Then she shows us the dining hall, which is like a converted barn with an alcove for the kitchen. The chairs have high backs, and the tables are shiny and already laid with silverware glistening under two enormous chandeliers.

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” Emily says, and Saffron smiles and walks away.

“She’s weird,” I say.

Emily nods. “She is. But this place…”

She leaves a gap that we both fill with our own adjectives but only in our heads, and then the hall starts to fill up with the rest of the class, and everyone is smiling.

When Mr. Humphries walks past, he says, “What do you think, girls?”

Emily says, “It’ll do.”

He laughs and collects his food from the kitchen, and we copy him.

The tables are long, like in medieval feasts, which means Emily and I can’t sit on our own. Instead, we have to sit with Ali Ballard and Pav Kaur and the Slovakian girl, Maya, who only joined junior year and looks over twenty.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Ali asks, and we nod and do our best to ignore her.

Our group is three big, and that’s how we like it. Without Hanna, it’s the two of us, and we have no intention of faking friendships just because we’re somewhere else. Even here, away from school, away from my family and the Magpie Man and everything I know, nothing has changed. Not really.

At the next table, Jennifer Erswell says, “Isn’t this place orgasmic?”

Everything she says is sexual, even though we think she’s never actually done it. I don’t care either way. You don’t scratch an itch like Jennifer. You let her talk and do your best to ignore her, or she’ll latch on and never let go.

I look around at all the cliques forced to mingle, at Saffron and the other volunteers, at Mr. Humphries sitting with a woman who looks like a hippie and an old man with thin gray hair. I figure he’s at least eighty, and as I stare, his eyes quickly dart from his food to my face, and I look away.

When I glance back, he’s still staring at me, not smiling like the others, his face flat and emotionless, and when Emily sees what I’m doing, she nudges me and says, “I think he likes you.”

But I don’t think he does. He doesn’t seem happy to see me at all.

The four boys in our class, Harrison, Yinka, Austin, and Sam, are squashed at one end of Jennifer’s table, doing their best to leave a gap. They have a whole wing of the monastery to themselves—a room each while we’re sharing in twos. They’re nice enough, but I don’t think they like being outnumbered.