The bus dropped me at the bottom of the hill and left before I could change my mind. So I walked up, because that's what you do when you have two bags and nowhere else to be.
Sundermoor sat up there like it had grown out of the rock. Gray stone, lit windows, a bell tower. I remember thinking, great, it's either a school or a very fancy prison.
The office smelled like old paper and lemon cleaner. The woman behind the desk found my folder, flipped it open, and stopped at one line.
Kind: pending.
Pending. Like a dentist appointment. Like a text you're waiting on. Like a maybe. I asked what it meant, and she said the school hadn't worked out what I was yet. She said it the way you'd say the printer was broken.
My room had a bed, a window, and a roommate who hadn't shown up. I dropped my bags, looked at my own face in the dark glass, and went straight back out.
Sitting alone in a new room felt like the start of a bad habit.
Tilda: You're the new one. The pending one.
Nell: Word travels fast.
Tilda: Small school. Your file is basically a rumor.
Tilda: I'm Tilda. So what are you, really?
Nell: Genuinely? No clue. I can't shift, I can't cast, and once I made a vending machine give me two sodas.
Tilda: That's not a thing.
Nell: It's been four years and I still think about it.
Sable: Aw. Pending. That's a sweet word for a thing that doesn't know what it is.
She said it at full volume, and the two behind her laughed on cue, like somebody had rehearsed them.
Sable: Don't look at me like that, blank. You're not a fucking person yet.
Tilda got very interested in the floor. Her fingers went tight on her cardigan sleeve.
Tilda: Don't answer her. That's Sable. She's with Bram, and Bram decides who exists here.
Nell: That's insane.
Tilda: That's the school.
Dinner was in a hall with long tables and too many chairs, and every head turned when the door opened. Some of them turned back fast.
Tilda: One rule. Do not sit at the back table.
Nell: Why, what's at the back table?
Tilda: Cormac.
The back table was empty except for him. Every other table was packed, and the space around Cormac was wide enough to park a car in.
She said his name quietly, the way you say a word you're not supposed to know.
He was big. Black jacket, sleeves rolled, dark hair, a tray he wasn't eating from. Half the room was not looking at him, and he knew exactly how hard they were not looking.
Tilda: Stop looking at him.
Nell: He's looking at me first.
I have zero survival instincts, apparently. Because my first thought was, he looks lonely. Not dangerous. Lonely.
So I waved. Not cool. Not even close. A tiny wiggle of my fingers, like two strangers in a waiting room.
He didn't wave back. But the corner of his mouth pulled up, just a crack, like he'd forgotten how his own face worked and something in him had remembered.
Tilda: Oh no. Oh no no no.
Tilda: Do you know what he is? He's a dragon, and he hurt someone. Years ago. A girl nearly died.
Nell: Nobody talks about it. But everybody knows.
Tilda: Everybody knows. And nobody says it out loud, because he's still here and he's still allowed to be.
Bram: Hey. Pending. You're looking at the wrong end of the room.
Bram: Sit back there and you're nothing to us. Not a joke, not a story. Nothing. Just so you know.
So now I had a folder that said pending, forty strangers who'd already made up their minds, and one dragon at the back who was still watching me.
I could be scared of him later. First I wanted to know why he ate alone. And maybe, quietly, what a pending girl is worth in a place like this.