Chapter Text
The older woman leaned back in her chair, the file sprawled open in front of her, lifting the picture of the young girl to better catch the light. She was small, definitely too small to be 16, and she appeared to be fighting back tears in the photo, her deep brown eyes resembling those of a kicked puppy. The woman sighed and laid the photo down, reading through the file again.
Ava Silva, age 16, would be joining the school in fifteen days from Andalucia, Spain. Her file read like a rap sheet, filled with pages of incident reports from the girl’s caretakers. Mother Superion disliked the girls with thick files, they typically caused her more trouble than the others, especially the ones whose files were held together by tape and paperclips like this one.
Mother Superion usually would’ve automatically disliked this one, but the latest incident report felt… off . There were pieces of the story that contradicted each other, and the girl’s side of the story had been conveniently “lost” in the mail.
Then there was the photo, the girl’s eyes were hollow and Mother Superion truly believed the “shadow” under her chin wasn’t what the nun at the orphanage had tried to convince her it was. The nun had been too detailed, had answered questions Mother Superion hadn’t asked, had danced suspiciously around the questions Mother Superion did have.
Mother Superion knew this girl wasn’t who St. Michael’s Orphanage was making her to be — there were too many holes in the application and her file, not to mention that there wasn’t a single positive thing about the teenager in all 457 pages of her file and she didn’t have a single transcript from a single school. If Mother Superion hadn’t been doing her job as long as she had, she would’ve assumed the new girl was going to be a thorn in her side.
Good thing Mother Superion had been the headmistress at St. Aloysius Gonzaga’s School for Troubled Girls for twenty-three years.