Page 14 of Every Heart a Doorway

“Try for groups of three,” said the boy with the bone. “If you can’t manage that, try not to find your door.”

Some of the students laughed. Others looked pained. Loriel was among the latter.

“Tell us about your door, Miss Youngers,” urged Lundy.

“I almost didn’t see it,” said Loriel. Her voice turned distant. “It was so small. This perfect little door, carved into the lintel below the porch light. Like a door for moths. I just wanted to see what it was, that was all, so I got up really close, and I knocked with the tip of my pinkie finger. The world went all twisty and strange, and then I was standing in the hall on the other side of the door, looking back on this impossibly huge porch. I didn’t go through. It pulled me. That was how bad the Webworld wanted me.”

Loriel’s story was grand and sprawling, a majestic, epic tale of spider princesses and tiny dynasties. Her eyes had always been keen, but after spending a year in service to the smallest, they had sharpened so much that she had to wear lenses made of carnival glass to keep the world from being so magnified that it was painful to behold. She had fought and she had triumphed, she had loved and she had lost, until finally the Queen of Dust had asked if she would become a princess of the land and stay forever.

“I said I wanted nothing more, but that I had to go home and tell my parents before I could accept,” said Loriel, sniffling. The tears had started to fall somewhere around the death of her beloved Wasp Prince, and seemed set to continue for the foreseeable future. “She told me it would be hard to find the door again. That I would have to look harder than I had ever looked in my life. I said I could do it. That was almost two years ago. I’ve looked everywhere, but I haven’t seen my door.”

“Some doors open only once,” said Lundy. There was a murmur of agreement from the room. Nancy frowned and sank deeper into her seat. It seemed cruel to dredge up everyone’s pasts like this, pin them quivering to the floor, and then say things like that. Loriel surely knew by now that she probably wasn’t going back through her tiny door to her even tinier world. She was smart enough to have figured it out for herself. What was the point in saying it?

If this was the school for those who wanted to come to peace with their voyages and remember them fondly, she would have hated to see the other campus.

“She said I could come back,” said Loriel. “She promised me. Queens keep their promises. I just have to look more closely. Once I find the door, I’m gone.”

“And your parents? Are they prepared for this inevitable disappearance?”

Loriel snorted. “I told them where I’d been—a year for me, twelve days for them—and they said I’d clearly been through some trauma and couldn’t be trusted. They sent me here so I’d stop being crazy. But there’s nothing wrong with me. I went on a journey. That’s all.”

“A journey to a documented world, even,” said Eleanor. She was standing in the doorway, new lines of exhaustion graven in the soft skin around her mouth and eyes. She looked like she had aged a decade in a day. “There have been five children pulled into the Webworld since I began seeking you all out. Two of them found their way back again after returning home. So you see, there is hope. For Loriel, and for all of us. Our doors are hidden, but by looking closely enough, we can find them.”

“Eleanor.” Lundy stood. “You’re supposed to be resting.”

“I’ve had rest enough to last a lifetime, and only a lifetime for the rest of what’s to be done,” said Eleanor. She moved away from the door. Several students rose to help her to an open chair. She smiled, patting at their cheeks. “Good children, all of you—yes, even you, Lundy. You’re all children to me, and I your teacher, the only one who refuses to lie to you. So listen to me now, because it sounds like you’re doing a fine job of confusing and upsetting yourselves.

“You will not all find your doors again. Some doors really do appear only once, the consequence of some strange convergence that we can’t predict or re-create. They’re drawn by need and by sympathy. Not the emotion—the resonance of one thing to another. There’s a reason you were all pulled into worlds that suited you so well. Imagine, for a moment, if you’d fallen into the world described by your neighbor instead.”

Nancy glanced at Jack and Jill, uneasily imagining what her life would have been like if she’d found their door instead of her own. The moors didn’t seem to care about stillness, only obedience and blood. Neither of those things were strong suits of hers. All around her, other students exchanged equally uncomfortable glances, making their own connections and finding them just as unpleasant as she did.

“Sumi had Nonsense in her heart, and so a door opened that would take her to a world where she could wear it proudly, not hide it away. That was her real story. Finding a place where she could be free. That’s your story, too, every one of you.” Eleanor tipped her chin up. Her eyes were clear. “You found freedom, if only for a moment, and when you lost it, you came here, hoping it could be found again. I hope the same, for each of you. I want to make excuses to your parents when you disappear, to tell them that runaways will always run again if they have half the chance. I want to see the back of you more than I want almost anything in this world.”

What she wanted most didn’t need to be spoken, for they shared her hunger, her brutal, unforgiving desire: what she wanted most was a door, and the things that waited on its other side. But unlike the rest of them, she knew where her door was. It was simply closed to her for the time being, until she could find her way back to childhood.

The boy with the wooden bone put his hand up. “Eleanor?”

“Yes, Christopher?”

“Why did your door stay, while all ours disappeared?” He bit his lip before adding, “It doesn’t seem fair for it to work like that. We should have been able to go back.”

“Stable doors like Miss West’s are less common than the temporary kind,” said Lundy, back on familiar ground. “Most children who go through them don’t come back, either on their first trip or after making a short return to their original world. So while we have records of several, the chances of finding a stable door that resonates with the story you need are slim.”

“What about, like, Narnia?” asked Christopher. “Those kids went through all sorts of different doors, and they always wound up back with the big talking lion.”

“That’s because Narnia was a Christian allegory pretending to be a fantasy series, you asshole,” said one of the other boys. “C. S. Lewis never went through any doors. He didn’t know how it worked. He wanted to tell a story, and he’d probably heard about kids like us, and he made shit up. That’s what all those authors did. They made shit up, and people made them famous. We tell the truth, and our parents throw us into this glorified loony bin.”

“We don’t use terms like that here,” said Eleanor. There was steel in her tone. “This is not an asylum, and you are not mad—and so what if you were? This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm. If anyone should be kind, understanding, accepting, loving to their fellow outcasts, it’s you. All of you. You are the guardians of the secrets of the universe, beloved of worlds that most will never dream of, much less see … can’t you see where you owe it to yourselves to be kind? To care for one another? No one outside this room will ever understand what you’ve been through the way the people around you right now understand. This is not your home. I know that better than most. But this is your way station and your sanctuary, and you will treat those around you with respect.”

Both boys wilted under her glare. Christopher looked down. The other boy mumbled, “Sorry.”

“It’s all right. It’s late, and we’re all tired.” Eleanor stood. “Get some sleep, all of you. I know it won’t be easy. Nancy, can you—”

“I already said I’d room with her tonight,” said Kade. A wave of relief washed over Nancy. She’d been afraid she would have to go to another room, and while she hadn’t been there long, she was already attached to the familiarity of her own bed.

Eleanor looked at Kade thoughtfully. “Are you sure? I was going to suggest she room with someone on her hall, and that you lock your door tonight. This is a great imposition.”

“No, it’s fine. I volunteered.” Kade flashed a quick smile. “I like Nancy, and she was Sumi’s friend. I figure a little stability will do her good, and that makes any inconvenience to me completely beside the point. I want to help. This is my home.” He looked slowly around the room. “My forever home. I turned eighteen last month, my parents don’t want me, and the Prism wouldn’t have me back even if I wanted to go. So it’s important to me that we take care of this place, because it’s been taking care of all of us since the day we got here.”