Page 31 of Good Girls Lie
“Mmm?”
“Are you all right? Camille?”
Camille’s eyes are glassy, her face flushed. I instinctively put a hand on my roommate’s forehead.
“Whoa. You are burning up. Come on, up you go. Let’s get you to the infirmary.”
“No!”
Camille jerks back, shrinking into the cushions. She’s holding a heating pad to her stomach, disguised under a throw pillow.
“Camille, you’re sick. You need to go see the nurse. I don’t want to catch whatever you have.”
“You won’t,” she mutters. “It’s that time.”
“Your period gives you a fever? Come now, you need to be seen.”
“Sometimes it does. I just want to sleep.” She manages to focus on me. “How was your audience with the queen?”
“Changing the subject won’t deter me. You need to be seen.”
“If the fever hasn’t broken by morning, I’ll go, I swear.”
“Fine.” I take a seat next to her. “She wanted to elucidate my manner of insults. She felt I was being illogical by calling her a daft cow as she’s neither stupid nor fat.”
Camille laughs softly, wincing at the effort.
“Then she invited me to breakfast.”
“With the seniors? Whoa.”
“Yes. Now that I’ve been properly chastised, if you won’t see reason, I’m going to bed. Can I get you anything? Hemlock?”
“You are so strange. Maybe just some Tylenol? It’s in my bag.”
Camille’s purse hangs from the back of her desk chair, easy to find. I start to dig in, but Camille says, “Wait. Just, hand me my purse, would you?”
I hand it over, and her clear, reusable water bottle with the school crest labeled on the side, half-full.
“Thanks.” She digs in her bag, pulls out the white-and-red bottle, swallows down the pills. “Listen, Ash. I know this place is weird. Just stick it out. It gets better. The first couple of weeks in a new school are always difficult. Goode is exceptional. You’re going to fit in fine.”
I collapse onto my bed with my worn copy ofThe Republic. “I admit to wondering if I should have been focusing on Machiavelli instead of Plato.”
“Stop making me laugh, Ash. It hurts.” Camille giggles and snaps off the light.
The darkness bleeds around us, sweet and velvet, and I think back to the strange sense I’d had in the Commons as if someone were watching me. I’ve been chalking it up to being surrounded by 199 other girls and the teachers, maids, groundskeepers on-site, all of us shoved into the tiniest fishbowl imaginable, but now I wonder if there’s something more. This school is old for America; these buildings stretch back hundreds of years. The area is isolated; the mountains whisper secrets on the breeze. Places have memories, especially when there’s been bloodshed. A walk along any battlefield will confirm that.
My mother would love it here. Would have done, that is.
My parents are dead.
A small voice from the ceiling pulls me away from the sharp pain that floods my chest at the thought of my mother’s soft, lined face, worn and gray and riddled with worms. The notes from Grassley’s Bach fugue rise in my mind.
“What’s her room like?” Camille’s question chases away the scene in the parlor, Father on his back. Mother, gray and lifeless.
“Becca’s? Don’t know. They took me to a big room that overlooked the mountains.”
“The Commons?”
