it completely), and she would have to wrangle some way of talking to him unmonitored. He might not be jumping up and down to be chosen to be helpful, but he ought to be able to pass a message. As long as she wasn’t operating with sludge for brains, she ought to be able to convey one.
It was a vague sort of a plan, and it needed to be fleshed out, but she could work on it. She was sort of drowning in free time (that happened whenever people expected you to be in your room sleeping whenever you were given the opportunity). As it was, she spent her days amassing information. It was a monumental task given that she couldn’t ask any questions. It took her three days to figure out where her new school was located. In the time that she wasn’t eavesdropping, she was plotting. She felt fairly confident that Connor already knew about Wyatt’s little foray into the world of kidnapping, but she kept a mental tally of the details that were contained in Meredyth’s files that might be helpful to him to know.
She pieced together the family connections of the girls at the school and began placing herself in positions to listen in on casual mentions of parents and siblings and their business and personal associations and anything that might tie back to Meredyth’s circle of influence (nobody paid much attention to where she chose to sit at meals). It didn’t pay off often, but there were tidbits here and there from certain politically connected girls who probably didn’t even know that what they were talking about had any importance. Lia knew; she had a map of the bigger picture in her head. She could see where some of the items mentioned might fit on it.
She paid attention to patterns. She started playing connect the dots, and she waited for something, anything to jump out as significant. It wasn’t like she didn’t have the time. Hours still drifted into hours, days still drifted into days, and weeks still drifted into weeks. She eavesdropped, she pretended like she didn’t care about anything but her next opportunity to take a nap, she eavesdropped, she made plans for arranging for outside communication, she eavesdropped, she thought about how much she missed talking to Kyle, and she eavesdropped some more. The cycle repeated, but she, at least, knew that there was a cycle this time.
She couldn’t write anything down. She had noticed little things that told her that her room was being periodically searched. She worried about that as she started to find more and more little items that might prove to be important. She was afraid that she would forget something, so she spent her evenings staring at her ceiling and reciting everything she had found over and over again. They started to organize themselves by common theme, and she started keeping a tally of how many items belonged under each subheading so she could count as she recited them and know if something was missing.
She assigned each cluster of information a spot on her ceiling and used the physical action of tracing a path from place to place with her pointer finger to help keep the memories together. She pointed, and she recited. She traced, and she counted. She pointed, and she recited. She traced, and she counted. Then, she did it over again and again and again. It became a ritual that took the place of sleeping for large sections of her nights. Sleep didn’t seem nearly as important as trying to make sure that she wasn’t going to forget anything that might be important later. She would make it to December. She would find a way (through Will or otherwise) to get a message to Connor. Connor (or probably Anna) would help find a way for them to get information back and forth, and she would be able to spill all of the information that she had stored up in her head. Until then, she just had to make sure that she didn’t lose any of it.
She thought, sometimes, that the points that she had traced across the ceiling had found form and really etched themselves above her. She could see them so clearly. Obviously, however, she wasn’t seeing them clearly enough. There was something there. She knew there was. She could feel it. She just couldn’t see it yet. It would come. Something had to come out of this. She just had to find the bigger pattern. She just had to see how it all tied together, and she would know what it meant.
Then, it happened. One minute she was staring at the imaginary dots and reciting to herself what each one stood for and why it might be important, the next it was as though neon lights had started to weave themselves between certain points. Connections stood out. Timelines formed. It was clear. She could see it. There was a pattern. There was a design. Some of the dots dropped out and shifted to the side. Those were the unimportant ones; those were the ones that weren’t relevant to the matter at hand. The rest of them painted a design that she could read as clearly as the words on a page. She had one small moment of giddy delight at the successful culmination of her weeks and weeks of focus and study. Then, the message that the dots and lines were conveying sunk in behind her initial pleasure. She could read what it said, and it was nothing good. The middle of December couldn’t come quickly enough.
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