“Sponge cake with apricot jam and fresh cream.” Lottie knows what she wants, and grabs it. Mrs. Thomas smiles at her request, and I have to admit that her boldness yields better results than my “be humble” strategy.

“I’ll pass on your requests to the kitchen staff.” Mrs. Thomas reluctantly moves to the door to finish her head count. “Sleep well, and good work, girls. Be proud.”

Lottie and I lie awake in the semidarkness as Mrs. Thomas’s voice echoes in our minds. Sleep well. Good work. Be proud. At school, it seems that the job of adults is to magnify our faults so that, burdened by shame, we learn to be better. Mrs. Thomas, in particular, has a history of putting girls in their place. Something has changed in our world.

“Well.” I blink at the ceiling, disoriented. “That was . . .”

“Abnormal.” Lottie finds the correct Oxford Dictionary word to fit Mrs. Thomas’s unusual behavior. “But it was nice, hey?”

“Yes,” I say. “It was.” And I mean it. Our parents send us to Keziah to get an education and to toughen us up for life’s challenges, except school itself is a challenge that many of us will never conquer. School is a battlefield. The teachers and the other students are our enemies, and we learn to endure the slings and arrows alone.

Lottie turns to face me. “Tonight she’ll switch from listening to ‘This Bitter Earth,’ to ‘At Last.’ Wait and see.”

“For how long?” I ask. “A night or two if we’re lucky?”

“I don’t know, Adele. That’s why we have to enjoy it while it lasts. Tomorrow will take care of itself, but tonight . . . tonight we are heroes.”

The way that Lottie says “heroes” fills me with a sensation of strength and power. I stretch out and, when my eyes close, a wall of flames roars to life in my mind again. A burning branch twists and falls, and showers me in sparks.

“All I can see is the fire,” I say to Lottie, who lies on her cot and stares at the ceiling, wide-awake.

“That’s normal,” she says. “When a bad thing happens, your mind goes over and over it, till one day, it stops.”

“How long will that take?”

“A week, maybe more. Some things never go away. With the fire, at least, we won. We beat it. We made a difference. The other hurts will fade or not, but there’s nothing we can do about that.”

The seriousness of Lottie’s voice tells me that she speaks from experience. I hate to think of an older version of me with a key mark still visible on my wrinkled skin, still visited by dreams of fire and ash, decades from now.