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  “Are you going to be the one to stop her?” another voice countered. “Or do you want to keep both your nuts?”

  Some girls giggled at that, while others shushed him.

  “She didn’t look so bad.”

  “She looked like an Ainsworth,” someone else said. I recognized the voice. It was him.

  I inhaled sharply. Ainsworth. That was what the driver of the car that had picked me up at the airport had called me. The same name. The name of the school.

  I turned to Miss P. “Why . . .” I began, feeling my cheeks redden. “Why are they—”

  Before I could get the rest of the words out, she touched my shoulder. “Don’t worry about things you can’t control,” she said softly.

  Then she smiled at me so sweetly that I almost believed her.

  The closer we got to the dorms, the more students I saw. Fortunately, Miss P didn’t introduce me to any of them. “Forgive me, but I’m running a little short on time, and I want to get you settled into your room.”

  “My room?” I was expecting an orphanage-type ward with twenty cots lined up next to each other, like the drawings in the Madeline books.

  “At Ainsworth, all the rooms are singles,” she said. We turned down a short hallway and into a vacant space, where she turned on the light. “Here it is, Katy,” she said, opening a pair of wooden shutters over a window with a tiny stained glass panel at the top.

  I was stunned. Outside was a breathtaking view of a lake with a weeping willow on the far bank. Nearby was a small rowboat shaded by big trees whose leaves were beginning to color. It was like a scene from a postcard.

  “The change of seasons is lovely here,” Miss P said wistfully. “You’ll be able to see it all.”

  The only items inside the room were a small dresser, a desk, and a bed covered by a down comforter. “I understand you have no bedding with you, so that will be provided,” she said. “You may decorate it however you like, so long as you damage no surfaces. However, the décor must be reasonably tasteful and inoffensive to the common sensibility.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “The lavatory and showers are shared, and you’ll find them down the hall to the right. Mealtimes are at seven in the morning, twelve noon, and six in the evening, in the main dining room.”

  I nodded.

  “Speaking of meals, all new students are invited to lunch tomorrow at Hattie’s Kitchen. Have you heard of it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then you’re in for a treat,” she said, smiling. “Hattie’s is a little restaurant in the Meadow.”

  “The Meadow? Is that the place that’s covered in fog?”

  “Exactly. Whitfield’s claim to fame.”

  “I didn’t see a building on it.”

  “Probably because of the fog. And it’s not even very dense yet. Once the fog really rolls in, no one will see Hattie’s at all.” She laughed. “But we all know where it is. It’s a charming place, and Hattie herself is as much a part of the school community as we are. We like to say that at Hattie’s you always get what you need.” Her eyes sparkled. “Well, if you don’t have any questions, I’ll leave you to unpack.” She nodded and started to walk away, but something was sticking in my mind.

  “Um, Miss P?”

  She turned toward me. “Yes, dear?”

  “I was wondering . . . about my name. Everyone here seems to think it’s Ainsworth.”

  She smiled. “It’s a natural mistake, Katy. You see, the Ainsworth women traditionally keep their names. It’s their husbands who change theirs.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not so strange, really. The Japanese used to do it regularly, to maintain a family line.”

  “The women never change their names?”

  “Not if their name is Ainsworth. But clearly that’s not the case with you, so we’ll just forget it, shall we?”

  “Okay,” I mumbled.

  “And by the way, your legal name, Serenity, . . .”

  “Ugh.”

  “. . . is one that is very well respected here.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Serenity Ainsworth founded our school. She was a teacher in England, and taught the children of Whitfield as soon as the land here was settled. She was, by all accounts, an extraordinary woman.”

  “I see.”

  She smiled again. “We’ll still call you Katy, though.”

  I relaxed. “Thanks.”

  CHAPTER

  •

  THREE

  EMPRESS

  As soon as she was gone, I fell back on the bed, exhausted. I hadn’t slept much during the past three weeks. Or the past three months, really.

  I turned my head to look out the window. A breeze was sending ripples over the lake. Somewhere a woodpecker was klok-klok-kloking like crazy, and from far away I could smell the salt air of the ocean. I closed my eyes. Strangely, I felt safer in this room where I’d been for approximately seven minutes than I had for almost as long as I could remember. Oh, I knew I’d probably have a hard time fitting in with the other students—nothing new there—but things like that didn’t rattle me anymore.

  Not after Madam Mim.

  Her name was Madison Lee Mimson or, as I’d dubbed her, Mad Madam Mim, after a crazy sorceress in an animated Disney movie. But she was worse than a cartoon monster. She was Grendel. Mim was the Beast, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Godzilla, Mothra, Lex Luthor, Saruman. The motherlode of horrors. And the number one reason I was stuck in Whitfield, Massachusetts, for the foreseeable future.

  As a VP of public relations for Wonderland, Mim represented “the interests of Wonderland” up and down the East Coast. I’ll never know exactly how she met my father, but within days they were shacked up and some weeks later, Dad and I were on our way to New York to start our “new lives.” After years of teaching at a series of small Florida colleges, Dad had gotten an assistant professorship gig at Columbia. Major strings must have been pulled for that. And where there were major strings, there was Mim doing the pulling. It was during the plane ride up that Dad decided to let me in on his plans for my future.

  “We . . . that is, I’ve found a school for you, Katherine.” Dad looked serious.

  Something in his voice made me shiver. He wouldn’t make eye contact. “Where is it?” I asked quietly, carefully.

  He cleared his throat. “It’s a . . . it’s a boarding school, Katherine.”

  “A boarding school?” I squeaked. “Where?”

  “It’s a fine place, really—”

  “But why do I have to live there? How far away is it from you? And her.”

  A long moment passed. Too long. “It’s in Whitfield, Massachusetts,” he said finally. He looked out the window.

  “I see,” I said.

  “Let me explain.” He put his hand over mine. I yanked it away. “There are some things I’ve never told you, Katherine. About your mother. And her family.”

  My mother? He had never spoken a word about her. I inclined my head slightly, listening, though I wouldn’t look at him. “Go ahead,” I whispered.

  “Agatha—your mother—er, went to school at Ainsworth. That’s the name of the school where you’ll be going. Her family founded it, in fact.” He smiled. “Which is why they’re willing to accept you at no charge.”

  I felt my jaw clench. “Are you telling me—” my voice caught, “—that you’re dumping me in some Dickensian institution in fricking Massachusetts BECAUSE IT’S FREE?”

  The people in the row next to us turned to stare.

  “Katherine—”

  “Excuse me,” I said, and went to the restroom, where I spent the rest of the flight.

  Mim was waiting for us at her Sutton Place apartment. She was blonder than she’d been in Florida, and dressed in a silk-and-lace camisole and jeans, trying to look like the teenager in the family.

  “Hi, Kathy,” she bubbled.

  “Katy.”

  “Riiiight. So, nice to see you.�
��

  She showed us around the apartment, pointing out all the tacky, expensive details that were supposed to impress us.

  “And here’s where you’ll sleep, Kay-Kay,” Mim said cheerily, gesturing inside a leather-appointed office strewn with papers. “The couch is really comfy.”

  “Kay-Kay will be fine here,” I said dully. I went inside and closed the door.

  That night I tried to sleep, but it was a losing battle. This was supposed to be the quietest address in Manhattan, but it still sounded like a jet runway to me. And the leather couch I was lying on was covered with buttons that stabbed into my flesh like pokers. I spent most of the night reading through Mim’s work memos, which was how I found out that Wonderland Corp. was considering opening a store in Whitfield, Massachusetts.

  So I knew whose idea this really was.

  Who does she think she is? I kicked over a pile of papers. I was so furious I couldn’t see straight. It’s my father! My life! I shoved the files littering Mim’s desk on the floor. Papers were whirling around the room everywhere. Still I wasn’t satisfied. I felt all the anger I’d been penning in about Mim, Dad, school bubble up from the very center of my being until it was shooting out my hands, my fingertips, my eyes. I concentrated on her papers until they swirled into a cone, very attractive, very neat, like the funnel of a tornado. Then, when they were all in motion, I pushed them with my mind out onto the street.

  Bite me, Wonderland.

  “Why couldn’t you?” I heard Mim saying. She had two voices, I’d learned: The throaty, sexy blonde voice she used with my father, and her Wonderland voice, the sound of corporate fingernails against a blackboard. It was demanding. It was confrontational. And it carried.

  It was the Wonderland voice I was hearing now. I opened the door a crack.

  “You had every chance to explain things on the plane.”

  “Keep it down, please. She’s asleep.”

  “You’ve been protecting her far too long, Harrison.”

  “She doesn’t have to know everything.”

  “Is it better that she find out from the other students?”

  “It was a long time ago, Madison. My guess is, no one will even remember.”

  “Not remember? It was all over the national news! For the past ten years, Wonderland has been paying through the nose for that woman’s insanity, and that girl—”

  “Her name is Katherine.”

  “Then Katherine”—she spat out my name as if it were an insect that had flown into her mouth—“had better be prepared with a believable story.”

  “You mean your story,” Dad put in sharply. “The story your staff wrote to make Wonderland seem like a superhero fighting against a demonically possessed woman.”

  My breath caught. Who were they talking about?

  “It’s for her own good, Harrison. If she appears sweet and humble, everything will go easily. With that angelic face, she can carry it off. It can work, a win-win situation all around. We’re saying, yes, her mother may have been criminally insane—”

  What?

  “But things are different now, thanks to—”

  “Wonderland,” Dad said cynically.

  “Thanks to the forgiving community of Whitfield,” Mim finished. “And Wonderland.” She giggled.

  I pushed. Their door slammed open.

  “What was that?” Mim asked.

  Dad appeared in the doorway down the hall, wearing a silk robe. “What are you doing awake?” he asked, annoyed.

  “‘Criminally insane’? ‘Demonically possessed’?”

  He stared at me for a moment, looking scared at first, and then defeated. Without answering, he closed the door.

  We never discussed it again. Dad started teaching at Columbia, Mim worked sixteen hours a day, and I stayed in “Kay-Kay’s” room. Three weeks later, a taxi picked me up and took me to LaGuardia Airport.

  That was how easy it was for Mim to take my dad from me.

  Slowly I sat up and keyed in his cell phone number. The phone rang for a long time before his voicemail message came on.

  “This is Dr. Harrison Jessevar. Please leave your name and number and the reason for your call.”

  “Hi, Dad,” I said. “I got here safely.” I hesitated. There must have been something else to say. There must have been, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. “Bye,” I whispered.

  Mim took him, but I guess he hadn’t been hanging on very tight to begin with.

  CHAPTER

  •

  FOUR

  CAKES & ALE

  The first thing I saw when I woke up the next morning was a pair of cardinals perched on my windowsill. Behind them, the water on the lake looked pink in the dawn light. Even my memories of yesterday’s debacle in the school library had receded somewhat after a decent night’s sleep in a place other than Madam Mim’s home office.

  That afternoon I walked through the fog, which was thicker than it had been the day before, to a little building that looked as if the Seven Dwarfs might have lived there, with sloping, rounded eaves, stucco walls, and windows with hundreds of little square panes separated by black leading. Over the Romanesque door was a sign in rounded script: HATTIE’S KITCHEN.

  Inside, it was everything Miss P said it would be, charming without the self-conscious cuteness of places with names like Ye Olde Pubbe. The wooden chairs were big and sturdy and comfortable, four to a table. The windows looked out on every side except for the one facing the street so that, like the school, it gave the sense that the place was in the country, not in a town at all.

  I was seated at a table against a wall with two other students, a girl named Verity Lloyd who wore striped tights and a beret, and a boy with white-blond hair that looked as if it had been electrified.

  “Cheswick,” he said, formally extending his hand to me.

  “Uh . . . is that your first name?” I asked.

  He nodded crisply. “Cheswick Fortescu.”

  That figures, I thought. I wasn’t going to bring it up with these two, but from what I’d seen, the student body at Ainsworth seemed to be divided into two distinct groups. There were the typical boarding school types, rich kids with cool clothes and names like Muffy. But the second group was totally different—not just different from the Muffies, but different from any kids I’d ever met.

  They were definitely geeky, but not public-school geeky. For one thing there were a lot of them, at least half of the student body. Most were local. Some stayed at the school even though their families lived right in town.

  But there weren’t a million varieties of geeks like there had been at Las Palmas where the halls teemed with Emo kids wearing black eye makeup and tight pants; techno geeks; audiophiles; the Anime freaks; goths; theater nerds; and the kids who wrote poetry and listened to groups like Coldplay and Starsailor, the types I called the QMSes, or Quivering Masses of Sensitivity.

  None of these would describe the geek faction at Ainsworth. They were, rather, confident geeks, if there is such a thing. Kids who dressed exactly how they felt and were proud of it, who didn’t hate school, or their parents, or even the village they lived in. These were hard-core townies, unapologetic and united. A tribe of geeks.

  Not that I was part of that tribe. So far, no one except Miss P and Cheswick Fortescu had even said hello to me.

  “Have you ever been here before?” Verity asked me.

  “No.” I looked around. At the table next to us a couple in their twenties was arguing. They were so truly angry with each other that I could almost see sparks flying out of their mouths. “Did anyone get a menu?”

  Cheswick laughed, his dandelion-puff hair bouncing. “Nobody gets a menu here,” he said. “You just get what you need.”

  “And you never know what that’s going to be,” came a deep woman’s voice from behind my shoulder.

  With a gasp I turned around to see a beautiful middle-aged black woman standing over me. She was very tall, with gorgeous silver-streaked hair that looked as if
it had never been cut. Pushed back behind her ears, it hung in dreadlocks to below her waist, interrupted only by a pair of big gold hoop earrings.

  “Well, looky here,” she said, grinning at me. “An Ainsworth.”

  Again. Seriously?

  “Actually—”

  “And a beauty, too!” Her eyes widened. “Could you be little Serenity, all grown up?”

  I felt myself melting with embarrassment, while making a mental note to complain to Miss P for blabbing about students’ personal details.

  “My name’s Katy. Katy Jessevar.”

  “Katy Jessevar,” she repeated slowly. Then she burst into peals of loud laughter. “Trying to be someone else,” she said. “Why? Don’t you like who you are?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I wished the sky would open up and hurl me into another dimension.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said, touching my cheek. Her hands were rough and bony and warm. “You don’t even know who you are yet, but I do. Your eyes tell me everything.”

  I smiled wanly. She laughed again. So did the others at my table.

  The woman chatted with the two of them for a while before moving on to the other new students, but when she passed by on her way to the kitchen, she gave me a big wink.

  “That’s Hattie,” Cheswick said.

  “I figured.” I folded my hands so that no one would see how they were shaking.

  “It’s always a little scary the first time you meet her,” Verity said kindly. “My parents said I cried.”

  “Yeah, I can see that as a possibility,” I conceded.

  “Hey, over there.” Cheswick was gesturing with his chin toward another table, where an old man was sitting alone, eating soup and biscuits.

  “What is it?” Verity whispered.

  “Look what just came in the door.”

  It was a dog, a spotted little fellow with a jaunty walk and a big canine grin. It made its way directly to the old man and sat down next to him.

  The old gent took a while to notice the dog, but when he did his wizened face broke into a broad, toothless smile. “And who might you be, sir?” he asked in the too-loud way of people who are hard of hearing.