This is the story the doctors at the understaffed hospital tell her, and a story that she believes:

Mary was born with a rare bone disease called osteogenesis imperfecta, imperfect-beginning-of-bones, and is lacking a sufficient amount of a particular type of collagen, which is why her bones break. Common symptoms include short stature, skeletal deformations of varying severity, dental and respiratory complications, blueish or greyish sclerae, hearing loss as a teenager or young adult, and, in virtually all cases, frequent fractures. Many people with this disease die as infants or young children, but Mary's form is mild, so she will be able to live a normal life, and the fractures will probably stop happening so often when she hits puberty and stops growing so quickly. The disease does not have a cure, but it can be managed. It is extremely important that Mary eat healthy food including lots of calcium. It is even more important that Mary engage in safe forms of exercise, preferably swimming and preferably not contact sports, so that her body grows stronger and is not so easily broken.

This is the story her grandmother tells her, and she believes it, too:

In 1655, after an unsuccessful attack on the island of Hispaniola, the British captured Jamaica, prompting a flight of the existing Spanish colonists. Their African slaves then fled to the island's interior, where they intermarried with what was left of the native Arawak people, who themselves had largely been killed off or enslaved by the Spanish, with only small numbers surviving in the mountainous interior that the Europeans found difficult to penetrate. They created a society that survived by a combination of subsistence farming and frequent raids on plantations. And, of course, they had their own magic, as every people does; spells for hiding and for cursing and for healing, spells that helped make Jamaican Maroons a force to be reckoned with for nearly a hundred years. They wove hostility into the island itself, decades and decades of combinatorial curses upon the British colonists, killing their children in horrific numbers with things that the European books identify as malaria and yellow fever. Occasionally, they called down even more dramatic attacks: the 1692 earthquake that sank two-thirds of Port Royal, the great fire in 1703, and the great hurricane of 1722. 

The earliest British settlers were pirates, and though they had plantations, they also stole from their neighbors in turn, disrupting Spanish shipping and taking what they could from their more powerful neighbors. Then came sugar, balanced in its sweetness by the bitterness of its cultivation, a project that required frequent human sacrifice to keep the project going (but it is easy to sacrifice the children of your enemies). And all the while, curses: curses the Spanish laid on the British pirates, curses the pirates laid on the Maroons when Henry Morgan made war against them, curses the British laid on their own pirates when piracy was no longer the strategy of the hour, and those who had once been celebrated were now criminals, just as likely to turn on British ships as on the ships of Britain's enemies, Arawak curses and African curses and British curses and Spanish curses, weaved on people after people and sometimes hitting the same people twice, as all of these peoples interbred, willingly and not. Every conflict brought new curses, and every curse brought new conflict, and the older children and young adults who were the age to fight in conflicts died in numbers you wouldn't believe, not even if you said them, numbers your mind couldn't count to without saying, no, that can't be right. They were torn apart by bullets and by nooses and by the horrible walking things that too many old curses turn into.

In 1967, a few years after Jamaica was granted formal independence, a young woman who worked as a maid in one of the old plantation houses was raped by the son of the house’s owner, who had just come back from boarding school. He was not convicted of a crime. When his parents learned that the maid was pregnant, however, they told her that the child would be cursed. She hadn’t believed them. But twelve years later, when the child who had grown up was attracting things to her own house, things that her mother could only just defend her from with the aid of a shotgun, she sought out her old employers again, and asked what she must do. They arranged for the child to be raised for six years in the UK, in a community of magic-users that could, between them, provide enough protection for the the girl to live long enough to learn to control new kinds of magic, kinds that would keep her safe from these curses. This is how her grandmother survived to adulthood, in the London enclave, in the 80s.

In 1989, a child was born to her grandmother; this child was Anemone’s mother. Her mother would be the only one of eight children who survived long enough to have a child of her own, and she didn’t make it much longer than that. All of the other children died; without an enclave, her grandmother couldn’t keep them safe.

In 2005, a child was born with brittle bones and the ability to remember the past, and in particular the ability to perfectly recall every event that had ever happened to her. That child was Anemone. Her blood was English, Spanish, Arawak, and probably many different varieties of American and African that could no longer be distinguished from one another. 

All of these peoples remember themselves, in her, because she can remember the past. They remember how much and how deeply they hated each other for so long. These peoples are at war inside of her, and this is why her bones have so easily broken. But now she is able to see the future, too, and can see that she will not be any one of them, or even all of them, but a new person, a person to whom the ancestral curses do not apply. This is why she is becoming stronger, and why the curses that these peoples have laid on one another are slowly coming to rest inside her. But the violence does not want to end in peace, it wants to beget more violence, and beget more hatred, and wipe out every story that stinks of hope or peace. That is why the monsters of the curse come to find her while she sleeps, and why her grandmother must stand guard over her and kill them with a machete.

This is the story that Clarke Silverstring tells her, after he catches her in the middle of breaking into his old plantation house looking for answers, after she counts back how old he must be and looks into his eyes and realizes that he is her grandmother’s father, and she believes this story, too:

She is a wizard. A wizard is a person with a kind of magic that comes from his people, from Britain. Almost all wizards die as teenagers. This is why all of her aunts and uncles on one side of the family are dead, and this is why her grandmother had to go to Britain, or she would more than likely have died, too. It’s honestly surprising that her grandmother made it, either, most children don’t make it even if they live inside an enclave.

In the early 1800s, a few of the Jamaican British - the most skilled of all British in curses, at least of those in the Caribbean - found a place to hide their children, as the Maroons had hidden in the forested mountains. A school, all built out of magic and suspended in a sea of inky blackness, a place where they hoped the monsters couldn't reach them. People came there from all over the world, people who were being chased by the curses that their parents and grandparents and great-great-grandparents had thoughtlessly set loose. But the school was as imperfect as the mountains were, as imperfect as her bones, and the children still died, though not in such great numbers. It was not a good place. Even the ones who came back were changed by years inside. He does not say that this had anything to do with the circumstances of her grandmother’s conception, when he would have been eighteen, but she hears it between the words, and so that is part of his story, too.

No children from Jamaica have gone to the school in a long time. He didn’t think there were any left. His children went there, all of the children apart from her grandmother, and his grandchildren, but none of the grandchildren came back, so nobody is around to use the one seat that traditionally belongs to Jamaica. It’s been consistently sold off to other people for at least the past ten years. But the seat exists, and it is her birthright. If she wants to survive past her fifteenth birthday, her best possible chance is to petition for that seat. She’ll probably still die, but she’ll have better odds than her mother did.

This is the story that she tells him back, after the petition that she writes is accepted, and she believes this story as much as any of the others:

"You keep saying that I am going to die. Everyone keeps saying so. You are telling me this because you want me to believe it, because you know that if I do it will become true, and your mistakes will stop having a face and a name. But I am not going to die, because I do not believe you. I have seen the past and the future, and seen my grandparents’ grandparents and my children’s children, and I am going to live to see them with my eyes and not my mind. You may show me how I will live, or I will find out myself, but I will learn at some point either way.”

These are the things that Anemone has, on the morning of induction:

A fifteen-pound bag of tools and kits and trade goods that her great-grandfather assures her will be useful inside the Scholomance, at least if it’s still anything like it was when he went, at least if she remembers to be nice to everything inside it

Medicine for her bones, for infections, for pain, and for ensuring that she has all the vitamins she needs, and medical supplies for emergency situations

Spare shoes

Reusable menstrual pads

A three-pound bag of sacred items to aid her in petitioning the help of great spirits from a dozen different lands and religions and magical traditions

Two decks of tarot cards

A bag of amethyst rune stones, which double as mana storage

A three-pound set of agate bookends, for keeping books happy at least until she reads them and memorizes their contents, which also know how to double as mana storage if necessary

Native-level fluency in English and Jamaican Patois

What her great-grandfather calls “downright preternatural skill for two years of study” and her grandmother calls “your peoples remembering themselves” in Spanish, French, Latin, and ancient Sumerian, the languages that her great-grandfather knew how to teach her

A warning that if she picks up any more languages, which she will undoubtedly do, she must set aside time to learn them completely, or she may be given assignments she cannot read

One hundred and twelve wizard spells, all perfectly memorized, although she lacks the mana capacity to cast many of them

A mental map of the Scholomance, which should become perfected when she actually arrives

A pile of stories that she believes with all her heart.

When the tug comes, she welcomes it.