After dinner she came back to an empty dorm room. She could go down to the common room and try to make some friends, but what was the point? She’d just say the wrong thing. Besides, Wellsworth wasn’t the first school her mom had sent her to so she could get a “top-notch education,” and it probably wouldn’t be the last. She’d figured out a long time ago that friends never stuck around when she switched schools, so why bother making new ones?
She started rummaging for her pajamas and found her soccer cleats instead. Maybe soccer might give her a friend or two. She’d never fit in on her teams at home because she always played with older girls, but that might be different here. Then again, she might not even make the team.
She sighed and pulled out her father’s box. Had he ever been to a school like this in England? Had he made friends easily? Emmy’s mom was always so bubbly, like some kind of delicious drink, but Emmy…well, she was more like a soda can that had gone flat. Maybe she was more like her dad. Or maybe she was just an anomaly. An evolutionary blip that would disappear as quickly as she had come.
She slid the box under her bed—Victoria didn’t seem like the kind of roommate who would understand about her dad. She opened up her laptop and typed “Thomas Allyn” into her web browser. She’d searched for her dad a thousand times, but she’d never found anything. This time was no different.
She closed her laptop and slipped it back into its case. There must be a reason someone had sent her that letter now, right before she got to England, but she had no clue how to figure that reason out. How could she find information about someone who seemed to have been erased?
Emmy jumped. Her cell phone was ringing. She pulled it out of her backpack. “Hello?”
“Hello, darling!” her mother said. “How are you? Did you have a good flight?”
“Yeah, it was fine.”
“How are you getting settled in? Have you met your roommate? Are you making lots of friends already?”
“Uh…”
“Never mind, I guess you just got there, but I’m sure friends will come easily enough.”
Emmy didn’t say anything. When had she ever made friends easily?
“Listen, darling, I can’t talk long, I’m having dinner with Gretchen, but there was one tiny thing we didn’t get to discuss before you left.”
Emmy’s whole body got stiff. Any time her mother said they had to talk about something, it rarely turned out to be tiny.
“Wellsworth has very challenging academic standards, and I think it’s best if you don’t take on any extracurricular activities that aren’t directly related to your studies.”
“What do you mean?”
Her mother cleared her throat. “I think it’s best if you focus on schoolwork. You can’t afford to be distracted by anything extra, like clubs, or sports, or—”
“You mean soccer.” Emmy’s heart hammered against her ribs. “You’re saying I’m not allowed to play soccer.”
“That’s right.”
Emmy’s voice seemed to have disappeared. She had a million things to say, but she couldn’t spit any of them out.
“I know that might be a bit disappointing, but—”
“Disappointing!?” Emmy blurted. “Soccer’s one of the most important things in my life, Mom! You can’t just take that away from me!”
“Emmy, don’t be so dramatic. I know soccer is important to you, but it’s just a game. You’re almost twelve; you need to start focusing on what really matters. These next few years of school will shape the course of your life. You can’t afford to be distracted.”
“It’s never been a problem before.”
“But now you’re at a much more rigorous school. It’s not like we can move you somewhere else if you run into trouble.”
“But Madam Boyd said I could go somewhere else if Wellsworth was too hard.”
“Emmeline, do you have any idea how humiliating it would be if you had to leave school?”
“You’ve moved me to new schools before.”
“Yes, but boarding school is different.” She paused and took a deep breath. “I was doing an interview yesterday, and the reporter asked whether sending you to a boarding school showed good parenting skills. I have to be careful about this. Can you imagine how damaging it would be to my career if I sent my daughter to boarding school and she couldn’t cope? The press would have a field day with me, with both of us.”
Emmy’s jaw went tight. So that’s what this was really about. Her mom’s career. It was always about her mom’s career.
Her mom sighed. “We’ll have to finish this conversation later, I’m going to be late. I love you.” The phone went dead.
Emmy clicked the red button on her phone. No soccer. The one thing she was looking forward to. The one thing that mattered. The one place Emmy mattered. But that didn’t matter to her mother.
• • •
Emmy hadn’t been asleep that long when her alarm started blaring the next morning. She rubbed her eyes. Victoria was nowhere to be seen. Probably got up early so I couldn’t ask her for help.
Emmy’s school uniform wouldn’t be ready for a few days, but she had a gray skirt and a sage green sweater that might blend in. Her first two classes were economics and biology, and they were every bit as hard as Madam Boyd had warned. The economics teacher kept sneezing, which made him lose his train of thought and change topics in the middle of a sentence. After class he dumped a stack of homework sheets on Emmy’s desk and walked away before she could ask any questions. The biology teacher was more helpful, but he spent so long going on about natterjack toads that she missed lunch. When the bell rang, she had to race to her fine arts class, where she was bowled over by the smell of moldy fruit.
“We need to sketch the fruit in various states of decay,” the teacher drawled. “It draws us closer to the very essence of the peach!”
After madly taking notes on oil spills in geography, she checked her after-school schedule. She was supposed to talk about a plan for learning Latin with a teacher named Master Larraby. She followed the map to the Classical Studies wing, found the right office, and waited. And waited. And waited. She checked her schedule again. Latin tutorial, Master Larraby’s office, Classical Studies department. She was definitely in the right place, but there was no teacher to be found.
An hour later, she threw her bag over her shoulder and stomped back down the hallway. What a waste of time. At least if she went back to her room, she could get a little homework done before dinner.
She slipped into the common room and nearly bumped into a group of girls who were crowded around a fancy-looking shoebox.