Page 5 of Breaking Ophelia
Bam looks at the line of blood on his thumb, then wipes it on the tablecloth. “I’m fucking starving. Let’s go eat.”
Colton glances at the chalice, the knife, the stains on the velvet. “Let’s go to Penny’s. A beer to wash the taste of your STD’s away would be fucking nice, Bam. You can pay.”
I stare at my own hand. The blood has stopped flowing, but the cut is a bright red mouth, grinning up at me. This is how you inherit a world: you take the wound and you keep it open.
Chapter 1: Ophelia
ThefirstthingWestpointAcademy takes from you is hope. Not with the contracts or the fines or even the hallway whisper of the Night Hunt, but with the view you get while the iron gates drag themselves open. Two gothic towers, each topped with a shivering pennant, flank a courtyard so swamped in mist you’d think the whole place was underwater. The car dies with a last nervous rattle. I almost laugh.
The driver’s hands are tense on the steering wheel, face pale with relief now that I’m leaving. He doesn't wish me luck. He doesn’t even look back as I drag my trunk up the gravel path, the plastic wheels choking every few feet. Maybe he’s worried that if he looks, he’ll see something contagious. The debt, maybe. Or the reason my father sold me here in the first place.
Make me proud.He’d said as he packed my shit up and signed the papers.
I’d tried to protest. His piss poor ability to manage his financials shouldn’t be my problem, but the honest to God’s truth is that here will be better than there anyway.
Drunken bastard.
The air is cold enough to make my face feel like it’s getting a chemical peel I never asked for. But I try to smile at passer-bys anyway.
Survival 101: never show pain. The walk from gate to hall is longer than it looks, and every step is watched. Not just by the security cameras in the hedges, but by the stone panthers perched on every ledge, their eyes hollow and mean. I wonder who picked that mascot.
Seems a bit pretentious, but hey, what the fuck do I know about wealth and how the rich spend their pocket change.
At the bottom of the marble steps, I pause and check myself in my phone. Hair: brushed. Face: unremarkable, but symmetrical enough to avoid comment. Shirt: thrifted, two sizes too big. Shoes: brown boots, so scuffed that the original leather shows through like bone. I straighten my spine, grip my bags handle until the plastic creaks, and enter.
Inside is a fever dream of privilege. Everything is lit from below, so the faces of the students floating through the Great Hall lookhaunted, teeth and cheekbones sharpened by up-lighting. There are uniforms, but some are customized, like the rules don’t apply if your family has a wing named after them. Velvet lapels. Embroidered silk. Diamond stickpins that could pay off half my father’s mortgage in a day.
I don’t look at them, so naturally they look at me. Whispering starts before I’ve crossed the foyer.
“That’s her? Debt girl?”
“I heard she’s from—”
“—wears thrift store. Can you believe?”
“…does she even own silk?”
I look at every face. None friendly, but most curious. That’s better than open hostility; I can work with curiosity. I move forward, forcing my pace to slow. If you walk too fast, you look like a scared little rabbit.
I focus on the floor: marble, white and veined in black, each tile inlaid with the panther crest. I drag a scuff line through the first one I see.
It’s gross, really.
This open display of money when people are starving just down the street.
At the end of the corridor is a checkpoint, or maybe a baptismal font. There’s a podium made of some rare wood, and behind it a staff member in midnight-blue robes, a silver wolf pin glittering at the throat. She doesn’t greet me. She only glances at my trunk, then at my face. Disgust laces her features.
Hey, I don’t fucking wanna be here either, lady.
She slides a packet across the podium without a word. My name is printed at the top, and underneath, the words: “Room 314, North Tower.” A small blue card, a key, and a folded map are paperclipped together. I can’t help it: my hand shakes when I take the packet.
Not enough for her to see.
I hope.
The woman is already looking past me, as though I’ve failed a test just by existing. A group of boys in matching black blazers hover nearby, one of them twirling a dagger by the point, watching me through his hair. The others ignore me, so I ignore them back. The more you look like a ghost, the faster you become invisible.
I turn and drift with the current of students, navigating by landmarks: the panther in the mosaic, the double row of ancestor portraits—every one of them unsmiling, every one painted with the same shade of red in the whites of their eyes. I keep my shoulders squared, even when my arms start to ache from hauling the trunk. I imagine their eyes on me, the gaze ofmy father from three states away. I let the anger fill my lungs instead of air.
