Perfect Ruin

11

PEN HAS A POWERFUL SKILL IN GOING FROM defiance to contrition. She is all “Yes, sir” and timid nods the entire way down the hall. As the headmaster turns to open his office door, she smirks at his bald spot.

“Ladies,” he says, standing aside to let us in.

“Yes, sir,” we murmur, heads down.

We file past the receptionist, who does nothing to hide her surprise that among all the mischief makers she’s seen in this academy, we’re the latest—a star student and a patrolman’s daughter. The headmaster leads us to his office and closes the door behind us.

“There now,” he says. His chair creaks under his weight and he gestures for us to sit in the chairs on the other side of his desk. Pen fans her skirt daintily over her knees.

“The obvious question here is what you were both doing outside during academy hours. The second question—and I do believe this is the most important—is why you were trying to enter through a window rather than a door.”

He waits for our answer. Pen glances at me, clears her throat. “We were talking,” she says.

“Talking?”

She raises her shoulders, feigning embarrassment. “Female matters, sir. I’m a little more—seasoned—than Morgan and she was asking me for advice regarding a private conundrum with her betrothed.”

Headmaster Vega clears his throat and straightens a stack of papers on his desk, clearly flummoxed. There’s a bit of a blush across his dark face. “Why couldn’t these matters be discussed during your lunch period?”

“Lack of privacy, sir,” Pen says. My face is burning and I want to kick her, I want to kick her, I want to kick her. It isn’t the lie she’s telling so much as how much she’s enjoying my reaction. At an age when intimacy between betrotheds is a distinct possibility, parents and academy officials try to stay uninvolved for the most part. It was the one topic she could broach without being challenged.

“We would have used the door, but Morgan didn’t want her betrothed to know we’d left.” As if taking a cue from a stage director, she looks at her lap and blushes. “We were trying to execute discretion. Sir.”

Headmaster Vega clears his throat again. “I see. Given that this is a first offense for both of you, I see no need to summon your parents. I trust that from now on you’ll keep your private affairs outside academy hours. This is an institute of formal learning.”

“Yes, sir,” she says.

“Sorry, sir,” I say. My mouth has gone dry.

Headmaster Vega scrawls something onto a piece of paper and hands it to Pen. “You can head to your next class, Ms. Atmus. Stay for a moment, Ms. Stockhour.”

Pen is just as perplexed by this as I am, but she doesn’t question it. She squeezes my shoulder as she takes her leave, obeying the headmaster’s signal to close the door behind her.

After the humiliation I’ve just endured, it is with great effort and embarrassment that I meet the headmaster’s eyes. He picks up on my anxiety and says, “You aren’t in any trouble, but I was hoping to speak with you.”

“Yes, sir?”

“As you know, an academic record is kept of every student from their kinder years. In the last three years, your grades have faltered. You aren’t struggling by any means, but when a record goes from flawless to flawed, it is noticeable.”

This has nothing to do with being caught outside the academy. But that does nothing to quell my anxiety, because before the headmaster says another word, I already can see where this is heading.

“Your family has had a rough go of things since your older brother’s incident. I understand it left him disabled.”

“Functionally disabled,” I amend. There are those who have been dispatched after jumping from the edge damaged their cognitive functions. There are those who died on their own. “He’s still able to contribute a trade.” His identification card used to say he was a medical student. He threw it away after his incident, and Alice quietly retrieved it from the recycling. She keeps it hidden among her jewelry, and I’ve seen her take it out sometimes, turn it over and over in her palm. She loves my brother entirely, even the parts of him he’d like to forget.

I don’t like talking about Lex to people I barely know. It isn’t enough that I could have lost him, but what happened is a pall that will hang over my family for always. When it happened, my friends distanced themselves, one by one, until only Pen remained with that unwavering loyalty of hers. My father busied himself in his work, protecting Internment when his own son proved to be beyond protecting. My mother has been half herself.

Headmaster Vega attempts to smile. “I’ve only received happy reports from your instructors, and though one or two have said you’re a bit of a daydreamer”—Newlan—“it’s clear that you’re a bright girl. I’m concerned that something is holding you back. I know that you met with the king’s specialist, Ms. Harlan, and she informed me that she gave you a card with her home address, but that you haven’t called on her.”

“I didn’t want to impose,” I say. That’s not true. I’ve been considering it. I came so close to telling Basil.

“I’d like you to meet with her,” he says. “I gather that part of your hesitation comes from not wanting to burden your parents, am I right?”

Reluctantly I nod. It’s the absolute truth.

“I don’t think there’s any reason to make them worry, then, provided you’re willing to meet with Ms. Harlan during your lunch period. You may bring a cafeteria tray with you. How does that sound?”

He’s asking, but it’s not really a question. The headmaster is an authority figure, and authority figures don’t make suggestions to students. They tell. Until we become the property of our spouses, we are the property of our educators.

“This matter will be met with discretion,” he says. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

When I don’t answer, he says, “This is a matter more common than you might think. Many students receive counseling for a number of different reasons, and it all turns out fine.”

Fine. I mouth the word at my lap, desperate for the taste of it. What I wouldn’t give for things to turn out fine.

“All right,” I say.

He smiles, all the creases in his pudgy face curling like the wind the sky god conjures in my textbooks. “There will be no need to sneak off the premises to seek counsel from your classmates. I hope we have an understanding.”

“We do, sir.”

“Wonderful.” He scribbles an excusatory note on a piece of paper and hands it to me. “You’re dismissed. Have a pleasant afternoon.”

After classes, Pen and I linger on the outskirts of the playing field, watching the athletes chase one another within the confines of the low stone wall that marks game territory. Basil and Thomas are on opposing teams, and I could swear they’ve turned their practice into a private competition to impress us. Thomas is about as tall as Basil, quick and lean while Basil is more solid. It could be anyone’s win.

It’s an especially windy day, which is common for the short season. I bunch my fists inside the sleeves of my red academy sweater as we sit and watch them.

“Look at that,” Pen says. “If I were one of those poor, dumb, love-struck girls, I’d say there’s nothing in the sky more fetching than that, our boys with their sleeves rolled up, going at each other like beasts.”

I wonder if she knows her hand is to her chest. Her face goes flat. “Thomas doesn’t look too bad from this distance, does he? What a disappointment to know he’s not so exquisite up close.”

“He’s perfectly attractive,” I say.

“He has a nose like a broken bridge.”

“Oh, he doesn’t,” I say.

“You want him for yourself, is that it?” Pen says. “Have him. I’ll trade you your day-old compost scraps. At least then I could use them to grow something I could stomach.” She is smiling as she watches him, though. I watch the boys, too, trying to follow Basil across the field, the beads of sweat making his hair jagged when he doubles over to catch his breath.

I wrap my arms around Pen’s shoulders and lean my head against hers. “I hope we live in apartments next door to each other once we’re grown and married,” I say.

“I’ll be a mapmaker by then,” she says, “penning maps by candlelight until all hours. Maybe I’ll turn irrational. But not the bumbling, stupid irrational. The quiet sort, whispering things to glass jars as though they’ll hold my secrets. No one will ever know.”

There’s a moment of silence before she snorts and giggles. I can never tell when she’s being serious. She seems to prefer it that way.

“Hey,” she says. “I have to get something from the art room. Come with me.”

“I think Basil wanted to walk home with me.”

“We’ll be right back,” she says, and tugs me to my feet. She leads me into the academy, up the stairs, to the art room.

There’s a sort of eerie peace to an empty classroom. The easels display colorings like windows, each one a distorted view of Internment. I know which one is Pen’s even before she has marched over to it. The easel’s ledge is a mess of coloring pens, and bladder sacks haphazardly tied shut with twine, fat with colors. The bladders of small animals are the most common way of storing colors; paper wouldn’t do the job, and collapsible metal was deemed too wasteful when an inventor proposed the idea a hundred years ago. The colors themselves are made from plants.

She’s colored the glasslands the way they would look late in the afternoon, the domes and spires mirroring the orange sky and smoky clouds. She’s memorized that place. Not only does her father work there as a sun engineer, but she has a perfect view of it from her bedroom window.

She frowns at her work. “My contribution to the festival,” she says. “The instructor thinks it’s quite good. She wants me to color it in the center of the clock tower canvas, assuming we get the king’s approval.”

“Really?” I say.

She shrugs.

Every year, a large canvas is prepared by the city’s most talented artists. For the final week of December, the king allows the canvas to be wrapped around the clock tower. There’s a final week of festivities under that canvas, and even the rarely seen prince and princess come out to mingle.

“Pen, that’s a huge honor,” I say. “Why don’t you seem at all excited?”

In answer, she tears her coloring from the easel and crumples it in both hands. The colors are still wet, and oranges and grays stain her fingers. “It wasn’t right,” she says. Gritting her teeth, she pushes the balled paper together before yanking it into two pieces.

She drops the ruined project into a recycling tube, where it’s immediately sucked away, leaving a smear of color on the rim.

“How could you say that?” I say. “It looked perfect.”

“It was going to bother me all night knowing it was just sitting here all wrong,” she says. “I’ll make something better tomorrow. A portrait, maybe. You can be my model.”

“I thought the assignment was to color the city,” I say.

She shakes her head. “The assignment was to color something we love.” She gestures to the easels, full of colorings. “Clearly, everyone loves Internment. But I’ve decided you’re a more interesting part of my world than a bunch of buildings.”

“Maybe you should color the clouds,” I say.

“It’s been done a thousand times,” she says. “Really, Morgan. I’m disappointed in you.”

“Forgive me,” I say. “We aren’t all creative geniuses.”

We make it to the doorway before she runs back to her easel and takes the slenderest of the coloring pens. She wipes the bristles on a scrap of cloth and places it in her skirt pocket. “I’ll work on it at home,” she says.

I don’t know very much about art—that has always been Pen’s area—but I do believe that it is honesty at its core. I look at the smear of color on the recycling tube, and I worry that there’s something Pen’s trying to hide.

I can’t sit in the apartment any longer. I can’t listen to my mother’s rasped breathing as she sleeps in Lex’s blanket, and Alice’s shoes upstairs. She has a pair of wooden shoes that Lex favors. They’re loud and he always knows where she is when she’s wearing them. Normally the sound doesn’t bother me, but tonight I can’t seem to concentrate on anything but those steps. Pacing this way and that.

Yes. That word keeps coming back to me.

Are you a murderer?

Yes.

Yes.

Alice moves across the common room.

I put on a sweater and leave the apartment.

A patrolman holds open the door for me, tells me to be safe. I hear that every day. Be safe. I wonder what the patrolmen are doing to catch the supposed murderer. I wonder what they’re doing to catch the person who really killed Daphne Leander. There was some talk at the academy about a memorial service. It was held on Monday for family only. No friends were invited, if she had any friends—from what I’ve heard, she and Judas kept to themselves, a trait that gave them a reputation for being snobs. But I’ve learned not to take stock in what people say. I can only imagine what’s been said about me since Lex’s incident, and about Pen, who distances herself from all the high-ranking cliques at the cost of being my friend. “Who needs them?” she says.

The park is empty when I arrive. Little winged insects keep their chorus in the brush. I tread quietly, listening for patrolmen. Listening for Judas.

Only when I reach the cavern do I dare turn on my pocket light, angling it inside. But I find no messages written on the wall with a pebble. And I don’t find Judas.

Instead, curled under a red academy sweater, I find Amy Leander fast asleep.