Orpheus Girl

by Brynne Rebele-Henry

  When Jason is done registering me, he hands me a plastic clip-on name tag and I snap back to reality.

  Grammy comes inside and signs some papers. She’s still crying. Tears fall from her face and smudge her signature.

  “I’m sorry. Okay. I’ll call you every time I get the chance.”

  Then she’s gone too.

  After Grammy leaves, the panic sets in. My backpack with the knife and my journals are now with Hyde for “safekeeping.” I realize now that everything I grew up with, everything I’ve ever known, is gone. Before this, I’ve never been farther than twenty miles from Pieria. The only time I’ve left was in eighth grade, when my class went to the aquarium. I remember pressing my hands against the wall made out of glass, watching the strange aquatic creatures bob around, and though I didn’t know why, I cried.

  Jason makes me empty my pockets. All I have is a pen, a candy bar, and a photo of Sarah and me that I tucked into my waistband. He takes everything except for the picture, which remains hidden.

  In it Sarah had just turned fourteen, and we’re celebrating by going out to dinner with her parents. We’re both wearing dresses. The light in the photo obscures my face so you can see only a shadow in the shape of a girl, and Sarah’s smiling, illuminated. For once, one of the dresses her parents always wanted her to wear seems natural. She looks like she could have been someone else, but also happy in a way that was rare for her. That’s why I kept the photo next to my bed, why I brought it with me. Back in Pieria, on nights we weren’t together, I’d look at it, imagine that maybe we really were the girls that we looked like in that picture.

  I realize that a small crowd is gathering around me. A couple of girls and a boy. One of the girls is wearing a T-shirt: “ACCEPT THE SAVIOR INTO YOUR HEART, AND NEVER WANT AGAIN!” It’s then I decide that I’m going to be the biggest, baddest lesbian these hateful freaks have ever seen.

  Hyde leads me to a bathroom and gives me a pile of clothes. There is a faded denim skirt. It is ankle-length, too big around the waist. I have to hold it up with a belt. Hyde helps me punch an extra hole with a pocketknife so it won’t fall back down. They let me keep my red sneakers and my black lace bra. But they make me put on weird granny-style cotton underwear and a T-shirt with a Jesus slogan on it. Mine reads “JESUS SAVED ME! HE CAN SAVE YOU TOO!” It’s only when Hyde leads me outside into the backyard that I realize that everyone here is wearing a Jesus T-shirt. I keep looking around anxiously. I’m starting to worry that Sarah’s not here, that she’s at a different camp. I think about calling out for her, but I am afraid of giving anything away. There are about eight of us.

  Then I see her.

  It’s like I’m not really seeing her, because the person I’m looking at is no longer Sarah, just some broken shell that resembles her. She’s wearing a dress that somehow makes her look even gayer and she’s shaking with cold, though it’s a warm evening, balmy even. She has a blank look on her face, like she’s no longer there.

  Even though I know we’ll both pay for it, I run to her. My heart is beating too fast, and I think maybe they got to her, did to her whatever they did to those other girls.

  “Sarah?”

  She looks at me. Her long hair is gone, cropped close to her head in raggedy patches, like grass that’s been poorly mowed. Her eyes seem washed out. She’s dressed the same as me, but they made her put a silky pink bow in her short hair. Without the makeup her mother used to foist on her, and despite the bow and the dress, with her shaved head she almost looks like the girl she always wanted to be.

  I can feel a sob rising in my throat at what they’ve done to her. Her eyes look vacant, like pictures I saw of towns after they’ve been bombed: empty craters, shadows shaped like their old residents. She’s looking behind me—at Hyde. He watches us with his head cocked for a minute then shakes it, like he’s forgotten something, and goes inside. When he’s gone, her eyes regain their normal sparkle and she winks at me.

  “Sorry for freaking you out,” she whispers. “I just have to act like I’ve been lobotomized. Or else they make me sit by myself in this room and talk to this freaky woman, Char, who’s kind of not there—like, mentally—at all. I think she’s an actual serial killer, I swear. God, it’s good to see you. I heard them talking last night, heard them say your name, how Grammy found out, needed to get you fixed. They didn’t mention me, though, so I don’t think they know about us yet.”

  She takes a red apple out of her pocket. In the colorless yard, where the sky is faded and even the people look bleached, the brightness of the apple makes it look precious. She tosses it to me and I bite into it.

  It’s so sweet it makes me gag. I think maybe we can get out of here, and when I watch Sarah, her eyes glitter with something akin to hope.

  As I take in Sarah’s hair with its ridiculous baby bow, I decide that the first thing I’m doing tonight is shaving my head. Let’s see them try to straighten up that. I start laughing at the idea of my bald head with little pink bows affixed to it. Maybe a tiny pink baby bonnet.

  Sarah’s face crumples.

  “What?” I whisper.

  “It’s my fault. I’m really sorry.”

  Hyde calls for us to come back inside. He says we’re doing a prayer circle. The room has green walls and no furniture except for thirteen plastic fold-up chairs arranged in a circle, with Hyde, Jason, and Char in the center. Char, I notice, has a hungry, almost wolfish look about her.

  I can feel my heart thudding somewhere in my chest. I’ve heard the stories about what they do to you here.

  Hyde explains to me that in these circles everyone has to go around and say why we’re here. We must describe our sins and then say what we want to be, who we want to become once we leave the program cured of our unnatural desires.

  Diane, a blonde girl with the shoulders of a football quarterback and a kind of butch swagger that even the hyperfeminine outfits all the girls are wearing can’t change, goes first.

  “Well, my sin—I mean, where I went wrong—it was definitely when I was going to school, you know, and I played football on the boys’ team”—I was right!—“and there was this girl, Mary.”

  “Go on,” Hyde says, even though he’s staring at me.

  “And, well, one night after the game we were showering together because I had to use the cheerleaders’ locker room to clean up and not the boys’ one, which really didn’t help me, and Mary, she was so pretty, and I guess she kind of just got in the shower with me . . .” Here, she trails off.

  “And that was when you sinned?” Hyde asks.

  “We sinned and then another girl found us and told.”

  “And you know now that what you were doing was an affront against Jesus Christ himself? And now that you’re here with us, you’re ready to accept him into your heart and cast aside the homosexual desire that Satan has spawned in you?”

  “Yes.”

  The boy next to me—a beautiful, flamboyant boy with a Russian accent and blue-black curls—seems to be the one patient I’ve seen who’s as outwardly gay and unrepentant as I am. He nudges me and whispers, “Actually, it was the whole cheerleading squad, not some girl named Mary. Their coach found them.”

  When Hyde cuts us a look, the boy makes the blow-job face until Hyde flushes a deep crimson.

  The boy’s name is Leon. Later I learn that he’s an army brat who spent his childhood trekking around Russia. Before he moved to Mississippi and got sent here, to a facility so deep in the middle of Texas that his father hoped nobody from their new town would find out, he lived in Moscow. His mother had died suddenly from an illness that was diagnosed after it was too late to save her, and his father took a job in America. Finding himself facing the pressures of the Deep South, pressures that in some ways were worse than in Moscow, he shipped Leon off. From what Leon says, it sounds like his father doesn’t actually hate his son’s gayness. He just wants to m
ake his son’s life easier in some misguided but well-meaning way.

  The group keeps going around. There is a “girl” who is really a boy, and whenever he speaks Hyde snaps, “In your natural voice, not so deep,” and he has to raise his voice to an unnaturally shrill tone. He is the only one they’ve made wear a full-on dress. It is an atrocity, hot pink and frilly, bunching awkwardly around the shoulders.

  Hyde and Char call him Maia, but I make a note to call him Michael—his real name—when they aren’t around.

  Today his confession is that he stared at himself in the mirror, stared at the body they’d turned into something not his own, and started to cry. “Like a girl,” Hyde says. “Good.”

  There is a girl named Karma who is here because her father found her with their maid’s daughter. He disowned her, saying he’d rather let all his money go to waste than pass it on to a homosexual. When she learned he had cancer, she agreed to come here. Maybe her presence is all part of some elaborate plot to fake being converted to heterosexuality until the old guy blitzes, then go back to lezzing it up. That’s what I hope, anyway; otherwise it’s just too sad.

  Karma sounds perpetually stoned, like Jean always did.

  Listening to her reminds me of home and Jean’s thick honeyed voice, how her throat was always gravelly with smoke, and also of the other girls at my school who would come in on Monday mornings with that same glazed look, the raspy aftermath from the night before still edged into their sleepy voices.

  After Karma speaks, Hyde says, “Everyone, this is Karma’s last night. Give her a round of applause.” I think I see a tear fall down Karma’s face. Everyone starts clapping wildly, so I join in.

  Hyde stands up, puts a hand on her shoulder. “Karma fought her demons, and she won. She overcame them and found the light in a remarkably short amount of time. She’s truly blessed to have walked through the fires of damnation and to have come out saved.” He smiles down at her. “She’s one of our greatest successes.”

  Karma’s cheeks are red. Her bottom lip trembles with what I think is anger, but after a second she collects herself and says, “Thank you.” She sounds like she means it. Jason stares at her with something like jealousy marring his face.

  There are only ten of us—counting staff—in the room, and when Clio notices me looking around quizzically, she leans in and stage-whispers, “Sometimes if we’re good, we get to skip the last session of the day.”

  At that moment Hyde turns to me. “Raya? Why don’t you share your story of how you strayed from the path of Jesus Christ and became a sinner?”

  I stay quiet. My heart is beating so quickly that for a second I think maybe they can hear it.

  “Raya, if we’re to cure you of this disease, you need to share with us how you got here.”

  I take a deep breath, don’t look at Sarah, because if she looks at me, I know I’d choose the path of least resistance and pretend to be cured instantaneously just so I can be with her. And that I cannot do. To protect myself I’ve already created an entire fake life history—a persona to act out—because if I’m pretending to be someone else, they won’t be able to get to me. I tell myself that they can’t break a girl who doesn’t exist because all they’ll be breaking is a figment of my imagination.

  I clear my throat and try to talk in the toughest voice I can manage. “Well, like the rest of you, I sinned as much as I could. Actually, they called me the lesbian Don Juan in my town.”

  Sarah sniffs, a laugh. When Hyde turns to her, she fakes a deep, hacking cough.

  I forge on. “Yeah, I guess the homecoming queen’s boyfriend got mad and told someone who then told everyone. He was probably upset his girlfriend dumped him for me.”

  Slowly Leon starts to clap. Hyde shushes him. He starts clapping again. Hyde shushes him again. It goes on like this for a few minutes. Then Hyde and Char turn to me. When I see the expressions on their faces, my stomach sinks.

  Char’s eyes burn into mine, and she says that I’m “a sinner, disgusting, unholy,” that I “need to learn the error of my ways.”

  I feel my face go hot with shame. I don’t know what to do, so I just mumble, “I’m fine.”

  It’s a bad idea because over the pulsing blood in my ears, I can hear Hyde saying that I am going to rot in hell, be consumed in brimstone and fire with all the other sinners, and that I’ll still be cold. It’s frightening, and even though I don’t believe in any of it, I start to get a little queasy. I don’t respond. Hyde, now finished with his speech, is staring at me expectantly. I gaze at my lap.

  Char clears her throat. “Raya? You need to acknowledge that what you’ve done is wrong if you want to heal. You need to repent.”

  I look up and see Sarah, who’s watching me nervously, fidgeting.

  So I take a deep breath and say, “I’m sorry, I guess.”

  Char smiles, doesn’t say anything. Hyde nods approvingly.

  During all of this, I maintain the stubborn grin of a girl who cares about nothing. The truth is I’m terrified. But over the years I’ve learned how to retreat inside of myself, how to kill the girl inside me and reinvent myself again and again and again, to lie so much I start to believe it. So that’s what I’ve decided to do.

  Sarah’s next. She sits up straighter. “I fell in love with a girl.” She looks up at the ceiling, won’t make eye contact. My mouth is dry, cottony. Then she looks at me. “She was my best friend, but I loved her. Then my brother’s friend saw us, and that was it.” She crosses her arms over her chest, juts out her chin, almost as if she’s daring them to challenge her.

  Char says, “But you know that’s wrong, right? That you committed a sin?”

  Sarah’s arms fall to her sides, and she looks sadder than I’ve ever seen her, sad in a way that makes my stomach hurt.

  After the group ends, Hyde brings me to the rec room. It has three couches, a bookshelf, a pool table, a table with a pile of board games, and one half-dead TV that’s airing only static. A few minutes later he returns with my backpack.

  “Sorry, it’s against rules for you to keep the knife and journals, but everything else is okay. I’ll show you your room.”

  He leads me into a hallway that opens into a series of rooms. I see Leon disappear into one at the far end. They’re all the same. The doors are all open. It reminds me of sleepaway camp: each room is small and spare and composed of only a bunk bed, a chair, and two small chests of drawers.

  Hyde ushers me through one of the doors. I sit on the bottom bunk. A short head peers over the edge of the top bunk.

  “Hey stranger.”

  By some miraculous oversight or by some devious attempt at proving Sarah unwell, they’ve assigned us to be roommates.

  After Hyde leaves, she climbs down the creaking ladder that leads to the top bunk and rests her head on my shoulder.

  “Sarah? What happened?”

  She lets out a quivering sigh. “After you left that morning, Aristo and my brother showed up. I don’t know what they told them, but my parents disappeared for hours. Then Aristo made me shave my head just because he could. I guess I always wanted short hair, only kept it long because of them, and when my parents got back, he told them I did it myself. Proof of my perversion. Then they put me in the car with a suitcase. I tried to slip away and call you but they followed me, wouldn’t even let me go to the bathroom without them waiting outside the door because they thought I’d run away.”

  I open my mouth, but I can’t speak.

  I brought this on her. If she hadn’t kissed me, if I hadn’t kissed her back, if she hadn’t somehow fallen in love with me despite everything, then she’d still be safe. But I know that regardless of what either of us could have done, one day, eventually, they would have found us both. So instead of speaking, I just kiss her. She tastes like salt and oranges, as always. She pulls me closer, slips the Christian T-shirt over my head, and straddle
s me. Then we seriously lapse in our progress toward discovering our inner heterosexual selves.

  Afterward I pull my clothes on loosely. I decide to find Leon down the hall. He’s clean-shaven, so I think he must have a razor. He’s probably the only one here who would enjoy that small act of rebellion. Everyone else seems too scared, too shattered.

  Leon answers his door wearing only a pair of hot pink Speedos. “Ahh, friend. I thought you would come see me.” He grins toothily. Later he tells me that he refused to let Char and Hyde take them from him. “I said if you do, I won’t wear anything at all, will be naked like bear in the winter. Then I danced like this.”

  He gyrates his hips around, wildly throwing his body out, hands flailing in the air. Apparently they conceded and allowed him to keep his more feminine undergarments.

  “I was wondering: Could I borrow something?”

  “Hush. Anything for friend.” He sweeps his arm out, gestures into the room. I notice the empty top bunk.

  “You don’t have a roommate?”

  He chuckles. “Ha. They didn’t trust me with the other boys.” He swings his hips around a little. “How does that song go? Too sexy for my vest, too sexy for shoes. Too too sexy.” He does jazz hands and chuckles. “I always loved that song. They’d play it in the clubs in Moscow. You know how to dance?”

  I nod, unable to keep from smiling.

  He grins wider. “Wonderful. I will make you my dance partner.”

  Leon starts bopping around the room, bringing one hand over his face and making scissor motions. He almost trips a couple of times. I watch him for a few minutes, then, when it becomes clear that if I don’t do anything he’s not going to stop dancing for me anytime soon, I clear my throat.

  “Do you have a razor I could borrow? I want to shave my head so they can’t make me wear bows in my hair like they did to the other girls.”

  “Genius! I never thought of that.” He rummages through his chest of drawers and hands me a plastic disposable. “Good luck.”