mind . . .”
Stevie gripped the side of her seat. “I’m not going to change my mind. We’re here. Almost.”
“I’m just saying . . .” her mother said, and then she stopped saying it. This was another well-trod conversation. The morning was full of greatest hits and little new material.
Stevie looked back out as the view of the mystically blue Vermont skyline disappeared, eaten by the trees and the walls of sheer rock where the road cut through the mountains. Her ears popped from the slow increase in altitude as they drove along I-89, away from Burlington, Vermont, and deeper into the wild. Sensing that the conversation had come to its natural end, she put in her earbuds. Her mom touched her arm as she went to hit play on her podcast.
“Maybe this isn’t the time to be listening to those creepy murder stories,” she said.
“True crime,” Stevie replied before she could stop herself. Making the correction made her sound pedantic. Also, no fighting. No fighting.
Stevie pulled out the earbud jack and coiled the cord.
“Have you heard from your friend?” her mom said. “Jazelle?”
“Janelle,” Stevie corrected her. “She texted and said she was on her way to the airport.”
“That’s good,” her mom said. “It will be good for you to have some friends.”
Be nice, Stevie. Don’t say you already have friends. You have lots of friends. It doesn’t matter that a lot of them are people you know online from murder-mystery boards. Her parents had no idea that you could meet people outside of school and it wasn’t freaky and the internet was the way of finding your people. And, of course, she had friends at school too, but never in the way she was supposed to, which apparently involved pajama parties and makeup and going to the mall.
That didn’t matter now. The future was here, up in the misty mountains.
“So Janelle is interested in what again?” her mother asked.
“Engineering,” Stevie said. “She makes things. Machines, devices.”
A skeptical silence followed.
“And that Nate boy is a writer?” her mother said.
“The Nate boy is a writer,” Stevie confirmed.
These were the two other first years known to live in Stevie’s new dorm. They didn’t tell you about the second years. Again, this was information that had circulated around the Bell kitchen table for weeks—Janelle Franklin was from Chicago. She was a National Student Spokesperson for GROWING STEMS, a program that encouraged young girls of color to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Stevie had gotten a lot of background: how Janelle had been caught (successfully) repairing the toaster oven when she was six years old. Stevie knew all of Janelle’s likes: making machines and gadgets, soldering and welding, curating her Pinterest boards of organizational techniques, girls with glasses, YA novels, coffee, cats, and pretty much any television show.
Stevie and Janelle were already in regular text communication. So that was good. Friend one.
The other first year in Minerva was Nate Fisher. Nate said less and never replied to texts, but there was more to know about him. Nate published a book called The Moonbright Cycles when he was fourteen—seven hundred pages of epic fantasy written over the course of a few months, first published online and then in book form. Moonbright book two was supposedly in the works.
They were the kind of people Ellingham Academy accepted.
“They sound like very impressive people,” her dad said. “And you are too. We’re proud. You know that.”
Stevie read the code in this sentence. Much as we love you, we have no idea why you have been accepted into this school, strange child of ours.
The entire summer had been like this, this weird mix of voiced pride and unvoiced doubt, underpinned by confusion about how this series of events had happened at all. When she had first done it, Stevie’s parents didn’t know she had applied to Ellingham at all. Ellingham Academy wasn’t the kind of place people like the Bells went to. For almost a century, the school had been home to creative geniuses, radical thinkers, and innovators. Ellingham had no application, no list of requirements, no instructions other than, “If you would like to be considered for Ellingham Academy, please get in touch.”
That was it.
One simple sentence that drove every high-flying student frantic. What did they want? What were they looking for? This was like a riddle from a fantasy story or fairy tale—something the wizard makes you do before you are allowed into the Cave of Secrets. Applications were supposed to be rigid