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ONE

DANNI

I’m about halfway through my tour of Bramppath College when I get the sneaking suspicion I’ve dropped myself smack in the middle of shark-infested waters. And growing up in Boulder, Colorado, I never even learned how to swim.

Bramppath College is a stupidly prestigious boarding school, full of stupidly rich kids who all own Porsches, or BMWs, or whatever. Some of my classmates will be royalty—literally—and the rest will be nothing like my friends back home.

I belong at a red brick school, with desks decorated in permanent marker, and paint chipping off the walls, and everyone old friends with everybody else in their class. But now I’m enrolled in a place where the students sit around roses and honeysuckle, and eat at mahogany tables, and don’t look at girls like me unless it’s down.

Hellene, the bubbly woman who works in the uniform shop and is our temporary tour guide, is nice enough, I guess. But that’s no reason to let down my guard around rich people just yet. She doesn’t exactly seem like she drove a Porsche to work. Still, she’s either high-key obsessed with the school, or she’s being paid a decent amount to pretend to be, because she’s been rattling off facts about the buildings like she’s on speed. Mom’s super into it, though. The two of them are walking way ahead of me, talking like they met fifteen years ago instead of fifteen minutes.

I trail behind them, staring around as we walk. The grounds are enormous. My entire suburb at home could fit on top of this school, I swear. We duck under a neat hedge arch, hop down some stone steps, and then cross through a flower garden. To our left is yet another towering building that Hellene says was built centuries ago, and I crane my neck to take it all in until I pull a muscle.

Even my body knows I don’t belong here. Too bad my mind didn’t figure that out until it was way too late.

Until today, the whole moving countries thing was sort of exciting. Mom met this guy, Dennis Baker, online like two years ago, and as it turned out, he wasn’t a catfish. He’s actually a pretty great guy. My biological dad dipped when Mom got pregnant, and she stayed single pretty much my whole childhood, so I never had any kind of father figure to compare Dennis to. Still, I’m pretty sure he’s one of the better ones. When he and Mom got serious, he even offered to move to Boulder at first, because he thought I should finish high school in my own country. But then Mom went to visit him in Henland and got all googly-eyed over it, and fast-forward a year and a half, here we are.

When all this went down—back when I was young and na?ve—the first thing I thought was, Holy shit, I get to live in Henland ? It might be a small country, but it’s freaking stunning, and it’s within driving distance of places like Paris and Brussels. Seriously, I could drive south from Boulder for longer than either of those trips and still be in Colorado. The second thought was, Wait, isn’t Bramppath there? Bramppath College ( college, it turns out, can confusingly also mean high school in some countries) is famous for being one of the best schools in the world for pumping out musical geniuses. Maybe, I thought, I could be one of them.

I don’t think Mom and Dennis were exactly psyched about the idea of me going to boarding school, but they let me apply for a scholarship anyway. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure they thought I’d never get it in a million years.

Then I got short-listed. And accepted.

Which brings me to today. Touring Bramppath in person for the first time, as out of my depth as a rubber duck in the ocean.

“The ballroom is to the right of the tennis courts,” Hellene says to Mom, who makes her “impressed” noise. “The main piano is there,” Hellene adds, pointing, and I perk up. “You can book practice slots online, but I believe you’re the only serious player at the school at the moment. It’s all about the strings this year. You should find it mostly free.”

Mom pumps a fist in the air at me. I pump mine back, and hope she can’t tell that I’m panicking.

The thing is, I didn’t have the best start to high school. Things have been better recently, but that’s thanks to my best friend, Rachel. Rachel, who lives in Boulder, and won’t be here to have my back if the Bramppath kids decide they hate me. And they might. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to me.

At the end of the tour, Hellene takes us into a small room near the main office. “Just wait out here for a moment,” she says, going through a door that leads into an ominous black stairway. “I’ll grab your uniform.”

Mom and I exchange a glance. Shrugging, I sit down on one of the dozen or so wooden chairs lining the wall. There’s one other person here, a girl about my age with perfect lips and a sharp chin who looks like she might be East Asian. She gives me a distracted smile and pushes her bangs out of her eyes, showing off straight, high-set brows.

I don’t know how to tell if her clothes are expensive without referring to labels, and I can’t see any of those, but something about them looks expensive, anyway. She’s dressed in head-to-toe neutrals, her bag is all floppy like real leather, and her shoes are spotless.

I bet she has a Porsche.

Hellene comes up the stairs clutching a box. She grunts under the weight of it, and I jump up to give her a hand, but Mom gets there first. When they haul the box onto the desk, Hellene steps back, catches her breath, and notices the other girl. “Oh, Molly. Senior cape, right? I’m sorry, we’re running a little bit late.”

Molly shrugs. “I’m not in a rush.”

Satisfied, Hellene starts unloading the box. “The compulsory uniform is covered by the scholarship,” she says, handing me a mountain of clear, individually wrapped packages, all in varying shades of dark green and white. “I’ve got your shirts, skirts, vests, and socks.… Here’s the school tie, the school jumper, your formal dining gown—this one’s heavy—and the senior cape.”

“What, no emblazoned underwear?” Mom jokes, and I concentrate on melting into the floor. If probably-owns-a-Porsche Molly didn’t peg me as an outsider before, she sure knows now.

The bundle, which is roughly as tall as I am, starts forming a leaning tower of packages in my arms almost as soon as Hellene hands it over, so I transfer it to a nearby chair. For a beat, I think it’s going to hold its balance, but then it topples over, littering the room with plastic-sealed clothing.

Amazing.

With poker-hot cheeks, I start snatching the packages up, and Molly covers a laugh behind her hand. I wince, and she stops.

Hellene goes on to Mom: “There’s also a rugby jumper, but as it’s an optional purchase it’s not covered.”

“That’s fine. How much is it?”

“A hundred and fifty.”

Euros? I snap my head up. “It’s fine,” I say to Mom. “Seriously. I have, just, so many sweaters, I don’t need another one.”

Mom bites her lip and folds her arms. I think by trying to give her an out, I’ve accidentally embarrassed her. “It’s fine, honey.”

“I can get one later, right?” I ask Hellene in a squeaky voice. “If it turns out I do really want one or whatever?”

Something that looks a whole lot like relief sneaks across Mom’s face. “Is the sweater decorated with precious jewels, by any chance?” she asks Hellene, who breaks into a peal of laughter.

Something moving next to me catches my eye. Molly has crouched down to my level to help me gather the packages. I smile, half grateful, half wary, as she dumps them back on the empty chair. “Thanks.”

“No worries,” she says, before lowering her voice. “I wasn’t laughing at you. I was laughing at Hellene. I’m pretty sure she’s flirting with your mum.”

Hellene’s leaning over the desk while she explains the forms to Mom, right up in her personal space. Maybe my “she’s putting on an act for her job” theory was only half right. Molly and I sit down next to each other, and I whisper back, “You think?”

“I’m ninety-nine percent certain.”

I’m not sure if the joke is how awkwardly obvious Hellene’s being, or if Molly just thinks the idea of a lesbian is hilarious. Please let it be door number one. If I meet a student who actually seems nice, only to find out they’re homophobic? I might walk out that door and keep going until I reach Colorado, swimming abilities be damned. “She’s taken,” I reply carefully.

She clicks her fingers in a “dang” sort of way. “Hellene will be so disappointed. She divorced her wife last year and we’ve been telling her to get back out on the dating scene. Guess she finally listened to us.”

There’s something about the way she says it that gives off major green flags. I’ve had years of practice paying attention to how friends and family talk about the queer people they know, trying to gauge if they’d be safe to come out to one day, when I’m ready. So, I’m not psychic, but I’m at least able to make a pretty educated call here. This girl doesn’t seem to be awful or a homophobe. Even better, she doesn’t seem to find me especially unbearable.

The panic I felt during the tour has eased up. Like, a lot.

Molly nods at the uniform pile. “Senior cape, huh? Fifth or sixth year?”

“Fifth.” Otherwise known as junior.

“Oh, same as me,” she says. “This your first time boarding?”

“Yeah. First time in Henland at all, actually.”

She gives me an overexaggerated look of surprise. “What? I would’ve never called it.”

“Nothing gave me away at all?”

“Could be a local for all I know.” She scrunches up her nose as she says this, and I grin.

Mom glances toward us, and gives me an encouraging thumbs-up. I pray to sweet baby Jesus Molly didn’t notice her.

“Is it weird? Moving to a totally different country?” she asks.

“A little. I was excited to see everything, but my mom and her hus—my stepdad—have been busy with moving and immigration stuff, so I haven’t had anyone to do anything with. I’ve pretty much stayed holed up in my room the whole time.”

I regret the words as soon as I say them, but I can’t suck them back in. I sound like an antisocial loser with no life.

Thankfully, Molly doesn’t seem put off. “I’m actually having a get-together at mine after lunch on Saturday for a few of the fifth years. You should come by if you get tired of your room.”

I can’t disguise my look of surprise and Molly must notice my face, because she clarifies. “You’d be doing me a favor. I need an excuse to spend less time with… certain people.”

I want to ask why she’s inviting people to her house if she doesn’t want to be around them, but I decide to leave it. Bring on the rich-people daytime rager.

“Well, obviously, my social schedule’s packed,” I say airily, and Molly grins. “But, yeah, weirdly enough, I might be free.”

“Cool,” Molly says. “You’ll be able to meet some of the girls from our class.”

“Is Princess Rosemary in your class?” Mom asks. I hadn’t even noticed she was eavesdropping. “I mean, does she attend with everyone else?”

“She doesn’t have a contagious disease, Mom,” I say, pleading with my eyes for her to stop before Molly uninvites me.

“Princesses have tutors,” Mom says, getting all defensive.

“Rose attends normal classes,” Hellene cuts in. She does not look happy to be left out of the conversation. “I’m sure Daniela will get to meet her.”

“Oh, really ?” Mom drags the word out and wiggles her eyebrows like she’s implying this is great news for me, personally. Like I’m a social climber who moved countries so I could hang out with the princess of Henland.

This is right at the upper limit of my embarrassment tolerance. I’m gonna have to go ahead and disown my own mom now, which is obviously not great, because I really liked her before this conversation.

Dying inside, I mouth “sorry” to Molly. She looks… not exactly pissed off, but definitely grim. All the friendliness has been zapped from her face in one hit.

I’m doomed.

“Will the princess be at the party?” Mom prods her, because she wasn’t done with the humiliation just yet, I guess.

Molly darkens even more, somehow. “Yeah, she will,” she says in a clipped way. Finally, Mom takes the hint, and turns back to Hellene.

I don’t know what it’s like to grow up with a monarchy, but I’m pretty sure some people feel strongly about the royal family here. There are magazines dedicated to them by the grocery store checkout, and bumper stickers with the royal crest stuck on the back of cars, and the immigration office has a floor-to-ceiling portrait of the king and queen hanging in the entrance hall. But if I had to take a safe bet, Molly doesn’t seem to be one of those people.

“Woo, royalty,” I say in a quiet, mocking voice. Sorry, Mom. It’s every girl for herself out here, and if I get uninvited from this party because my mom has no chill, I will nurse that grudge until my dying day.

Luckily, my bet is right on the money, because Molly sinks into her seat as all the tension leaves her shoulders. “Everyone’s coming over around one-thirty,” she says. “Can I grab your number? I’ll text you the address.”

Across the room, Mom catches my eye and raises her shoulders in excitement.

As Molly lowers her head to use her phone, I shoot Mom’s happy gesture right back at her.