As we walked across the campus, to me Hadley Upper School looked more like a miniature Ivy League University than a preparatory school. It had to have some serious alumni donors.

  School started in less than a week, but now the campus sat quiet and waiting. Its wall and tree-bordered grounds sported multiple older looking buildings and separation from the streets around it made it feel like walking onto the campus took you back a century. It had obviously begun life outside the city and had managed to maintain its character as the suburbs grew around it.

  The last time I’d been here I’d taken the test in one of the more modern outbuildings, a dedicated testing center. May had handed my documents over to the test proctor and waited as I’d been shown to a testing cubical with nothing but a provided notepad and pencils. Two hours later, with a passing score in every category—a twenty-three percent improvement in math—I’d been too wrung out to pay attention to my surroundings. Afterwards May had taken us out for ice cream to celebrate and that had been that. We’d have been back sooner for Welcome Day this week, but I’d done the most normal, human thing possible; come down sick. A vicious three-day bug that kept me miserable in my room while May waited on me again. Why couldn’t my changeling rejuvenation have given me a boosted immune system, too?

  Sick-days aside, the last three weeks had been a weird holding pattern; I’d holed up, even May unable to drag me out, and studied. Yes, I’d passed, but really only by an adjusted minimum for much of it. Just thinking of school again filled me with dread and there was no way I was going to let it be an academic nightmare as well, so I’d spent my days cramming the texts for what would have been my ninth-year classes had I attended (and dealing with intermittent panic-attacks at the thought of summer’s end). Now it was days away and today was a preview.

  May walked us briskly—her philosophy being it was better to be five minutes early than on time—taking us to our appointment in the old school building that was the center of the campus. Its inside matched its outside, all old wood and stone and aged but well-maintained tile floors. Through the front doors, the school offices sat opposite the entrance. “Good afternoon,” she said politely to the woman behind the counter. “May and April Seever, we’re here for our appointment.”

  The office assistant greeted us with a smile, giving May a pen and a clipboard to sign in on, and we sat. Five minutes later (the school believed in on time too, check), she called out to us and when we stood, led us down a hall to a door with a plaque that said it belonged to Vice Headmistress Fordice.

  Vice Headmistress. Really.

  With a light knock, our guide opened the door to usher us into a small, carpeted office, a cozy paneled room. The older woman who rose from her desk as we entered, dressed in a dark blue blazer and pencil skirt, looked like a vice headmistress.

  “May,” she said with a smile. “And now April. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Have a seat.” When we were all situated with the door closed, she cleared her throat, looking at me. “Hello, April, I’m Vice Headmistress Elaine Fordice, and I’m sorry we couldn’t meet on Welcome Day. So, first of all, congratulations. When May told me about your education background, I was a bit skeptical that you would have the academic foundation needed to flourish here. It would have done you no good to admit you only to watch you burn out trying to catch up to where you needed to be. We try to avoid that, and I’m glad that you decided that coming to learn with us would be worth the extra year. Now.” She folded her hands on her desk, sitting straight with a pleasant smile.

  “Since you missed Welcome Day, I’m going to give you the Welcome Speech and then hand you over to your guide for the day. She will, I’m quite sure, explain a lot more. Are you ready?”

  When I nodded her smile widened and she sat back, obviously reciting from memory. “Welcome, students, to Hadley Upper School. Those of you who have come up from Hadley Lower School will find much that is familiar. Those of you who are new to Hadley will find much that is different. Our founding benefactor created Hadley as a college preparatory school for the children of white-collar and blue-collar families at a time when higher education was for the most part the province of the moneyed and professional classes. We continue that tradition today, and well over half of our student body are scholarship students provided for by the Founder’s Endowment. They are the strength of our school.

  “However, while we are a college prep, you will find that our primary goal isn’t to graduate matriculating students but to graduate a Whole Person, ready to undertake the challenges of adulthood and citizenship. At Hadley, the academic studies of a Whole Person follow the classical trivium and quadrivium of Renaissance liberal arts studies. Grammar. Logic. Rhetoric. Math. Science. Music. Art. With grammar, logic, and rhetoric we instill critical thinking and a strong foundation of knowledge of civics, ethics, and history. With science we prepare the inquiring mind. With music and art we feed the spirit. And since we cannot separate our minds from our bodies, we supplement our studies here with a rigorous athletic program our Hadley Lower graduates are more than familiar with.

  “Ordered minds. Engaged spirits. Strong bodies. As Hadley students you will emerge from the crucible of your education here prepared to go where your dreams take you, to thrive through adventures and adversity, to carry the torch into the next generation.”

  She stopped. “Well? How was that?”

  “I’m a little scared, now?” I was only half joking; it did seem a little much for a high school.

  “You should be.” And she startled me with a wink. Hitting a button on her phone, she said “Would you send Ms. Patton in, please?” A minute later there came a light knock and a blond girl stuck her head in the door.

  “Hi, Vice!” she chirped. “Is this my victim—I mean, my new sister?”

  “Ms. Patton,” Ms. Fordice said, wrestling a smile. “Thank you for coming in today, it’s good to see you in fine spirits. This—” she indicated me and May, “—is April Seever and her mother, May. I have some details to go over with her mother, but you are free to take Miss Seever with you now.”

  “Excellent!” The chipper blonde stood back and out of the way, and with a last look at May I followed her into the hall. She shut the door behind us. “Elizabeth Patton,” she said, talking fast as we started walking. “Yes, a relative of that Patton, and you can call me Pinky.”

  She looked me over as we walked. Today I’d dressed in a black skater’s skirt and a dark green blouse, matched with a black knotted hairband. May had done some “very basic” makeup on me, taking me through the steps. (Washed face, tinted moisturizer, blush, eyeshadow, eyeliner, lipstick, and God, this is going to be a daily thing, isn’t it?) “You’re really a tenth-year? Because you don’t look it.”

  So much for the face paint making me look older. “I’m actually eighteen a few weeks ago, but yup I’m a sophomore. Sorry.”

  “Really? How—later, let’s do this first. So you missed Welcome Day or you would have met me then, but I’m your new Big Sister. Surprise!”

  “Big sister?” Pinky stood maybe four or five inches taller than me and was softer and fuller-figured though with more happening on the bottom than up top. Dressed in shorts that hugged her wide hips and a snug t-shirt that accented her narrow waist—taking a last opportunity to walk these halls in summer clothes, I supposed—even with her long blond hair up in a ponytail and no makeup visible on her heart-shaped face she still looked older than me.

  “Yup!” Her chirp dragged my attention back from her face and figure that once would have had me stammering at the pretty girl paying attention to me. “See, Hadley Girls School is big about ‘No woman is an island, etcetera,’ so all the incoming eighth-year girls are assigned a tenth-year girl as a Big Sister. It’s her job to make sure her Little Sister gets the down-low on everything and has someone in her corner. The Big Sister-Little Sister thing is a sacred bond. I lost mine this summer when she moved to California, so Vice asked me to be your Hadley Sister even though you’re a tenth-year and I’m only a year older than you—ahead of you, I mean. I turn eighteen myself in October. Got it?”

  Got it? I had so many questions, but— “Wait, you said Hadley Girls School? I thought Hadley Upper was coed?”

  She laughed, opening a door into the school halls. “It is, and it isn’t. There’s a headmaster of Hadley Boys and a headmistress of Hadley Girls. The core academic classes are sex-segregated in their own wings of Old Main—where we are—and with separate gymnasiums even. We share the auditorium and cafeteria and most of the club rooms and art and performance rooms. The Sister System is a Hadley Girls thing, Hadley Boys have their own thing.”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  And now I just had to know. “And what’s that?”

  “Cohorts. The incoming eighths get organized into cohorts of five or six boys in their Homeroom Class. Your cohort brothers are like your blood-brothers—you watch out for each other until you graduate. And cohorts compete against each other academically and athletically in a points system for the honor of being declared First, Second, or Third Cohort of their year. Platinum, gold, and silver laurels.”

  “Do we compete together as sisters?”

  “Pffft. As if we don’t have enough competition in this school. We just watch each other’s backs. You’d have an Elder Sister too, my Big Sister if I wasn’t a junior. She graduated last spring, so you’ve just got me.”

  Huh. A mentoring system of Elder, Big, and Little Sisters passing on their experience from class generation to class generation. It sounded really different for a school, but I had to admit made a strange kind of sense—especially if Hadley academic life was as intense as Ms. Fordice made it sound. Incoming girls would need all the support they could get.

  While filling me in she’d been leading me through the empty halls and now we stopped in front of a locker.

  “The auditorium, cafeteria, and administration offices divide the building, with Boy Country on the south side and Girl Country on the north side. All our lockers and classrooms are here, and we go south only for the classrooms used by the after-class clubs. Your locker is right by mine, they try and group sisterships together or at least close so we can see each other every day even if we don’t share classes or clubs. Here's your locker number and combination and mine.” She handed me an official slip of paper for mine and a sticky with her locker combination on it. “What?” she said at my look. “One of us might need the other to get something for them.”

  When I nodded, she showed me how they worked, opening her own. The narrow lavender-colored lockers came in pairs, with the main locker below for my coat and other long items and a wider “book locker” above that could be opened with a latch in the main locker; two book lockers stacked above each matched set of main lockers. “I’ve got the top book locker for our pair, of course,” she said, showing me. “Since you’re a shrimp.”

  I snorted but, yeah, I was. She made me promise to memorize both our locker combinations (she’d text over the weekend to check), then handed me a school map with our lockers marked with an X and a circled classroom she led me to next.

  “This is your homeroom, Ms. Hollander’s class,” she said, opening the door. With all of the maps on the walls, it looked like a history or geography classroom. “You’ll have the same homeroom for the next three years, and your homeroom teacher is your primary academic advisor. If you’re wondering how they can do that, Homeroom is when they teach the core civics and history blocks. That program lasts all five years and most of the teachers here teach it in addition to their own disciplines. Of course it’s geared towards scoring us a bunch of Advanced Placement credits to the eventual college of our choice. Questions so far?”

  I looked up and down the hall. “Yeah, are the boy’s lockers all blue?”

  She laughed. “Lavender blue to our lavender pink, actually! Soooo basic, right?”

  I couldn’t imagine a school set up like this in the 21st Century. “How did this happen? Why not just have separate boys’ and girls’ schools if that’s what they wanted?”

  “Well . . . the story goes that the granddaughter of Aldous Hadley, the robber-baron who founded the original boys’ school, wanted to build an identical school for girls but couldn’t crack open the Founder’s Endowment to shake loose the money for it. But she could make Hadley coed—and didn’t want to. She believed that girls learned better given their own teachers and classes, no distractions. So she did this, and because of the Endowment it’s been this way ever since. But like I said, we do mix it up. Come on.” We started walking.

  “I do have another question,” I said as we headed down the hall away from where we’d come in.

  “Shoot.”

  “Why are you called Pinky?”

  “Because nicknames are a school tradition—not everybody has them, but it’s a thing for your friends to use your nickname. And mine . . .” She stopped, holding up her left hand, pinky extended, and I realized that the end of her pinky-finger was missing. No fingernail, no finger past the last joint. “I got my hand crushed when I was a kid. Everything else healed but this.” Extending her hand, she turned it palm up in invitation, smiling encouragingly when I hesitantly took it.

  At her nod I ran my fingers over her hand. The stump was smooth with barely a scar, and what looked like surgery scars running down the side and back of her hand, almost invisible. “They had to reconstruct a few bones,” she said at my obvious question.

  I let go. “And kids named you Pinky over it? Why would you be okay with it?”

  “Hey!” She laughed, starting us walking again. “I picked the nickname. It was really either that or General because of my last name. And I fought hard to make it stick, too. A lot of teachers objected.”

  “But—” I really had nothing to say. In school my experience had been that nicknames were cruel, certainly nothing friends used. Not that I’d had many friends. “When in Rome, I guess?”

  “Absolutely. Say it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Saaaaaay it.”

  I laughed. She really was too much. “Pinky. Pinky, Pinky, Pinky. Happy?”

  “Yes. Don’t call me Pinky in the presence of my spawn point, but—”

  “Your what?”

  “My spawn point? My mom? She’s still weird about it. She’s the one who was there, had to wrap my hand and drive me to the emergency room and all that. Trauma. So with her you call me Elizabeth or Ellie. But at school, Pinky.” On that emphasis she pushed open the outside door we’d come to, leading me out the back of the building. “And here’s what I’m talking about.” She started pointing as we walked.

  “Boys and girls gymnasiums.” Two big identical buildings to the north and south of Old Main. “The Armory.” A low, long building in between them. “The Works.” A building beside the armory and what. “And Music Hall.” She walked faster, forcing me to stretch my legs to keep up.

  “You have an armory?”

  “For the Gun Club, Fight Club, and J-ROTC, obviously. All but Fight Club are coed.”

  So many questions, but “And the Works? Music Hall?”

  “Art studios and workshops, practice and performance studios. Single-sex for classes, coed for clubs. And here we are.” We’d gone down the straight path past the buildings and into open ground. A lot of it. Pinky threw her hands wide, gesturing expansively. “The Green.”

  The Green was a huge open field divided up into a flat grassy park area big enough to host a carnival and a bunch of athletic fields. The school buildings sat on a rise above the Green, so we could see all of it; two soccer fields, two baseball fields, and a football field. Tracks ringed the football and soccer fields, all of them with an open side facing the school and a bleacher side for spectators. There was even a . . . “Is that an obstacle course?”

  “For the J-ROTC—Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps—but PE uses it a lot, too. And there’s what we came for.” She took us down the stone steps to the Green, which wasn’t as unoccupied as Old Main. A girls’ team were kicking a ball around one of the soccer fields and a bunch of boys were running the tracks or throwing footballs around.

  “What are we . . .” I trailed off because it was obvious as Pinky headed right for the football field. She laughed and recited; “Hadley Boy, Hadley Boy, where are you going? ‘I’m going to play a game down on the Green.’ Hadley Girl, Hadley Girl, where do you wander? ‘I’m wandering on over where boys can be seen.’ Football and soccer start in the fall and dedicated Sports Club students start practicing early, so since we’re here . . . Hey! Brad!” She waved and one of the boys catching a football looked over to see us standing on the edge of the track. Tossing the ball to another boy he headed our way.

  Tall and lean in an obviously strong broad-shouldered athletic way—I could tell because he wasn’t wearing a shirt—as he jogged up to stop in front of us, I recognized him from my one brief exposure to boys so far.

  Really, what were the odds?

  “Hey!” he greeted us, a little out of breath, his voice deep and rich; puberty had obviously hit him early and hard and kept going to finish the job well before quitting time. After that eloquent greeting he picked Pinky up and spun her around, landing a smacking kiss on her cheek while she shrieked.

  “You’re all sweaty, you moron!”

  He just laughed, setting her down. “How’s my girl?”

  “Not your girl since fourth grade!” But she was laughing, too. “This is April. She’s my new little sister. Be nice.”

  “Right.” He turned to me, and his smile dropped. “Oh. Hey.”

  “You know each other?”

  “I—” Looking up at him I had no idea what to say. My head had become a very strange place.

  Then he did something unexpected; he actually stepped back so he wasn’t looming over us. “Yeah, sort of,” he said. “April, right?” he confirmed as if he couldn’t be sure after only hearing my name twice now. He rubbed the back of his neck, giving me a nod. “This is kind of awkward, but I’m glad to see you. Listen, the other day. I didn’t think about it until after, how me and the guys might have sounded to you, but I could tell we made you uncomfortable. I’m sorry.”

  Pinky gaped. “You made her uncomfortable?” Smacking his arm, she glared. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing!” I said before he could protest his innocence. “I was on my way to lunch a few weeks ago with my mom and they met us at a crosswalk. They were loud, that’s all.”

  “Yeah?” She looked at me and then scowled at him some more. “That’s all? Just boys being stupid?” Brad looked a little hunted and now I wanted to laugh. Pinky was taller than me and she still glared up at him.

  “Yeah,” I answered for him. “They weren’t even rude, just, you know, there. Do over?” I didn’t know what possessed me to put my hand out but I did, and a grin transformed his face. He carefully shook it, his hand big and warm.

  “Thanks, now Pinky won’t kill me. And you can call me Rex.”

  I blinked away my distraction. “Rex?”

  “My nickname. From Tyrannosaurus Rex. Pinky here gave it to me when I started shooting up. I got taller real fast and was more than a little awkward for a while. Tripped over everything.”

  “Oh.” He’d let go of my hand but it still tingled. Standing there all broad and sweaty, and with that nice deep voice and looking at me and being so nice he was just . . .

  As I flushed, heat spreading down my neck and chest, I felt the thump deep in the core of me.

  Fuck!