Catherine House

by Elisabeth Thomas

  “Man, this really needs ice,” she mumbled. Then she said, “But did you hear? Four first-years have already been asked to leave. Gone. They’ll be out tomorrow.”

  I had heard that. One of the first-years was in Molina, a tiny, white-faced girl. She had thrown up in the morning room yesterday at breakfast. She must have heard the night before.

  “No way am I failing out, even if I hate it here,” Yaya said. “I’m not going to get sucked into this house’s shit, but I will graduate. I’m not fucking this up.”

  “I always fuck things up,” I said.

  “Yeah, me too. But then what? We end up at some normal college, applying for scholarships every day and doing, what—keg stands every night?”

  Yaya shook her head.

  “I mean, I guess it’d be nice to drink better shit than this.” She lifted the teacup. “Wear normal shit, fuck around with normal guys. But if we wanted to be normal, we wouldn’t have applied to Catherine. And if we weren’t supposed to get in, we wouldn’t be here.” She shrugged. “Anyway, shit. Free tuition and room and board for three years? If I lose that, my mama will slit my throat.”

  “My mother doesn’t care about me,” I said.

  “Really? What’d you do to her?”

  “Nothing. I think we kind of just forgot about each other.”

  “Man. Sounds nice.”

  I said, “I don’t know why I came here.”

  She glanced up at me. “I don’t believe that.”

  A cloud moved over the moon.

  “Have you heard from your family?” I said. “Your mama?”

  “Oh please,” Yaya said. “This house isn’t going to give us any of our mail. When I tried to make a phone call the other day, it cost four hundred points to dial out. Literally impossible to afford. We’re not going to be hearing from anyone for a long time.”

  Her eyes were dark.

  “Remember those ridiculous pamphlets they mailed our parents? No worries—if we’re ‘well ordered’ we can call our loved ones any day of the week.” Yaya rolled her eyes. “My mama read that and laughed. She’s not stupid. I’m not stupid, either. She taught me a long time ago that if I want to be big, I’m going to have to do big things. Big, strange, ugly things.”

  Something about Yaya’s words made me think of the boy—the man—who’d been lying on her bed.

  She yawned and ran a hand through her hair.

  “I’ve got to cut this off,” she mumbled. “All the other black girls want to keep up with the salon, but, man, I don’t have time for that.”

  “Shave it,” I said.

  “You’re funny,” she said, without laughing. She crossed her arms. “Why do you hang out with that weird girl?”

  “Baby?” I said. “She’s my roommate.”

  Yaya stared at me as if waiting for more of an explanation. I said nothing.

  Yaya reached into the bottom of her cup again. She stuck a mushy blackberry into her mouth.

  *

  When I went home that night, I didn’t go back the way I came, down the passage from Harrington through to the Molina parlor. Instead, I walked out the entryway, past an avenue of windows, and onto the yard.

  The grass stretched before me, colorless and cold. In the distance, the towers and jagged pine trees loomed, vicious black and sharp. The yard smelled icy, like a long winter coming, and the night was gravely still. The moon, high in the sky, was white as a ghost.

  I crouched on the grass, hugging my knees.

  Some students had dreamed of Catherine their whole lives. Maybe they’d heard it was one of the most secret, wild, beautiful houses ever built and knew they had to come here someday. Maybe they’d watched an interview with some movie star, heard the reverent way she mentioned her alma mater—Catherine—and yearned to go wherever she had been. Maybe they longed for Catherine because they longed for anything miles and miles away from their dull, gray homes and dull, gray lives.

  Or maybe it was the only school they could afford.

  For whatever reason, they dreamed of Catherine. They hadn’t spent their childhoods playing kickball or pretending to be princesses. Instead, they had bent over problem sets and Latin textbooks, writing practice essays until their fingers bled, sleeping in the car on the way to ballet studios and concert halls, swim practices, science fairs—anything to shape them into the type of person Catherine wanted. Whatever that might be. And who really knew? Who knew how Catherine sized up hundreds and thousands of smart, accomplished, charitable, perfect children and decided who was in and who was out?

  Even the most insane parents, admissions officers, and overachieving students couldn’t decipher Catherine’s admissions standards. But the kids who came here, studied hard, and graduated—kids like me, if I didn’t get kicked out—went on to live lives of sublime power and prestige. And everyone else spent their days wondering what sweet secrets lay here, behind Catherine’s gate. How special we must feel, and how secure, here inside.

  I hadn’t cared about the prestige. It hadn’t even occurred to me to apply until Mr. González told me I should. I definitely didn’t think I would be accepted. But somehow, I was in. And I should have been happier than anyone to be sheltered by Catherine’s gate. After all, here in the house, nobody knew where I’d been or the things I’d done. I was brand-new.

  Except wandering Catherine’s dark, too-silent halls didn’t make me feel new. I felt as crooked and perverse as ever. Like one of the house’s many shadows I saw reflected in its dirty windows and mirrors.

  Hadn’t I heard somewhere that Catherine was one of the most haunted houses in America? I didn’t believe in spirits. But in that moment, crouched there on the grass, I could feel the house behind me: its deep, dark, infinite body as twisted and corrupt as a forest.

  When I climbed the stairs to our room, a gray morning was dawning. I closed the door softly, sure that Baby was asleep. But she was awake. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed with a napkin in her lap.

  “Baby?” I said.

  She sniffled.

  I sat down beside her. I touched her hand.

  “Baby, what’s wrong?”

  She hiccupped.

  I lifted the napkin.

  The shards of Billie Jean’s broken shell glistened in the moonlight.

  “They came,” she said. “They came to do the inspection. And I knew they would find him. I knew.”

  I set the napkin back down.

  “And you weren’t here,” she said. “You were away. You were at a party. I needed you. I knew they were going to find him. And you weren’t here.”

  I rubbed her wrist.

  I didn’t wonder why she had done it. Why she couldn’t have just hidden the tank and kept our secret. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter.

  “Tomorrow,” I said, “let’s give him a nice funeral. We can bring cookies and wear our black sweaters.”

  She ran a hand over the napkin.

  Footsteps echoed outside the door, then something clattered. The tea tray had been delivered.

  Coming In

  Days at Catherine operated by a clockwork of meals. Tea trays arrived at gray daybreak, then, precisely two hours later, the halls served breakfast in their morning rooms. The dusty windows in Molina’s morning room faced west, so the sunlight shone sideways on the spread of eggs, gray biscuits, half-peeled oranges, and pitchers of Five Alive and seltzer. The halls served afternoon tea in their respective parlors, too. Afternoon tea, the Blue Book explained, was a cherished time of rest, a break between classes for a drink, a snack, and some warm conversation amid our busy days. I liked napping in the parlor during tea, but I didn’t like the cookies. Every time I ate them, my stomach filled with unsettled dread.

  Lunch and dinner were served in the Harrington great hall. The meals there were kingly, rich and hideous, and not very filling. We spent hours listlessly picking at game hens with fatty skin, boiled hams braised in wine, consommés and onion soups and eggs poached in sour cream sauce. The fruits and
vegetables were shrunken and strange. Our digestion was always upset.

  The only day we didn’t eat dinner together was Friday. Or rather, the rest of the house ate dinner then, but first-years weren’t invited. I didn’t know why. We ate as many cookies as we could during tea and went to bed with throbbing stomachs.

  Days became weeks. Night fell earlier and earlier. A chill entered the house and didn’t leave. Wind beat at the windows, whistled through the stone bricks, and sneaked under doorways. Radiators let out pools of dank heat that never spread far enough. I bundled myself in the itchy wool sweaters I found in my wardrobe. They made me feel sweaty but somehow still cold. My bones were cold. My brain was cold. I had a new schedule for the semester—Art History Introduction I, Calculus II, Marriage and the American Family, Ancient Philosophy—but I rarely went to class. I stayed in bed. I slept for hours.

  Outside, the yard browned and died.

  When I wasn’t in bed, I wandered the Harrington library, the hub of the house’s academic wheel. The library’s stained-glass doors opened into a three-story kaleidoscope crammed with desks and noise and books, professors arguing with crying boys, girls napping on couches. Past the front desk, where student workers gossiped as they organized course packets, were shelves upon shelves of books. They almost hid the winding staircase to the second floor. On the second floor stood more shelves of books, along with the house’s only computer lab: ten machines lined up in a dull, low-lit row. I browsed the Encarta Encyclopedia there. It had a good article about Aztec sacrifices. Most of the computers were damaged; some wouldn’t turn on at all. None had access to the Web.

  On the third floor, behind one of the bookcases, I found a forgotten reading room, a tiny alcove with one green lamp and a dusty, sunken blue couch. A print of a dark man driving a chariot hung on the wall. He was wielding a bolt of lightning and baring his teeth. His skin glistened with sweat.

  I lay on the couch and closed my eyes. I touched myself, dreaming of him and me and a fragrant garden.

  When I opened my eyes, I was still in the house.

  *

  That winter I was sleeping with a girl I’d met in the bathroom outside my philosophy class. Mandy had ferociously straight, long black hair and tiny teeth. We had little in common, but we didn’t talk much. I would go over to her room at night when I couldn’t sleep. The smell of her deodorant, a stifling, woody, churchy scent, darkened my mind so I couldn’t think of anything else.

  One night, I ran my hand over Mandy’s back. The moon had slipped from behind a cloud. In its white light, I saw she had a scar, a long pale scratch from the top of her shoulder down her spine.

  I felt, in that moment, that I saw Mandy clearly for the first time. Usually when I came to her room I was drunk. But I was sober enough now to notice her bitten nails, her pin-straight eyelashes, and her scar.

  Mandy turned to me. Her eyes, in the moonlight, were shiny and fierce.

  “Don’t,” she hissed.

  I dropped my hand from her back.

  There was a silence. Mandy opened her mouth, then closed it again, as if she realized she should say something more but didn’t know what. She lay back in the bed. Our bodies weren’t touching.

  “It wasn’t her fault, you know,” Mandy finally said. “It was mine, too. We both hurt each other.”

  I don’t think I had fully realized it until right then: I wasn’t the only one at Catherine on the run. None of my classmates spoke of their pasts, but I sensed them—all their misshapen histories—at dinner, as they chewed their carrot salads in silence, or when their voices laughed too loudly at a stupid joke, or later, in the many feverish hours they spent studying in the library. Everyone here was here desperately. All of us, for one reason or another, had nowhere else to go.

  So, here we were. Christmas must have come and gone. First-years whispered about what we might be doing if we were home: trimming trees, lighting chapel candles, getting drunk with cousins, sledding down silvery hills. Some tried to make phone calls home, but Yaya had been right, none of us had earned nearly enough points. So Christmas was gone, and New Year’s, and nothing happened.

  Nothing ever happened at Catherine.

  Mornings, after I peed and brushed my teeth, I grasped the sink. I stared into the mirror.

  Days. I could see them all, all the days, reflecting into each other forever. Mirrors repeating against mirrors.

  Baby had passed Chemistry I, but now she had Chemistry II, which was even harder. Sometimes when I walked by the lab I heard her class chanting like an order of monks or sketching diagram after diagram in tense silence. At night, in our room, Baby paced and muttered formulas to herself. She didn’t eat. She left flash cards in her bed, by the bathtub, under the dresser. She cried more.

  Baby did have a way of calming herself down, I learned. She picked Master Locks. She’d brought a whole stash of them and a lockpicking kit in a little leather pouch. When she was stuck on one of her worksheet problems, she’d spread them out on her desk and pick them one by one. When a lock finally popped open, she didn’t smile. She just set it aside and moved on to the next.

  “Who taught you how to do that?” I asked once while I watched her. I had been trying to do my calculus homework, but all of my answers were checking out wrong.

  Baby worked for a while longer, fingers twisted around the lock, before she said, “My sister.”

  “Your sister knew how to pick locks?”

  “My sister knew how to do everything.” She had a proud lift to her chin.

  I imagined her sister’s car crash, sometimes. Shattered glass, thrilling heat.

  “I’m going for a walk,” I said.

  I went outside. I walked in circles around the brown yard. I picked up a stick and put it down again. The sun disappeared behind the trees. I went back inside.

  *

  I watched the first snowfall of the season from my couch in the library. The skylight had been opalescent gray all morning. By afternoon, the first flakes fell. They multiplied like a cancer on the glass, shrouding the light. Soon the whole window was dead white.

  I arrived back at our bedroom to find Baby standing by the window, watching the snow with her arms folded. She was wearing our formal uniform of black tights and a black dress that fell stiff to her knobby knees.

  “The winter festival,” she said when she saw my confusion at her outfit. “Did you—did you really forget?”

  Yes, I had forgotten about the festival. We’d received a notice about it on one of last week’s morning tea trays. I hadn’t understood whether it was in celebration of the solstice or the new year or some obscure midwinter holiday.

  “Well, get dressed,” Baby said. “And in something appropriate, please. We are going to be late.”

  After the library, the Harrington great hall was the most expansive room in the house. Long oak tables ran from wall to wall, and the high-pitched, barrel-vaulted ceiling echoed with the noise of crazy laughter, feverish conversation, and chair legs scraping against stone. One wall was an open bank of windows that looked out onto the yard; the others were hung with faded tapestries of Roman myths. The tapestries fluoresced with turquoise and magenta light from the stained-glass clerestory. The professors and administrators sat on a raised dais in the back of the room. Behind the dais hung another tapestry, this one woven with the cryptic patterns and figures that formed the Catherine House insignia.

  Baby and I squeezed our way to the table with the other Molina students, all in similar black formal dress. I sat down and spread my napkin on my lap. I poured myself a glass of wine.

  Baby was staring at me, sharp-eyed.

  “Yes, sweetie?” I said as I poured.

  “You have a bruise on your throat,” she said.

  I touched my neck. It was probably from Mandy. I’d gone to her room the night before.

  As I sipped my wine, I looked for Viktória at the professors’ table. She always sat in the center, and there she was now, head turned in conversation. He
r profile was vase-like, elegant and strange. It was hard to tell her age; her hair was streaked with gray, but thick and long, and her skin was unwrinkled, but thin, almost spectral. Her white chiffon shirt was so sheer I could see the outlines of her breasts. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

  “Vanilla pudding,” said Theo Williams, another Molina first-year, as he slid into the seat beside mine and plucked up the menu card. “My favorite.”

  I glanced over his shoulder at the menu. It described a four-course meal of desserts. To start, vanilla pudding, then cream cheese pie, then a selection of Jell-Os, a palate cleanser before the final course of white cake. I could see the cake now on the service table. It was tall and proud as a bride, encrusted with thick icing and dripping with fondant lace.

  Baby looked like she was going to be sick.

  “Dessert for dinner?” said Nick, across the table. “Oh, good. All we need are some martinis and passive-aggressive quips and it’ll be just like home. My mother would be so proud.”

  “Would she?” Theo said. “Would she really be proud of her little Nicky boy?”

  “Of course she would. She loves me so. I’m her greatest investment.”

  “Man, what about last night?” Theo said.

  Nick tucked his napkin into his collar. “What about last night?”

  “When you were throwing up in the fireplace?” Theo said. “Would she have been proud of you then?”

  “Oh yes.” Nick straightened the napkin. “That’s a Townsend signature move, really.”

  Theo grinned. “Fucking doofus.”

  Theo Williams and Nick Townsend had formed an instant, easy friendship. They didn’t look a thing alike: Theo was a shortish, scrawny black kid with shaggy hair and an eager energy, while Nick had the broad shoulders, princely blond curls, and beautiful manners of someone who’d gone to expensive private schools and summered on various shores. But they were both the kind of boys who felt at home everywhere. Nothing ever bothered them. When a pipe burst in the second-floor hallway, or last month when bad chicken cassoulet left the whole house with food poisoning—every misfortune just made them laugh.

  “Ugh, is that what I saw in the fireplace this morning?” Yaya said, wrinkling her nose. She slid into the seat next to Theo’s. “You are foul.”