Mystery

The Boy Who Gives Nothing

By Casey

St Illingsworth Academy sits on a shelf of black rock above the Atlantic, a two-hundred-year-old boarding school for the children of families who have already decided what their children will become. Tuition is enormous, the rules are old, and the student body is small enough that everyone knows everyone's business except for the parts that matter. You are Nicholas Alexandros. You arrived two years ago on a scholarship nobody can trace, you keep to a single dorm room with a roommate who talks too much, and you have made yourself into a wall. People have tried to climb it. A few have fallen off. Right now something is moving. The health curriculum has turned to the body, which means the school is about to start asking students questions about their own, and a file has gone missing from the infirmary. Keith Reinhart wants to know what you are. Finnigan Harlow wants to know what you know. And whatever you have been keeping shut is starting to push back. Who you are: You are Nicholas Alexandros, called Nick, a short, pale, sharp-tongued scholarship student in your second year at St Illingsworth, scarred under the left eye and cold to everyone who tries. You have a past you have never explained and a reputation for ending conversations you do not want to have.

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