“However, if you choose to exercise your minds, I can teach you how to communicate the unspeakable. How do you describe the briefest sensation? A smell you haven’t experienced since you were a child? The ecstasy of seeing an animal being born? The immeasurable grief we feel when faced with death? We can’t even begin to communicate these complex emotions to each other. But Latin can illuminate sensations you never realized you had.”
All eyes were glued to the professor. Suddenly, Latin became interesting. Even as a child I had felt isolated in my thoughts. I was sure that nobody knew the real me, the full me, even my parents. And now that they were dead, I was completely alone. How could I explain all the things I was feeling to another person? Maybe Latin was the answer.
Professor Lumbar picked up a piece of chalk and began to scrawl something on the board. Latinum: lingua mortuorum. I copied it in my notebook.
“Now, open your books to page twelve,” she said, and proceeded to make us copy out verb conjugations until the period was over. Once out of class, I flipped through my dictionary to try and decipher what she had written. After writing out the translation, I looked around suspiciously.
Latin: The Language of the Dead.
The rest of the day went by in a blur. We were herded from one classroom to the next like cattle, lugging our books up and down the rickety old stairs of Horace Hall with just a short break for lunch. It had been so long since I had been at a new school that I had forgotten how difficult it was to be the new girl. I had no friends, and everyone at Gottfried acted like they’d stepped out of a polo match in the British countryside with the Prince of Wales. And considering that Gottfried actually had a polo team, and one of the upperclassmen was distantly related to the Duchess of Kent, some of them probably had. Eleanor was clearly one of the most popular girls in our grade, and fluttered from group to group chatting about her summer. Because she was only in two of my classes and there was barely time to talk in between, we agreed to catch up at dinner.
Left to my thoughts, I wondered what my friends at home were doing. Annie would be in biology, sitting in the back row, passing notes to Lauren while Mr. Murnane lectured about the body. And where would Wes be? In U.S. History, or maybe English Lit. Daydreaming about Wes used to be something I looked forward to, but now it just made me sad. Was he still thinking about me, or had he already moved on? The thought of him with another girl was too unpleasant for me to bear, and I pushed it out of my head, resolving to focus on my classes. It was the only way I’d be able to get through the first day of school without losing my mind.
I was just about to head to Philosophy when I heard something drop. Behind me, a frail girl with stringy brown hair was kneeling on the ground, frantically trying to pick up the papers and pencils and books that had fallen from her bag.
Feeling her embarrassment, I set my bag down and approached her. She looked rumpled, with puffy eyes and a glazed-over gaze, as if she had just woken up.
“Do you want some help?”
She turned to me with gratitude and nodded. Her brown hair stood up in the back with static, and she had a run in her nylons that started at the heel and traveled all the way up to the hem of her skirt.
“I’m Renée,” I said.
“Minnie,” she said timidly.
Before I could respond, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
A woman with a yardstick was standing behind me. She was short and squat, with thick calves and an oversized blazer with a peacock brooch on the left lapel. Her hair was a dull brown and was cut close to her head in a no-nonsense style.
Minnie’s face contorted with fear and she stuffed the rest of her belongings into her bag and scurried away to the corner of the foyer, leaving a few stray pencils on the ground.
“Stand up,” the woman said to me.
Upright, I towered over her, my eyes meeting the top of her head.
“What is your name?”
“Renée,” I said, resentful of being ordered around and asked my name when all I’d been doing was helping a girl pick up her things. Professor Lumbar I could understand, since I had been late, but this was unnecessary. “What’s yours?”
She stared at me, horrified at my impertinence. “The audacity—” she said, almost to herself. “My name is Mrs. Lynch. But don’t busy yourself trying to remember it; in time it will ring familiar. An insubordinate child like you, I suspect, will be seeing a lot more of me in the future.”
She took me by the elbow and led me to the foot of the stairs.
“What are you doing?”
“General procedure.”
“But I haven’t done anything wrong!”
“Kneel,” she barked.
Startled by the abnormality of her command, I dropped to the ground in front of the staircase, trying to convince myself that teachers no longer beat students with rulers. Did they? Around us, a crowd of students had begun to gather. A group of girls pointed at me and whispered. I tried to ignore them, though I could feel my face growing red. The grainy wood floor was rough against my bare knees, and I shifted my weight uncomfortably.
Mrs. Lynch circled me, her brown clogs clicking against the floor like a timer. “No stockings,” she murmured, dragging the end of the ruler across the back of my legs.
“Untucked shirt,” she continued. She dropped the yardstick, its butt hitting the ground with a thud. A hush ran through the crowd of students. I winced, waiting for her to hit me, but instead she bent down and held the stick against my thigh. She looked at my skirt and frowned. “Two and one-quarter inches above the knee. The dress code stipulates that skirts can be no more than two inches above the knee.”
“But it’s only a quarter inch!”
“Nevertheless, you are out of dress code,” Mrs. Lynch sneered, showing a row of tiny yellowed teeth.
I glared at her and stood up, pulling at my skirt. How was this possibly punishable?
“You will go back to your room and change.”
“But I have to go to philosophy—”
She ignored me. “And on the way you’ll pay a visit to the headmistress’s office.”
“I have class now!”
“You’ll have to miss it,” she said, and began to walk away.
“But it’s the first day!”
She turned to me. “Young lady, you’re lucky it’s the first day. Otherwise your punishment would have been far more severe.”