3. What Exactly Constitutes an Attic Person #2
They aren’t underground for long, and when they emerge out of the stairwell and exit through another thick slab of a door the sunshine is so bright Briar is temporarily blinded.
When their vision blinks back in, they’re in the grounds; ahead is a fastidiously mowed lawn, alternating stripes in shades of green, with hedged gardens to the right and dramatic outbuildings ahead and to the left.
Each of those buildings could be its own little school - they’re mostly Victorian, faded clay red and fussy around the edges, with wrought iron gates curling malevolently at each entrance and rows of arched, pale-trimmed windows.
‘These are the halls of residence,’ says Eugenia.
She gestures vaguely to the left. ‘This is Hawthorn. There’s a courtyard and then Stuart, which looks the same but with everything backwards.
Baldwin is around the corner, and Cavendish is across the other side of the grounds, by the maze.
Griffin is next. Then the extended residential block .
. . Sterling, Montague, Windsor, Sinclair.
You will not remember any of this. I’ll get a map.
There is staff accommodation, but it is all full.
Because you are temporary, we put you in Eden.
Any trouble, there is the Dame - she sleeps here, looks after the scholars - on the ground floor.
There is the Housemaster, too, but they do not like to be bothered. ’
Briar hasn’t given much thought to accommodation, because it was hard enough to believe they’d really be here at all.
Now it’s suddenly a pressing concern. These dormitories will doubtless be divided by gender, a subject that’s been carefully avoided during all of the arrangements so far, a conversational minefield.
The binary looms as large as the building as Eugenia leads them across the lawn from the main school and through the front entrance.
The porch is muddied and full of discarded umbrellas.
There’s a disappointingly normal blue felt notice board in the entrance hall covered in miscellaneous scheduling announcements and behaviour warnings, a myriad of scuffs on the very brown carpet, but the ceilings are high and iced like wedding cakes, and through the door to the left Briar can see what looks like a common room lined with bookcases and strewn with cracked leather sofas.
It’s clearly a boys’ dormitory, based on the pinned pictures of rugby teams and what looks to be a small troop of prefects.
Fine. Boys can be oblivious, incurious. Briar will just have to be careful.
‘You are at the very top,’ says Eugenia. ‘Sorry. It’s a lot of attics for you. But you look like an attic sort of person.’
Is this an insult? Briar’s almost wearing a suit.
Their palms might be calloused, but their nails are neat and clean.
It’s been ages since they’ve punched anybody.
Their hair is freshly cut, and although the barber had been slightly confused by the vision when given a few photos of the long-haired guy from the terrible 2000s Dorian Gray, he’d done a passable job, even if Briar’s gentle curl likes to mess with the lines.
What part of any of that screams attic person?
On the way up, there’s nothing to see but plain wooden fire doors, presumably leading to corridors full of dorms. They reach the top of the third floor and traverse a small grey-carpeted hallway that leads to a second, much more understated set of cramped stairs.
At the top of this, there’s only the one door. Briar’s door.
‘I have a key,’ Eugenia says. She grasps the handle with one hand as she rummages in her pocket to find said key, and to both of their surprises, the door falls open.
The room is miniscule, and has a steeply slanted ceiling with exposed rafters; there are twin chests of drawers instead of a wardrobe, because a wardrobe wouldn’t even make it through the door, let alone fit against one of the angled walls.
A space heater has been left unplugged next to a standing fan.
The single bed has been built up on a platform that fits perfectly into the nook of a window, with a last little set of steps that need to be ascended to reach it.
These details are somewhat eclipsed by the fact that the room is already occupied.
Three students sprawl within, one of them smoking something suspiciously joint-shaped, all of them looking like startled owls.
They’re about Briar’s age, and they’re wearing a uniform - dress shirts, dark waistcoats, black silk cross ties affixed with a silver pin that must be the school crest.
‘Whoops,’ says one of them, a pale, angular guy with dish-water hair brushed away from his face and a very pouty mouth. He’s lounging on the steps with his blazer balled up beneath him, his long legs draped one over the other. ‘Morning, Eugenia.’
He’s unbelievably posh. Royalty posh, vowels and plum. It riles Briar immediately.
‘Good morning, Westby,’ says Eugenia. ‘Adams. Watson.’
Adams seems to be the Black boy with the buzz cut and the delicate gold-framed glasses sitting cross-legged on the platform bed, and Watson is the well-eyelinered and bleached girl next to him, with her chequered grey skirt hiked up so high that Briar can see about a mile of peachy leg before her black knee socks kick in.
‘We didn’t think anybody was using it,’ Adams says, gesturing vaguely to the room as he sits up straighter. ‘Sorry.’
Watson is the one nursing the joint. As Briar watches, she casually reaches down and puts it out by pressing the cherry to the inside lining of her discarded blazer, where it smokes briefly and dies.
‘Congratulations,’ Eugenia says tonelessly.
‘You have all just volunteered to be my helpers. This is Briar Jones. Briar is going to be staying here and helping me with caretaking duties. I am too busy to provide a tour. I think I will invoke the buddy system. It is usually for scholars, but it will do. Three buddies for you, Briar! Probably the record for the most buddies, but between them I think they will only be as good as one. Take some time, settle in, then come and see me in the morning after breakfast and I will get you started.’
Before Briar can ask any more questions, Eugenia leaves, shutting the door behind her.
Adams lets out a long whistle and flops down on the bed.
‘Hope you don’t mind,’ Westby says, sounding as if he’s already decided that Briar won’t. ‘They never usually fill this room, so nobody checks. What was your name?’
‘Briar.’
‘First or last?’
Briar blinks at him stupidly. ‘Oh. First. Last name Jones.’
‘Right, right. I’m Crispin Westby. Westby or West, usually.’
Briar has never met somebody actually called Crispin before. It’s like meeting a character from a cartoon. Then again, there’s probably a healthy clutch of Tarquins, Humphreys and Octavias within the school walls, too. Disturbing and fascinating.
They can’t help but notice that not one of these people has offered to leave the room, now that Briar has turned up to occupy it.
‘Tate,’ says the bespectacled guy, giving Briar the nod. He looks expectantly at the blonde girl, who’s now trying to scratch crusty joint ash out of her blazer with a black-painted thumbnail and a bored expression. ‘And this is Hadley.’
‘You can’t be a pip,’ she says. ‘Unless you’re freakishly tall and built.’ She’s got large, wide-set eyes like a pedigree cat, an alien look about her, modelesque in her weirdness.
‘No, Hads, you beautiful idiot - weren’t you listening to Genie?’ says Westby. ‘Not a pip. Staff.’
‘Staff?’ Hadley looks at Briar properly. Her fringe is so long it’s caught in her sticky lashes. ‘In Eden?’
There’s a brief silence. Then Briar says, ‘What the fuck is a pip?’
The tension breaks. Tate laughs and adjusts his glasses, and Westby smirks.
‘Younglings,’ says Hadley. ‘Ripe for the slaughter.’
A bell rings very suddenly in the near distance, tolling twice, and Westby somehow saunters up from the floor like an ice cream melting in reverse.
‘That’s chambers. Anyone want a sad croissant? Jones, I’ll take first buddy shift and squire you about the place. Or at least squire you as far as the croissants.’
This is met with apathetic shrugs. Apparently, nobody else yearns for sad pastries.
Briar puts down their bag and follows Westby silently out of the door, glancing back at the room’s inhabitants, who still look disinclined to move. Westby, for his part, seems content to hum tunelessly under his breath as they descend the stairs and emerge back out into that brilliant sunshine.
‘Briar, eh,’ he says finally, as they cross the lawn.
He sounds like a gentleman in wartime, preparing to read bad news on a wireless, but he’s handsome in almost the opposite way; delicate, washed-out, boyish but underfed.
He would have been exempt from the draft on account of a sickly disposition.
‘Interesting. Interesting, interesting. Lot of those gender-neutral names are botanical, aren’t they?
But they’ve stuck you in Eden. I suppose you’re . . . ?’
‘I’m non-binary,’ Briar says, trying to deliver it with the nonchalance of ‘I’m right-handed’ or ‘I’m a Pisces’. It comes out more like an admission of guilt under light torture. ‘My pronouns are they—’
‘All right, I get it, don’t hurt yourself. You’ll give some of the scholars a fright . . . It’s all very Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell around here. Luckily you stumbled into a den of iniquity, we’re not so easily ruffled. Oh, watch out - pips incoming, and they look feral.’