When her Mom had said; sweetheart, make a choice. Allie hadn’t realized she’d chosen an actual concentration camp over literal freedom. It had been a grand total of one entire school day at the academy, her new little slice of heaven to call home for the next year or so, and Allie was about as close to throwing herself off a tall building as she was to exposing herself as a major fucking idiot for having thought Catholic boarding school was a good idea. Call her tragic, but the idea of going to a boring little public school in a quaint suburban town had seemed like the end of the world and this was the easy option, especially after Kat had made up so much bullshit about it not being that bad. Whatever, it was only for the rest of her junior and senior year, it wasn’t the worst thing... or that’s what she’d thought before she’d come, she’d seen and she’d decided that her step-sister was a gigantic pathological liar.
Academy Card lost in the depth of her bag, Allie didn’t want anybody seeing her last name and connecting the dots. Not yet anyway. Not when she’d already twisted her head at an angry “Bishop!” once that day, only to realize it wasn’t her that was gaining the exposure but her twiggy adopted counterpart. Already sufficiently pissed off by entry to the world against her own free-will, Allie now sat on the low wall of the cloisters, reflecting on her traumatic first day. Her uniform had been corrected not two, but three times already, she’d been told to remove half of her makeup and all of her nail polish, and if that wasn’t traumatic enough to her fragile identity, being talked to like she was stupid by teachers and leered at by senior boys was tipping point.
A shadow fell over her and Allie was a hair-trigger from bashing her skull into sandstone. “Let me guess — I can’t sit on the wall. Breaking School Code four-hundred and twenty-eight. Give me a sec, I’ll just add that to the extensive list of wrong shit I’ve done today, thanks.”
