Chapter Text
By the time the Academy appeared beyond the rows of maple trees lining the driveway, Cara had already spent most of the journey watching the landscape slide past the car window while trying not to think about the fact that she would be sleeping somewhere unfamiliar that night.
The thought itself wasn't frightening. She had traveled before. She had spent several nights in hotels or corporate guest suites while accompanying her father to events where adults spent entire weekends discussing investments or acquisitions. What unsettled her was not the idea of a new place but the idea of being left there. While escaping Mom’s constant watch was liberating, it also meant being exiled to an entirely new environment, and adapting to new places wasn’t exactly her strong suit.
It was her own undoing anyway. The next time she interfered with her dad’s business deals, she would learn to be more untraceable. At least to him.
As the car rounded the final curve in the road, the campus gradually revealed itself between the trees. The buildings looked exactly like the sort of school featured on the covers of expensive brochures, with red-brick facades, white-trimmed windows, and ivy creeping up stone walls in a manner that appeared too picturesque to have occurred naturally. Students and parents moved across the grounds carrying suitcases, garment bags, storage bins, and enough emotional baggage to populate a second campus.
Everywhere Cara looked, people were hugging. A mother near the fountain wrapped both arms around her daughter while simultaneously crying and attempting to give advice. Two boys were pretending not to be upset while their father repeatedly reminded them to call home. A younger sibling clung dramatically to the sleeve of an older brother, behaving as though boarding school involved crossing an ocean rather than spending a semester two states away.
Cara watched the scene unfold through the passenger-side window and wondered whether everyone else had received some sort of instructional handbook on human attachment that she had somehow missed.
Beside her, her father slowed the car and glanced briefly toward the main academic building.
“The facilities appear satisfactory.”
The comment carried all the warmth of a quarterly performance review. Cara almost smiled. For her father, this was practically enthusiasm.
When the car finally stopped in front of Hawthorne Hall, neither of them immediately reached for the door. The silence inside the vehicle felt familiar enough that it barely registered. Most people probably imagined silence as the absence of conversation, but the Pierce household had always operated differently. Silence was simply the default state that existed whenever information did not need to be exchanged.
“You have your advisor's contact information?” Pierce asked.
“Yes.”
“The academic schedule?”
“Yes.”
“The reporting calendar?”
The reporting calendar consisted of dates on which she was expected to email updates regarding grades, activities, and academic performance. Cara suspected very few thirteen-year-olds arrived at boarding school with reporting requirements.
“Yes.”
For a moment she thought that would be the end of it. Then her father looked toward the dormitory entrance and said, in a tone so casual she nearly missed it, “You’ll do well here.”
The statement caught her off guard, probably because it wasn't practical advice. It sounded suspiciously close to encouragement. Before she could decide how to respond, he had already opened the driver's door and the moment dissipated. A few minutes later she stood alone on the front steps of Hawthorne Hall, watching his car disappear between the trees.
Cara adjusted her grip on her suitcase and headed inside.
The lobby felt like stepping into a radio station broadcasting every channel simultaneously. Conversations overlapped in every direction. Parents carrying boxes upstairs, students exchanging phone numbers (The semester hasn’t even started yet?) , and resident advisors distributing packets and room keys while trying to maintain order among several dozen teenagers experiencing varying levels of excitement and panic.
Cara had never understood how other people filtered noise. Each conversation arrived separately in her mind. Every laugh, every question, every introduction.
Nuisances.
By the time she reached the registration table, she felt as though she had accidentally bumped into a hornet’s nest.
A woman wearing a Hawthorne Hall name badge greeted her with the cheeriness of someone who had probably survived many first days. She introduced herself as Mrs. Donnelly and handed over a room key before pointing her toward the second floor. When she finally reached Room 215 and pushed open the door, she stopped in the doorway long enough for the girl inside to notice.
Half the room already belonged to someone. The bed nearest the window was covered with blankets and decorative cushions. Photographs stretched across a string above the desk. Bottles of makeup lined in neat rows on shelves. Cara wrinkled her nose. The perfume... They’ll have to work something out about that.
The opposite side remained completely empty. Cara couldn’t help but think the contrast was so dramatic that it resembled a visual representation of two entirely different childhoods.
The girl kneeling beside an open suitcase looked up and smiled immediately. There was no denying that she’s pretty. Her skin carried the warm golden tan that seem to glow even in the dorm’s bad lighting, and those gray eyes framed by long lashes gave her gaze almost a luminous quality. She tossed back her long blonde curls. “Oh good, I was starting to think my roommate wasn't real.”
“Lucky for you I am real.”
The girl laughed airily and held up a perfectly-manicured hand. “I’m Kelly.”
“Cara.”
“Nice to meet you.”
The conversation continued from there, although continued might have been too generous a description. Kelly asked questions with enthusiastic determination while Cara attempted to answer them in ways that sounded vaguely normal. Unfortunately, every answer seemed to reveal a new problem. Most people apparently spent summer vacations attending camps, visiting relatives, or developing social skills. Cara had spent part of hers teaching herself a new programming language because she had become dissatisfied with the limitations of the previous one.
By the time they headed downstairs for dinner, Kelly looked less concerned about sharing a room with a stranger than fascinated by the possibility that her roommate might secretly be an alien. To Cara's surprise, Kelly still invited her to sit with a group of girls during dinner. The invitation felt generous enough. Cara almost refused out of habit. Spending the evening alone would certainly be easier. She could unpack the rest of her belongings, familiarize herself with the school network, and avoid the exhausting process of making conversation with strangers whose social instincts appeared to operate on an entirely different frequency from her own. But she accepted anyway. Cara knew from experience friendliness is rare to come by.
Years later, she would remember that decision because it marked one of the first times she consciously chose discomfort over isolation.
The dining hall occupied the oldest building on campus. Tall windows stretched almost from floor to ceiling, and the last light of the afternoon spilled across long wooden tables polished smooth by generations of students. The room carried the comfortable smell of fresh bread and soup, while hundreds of overlapping conversations rose toward the rafters and blended into a steady murmur, as though they had known each other for weeks rather than hours.
Kelly led her toward a table near the windows where several girls were already seated. Introductions followed so quickly that Cara immediately lost track of most of the names, although she retained small details that seemed more useful. One girl wore a bracelet covered in tiny silver charms shaped like animals. Another had painted her fingernails different colors and absentmindedly tapped them against her glass whenever she spoke. A third laughed before finishing her own jokes.
Remembering details had always been easier than remembering people.
Cara listened as classes, hometowns, and stories from previous schools passed around the table while everyone ate. When one girl admitted she hated mathematics, the others laughed and immediately began describing subjects they hated as well. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes.
Why are they still talking about topics like subjects as if they were still in primary school?
Inevitably chats shifted toward summer vacations. One girl described spending three weeks in Connecticut with her cousins. Kelly talked about a disastrous attempt to learn surfing during a family trip to California. Everyone contributed something that sounded pleasantly chaotic and age-appropriate. Eventually the attention reached Cara. For perhaps the first time in her life, she genuinely tried to provide the response that another person might want to hear.
Unfortunately, she settled on honesty. Damn her lack of imagination, and her big mouth.
“I spent most of July learning Python,” she said.
A moment of awkward silence settled over the table.
“The snake?” somebody asked.
Several girls laughed. Cara felt her face heating up.
“The programming language.”
The laughter returned, though this time it sounded more amazed than mocking.
Kelly gave her a side-eye look and shook her head with an expression that suggested she had expected exactly that answer. “You really do like computers, don’t you?”
The question was asked lightly, yet Cara found herself thinking about it longer than necessary. Like was a strange word. People liked movies or music or traveling. And when it comes to computers, usually it was a game rather than programming. Programming had always felt less like a preference and more like a place where the rules made sense. Before she could reply, the conversation had already moved elsewhere.
To her mild relief, nobody excluded her afterward. Even if she did caught some of them exchanging the kind of meaningful glances that usually signaled ridicule. The girls simply accepted her answer as another unusual fact and continued gossiping, but nobody paid much attention to her after that. Kelly, on the other hand, breezed through them as if she owned the place already. It had been a mistake going to dinner with them, she should’ve known better, she was never the type of girl that bonded with most of her peers. Why bother?
Well, no harm trying...
Later that evening the students of Hawthorne Hall gathered in the common room for orientation. By then the sky outside had deepened into shades of violet and blue, and the windows reflected the warm interior light back into the room. Sofas had been arranged in a loose circle, and students settled into them with varying degrees of enthusiasm while Brooke, the resident advisor, explained the activities planned for the evening. People call it ice-breaking. Cara called it shared embarrassment, which was how friendships worked in general.
When Brooke announced that everyone would introduce themselves and share an interesting fact, a collective groan moved around the room. The reaction relieved Cara slightly. At least she was not the only person uncomfortable with the exercise.
Sitting through everyone else’s stories throughout the years had given her enough information to know one thing—Nobody was actually interested in facts. People cared more about entertainment than accuracy. They wanted narratives, anecdotes that could be summarized in a sentence and rewarded with laughter. Like getting stranded on a ski lift in Vermont, or been bitten by a llama. Whether the stories were entirely true was beside the point.
The introductions had already been going on for nearly half an hour by the time Brooke's attention finally shifted toward Cara.
Cara rose from her chair and became acutely aware of the number of people looking at her. During presentations or academic competitions she never minded an audience, but this felt entirely different. She folded her hands behind her back to stop herself from fidgeting.
“My name is Cara Pierce. I'm from Maine.”
Cara hesitated. She wasn’t going to repeat what she’d said among those girls back at dinner. That certainly didn’t end up well.
“This summer my family and I spent a few weeks sailing along the coast of Florida.”
The lie burst out of her surprisingly easily. Perhaps because it was built from fragments of truth. She had been to Florida. She had seen boats. She simply hadn’t spent her summer on one, unless a cruise counts.
Several students immediately looked interested. “What was it like?”
“It was nice,” Cara replied, her voice remained steady. “We stopped in different towns for the first few days then spent most of our time on the water. Sailing is a lot harder than you think.”
Someone laughed. Cara recognized the voice immediately. It was Kelly. A few heads turned toward her.
“Oh, come on,” she said, looking directly at Cara. She was...smiling? Her eyes were glinting in a way that made her stomach curl up inside. “You told me at dinner that you spent the entire summer learning something, what was the name...Python?”
The room erupted almost instantly. A boy near the fireplace grinned. “So which was it? Or have you programmed the boat?”
Cara felt every eye swing back toward her.
Kelly leaned forward to him and lowered her voice, but still loud enough for everyone to hear. “I'm pretty sure it was the snake.”
More laughter followed, though there was no malice. Which didn’t make her feel any better. She could even see the satisfaction hidden beneath Kelly's expression. It lasted less than a second before disappearing behind another cheerful smile.
Cara forced herself to smile as well. “I guess Python won over me.” she said flatly, staring straight at Kelly. “Surfing the web felt like a better choice than surfing the water, at least the boats kept me dry.”
The group laughed one final time before moving on. Within moments Brooke had called on the next student and the attention shifted elsewhere.
It seemed like forever before the night’s activities finally ended. A few people said goodnight as they passed. The pathways crossing campus were lit by scattered iron lampposts, and groups of students drifted between the dormitories in clusters of twos and threes, their voices carrying softly through the evening air. Every now and then somebody laughed, and the sound floated briefly above the steady chorus of crickets hidden among the trees.
Cara walked beside Kelly for part of the journey. Neither of them mentioned what had happened during the introductions. Kelly seemed perfectly comfortable discussing tomorrow's schedule and speculating about which teachers might be difficult. The ease with which she moved from one conversation to another with different people fascinated Cara in the same way certain magicians fascinated her. The trick itself mattered less than the fact that everyone else seemed willing to accept the illusion.
By the time they reached their dormitory room, the hallway had settled into the pleasant chaos that accompanied the first night of school. Outside the window, the lights scattered across campus gradually began to disappear one by one as students prepared for bed. The athletic fields beyond the dormitory faded into darkness, while the digital clock atop the administration building remained visible above the trees.
Kelly dropped onto her bed and kicked off her shoes before reaching for her phone. The glow from the screen immediately illuminated her face, and her expression relaxed into the familiar look people adopted when communicating with someone they actually wanted to talk to.
Cara unpacked the last few items from her suitcase and arranged several books on the shelf above her desk. The task required very little concentration, which unfortunately left her mind free to recall the evening.
Several minutes passed before Kelly glanced up.“Hey.”
Cara turned. Kelly twisted a strand of hair around one finger and offered a small smile.
“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you earlier.”
For a brief moment Cara studied her roommate's expression. The apology arrived with impeccable timing. Just late enough to appear thoughtful, but casual enough to avoid becoming serious. Kelly looked sincere.
“You don't have to apologize,” she said.
Kelly visibly relaxed.“I honestly thought it was funny.”
Yeah you do. “It’s fine,” Cara replied, and shrugged her shoulders lightly.
Kelly smiled, returning her attention to her phone and resumed texting whoever’s waiting for her. She eventually switched off her lamp and disappeared beneath her blankets. Within minutes her breathing slowed into a steady rhythm. The room grew quiet. For the first time since arriving at the Academy, Cara found herself entirely alone.
She opened her laptop. The familiar startup screen appeared, and with it came a sensation she had difficulty describing. She was home. Computers possessed none of the warmth people associated with friendship, yet they offered something Cara valued just as highly.
Clarity.
A computer never pretended to mean one thing while intending another. Human beings seemed committed to hiding theirs. Slowly, she lost herself for hours in the whirlwind of coding before closing her laptop. Listening to the soft hum of electricity and watching the pale moonlight stretch across the ceiling, she almost sighed before she stifled the noise. Cara chuckled.
Oh well, first days never go well.