The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy by Anne Ursu

Author:Anne Ursu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walden Pond Press
Published: 2021-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

16

Missing Pieces

The girls of Rose Hall became an even quieter group after that. While they’d had little to say to each other before, now the silence had body and weight. It plodded behind them everywhere they went, lurked in the back of their classroom, tucked itself into bed in their rooms at night.

Even though Ana-Maria’s insistence that her parents were coming to get her had seemed less and less likely, her confidence more and more absurd, no one could blame Ana-Maria for wanting to believe she didn’t really belong there.

They were troubled girls, cast off by their families, isolated in this academy way up in the mountains; they had to be taught how to sit, how to walk, how to eat soup, how to speak. They needed rules about how they could dress, how they could spend their time, what they could talk about. And as the weeks went on, it seemed that Dragomir Academy was the only home the girls had. None of the girls got letters from their families.

Including Marya.

Maybe her parents no longer considered her their daughter, just like Ana-Maria’s. Maybe now, while they were all girls, none of them were daughters anymore.

Madame Bandu, though, wrote every week. Marya still hadn’t gotten any reply from her or Luka to her first letter; it would be at least a month from the time she wrote a letter for a response to arrive (unless Madame felt compelled to pay for a messenger, which there was no good reason for her to do, as much as Marya might very much want it). There was part of her that was afraid that they wouldn’t write back ever again once they’d gotten her letter, that somehow her mention of Baby Pieter was a huge mistake. That sentence sat with her always, a burning ember in her chest.

It was autumn in Illyria, and it was getting cold in the mountains. There were fires going in the rooms now, their colors matching the tree canopy outside the window. The school supplied the girls with coats for their outdoor walks now, and when they came back, their cheeks were chapped and their noses red.

Dragomir continued to promise them opportunity in one moment and in the next show them how little they deserved it. Marya couldn’t stop thinking about Nadia Dragomir, about what had happened to her. If she could fill in the blanks about why the Dragomirs had started this school, maybe she could figure out what the teachers weren’t telling them.

So, on the first Sunday free period they had after the disastrous evening in the parlor, Marya headed back to the library to see if she could find out anything else. Today the library was empty of students, save Marya, thanks to some vomiting-based illness that was sweeping through the school and had nearly half the girls in their rooms or in the infirmary.

Today Mademoiselle Gris was working at the library desk by herself, with no sign of of Irina. “What can I help you with, Marya?” she asked.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.