Journey of a Girl

A Proper Education: Chapter Eight

When she rose the next morning, Credence went to Adam's bed.

She hoped to find him in better spirits, but her heart sank when she found his bed empty.

He was not in the room. 

Maybe the Headmaster needed to examine him to make sure everything is truly all right.

She told herself she would see Adam at breakfast, where he was sure to be inundated with questions and genuine welcome. It would be a wonderful thing to see the look on his face when he realized how much he was missed.

But Adam was not at breakfast.

The prevailing rumors of the morning were that Adam had vanished into thin air, been punished so severely for his behavior that he died, or was locked away in a secret dungeon beneath the school.

This was all nonsense, Credence knew, for she had seen the boy only hours before.

"Do you think it's true," asked Gregory, "did the Headmaster beat Adam to death?"

Credence snorted and one of her classmates, Lily, answered, "That's not like the Headmaster at all. When has he ever been unkind to us?"

"He loved Adam more than anyone," added Penny, the girl who had been the focus of the Headmaster's attention when the chaos with Adam erupted. "He wouldn't harm a hair on his head. And he wouldn't harm anyone else, either."

"Maybe Adam's family came for him because he was sick," Lily said.

"He didn't have a family," Penny said. "Everyone knows he was found on the street."

"You saw how Adam acted," Gregory snapped, "that kind of behavior can only mean punishment."

"Punishment maybe, but not death," retorted Penny. "I don't know where you get such awful ideas."

Gregory shrugged. "S'what all the older ones are saying."

"They don't know any more than we do," Penny said. "You need to stop listening to those rumors."

Credence frowned. She wanted to tell the others that she had seen Adam and everything was going to be fine, but she found her tongue unwilling to move.

Just tell them, she scolded herself. Tell them the truth.

They wouldn't believe her, and she knew it. Gregory would scoff and make some snide remark about her upbringing in the woods, and the others would scorn her for telling lies. It was a sad truth that Credence had no real friends among her classmates, and though they included her in their conversations, that invitation danced on a knife's edge. It would be too easy to lose their civility, and then they would revoke all courtesy from her and she would be utterly alone without anyone to talk to.

If she had learned one thing in her time at the school, it was that there were no friends to be had, not for her or anyone else. There was an unacknowledged competition between all of them, and it seemed a foreign notion that anyone should become close with their peers. A few of the younger children clung to the older students, as Tildy had to Credence at first, but their relationship was more of a leader-follower role than a true friendship. Even those who took their meals together, who talked and laughed with their company, always kept a distance between each other, like an invisible wall, to keep from growing close. Once, during a free hour in her sleeping quarters, Credence overheard a few students musing about their future at a keeper's house, and how they wished to belong to one so they might make a true confidant. The school is no place for friends, their conversation implied.

Why confide in such companions at all?

Gregory continued to concoct gruesome fates for Adam, enjoying the looks of disgust he received, while the others argued against his theories.

Penny was in the middle of reprimanding Gregory for a particularly vile scenario that included a body-stretching rack and a barbed whip, when her expression abruptly changed and her words cut off mid-sentence. She dropped her spoon back into her bowl of breakfast porridge.

"What is it now," Gregory mockingly asked, "fairy got hold of your voice?"

Penny ignored him and brought her fingers to her mouth.

"You've got fairies here, too?" Credence asked.

Gregory rolled his eyes. "Everyone knows fairies aren't real, wood brat. 'Cept people who eat bark for dinner, I suppose."

"What's wrong, Penny?" Lily asked, her tone genuinely concerned.

Credence and Gregory turned from their fight to look at their classmate. Slowly, with the hesitation of one who doesn't want to look at what they've stepped in, Penny pulled a small, dark mass from her mouth. She dropped it on the table with a gross plop before turning away to give a dry retch towards the floor.

"What is that?" Lily asked in disgust.

"Might be spiders," Gregory said with a grin. "It looks like a ball of mashed spiders. Look at the hair—"

Another heave exploded from Penny and her eyes filled with tears.

"Please," Penny begged through a gasp, "tell me it's not a bug, please, tell me—I bit into it!"

With joyful, gruesome interest Gregory scooped up the chewed mass with his spoon and held it close to his face.

"You've got horrible breath," he teased.

"What is it?!" Penny all but screamed.

Gregory poked the object with his finger.

"I need a better look," he mumbled and picked up the mass with his bare hand, which made Lily groan.

Everyone at the table save Penny watched in gross fascination as Gregory squeezed and manipulated the thing with his fingers.

"It might be hair...but let me see..."

Another heave came from Penny, this time sounding a little less dry.

Gregory sat the mass on the table and pulled at it, stretching and smoothing it out. It wasn't until the last corner was unfurled that Gregory leaned back and announced in an astonished whisper, "It's cloth!"

"That's it? Just cloth?" Penny asked with a little less doom in her voice. "You promise?"

"Yeah," Gregory answered with a wicked smile. "Could be one of the domestics underclothes."

This time a bit of porridge came up with Penny's heaving.

"No, it looks like a piece of shirt," Lily said, her disgust quickly turning to curiosity.

Penny wiped her mouth and forced herself to look at what she'd bitten into.

"It is a piece of shirt," she said with a gasp and a hiccup.

"How did it get into your breakfast?" Lily asked.

"Whose shirt did it come from?" Gregory added.

They all began to whisper excitedly, taking turns to examine the cloth and give their guesses—

All except Credence, who stared at the chewed fabric in silent horror.

A shiver passed through her.

She knew exactly where it had come from.

It belonged to Adam.