Page 128 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

“We will not toss you out on the street,” said Miss Ironish. “But until further notice you will house yourself in the boys’ dormitory across the schoolyard. Scarly will show you the way.”

This is how Rain came to be exiled to the haunted dormitory where, a few months later, the ghost first appeared.

I0.

She loved her new arrangement. For one thing, though again on the top floor, she now had a window. The plastered ceiling was high, and no nails poked through. While Rain had hoped and longed to be a girl swimming in dailiness with the other girls, she had little capacity for gloominess, as far as she knew, and she didn’t feel lonely to be so alone.

Also, although Scarly now

had relocated to the main building to take up her old room, paradoxically Rain saw her more often. The maid had greater liberty to roam the premises of the annex than any of the students. As long as Scarly carried a tray or a bucket or a lamp, she could come and go up the stairs to Rain’s attic without being stopped. Usefully, the unused boys’ dormitory was built above the storerooms and the stables, and the four maids were kept to a pretty clip, dashing back and forth all day. At nighttime when Scarly finished her final chores she could wander across the courtyard as if to count the clean sheets for the laundry or leave the morning list for the milk and eggs man. Then she could stand at the base of the steep winding staircase that rose two full flights and call out, “Hoo hoo!” as if she were an owl, or an Owl.

Rain’s room was so far back under the eaves that she couldn’t always hear Scarly. But Tay usually did. Tay would go sniffing and scraping at the closed door until Rain pulled on some socks and a tatty knitted houserobe and came inching out to meet her.

“Is the others being beastly to you?” asked Scarly, the first time she came to visit.

“Not really. At the start they were cross because Miss Ironish dumped the crawberry trifle in the horse trough behind the stables, but then the Lurlinemas baskets arrived anyway. All the girls had treats and presents enough to please them.” Rain had gotten no such basket, but she hadn’t expected to, and she imagined that Scarly had been similarly deprived. “Did you ever see a ghost here?” she asked, to change the subject.

“En’t no such thing as ghosts.”

“I hear some spooky-spooky noises at night.”

“Doves in the joists. They can’t sleep with them bats in the belvedere coming and going all night.”

“Shall we get down to it?”

“Right, Miss.”

Rain had decided to teach Scarly to read. They worked for almost an hour in the lamplight. From a classroom Scarly had pinched a slate and a slice of chalk, and Rain formed letters first while the maid copied them below. “Put more of a foot on that L or it will be mistaken for an I.”

Scarly labored with her tongue in the corner of her mouth. She was tired enough when she arrived and she could rarely work for long, but she came back every second or third night. Since there was no extra coal for the stove in Rain’s chamber, they sat huddled under a single coverlet like a giant slug with two heads. Tay liked to bask in the lamplight and bat at the scratching chalk the way a cat might.

One evening Scarly yawned and said, “I en’t the strength to do any more nasty vowels. Let’s just sit here and keep cozy for a moment till I get ready to run back through the cold to my room.” It was midwinter now, and the schoolyard between the annex and Founder’s Hall was hip deep in snow. “Tell me about your home.”

Rain liked Scarly as well as she imagined she could ever like anyone, but she still wanted to hew to the instructions that her aunt and her parents had given her. Avoid making idle conversation that might endanger anyone. Rain didn’t believe she knew how to tell stories, anyway, and neither did she want to lie. “I’m good at forgetting all that,” she said, which was truthful enough. “Tell me about yours instead. Have you got two parents?”

“Sure enough, man and wife, live in a hamlet that en’t got no name. A half hour on foot from Brox Hall, on the train line.”

“How did you get all the way here?”

“They had nine other mouths to feed, din’t they, so since my mouth was less sassy than some, they figured to put me to work in the city.”

“You have nine brothers and sisters?” Rain almost saw shooting stars.

“No, six of ’em, plus Grandmaw, that gormless old witch, and the goat and the milk-cow. The chickens don’t count as they feed themselves with grubs and such.”

Rain wasn’t sure how to frame the next question. “Do you miss them much?”

“I see ’em once a year, don’t I?” She tightened her lips and bobbed her chin in affirmation. “That’s more than my maties belowstairs, most of ’em, and also Cook, who has three sons in the army and thinks they must all be dead as dinner.”

“Are they older or younger, your brothers and sisters?”

“Oh, all sorts. How about you?”

“I have Tay,” said Rain.

“Anyone coming to see you on Visitation Day?”

She caught herself from saying my aunt. “I don’t know. I haven’t had any”—what was the word?—“correspondence.”

---