Page 3 of Mislaid in Parts Half-Known

Roughly a month after she showed up at the school, Kade had produced a small plastic rectangle with her picture and a bunch of lies on it. On the name line, it said “Antoinette West.” Antsy had looked at him curiously, the rectangle in her hand, and he had shrugged, suddenly awkward.

“Auntie said you couldn’t use your last name becausepeople might be looking for you, but that you’re not one of the ones we have to keep hidden and pretend isn’t here,” he’d said. “She seemed to think no one would be able to recognize you if they saw you. That so?”

Antsy had nodded, wondering how much she’d accidentally let slip. Did Eleanor somehow know how old she actually was? Or did she think that Antsy was like Cora, and her hair had changed color on the other side of the door? But those hadn’t been questions she could ask, and so she had simply nodded, tucking the rectangle into her pocket where it would be safe.

“Don’t lose that,” Kade had said. “We’ve got a former student who makes IDs for us when we need him to, but he costs, and he doesn’t like to have too many floating around out there. It took a while to get this one arranged.”

Antsy scoffed. “I don’t lose anything,” she’d said.

“That’s what Auntie says. Welcome to the family, cuz,” and he’d grinned, all sharp white teeth and amusement, and Antsy had grinned back, feeling suddenly free. Little rectangles with everything there was to know about a person were a sort of currency in this world. They meant you existed all the way, so even the computers knew you were there. And if she had the same last name as Eleanor and Kade, that meant she had a family again. Last names could change, and being a part of a family didn’t mean people wouldn’t hurt you, but it was still something wonderful.

But the little rectangle had stayed in her pocket, never used, until the day she’d woken up to find Cora already gone, and not soaking in the bathtub as she often did on the quiet mornings, when the bones of the school rattled in the fading wind, when the ghosts in the walls—not literal ghosts, not that Antsy had ever been able to tell, butghosts all the same, ghosts made of absence, of loneliness and longing—came out and wept. The static had been there to fill the space where Cora wasn’t, and so Antsy had gone creeping around the school, letting the lodestone ache of something needing to be found lead her, until she’d left the school entirely to go walking across the dew-wet yard into the trees, which were as close and dense and yes, old, as Eleanor had said they were.

Into the woods she’d gone, one whisper-quiet slip of a teenage girl with red, red hair and a long pink nightgown getting muddy at the hem, following a static only she could hear. She’d been passing a particularly tall and gnarled tree when the static changed, going from a low buzz to a ringing in her ears so loud that it almost hurt. Recognizing a prod when she felt one, she had turned toward the tree, kneeling in its roots.

There, tucked between two thick old roots each as big around as her arm, was a tunnel. If she squinted, she could just barely see a Door at the very end of it, small and golden-brown and almost glowing, although it didn’t cast any noticeable light. It was simply more visible than it should have been, given everything around it.

“No, thank you,” she had said, something close to terror building in her chest. For six months she’d gone to bed and woken up only a night’s sleep older. For six months she’d lived minute to minute, day to day, aging at exactly the same speed as everyone around her. She could tell, just by looking, that this Door wasn’t the one that would take her back to the Store. This Door belonged to Eleanor.

More, she could tell that it had somehow lingered, that it had been exactly where it was now for a very long time. Long enough for the tree to grow around it, rather than wedgingitself into an open spot in the world. This Door had been before the school; it very well might be after, as well.

Antsy remembered the things they’d been told in evening therapy sessions, about how most Doors appeared once, then vanished forever, or as good as forever, and how some of them stayed until they were opened, and how some—the rarest of them all—put down roots and stayed close enough to forever as to mean the very same thing. She thought about some of the things she’d heard murmured about Eleanor, about the hungry way their headmistress watched Sumi move through the school, about the way she tried to assign every new student to Nonsense, whether or not it suited their narrative, and thought she understood something now that she hadn’t before waking up alone in her room.

The ringing faded, replaced by the static that had drawn her out here to begin with, and she scrabbled around in the dirt until her fingers hit something hard and sharp and neither stick nor stone. Antsy pulled whatever it was out of the dirt, holding it up to see in the watery moonlight. A ring of keys, complete with ancient, moldy rabbit’s foot.

And then it was off to the office with something new known and something to return. Doors had their own song in the static; if she was close to finding one of them, they screamed to be seen. But other things would still sing when it was time to bring them home.

Antsy had returned the keys to Eleanor just in time to catch the fact that Cora had requested a relocation, and she’d gone back to their still-shared room sick with the conviction that she must have done something wrong at some point during their brief time together. She’d slipped somehow, said something she shouldn’t have, and now even her roommate couldn’t stand to be around her.

Intellectually, she knew she’d done nothing of the sort, but emotionally, she was struggling to behave like as old as she looked. She had no idea how most things worked, and she was getting overwhelmed easily and often, bending under the weight of a world she no longer understood. If there was blame in the offing, even imagined blame, it was easier to take it on her own shoulders.

Three days later, Cora was gone, bound for the foreboding-sounding Whitethorn Institute with its promise to “cure” students of the “delusions” which had severed them from their lives and families.

Two days afterthat,Cora’s friends had come to Antsy, saying they’d heard she could find anything. They wanted her to find their friend.

She had agreed, and Cora had come home, along with Sumi and a small cluster of new faces, Regan and Julia and Carrie and Emily and Marian, and Antsy suspected—although she couldn’t quite be sure—that was when everything had started to go wrong.

3 HIDE AND SEEK IS LOST AND FOUND FOR AMATEURS

“I HEARD YOU CANfind anything,” said Emily anxiously, standing near where Antsy sat in the school cafeteria, a former dining room that had been converted to hold forty students eating at once. All the escapees from Whitethorn were like that: anxious. They sounded worried all the time, like they knew down to the bottom of their bones that any day now, they’d be gathered up and carried back to what Antsy thought sounded very much like a prison.

They also didn’t know how to be free anymore. They flirted with the idea like guests at a party, taking little steps and stabs, then dancing backward, out of reach. The more regimented things could be, the more relaxed they were. Eleanor had assigned one of them, Julia, to teach Antsy’s classes, and the woman could barely answer questions that weren’t precisely outlined in the text.

“Barely” wasn’t the same as “couldn’t,” though, and Antsy could see flickers of rebellion in Julia’s expression during class. It was Julia, always Julia, no “Miss” or “ma’am” attached. The one time Antsy had called her “Miss Julia,” the woman had recoiled so violently that she smacked her head against the wall, and classes had been cancelled for the rest of the day.

A new teacher wasn’t the only change brought on by Cora’s return. Cora hadn’t come back to room with Antsy, instead moving into Sumi’s room, although all three of them quietly agreed that the Trenches hadn’t been Nonsense at all.That world of watery wonders was Logic by any reasonable definition, and it was odd that Eleanor had been able to get that wrong. Although she’d been wrong about the Store, too.

So for the time being, Antsy slept and woke alone, waiting for the day when the slow shuffle of rooms would put someone new into the bed across from hers, which was slowly becoming a dumping ground for clean but unfolded laundry, vanishing under shirts and sweaters.

“I can,” Antsy agreed, with her own note of wariness. “You have your lunch?”

Emily nodded.

“Sit down, then.” And she’d scooted her own tray closer to herself, making space as Emily sat.

Lunch and breakfast at the school were informal affairs, as much buffet as menu, with the students free to pick and choose from whatever suited them. Antsy looked at the contents of Emily’s tray, blinking a bit at the jumble. Whole-grain bread smeared with butter and what looked like cranberry relish, a slice of pumpkin pie, and half an acorn squash dusted with cinnamon and sugar.

Emily saw her looking and blushed, already dark cheeks growing darker. “I know it’s a little weird, but it’s what I like, and Sumi said I was allowed to have whatever I liked for lunch. I’ll eat the same as everyone else does at dinner, I promise.”

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