Locked Inside Read Free

daughter. Marnie used to wonder what they were hoping to see. That had been one reason why, when she was fourteen, she’d chopped off most of her hair and then bleached the rest white as dandelion fluff. With the careful half-inch of dark at the roots, it screamed fake. Marnie loved it. It gave the gawkers something real to talk about; something that was her choice. On top of that, any time she got really scared, really shy, she’d paint huge circles of black eyeliner around her eyes. If she also put onher favorite neon pink T-shirt—far more noticeable than black—and her entire collection of heavy silver rings and chains, she could face just about anyone.
    Marnie’s first boarding school—her first school, in fact, because before that Skye had taught Marnie at home—had been a bigger, coed institution, with a cafeteria. Marnie had looked ordinary then, except for the shocking resemblance to Skye. In that cafeteria, she had had to walk through the press of tables that were full of other kids, teachers, and the occasional headmaster or dean before she could finally get into line with a tray. She’d felt everyone watching her back while she went through the line. Then, when she’d finally emerged with food, she’d had to turn and survey the sea of faces again, looking for a table at which she could reasonably sit and eat.
    It didn’t help that there were at least a dozen other “celebrity” kids at that first school. Their parents were famous actors or corporate titans or rock stars. Whereas Skye was an ex-gospel singer who’d started her own … well, some said it was practically a religion. Suffice it to say that Skye was not the same kind of celebrity parent that those other kids had.
    Strange, was what the other kids called Marnie. Maybe it was true. Marnie suspected that there was more to strangeness than the dictionary would have you think. As Skye had often said,
If you want things to be simple, sweetheart, you should go ahead and end it all right now.
Which was not typical advice, Marnie now knew, to give to your daughter when she—for example—complained about long division.
    The feeling of being watched always came back at mealtimes.
    Halsett Academy for Girls, located in semirural Halsett, Massachusetts, near the New Hampshire border, did not have a cafeteria. Instead, there was a rather pretty Victorian dining hall, with floral wallpaper and tables of dark wood at which you had an assigned place. Initially, Marnie had thought this a better system. But you could always leave a cafeteria, while here, during dinner, you had to sit for a full hour, passing platters under the eyes of the staff. Marnie hadn’t decided if it was better or worse now that, because she was an upperclasswoman, her table was free of a permanent, assigned supervisor.
    This evening, Marnie came to dinner at the last possible moment—she’d have skipped the meal if it wouldn’t have stirred up more trouble than she wanted to deal with just now—because she’d been putting the finishing touches on her plan to confound the Elf. Even now, as she slipped into the last available chair at her table, she was still thinking about it. She’d had one idea after another, fountaining, all afternoon. She nodded a vague hello to the table of girls and quickly bowed her head for grace.
    Grace at Halsett Academy was a gentle melody with inoffensive, nondenominational lyrics. (
Might as well sing to your big toe, if you’re not going to bother even mentioning God
, Skye would have said.) Marnie didn’t join in, but she didn’t mind listening, either. Some of the girls had nice voices. Jenna Lowry had a clear soprano; Tarasyn Pearce a powerful alto, almost a tenor. Tarasyn’s voice had actually shocked Marnie the first time she’d heard it, so similarwas it to Skye’s. But here in the dining hall, it was muted somewhat by the other voices, including a couple that could have flattened small hills. Marnie herself, for reasons she’d