certainly been for a while.” I mopped up the cooling sweat on my shoulders with my handkerchief.
“Never mind.” She shook her head and went back to unlacing the corset.
“I know it’s wasteful,” I said softly, “but I hate it all—partly because I think I am supposed to love it and partly from my own dislike. I do not like the way I look in dresses; I do not like the chafing of them against my legs; and I do not like the way every part of this outfit constrains me. It is as if I am experiencing everything at once, my senses overloading, and it is unbearable. I don’t feel right in them.”
They were my mother’s domain. She adored clothes, her own closet still limited since we had sold some old dresses to pay off my father’s debts right after his death. I didn’t love the midnight arts as she did, and all of the clothes and jewelry she wanted me to wear only reminded me of my failures. Dressing how she wanted was like wearing my wrongness for all to see. If they looked at me, they would know I wasn’t meant for their world.
“I do not belong.” I pulled the rings from my fingers and rubbed the pink welts they left behind. “Wearing things like this only increases that feeling of wrongness in me. They are a reminder of what is expected and what I am not.” I laughed and forced myself to smile. It was no good wallowing. “And I do hate being wrong.”
Annette hummed, taking great care not to brush my skin as she peeled the last of the corset free. “That makes sense. Not belonging. I don’t either.”
She adored everything I hated and was already practically the perfect lady of Demeine. My mother would have loved Annette.
“You enjoy the midnight arts, don’t you?” I asked.
“It’s the only thing I enjoy,” she whispered. “Do you ever feel like magic is the only thing that understands you, even though it’s not real?”
Magic couldn’t think or feel, but it existed, and it wanted me.
“I know exactly what you mean, and yes, I do feel that.” I stepped out of the gown and underdress, and Annette gathered them up as if they were the most precious things she had ever seen. “I feel broken. The world tells me I should want these things, but I don’t.”
Standing in a stranger’s garden in nothing but a shift made it easier to say.
“If I go to this school, if I study the midnight arts, if I stay here and witness day in and day out the very things that make me feel broken for not wanting them, I fear it will kill me. I have felt out of place, unwanted, unimportant for so long with my mother, that I want something for me. Being forced to attend this school makes me feel like I’m not a person.”
Annette’s warm hand touched my shoulder. “As if when Lord Sun and Mistress Moon were weaving the world and all its people into creation, they dropped a stitch while making you?”
“Yes.” I laughed and wiped the cosmetics from my face. “I think more than a few.”
She pulled off her own dress and stays, and the simplicity of her clothes made me smile. The fabric was itchy and the dress slightly too tight, but I needed no help. Most importantly, my mother would have hated it. I kept my hose and gave her my shoes.
“I can’t believe you’re giving this away,” she said, tracing the silver lines of my dress’s bodice from pearl to crystal to pearl.
I undid the too-tight braids slicking back my hair. “I know I am lucky to have been born into my station, but you will appreciate that dress far more than me. You’ll be wearing the jewelry too. They’re heirlooms.”
She picked up her own cheap necklace and compared the little moon charm to the sapphire collar that had been my great-grandmother’s, and the silver glittered in her eyes. “I could buy a house or twenty with these.”
“Please do not. My mother would murder us both,” I said. “Speaking of, though, how are your mathematics?”
She hummed, gaze stuck on one of the mirrored necklaces my mother had hoped I would use for scrying.
“Annette,” I said sharply. “This is important. Mademoiselle Gardinier is expecting me to be atrociously behaved, but she will catch on to our charade if you do not have the requisite knowledge, like mathematics, history, or reading. Your penmanship, as well,