Staying Under

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

Shock didn't even begin to express how I felt. When it began to wear off—which took all but less than a minute—I suddenly remembered a piece memory from my childhood before I was ever brought into the academy. I had seen this man before. Amy was right—I'd always had a guardian. I just didn't want to have one, and the wish kind of got buried along with every single memory I didn't want to remember.

My guardian-slash-uncle or whoever he was, didn't even spare me another glance after that announcement. "Can we do this as quickly as possible?" he asked Principal Edgerton. "I have somewhere else to be."

"I," I said slowly, "am staying at the academy."

"Miss Williams—"

It wasn't me who interrupted the principal, but Lord Ellison. "Never use that name in front of me again. That is not her name."

I had to say this thing for Principal Edgerton: she stood on her ground and planted a deceptively innocent face as he said, "But, why, you have never bothered to name her before, Lord Ellison. Riley Williams is the name she grew up with."

"No sister of mine would ever have named her daughter," he said that word with a particular disgust that chilled me to the bone, "something as abhorrent as that."

"Look, you can name me anything if you just let me stay here. I'm not going anywhere else."

Finally, my guardian-slash-uncle turned to look at me. "Your misdemeanors have robbed you right at speaking."

"And you lost the right to control my life when you dropped me off to rot in an orphanage where people think I'm a freak!" I yelled.

Sobbing, I ran out of the office without a clear destination to go. Corridors and lights blurred around me as tears flooded my eyes. It didn't matter if people called him Head Council now or a lord, or my uncle. To me, he was still the man who found me in the site where my parents died. The memory stayed down most of the time, but now it came back full on with the details. I remembered crying. I cried a lot because I was confused. They lay on the floor and stared up at the ceiling, seeing nothing. Blood had been everywhere—out of their eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hair. There was a pool of it where I sat.

And then he came. My three year-old self felt so small compared to his looming shadow from the door. It had been raining heavily outside. He called someone, and picked me up to his car. I never really learned what had happened to my parents after that. Every time I thought about them, I only remembered their empty eyes and blood. I couldn't recount anything from before that.

The man drove while I cried all the way. He didn't have an umbrella with him, but when he stepped off the car and pulled me out, none of our clothes were soaked by rainwater. And then he had told me the words I still hated to this day, "Be good."

I remembered watching him drive away and I stood there for hours, crying until I realized didn't know where I was, or who I was.

That was my earliest memory. That was one of the events in my life I wanted to pretend had never happened.

My eyes had dried when I found the backyard pond and sat on the bank. The principal must have had it cleaned after my drowning incident, because the water looked so clear now that I could almost see the bottom. Not wanting to ruin the water, I took off my shoes and blazer before I sank my legs in. After I tested the water, I went deeper under until I was neck-deep. The bottom wasn't that far my toe. I took in one last deep breath and pushed myself completely under.

It was different without earplugs, but at this shallow depth I wasn't really bothered by their absence. Being under the surface was familiar—I was trained to relax underwater, after all, despite the drowning incident. My facial muscles calmed and I let my eyelids drift half-open. At contests, my official record was twenty-seven minutes, but I usually did better in practices. Once, I even got to thirty-one minutes. Contests made me nervous because I always wished to come out as the best. It was like deep inside me, I had always known my life would mean nothing if I didn't give myself some meaning to it.