Orpheus Girl

by Brynne Rebele-Henry

  She sighs. “Earlier, I guess I thought about women.”

  Char starts to open her mouth, but Hyde puts a hand over hers, turns to Sarah. “What did you think about that was sinful?”

  Sarah’s got a sort of glimmer in her eyes that I’ve never seen before, something between terror and rebellion.

  “I thought about fucking them. I don’t know about you, Hyde, but I just love when you’re going down on a girl and her thighs start to shake. Though you probably wouldn’t know about it from firsthand experience.”

  Hyde is clenching and unclenching his hands into fists. “Those are sinful things, Sarah. It’s not the Lord that’s causing you to behave in this way.”

  I make frantic knife motions under my throat, hoping that she’ll stop, that she’ll save herself, but she ignores me and forges on.

  “The last girl called for the Lord when I was done with her. Did that ever happen to you, Char?”

  Char’s face has morphed into a strange mask, her eyes eerily still, and she grabs Sarah’s arm, yanks her up, and half drags her outside. Hyde starts, like he’s going to stop Char, then changes his mind, hangs back and watches. The only person who took the punishment silently when they said that though he’d told them his thoughts he still wouldn’t get dinner was Jason, but I think he’s been starved for so long that he has forgotten how to be hungry. He’s forgotten all about the outside world away from Friendly Saviors. All he has is shame and fear.

  I abandon all attempts at hiding what Sarah means to me and run after her and Char—not caring, in that moment, that they’ll realize we know each other and that since neither of us lived anywhere other than Pieria and both of us arrived at the same time, we’re together and had something to do with each other’s disappearances.

  What do they see when they look at us?

  Sarah’s hair is still ragged, but she carries herself with a strange regality, like she’s locked her body inside itself. She wears the long denim peasant skirts that make us look like Mormon fortune-tellers and the tucked-in shirts that have off-brand Christian slogans on them with the same butch bravado as she once wore her baggy men’s pants and frayed white tank tops.

  My head’s shaved, and I’ve been trying my best not to look in mirrors, but I know that without the wildly tangled curls hiding my face, I look just like my mother. I have her small features and high bone structure, only I’m younger and darker-haired and sadder-looking in some intangible way. I wear the uniform slightly less gracefully than Sarah does, with the ends of my long shirt tied behind my back and the skirt dragging at my ankles.

  I’ve spent so much time trying to hide my body because of its desires that I’ve never thought about whether I’m attractive. When I was younger, I would wear the loosest shirts I could find to hide my breasts, and pants three sizes too big that I’d hold up by cinching the belt loops around my waist with scarves. Though Grammy started buying me tight sundresses, I still tried to hide my body under oversized jackets, long scarves, and unpadded bras several sizes too small that left red half-moon marks under my ribs when I took them off.

  The only time I thought my body could be beautiful to someone else was the first time I slept with Sarah. As she unzipped my dress, she kissed the scars where the vertebrae had broken through my skin, and I knew from what I saw in her eyes that when she looked at the scars, when she looked at my body, she saw something I had never been able to see when I stood in front of the mirror: she saw something desirable.

  If they look closely enough, maybe they can see the slight bumps that are different from the natural curvature of a spine under my shirt. The possibility of flight that was ripped out of me, the silvery marks that are all that’s left of that hollow promise now. And if they look even closer, they can see that I try not to look at Sarah directly. If they keep looking, they will see the motherless sadness that I keep mostly hidden.

  The others follow me. Char’s leading Sarah to the edge of the football field. She looks at Sarah with her mouth set into a thin line, a look that I know from my time with Grammy means trouble.

  “Run,” Char tells her. “Don’t stop until I tell you to.”

  And so Sarah, resigned to whatever happens to her, runs. Char makes her run for two hours, until the sun is low in the sky and the crickets have started to sound. Eventually she keeps falling down and taking so long to get back up that my heart thuds in my throat. Her skin is flushed, wet with sweat, and in the rippling light her sunburn looks like it’s catching fire, like she’s being set aflame. When she falls, Char just calls out “faster,” and then she’s a blur of a girl in motion again.

  While she runs, I hold the keys in my hand so tightly that I can feel them cutting into my skin. Our freedom. Char won’t be sleeping, will still be on the porch, but with a car it won’t matter. There’s only one vehicle here, and she couldn’t follow us very far on foot. As long as we can get in the car and lock the doors before she reaches us, we’ll be safe. I’ll ask Leon to come with us and tell him to bring Clio, too. I don’t know if I can completely trust them, but I know it would be better to have more than two escapees. Harder to catch all of us. Besides, Clio stole the sugar for me, risked the wrath of Char, who presides over the kitchen supplies, so she seems trustworthy.

  Sarah’s slowing down now and I can see her chest heaving. Her legs are shaking. Her shirt is covered with a deep V of sweat, and I can tell she’s starting to give up and my stomach hurts, but I can’t do anything now without making it worse for her.

  At the end of the two hours, Char turns to go inside, to start dinner and preside over the quiet table, and everyone leaves with her, with slightly guilty but too-scared-to-do-anything expressions on their faces.

  I go to Sarah. She’s gasping, doubled over. I sit down next to her in the grass and hold her head in my lap as she cries. Then she sits up. She has a strange look on her face, and at first I think she’s going to say something to me, but then she throws up. I pull my sleeve down over my arm and wipe her mouth, hold her tighter because it’s all that I can really do.

  We stay like this until the moon is out.

  She looks at me, finally. “We need to leave. Tonight.”

  I nod, slip the keys out of my pocket, and hand them to her. She manages to stand up, though she’s limping, and I bring her around to the back of the house where no one will see us and then up to our room, where I make her lie down.

  When I go into the kitchen, everyone’s quiet. Watching me. I know bringing two plates would look suspicious, so I heap one plate with too much food.

  Hyde decided to let Jason and Michael eat after all. Tonight dinner is canned vegetables that long ago lost their vegetable-ness and are now just indistinguishable brown pieces of something spongy-looking. There’s corn bread, chicken (slightly raw on the inside but burnt on the outside), and lukewarm milk. It’s clear that Char is the one who cooked it because she watches everyone eat, gets a vaguely violent expression whenever she notices anyone trying not to grimace or spitting food into their napkins.

  I whisper that I don’t feel well, that my head’s still ringing, and surprisingly Char lets me leave. Upstairs I set the food down in front of Sarah. She eats it quickly, keeps offering me some, but I can’t eat because my throat feels like it’s closed up. She puts the keys on the bed between us. In the dark of the room, the metal of the keys almost glows, and I realize I’m slightly afraid of touching them, like they’re some kind of weapon. Then there’s a knock on the door, and I put the keys in my skirt’s pocket, hope Hyde hasn’t figured out they’re missing yet.

  But it’s just Leon. He’s leaning in the doorway. “You feeling better?”

  Sarah nods.

  He smiles at me. “The bald looks good on you.”

  I’ve made up my mind. “Here, close the door.”

  He raises an eyebrow but comes to sit next to us on the bed.

  I pull the keys o
ut from under the mattress. “They’re to the truck. We’re going to get out tonight. Do you want to come?”

  Leon sucks his teeth so hard I can hear them crack, shakes his head. At first I worry he’s going to tell the others, that I was wrong to tell him and I just ruined our only chance at escape. But then he chuckles. “You’re sly, Rainy. I’m going to call you that now”—he traces around my eyes with his index finger—“because your eyes always look like you just cried.”

  He turns to Sarah. “I’ll call you Birdy, because you run like a girl who could fly.” She smiles at him but doesn’t say anything.

  Suddenly he looks serious. “But what will we do when we get out?”

  “I don’t know yet; I just know we need to leave here. We’ll figure it out after.” I stare at him. “Leon? Do you trust Clio?”

  “Of course.”

  “Tell her to come too.”

  He grins again and jumps up, hurrying out. “Wait.”

  A few minutes later he comes back holding four socks that look like they’ve been stuffed with something. He tosses them on the floor, and something in the socks clangs. “I put these in the lining of my suitcase. I thought when Papa told me he was taking me here, he meant jail. So I sewed these in.”

  We pull out rolls of coins. They’re all silver dollars. I don’t know how he even got them since I thought they stopped making them years ago. I look at the socks. Each one is worth about a hundred bucks.

  “Is this enough?” I whisper.

  “More than.”

  He gets up, says he’ll meet us downstairs at one in the morning.

  As he’s leaving, Char knocks on the door.

  “Girls?”

  I push the socks under the blankets on the top bunk, hoping she didn’t notice. “What?”

  She sits down on the floor. “Look, I’m sorry about earlier—to both of you. Sometimes I don’t know when to stop.” She seems legitimately upset. Her pale eyes—eyes that look almost completely white—are watery with tears that could be real or crocodile. “I don’t know. My mother always said I needed to be more careful. I just sometimes can’t find the line between good or not.”

  I don’t want to say anything, but Sarah looks upset, touches her shoulder.

  “Did you go here too?”

  Her features sharpen, the sadness gone, replaced with the mask. The shift is startling, like watching an afternoon suddenly shift to the blank darkness of night.

  “It doesn’t matter. Good night, girls.”

  She leaves, slamming the door behind her.

  When I first got here, I swore to myself that they couldn’t break me. But now I sense small fissures in the cracks of my selfhood. It’s only been two days—already I feel like I’m losing the memory of the girl I once was. I have no choice. I’m going to either get out or die here.

  Sarah and I sit in silence, waiting for the house to go quiet. Eventually, just before one in the morning, everything is silent. We put our pillows under our blankets, drape the sheets around them so that in the dark of the room, they look like they could be our sleeping bodies.

  Leon creaks the door open. “Ready? Clio’s waiting. Her room’s at the end of the hall.”

  We follow him. He knocks softly and Clio answers. She’s wearing what is clearly someone else’s shirt. Guessing by the way she carefully pulls the sleeves over her wrists like it’s something precious, it probably belongs to the girl she left behind.

  He says, “Girl, get your things. We’re blowing joint.”

  “Blowing this joint,” I correct Leon, pulling the keys out of my pocket.

  Sarah laughs, covers her mouth with her hand.

  Clio whispers, “Let me get my things. I had to wait until Diane was asleep.”

  While she packs, we move her blankets around too. By the time they realize we’re not here, that the shapes in our beds are not our sleeping bodies, it will be dawn and we’ll be gone, already on our way to freedom.

  We walk through the dark house. Everything is silent. Leon opens the door to the kitchen, and we slip out of the house and walk around the yard to the front, where the truck is parked.

  Char’s smoking on the porch, but she’s got a faraway look in her eyes, like she’s not in her own body. And we have the keys to the truck, so we have the advantage.

  I point to her slumped form.

  “We just need to run. The car is at the end of the driveway. Lock the doors once everyone’s in, and she won’t be able to do anything.”

  Then we’re running, faster than I’ve ever run before. The mud in the driveway has dried up, and it turns to dust under our feet. We get to the truck. It’s unlocked.

  Everyone’s in and I click the locks. Last year Grammy took me out to a field on the outskirts of Pieria and taught me how to drive the Volvo, and I can’t help but remember her lessons now, how her fingers trembled as she handed me the keys.

  In the rearview mirror, I see Char walking toward us. I can’t get the truck to start because my hands are shaking too much to get the key in the ignition, and panic is rising in my throat. I think for a moment that we’re done, it’s over. I hold my breath.

  But Char raps on the window. She says, “I don’t have to tell anyone what I saw for three hours.” Then she walks back to the house. In the moonlight, her almost-white skin glows.

  I finally get the key in the ignition, start the truck. I floor the gas pedal as hard as I can, and we careen out of the driveway. The forest looms strangely, the moon is high and bright tonight, but the trees block out the light, making it hard to see. I white-knuckle the steering wheel and try not to veer. Something (a deer, I think) runs across the road. I swerve crazily to avoid it and lose control.

  I see the crash before I feel our bodies being thrown against the dashboard, the airbag exploding against my chest. I’m outside my body watching the four of us.

  There’s blood on my face and Sarah’s eyes are closed.

  Clio and Leon seem fine, but they are upside down. No, the truck is upside down in the road. I don’t know how. Someone is saying something, and it takes me a long time to realize it’s my name. Then I feel a sharp pain in my back, and in my haze I think that it’s my wings, that they have finally returned to me.

  Part Five:

  A Girl at

  the Edge

  When I wake up, all I can see is light. It burns my eyes. It takes me a few minutes to realize it’s a flashlight, that the car skidded out and flipped over, and everyone at Friendly Saviors heard the crash and came to save us. That I failed again. That we are trapped here with no way of getting out. Sarah’s arm is twisted out and her nose is bloody. She’s so pale it looks like all the blood was drained from her, and I’m so scared she’s dead, that it’s my fault. I put my hand over her mouth and feel her breath. She’s alive.

  I’m still half-upside down, caught from the seat belt.

  Then everything goes black again.

  I wake up in a cot in a drab room that I’ve never seen before. There are three cots next to mine. I can see Sarah’s ragged head, Clio’s twists, and Leon’s black hair, blue in the morning light. I sit up fast, thinking at first that we’ve escaped, that we’re free, that I imagined the crash. Then I see Char in the corner of the room.

  Char stands up, wipes her palms on her pants, leaving sweat marks. She’s nervous, something I didn’t think possible since she usually seems more robot than woman.

  “Raya?”

  “Yes?”

  Then it hits me: I know where we are. We’re in the second house. The house where they send the kids who spend all their time resting or wandering around vacantly. Kids whose faces always look like drawings before they’re erased from the paper completely: only melting shadows in the space of what they once were and what they could have been had they not been disappeared.

  “Do you remember what happened
?”

  I don’t know what to say or how to prevent what I know is coming, so I just shake my head.

  Char sits down next to me on the cot, which creaks under her weight. She looks down at me and her lips twitch a little bit, as if the shadow of a smile were crossing her face. “I knew a girl like you once.”

  “What happened to her?”

  She sighs. “I don’t know. She got out.”

  “Like I tried to?”

  Her face softens. “You know, it’s better this way. To be like me. Cured.”

  “But are you?” My head aches still, and there’s a low ringing in my ears.

  The softness disappears and she stands up brusquely. “Of course I am. Anyway, given your recent behaviors, we have to treat the four of you accordingly.” She pauses, then shakes her head. “After you’ve eaten, I have to start. Hyde’s orders.”

  I realize we’re all going on the list at the bottom of the whiteboard.

  Sarah is awake now. She’s fine except for a bruised arm. The others, amazingly, are unharmed as well. I decide to wait until later to tell them about whatever is going to happen to us. We walk to the main house. Michael and Diane watch us nervously but say nothing. They give us bowls of instant oatmeal and cups of lukewarm water to drink.

  When Jason sees us, his eyes widen. “You’re getting the electric shock treatments?”

  Sarah turns to me, but I don’t have to say anything. She can already see it on my face. Her bottom lip quivers as we sit down. I reach for her hand under the table, and it’s shaking. I hold it, run my thumb over the base of the vein at her wrist, feel it pump quickly against my hand. She smiles at me, though her smile is forced.

  So far all they’ve done is make us go to group prayer circles where we have to share our sexual experiences or urges, or if we have nothing to share, to make up some psychosexual bullshit. Then they make us move rocks. Then there was the first therapy session where Char showed me photos of beautiful women together and put my hands in cold water, held them there until I could feel the skin around my fingertips shrivel, go numb with pain.