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Those same eyes regard me now. Eyes like mine, but sharper. Clearer, too, than the last time I saw them — than the most recent version of Mom I’ve been forced to carry around since the fall-out, the one whose sight could only zone in on a glass bottle.
“What are you doing here?” I’m standing in an empty classroom in my heavy Lochkelvin uniform, but I may as well be naked for all the scrutiny coming my way. Lochkelvin, I realize now, has been an unexpected haven, the most curious blessing. It’s a place that’s allowed me necessary healing time away from Mom. Away from the woman who raised me and then failed me. It’s made me gain resilience, independence, self-belief. It helped me to grow up. And sure, it was a struggle and a half to get there, but I feel like I’m in a good place now…
Which is why I’m so worried about what the small woman in front of me will say or do.
For a long time, Mom says nothing. She simply observes me, from the straight tartan hem of my school skirt to the new choppy shortness of my haircut. Her eyes linger on my distinguished-looking blazer, on the Lochkelvin crest stitched into the pocket. Threaded in gold, the lion and the unicorn partake in their never-ending fight, battling right beside my heart.
“You never wrote.”
Three words, spoken with as much blame and offense asIt should have been you. Three words, after crossing an ocean to find me.
I’m floored.
“What did you expect? Did you honestly think I’d write after the way we left things?”
“Why not?” she asks sharply, and her tone prickles enough for me to cross the classroom and close the door. Her face isn’t as gaunt as before, her sleek dark hair more groomed than not. It takes effort to process the version of my mom I’m seeing — she seems a world away from the last time I knew her. “Are you ashamed of your mother?”
Yes. I keep this answer firmly buttoned up.
But yes. Iamashamed.
Ashamed.
Concerned.
Nervous.
But I refuse to shrink. It’s the one thing I’ll never do: I’ll never be scared of her again. Oscar Munro had tortured his son and Rory had given him nothing. If Danny can still find it in him to laugh and joke around after the beatings from his dad, then I can learn to be unaffected too. Those boys are marvels. And so I raise my chin and straighten my spine like the good little Lochkelvin student I’ve become, and I face my mother head-on.
“You made me leave.” It’s a burst of raw truth, of the rampant sincerity that had been missing from our silent, miserable, Dad-less lives. “You pushed me and pushed me until I was forced to leave for my own sanity. I’d benothingwithout this scholarship.” I don’t know where these words are coming from but all I know is they’re true. And that somehow I feel connected to these stone walls in ways I’ve never felt before. “I’d be nothing without this school. Lochkelvin was there for me when you should have been — and yeah, it may have been torture at times, it may have beencharacter-building, and I may have been extensively bullied by every rich clown in this castle, but you did all three to me long before I ever stepped foot in here… and you hurt me more, because you’re my mom andI love you.”
It’s a declaration of everything I’ve kept inside myself since arriving here.
There’s silence.
My mother’s lips purse. She inspects my black school shoes. “Your shoes, your skirt… I barely recognize you. You look so plain.”
Another barb, casually thrown. She’s good at that, at changing the subject just to put me down.
I swallow. All I want is for her to scoop me into a bear-hug like the old times, but I should have known she’d be cold. I should have known she wouldn’t listen. Dad’s death froze the air between us. “What are you doing here?”
She gathers herself, tightening the only smart black jacket she owns. “It came to my attention that you required medical attention twice last year.” She fixes me with a look that demands explanation. Like accidents can’t possibly happen, like I must have been in the wrong.
Never mind that one was from falling down a ravine and breaking my already sensitive ankle, and the other was from walking through a forest of psychological horror on a night of rituals that felt like a dream.
“So?”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask how much medical attentionshe’srequired. “I got better.”Did you?I want to ask, the question burning in my mind, and all I want is for my mom to answer,Yes.
But she’s slow when she talks, every word a minor victory. “You ran away from me, my lamb,” she says softly, and I try not to flinch at my old nickname.
“Lochkelvin’s a good school, Mom.”
“Ran away,” she continues, not listening to me. “Ran… into the arms of boys.”
My face colors, my cheeks flush hot. No. We arenotdoing this. For my sanity, my world is a compartmentalized place. The chiefs do not need to know my history, and my mother does not need to know a thing about the chiefs.
“If you came here to actually say anything—”
“When you left me, I visited Madame Berenice.” She announces this like it’s her trump card, and my eyes slide closed. So that’s it, then. My mom’s been spending all the money not earmarked for booze on a spiritualist fraud. She’d never been like this before Dad died. Never. She’d laughed at the people who visited that hut by the beach, called them blockheads and pea-brains.
“Mom, you’re not well—”
“Iam!” she declares, strong enough that I back off. “Iamwell. But you…” She shakes her head at me with big sad eyes. “She told me things about you, when you were gone. Filled me in on what you’ve been up to. About the things you’ll go on to do.”
“I haven’t been up to anything.” And I sincerely doubtMadame Berenice, the old fraud who lives in a dilapidated shack, has her watery, astigmatic eyes set on a private school in the Scottish Highlands.
There’s silence, and then Mom says suddenly, “Jessa, you’re too young to marry.”
I go cold all over.What? There is no way — no way — my mom knows anything of the very new, very private plans Rory had whispered to me under silk bedsheets while kissing my neck. “Your heart is going to be broken,” she continues, her gaze growing sadder by the second. “And I knew as soon as I saw them that those boys are the ones who’ll do it.”
