guy who’d built the place back in the early 1900s. Instead she stared at the glossy photographs. They looked like a set for one of the Harry Potter movies, not like anything Spirit could imagine being actually real. There was the “Great Hall,” done up in the kind of grand Art Deco scheme she remembered from visiting the Empire State Building in New York City once. There was a “refectory”—which looked pretty much like a dining room, with white linen tablecloths and enormous chandeliers; a library—which could have been pulled right out of another of those fake British Stately Homes; and a couple of pictures of classrooms. It looked as if there were school uniforms. Spirit frowned. She thought she was going to get pretty tired of brown and gold before she was done with this place, though. She turned the page quickly, intending to skip the rest of the boring stuff (if this was an orphanage, who was this supposed to impress?) but something caught her eye.
“Oakhurst residents will be encouraged to explore information technology in our state-of-the-art facility in order to prepare themselves for the challenges of the future.” Spirit knew computers, so she frankly stared at the full-page spread on the computer lab, because the descriptions of what was available for the students’ use was mouth-watering. The whole school had WiFi, and its own servers, and the servers ran on a T1 line to the outside world—a full-duplex circuit transmitting 1.544 megabytes per second concurrently. Uploads, downloads, and net-surfing would take place at the speed of light. And the brochure said that each arriving student was “issued” their own laptop. She turned the page. There were photos of a tennis court and an Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool. And there were riding stables! A gymnasium! An exercise room with more equipment than an athletic club! Each picture just made her stare harder. Finally she looked up at Loch.
“What—?”
“I keep thinking it can’t be real either, but . . . this is the school’s own Rolls.” Loch shrugged. “And I can’t think of any reason they’d want to fool us. I can’t touch a penny of my trust fund until I’m twenty-one, and, uh, it’s not like I’m anyone important. All Father’s stock and everything just got bought back by the partnership and the money was put into the trust. And neither of us has any place else to go anymore.”
She’d thought she was cried out by this time. But that reminder of why she was on her way to this place was enough to crack Spirit open all over again. To her dismay, her eyes brimmed up and spilled over, and when she tried to catch her breath, she heard herself give a long shuddering sob. Loch looked helpless as he handed her the box of tissues set into the armrest next to her.
“I . . .” Loch gulped. “I’m sorry, Spirit . . .”
She struggled to get control of herself, and Loch kept talking, stumbling through a long rambling explanation of how he’d ended up here in the back of this limousine with her because he was obviously mortified at having made her cry.
“I don’t . . . I mean, my father and I never really got along. I hardly knew him. He was always off on business trips, or working, and my mother died when I was a baby. If Father could have gotten one of his assistants to take me for that interview at Albany Academy he would have, but they said he had to be there, so when the hotel caught fire and he didn’t get out, it was . . .”
Loch finally ran down, like a music box running down, his last sentence unfinished. Spirit got control of herself and wiped her eyes and her sore nose. She thought she remembered seeing that hotel fire on the news. It couldn’t have happened more than a week ago. Sixty people had died. “How . . . How did you get out?” she asked.
Loch shrugged. “We were in separate rooms. He wanted it that way. I guess he had . . . woman-plans. I went out the window. I free-climb, I do parkour. I never even thought about going out the door.” He sighed. “I don’t know. I mean, he was my father and I should feel something but . . . I know more about Tom Cruise than I know about my own father.”
Spirit nodded numbly. In a way, she wished it had been