“THE MOOSE IS A LIE,” STEVIE BELL SAID.
Her mother turned to her, looking like she often looked—a bit tired, forced to engage in whatever Stevie was about to say out of parental obligation.
“What?” she said.
Stevie pointed out the window of the coach.
“See that?” Stevie indicated a sign that simply read MOOSE. “We’ve passed five of those. That’s a lot of promises. Not one moose.”
“Stevie . . .”
“They also promised falling rocks. Where are my falling rocks?”
“Stevie . . .”
“I’m a strong believer in truth in advertising,” Stevie said.
This resulted in a long pause. Stevie and her parents had had many conversations about the nature of truth and fact, and this might, on another day, have erupted into an argument. Not today. They seemed to decide, through some mutual and unspoken agreement, that they would let the matter slide along.
It wasn’t every day you moved away from home to go to boarding school, after all.
“I don’t like that we’re not allowed to drive up to the campus,” her father said, for what was probably the eighth time that morning. Ellingham’s information packet had been very clear on this point: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DRIVE STUDENTS TO THE SCHOOL. YOU WILL BE FORCED TO LEAVE THEM AT THE ROADSIDE GATE. NO EXCEPTIONS WILL BE MADE.
There was nothing nefarious in this—the reason was well explained. The campus had not been designed for lots of cars. There was only a single road in, and there was no place to park. To get in or out, you rode in the Ellingham coach. Her parents had viewed this dimly, as if a place hard to reach by car was somehow inherently suspicious and impinged on their God-given American freedom to drive anywhere they wanted to.
Rules were rules, though, so the Bells were seated in this coach—a quality one with a dozen seats, tinted windows, and a video screen that did nothing but faintly mirror the window reflection back again. An older, silver-haired man was at the wheel. He had not spoken since he had picked them up at the rest stop fifteen minutes before, and even then all he said was, “Stephanie Bell?” and “Sit where you want. No one else in there.” Stevie had heard about this famous Vermont reticence, and that they called outsiders flatlanders, but there was something spooky about his silence.
“Look,” her mom said quietly, “if you change your mind . . .”
Stevie gripped the side of her seat. “I’m not going to change my mind. We’re here. Almost.”
“I’m just saying . . .” her mother said, and then she stopped saying it. This was another well-trod conversation. The morning was full of greatest hits and little new material.
Stevie looked back out as the view of the mystically blue Vermont skyline disappeared, eaten by the trees and the walls of sheer rock where the road cut through the mountains. Her ears popped from the slow increase in altitude as they drove along I-89, away from Burlington, Vermont, and deeper into the wild. Sensing that the conversation had come to its natural end, she put in her earbuds. Her mom touched her arm as she went to hit play on her podcast.
“Maybe this isn’t the time to be listening to those creepy murder stories,” she said.
“True crime,” Stevie replied before she could stop herself. Making the correction made her sound pedantic. Also, no fighting. No fighting.
Stevie pulled out the earbud jack and coiled the cord.
“Have you heard from your friend?” her mom said. “Jazelle?”
“Janelle,” Stevie corrected her. “She texted and said she was on her way to the airport.”
“That’s good,” her mom said. “It will be good for you to have some friends.”
Be nice, Stevie. Don’t say you already have friends. You have lots of friends. It doesn’t matter that a lot of them are people you know online from murder-mystery boards. Her parents had no idea that you could meet people outside of school and it wasn’t freaky and the internet was the way of finding your people. And, of course, she had friends at school too, but never in the way she was supposed to, which apparently involved pajama parties and makeup and going to the mall.
That didn’t matter now. The future was here, up in the misty mountains.
“So Janelle is interested in what again?” her mother asked.
“Engineering,” Stevie said. “She makes things. Machines, devices.”
A skeptical silence followed.
“And that Nate boy is a writer?” her mother said.
“The Nate boy is a writer,” Stevie confirmed.
These were the two other first years known to live in Stevie’s new dorm. They didn’t tell you about the second years. Again, this was information that had circulated around the Bell kitchen table for weeks—Janelle Franklin was from Chicago. She was a National Student Spokesperson for GROWING STEMS, a program that encouraged young girls of color to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Stevie had gotten a lot of background: how Janelle had been caught (successfully) repairing the toaster oven when she was six years old. Stevie knew all of Janelle’s likes: making machines and gadgets, soldering and welding, curating her Pinterest boards of organizational techniques, girls with glasses, YA novels, coffee, cats, and pretty much any television show.
Stevie and Janelle were already in regular text communication. So that was good. Friend one.
The other first year in Minerva was Nate Fisher. Nate said less and never replied to texts, but there was more to know about him. Nate published a book called The Moonbright Cycles when he was fourteen—seven hundred pages of epic fantasy written over the course of a few months, first published online and then in book form. Moonbright book two was supposedly in the works.
They were the kind of people Ellingham Academy accepted.
“They sound like very impressive people,” her dad said. “And you are too. We’re proud. You know that.”
Stevie read the code in this sentence. Much as we love you, we have no idea why you have been accepted into this school, strange child of ours.
The entire summer had been like this, this weird mix of voiced pride and unvoiced doubt, underpinned by confusion about how this series of events had happened at all. When she had first done it, Stevie’s parents didn’t know she had applied to Ellingham at all. Ellingham Academy wasn’t the kind of place people like the Bells went to. For almost a century, the school had been home to creative geniuses, radical thinkers, and innovators. Ellingham had no application, no list of requirements, no instructions other than, “If you would like to be considered for Ellingham Academy, please get in touch.”
That was it.
One simple sentence that drove every high-flying student frantic. What did they want? What were they looking for? This was like a riddle from a fantasy story or fairy tale—something the wizard makes you do before you are allowed into the Cave of Secrets. Applications were supposed to be rigid lists of requirements and test scores and essays and recommendations and maybe a blood sample and a few bars from a popular musical. Not Ellingham. Just knock on the door. Just knock on the door in the special, correct way they would not describe. You just had to get in touch with something. They looked for a spark. If they saw such a spark in you, you could be one of the fifty students they took each year. The program was only two years long, just the junior and senior years of high school. There were no tuition fees. If you got in, it was free. You just had to get in.
The coach veered into the exit lane and pulled into another rest stop, where one other family stood in wait. A girl and her parents studied their phones. The girl was extremely petite, with dark, long hair.
“She has nice hair,” Stevie’s mom said.
Though she was talking about someone else, this was a reference to Stevie’s hair, which Stevie had cut off herself in the bathroom in the early spring in a burst of self-renewal. Her mother had cried when she saw Stevie’s blond hair in the sink and had taken her to a hairdresser to get it trimmed and shaped. The hair had been a major point of contention, so much so that at one point her parents said she would not be allowed to go to Ellingham as a punishment—but they backed down in the end. The threat had been made in high emotion. Her mother had been very attached to Stevie’s hair, which on some level was why it had to go. Mostly, though, Stevie just thought that it would look better short.
It did. The pixie cut suited her, and it was easy to care for. There were problems when she dyed it pink, and blue, and pink and blue. But now it was back to normal, dusty blond and short.
The girl’s bags were loaded into the bottom of the coach, and she and her family got in. The three of them were all dark haired and studious-looking, with large eyes framed by glasses. They looked like a family of owls. Polite, mumbled hellos were exchanged, and the girl and her family took their seats behind the Bells. Stevie recognized the girl from the first-year guide, but didn’t remember her name.
Her mom gave her a nudge, which Stevie tried to ignore. The girl was again looking at her phone.
“Stevie.”
Stevie took a long breath through her nose. This was going to require leaning over her mom and calling out to the girl, who was a row behind on the opposite side. Awkward. But she was going to have to do it.
“Hey,” Stevie said.
The girl looked up.
“Hey?” she said.
“I’m Stevie Bell.”
The girl blinked slowly, logging this information.
“Germaine Batt,” she said.
Nothing else was offered. Stevie started to lean back, feeling like this had been a good effort all around, but her mom nudged her again.
“Make friends,” she whispered.
Few words are more chilling when put together than make friends. The command to pair bond sent ice water through Stevie’s veins. She wanted falling rocks. But she knew what would happen if she didn’t do the talking—her parents would. And if her parents started, anything could happen.
“Did you come far?” Stevie asked.
“No,” Germaine said, looking up from her phone.
“We came from Pittsburgh.”
“Oh,” Germaine said.
Stevie leaned back, looked at her mom, and shrugged. She couldn’t make Germaine talk. Her mom gave her a well, you tried look. Points for effort.
The coach juddered as it turned off the highway, onto a rockier, smaller road dotted with stores and farms and signs for skiing, glassblowing, and maple syrup candy. Then there were fewer buildings and more stretches of farmland with nothing but old red trucks and the occasional horse.
Up and up into the woods.
Out of nowhere, the coach made a sharp turn into an opening in the trees, jerking Stevie to the side and almost tipping her out of her seat. Close to the ground, there was a small maroon sign with gold letters: the Ellingham Academy entrance. It was so inconspicuous that it seemed like the school was deliberately hiding.
The road they were now on was barely a road. It would be charitable to call it a path. What it was, in reality, was an artificial tear in the landscape—a meandering scar in the forest. At first, it went down, very fast, pitching toward one of the streams that bounded the property. At the base, there was a construction that you could laughingly refer to as a bridge that appeared to be made of wood, rope, and dreams. The sides were about a foot high and it looked like it would collapse if anything heavier than a steak dinner crossed it.
The coach barreled over it. The bridge shook violently, rumbling Stevie’s seat.
Then they went up again, at a gradient usually reserved for ski lifts and airplane takeoffs. Nothing would stop the coach. The shade from the trees darkened the path completely. The branches scratched at the sides of the vehicle like dozens of fingernails. The coach made grinding noises and seemed to be fighting its way up the ever-narrowing path. Stevie knew there was nothing to be afraid of, but the coach seemed to be working against the forces of the universe itself to make its way up this driveway. It was unlikely that this would be the trip, this one with her and her parents, that the coach would give way and barrel backward the way it had come, running loose and wild, crashing blindly toward the river and sweet, cold, watery oblivion . . . but you never knew.
The ground started to level and trees gave way to a smoother path and an opening view of green lawns. The coach approached a gate guarded by two statues on pedestals, winged creatures with smiling faces and empty eyes, four paws, and tails.
“Those are strange angels,” her mother said, craning to look.
“They’re not angels,” Stevie said. “They’re sphinxes. They’re mythical creatures that ask you riddles before you’re allowed to enter a place. If you get it wrong, they eat you. Like from Oedipus. The Riddle of the Sphinx. That’s a sphinx. Not to be confused with Spanx, which is a sidearm in the holster of the diet-industrial complex.”
Her mother gave her that look again. We kind of wanted the going-out, shopping, prom-going type, and we got this weird, creepy one, and we love it but what is it talking about, ever?
Sometimes Stevie felt bad for her parents. Their idea of what constituted interesting was so limited. They were never going to have as much fun as she did.
Germaine peered over at Stevie with large, luminous eyes. Her expression was as unreadable as the sphinxes’.
In that moment, a blanket of doubt dropped over everything in Stevie’s mind. She should not have been admitted. The letter came to the wrong house, the wrong Stevie. It was a trick, a joke, a cosmic mistake. None of this could be real.
But it was too late, even if all of those things were true, because they had arrived at Ellingham Academy.