Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire
Sometimes the people who go through Doors go through because they are lost and need to find their way home. Sometimes they are home but need to be Lost with a capital L which is different from just losing their way. Sometimes they come back when they didn't mean to and desperately want to get back to where they belong, but the Doors disappear from them, until the time is right, or until they are found again. Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children’s doors are open to anyone who needs them, and she's never turned anyone away.
Antsy arrived at Eleanor’s School and was deemed to be from a Nonsense world by the headmistress, though that doesn't seem quite right. Antsy haltingly told Eleanor where she went and that she was sure, but then she maybe she wasn't, and Eleanor told her that sometimes you can be quite sure, but the Doors might decide you are no longer the person they need in their world and boot you out anyway. She also told her that the Doors are different and sometimes you can use them only once, or they only stay for a certain amount of time. Eleanor asked Antsy how she found the school and if she has any talents, and Antsy described the staticky feeling she gets when she knows something is lost and wants to be found. Eleanor mentions losing her keys (Did she go looking for her Door? Did she lose her keys on purpose? Did the Door take her keys trying to get her to come back? Does she sneak there and go through often?) and how Antsy would've been a great help, but then tells her about classes and showed her to her room, which she shared with Cora.
Six months passed and Antsy was happy to have only aged one day at a time. She didn't really make any friends, though Cora's were nice enough to her. She visited Angela, the girl whose kitten she found that led her to this school, but she and her friend, Seraphina, who is so beautiful Antsy couldn't look at her, weren't very nice at all. Antsy went out on the grounds one day and found Eleanor's keys, and Eleanor's Door, and returned them to the headmistress, only to overhear that Cora wanted to go to the Whitethorn Institute. This was the day that everything changed. Antsy went with Cora's friends to find her and bring her back, and she brought a couple of others back as well. And now here we are.
Emily, one of the girls from Whitethorn, a beautiful black ballerina who went to a world of harvest and Halloween, approaches Antsy at lunch to ask about her ability to find anything. She doesn't outright say what she's looking for and then Sumi comes up and nonsenses everything, making Emily chat instead of asking Antsy about finding things. It almost feels like she made a friend.
At a small group therapy meeting later that most of the regular students don't go to anymore, Antsy is distracted by Angela who takes her away to the library to talk to Seraphina. They are not nice to Antsy at all, mocking her for thinking she has friends, but she's so mesmerized by Seraphina’s beauty that she goes along with everything she says. Seraphina wants Antsy to find her Door because she's too beautiful to even properly exist in this world.
Luckily before Seraphina is able to make Antsy do anything she doesn't want to do, Christopher shows up, turns off the lights and pulls Antsy away. Unlike everyone else, he is not enamored by Seraphina's beauty because he fell in love with a skeleton. He leads her to Cora who helps her escape to Kade’s attic room. Emily and Sumi are also there and Emily apologizes for giving Angela and Seraphina the idea that Antsy can find Doors. Kade and the rest of the crew want Antsy to know that they don't want to be her friend only because she can find things, which is nice, and they just want to keep her safe.
Antsy explains that she knows a lot about Doors, that they cost time to open and that they give them language when they go through, which is really cool, and that she knows the places where many of them went and that Seraphina probably went to a Drowned World like Cora, but hers was a place where they valued beauty above all that and when they couldn't find the most beautiful thing, they made it by pearlizing girls. Before they can get much more about that Door, Seraphina and Angela come knocking at the attic. Kade wants to call for Eleanor, but instead, Antsy leads them to a Door. She offers to pay the price, three days and they go through.
Everyone is mesmerized by the beautiful, shining world, everyone that is except Kade. Antsy has opened the Door to Prism and he feels exceptionally uncomfortable. He says it was a perfect world for everyone, except for him, because they only accept girls from their world in Prism and once the Goblin King realized Kade was a boy, which Kade knew all along even if he looked like a girl on the outside, he finally felt seen, but then he helped kill the king anyway. He was soon booted out of Prism for being a boy instead of a girl and now it's painful for him to be back. He knows that Prism has specific rules and that soon the people who live there will find out that they are here and won't take kindly to it. They all head into the forest, into goblin territory, and Antsy tries to find another Door. They go into a cave where they find the Door to Antsy's shop. Sumi offers to pay the toll and opens it.
Everyone goes through, except for Sumi, who stays for a moment longer to chat with a goblin that was following them. The goblin asks if his prince just walked through the Door and she says yes. The goblin asks her to pass along a message that the goblins in the kingdom miss their prince, though now he is their king.
Inside the Shop, Christopher uses his bone flute to ask dead bugs to lead them to the front desk where they find a small girl working. She says her name is Yulia and it's obvious to anyone who knows what to look for that she has come from The Moors, but she's only five. Antsy goes on a tirade and soon Vineta appears and they yell back and forth about telling the tolls for the doors and forcing people to grow and about leading her friends to this place where they could open Doors to their homes if they wanted to. Antsy tries to explain to Yulia about the price Doors cost but then realizes that Hudson, the magpie who also works at the shop, is missing. Apparently he wanted to tell children the truth like Antsy asked and so Vineta and Yulia put him in a cage and tossed him through a Door. Vineta is clearly the worst.
Antsy and her friends march off, leaving Vineta and Yulia to go through random Doors to find lunch. Antsy is determined to find Hudson and they come to two Doors, one clearly leading to Emily's world of Harvest. The other is the Door where they threw Hudson, so they open it. Christopher stays behind to keep the Door open and to stop Vineta shutting them out if she comes along, which is totally something she would do.
The other side of the door is lush and green and Kade rightfully welcomes them to Jurassic Park. This is clearly the world of the dinosaurs and Emily recognizes it. She whistles and someone or something whistles back. It's a someone, Stephanie, her former roommate from Whitethorn. She lives as the only human in this world of dinosaurs and is perfectly content and also might be dead. Antsy asks about Hudson and explains that she's there to find him and take him back to his world, and soon he flies down to meet her. She tells him that she is going to stay in the Shop and needs his help to get rid of Vineta.
Unfortunately a giant tyrannosaurus-looking dinosaur comes after them then so they have to run and luckily they all get away. Kade and Cora have a long conversation about Stephanie staying behind because this is where she belongs and about going through Doors when they're meant to, even if they have the opportunity to go back through then using the Shop. Kade seems particularly interested in staying in the Shop because he has such a keen interest in creating maps of all the worlds, but Cora insists that he has to come back because Eleanor and the rest of the students at school need him. She decides that she really wants to go back to the Trenches, but won't go until the Trenches want her to come back, because that wanting is important.
They finally make it back to the Shop where Christopher is still holding the Door open for them. Antsy and Hudson make a plan to oust Vineta because he made his promise to Antsy before she was booted and wants to keep it. He tried to tell Yulia in his own way about Elodina and the cost of the Doors, but she didn't catch on, and then when she started to, Vineta forced her to put him in a cage and throw him away to the dinosaurs. It was not Vineta’s place to push Hudson out of his own world, so he goes to speak to the other magpies about what they should do.
Antsy goes through the staff only door at the Shop while her friends wait behind menacingly for Vineta to return, and soon enough she does, making Yulia carry way too much for her tiny frame. Antsy yells at Vineta more about there being a difference between going through one door every week or so when they need supplies and going through ten doors a day because they don't know what they want for dinner. Vineta gets angry of course because she's old, but they all tell her that just because she was abused and her time was stolen from her, that doesn't mean she is allowed to do the same to others. Antsy isn't going to force her out, but that doesn't mean that the magpies won't. They arrive and suggest that she choose a Door to go through rather than being forced through one.
Antsy tells Yulia that she will never make her leave until she is ready, but won't force her to stay either, and she decides she'd rather help in the shop than go back to her world where the vampires are waiting for her. Antsy offers them all the option to go back to the school or to go to their homes or to go to anywhere else they want to go because now that she's come back to the Shop where she knows she wants to be, she can see where each Door will go before she opens it. They decide to go back to the school, even Cora and Christopher, who have only ever wanted to go back to the Trenches and Mariposa, and they walk to the Door to Eleanor's. Surprisingly, Sumi decides to stay behind. She knows she'll get to go back to Confection when it's time, but maybe she'll open some Doors herself to get time to hurry up.
Three months pass back at the school and Cora and Kade have spent a lot of that time together. Kade convinced Eleanor that he should be the one who decides which kind of worlds students went through because she often saw Nonsense when it wasn't there, which she is delighted by. He and Cora are out running around the turtle pond one day when Cora asks if this is enough. Waiting and maybe growing up. Kade says it is, but she says it's not. Suddenly Sumi walks through a Door behind them and suggests that Cora should just go home. They are happy to see Sumi again, who is now back to the age she should've been before she was murdered by Jill. She and Kade chat and then realize that Cora is staring at something in the pond. It's her Door back to the Trenches. She walks through.