Two

Ashford House sat a couple miles out of what passed for downtown Eden Eld, far enough that the town border ran right through the middle of it, leaving the house half in and half out. Eleanor was the first one on the bus, and she took a seat all the way in the back, scrunching up in the corner. She watched the landscape flow by. Trees and more trees, mostly, and a few bare meadows, gone gray this late in the season. Not too many houses until they got closer to Eden Eld.

The bus stopped a few times, letting kids on one and two and three at a time, dressed in matching uniforms. Carefully pleated skirts for the girls, slacks for the boys, everyone wearing jackets bearing school crests, thirteen pine trees in a ring around a rose. They all ignored her. Good. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She didn’t want to get to know anyone. She just wanted to get through the day and get home.

Not home. Back to Ashford House, because home was gone.

“Are you going to eat that?”

She jerked, startled, and realized that someone had taken the seat in front of her. He hung over the back, pointing at her toast with one hand while the other dangled loose. He had brown skin and glossy black hair that curled and tumbled and coiled every which way, hiding one eye. He looked like a pirate or a poet, or maybe a bit of both. He also looked hungry.

“I guess not,” she said. “It’s pretty cold.”

He shrugged. “I don’t mind.”

She handed him the toast and he ate it in five massive bites before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, then reached out to shake hers. She eyed the smear of crumbs and jam on his knuckles, then shook his hand anyway. She’d promised to be friendly. When her hand touched his, her skin prickled, like a bug running over her wrist. She shivered and pulled away. He looked a little puzzled, but his smile didn’t falter.

“I’m Otto,” he said. “Otto Ellis.”

“Eleanor Barton.”

“You’re new.”

“I knew that, actually,” she said sharply. But he laughed, a bright, startling sound that made her grin on reflex, forgetting that strange, scuttling sensation in the face of his open friendliness.

“Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t telling, I was just saying. I talk too much and point out the obvious. Or so I’ve been told.”

“How could you tell? That I’m new?” she asked. Did she stand out? She’d planned on not standing out. It was basically her entire plan for surviving Eden Eld, in fact, and it was off to a bad start.

“It’s a small school,” he said. “Not that hard to memorize all the faces. Especially all seventeen of us that ride the number seven bus. Eighteen now, I guess.”

He drummed his fingers on the back of the seat, then seemed to make a decision. He grabbed his backpack and swung himself around, plopping down in the seat right next to her and dumping his worn, dog-hair-covered backpack on top of his feet. She resisted the urge to scrunch farther away.

“Did you just move here?” he asked.

“Um. A couple weeks ago,” Eleanor said. “But I was taking some time off.”

“Was it because of your parents’ jobs or something?”

“No,” Eleanor said, flushing. Instinctively she pressed her fingertips against the flat, shiny skin on her palm. “It was—I’m staying with my aunt. At Ashford House.”

His eyebrows went up, vanishing under the beautiful briar of his hair. “Ashford House? That weird, spooky place at the edge of town?”

“That’s the one,” Eleanor said, trying to sound as casual as she could. Ashford House made normal harder.

“Awesome,” he said with feeling. “You know it’s supposed to be haunted? Or some people say that, anyway, but I think it’s just because it’s big and old and weird. I went looking and it turns out no one’s ever even died there, so how could it be haunted? And actually that’s really weird given how old it is. Somebody’s died just about anywhere that’s more than a hundred years old. Does it really have nine staircases?”

“Only seven,” Eleanor corrected. He looked at her with rapt attention. She had to admit it was kind of nice, being the authority on something. “But they’re really strange. There are two spiral staircases, and one that wraps around a corner at the very edge of the house and is so narrow Ben—that’s my uncle—can’t even get in. And one of them you can only get to if you walk through the giant fireplace in the living room, and it doesn’t go anywhere at all. It just stops at a wall. And Uncle Ben says it’s on the original plans that way, too. It never went anywhere.”

“Cool,” Otto said, grinning, and Eleanor couldn’t help but smile back. “So why are you living with your aunt and uncle?”

Her smile wavered.

She could refuse to answer. Then she’d seem weird and rude.

She could tell him the truth. Then she’d seem weird and tragic.

Or she could lie.

“My parents died in a car accident,” she said. Car accidents were normal.

He looked stricken. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s okay,” she said, feeling guilty. But the truth would have only made him feel worse for asking. She added the lie to her list.

The bus pulled up in front of the school a few minutes later, and the rest of the students started grabbing their bags and rushing off. The school was a huge, imposing brick building, standing against the dark backdrop of the towering pines that were everywhere in Eden Eld.

One side of the front courtyard had been decorated with hay bales and scarecrows and pumpkins, and fake spiderwebs stretched over the front archway, but the Halloween decorations somehow made the place less spooky. It was scarier by itself, with its tall, narrow windows and the looming clock tower on the north side of the building.

Halloween. She’d been able to ignore that it was coming, holed up in Ashford House, but she couldn’t get away from it now. Today was Wednesday. Saturday was Halloween, and that meant it was her birthday. She was going to be thirteen.

The first birthday she would celebrate without her mother.

“Who do you have first period?” Otto asked. She forced herself to look away from the decorations.

“Mr. Blackham?” she said. “Chemistry.”

“Oh, he’s great,” he said. “He lets us light things on fire for science and make ice cream with liquid nitrogen, which is totally dangerous and awesome. I can show you how to get there, if you want. This place is kind of a labyrinth.” He said labyrinth with clear enthusiasm for both the word and the concept. There wasn’t any pity in his eyes at all. A little sympathy, but not that oh-you-poor-kitten look she was so used to. Her stomach balled up in one big knot. Now she felt even worse for lying to him. But how did you tell someone you just met I live with my aunt because my mother tried to kill me?

You didn’t. Not if you wanted to be normal.

“That would be great,” she said, feeling the puppet strings at the corners of her mouth. “That would be perfect.”

---

•   •   •

THE DAY’S LESSON did not involve lighting anything on fire, for science or otherwise, to Eleanor’s great relief. She knew fire too well now. She knew how different things smelled when they burned—walls, carpet, furniture. She knew the sound of glass cracking from heat and the grit of ash and soot that never seemed to scrub off her skin. So it was a relief to simply open a textbook and stare down at the diagram of a water molecule as Mr. Blackham directed them to the vocabulary lesson.

But they had hardly begun when a boy with mousy brown hair and mousy brown eyes darted in and handed a note to Mr. Blackham. He squinted at it before calling out, “Eleanor?”

She raised a tentative hand to shoulder height. He smiled a little, and she flushed. Of course he knew who she was. She was the New Girl. “Ms. Foster would like to speak to you,” Mr. Blackham said. At her blank look, he sighed and pulled his glasses down his nose so he could look over them at her. “The headmistress. Left, down the hall, right, the office is right there.”

“Is something wrong?” she asked. Her mind raced through every terrible thing she could imagine—Uncle Ben hurt at work. Something wrong with the baby, with Jenny. The house—houses as old as Ashford House had old wiring, too. All it took was a spark to start a fire.

“I wouldn’t know,” Mr. Blackham said, with the sort of tenderness that meant he knew about her mother and would be one of those adults who treated her like she was seven, not almost thirteen. “I’m sure everything’s fine.”

If he didn’t know, he couldn’t be sure.

She hopped off her stool and grabbed her bag. She hurried out of the classroom, a sour taste at the back of her throat. Her fingers found the shiny patch of skin on her palm. Without any students in the halls, her shoes echoed on the tiles, the sounds bouncing against the walls and falling back at her until it sounded like copies of her were walking to either side.

Being called to the headmistress’s office wasn’t good, was it? Not on her first day. Had she done something wrong? She couldn’t think of anything. She’d been normal. Mostly.

Except for the clock, maybe. And the bird, maybe. But no one else knew about those.

Mr. Blackham’s directions brought her to a large oak door, like something borrowed from a castle. She reached for the knob, but it flew open of its own accord, nearly hitting her. The girl who hurtled out of the office did hit her—a glancing blow on the shoulder that still nearly took them both tumbling to the ground. The girl caught her by the arm, hauling her upright.

At the touch, Eleanor’s skin crawled, like insects scuttling over her wrist—the same feeling she’d gotten when Otto took her hand. The girl dropped her arm and blew out a breath, kicking loose strands of coppery hair away from her face. The rest of it was back in a sloppy ponytail. She wasn’t wearing her school blazer, and her white polo shirt was wrinkled and only half tucked in to her slacks.

“Watch out!” the girl chided her. “Don’t you know it’s dangerous around here?”

“I—” Eleanor began, but the girl was taking off again down the hall already, her sneakers squeaking on the tile. Eleanor watched her go, rubbing her wrist, though the tingling had already stopped.

She shook her head. It was probably nothing. Nerves.

She turned back to the door, which had swung shut. Tentatively, she opened it. This time, nothing jumped out at her, and she stepped into the office. Inside, a gray-haired woman with purple lipstick sat typing at a computer. She looked up when Eleanor entered and pursed her lips.

“She’s waiting for you,” the woman said in the kind of scratchy voice you got from smoking cigarettes all your life, and pointed over her shoulder at a second, much less intimidating door leading to an interior office. Eleanor slinked past her desk. The woman started typing furiously.

The inner office door stood open a crack. Eleanor knocked tentatively, pushing it open a bit at the same time, and poked her head in.

A woman about her mom’s age sat behind a huge oak desk that matched the large office door. The legs were carved into gnarled tree trunks that bulged outward before curving back in toward the wide, flat surface. The woman behind the desk had skin as milky as white marble, her features precise, giving her a sculpted look. She wore her orange-red hair scraped back in a tight bun. Her lipstick was bright red and her eyes bright green—everything about her was bright as polished gems. She made Eleanor think of serpents and of wicked queens, like in the fairy tales her mother used to read to her.

“Miss Barton. Please, take a seat.” She waved at the armchair opposite her, across the desk, and Eleanor sank into it. She felt like she should say something, but she couldn’t imagine what. Ms. Foster folded her hands on top of the desk and peered at her through black-rimmed glasses. “How is your first day going so far?” she asked.

“Um. All right,” Eleanor said. “I was only in class for a few minutes.”

“But you haven’t encountered any problems?”

“No,” Eleanor said. “No problems.”

“Good. Very good. Now, I’m sorry that we haven’t met before today. Normally I insist on meeting all of our students at some point in the application process—but you didn’t have a normal application process, did you?”

“No, I guess not. I don’t really know—I know my aunt—”

“Jenny is a delightful woman,” Ms. Foster said with a wide smile. Her teeth were very white and very straight. “But it’s not really on her account that I waived the usual procedure.”

“It isn’t?” Eleanor asked.

“Your mother. Claire. She was a dear friend of mine,” Ms. Foster said. “We grew up together, here in Eden Eld. When my father was the headmaster. We got into all sorts of trouble.” She chuckled like she expected Eleanor to join in, but Eleanor’s mouth was dry. No one had said her mother’s name out loud to Eleanor, not that she could remember, since the fire. “I know that you are having a very difficult time right now. But I want you to know that you can come to me. For whatever you need,” Ms. Foster said.

Her words overflowed with warmth, but a cold shiver went down Eleanor’s spine. She mumbled that she understood. Her eyes dropped away from Ms. Foster’s. It was hard to hold that bright green gaze.

A silver picture frame sat on the corner of Ms. Foster’s desk. The photo was of a smiling Ms. Foster, in the same dark blue suit she wore now. Next to her stood a weary-looking man with gray at his temples and a long, sorrowful nose. And between them, their hands on her shoulders, was the redheaded girl who’d nearly knocked Eleanor over, a smudge of dirt on her cheek and a grin stretched so wide you knew she was faking for the camera.

“My daughter,” Ms. Foster said. “Pip.”

“We’ve met. Sort of,” Eleanor said. If you could call that a meeting.

“My one and only,” Ms. Foster said with a kind of sigh, and then she clapped her hands, making Eleanor jump in her seat. “Well! You had better get back to class. You don’t want to get too far behind. So much to do and so very little time.”

She smiled with those perfectly white, perfectly straight teeth. Eleanor stood. And then she paused. “You said you were friends with my mom?” she asked.

“Very good friends. Everyone knows each other in Eden Eld, of course, but Claire and I shared a number of interests in common,” Ms. Foster said, tapping one long nail on the desktop thoughtfully.

“What kind of interests?” Eleanor asked.

“Oh, you know the sorts of things that teenage girls can get up to,” Ms. Foster said. A strange look flashed over her face. Something that was nearly sadness, and nearly satisfaction. “Or you wouldn’t know quite yet, I suppose. Claire and I had a special interest in local history. Though it led us to quite different places.”

“I see,” Eleanor said, though she didn’t. She could tell that Ms. Foster wasn’t going to say any more about it, though, and there was something very uncomfortable about standing in front of that huge desk with those perfectly green eyes fixed on her. She swallowed. “I should go, then.”

“Wonderful,” Ms. Foster said with another sparkling smile, and Eleanor backed away two steps before turning and hurrying from the room. She shut the door behind her and started to walk back out past the secretary’s desk, but then she froze. The secretary had stopped typing and was staring in confused puzzlement at the last line she’d written.

Get out gET out GET OUT get OUT GeT OuT get oUt of Eden eLd

“Well,” the secretary said in her hoarse, cigarette-wrecked voice. “Well.” Her chin wagged back and forth, an odd sort of twitching, and she stabbed one yellow-stained finger against the backspace key. “Well. Well,” she said with each stab, and one by one the letters vanished, until all that was left was a normal email. Then she blinked and smiled brightly at Eleanor. “Is there anything else you need, dear?” she asked.

“No,” Eleanor said hastily. “Nothing, thanks.”

She fled.