Free Blow Out the Moon by Libby Koponen

my parents both waved to me and I waved back. The train started with a jerk and noise — a whistle, and then that horrible clacking that keeps getting faster. We all kept waving.
    I kept thinking: I cannot cry, I
will not cry,
especially in front of Lindsey Cohen.
    On the wall just above her head was a small glass box with a sign below it saying:
    TO STOP THE TRAIN IN CASES OF EMERGENCY, PULL DOWN THE CHAIN.
    PENALTY FOR IMPROPER USE, £5.
    I wondered what would happen if I pulled the chain: How would it stop the train? Of course, I wouldn’t pull it — this wasn’t an emergency. And I wouldn’t cry. After all, I
wanted
to go to boarding school.
    “Make sure you’re right, then go ahead,” Davy Crockett said, and he did, even at the Alamo. That was much worse than this!
    I would NOT cry. And if it felt like I might, I could go into the little hallway and look out the window there, keeping my back to the compartment.

Chapter Fourteen:
    Sibton Park
    I didn’t cry, but I did walk into the little hallway. I pressed my face to the window and looked hard. Once we got into the real country, there were fields, deep green and (often) full of sheep. When I went back into the compartment, I fell asleep. I woke up a little in the taxi but I didn’t REALLY wake up until I was sitting at a long wood table late that night, eating cold roast beef. It was rare (just how I like it), and as I ate, I got more awake. Lindsey Cohen was sitting next to me, and we were at Sibton Park.
    The room was big and bare, with three long wooden tables (all empty), squares of gray stone for a floor, and lots of big windows (it was too dark outside to see anything out of them). It was also a little bit cold.

    Sibton Park, as it looks when you come in the front gates and go a little way down the front drive. The house had been added onto over the years, and each side of it (there were more than four) looked quite different. The front was the most formal.
    A grown-up came in and said she’d bring me to my dormitory. She led me through a long passage with coathooks and kids’ raincoats all along the walls, and a brick floor so old that the center dipped down from all those feet over the years.
    We went up steep stairs and through a wider, fancier hallway with wood floors, then up more stairs into a small room with no furniture in it, and down two steps into a long, straight, wide, white hall with lots of closed doors.
    The first door on the right had a white wooden sign with neat black letters saying: WELLINGTON. The next said: WATERLOO . Then, above a little step on the left, the door said: WC .
    She opened the door, and I saw a little white room with just a toilet, no sink or bathtub. I stepped up into it and closed the door.
    When I came out, we walked past more doors and stopped at NELSON . This, she whispered, was my dormitory, and I’d need to get ready for bed quietly so I didn’t wake “the others.” Then she opened the door.

    A dormitory at Sibton Park — not Nelson.
    The room was big, with tall, old-fashioned windows open (a breeze and a silvery gray light came through them, and outside I could see a leafy branch), a fireplace, and five beds: four with girls in them, one empty. There was a little sink in the corner; she pointed to it and watched me wash and get into bed, then whispered good-night.
    As soon as she was gone, all the girls sat up in their beds. One by one, they said hello and whispered their names, very politely: Rosemary Hitchcock, Sarah Riley, Catherine Marshall, and Hazel Fogarty. They seemed nice (only Sarah Riley had kind of a snobbish voice, I thought).
    “My name is Elizabeth Koponen,” I said, “but everyone calls me Libby.”
    “Are you American?” Catherine Marshall said. She was in a bed by itself across from the door. My bed was in the middle of a row of three beds against a wall.
    “Yes,” I said proudly. I
am
proud of being an American. “Don’t ever give me tea — if you do, I’ll have to pour it