Page 3 of Beneath the Sugar Sky

Cora had sputtered and stammered and somehow signaled her agreement. Nadya had smirked and taken Cora’s arm in hers.

“Good,” she’d said. “I’ve been ordered to make more friends, and you seem to fit the bill. We damp girls have to stick together.”

In the weeks since then, Nadya had been the best of friends and the worst of friends, prone to bursting into Cora’s room without knocking, pestering her roommate and trying to convince Miss West to reassign one or both of them so they could room together. Miss West kept refusing, on the grounds that no one else in the school would be able to find a towel if the two girls who took the most baths were in the same place to egg each other on.

Cora had never had a friend like Nadya before. She thought she liked it. It was hard to say: the novelty of it all was still too overwhelming.

The turtle pond was a flat silver disk in the field, burnished by the sunlight, surface broken by the flat disks of the turtles themselves, sailing off to whatever strange turtle errands they had in the months before their hibernation. Nadya grabbed a stick off the ground and took off running, leaving Cora to trail behind her like a faithful balloon.

“Turtles!” Nadya howled. “Your queen returns!”

She didn’t stop when she reached the edge of the pond, but plunged gleefully onward, splashing into the shallows, breaking the perfect smoothness of the surface. Cora stopped a few feet back from the water. She preferred the ocean, preferred saltwater and the slight sting of the waves against her skin. Fresh water wasn’t enough.

“Come back, turtles!” shouted Nadya. “Come back and let me love you!”

That was when the girl fell out of the sky and landed in the middle of the turtle pond with an enormous splash, sending turtles skyward, and drenching both Cora and Nadya in a wave of muddy pond water.

2

GRAVITY HAPPENS TO THE BEST OF US

THE GIRL IN THE pond rose up sputtering, with algae in her hair and a very confused turtle snagged in the complicated draperies of her dress, which seemed to be the result of someone deciding to hybridize a ball gown with a wedding cake, after dyeing both of them electric pink. It also seemed to be dissolving, running down her arms in streaks, coming apart at the seams. She was going to be naked soon.

The girl in the pond didn’t seem to notice, or maybe she just didn’t care. She wiped water and dissolving dress out of her eyes, flicking them to the side, and cast wildly about until she spotted Cora and Nadya standing on the shore, mouths open, gaping at her.

“You!” she yelled, pointing in their direction. “Take me to your leader!”

Cora’s mouth shut with a snap. Nadya continued to gawk. Both of them had traveled to places where the rules were different—Cora to a world of beautiful Reason, Nadya to a world of impeccable Logic. None of this had prepared them for women who dropped out of the sky in a shower of turtles and started yelling, especially not here, in a world they both thought of as tragically predictable and dull.

Cora recovered first. “Do you mean Miss Eleanor?” she asked. Relief followed the question. Yes. The girl—she looked to be about seventeen—would want to talk to Miss Eleanor. Maybe she was a new student, and this was how admissions worked mid-term.

“No,” said the girl sullenly, and crossed her arms, dislodging the turtle on her shoulder. It fell back to the pond with a resounding plop. “I mean my mother. She’s in charge at home, so she must be in charge here. It’s only”—her lip curled, and she spat out her next word like it tasted bad—“logical.”

“What’s your mother’s name?” asked Cora.

“Onishi Sumi,” said the girl.

Nadya finally shook off her shock. “That’s not possible,” she said, glaring at the girl. “Sumi’s dead.”

The girl stared at Nadya. The girl bent, reaching into the pond, and came up with a turtle, which she hurled as hard as she could at Nadya’s head. Nadya ducked. The girl’s dress, finally chewed to pieces by the water, fell off entirely, leaving her naked and covered with a pinkish slime. Cora put her hand over her eyes.

Maybe leaving her room today hadn’t been the best idea after all.

* * *

MOST PEOPLE ASSUMED, upon meeting Cora, that being fat also meant she was lazy, or at least that she was unhealthy. It was true she had to wrap her knees and ankles before she did any heavy exercise—a few strips of tape now could save her from a lot of aching later—but that was as far as that assumption went. She had always been a runner. When she’d been little, her mother hadn’t worried about her weight, because no one who watched Cora race around the yard could possibly believe there was anything wrong with her. She was chubby because she was preparing for a growth spurt, that was all.

The growth spurt, when it had come, hadn’t been enough to consume Cora’s reserves, but still she ran. She ran with the sort of speed that people thought should be reserved for girls like Nadya, girls who could cut through the wind like knives, instead of being borne along like living clouds, large and soft and swift.

She reached the front steps with feet pounding and arms pumping, so consumed by the act of running that she wasn’t exactly looking where she was going, and slammed straight into Christopher, sending both of them sprawling. She yelped. Christopher shouted. They landed in a tangle of limbs at the base of the porch, him mostly under her.

“Uh,” said Christopher.

“Ohfuck!” The exclamation came out as a single word, glued together by stress and terror. This was it: this was the moment where she stopped being the new student, and became the clumsy fat girl. She pushed herself away from him as fast as she could, overbalancing in the process, so that she rolled away rather than getting back to her feet. When she was far enough that they were no longer in physical contact, she shoved herself up onto her hands and knees, looking warily back at him. He was going to yell, and then she was going to cry, and meanwhile Nadya would be alone with the stranger who was asking for a dead person. And this day had started so well.

Christopher was staring back at her, looking equally wary, looking equally wounded. As she watched, he picked his bone flute out of the dust and said, in a hurt tone, “It’s not contagious, you know.”

“What’s not contagious?”