Arriane nodded, making Luce accidentally snip off a chunk of hair she’d meant to leave. Whoops. Hopefully Arriane wouldn’t notice—or maybe she’d just think it was edgy.
“Eight classes, ten kids a pop. You get to know everybody’s crap pret-ty quickly,” Arriane said. “And vice versa.”
“I guess so,” Luce agreed, biting her lip. Arriane was joking, but Luce wondered whether she’d be sitting here with that cool smirk in her pastel blue eyes if she knew the exact nature of Luce’s backstory. The longer Luce could keep her past under wraps, the better off she’d be.
“And you’ll want to steer clear of the hard cases.”
“Hard cases?”
“The kids with the wristband tracking devices,” Arriane said. “About a third of the student body.”
“And they’re the ones who—”
“You don’t want to mess with. Trust me.”
“Well, what’d they do?” Luce asked.
As much as Luce wanted to keep her own story a secret, she didn’t like the way Arriane was treating her like some sort of ingénue. Whatever those kids had done couldn’t be much worse than what everyone told her she had done. Or could it? After all, she knew next to nothing about these people and this place. The possibilities stirred up a cold gray fear in the pit of her stomach.
“Oh, you know,” Arriane drawled. “Aided and abetted terrorist acts. Chopped up their parents and roasted them on a spit.” She turned around to wink at Luce.
“Shut up,” Luce said.
“I’m serious. Those psychos are under much tighter restrictions than the rest of the screwups here. We call them the shackled.”
Luce laughed at Arriane’s dramatic tone.
“Your haircut’s done,” she said, running her hands through Arriane’s hair to fluff it up a little. It actually looked really cool.
“Sweet,” Arriane said. She turned to face Luce. When she ran her fingers through her hair, the sleeves of her black sweater fell back on her forearms and Luce caught a glimpse of a black wristband, dotted with rows of silver studs, and, on the other wrist, another band that looked more … mechanical. Arriane caught her looking and raised her eyebrows devilishly.
“Told ya,” she said. “Total effing psychos.” She grinned. “Come on, I’ll give you the rest of the tour.”
Luce didn’t have much choice. She scrambled down the bleachers after Arriane, ducking when one of the turkey vultures swooped dangerously low. Arriane, who didn’t seem to notice, pointed at a lichen-swathed church at the far right of the commons.
“Over here, you’ll find our state-of-the-art gymnasium,” she said, assuming a nasal tour guide tone of voice. “Yes, yes, to the untrained eye it looks like a church. It used to be. We’re kind of in an architectural hand-me-down Hell here at Sword & Cross. A few years ago, some calisthenic-crazed shrink showed up ranting about overmedicated teens ruining society. He donated a shit-ton of money so they’d convert it into a gym. Now the powers that be think we can work out our ‘frustrations’ in a ‘more natural and productive way.’”
Luce groaned. She had always loathed gym class.
“Girl after my very own heart,” Arriane commiserated. “Coach Diante is ee-vil.”
As Luce jogged to keep up, she took in the rest of the grounds. The Dover quad had been so well kept, all manicured and dotted with evenly spaced, carefully pruned trees. Sword & Cross looked like it had been plopped down and abandoned in the middle of a swamp. Weeping willows dangled to the ground, kudzu grew along the walls in sheets, and every third step they took squished.
And it wasn’t just the way the place looked. Every humid breath Luce took stuck in her lungs. Just breathing at Sword & Cross made her feel like she was sinking into quicksand.
“Apparently the architects got in a huge standoff over how to retrofit the style of the old military academy buildings. The upshot is we ended up with half penitentiary, half medieval torture zone. And no gardener,” Arriane said, kicking some slime off her combat boots. “Gross. Oh, and there’s the cemetery.”
Luce followed Arriane’s pointing finger to the far left side of the quad, just past the dormitory. An even thicker cloak of mist hung over the walled-off portion of land. It was bordered on three sides by a thick forest of oaks. She couldn’t see into the cemetery, which seemed almost to sink below the surface of the ground, but she could smell the rot and hear the chorus of cicadas buzzing in the trees. For a second, she thought she saw the dark swish of the shadows—but she blinked and they were gone.
“That’s a cemetery?”
“Yep. This used to be a military academy, way back in the Civil War days. So that’s where they buried all their dead. It’s creepy as all get-out. And lawd,” Arriane said, piling on a fake southern accent, “it stinks to high Heaven.” Then she winked at Luce. “We hang out there a lot.”
Luce looked at Arriane to see if she was kidding. Arriane just shrugged.
“Okay, it was only once. And it was only after a really big pharmapalooza.”
Now, that was a word Luce recognized.
“Aha!” Arriane laughed. “I just saw a light go on up there. So somebody is home. Well, Luce, my dear, you may have gone to boarding school parties, but you’ve never seen a throw-down like reform school kids do it.”
“What’s the difference?” Luce asked, trying to skirt the fact that she’d never actually been to a big party at Dover.
“You’ll see.” Arriane paused and turned to Luce. “You’ll come over tonight and hang out, okay?” She surprised Luce by taking her hand. “Promise?”
“But I thought you said I should stay away from the hard cases,” Luce joked.
“Rule number two—don’t listen to me!” Arriane laughed, shaking her head. “I’m certifiably insane!”
She started jogging again and Luce trailed after her.
“Wait, what was rule number one?”
“Keep up!”
As they came around the corner of the cinder-block classrooms, Arriane skidded to a halt. “Affect cool,” she said.
“Cool,” Luce repeated.
All the other students seemed to be clustered around the kudzu-strangled trees outside Augustine. No one looked exactly happy to be hanging out, but no one looked ready to go inside yet, either.
There hadn’t been much of a dress code at Dover, so Luce wasn’t used to the uniformity it gave a student body. Then again, even though every kid here was wearing the same black jeans, black mock-turtleneck T-shirt, and black sweater tied over the shoulders or around the waist, there were still substantial differences in the way they pulled it off.
A group of tattooed girls standing in a crossed-armed circle wore bangle bracelets up to their elbows. The black bandanas in their hair reminded Luce of a film she’d once seen about motorcycle-gang girls. She’d rented it because she’d thought: What could be cooler than an all-girls motorcycle gang? Now Luce’s eyes locked with those of one of the girls across the lawn. The sideways squint of the girl’s darkly lined cat-eyes made Luce quickly shift the direction of her gaze.