......the stony cheerful facade was plastered upon her face once again.
This wording suggests to me that the woman _doesn't_ realize that the narrator _isn't_ fooled by her.
Exactly.
But that may also be the fact that the woman is depicted as an adult in this world and you know you pegged that most adults in this are ignorant of the intelligence the children possess in this story.
( chapter 4, part 4… )
Matron Bergman gave a surprised sigh of finality. She let her gaze wander from my medical sheet as I slowly sat up within my bed, my back supported upon my pillowed bed head.
“Your treatment shall commence at roughly mid-day today,” she responded with precise words before the militant efficiencies of her eyes resolved to a mockery of kindness.
I just nodded in response dumbly, not trustful of her brown eyes that held a smugness of disdain behind them.
But, the matron’s look wavered from me as she placed my medical info file back at the end of my bed and beat a hasty retreat from my room. She left with the clacking of her black heels upon the marble hallway, a reminder of how strange I felt within this solitary room.
“Well, I don’t like her either,” I heard Darius mutter darkly from behind me.
I turned my head to see him standing against the back wall of my room, his matted hair and scratched hands still a sign of his rugged appearance since I had first met him in the woods.
“I never said that,” I replied to him.
“Nope, but you thought it,” he shrugged in reply as he sat down within the visitor’s chair by my bedside.
I did not respond to that, knowing what he said was true. I studied his face, as if trying to detect a hint of inner meaning to his words. Having found nothing in his honest face and eyes, I merely resigned myself to shrugging back towards him.
“Why are you here?” I finally found myself asking him.
“In honest truth, I dunno,” Darius stated plainly, his voice a mix of concern and fear.
“I don’t know either,” I admitted, feeling a sense of familiarity in Darius’s feelings.
( to be continued… )