In The Absence of Sun

by tlehcsg

Reparative therapy was meant to silence it. The years home schooled all alone in that big house were meant to lock it away. But enrolling at Arendelle Prep was the worst thing that could have ever happened to that plan for the Senator's daughter. AU Elsanna, rated M for language, drug use, character death, and eventual *sexual explicitness*.

1. Chapter 1

A/N: I haven't updated anything in a year and a half, and I feel awful that I'm basically abandoning everything else I've left halfway done, but my writing has changed so much in that time and it wouldn't feel right to pick up with something I'd already started.

So I'm starting fresh with a fandom that's really surprised me with its vigor and depth. I want in on it. I want to flex my writing muscles and explore these characters.

This is pretty AU. No sisters, no powers. This story is my way of fleshing out a different interpretation of the canon story. I've outlined about nine or ten more chapters of this length - and by outlined I mean actually planned out, so I have no excuse not to update. If I go more than three or four days, I need a good sharp poke.

So, happy reading! Please let me know what you think, and enjoy the ride with me.

5/4/14 edit: I realized that I ought to add a trigger warning for what some may consider self harm. I don't necessarily see it as such, but just to be safe, I'm putting that out there.

. . .

Seven forty-nine a.m. on Tuesday, the first of September.

Why was the first day of school on a Tuesday? I couldn't exactly blame anyone who planned these things for the fact that the first didn't fall on a Monday, and I didn't, but it still seemed unnatural. Someone up there whose job was to map out dates on a high school's calendar year made the choice between the first of the week and the first of the month. Tough choice, I knew that. I would have chosen the Monday, but that would have left me all weird about starting the school year at the very end of August. The date-planner probably felt weirder about August than Tuesday, and I didn't blame them for that. You can't control what you feel weirder about.

Seven fifty a.m. on Tuesday, the first of September.

I wondered if the analog clock on the console might be a few minutes fast. I wondered if I'd have enough time to get to class before the first bell rang at eight. I wondered if ten minutes early was too early to be at school. I wondered if the big school building past the parking lot I sat in might have looked bigger than I remembered, which didn't make sense since the last time I'd seen the place was when I was eight and coming for a cousin's graduation. I wondered if I was making a big deal out of nothing, and deliberately uncurled my palms from the steering wheel and put them on my lap.

It was my first day of "real" school in five years. I couldn't blame myself for feeling weird about that.

Still seven fifty a.m. on Tuesday, the first of September. The digital display hadn't winked into the next minute since I'd last glanced at it. There was something lucky about that, wasn't there? Since time had frozen for just a little while as I'd worried over the engorged school, I could afford a few more minutes sitting there. I felt greedy for time alone in the car, and wanted to stall for just a few crumbs more of it… but that worry over being late was still there.

I forced myself out of the car my parents had bought me for driving to school and calculated how many things I didn't like about seven fifty-one a.m. on Tuesday, the first of September: the fact that it was Tuesday, the way the school loomed higher now that it did nine years ago, the possibility of being late to my first class, the dim gray clouds mottling the backdrop. Four. I yanked on the hem of my skirt where the pleats were crumpled halfway up my thigh; I didn't dislike the uniform, but so far the skirt became bunched up too high in the back whenever I stood up from a sitting position. Five. Charcoal gray skirt, silvery gray sky, dust gray building – it was the kind of color scheme they'd establish at a high school setting in a movie where all the teenagers get murdered. That was how they set up foreboding even in the beginning of the movie when everything was still normal and everyone was still alive – big bland skies and big dark buildings. I still wasn't sure how gray uniform skirts fit in to slasher flick cinematography, but I had a feeling it had to be related somehow. Audiences just loved those private school kids' uniforms all mussed up from chase scenes, or torn off from sex scenes, or blood-splashed from "Oh-my-god-he's-right-behind-us-and-the-best-friend-sidekick-is-definitely-getting-picked-off-right-now" scenes.

Crossing the street in front of the school and walking past the Arendelle Prep sign, I pictured myself running up those granite steps, bloodied and completely alone as the Final Girl in some Jason Voorhees prequel – significant gash on my forehead or cheek, navy blue stockings ripped from ankle to ass, powder blue blouse halfway or entirely untucked. There's a good chance I would be limping, too. And yeah, I'd be out of breath and crazed with the certainty that I was going to die, but it's not like I would actually die. The teenage girl always lives to the end of those movies. Especially if she's the new girl at school, and if she maybe hasn't got a lot of friends, and if she definitely has never in her entire life gotten anywhere close to losing her vir–

Yeah, the school had definitely grown taller, wider. It was a perception thing, for sure – not like the building could have followed puberty with me and actually sprang up a few stories along with my inches, but as I lingered up the steps I could have sworn I felt the shudder of Arendelle Prep itself… yawning. I couldn't linger for long. A boy wearing a blazer – they were all wearing a blazer – held open the front door as I approached, and I quickly went inside.

This wouldn't be so bad as one of those movies. My parents wouldn't be paying all this money just to have me chopped up into pieces, right?

. . .

It could have been worse. As far as first mornings go, it could have been much worse. The whole school thing wasn't too hard since I'd done it before – even though it had been five years. I moved down the cafeteria line, sliding the dark green plastic tray along with me, and figured that if I'd never been to a school in my whole life, this part would be too much to handle. This lunchtime part. That wasn't saying much, though, since the locker part would have been too much, and the moving to different classrooms part would have been too much, and the finding where I left my locker part would have been too much, and the surrounded by strange kids part would have been too much, and the finding where I left my locker coming from another entirely different hallway part would have been too much, if, you know… I'd been home-schooled my whole life. Instead of just the last big chunk of it.

I paid for the pre-packaged cobb salad and frozen yogurt I'd picked out – really, I could get used to this real school thing where you choose what you want for lunch – and wound through the river of gray and navy. Shoulders and knees – the different cuts and colors of hair up at eye level were the way that people could be picked apart as separate bodies. They were lanterns, head and hair lanterns bobbing on dark water that concealed a rocky streambed. It was a good thing I could swim. I snapped out of staring at the other kids and wove through to an empty table by the far wall. This swimming part, this lunchtime part, would have easily been the worst part for someone who had never been to real school. I could handle, though. I thought I was handling pretty well, considering… well, considering how much I disliked being around lots of other people.

I didn't fight my parents over this, though. They told me I was going to go to school this year – this was back in July, I remembered because the skin on my nose had been pink and peeling in thin little wisps from the Fourth of July cocktail mixer Dad had held for his campaign team out by the pool earlier that week – and it was strange because every stretch of my body went calm except the pink nosetip that pulsed a little bit, and I'd thought to myself, well, this is it.

And Mom had said, "Elsa, don't touch your sunburn." And I went back to my room on the third floor after that dinner, and I went into the bathroom and put on that aloe vera gel that felt like there was steam rising from my burn, and I put in the original Nightmare on Elm Street and settled into a familiar scared that I welcomed like the old friend that it was.

But being around all these people, in the middle of all these new people, was something I could handle. I knew it. I knew it sitting in the dining room back that July with the news of real school on my plate, and I knew it sitting in the four desks I was assigned to in four rooms that morning, and I knew it sitting there at the round table in the cafeteria. This was only a school. This was only a school, one of thousands of schools that people my age went to because you had to go to a school unless you were homeschooled. They all had to be there. It wasn't a big deal. And maybe I didn't have to be there so much as I felt like I ended up there by chance, like all other signs pointed to me not being there, but really… these people all milling around were just kids who went to classes and fell into these little orbits that bumped into one another's.

I scanned the people at other tables while I ate my salad because I didn't have anything else to do. It wasn't so much an issue of no homework yet, either; I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen so many teenagers in one place. It was kind of fascinating. Not a lot of students were still in line, and everyone seemed to be settling into tables in groups of four, five, or six. Some hesitated. Some hugged a lot – mainly girls, the guys didn't hug – and made room for an addition to six or seven. Maybe they didn't see each other all summer. One table didn't have room for a girl that maybe they hadn't seen all summer, like really had no room at all, not even to perch with her knees facing away from the table. I watched as she looked around for a minute and then dropped down into the table directly adjacent to her friends, facing them and turning back to her tray every few minutes or so to swipe what she was eating in a saucer of ranch dressing. The three other people at that table – two boys and a girl who hardly spoke to one another – kept glancing at the newcomer, but she didn't look at them once.

That big, full table was all girls. The one next to it was all boys, boys who focused on their food, and next to that one was another that was all boys, boys who focused on laughing a lot and on occasionally talking to the next table, one that was all girls, five or so girls who laughed at the boys who they must have known. I watched that last table for a few minutes longer than I watched the others – these girls ate much more slowly than everyone else, and smiled more slowly with good shoulders-back posture that I could recognize from all those years of etiquette lessons Mom had me take in the first floor parlor. As I was pulling my gaze around to find someone with bad hunched-over posture, probably to compare, something odd happened; one of the girls at that table, a girl with dark red hair, craned her neck to scan the cafeteria and then looked over at me at my table off over by the wall. I knew she was looking at me. She didn't look over at me again, but she cocked her head over in my direction and I saw her friends glance over my way.

I recognized that girl. I'd seen her not even fifteen minutes ago, in the hallway right before lunch. I'd found my way back from the senior hallway on the second floor to the main hallway by the front doors. I went to push through the doors and go leave for lunch, but they didn't budge. I tried again, perplexed. Why were they locked? Had I got mixed up and tried a different door from the one I came in?

A girl standing at the last locker watched me struggling. "What are you trying to do?"

I stopped pushing and looked over at her. "Leave? It's lunch period, right?"

The girl pushed a book into her locker. "We don't get off-campus lunch."

"Oh."

She finished putting away her books and shut her locker, turning to me. "Do you know where the cafeteria is?"

I glanced over at the white noise of other kids moving around lockers and friends in the hallway. "Yeah."

"Okay." The girl gave me a quick closed-mouth smile before walking off down the hall. I pushed off from the door, feeling slightly stupid, and took three wrong turns down emptying hallways before finding the cafeteria.

I was surprised I didn't recognize the first person who spoke to me at this school as soon as I started surveying her lunch table. Her vivid red hair was hard to miss. Her friends weren't glancing at me anymore, though, and neither was the girl herself, so I figured she was just telling them about some klutz new girl who'd made her laugh for all of five seconds and then moved on to talking about something else. Not really a big deal. It could have been worse.

Not really a big deal at all, but I couldn't get through the frozen yogurt without glancing back to that table of five or so girls with good posture. I couldn't help but watch a girl with strawberry blonde braids pointing the cherry tomato on the end of her fork at some girl across from her (all I could see was the short black hair back of her head). Who wore braids to high school?

Then I remembered that I wore my hair in a braid. I remembered the calm tingling-nosetip feeling from July for some reason, and I looked away, and then I threw out the rest of my frozen yogurt and left the cafeteria. It was five minutes until fifth period anyway.

. . .

The next day was the same as the first. For all the nerves I'd tried to squash about doing school, about how different and difficult it would be to adjust and feel like I could breathe there, there really wasn't much to it. It wasn't a whole lot different from how I remembered middle school being. Sure, the work was harder than it had been, but it made sense that senior English would be Hamlet and not the same To Kill a Mockingbird as in seventh grade (I thought about telling the teacher that the tutor at home had had me read Hamlet – and The Tempest – a year and a half ago, but I figured a little leg-up over the others in the class couldn't hurt, since after all, I'd never taken an honors class in my life). As for the other kids… well, I'd worried about that, about them, more than anything throughout July and August, but coming into Arendelle Prep had me realize that they were only a backdrop. Sure, as a moving, breathing backdrop they were more interesting to look at than walls, but they didn't pay attention to me and I didn't pay attention to them.

Well, maybe I paid attention to them. But it was in a movie way. Character assessment, right? This boy for example, near the back of the classroom, the costume department gave him floppy bangs, so since his eyes weren't easy to see he would end up near the second act either untrustworthy or hiding something. Probably both. I wondered what a teenage boy could possibly have to hide, but the thought was passing, and class started, and I forgot about it.

I went into the cafeteria again, and I bought a cobb salad again (though this time the frozen yogurt I chose was cherry vanilla rather than peach), and I threaded through the other tables to drop into the empty one at the far wall again. So far I found school to be rather monotonous. Wasn't an elite private school like this supposed to be more exciting? Wasn't it supposed to be full of more scandal? And wasn't it supposed to… well… wasn't it supposed to be giving me panic attacks?

"You know how you get," Mom had said two weeks ago, waving her finger in an indication for me to give her the three-sixty view of the new uniform she'd just brought home for me to try on. I'd spun, unsure of what to make of the blazer – Arendelle Prep's crest carefully sown onto the breast – or the skirt (was it really allowed to be this short?). The tie I liked, for some reason having always wanted an excuse to try one on.

"But they won't let you leave when you get overwhelmed by all of the other people." She had me turn the other direction. "You'll just have to find a way to handle it." When was the last time I'd been brought into Mom's east wing fitting room with something from the tailor's? Wasn't that for Dad's sponsorship gala in May, with the cream strapless gown that had chafed my underarms? I'd nodded along to what Mom was saying, not really listening as I kept turning clockwise, counter-clockwise, okay Elsa clockwise again, other way, no that's not counter-clockwise, and caught myself in all the different mirrors.

You know how you get.

I didn't really know, though, but I pretended I did. I'd have told Mom and Dad last night how well I did at school, how I didn't freak being around so many new people, but they'd been in Pittsburgh for a dinner. They'd probably be in Pittsburgh for another dinner tonight. Who even knew when they would or wouldn't be at a dinner in Pittsburgh, or Boston, or D.C.? I couldn't remember the last time I cared to guess.

"Uhh, 'scuse me."

I looked up sharply. There was a boy standing across from me on the other side of my table, looking at me with a cocked head and big brown eyes.

"Yes?" What did he want?

"Do you have fourth period English?"

"Yes." This was something I hadn't really prepared myself for. For some reason the possibility of anyone at this school talking to me of their own free will hadn't even crossed my mind.

The boy pulled out a book sandwiched in the stack under his arm. "I might be wrong, but I think this is yours." He held out a copy of Hamlet. I stared at the book in the boy's hand for a few seconds, not connecting the dots, and then automatically reached over the table to take it. It was a brand new paperback copy of the play that they'd handed out to the whole class, with a charcoal sketch of a skull printed on the front cover. I checked inside the cover – Elsa Isberg was written there in light pencil. Erasable. Just in case they changed their minds and I had to give the book back.

I looked back up at the boy. "I left it behind, didn't I?"

He raised his eyebrows – they were very thick, and the motion changed his face. "Right there on the desk and you walked out without looking back. What's your name?"

He'd circled slowly around to the side of the table that faced out towards the rest of the cafeteria, the side closer to the wall where I sat. I followed his path curiously. "Elsa. You didn't look at this?" I pointed at the inside cover of the book where I'd written my name.

The boy planted a hand on the table and rested his weight on it. Through his open blazer I could see his left shirttail was untucked. "Finding you didn't take that much Nancy Drew work, I just recognized you from class. You're welcome."

He began to smile as he said this, but I still felt bad for not thanking him. So I did.

"No big deal," he said, and took the seat two away from mine. I wasn't sure if he was trying to give me space, and wasn't sure if I wanted or needed it, but I appreciated it just the same.

I cleared my throat. "So what's yours? Name, I mean." This was why I didn't go out in public. The first time someone struck up a conversation with me and I was fumbling all the cues.

"Ali." The boy, whose name was Ali, slid his hand over the table towards me, thumb facing the ceiling. I took the hand and shook, pleased to find that it was warm and extremely dry. I realized that this was the same boy with the floppy bangs that I did my character assessment on. I reassessed – the bangs meant boyish. Full of mischief.

"So you're new," he said. In no way was it a question.

"I'm not even going to fake surprise at being so obvious."

"Don't worry about it!" Ali looked away and glanced out over the other tables. "Good spot you picked, by the way, but I'll show you a better one." He turned back to me, blinking. "But no, don't worry. Mainly everyone just knows everyone else. New people are, well. New." He grinned at me, this time with teeth – this boy had a face made for smiling with teeth. Wow. It just lit him up. I couldn't help but smile back, curiously at ease. I still didn't know why this boy was talking to me, but I didn't mind it. So I took a deep breath.

"Any pointers for a newbie?"

Ali leaned back. "You're already on the right track. Keeping an open mind, that's a given. Asking me what to do? You're set."

"I might as well graduate now."

He laughed; it was strange, I'd never felt like a very funny person before. "So you're a senior?"

"Yes."

Ali edged his chair a little bit closer to me and began to scan the other tables. I turned to follow his gaze. "Who have you met so far?"

"No one."

I thought he would look at me funny for that, but he kept his eyes moving outward. "Then who do you have in class?"

"Uh…" I roved over all the blazers. Eventually I snaked my finger up by my lip and pointed as discreetly as I could. "That table by the big windows with those guys. You see that one?"

"Yeah."

"They're in my Calculus class – the really big guy and the short one sitting next to him."

"Hmm." Ali rubbed his mouth. "Yeah, that's Ralph Wareck and Felix Fiske. They play a lot of Pokémon and stuff like that and don't really talk to anyone but each other. Who else?"

"Um. Okay, over there in the middle. All boys." I indicated with an upwards tilt of my chin.

"You must mean Shang."

"Maybe?"

Ali leaned in and nodded at the table. "You're taking Calculus and honors English, so I'm assuming you take all honors classes, and Shang Li is the only one of them that takes honors."

"Oh." I watched the serious-looking boy with a black buzz cut who I recognized from my classes. He leaned on his elbows and concentrated on his tray.

"There's not too much you need to know about Shang. He's a good guy. Kind of a pain in the ass if you do a group project with him, you know – doesn't usually think other people will do their part of the work, but prove him wrong and you're fine. Military family probably makes him a perfectionist like that."

I looked away from Shang over to the table of girls next to them. The good posture girls. The one with braids sat in the same place, but this time her friend with black hair was next to her; the other girl – who I now saw wore bright red lipstick, nodded while braid girl rolled her eyes and waved her fork. No cherry tomato this time.

"Who else do you recognize?" Ali said.

I wanted to ask Ali about the girl who conducted her speech with a fork, but I couldn't come up with a class I was sure he didn't have with me quick enough. "The table next to them?" I waited for him to nod. "That girl with red hair, we talked yesterday."

"You mean like, with really fake red hair?" He scratched the shaggy black hair on the back of his head. "Ariel Triton. She does cheer with the rest of them."

"They're all cheerleaders?" I honestly didn't know what I thought about cheerleaders, having never met one before, but for some reason I assumed the cliquish nature of them was just contrived for characters onscreen. I mean, I knew they existed, and that as a general rule they might be pretty, but it hadn't occurred to me that they would actually all sit together at lunch like cheerleaders did in movies.

"Well, I think Ariel is on the swim team too, but yeah. That's about as broad as the horizons get for the rah rah group."

I watched the Ariel girl dab at her mouth with a napkin while watching another girl talk. She was watching braid girl, I noticed, and my eyes slid over to watch her too. I wondered if Ali was going to tell me about the others at that table.

"So when did you talk to her?" he said, raising those thick eyebrows of his at me.

I told him how this Ariel girl had put me out of my fruitless door-pulling misery. "I must have been trying to force that door for the better part of a minute."

Ali laughed, bright and full. "Geeze, that must have been embarrassing." I liked how he didn't pretend it wouldn't have been.

"Yeah, I wanted to drop out, but my mom wouldn't let me. So here I am."

He laughed again – and causing it still felt so alien to me – then gave me a good long look with the shadow of it quirking his mouth. "There are other ways. I'll show you."

"What, you mean like out of the school?"

"Well, duh." I couldn't remember the last time I'd been duh'ed. Logic told me I definitely had been in the past, since I'd been in school with other kids for six whole years. Upbringing told me to be offended by it, but I smiled in spite of myself. Ali continued, "I usually don't eat in here. And I know you don't really want to either." He was probably going off of my escape attempt from the day before.

I couldn't help but be curious, even though I didn't really want to break any rules at my new school. It couldn't hurt just to find out and satisfy my curiosity. Against my better judgment, I asked him. "How?"

But Ali just put one hand behind his head and inspected the fingernails on his other. "Said I'd show you, didn't I?"

"Fine, then show me."

Abruptly, Ali pushed off the chair and got to his feet. "So impatient!" He was laughing again, and whatever frustration I felt dissipated. I didn't know him, but I knew it was very hard to be mad at him.

"Listen," Ali went on, "Meet me at the water fountain in between the third floor bathrooms before lunch tomorrow."

I knew without even bothering to try to recall the third floor bathrooms that I'd get lost. "Why can't we just go from English together?"

He rolled his eyes. "Oh, just trust me. Your life is gonna be so dull without a little mystery in it."

I rolled mine right back. "Oh, just what I need. A little contrived hallway suspense to make my life worth living."

"That's the ticket!" Ali was already backing away towards the entrance, pointing his finger at me. "Remember the mystery!"

"Ooo-kay." I waved slowly as he disappeared through the doorway, then blinked, and he was gone. It was like he'd never been there to begin with. The blazers still moved around me and their chatter swirled and muttered around the high-ceilinged room. For the first time I noticed how old the architecture must be. This whole place was old. Old, polished wood and polished stone nearly everywhere you could touch your eyes or fingertips. I slowly trailed both my index fingers away from me on the well-oiled wood of the table's lip. Still the blazers moved around me, their owners talking to their friends and acquaintances and enemies in a seamless river of words that floated up and around towards the ceiling, the same way they had when I'd come in and started the lunch period today without a friend to my name.

I was ending the hour with a friend, wasn't I?

Briefly, I let a little smile tug at my lips. Gathering my sticky lunch scraps of plastic and paper onto my tray, I wiped my face clean of expression and went to toss the garbage in the bin by the entrance. Then I turned, walked back to my far-wall table, and grabbed the copy of Hamlet that sat there.

. . .

To my great surprise, it only took me inwards of five minutes to find the third floor bathrooms the next day. I knew it took less than five because the second between-class bell hadn't rung yet by the time I trudged up to the water fountain, and we were given exactly five minutes between classes. Halfway into my third day I hadn't spoken to any other students than the one on my first day, Ariel, and the one on my second day, Ali, but I overheard enough to know that the other students at Arendelle found it to be far too little time to get to class.

"Hartz had my head this morning for being late." In the half minute before Calculus started I'd heard the boy in front of me talking to his friend. "I swear to god, I can't get anywhere on time with this bell schedule." He'd checked his watch, as though reassuring himself that he wasn't late again, and I'd caught sight of protruding front teeth with lime green brackets worrying his lower lip.

"Dude, you need to relax," his blonde friend had said lazily, and that was that. I didn't feel like it was too little time, since the school wasn't all that big and I hadn't had any trouble making it to class yet with any less than a full minute to spare, but then again I didn't spend any of those five minutes catching up with anyone at the lockers. Most everyone in the senior hallway up on the second floor did that. I didn't see the fork-pointing girl in that hallway in between any of my classes, though, or her red-haired friend Ariel (she was on the first floor by the door, I remembered that eventually). I figured they must have been younger – juniors or sophomores. Were juniors, even sophomores, on the same cheerleading squad as the seniors? Were the other cheerleaders at that lunch table seniors, or was the squad all mixed-year based on talent? I hadn't the slightest clue how it worked, figuring I couldn't go off movies since they would probably change around the rules to suit the plot. Curious, I kept my eyes peeled for the girl with the black bob (she was the only other one from that table who I remembered), but after a few seconds of scanning around all the different heads of hair mixing around the narrow hallway, I realized that I couldn't search for a specific person without looking like I was searching for a specific person, and I ended up turning back to the books in my locker. The only face I recognized at the lockers in the senior hallway was Shang, but he was easy to pick out since I had most of my classes with him. I didn't see Ali. He must have been a junior too.

I bent down over the water fountain and took my third quick sip in the past minute. The bell had just rung, and the hallway – no lockers, just classrooms – was almost empty but for a few stragglers swimming by. I twisted the knob – it was an older dark-metal fountain, with a knob instead of a push panel – and felt the gloves I wore today slip on the spindles.

A slither of dull pain echoed in the skin of my fingers. I froze, counted to five, and then used the heel of my hand to press the knob far enough forward that a trickle of water burbled from the fountain's spout. The gloves were a pain to wear at school – no one else wore gloves. But the creamy suede was the same exact navy color as the blazer, so I figured they blended in pretty well. At least, I hoped they did. It's not like anyone looked at me – my hands, my face – in the first place.

That day two weeks ago in Mom's fitting room, when I'd tried on the uniform for the first time, I had stepped down from the short wooden platform in the middle of the mirrors, tugging at the hem of the skirt (I still hadn't got used to keeping it from bunching yet). That was when I'd caught sight of the blue gloves sitting folded on top of the uniform parcels. I'd shot Mom a glance that was not quite a question. I couldn't hear the tight-lipped sigh, but had recognized the flare of her nostrils.

"None of your others would match," she'd said, as though that was all there was to say. I wanted to look at the floor and say something in my defense, something to change her mind, but it wasn't like I hadn't had to pull on the white lace pair not even six weeks before. It was logical to have had new ones made for the new uniform.

"True." I'd shrugged, contemplating the new blue gloves as though I was simply assessing the correctness of the color.

Half a minute of silence passed. "Let's hope you don't have to use them," Mom had said, rubbing her elbow gently. Then she'd turned toward the door. "It fits well, doesn't it? I'll let you get changed."

In the second floor hallway on my third day of school, standing between the MEN's and the WOMEN's bathrooms with my lower back pressed into the water fountain, I gazed across the hall at a dark wooden doorjamb, not really looking at the doorjamb, and ran the first three suede fingertips of my right hand up and down the suede palm of my left hand. All I did was watch Zombieland last night. I'd watched it a dozen times before. Up. Down. And I couldn't control or even begin to explain how Emma Stone looked… what did she even look like that was different? Who did she look like but her regular self? I didn't know. Up again. Down again. There was the faintest velvety sliding noise as the suede brushed against suede.

I hated having to wear the gloves, but the gloves themselves I rather liked. These, and the rest of them. The black matte leather, and the feathery tan kidskin, and the white lace, powder blue lace, and mint green lace that had all come in one box together, and the deep red-wine suede, and the close-knit eggshell satin, and all the others. They were all soft. They kissed my skin, bathed and soothed it.

They were warm.

"So how lost did you get?"

I shoved my hands behind my back and looked up to see Ali approaching from near the main staircase.

"I'm still lost," I said automatically. "I'm not on the third floor, am I?"

The boy grinned as he came closer; it was still as contagious as it had been the day before. I was glad for it. "You're in the basement, klutz." He walked right past me, and since he didn't turn into the MEN's restroom, I took it as my cue to follow and fell in step with him. "It's seventh period by now. How long have you been standing here in this supply closet?"

I stretched my legs longer and faster to keep up with Ali. "Couple hours. I got confused."

He led me into and up a narrow staircase on the far end of the hallway. His gray slacks jogged up the stairs above me. "Well, you smell great," he called over his shoulder. "Really loving the Eau de Pine Sol."

"Your French is great," I said as we reached a landing and crossed into another hall-end staircase; I meant it, too, just from his accent on a few short words. But I wasn't sure if I should do any more than joke with Ali in this friendship yet, so I said it like I was teasing.

"Merci, mademoiselle, mais la grâce va au bon Professeur Lumière."

I could understand what he said well enough from two and a half years of French tutoring, but I concentrated more on tasting the ease with which he said it. For some reason, a well-spoken foreign language always made me hungry. When the words rolled from Ali's mouth, it tasted like… soft bread. With butter.

"Okay, will you need a leg up?"

"Hm?" I shook my head out of its thoughts of bread-words and took stock of Ali, right in front of me, hanging languidly with one arm and one leg off the second rung of a floor-to-ceiling ladder. Ladder?

"No," I said reflexively. "Does this go to the roof?" I hadn't even been paying much attention to our journey upwards. How many floors had we ascended? Two? Ten? I looked around the small ladder-room, its smudged but clear sunny windows and its short ceiling. It was a brief climb up to the hatch door. I wasn't scared of climbing ladders, or of roofs. If I really was being led to a roof. Still, this was happening very fast.

It was only my third day at real school, after all.

Ali must have noticed me blink once, twice in a row up at the hatch. He mashed his lips together and used his body weight to swing around directly in front of me. God, did it look effortless. How did he do that so fluidly?

"You've just gotta trust me," he said, those brown eyes bright and wide pointed down at me. "You do, right?" And with that, the corner of his mouth quirked into a smile. Like before, it lit up his whole face with an enthusiasm that said, I'm excited. I want you to be excited about the same thing. I liked that he didn't feel too cool to show excitement, and that he didn't only want it for himself.

And I didn't really – trust him that is, at least not entirely, but there was nothing wrong with that. I'd known him a day. It's not like I mistrusted him. It's just not like I had to trust a person immediately within the first twenty-four hours of knowing them in order to ever trust them in the future. I knew that I could, that I absolutely would eventually, and that was enough for me. "Sure," I said, "Why not," and without even thinking about it slipped a gloved hand out from behind my back and gripped the rung at Ali's hip-level.

He glanced at my hand. "Nice gloves," was all he said, before he swung back around and climbed up through the hatch without a backward look. I looked at the place where the suede fingers curled around the smoothed-rust rung for just a second before squeezing tighter, gritting my molars through the slow blossom of pink pain in my fingers, and following close behind.

I pushed through the hatch, and god, it was definitely the roof. I hoisted myself up and out of the person-sized wooden square in no hurry, forgetting Ali for just a split second, because yeah, this was the roof, and I had never been on a roof before. I'd have thought I had never looked at treetops before.

"What do you think?"

I looked up at Ali and his extended hand, there to help me to my feet. I ignored the hand and stood, slowly but as gracefully as I could manage; I wanted these first few seconds to be mine.

"This is so… cool." I edged closer to the short brick wall nearest to me. It faced another roof, the top of another building – maybe the cafeteria – and beyond that was the tree-lined lane that led from the road into the Arendelle parking lot. Looking at it from this angle, it seemed like I had never driven my car down that path in my entire life. Ali smiled to himself, shoved his hands in his pockets, and looked out over the playing fields behind the school to the east. It really was breathtaking. I hated to be such a geek about nice scenery, but something about big open skies always put a strange helpless thrill at the top of my throat. The sun unashamed of touching my skin, the wind playing through my stray hairs and the open-mouthed sleeves of my blazer… This was what Emerson talked about. Man, nature, man and nature, and all that. Looking out over the tops of all the outside parts of this school, I almost felt like I went there. Like I was supposed to be there with all the necktie-kids who called this place second home.

After a minute or so I noticed Ali turn towards me.

"You didn't bring any lunch, did you?" He had one of his eyebrows raised, smiling so I knew he was amused. I preferred it that way, knowing he was amused with me rather than concerned. I didn't have to worry about making him worry. It was nice and new.

"Forgot," I said with a shrug.

"That's fine," Ali said, starting to walk around the other side of a taller rooftop wall. "I'll make Kristoff give you something, he always brings enough for a moose to share anyway."

"Who?"

"Kristoff." I trailed behind, ducking around the corner, and found Ali standing on the other side of the wall with his head cocked towards a boy, a blondish boy sitting hunched over on a ledge. The boy raised his eyebrows.

"Uh, me?"

Ali hopped up next to the boy – and maybe boy was the wrong way to think of someone so big – and unfurled the brown bag in his lap. I hadn't even noticed him bring it up with him. Maybe this Kristoff had brought it.

"This is Elsa," Ali said. "Brand new at Arendelle."

The other boy peered into his own bag. "Nice." He glanced up at me briefly. "I'm Kristoff."

"It's nice to meet you." I slowly came closer, watching the two boys talk for a few minutes, eventually leaning my shoulder against the wall directly across from them. They unwrapped sandwiches and fell into an eating silence for a few minutes – I was engrossed in all I had to look out at and didn't mind.

"So," Kristoff finally said to Ali. "I ran into that guy you hate yesterday."

Ali leaned back on the palm of his hand and rolled his eyes. "And?"

"And he threw his jockstrap at me." Kristoff sounded bored.

"So what, you were just walking down the hallway and he was like, 'Hey buddy, catch'?"

"More like I was out by the team entrance to the field and they were finishing practice."

"Did it smell really gross?"

"What the fuck is wrong with you?"

By this point I was having trouble following along. "Who do you hate?" I said. Kristoff took a bite of his sandwich and Ali sighed.

"Just this two-faced asshole new guy."

"The teachers like him better," Kristoff added, enunciating carefully around a full mouth while his eyes were still on his sandwich.

"New guy?" I asked.

"Not new like you," Ali said. "New like last semester. And the teachers do not like him better."

"Then why do you hate him?" I felt like I was missing something.

Ali heaved an even bigger sigh (seriously, this boy was getting to be a drama queen). "Okay, so… Here, come with me." He hopped off the ledge he'd been sitting on and wove off back towards the hatch we'd come in through. I shot a glance at Kristoff, but he didn't move from his perch or even look up, so I went after Ali. He bent over the short ledge I'd first looked out over towards the lane, facing a wide stretch of slanted glass panels. "Okay, see down there?"

I realized, now that I was being told to look at it, that this was a ceiling window, and I realized now that I was making an effort to let my eyes adjust, that this ceiling window overlooked the cafeteria. It looked completely alien to me now – it was hard to believe I'd sat in there two days in a row. I couldn't even pick out where my empty side table was.

"That table where Shang is sitting," Ali went on. I knew that table. I knew where it was, or at least would know where it was if I was at ground level, but for some reason finding anything familiar from the clear, windy outside looking in was near impossible. Eventually I focused on the middle of the large room and found the cluster of faces I'd been paying most attention to over the past few days. The bright red spot of that girl Ariel's hair definitely helped.

"Yeah."

"Okay, well that's him there across from Shang. Not the dark hair, but the one next to him. Patchy sideburns, you see him?"

"Yeah."

"That's Hans." Squinting down through the sun-spotted greenish glass, I could see down to the cafeteria tables surprisingly well. The boy Ali had indicated, sandwiched between two other boys with darker hair, sat back with both hands laced behind his head. There was something pricking me that I couldn't place with him, same as with the girl with the braids, but with this boy it was different. I got the more concrete feeling that I knew him from somewhere.

"And yeah," Ali went on as though right in the middle of another conversation, "maybe it is a teacher thing, but you don't even have to have a class with him. Just talk to him, and then you hear how he acts around his friends, like the way he talks about his girlfriend when she's not around. I swear, I've never met such a spoiled, selfish, entitled trustfund mayor's kid who-"

Mayor's kid. It hit me with a jolt, distracting me from the rest of Ali's rant. Hans. Hans Westerguard.

. . .

"Mayor Westerguard's son, Hans," Dad said. With one hand on my shoulderblade and the other palm-up between me and the boy smiling tall in front of me, Dad turned from me to him and squinted into the bright sun while he put on a symmetrical grin.

"Nice to meet you, Elsa." The boy wore thick sideburns, a white tee shirt under his tucked-in gray button-up, and a politician's kid's smile, and still he wasn't sweating. Not a single bead glistening at his hairline or the hollow of his throat. He and I had that in common – not the sideburns, but the easy surreally-dry skin. For my part, the part of the daughter rather than the son, I wore a three-quarter sleeved blue floral that cinched tight at the waist and went down to my knees; it was pretty, but it was more form-fitting than I liked to wear in sticky July, and with the vivid red petal prints it was more colorful than I really liked to wear ever, but Mom had said it was "in keeping with the theme" and suited my figure well, so I was wearing it. I should have been sweating more – knew biology well enough to know when a person should be reacting to an eighty-seven degree poolside sun and getting drenched in themselves – but I was lucky.

I was lucky to be out, around so many people. I never knew anyone at these parties, never knew what to say to anyone at these parties, but I was always glad to get to see who they were, just for a few hours. To see that they were real.

The tall boy, Hans, had put out his hand, and I had shaken it, and his own dad – standing on his right side with a hand to shoulder in a diagonal mirror of my Dad – gave the boy's shoulder's two short pats.

"Elsa," the Mayor said, "Am I remembering correctly that you'll be graduating this next year too?" He must have remembered my age from meeting me two or three times before, here at the house at some kind of dinner or cocktail night; I remembered his long arrow-shaped nose and the rich gray-canoe mustache tipped upside down underneath it, and knew I had met him. Somewhere deep down where I knew that I was supposed to do so, I flushed with the contented delight that I had met the Mayor enough times that he knew who I was.

Before I could open my mouth and reply, Dad pointed his chin at me. "Yes, she and Hans are the same year."

Year, as in year in school? As in starting on the fifth year in a row taking lessons two staircases down from my bedroom? No, this Hans Westerguard probably wasn't in the same same year. But I pushed up the corners of my mouth and nodded anyway.

Hans, Hans with the dark reddish sideburns and the two layers that didn't make him sweat, looked at his dad and then smiled at me. In the lull, this was the part in the movie where some kid – who invited the kid? who cared – would jump in the pool with a nice atmospheric, summer-sounding splash. This sets the scene so well, the director says, for a Fourth of July scene. You've gotta have that kid splash in the pool.

But nobody splashed, and Dad's grip tightened on my shoulder the way I saw Mayor Westerguard's grip tighten on Hans's while they talked in convincingly light tones about the Senate elections in April. It was like they were pretending they weren't going to be going up against one another. It was disconcertingly false. But rather than be disconcerted, and rather than really care if that boy Hans's shoulder tendons chafed any worse than mine did, I cast my eyes around the poolside for Mom, or for anything else, really. I couldn't find Mom (I wasn't looking all that hard, honestly), but over on the longer north side of the pool there was Dad's chief campaign manager Helen, Helen Park, Helen Something (what was it?), laughing with her head thrown back further than I'd ever seen it at something another team member, Lucius, was saying over the rim of a yellow margarita. I was glad to see Helen laugh at a party like she wasn't at a party to be at work. And my gaze traveled over to Helen's two kids on their wooden deck chairs, wearing clothes that were nice enough for a parent's boss's party but loose enough to have swimsuits on underneath – a string there, through the black-haired girl's billowy red dress. They looked bored, but the woman with them – platinum blonde, and maybe a nanny since she was only paying attention to the kids when no one paid attention to the kids at these things – she was trying to talk to them. She cocked her head at the pool; she was trying to get them to swim. The younger kid, the blonde boy, said something to her, and the nanny gave a catlike smile and peeled off her shirt just as easy as you'd like.

I looked away, and for some reason my eyes went straight to Hans, but his only flickered to mine for a quick, passing moment before moving on. I couldn't look at Dad, but didn't he notice? Wasn't it abnormal and out of place? For someone to strip down to a swimsuit right next to a pool, at an eighty-seven degree Fourth of July party whose invitation read "Please Bring a Bathing Suit"?

My gaze tore back to the woman with Helen Something's kids, and now it was just a black bikini on her goldenish skin as she stood from her deck chair. No one else was staring, and I didn't know why. The blonde boy got to his feet too, laughing, and the nanny turned to the ladder, extending a toe towards the water. That toe towards the water that meant calf and thigh and belly and everything that followed in the water.

"Excuse me a minute, Dad?" I looked up at Dad with a quick closed-mouth smile, told Mayor Westerguard and his son Hans that it was nice to see him again and nice to meet him, respectively, and went off through the clusters of nice people back to the house.

The front arm sides of my shoulders felt a little trembly while I toted a silver serving tray of ice cubes up to the third floor, but otherwise my body felt calm. Blood hummed only very quietly next to my ears. All that the skin around my thighs did was quiver around the bone; it wouldn't fall off. No, this I was used to. I'd long since composed a routine. I heaved the tray, the oblong silver scallop tray of ice, up on to my bedroom-adjacent bathroom sink. I pointed my nose at the ceiling – I wouldn't notice the burn on the tip until the next day – and blinked back the way that I couldn't so easily close my mouth with my neck all taut like it was, gripping the tray's now cold handles.

"You might still have those unnatural thoughts when you leave Compass. That's normal. You're starting a very slow and very long journey into young adulthood, and we know it's impossible to be perfect. But by now you've learned the ways that work best for you to keep those thoughts away when they get especially bad."

I plunged my hands into the ice.