The Devil & Me

Chapter One: Bad Fortune

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The air was warm, and the fields surrounding the school⁠⁠—the old fortresses of stone, ivy, and towers⁠⁠—were a heavy, saturated green. In the hot winds that blew, it felt like standing in the middle of time, where nothing moved. And I remembered walking through these great, wooden doors as a freshman, picking at the garden flowers, and feeling like I'd landed in the middle of a book.

Fortuna Academy⁠⁠—where a girl from nothing could make her future.

Now I knew that there's no such thing as heaven here on earth, and even if there was, it would never be Fortuna.

"Just two more years," my mom said to me. She was a big woman, in a tall, broad way, like she'd never bend to anything, not life and not hurricane winds. As I grew older, I saw that what I'd believed wasn't true, and as the years went by, she was shrinking and her eyes crinkling with the wear and tear of work. She was a nurse, working twelve-hour shifts six nights a week to pay off her debts⁠⁠—from school, and from the cost of my Dad's hospitalization in the last years of his life. I didn't remember much about him, besides the fact that he⁠⁠—like my mom⁠⁠—was big, dark-skinned with the most radiant smile. But even in that, I could be wrong. It had been seven years.

"Keep your head down," my mom said. "Just coast through it. Good grades, no boys."

"No boys," I repeated. Because God knew I never had good experiences with any of them.

My mom gave me one last kiss on the cheek, before peeling off in the truck she'd rented for the drive up here. We live in New York, but the school is way up in New England backcountry; a perfect, little place for a girl from the city, where she can grow, explore, and thrive. Like hell she can, I thought with a grumble. The advertising for this place was horribly deceptive. A girl like me was better at home, no matter how bad the school was. At least at home, I had my dignity.

As the truck disappeared down the road, and the school square filled with the sound of laughter, I picked up my suitcase. Maybe Luce and Grace were here already. That might make me feel just a little bit better.

I stepped inside, and Fortuna's walls swallowed me up. "Welcome to a bright year," a poster said, all draped in the shadows of the antechambers' old arches. A prickling went down my back. A bright year? We'll see.

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The first thing you notice about the inside of the building is how fussy it looks. When you see pictures of new academies, you can see why they're state of the art. They have glass walls, bright hallways, and glossy floors. Fortuna doesn't believe in that. No, Fortuna spits on that and says, "bullshit." Inside the administration building, the floors were made of stone ground down by a dozen generations of feet, and a roof carved with careful, curling wooden details (decorated by the scratched out, painted over, but still noticeable scribblings of teenage boys).

I signed in with the administration and got my house keys, before heading through a courtyard to reach the girl's dorms. The heat of the sun battered my skin, though already, the light was sinking below the hills. This was the kind of summer that made a person lazy and slow until the stars came out. Not me though; I was on my guard. In this very courtyard, I'd had my bag stolen sophomore year, only to later find it shoved into a third-floor toilet. Vicious, Fortuna's students.

Separating the girl's dorms and the boy's dorms was a large cafe room, meant to serve as a studying hall, but really becoming the host of late-night meals and snatched kisses. There were teachers who were supposed to monitor the palace, but these being the dorms (in other words, student, not teacher turf), and the teachers being Fortuna alums themselves more often than not, students rarely got punished for their behavior. As much as Fortuna was a school, it was a pot where the rich could mix with the rich, and families could strike ties with each other, taking comfort in the fact their children liked each other.