Summer St. Julien doesn't flinch. Not when the home room bell rings again, even though it rang five minutes ago (that's to cover up the screams), and not when the Teacher sends her to the Principal's (that's for smiling). Normally everything about the School makes her flinch, makes her nervous, makes her skin crawl with premonitions. The kind you get when you look at someone and you know they're not coming back.

But today Summer is angry, she's holy hell angry, and she's carrying an axe on her back. That's not what the Teacher is pissed about. It's the smile, all the smile, smiles are dangerous. Smiles bring the monsters down. Summer smiles big and feral with the joy of a skull right up until the Teacher speaks. "To the Principal's, St. Julien." Summer snaps the smile back in so tight it hurts her mouth. Her feet take her up and out, the whole classroom staring at her like a bunch of hooded owls, blinking dumbly with glazed cow eyes. They are cowed, trampled and chewed and spit out and this is all that's left.

Not Summer. She won't be trampled. She won't be chewed.

Her feet carry on without choice, the words command her down the foggy stone halls, constant condensation filling the cracks, breaking the mortar, erasing, eroding, dust to dust. That's how the monsters like it, they like the dust. It's funny though, really, and Summer stifles a giggle (hysterical, if she's honest). Because even though she can't control her feet, the choice is still hers. She wants to be here, wants to go, wants to find out what waits for her in the dark, in the Principal's office where one in five never come back.

Her best friend didn't come back. Shane Starlin. A girl who wore her robes in tatters, sharpened her nails, and smiled for the monsters just so she could draw them. Gone since Tuesday, so Summer did the only sensible thing she could. She got an axe.

It weighs on her back, knotting into an ache, a hard, fibery knot she rolls between her shoulder blades. Her feet stop her at the Principal's door. It's black and leaky like everything at the School. Not stone. Sodden wood, swollen and grotesque, bulging and splintering at the edges.

The door opens, sluggish and spongy-damp, emitting a smell like boiled snails. Summer doesn't know what boiled snails smell like, but she imagines it's this. Briny and cold and a little poisonous. She wonders if she's prepared. She has the book of monster drawings Shane left behind, she has her axe (which she takes in hand), and she has her godawful anger, eating her, drowning her, pummeling her lungs into shattered breaths. Summer is pierced on that spot with breathing, it pains her and paralyzes her.

That's how she knows she's ready.