Page 1 of House of Hearts
1
I didn’t come to Hart Academy for a $40,000 high school diploma, but something tells me “cold-blooded revenge” would’ve looked bad on my admissions essay. At the very least, I’m sure they wouldn’t have sent me the brochure if they knew I’d cross the headmistress’s eyes out in black Sharpie.
I slap on the smile I practiced in the mirror and bury my vendetta six feet deep. I’ll unearth it later, but for now I need to look like any other perfectly adjusted, super-excited senior. I could at least pretend to be happy, right? I’m standing at the gates of the crème de la crème of boarding schools: a wealthy academy in Upstate New York where old-money families off-load their children each fall. Anyone in my shoes would be ecstatic to be here—well, almost anyone. My mother’s wearing an identical pair of sneakers, and all she’s doing is sniffling into a tissue.
“I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” she says, crying.
She’s been doing that all morning. It started after her tenth snoozed alarm, and it continued the entire three-hour drive in the car—Google Maps couldn’t get a word in without my mother blubbering into the steering wheel.
I hand her the last Kleenex in the pack. We’ve gone through several. “I’ll call every night.”
She accepts my offering with a final blow of her nose. “You better! Oh, Violet, I’m so worried about you. You packed your pepper spray, right?” she whispers entirely too loudly. “You know I don’t trust rich kids—their parents have good lawyers. They could get away with anything.”
God, don’t I know it.
I stretch that fake smile further for my mother’s sake. It’s starting to chafe. “Yes, Mom. It’s in the front pocket of my duffel bag.”
“And your little whistle?” she presses.
“Yes, Mom. It’s on my key chain.”
“What about—?”
“Mom, trust me, I’ve got it all. Do I have to show you my laminated checklist?” I swivel around to pull it out once again. My packing list (however small) has been highlighted and checked off several times over. If it were up to Mom, she would’ve packed a mismatched pair of socks, an old blanket I had when I was five, and then nothing else because she would’ve been too busy bawling.
“Oh, Violet, when did you get so grown up?”
Probably at age eight when Mom’s deadbeat ex smashed a beer bottle against the wall and I spent the rest of the night in my room staging our elaborate escape. “I’m pretty sure I was born this way.”
She harrumphs but doesn’t argue with me there.
“Quit worrying so much. C’mon, isn’t it breathtaking? It looks just like the website.”
This time I’m not lying. Itisbreathtaking, but I’m also completely and utterly out of my element. Our trailer-park home is a far cry fromthe Gothic gray stone library; our Ford Fiesta sticks out like a sore thumb against the lot of sleek armored cars. “Did you know this school was featured inArchitectural Digest?”
I gesture to the building beside us. The Great Hall lies in the quadrangle like a sleeping beast, its enormous body embellished with sandstone and its oriel eye focused on the courtyard ahead. Students mill through its arched ribs, their bags slung across their backs and their phones poised at the ready. I don’t blame them; every inch of this place is begging to be immortalized on canvas. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. It’s the site of an open murder investigation. Or at least it should be.
“C’mon!” I urge, tugging Mom deeper into the crime scene.
It hardly looks like one anymore. Instead of police tape and chalk lines, we’ve got cotton candy and balloon animals,Welcome Back, Students!strung high from dogwood trees. It’s a lesson in extravagance, a nightmare of confetti and rose topiaries and Golden Goose sneakers.
Nothing about it screams “a girl died here a year ago”—no funeral attire or memorial imagery scattered among the fairgrounds. My best friend’s death has been scrubbed away in time for orientation. Headmistress Lockwell and her family saw to that.
“Ooh, can we see that?” Mom’s voice rips me back to the present. She cuts off an exhausted custodian before he can toss a crumpled map into the trash. Smoothing out the wrinkled folds, she jabs at the center. “God, Vi, all right, I’ll give you one thing: This placeisfancy. There’s a regulation tennis court and an Olympic-size swimming pool and—”
I cut her off gently. “We don’t have time to look at the pool, Ma. We need to get to the new-student orientation. We’re all the way over here, and we have five minutes to get there.”
“Here” is sandwiched between the Great Hall and Fitzpatrick-Wallace Library. “There” shines like a beacon in the distance, a journey beyond a sprawling family of green hills.
She huffs like a lectured child but doesn’t press the issue. Instead, she follows my lead as I push our way through the crowd. What we lack in money, I more than make up for in false confidence. My power walk is honed from years of customer service—shoulders back, chin up, arms crossed. It’s all about making the world believe you’re stronger than you really are so they don’t chew you up and spit you out.
Though, to be perfectly honest, I do feel like a used wad of bubble gum right now. But that’s less confidence-based and more due to the fact that the sun is stuck on the broiler setting.
Mom pauses to wipe a bead of sweat from her brow. Above our heads, a trellis readsThe Little Garden. The space around us is a bleeding canvas of color: bright yellow marigolds, stalks of purple-bellied aconite and pink valerian, patches of poppies and beds of wormwood. All of which are tucked away inside carefully placed shrubbery.
“Aww, Violet, let’s stop for a second. I want a cute photo of you in front of the violets,” she says, like it’s an ingenious, novel idea and not something we’ve been doing since the day I was born. “Here, take this, I have to look for my phone.”
She passes me the wrinkled trash-pamphlet, and I squint through the creases as she looks. “ ‘Funded by an alumnus’s generous donation, the Little Garden is a curated collection of Shakespearean variety. A campus favorite, it is not uncommon to find students and staff alike basking in the beauty of—’ ”
