I didn’t know what her problem was. He looked at me first.
Another girl with box braids passed me on her way out of the dining hall and paused to take me in.
“You’re new,” she observed.
“Does it show?”
She gave me half a smile and took it back before it could become friendly enough for the room to misunderstand.
“You’ll want to find the east kitchen next time. After hours. The bread there is better. So is the company.”
She was gone before I could thank her or ask her name.
I stayed at the wall until the dining hall began to thin. Then Iwent back to Room 114, lay down on the wool blanket with my boots on, and waited.
Somewhere down the hall, a door closed.
Then another.
After that, silence.
No one came to explain the school. No one came to ask if I had eaten. No one came to tell me I had done everything wrong in my first few hours.
But I felt like I had.
2
The window had no light to give me when the first bell rang.
What little sky I could see beyond the wall was still dark. The room was colder than it had been when I’d fallen asleep.
I had passed out in my clothes. They were rumpled and stiff, so I changed into the uniform I found in the closet. I wasn’t under any illusions that they’d make me fit in better, but at least maybe I wouldn’t stand out quite as much.
There was a small basin in the corner of my room. I drank from it because I was thirsty and no one had told me not to.
Later, I would learn Zenith Hall had rules for every basin in the building. None of them were meant for drinking. But I didn’t know that then.
The woman from yesterday had said the “first reading” when the bell rings. As if that explained anything.
I figured I had better try to find it if I wanted to avoid making a worse impression on my second day than I had on my first.
In the hall, a boy in a dark school coat that matched mine came around the corner carrying a stack of books, and I stopped him.
“Where is the first reading?”
He pointed up a staircase without speaking and continued past me.
So up was the only answer I had.
Better than nothing.
I walked to the stairwell and climbed one flight of stairs, then another.
By the third, my breath was working harder than I wanted it to.
The stairs finally ended at a fourth-floor landing with one open door.
I peeked inside. A stone basin, low and round, suspiciously like the one in my room, set into a small chamber.
