Beverly Hills Prep Academy

Beverly Hills Prep Academy is the guarded, high-status private school attended by Anastasia Coleman and Juliette Coleman, and the school Ella’s father chooses for her after bringing her to California. Its polished prestige is set against Ella’s Boston upbringing and her need to conceal the lasting effects of her injuries: she enters an institution that advertises exceptional academic success but finds little social safety or belonging there. The campus becomes not merely a backdrop to her adjustment, but a setting where class difference, disability, bullying, and institutional responsibility collide.

Setting and Institutional Image

Ella’s father enrolls her at the same school as the twins. The Academy boasts a 98 percent college-placement rate, an emphatic contrast with Ella’s former Boston high school, where metal detectors marked the entrance and only about half the students graduated. The disparity is not just academic. For Ella, the school represents a world whose customs and advantages feel remote from the life she shared with her mother.

The campus gives that difference a physical form. Set behind enormous iron gates and a guardhouse, the school spreads across a broad lawn; its smaller buildings are linked by covered arcades that remind Ella of old monasteries. The grounds strike her father as beautiful, and he asks whether she is excited after their meeting with the principal. Ella experiences the same beauty as estrangement: the institution looks so unlike her old school that it seems to belong to another planet. As they leave the parking lot, her heart begins to race, and she grabs her father’s arm to plead that he not make her attend.

The required uniform intensifies her dread. Students wear white polo shirts, or turtlenecks in winter, with dark-blue pleated skirts. Ella has spent the summer staying indoors and, on the few occasions her father and Jennifer Coleman have made her go outside, has covered herself from head to toe. A short-sleeved shirt and knee-length skirt would expose more of her skin than she feels able to show. Later, she explains to Dr. Parish that a public school would feel more familiar and socially mixed, and would let her choose clothes that did not make her scars so conspicuous. Her objections concern not simply dress codes, but the pressure of being made visible in a place where she already fears rejection.

Arrival and Social Exclusion

Ella’s first day confirms her fears. Despite the heat, she wears the winter uniform to cover her skin. It does not stop the attention: students stare at her cane, long sleeves, and tights, and she believes they know who she is and what her clothes conceal. Some try to look away, then keep glancing back; others offer strained smiles or speak to her only when courtesy requires it. Still others openly gawk, laugh, point, or tease her to entertain their peers.

No one befriends Ella or stands up for her. A few students appear to pity her, but she suspects they are too frightened to intervene, perhaps because they have themselves endured bullying. At lunch, no one invites her to sit with them. The Academy’s prestige and carefully ordered appearance therefore coexist with a student culture in which visible difference can become a spectacle and bystanders’ fear leaves the target alone.

In the weeks that follow, the pattern settles into a bleak routine. Ella keeps to herself, completes her assignments, and tries not to react to remarks she hears from a distance. She holds back her tears at school, then cries after shutting herself in her room. Her online correspondence with Cinder gives her relief: he distracts her with silly stories and opinions about books and films, though she does not tell him how much the school and her new life are hurting her. The Academy’s social isolation thus reaches beyond the school day, shaping what Ella chooses to disclose even to a trusted friend.

Conflict and the School’s Response

The school’s difficulties become acute after Jason attacks Ella and reopens the skin-grafted area on her arm. While Ella waits in the school nurse’s room, her father—who is a prosecutor—can be heard raging behind a closed door in the principal’s office. He threatens to have Jason jailed, sue Jason’s family and the school, and have a teacher dismissed. Her nurse, Cody, warns that the arm may need further surgery because the scar tissue at the inner elbow has torn, and tells her to arrange an appointment with her surgeon and reduce the pace of physical therapy. The incident makes the Academy a site of immediate bodily risk, not only social discomfort.

Afterward, Principal Johnson raises whether the Academy is the right place for Ella. She initially hears the suggestion as a threat of expulsion and protests that she has done nothing wrong and does not provoke anyone; she has not even fought back. Dr. Parish clarifies that Ella is not in trouble. The adults are trying to determine what would be best for her, and Johnson and Ella’s parents raise the possibility of a school for students with physical disabilities. The suggestion horrifies Juliette as well as Ella, who asks how being shut away at such a school would help her.

Johnson’s case is that Ella has not found a place in the Academy: she does not speak with classmates, join clubs, or take part in after-school activities, and in her two months there she has become more isolated. Ella’s withdrawal is framed by the hostile reception she has faced, yet the school’s discussion risks treating her lack of social integration as evidence that she is unsuited to the school. Dr. Parish directly challenges that framing. She insists that the adults address Ella rather than attack her verbally, reminds them that what happened was not Ella’s fault, and names her as the victim who needs support, not resentment. Her intervention prompts apologies from both Ella’s father and Johnson, and makes the school’s responsibility to respond to bullying explicit.

Belonging and Narrative Significance

The Academy’s contrast with Ella’s former school carries a social as well as architectural meaning. In Boston, metal detectors and a comparatively low graduation rate formed the everyday landscape she knew; at Beverly Hills Prep Academy, guarded gates, expansive lawns, and a celebrated college-placement rate signal privilege. Ella does not experience that privilege as welcome. The school’s uniform and its students’ scrutiny make her body harder to hide, while her cane and covered skin mark her as different even when the scars themselves are not visible.

Her resistance to the Academy also reflects a struggle over who gets to define what will help her. Her father chooses the school and sees its beauty and opportunities; Ella experiences panic, anticipated humiliation, and the absence of familiar points of connection. When the school later considers whether she belongs there, the question shifts from her initial fear of fitting in to an institutional test of whether the environment can support a bullied student without making her disability the reason she must leave. The available evidence does not settle the Academy’s long-term role in Ella’s schooling, but it establishes its decisive early significance: the place advertised as a route to opportunity becomes the setting where her difference is exposed, her isolation deepens, and adults must confront the gap between a school’s prestige and its care for a vulnerable student.