Penn's intel was pretty remarkable. It crossed Luce's mind to ask her what the story was with Daniel, but the complicated intensity of her interest in him was probably best kept to a need-to-know basis. At least until she figured it out herself.
She felt Penn's hands wringing the water from her hair.
"That's the last of it," Penn said. "I think you're finally meat-free."
Luce looked in the mirror and ran her hands through her hair. Penn was right. Except for the emotional scarring and the pain in her right foot, there was no evidence of her cafeteria brawl with Molly.
"I'm just glad you have short hair," Penn said. "If it were still as long as it was in the picture in your file, this would have been a much lengthier operation."
Luce gawked at her. "I'm going to have to keep an eye on you, aren't I?"
Penn looped her arm through Luce's and steered her out of the bathroom. "Just stay on my good side and no one gets hurt."
Luce shot Penn a worried look, but Penn's face gave nothing away. "You're kidding, right?" Luce asked.
Penn smiled, suddenly cheery. "Come on, we gotta get to class. Aren't you glad we're in the same afternoon block?"
Luce laughed. "When are you going to stop knowing everything about me?"
"Not in the foreseeable future," Penn said, tugging her down the hall and back toward the cinder-block classrooms. "You'l friend to have."
CHAPTER 3. DRAWING DARK
Luce meandered down the dank dormitory hallway toward her room, dragging her red Camp Gurid duffel bag with the broken strap in her wake. The walls here were the color of a dusty blackboard—and the whole place was strangely quiet, save for the dull hum of the yellow fluorescent lamps hanging from the water-stained drop-panel ceilings.
Mostly, Luce was surprised to see so many shut doors. Back at Dover, she'd always wished for more privacy, a break from the hallwide dorm parties that sprang up at all hours. You couldn't walk to your room without tripping over a powwow of girls sitting cross-legged in matching jeans, or a lip-locked couple pressed against the wall.
But at Sword & Cross… well, either everyone was already getting started on their thirty-page term papers… or else the socializing here was of a much more behind-closed-doors variety.
Speaking of which, the closed doors themselves were a sight to be seen. If the students at Sword & Cross got resourceful with their dress code violations, they were downright ingenious when it came to personalizing their spaces. Already Luce had walked by one door frame with a beaded curtain, and another with a motion-detecting welcome mat that encouraged her to "move the hell on" when she passed it.
She came to a stop in front of the only blank door in the building. Room 63. Home bitter home. She fumbled for her key in the front pocket of her backpack, took a deep breath, and opened the door to her cell.
Except it wasn't terrible. Or maybe it wasn't as terrible as she'd been expecting. There was a decent-sized window that slid open to let in some less stifling night air. And past the steel bars, the view of the moonlit commons was actually sort of interesting, if she didn't think too hard about the graveyard that lay beyond it. She had a closet and a little sink, a desk to do her work at—come to think of it, the saddest-looking thing in the room was the glimpse Luce caught of herself in the full-length mirror behind the door.
She quickly looked away, knowing all too well what she'd find in the reflection. Her face looking pinched and tired. Her hazel eyes flecked with stress. Her hair like her family's hysterical toy poodle's fur after a rainstorm. Penn's sweater fit her like a burlap sack. She was shivering. Her afternoon classes had been no better than the morning's, due mainly to the fact that her biggest fear had come to fruition: The whole school had already started calling her Meat Loaf. And unfortunately, much like its namesake, the moniker seemed like it was going to stick.
She wanted to unpack, to turn generic room 63 into her own place, where she could go when she needed to escape and feel okay. But she only got as far as unzipping her bag before she collapsed on the bare bed in defeat. She felt so far away from home. It only took twenty-two minutes by car to get from the loose-hinged whitewashed back door of her house to the rusty wrought iron entrance gates of Sword & Cross, but it might as well have been twenty-two years.
For the first half of the silent drive with her parents this morning, the neighborhoods had all looked pretty much the same: sleepy southern middle-class suburbia. But then the road had gone over the causeway toward the shore, and the terrain had grown more and more marshy. A swell of mangrove trees marked the entrance into the wetlands, but soon even those dwindled out. The last ten miles of road to Sword & Cross were dismal. Grayish brown, featureless, forsaken. Back home in Thunderbolt, people around town always joked about the strangely memorable moldering stench out here: You knew you were in the marshes when your car started to reek of pluff mud.