RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,4
their hair at seventeen years old, but Colonel Stillwater can’t stand the sight of me with my natural hair coloring. He’d never admit it in a million years, but he can’t handle me with brown hair. I look too much like her with brown hair.
Short of forcing me to wear contacts, he can’t alter the blue of my eyes. There’s little he can do about the freckles that smatter the bridge of my nose, or the bone structure of my heart-shaped face. Without dropping some serious coin on a very talented plastic surgeon, he can’t alter my high cheek bones or my almond shaped eyes, all of which are gifts I received from my mother. But he could make me a blonde, and so he did. And I’ve hated every second of it.
Back in my room, I notice for the first time how bitterly cold it is. Compared to Tel Aviv, it’s practically sub-arctic here in New Hampshire, and it doesn’t seem as though the Wolf Hall administration have deemed heating a necessity for its students. After a lot of rummaging, I eventually find a cracked and yellowed Bakelite thermostat in the closet by the window, but when I crank the dial all the way to the right, nothing happens. The old fashioned and extremely ugly radiator on the wall gives a single choked cough, a bone-jarring rattle, and then falls resolutely silent.
Luckily, I’m so tired that even the cold can’t keep me from sleep.
3
ELODIE
The morning smells like rust and burning toast.
I crack my eyes and wince at the plume of fog that gathers on my breath. Somehow, it’s even colder in my room at seven a.m., which is impressive since I’m convinced it dropped down to somewhere in the twenties in the night.
If my father cared one iota about me, he would not have sprung this transition on me mid-semester. The smallest kindness he could have shown me would have been to relocate me during a break, but no. Colonel Stillwater decided that uprooting me out of the blue on a weekend was the best course of action. Far be it from me to disrupt his schedule; since he needed to disappear off on a training exercise at oh-four-hundred hours on a Sunday, it seemed perfectly logical to turn my shit upside down and expect me to be fine with moving country, having my world turned upside down, and starting class at a new school all within a thirty-two hour period.
This is the least of his sins. He has done much, much worse.
So here we are. Monday morning. My new life. From the strict itinerary my father shoved into my backpack, I’m supposed to be downstairs at the administration offices twenty minutes before my first period of the day, which leaves me forty minutes to get myself showered, dressed and organized. Since I showered last night, I normally wouldn’t bother showering again, but I still feel gross from the journey somehow, and honestly, I think I’m going to need to soak my feet in some scalding hot water in order to defrost them anyway. It’s only the middle of January; it’s probably going to get colder before it gets any warmer here in New Hampshire, so I’m definitely going to have to do something about the climate control in this room.
I pull back the thin sheets, my teeth chattering uncontrollably, and I make sure to grab my own towel and my wash bag this time. In the hallway, a number of the doors to the other rooms are open, and a line of girls has formed against either wall, waiting for the bathrooms. My heart sinks. Things were miserable at home, but at least I had my own fucking bathroom. Having to share the facilities at Wolf Hall is going to take some getting used to.
I join the end of the line waiting for the bathroom on the right-hand side of the hallway, and the girls ahead of me fall quiet in unison. Eight pairs of baleful eyes look me up and down. None of the girls seem all too friendly. One of my new classmates angles away from the redhead she was locked in conversation with and turns to me, offering me half a smile.
Her brown hair is curled tightly into an enviable afro. Her skin is almost as pale as mine, though. Her doe-eyed features and deep brown eyes give her the look of a young Natalie Portman. “Hey. Four sixteen, right? You must be Elodie.”