Dreadful Penny

Prologue

Melody Tang took her seat in the principal's office, screwed on her best mask of defiance and tick-tocked her leg, because what's the worst they could say about her—that she liked boys?

The principal, Madame Roussel, expressed her displeasure by lowering her glasses a finger's width down her nose. Melody stilled her roving limb, but only to get this over with. Behind the principal's desk, bay windows revealed green mountains, sunlight playing on the flat belly of the lake. The vista promised a bigger and less boring world.

"Do you know why you are here?" Roussel asked.

Melody had broken curfew last night and come back stinking of basement-bar smoke. She had finally made it with that guitar player and had hoped the acrid stink would cover up other, more loamy smells. She still tingled, a feeling that was worth whatever lame punishment the principal was about to dish out.

"Yes, madame."

"I don't think you do." There was of course expulsion. That would be the one thing she could never shrug off to her father. But...well, it was a stupid school anyway. She gave Roussel a little more chin.

"You have visitors."

Which mean...Daddy was here? Ready to take her home? Maybe she was in for a yelling, but the prospect of getting out of there was all too appealing.

But Roussel had said visitors—plural. So that didn't mean her father, unless he had brought her sister along, or suddenly acquired a girlfriend. Neither felt right.

"You are wondering who, I suppose?"

Mel nodded.

"So am I." Roussel pushed her glasses back up. "I am also wondering what people will think of the Institut, if we are training young women to be so ill-mannered."

Melody was like so whatever.

"What do you have to say for yourself, young lady?"

"I don't...nothing."

"'Nothing.' Miss Melody, I'm curious. When your father sent you here, were you excited or dismayed?"

"I was, um..."

"Um is not a word in any language."

"Sorry, madame. I was excited."

"So I had also believed. Etiquette is at the heart of Institut Château-Montclaire's education. And what is etiquette, Miss Melody?"

"Polite behavior in society."

"A codeof polite behavior in society," Roussel corrected, and Melody thought, Here it comes. "And a code is a set of social rules and standards. Curfews for women under the age of eighteen are an important part of the learning of etiquette at ICM."

"Yes, madame."

"I believe one reason your father placed you here was in response to your lapses in discipline at...what was it...Española Valley High School. You have great potential, Miss Melody. You have a fine mind, an excellent memory. You show great aptitude for multiculturalism and absorbing protocol. And your training in...ballet, isn't it, yes?" The principal lowered her reading glasses to look at her. "Yes, you are a natural athlete who has taken well to all of the social sports. You have the raw material to make for an exemplary graduate of the Institut. And yet here we are, you and I, in my office, when you should be taking your exam on European table manners."