The doorknob doesn't turn. After a long silence, a faint scratching sound reaches me through the wood. The hair on my arms prickles as it rises. There's another pause, then a clink. I jump in my skin as the door abruptly swings open.

My roommate is indeed not Exie. Almost the opposite of Exie, in fact, as though the universe detected my thoughts and decided it would be funny to present me with a manifestation of my attempts to scrub that girl from my mind. This one is tall—I could brain myself on her chin if I stood up too quickly—and so ghostly pale, I wonder if I should have included garlic on my packing list. She's got the kind of hair that falls like liquid about her shoulders. Also blue eyes, which I've never had a thing for. Least of all now.

The girl's pale gaze roams the room for several seconds too long before landing on me. She smiles widely. "Hello. Are you my roommate?"

Apparently. "Yes. Des. You?"

"Clarice."

She dips down to grab the twin suitcases beside her. As she does, something slips from her blouse pocket and skitters away across the floor. I stiffen. The silver pen from the check-in lectern comes to rest beneath the bed across from me. Clarice abandons her bags and darts to scoop it up again. She treats me to another smile. Then she re-pockets the pen and wanders back to the doorway to shut the door, humming. That's when I notice the brass nameplate on our door is gone.

Great. Of all the people I could be stuck with for the next ten months, my roommate just had to be the light-fingered type with a magpie's eye for the shiny. Nevermind that I definitely considered thieving that pen myself. It's different when I'd have done it just to cause a ruckus. I cast a glance around the room while Clarice unpacks, still humming. I'm giving the brass knobs on our nightstands a week if I'm generous. The fittings on the windows look more securely fastened, though if Clarice managed to lift that nameplate with little more than a minute and a bit of scratching, I wouldn't put it past her. Maybe she'll take the whole window while she's at it. Get herself kicked out so I can get a different roommate. I'd put up with freezing my ass off for a night for that.

There's a conspicuous lack of other things to steal in this room. Maybe I'm just noticing now because my thoughts are elsewhere, and my room at home looks about like this. But for all the tuition my parents claim to be forking over, there's very little luxury here aside from the fact that it isn't a dorm. Which I'm not complaining about, don't get me wrong. But it's odd. The bedframes are sturdy wood, without adornment. The mattress I'm sitting on has texture that mattresses should not, and I'm glad I'm seventeen and not seventy if I'm going to be sleeping on lumps all night. I'm not thrilled to be seventeen on lumps, either, but at least the blankets look snug. Which is good, because there's a draft coming off that window that I'm sure could stir a girl's skirt if she stood close enough, and no, I've definitely never tested.

Even the lamp in the room isn't much to write home about, unless you are like me and will write home about drivel just to meet my father where he's at. Then I remember I'm planning to burn his letter-paper, and discard that thought with a sigh. The lamp is dull. Dull, and dim, and dusty, with a little spiderweb hanging in one corner like defective lace. That spider is probably living her best life feasting on insects who've given in to the lamplight's siren song and met their ends in the bug graveyard accumulated behind its glass. If I dug through that graveyard and found last century's coal soot at the bottom of it, I wouldn't be surprised.

Clarice has finished unpacking. She maunders out of the room again without so much as a goodbye, and I'm left to contemplate her living space like that will grant me divine wisdom on how to deal with this semester. She has an marked absence of shiny things. Not that she's laid out, anyway. No jewelry, no fancy clothes, no picture frame on the nightstand. In fairness, I have no jewelry and no picture frame, either. I feel a bit of kinship with Clarice on this front. If we're both the kinds of people who'd sooner toss a family photo in a frog pond than display it where our parents can watch us while we sleep, maybe we can get along.

My eye then lands on my own suitcase, still untouched at the bottom of my bed. I have never been able to stand jewelry—too much cold fiddly metal against my skin—but my favorite skirts are all in there, together with a pocket mirror and at least one nice pen. I would rather not part ways with those. Next, I contemplate the shelves I have at my disposal. After a minute of deliberation, I opt to leave the bulk of my things in my suitcase. I set up my bed, then secure the tiny suitcase lock with a sigh and pocket the key. Time to see if I can keep from misplacing it for the next ten months. Off in an ethereal plane somewhere, the universe snickers.

Positive thoughts. If Melliford Academy roomed me with Clarice, they've either made a calculation error I can somehow exploit, or else they're aware we're liable to be the most problematic students in this year's cohort. If it's the latter, my reputation precedes me, and I'm off to a good start. Which means it's time for some planning.

Cross-legged on my bed, I build a mental list of tasks I'll need to lay the groundwork for my Humiliate My Parents And Escape Melliford Academy plan. I need to know the rules here, first of all, so that I may contemplate how best to flout them. Knowing posh schools, there's a school charter etched in a fancy metal plate somewhere and mounted on a wall. But the thing about rules is that each one has both a spoken and an unspoken component. Not to call myself an expert at this, but I'm quite proud of my ability to find and contravene the latter. Some people call them social norms. I prefer the term "personal challenge."

The second thing I would normally scout is the school building itself. Forbidden wings, locked rooms, ancient curses; the usual. Present circumstances, though, give me pause. Something nibbles at me about Clarice. Something that raises the importance of the third item on my to-do list instead.

I get up and brush down my skirt with a semiconscious hand. I'm not sure who I'm trying to impress, and opt not to query that matter until I want to know the answer—which is to say, sometime next century. I let myself out of my room. My second key falls to its doom in my skirt pocket. Shoving both hands in my pockets after it, I wander down the school's palatial hallways in search of what I speculate will be the noisiest corner of the building.

I am not disappointed. A jaunt up the hallway blesses me with a bellow of, "Barnabas eats worms and shits silver spoons!" from somewhere ahead. There's a metaphor about boarding school in there somewhere.

Raucous laughter attends this pronouncement. I follow it to the only open door at this end of the dorm wing. The student common room is a spacious, domed hall with a roaring hearth at one end, a motley assortment of couches, and lancet windows angled north of the midafternoon sun. I am disgusted I even know what lancet windows are. I am even more disgusted that my father would be proud of me. For that, I make sure to wipe my shoes on the rug, regretful that I didn't think to step in any mud puddles this morning. At least it makes me feel better. Apples falling far from trees and all that.

I didn't think there would be so many students here already. My parents perish of embarrassment if they're not four hours early to everything, but onboarding here lasts all day, and mine can't have been the only family hauling our haunches some ungodly distance across the countryside. Yet the common room houses nearly twenty individuals. I'm sure there's at least twice that number still unpacking in their rooms, and that's out of a cohort of a hundred as far as I'm aware. None give me more than a side-eye. Hands still in my pockets, I skirt the room's edges to size up the student food chain.

Several things jump out at me immediately. A line of carrel desks hugs one wall of the room, aspirationally for studying. Small tables line another. There's a boy at one of these carving up the wainscotting with a pocket knife, and nobody's looked askance at him. Another table has been commandeered by a game of poker. As I watch, one participant slams a hand down in the middle of it with a wolf's grin. She's wagered a pair of pearl earrings.

I kind of want to know who Barnabas is. There's a few students scattered about the couches, and a couple more at the carrels. Someone's already pushed two couches together and made a bed of them; he's sprawled across it with shoes on, napping. Not far off, a mousey boy with an aristocratic haircut has crammed himself in a couch-corner with a book. The remainder of the students have coagulated in front of the hearth, where a girl chats up a gaggle of boys in varying poses of machismo, suavity, and other socially appropriate mating displays.

Something's not adding up here, and it's not because I'm bad at math.

The scritch of a match makes me jump. I spin around to find graffiti boy holding a curl of carved wainscotting over an open flame. The wood burns up in an acrid puff of varnish. When he sees me watching, the boy's face twists into a grin that I'm sure would charm the socks off those more predisposed to find young men alluring. I pity the attempt. He reads my expression and grins wider. I would sooner step in horse manure than initiate conversation, so I continue my circuit of the room.

These are not the students I would have expected to find here given Melliford Academy's reputation, nor Exie's presence between its walls. Unless I've misread Exie, too. Or misread the Academy, which is admittedly more probable. I'm better at judging people than listening to my parents' soliloquies about boarding schools, so I'm sure there's things about this place that I've been monologued at about, and subsequently purged from my memory.

Getting expelled from Melliford Academy was already going to require some toil on my part, and this cross-section of its student body has not instilled hope in my prospects. There's a chance the good students are the ones in their rooms, and I wouldn't blame them. The scritch of another match sounds across the room. If this is the sort of student Melliford Academy enrolls, they—the school—must know what they're getting into. They can't not: the fourteen-page application letter my parents filled out included a background check, and I was still accepted. I haven't heard a fuss from the front door yet, so even Clarice's pen-pilfering has either gone unnoticed or been swept under the rug. The staff here know what they're doing.

I turn on my heel and stride out of the common room. I was going to start with run-of-the-mill trouble this semester, but others here have already beaten me to both petty theft and arson. If that's the starting point, I'll just have to raise the bar.

There's got to be a forbidden wing in this school somewhere. 

Like this chapter if you have  ✨ suspicions ✨

Comment if you think Des and Clarice will get along!