As Red as Blood (The Snow White Trilogy) Read Free Page A

together, whispering. Lumikki drained her coffee cup and looked at the clock. Still ten minutes before first period. Standing, she took her plain roll and left. She couldn’t deal with listening to the perfume mafia at the next table, and the smell was making her nauseated.
    The school’s social structure was pretty simple.
    There were the shallow girls who mostly cared about looks and wanted to get into law or business school. They came to the arts school because they had high GPAs and because they were, “you know, really creative and stuff.”
    There were the great Artists and even greater Intellectuals who saw school as a way to show off.
    There were the math geniuses who always looked a little lost.
    Then there were the normal, average kids who filled the halls, jammed the stairwells, formed endless lines in the cafeteria, and all looked, sounded, and smelled the same. No one would remember their names in a few years. No one even remembered them now.
    There were also some smart kids who were actually nice, though. And usually, Lumikki didn’t look down on the other kids either. She knew that the roles a lot of people played were just masks they put on at the beginning of each school day so that finding their place in the crowd would be easier. She didn’t blame anyone for that. But on her very first day of high school, she’d decided that she wasn’t going to let herself be forced into any category. She wasn’t going to let anyone bundle her in with some reference group so people could make easy assumptions about her.
    Lumikki had watched the formation of the divisions, the groupings, and the cliques with slight interest and mild amusement. She had stayed on the sidelines, on the outside. But she wasn’t a loner freak either, sneaking along the walls dressed all in black. People remembered her name.
    Lumikki Andersson. The Swedish-Finnish girl from Riihimäki. The one who had a carefully considered opinion about everything. The one who got perfect grades in physics
and
philosophy.
    The one who had played Ophelia so well that two teachers got mad and the rest got all choked up.
    The one who didn’t participate in any of the school’s pranks or parties.
    The one who always ate alone, but never looked lonely.
    She was the puzzle piece that didn’t have its own place, but could suddenly fill in almost any hole you needed it to.
    She wasn’t like the others.
    She was exactly like the others.
    Lumikki approached the darkroom’s outer door and glanced both ways down the hall. No one around. Stepping inside the little vestibule, she pulled the door shut behind her. Darkness. Automatically, without fumbling, she reached forward and opened the inner door. Her hand knew the distance from memory. Impenetrable darkness. Silence. Peace. A moment to herself before the school day began. Meditating. Recharging. A daily ritual no one else knew about. A habit that was both an echo of the past and an integral part of the present. For so many years, Lumikki had needed to find hiding places because she was afraid. Finding secret nooks and safe havens was a lifeline. These days, it wasn’t so much about fear as a desire to find some room just for her in a place that was shared by everyone. The darkroom was a refuge where shecould collect herself for a few seconds before stepping out again into the middle of all those other people’s talking and sounds and opinions and feelings.
    Lumikki leaned against the wall and stared into the darkness with closed eyes, emptying her mind thought by thought. The easiest part was getting rid of the day-to-day, mostly trivial stuff that revolved around the coming math class, or maybe going to the grocery store after school, maybe going to Body Combat later. But today, for some reason, she couldn’t even get past the surface noise. Something pushed back. Something intruded.
    A smell.
    The darkroom smelled different than usual. But she couldn’t quite place it. She took a step forward. Something