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The headmaster’s office is in the largest building, down a long corridor with the floor tiled like a chessboard. The walls are lined with portraits of students in dark uniforms, their mouths proud straight lines, unsmiling arrogance. Pins glimmer on the lapels of their blazers like dragon scales.
My eyes move from portrait to portrait, and my chest swells. I picture myself in one of these frames, my mouth a straight line, my dark blazer glimmering with badges.
One day, in the far future, the headmaster will gesture to my portrait and tell another eleven-year-old girl,This is Theodora Dorokhova. During her time at Spearcrest, she was the best student. When she spoke, everybody listened because everything she said was worthy of being heard.
My father, walking ahead of me, doesn’t so much as glance at the portraits. His strides are long and imperious. I look at the back of his head, the dark, gleaming hair, the stiff neck. He wears a black coat over a dark suit. His silhouette is the silhouette of a stranger.
The headmaster, Mr Ambrose, greets my father at the door of his office. Mr Ambrose is the same height as my father, a big, imposing man, but his green-brown eyes are kind behind his gold-framed glasses, and his brown skin is deeply lined around his mouth and eyes as if his face is used to generous laughter.
He shakes my father’s hand and turns to me, asking me in a kind and soothing voice to take a seat in the waiting area outside his door. My father follows Mr Ambrose into his office without casting me another look. The door closes.
I take a seat facing away from Mr Ambrose’s office. For the first time, I notice there is somebody else sitting in the waiting area.
A boy my age.
As soon as I notice him, he takes up the full space of my attention. I couldn’t say why.
I watch him surreptitiously at first, pretending to look at the old black and white photographs of Spearcrest on the wall above his head.
He is sitting very straight—his posture is excellent. He’s wearing dark corduroy trousers and a dark jumper, even though the weather is still warm. His face is very serious, like an adult’s. He wears his frown in his thick black eyebrows and on his lips, which have the softness of flowers but the severity of stone. His hands are on his lap, fingers laced together.
I straighten in my chair. Mine is blue felt, his is green. Between our seats is a table of glossy brown wood, and there is an enormous plant in the corner, underneath a window. A ray of daylight unspools like a ribbon of pale gold from the window, making the wood shine. The daylight doesn’t touch me, but it falls fully on the boy.
In a moment of carelessness, I meet his gaze. He’s looking straight at me. Unlike me, he’s not looking by accident. He’s looking with purpose and concentration, the way one might peer at the page of a book to decipher its words. I blink and hold my breath, disconcerted.
The boy leans forward, extending his hand across the table.
“Hello. My name is Zachary Blackwood. How do you do?”
I take his hand and shake it. My father is in the room next door; he might not be here right now, but he’s too close for me to have the key to my voice. It’s balled up tight and hard, the marble egg heavy in my chest.
When I speak, my voice trembles like I’m about to cry. “Hello. My name is Theodora Dorokhova. How do you do?”
Speaking to him is difficult, but now that we are engaged in a conversation, I’m free to look at him properly.
His hair is black, his tight curls cut close to his head. His skin is smooth and brown, the warm brown of acorns in autumn, and his eyes are brown too, almost luminous, framed by thick, curly eyelashes. His features still have the softness of boyhood, but there’s a grim austerity to him that reminds me of the painted saints in my father’s house in Russia or the ones in the gilded frames inside Smolny Cathedral, where my father took me when I visited him in St Petersburg for my ninth birthday.
The saints seemed to have an intense sort of conviction that made them look both full of power and devoid of joy.
This is what Zachary Blackwood looks like.
It’s how he speaks, too. Earnest, ardent, cheerless.
When I tell him my name, he nods very seriously. We shake hands like adults and break apart, both straightening in our seats.
“I’ll be starting here in the autumn term,” Zachary Blackwood announces. “Spearcrest Academy only accepts the best of the best, so it’s a great honour.”
I nod. “I’ll be starting in the autumn term, too.”
Zachary narrows his eyes for a moment and tilts his head. He searches my face without trying to hide what he’s doing as if he’s both assessing me and wishing for me to know I’m being assessed.
“You must be quite clever then, I suppose,” he says finally.
I want to tell him I am, but I have a feeling Zachary won’t believe me unless I offer up some sort of evidence.
“I achieved the highest scores in the eleven-plus exams in my school,” I tell him.
He nods. He sits very straight and very still. I’m impressed by the way he doesn’t bounce his leg or pick at his fingers or tap his armrest. It took me years to learn to sit well, to avoid fidgeting.Stop wriggling like a little worm on a hook, my mother would say with a tut. Did Zachary have to learn, too, or was he born calm and still and already perfect?
