Page 5 of Mislaid in Parts Half-Known

“How is that any stranger than maple syrup?”

“Oh, you didnotjust call maple syrup strange,” said Emily. “Maple syrup is the blood of the divine, boiled down into perfection, and you will not impugn it in my presence!”

Antsy laughed, and there were no more scripts as both of them finished their lunch, chatting about holidays she didn’t remember and scary movies she hadn’t seen, and when the bell rang for the next period, she felt as if she’d both made a friend and played a successful prank—a trick to go with the treat of their conversation. Emily hadn’t seemed to realize how different they were, age-wise, and maybe that meant no one ever would. Maybe she could get away with what she couldn’t change.

It wasn’t until she was settling alone at her desk in the classroom where the Basic Curriculum was taught to her class of one that she realized Emily had never told her what she wanted Antsy to find.

4 A DANGEROUS TALENT

EVENINGS WERE MOSTLYtaken up by therapy sessions, frequently uncomfortable events where groups of students in different combinations were ushered into a room to share their experiences. The woman who ran them, Nichole, was pleasant, about the age of Antsy’s mother, and seemingly unflappable. She was door-touched like the rest of them—most members of the staff were, one way or another, although some were kin to travelers, rather than former travelers in their own right, and a few of the teachers who covered only one class or subject had no idea that this was anything other than a very strange boarding school.

“The locals think we’re sort of like juvie light,” Sumi had said once, tossing a ball of yarn up into the air again and again, catching it like a cat. “They figure we’re all messed up, and that this is a good, controlled place for us to reintegrate into society.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?” Antsy had replied. She didn’t like the idea of people thinking she was “messed up,” whatever that meant.

“No, ’cause they’re right” had been Sumi’s reply. “None of us is normal, and we’ll either figure out how to pretend we are, or we’ll find our doors home, and then we won’t have to worry about it anymore, because all the ways we’re not normal are the way our real homes want us to be. We’re perfectly normal in the right environment.”

She had wandered away then, and that conversation replayed in Antsy’s mind every time she approached the room where group was held. Tonight was for students whose worlds had touched on what Eleanor called the “minor” directions, aspects of their realities that were harder to classify than the broad questions of Nonsense, Logic, Virtue, and Wickedness.

While Eleanor had been quick to declare the Store a Nonsense world, Antsy had spoken with Kade while he was helping her get a wardrobe together, and he had decided it needed to be added to columns labeled “Linearity” and “Whimsy.”

Shoulders tight, Antsy slipped into the room and looked for an open chair around the outside of the circle. Only about half the seats were occupied; the Nonsense and Logic nights tended to be chaotic and sometimes uncomfortably loud, but the minor directions never attracted many people.

Group was optional for anyone who’d been at the school for a year or more. Antsy was thus used to not seeing many of the people she considered friends even on the major nights, and the minors were usually just her with a therapist and a bunch of kids she barely knew.

Even if you did attend, no one was required to share. Antsy knew even before she sat down that this wasn’t going to be one of the nights when she joined the conversation. She had slept poorly the night before; the branches rattling outside her window had woken her several times, surfacing, gasping, in her silent room. The silence made her miss Cora more. They weren’tfriends,not the way she was friends with Sumi or Christopher, whose dry sense of humor delighted her, but they’d been companionable in their silences, and she liked having someone around.

She was so preoccupied with thinking about how much she hoped for a new roommate that she didn’t notice someone sitting in the chair to her left.

“Psst,” said a voice.

A girl whose name Antsy didn’t know was at the front of the room next to Nichole, head bowed and hands clasped, talking about a world of moths and moonlight, where everything happened according to the verses of something she called the “Great Song.” Apparently, she had been asked to write new text, and had been gathering the ingredients for ink when she stumbled back into her own backyard. She was afraid of what would happen if she didn’t get back before the written text ran out. Antsy blinked, shaking off the cobwebs of contemplation, and focused on the girl’s story. She hadn’t realized she’d been distracted enough to miss the start of the session.

“Psst,” said the voice again.

Antsy leaned forward, twisting to see who was being so disrespectful. Letting her mind wander was rude but not actively disruptive. This, though. This was taking someone else’s time and spending it as if it were your own, and that was a step beyond anything reasonable.

Angela raised one hand in a little wave, closing her fingers one after the other and opening them again the same way. Then she gestured toward the door. “Come on,” she mouthed.

Antsy shook her head no.

Angela frowned, clearly having expected an easy acquiescence from the newer girl. She leaned farther forward. “Seraphina is waiting for us,” she whispered.

Antsy shook her head again, this time wrinkling her nose in her best attempt at a “Who cares?” expression.

“You can’t be serious,” whispered Angela, somewhat more loudly. “She doesn’t wait foranyone. She barely waits forme.”

Antsy, who was more interested in following rules than in getting in good with the popular kids, shrugged.

“Getup,” hissed Angela, barely whispering at all.

“Is there something wrong?” asked Nichole, her normally sweet and pleasant voice cracking through the room like the hand of all adult authority. The girl from the moth world was crying, hands covering half her face. Antsy cringed.

Angela, catching Antsy’s reaction, smirked just a little. “Antoinette doesn’t feel good, ma’am,” she said. “She ate some potato salad with her dinner that Itoldher looked sort of nasty, but she didn’t listen. I was trying to get her to let me take her to her room.”

Nichole looked to Ansty, who was shrinking back in her seat, looking so unrelentingly miserable that it was easy to believe the lie of her illness. “Do you feel like you’re going to be sick?” Nichole asked. She glanced back to the student who’d been speaking, then shifted her attention to Antsy. “Or do you feel like you need to see the doctor?”

The school didn’t currently have a medical professional on staff, but all the adult teachers were trained in CPR and basic first aid. Nichole could hand out ibuprofen and antacids, and knew how to assess common ailments and decide whether something needed a trip to the local hospital or urgent care.

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