Chatoyant College, Book 1: New Student Orientation

Chapter 10: A History Lesson

When they had gotten their overpriced textbooks (though, unfortunately for Dawn, one of her textbooks hadn't arrived at the bookstore yet), Corrie decided to call her mom. Edie was just as happy to put on her headphones and pick up the knitting she'd neglected for the last couple of days. Her current project was a pair of lace socks, and she thought she'd memorized the pattern, but after not working on it for so long it wasn't in her head anymore, and she had to dig around in her bag for the pattern and reacquaint herself with it. She'd briefly thought of taking this time to put up a poster or two on the almost painfully bare walls of the dorm, but the knitting was a much more pleasant distraction, and before she knew it, Corrie was opening the door and letting in Dawn, accompanied by a short girl with blonde dreadlocks. Edie quickly finished the lace repeat and shoved the sock back into her bag before turning off her music and pulling the headphones out of her ears. "Hi, Dawn!" Corrie was saying. "And I take it this is the mysterious roommate?"

"That's me," said the short girl, grinning. She grinned even wider when Edie reached them. "I'm Naomi. Which one of you is Corrie and which one is Edie?" She was wearing an oversized tie-dyed T-shirt, a skirt made of a number of patches of different materials haphazardly sewn together, scuffed-up combat boots, and, as Edie was somewhat painfully aware, no bra. Her fingernails were painted with chipped pink paint.

Corrie introduced them, as had been her habit. "So where have you been? You missed all the introductions yesterday. Well, I guess Dawn already told you about that."

Naomi shrugged. "I figure I'll get to know everybody in my own time. My mom and I just didn't feel like driving as fast as we would have needed to if we wanted to get here yesterday."

"Where are you from?" asked Edie.

"Detroit. It's a long drive."

"Wow, I guess so," she said. "Nice, um, skirt, by the way."

She hadn't thought it possible, but Naomi's smile widened even further. "Thanks! I made it myself."

"I thought you guys might want to have some dinner," Dawn said. "Unless that free pizza in the dorms thing is tonight."

"No, I don't think that's until after the upperclassmen move in," Corrie said. "For now, the dining hall is still just freshmen and jocks. What do you say, Edie?"

She shrugged. "No complaints here."

Once they had settled themselves with their food at a table in the dining hall, two boys who looked vaguely familiar showed up with loaded trays. "Hi!" said one of them, a pudgy Hispanic boy with a big grin. "Mind if we join you?"

"Not at all," said Dawn, smiling back. "Rico, right? And... sorry, I didn't catch your name. There are so many of us."

"That's okay," said the other, who was short and thin, with a goatee that accentuated the angular intensity of his face. He continued talking as they set their trays down and sat. "Rico's the one who recognized you all as being from Gilkey--I just thought I might have seen you before. I'm Duncan."

The girls introduced themselves. "Are you two roommates?" Dawn asked. When they confirmed it, she asked, "Which floor are you on?"

"Fourth," said Rico. "You're on the fifth, aren't you? That must be a royal pain. The fourth floor is bad enough."

Both Edie and Dawn nodded enthusiastically, then laughed. "If only they could have put in an elevator," Edie said with a sigh. "But I think they built Gilkey before elevators were even invented."

"I doubt it," Rico said, sounding abstracted. "The first modern elevator was invented in 1853. I don't think the school is even that old."

"It is, though," said Dawn, surprising everyone. "I read it in the student handbook over the summer. I got really bored. Chatoyant was first established in 1650 by a Lady Alienor Chatoyant, originally of France."

"Wow," said Rico, a forkful of macaroni and cheese halfway to his face and apparently forgotten. "That makes it almost as old as Harvard--and Harvard is the oldest college in the United States! You'd think Chatoyant would be more famous because of that." Edie noticed Corrie wince and look carefully around the room. Had Harvard been one of the Boston schools that Corrie had mentioned her ex getting into? If that was the case, it seemed pretty crazy for him to choose Chatoyant. She knew if she'd gotten into a really good school she would have headed there without a second thought.

Dawn shook her head, setting down her own fork. "It wasn't always a college. For a while it was a boarding school for rich boys," she said. "Actually, I think it mentioned that it was a fairly popular place to send your kid if you wanted him at Harvard later. After a few decades they opened it up to girls as well, and it wasn't until after that that they made it a college and started to expand it. It's been in the same place this whole time, though."

"I doubt any of the buildings are that old, though!" Corrie said with a laugh.

"True!" said Dawn, grinning. "Anyway, Gilkey is the oldest building, but the only campus building that does have an elevator is Hickory, which is the newest. I think they were just lazy."

"That's not quite true, actually," put in Corrie. "The dining hall has a dumbwaiter, because all the baking is done in the basement. The class buildings all have service elevators, too, for the cleaning people, and because they have to make some things wheelchair-accessible in case there's ever a handicapped student."

"Well, thank you all for the impromptu history lesson," Duncan said, rolling his eyes. "Now I know more than I ever expected to about elevators."

Edie laughed. She'd been growing tired of the learned discourse, too. "I didn't know how old the school was, though," she said. "That's pretty interesting. I'm surprised it doesn't have a religious affiliation--most schools that old do, or did at one point at least."

"That's true," Dawn said thoughtfully around a mouthful of vegetables. "I hadn't thought about it, but I don't remember reading anything about a religion. Not even generic Christianity."

"Maybe because of the magic?" Naomi suggested. "I can't imagine any religions in 1650, much less Christianity, approving of a school that taught magic."

Dawn shook her head. "Magic wasn't taught here until after it became a college. At least, I think so. You know, I don't think that was ever made clear. Maybe that is why it isn't religious."

"We go to a weird school," Rico observed blandly. The whole table dissolved into laughter at that, and the subject changed.