The way you break

The gates of Blackwood Academy had not changed in four years, which felt, to Ava, like a personal insult.
Everything else had. The world had. She had - eighteen now, taller, harder around the edges, her body grown into curves that her secondhand blazer had needed three rounds of her mother's careful tailoring to accommodate. But the gates stood exactly as she'd left them: black iron worked into ravens and laurel, older than any of the family names that would be announced tonight, indifferent to all of them.