Page 126 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

She missed the breakfast bell, not only that morning but for eight mornings more.

9.

There were six instructors. Proctor Clapp supervised them all. At whim he would strike the iron bell in the hall, and only then could the teachers stop at the current topic and proceed to the next. Perhaps in his study he suffered narcolepsy for hours on end, for some days they would spend all morning on a single matter—the number line, or the Chronologies of Ozmas, or Primary Divinity, or dictation and diction—before the bell finally sounded.

Rain (Miss Rainary, Miss Rainary, Miss Rainary) was in a class with girls apparently three years younger and six years smarter than she was. They were young enough to adore tattling on her.

“Madame Shenshen, Miss Rainary doesn’t even know how to do her algorhythmics.”

“Madame Shenshen, Miss Rainary didn’t finish her tallies so I can’t check my work against hers.”

“Madame Shenshen, I was paired with Miss Rainary for Spellification yesterday. Today may I have a partner who actually knows something?”

Madame Shenshen was a taurine woman who drenched herself in essence of floxflower to disguise the symptoms of a powerful digestive ailment. She was impatient with Rain up to a point, but however hard she might try, for the promotion of Rain’s humility, Madame Shenshen couldn’t disguise her admiration of Rain’s swift progress. “For someone so evidently abandoned to the winds of chance,” she claimed once, clasping her hands like a smithy, “you are proving yourself worthy of the opportunities St. Prowd’s supplies you, Miss Rainary Ko. Bravo. Except this word, admonition, is spelled incorrectly. Please, if you will, tonight prepare me a page on which you spell it correctly three hundred times.”

Rain could not yet count that high, but Miss Scarly was clever at figures and worked it out. Sort of. When Rain arrived the next day with five hundred admonitions, she was punished for showing off.

The girls were noisy at breakfast and lunch and sat in silence at dinner while Proctor Clapp or Miss Ironish read aloud from Meditations of the Divine Emperor, a slim volume bound in ivory kid that was all the stir in the bookstalls that season. Rain knew this for herself because once a week they went for promenades along the Suicide Canal or into Pfenix Park, taking care not to step on the dead pigeons. Inevitably they passed a book cart or a storefront, and Meditations was everywhere, in stacks and stacks.

Popular, or maybe not, as the stacks seldom seemed to shrink.

Rain wondered when the other girls were going to sort themselves out in her mind as individuals, or if they would. Unlike stones and pinecones, they never stayed still long enough for her to collect them. Perhaps because Rain had met Scarly first, she thought the maid was the most interesting of the bunch. Rain wasn’t well used to launching conversations, while Scarly was trained to keep her lips closed unless spoken to. It seemed a losing proposition in terms of friendship, except that Scarly could communicate more in a saucy expression tossed in Rain’s direction than the Divine Emperor seemed to be able to do in fifteen pages of discourse about his own divinity.

The reading was coming along. On the one hand, every now and then Rain regretted mastering the skill at last. She had imagined that books would have more to offer. What Miss Ironish supplied from the locked case of volumes in the front hall seemed a steady dribble of hectoring. Though very pious hectoring.

On the other hand, she saw that Shiz was full of writing in a way that the Chancel of the Ladyfish above the Sleeve of Ghastille hadn’t been, nor the cottage at Nether How. Rain’s least dreadful moment of the week was the walk from Ticknor Circus along Regent’s Parade, next to whichever sourfaced student had pulled the short straw and gotten stuck with the new girl. It was a promenade of courteously brief literature! Statements applied all over the place, some in letters a foot high.

GENTLY USED GARMENTS. PLEXODIE’S FAMOUS HARMONIA CAFÉ. SHIZ CONSTABULARY. PORTER’S LODGE PLS. KNOCK.

And sandwich boards on the paving stones! LATEST WAR NEWS WITH EVERY BEER advertised near the door of the Cock and Pumpkins. HAPPY HOURS ADD UP TO HAPPY DAZE: that one outside the Peach and Kidneys. And her favorite, a sign over a shop down some uneven steps, almost below ground, on a mews off Railway Square: SKURVY BASTARD’S EMPORIUM OF LOST AND BROKEN ITEMS. She loved to read that one. She thought she’d like to quit St. Prowd’s and go to school under the tutelage of Skurvy Bastard.

By Lurlinemas she had proceeded to the fourth primer, the one with the stories of Little Handy Mandy, a somewhat moronic child with kleptomania—she couldn’t keep her fingers out of anything. She seemed preternaturally prone to trouble. Rain had used to like to steal things—was she as dull as Handy Mandy? The little girls laughed until their eyes streamed with tears. Rain said, “Madame Shenshen, I think I have finished with Handy Mandy.”

“Too much for you?” said Madame Shenshen. “I’m not surprised. I believe you’re ready to move up, once the Overseers have come and gone. Congratulations. I’ll miss you. If you ever get a yen to look back in on Handy Mandy or on me, you know where to find me.”

The Board of Overseers came for dinner at Lurlinemas, so the quality of the food was expected to improve appreciably. “Our best Dixxi House service, and if you break a plate I’ll break your neck,” instructed Miss Ironish. “Stand behind your chairs until the Senior Overseer is seated, and then follow his every move. If he picks up a spoon to sample the broth, you do the same. If he finds the dinner roll not to his liking, you do the same. If he leaves half his chop or asks for more peas, you do the same. If he writes his name in the custard with the end of his spoon, you are to do the same. Are there any questions? Miss Rainary, are you attending?”

“Yes, Miss Ironish.”

“If the Senior Overseer puts his napkin upon his lap, Miss Rainary?”

“I will do the same.”

“If he tucks it in at his collar?”

“I will do the same.”

“Very well. Miss Ghistly, do you understand? Miss Mauna, Miss Igilvy? Miss bon Schirm?”

“Yes, Miss Ironish.”

Rain didn’t remember having celebrated Lurlinemas before. Maybe back at Mockbeggar

Hall? She couldn’t work out how a festival day centering around some miracle of Lurline, the fairy goddess who had founded Oz, now honored the providence of the anonymous deity everyone called the Unnamed God. Or UG. Happily, on Lurlinemas the girls got maple syrup for their oatmeal sludge at breakfast, which almost mitigated the tedium of extra hours of prayers to the UG and a new devotional chant to the UG’s Divine Presence, Shell, Emperor of Oz.

Rain thought the maple syrup more divine than the Emperor, though she had learned not to give voice to such a sentiment.

At the service, candles were brought out, and little square bells the size of petits fours. The Senior Overseer, a stooped and mild old man prinked out in a plaid vest and a pince-nez, with sore skin that peeled in birch bark curls, read aloud the text and also the instructions for the ceremony, apparently not silencing himself for italics.

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