“No, but you catch colds all the time, and I guess she’s tired of listening to you hack up a lung.”

Nadya waved her hand dismissively. “We must suffer for our chance to return home. Now come, come, hurry. Those turtles aren’t going to tip themselves.”

Cora shook her head, and hurried.

Nadya was one of the school’s long-timers: five years so far, from the age of eleven to the age of sixteen. There had been no sign in those five years of her doorway appearing, or of her asking her adoptive parents to take her home. That was unusual. Everyone knew that parents could withdraw their children at any time; that all Nadya had to do was ask and she’d be able to return to the life she’d lived before … well, before everything.

According to everyone Cora had spoken to, most students chose to go back to their old lives after four years had passed without a doorway.

“That’s when they give up,” Kade had said, expression turning sad. “That’s when they say, ‘I can’t live for a world that doesn’t want me, so I guess I’d better learn to live in the world I have.’”

Not Nadya. She didn’t belong to any clique or social circle, didn’t have many close friends—or seem to want them—but she didn’t leave, either. She went from classroom to turtle pond, from bathtub to bed, and she kept her hair perpetually wet, no matter how many colds she caught, and she never stopped watching the water for the bubbles that would mark her way back to Belyyreka, the Drowned World and the Land Beneath the Lake.

Nadya had walked up to Cora on her first day at the school, when she was standing frozen in the door of the dining hall, terrified to eat—what if they called her names?—and terrified to turn and run away—what if they made fun of her behind her back?

“You, new girl,” she had said. “Angela tells me you were a mermaid. Is that so?”

Cora had sputtered and stammered and somehow signaled her agreement. Nadya had smirked and taken Cora’s arm in hers.

“Good,” she’d said. “I’ve been ordered to make more friends, and you seem to fit the bill. We damp girls have to stick together.”

In the weeks since then, Nadya had been the best of friends and the worst of friends, prone to bursting into Cora’s room without knocking, pestering her roommate and trying to convince Miss West to reassign one or both of them so they could room together. Miss West kept refusing, on the grounds that no one else in the school would be able to find a towel if the two girls who took the most baths were in the same place to egg each other on.