Chapter 2: Closed Doors

The bathroom tile pressed into Jessie's back with a cold that seeped through her uniform blouse and settled in her shoulders. Four seconds in, she counted. Four seconds out. She'd practiced box breathing before a debate competition in her tenth year at the transitional school, back when the only thing on the line was a plastic trophy and a certificate of participation. Now, breathing felt like a survival tactic rather than a technique, though the same system worked either way.

Outside the door, Allison continued the conversation she'd started before any of this.

"So this bathroom has a window, which is nice," Allison said, tapping something on the laminate counter. "But the mirror is tiny. Like, pocket-mirror small. I can barely see my own face in it." Jessie heard the clicking of plastic, then water running for a few seconds before being shut off. The sound of the faucet was ordinary. Allison's tone was ordinary. That was somehow the worst part.

Jessie pressed her palms flat against the tile and drew a breath. Her mind ran calculations on her own composure. Facial tension indicators: minimal. Micro-expressions: suppressed at a level she'd trained in mirror exercises since age nine. The soft smile she had learned as a child, the one Sister Concepcion considered an indicator of emotional stability, could be reactivated instantly. She could walk out of this bathroom as the same girl who had sat at the desk fifteen minutes ago, barely a different person, and Allison wouldn't be able to read anything she didn't want her to read.

The latches on dormitory bathrooms were not designed for anything beyond privacy. Thin metal hasps that scratched against doorframes when opened. A flimsy deadbolt that rattled. These fixtures had not been upgraded since the last budget cycle, which was to say, never. Jessie's back was hot from the contact of skin against cold porcelain.

She counted again. Breathe. Hold. Exhale. Hold.

"You good in there?" Allison asked. "It's okay if you're not. The new girl, Jessica—she's obviously shy. I get that. I was a disaster for the first month in my old placement too."

The use of her real name, Jessica, hit like a small stone dropped into still water. Allison had said it without thinking, or maybe she'd heard it spoken in passing earlier that week. The dormitory hallways weren't soundproof, and the nuns called on girls by their registered names during morning roll calls, and Jessie had let the name Maria Salinas belong to the past in a server somewhere else, while Jessica belonged to no one. Now Allison said it casually. A casual voice attached to a name no one should have known.

Jessie took another breath. The tiles were cold. The door was thin. Her voice would return at a normal register. She had rehearsed being normal enough times that she could probably set it to autopilot.

The latch was a piece of tin, and Jessie's hand found it without looking, a gesture she'd done a hundred times in this bathroom over five years at the Abbey, during the small daily theater of privacy. She slid the deadbolt back. The metal protested with a dry scrape. The door swung open onto a strip of floor just wide enough to stand on without knocking against the bunk bed Allison occupied.

Allison was leaning against that bunk, one hip crooked, arms crossed in front of her, already wearing the grin she wore like default clothing. She had pulled her skirt back on with the shirt still discarded on the mattress behind her, and her hair was messy at the crown in a way that suggested she'd slept a few hours before the packing truck dropped her off, though Jessie knew better: Allison probably slept whenever and wherever she felt like it.

"There she is," Allison said. "I was starting to think you'd declared yourself a nun and were locked in perpetual chastity in there."

Jessie matched her expression to one of mild, patient inconvenience. The same face she gave Sister Raquel when a lecture on humility ran too long. She moved to the sink to wash her hands, a useful stalling action, then turned and met Allison's eyes without giving away what she was actually thinking.

"Your uniform," Allison said, pointing at the spare on the chair Jessie had folded that morning. "It's a small, right? Same as mine."

The skirt was identical. Everything was identical. The Abbey bought uniforms in bulk from the same regional contractor the state-affiliated schools used, which meant sizes were standardised across every institution from this one to the next state line. Jessie's measurements, the measurements she had falsified on the registry as a young girl in an abandoned group home's records, were the same as every other girl's, which had been fortunate since she wasn't sure what her actual size would have been.

"We're the same size," Allison said, turning back to her own bed and holding up the hanger of Jessie's spare uniform. "It'll save us laundry time if we swap when the machines aren't in use. The dorm laundry is such a mess. You know how it goes."

"No," Jessie said. The word came out too fast. She corrected it without changing her face. "No thank you. I prefer to manage my own."

Allison raised an eyebrow. The grin didn't fade; it only deepened into something amused. "Straight off the bat. Bold. I like it." She tossed the hanger back onto the chair and settled onto her bed, crossing her legs and swinging one foot with the casual energy of someone who had already decided that Jessie was going to be interesting. "Mother Superior here prefers her own laundry."

A pun about nuns. Jessie recorded it, processed it, and chose not to react. She returned to her desk, opened her computational algebra textbook to a marked page, and stared at it without actually reading anything.

"Mother Superior," Allison said again, slower this time, as if the name tasted interesting. "Is that your new name, Jessica, or should I stick to the official one?"

"Jessica," Jessie said, answering the question without acknowledging the nickname.

"Official it is." Allison shifted on her bunk, swinging her legs down to the floor. "Look, I'm just saying. If you need anything, anything at all, ask. I'm not your enemy. I've been in four placements in two years, and none of them were better than this one, so I intend to make it work. You don't have to hide from me."

Jessie turned a page. She didn't look up. The math on the page was easy. Quaternions in four-dimensional space. She had solved similar problems at fourteen. She was sixteen now, and the textbook felt like it was written for children, though she kept pretending otherwise.

"I'm not hiding from you," she said. "I'm just busy."

"Busy." Allison let the word sit there. She laughed, a warm sound that somehow managed to be friendly without being condescending. "Everyone's busy. Some of us are just noisier about it."

Over the next few days, Jessie built the routine that would keep her intact. The bathroom at the end of the corridor had a second door, a door to a utility closet that opened from a different side, giving a thin corridor of privacy that didn't quite work but worked well enough. Jessie spent her changing sessions inside a stall cubicle that had no lock, which she compensated for by leaving her uniform fully displayed on the peg behind the door, a visible sign of occupancy that discouraged anyone from knocking while it was obvious no one was actually there. She'd already measured how long the walk from her bunk to the bathroom took at a brisk pace, five and a half seconds. Any girl who got too close in that interval, she could have herself fully clothed in under thirty, a speed that would still look natural if timed right.

Shower schedule was her tightest constraint. The communal showers operated on a rotation after evening prayer, between 20:30 and 22:00. Every girl in the dormitory used that window. Jessie changed her schedule. She showered after midnight, when the corridors had gone dark and the girls' prayer hour had pushed them into the communal chapel for their last devotional of the day. She knew the chapel went quiet at 21:15, and Sister Raquel patrolled the hallways until 21:45 before returning to her quarters. The gap between 22:00 and 21:45 was wide enough to operate in, provided no one got curious about who was still wandering.

Swim days were her most delicate arithmetic. The Abbey had a pool, a rectangular concrete structure inside a building that smelled like chlorine and damp concrete. Once a week, Sister Paloma instructed the girls to put on their modest swim uniforms and enter the water. Jessie had perfected the excuse: cramps, an earache, indigestion, anything that sounded plausible enough for a pious Catholic girl not to contradict. Cramps worked best. Girls understood cramps without needing explanation.

"Having cramps again?" Allison had asked on the third swim day, while Jessie stood by the pool deck in her uniform, watching the other girls plunge in.

"Yes."

"That sucks. My cousin used to get them so bad she'd cry in the bathroom." Allison hopped into the water with a splash that nearly soaked Jessie's shoes. She floated on her back for a moment, eyes closed, before flipping onto her stomach and starting a clumsy breaststroke that she did with great enthusiasm regardless of form.

Jessie stayed dry on the deck. She walked to the bench furthest from the pool, sat down, and opened a textbook she'd brought from the dorm. No one objected. Sister Paloma would check in once or twice, offer reassurance, and then leave. The other girls accepted her absence as another quirk of the quiet, sickly-seeming girl who sat in prayer during swimming class.

Allison observed her. Jessie felt the gaze even without looking up from the page. It was at the dining hall, too. Allison would sit across from her at the long trestle tables where everyone sat in assigned blocks by study level. Allison would lean toward her across the divide of trays and soup bowls, making small talk about the cafeteria food or some upcoming school assignment, always casual, always unhurried. Jessie answered in short, precise sentences and looked at her food. Allison laughed at something on the news being shown on the cafeteria's wall-mounted television, and for a split second, she would glance toward Jessie as if waiting to see if the new girl was paying attention. Jessie looked up once. Allison's eyes found hers, then she looked away, smiling at someone else.

It was not accusation. It was curiosity, disguised as nothing, and in that case, the distinction was irrelevant.

Ten days into the semester, Sister Concepcion called an assembly in the chapel. The girls filed in, sat on the hard wooden pews in their assigned rows, and listened to Sister Concepcion stand before the altar and make her announcement with the gravity of someone who had been told to make it sound important.

"Attention, daughters. I have important news." Sister Concepcion straightened the stack of printed papers on the pulpit. "A state-contracted health screening will be conducted at Our Lady of the Plains in two weeks. A nurse from the county medical office will perform a full physical examination on each of you. This is part of the routine wellness program the state mandates for all institutions under its care."

A murmur traveled the pews. Jessue already knew that murmurs usually meant half the room had recognized what this would actually entail.

"The examination will be comprehensive," Sister Concepcion said. "The nurse will verify age, assess physical development, and conduct general wellness checks. This includes examination of sensitive areas, in compliance with state regulations. We will, of course, maintain the proper decorum during these sessions. Girls will be taken one at a time. We have arranged a proper facility for privacy and respect."

Jessie heard every word without needing to concentrate. Her mind was already working through the logistics, breaking the announcement down into its constituent problems. A nurse, she had never met. A sterile room, most likely on the first floor of the administrative wing. A mandatory physical exam that would require an adult woman to touch, and examine, every part of Jessie's body with clinical scrutiny. There was no version of this in which Jessie came out clean.

She sat through the rest of the assembly in the expected posture of a listening student. Sister Concepcion continued with procedural details about the schedule and the dress code for examination day. Jessie's brain ran parallel tracks. One track catalogued the procedural information, stored it for use. The other track was building, in real time, a mental model of the administrative network she would need to breach.

When the assembly was dismissed and the girls began filing out, Allison caught her at the back of the line.

"You okay?" Allison asked. "You got that look on your face you got in the cafeteria earlier."

"I'm fine."

"You don't seem fine. You got that look that says your brain's doing that thing where it's solving a problem that also happens to be a problem, too."

Jessie walked past her. The corridor was narrow, and Allison had to angle herself toward the wall to stay out of the path of a returning teacher.

That night, Jessie went to the school computer lab. The Abbey had repurposed an old business office on the second floor into a computer room, four workstations, a printer that jammed at least once an hour, and a network gateway that connected to the Abbey's internal systems for attendance, grading, and meal scheduling. The firewalls on this network were laughable, the same ones she'd mapped in her first week. Her encrypted partition sat there, undisturbed, with its private server of textbooks and reference materials. She logged in under a separate guest credential she'd set up as a back door, and while the textbook application remained running, she opened a new directory window to navigate the student records and scheduling database.

At 14:00 the previous day, she'd already loaded the screening schedule into a private file. Her appointment was confirmed for 09:00 on the Tuesday after next, held in Exam Room 1 on the first floor. The schedule showed a total of forty-seven slots. Her own slot was marked with a red flag in the system's own notation, a visual indicator the Abbey's office staff probably saw as helpful but Jessie recognized as the marker for "special attention," which the system applied to every child whose physical development didn't align with their age group in some quantifiable way. It was a small marker. One that an administrative clerk would glance at and dismiss without thought. For Jessie, it was the exact piece of evidence that could end everything.

She pulled the screening schedule window side by side with the nurse's availability table. The nurse was contracted for four days, Monday through Thursday. Two of those days were already full. Wednesday had eleven open slots. Tuesday had six. Thursday was entirely blank except for the evening hours.

Jessie began pulling information from the scheduling database, navigating past the superficial firewalls she'd bypassed in her first week. She'd mapped the network's structure early in her residency, noting which databases were siloed and which shared authorization keys. The scheduling database, she had determined on day four, was connected to the staff rotation system through an authorization table that used the same credentials as the meal planning system. Anyone with access to the kitchen scheduling could theoretically modify the appointment calendar, provided they knew which table to edit.

The kitchen scheduling was on the third floor, accessible only from Sister Raquel's office. But the credential to access it was stored on the same server as the attendance records. Someone, Jessie had noted, could log into the attendance system, view the credential cache, and then pivot to the kitchen scheduling without needing Sister Raquel's keycard.

Jessie spent the next night building that pivot. She worked through the credential cache structure, noting how it indexed the third-floor credentials by department name rather than by user. Kitchen scheduling: "CulinaryOperations_V2.log." Easy to find. The credentials themselves, she found, were unencrypted in the log file, an oversight that the original system architect probably considered reasonable for a network that nobody expected anyone to breach. They were plain-text strings stored in a log that most people would never open, and certainly in a system where only two people ever looked at the logs for troubleshooting purposes.

The third night, she worked through rescheduling protocols. The database supported appointment shifts, but only through an approved administrative interface that required a supervisor's digital signature. There was no way around that through direct database manipulation. Any modification to the appointment table without the matching signature would trigger an automatic alert to the Abbey's internal IT system, which was, itself, Jessie's territory. She could suppression the alert, possibly. But suppression was a second step, and second steps carried risk.

Allison, then, approached from the side while Jessie sat at the desk with the terminal running.

The dormitory was dark. Allison's bunk was eight feet from Jessie's, and the screen's dim light was the only thing illuminating her face as she leaned over the edge of Jessie's bunk from where Jessie was sitting on her bed, since she'd been working at the desk all evening and needed to stretch her legs. Allison's proximity brought the faint scent of her hair product, something artificial and floral that she sprayed in the mornings in the dorm bathroom.

"Jessie." The name came out quiet, almost carefully. "I wanna tell you something. But I need you to promise me something first."

Jessie turned from the laptop screen. Allison sat on the edge of the bunk, legs swinging, hands folded in her lap.

"Promise what?"

"That this stays here. Between us. The girls at the neighboring orphanage, the ones who came here last week on exchange, there's one. Camila. Her name is Camila Reyes. I've known her since we were twelve, since before the last IEP. And I like her. Like, really like her."

Jessie watched Allison's hands. They weren't shaking. They were steady on her lap, folded as if she was trying very hard not to reach for something she wanted.

"This is dangerous to say," Allison continued. "I know what the rules are. I know what the camps are. But I'd rather say it to someone than keep it inside and feel like a coward." She looked up, meeting Jessie's eyes directly. "Just promise. Don't tell anyone."

The admission sat between them like something else in the room, a third person nobody had invited. Someone was handing Jessie the key to the fortress of her own secrets. Someone was choosing trust, unprompted and unguarded, while Jessie had spent five years methodically removing every door from her world. She'd rebuilt those doors from scratch, brick by brick, with encrypted partitions and fake names and careful performance. And here was Allison, casually pushing open a side gate and inviting Jessie through, offering her the one thing Jessie had built her entire existence around refusing.

Jessie sat motionless on the edge of her bed. Allison waited. The laptop screen beside them dimming slowly as it went into power-save mode, filling the room with an amber glow that made Allison's eyes look amber too.

"I promise," Jessie said.

Allison exhaled like she'd been holding her breath for minutes. "Thanks. Seriously. Camila has this way of laughing when she's nervous, and you can just see her whole body brighten up. She's from Lubbock, which is a desert and a dust storm and nowhere, really, and she acts like it's the center of the world. I think I've liked her since we were eleven." She smiled, just for a second, and then the smile was gone. "That's it. That's all I'm going to say. Don't tell anyone."

"I won't."

Allison swung off the bed and walked back to her own bunk without another word. Jessie sat there in the amber light, processing.

Allison's confession landed in a room where every door was bolted shut, and through one of those doors, a side panel that Jessie had built out of necessity alone, Allison was handing back a key. She'd handed Jessie something Jessie had never asked for, something Jessie didn't know how to accept. She sat motionless at her desk late that night, screen dimmed to the minimum brightness she could tolerate without cutting it completely. The amber light washed over the keyboard as she opened a blank document. The cursor blinked once. Twice. She began drafting, in logical blocks, the sequence of commands she would need to execute across the scheduling database, starting with the credential harvest, moving through the unencrypted log access, finding the rescheduling protocol gap she'd identified earlier, and finally constructing the suppression script for the alert system.

She worked through the first draft of the logic in roughly twenty minutes. Tuesday morning could still be saved, or Thursday, or Thursday could be rewritten to look like every other empty day on the nurse's schedule. Every night before sleeping, she could now check the calendar and know for certain. She'd have to move faster than the state contract allowed, which meant working around Sister Raquel's office access, and that part would require her to physically reach the kitchen scheduling terminal, and that part would require Sister Raquel to be in a meeting or a meeting-about-Sister-Raquel would need to be scheduled for her.

Jessie stared at the blank lines where the code blocks would eventually go and watched the cursor blink in the dark room, and somewhere in the quiet, she felt the first real tremor since her tenth summer when a ten-year-old girl hacked into the state registry and changed her life forever, and the tremors had only ever been inside, private, under her skin.