RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,24

wish he wasn’t right about that. I shouldn’t be so bent out of shape over the fact that Elodie didn’t discover the mangled frog’s legs I planted in her desk. It was a schoolboy tactic, childish as fuck, but I took one look at her the other night and I knew she’d be squeamish. If she hadn’t figured it out beforehand and she’d just lifted the lid on that desk, she’d have lost her freaking mind. She robbed me of that experience, and yeah, I’m salty as fuck about it. “Don’t worry. I have a plan,” I say.

“Fucking hell. Sounds ominous,” Dash groans. His accent always makes cursing sound way more fun. “You’re not planning on breaking into her room, are you? Because the last time you did that—”

I light the weed in the pipe, sucking the thick, sweet smoke into my mouth, then blow it at Dash, who sits up, alert. He holds his hand out, gesturing for a hit of his own. The guy doesn’t know how to be embarrassed. If he did, he’d do something to hide the tent his erect cock is making out the front of his pants. And I’m not talking two-man adventure racing tent. I’m talking a palatial eight-man tent with a separate fucking living area. His dick must be fucking killing him. “You can’t change the subject with Mary Jane,” he admonishes, taking a deep, heavy hit from the pipe. “My short-term memory’s bomb proof. I remember the shit you got yourself into the last time you broke into a girl’s room. And that room? God, you’ve gotta be fucking insane. If you wanna fuck the little French girl, then do it and get it out of your system, post haste. Anything else, and, well…” His eyes roll back into his head, his eyelids fluttering closed. “Anything else would be bad news for you, my friend. You know it’s true.”

7

ELODIE

Nun Elizabeth Mary Whitlock was hanged for suspected witchcraft in the rectory of Wolf Hall’s tiny gothic church in 1794. I learn this on Wednesday, while exploring the old tumbledown building with Carina after our last class of the day. We sift through piles of broken glass from the shattered windows, the shards worn smooth and opaque like colorful old sea glass, and Carina finds an ancient rosary. It’s beautiful, the beads alternating between what looks like labradorite and solid silver, and on the end a large, delicate crucifix dangles, cast in gold. We’re both too scared that it might have belonged to Elizabeth Mary Whitlock to keep it, so we bury it in the crowded graveyard at the rear of the church next to a headstone so old that the lettering carved into the stone has worn away to nothing.

On Thursday, Carina guides me to a dark, cramped crawlspace at the back of a cleaning closet at the end of our hallway and urges me inside.

At first, I’m petrified. I am not good with tight spaces. Over the past three years, I’ve done everything I can to master my fear, from locking myself in closets, to even tighter spaces where I can hardly move at all, learning how to breathe and to overcome my roaring terror. Against all odds, I can now endure the pressing claustrophobia, but the prospect of crawling into the dark, narrow space is still a daunting one.

Aside from my panic, I’m also suspicious. Carina, with her easy smile and her friendly, gregarious laughter, treats me like we’ve been friends our entire lives. I’ve never met a girl like her. An ugly part of me—the part that’s been the subject of plenty of ridicule and abuse at the hands of other female students in the past—thinks she might be setting me up for some epic prank.

I decide to trust my gut, though, and I climb inside, ignoring the frantic thrumming of my heart, holding my breath to keep from inhaling in the dust, and I scramble forward on my belly until I’m spat out inside a huge, cavernous attic with a bank of small, dirty windows overlooking the lawn and the turning circle in front of the academy.

Carina whoops, delighted, as I explore the abandoned, cluttered attic, watching me with open glee as I scavenge through travel chests and rotten cardboard boxes, amazed by the treasures I find inside.

On Friday, the girls from the fourth floor—Pres, the redhead, Rashida, Chloe, Loren, and even Damiana all gather in Carina’s room, which is at least twice the size of mine, and