I was crashing into the hotel room. I was slumping down. I was staring into a face.
“The house is the woods,” Viktória said. “You are in the woods.”
I tried to turn my head but couldn’t. Vomit rose up in my throat. I was choking.
A girl said, “I am in the house.” Her voice seemed to come from the ceiling.
“But before, you were somewhere else,” Viktória said. “Where?”
“In a white house at the end of a street,” the girl said. “We moved in last year, my mom and me. It was a big house. Too big. All the rooms had carpets. My mom vacuumed every day. I hated the sound of the vacuum.”
One of my pins had come loose. The pad had fallen from my skull. I touched my hand to the space where it used to be.
I rubbed my eyes. I felt as if I were emerging from a daydream. I wasn’t choking anymore, and I couldn’t see anything except the ballroom.
“You were in the house,” Viktória was still saying, “and what was in you?”
“The sad thing,” the girl said. “I was sad. I was sad like the vacuum was sad. I was sad, and I couldn’t stop being sad.”
“Yes,” Viktória said. “The sadness was inside.”
I lowered my hand from the loose pin. I blinked again.
I said nothing as I felt my heartbeat slow.
“Does anyone else,” Viktória was saying, “have bad things inside?”
I could hear the aides shuffle among our bodies. Pins beeped as the concentrators made small adjustments.
I felt a flash of panic. They were going to realize that one of my pins had fallen loose. They were going to bring me deeper into the dark daydream.
One of the concentrators stepped over my head. I looked up. It was the same boy with the acne.
He frowned as he glanced over the detached pin. But as he bent to fix it, his eyes flashed onto mine.
Please, I mouthed, don’t.
His face was impassive.
I didn’t know why he listened to me, but he did. He stood and let his hands fall. His footsteps echoed as he walked away.
I breathed.
The room was becoming clearer.
“My parents didn’t want me to go here, to Catherine,” a boy was saying in a lisping voice. “They wanted me close to home. But every other school was so expensive. My dad said we could have made it work, but I knew he was lying. Catherine was my only chance. My only chance to be everything they want me to be.” His voice wavered. “But I don’t want to be here, so far away. I miss my parents. I miss my church. I was in a group there. I miss hanging out with them after school, with my friends. I miss TV. And—what if my mom gets sick again? What if it comes back? And I don’t even know?”
Viktória slowly paced the room.
“I understand,” she said. “Yes. Fear. We have fear inside. But that is not you anymore. You don’t have to be afraid. Your future is here, in this house. You are here. You are in the house.”
“In the house,” we said.
“In the house, down the hall.”
“In the house,” we said, “down the hall.”
The stories drifted, and my mind drifted, too. Until Baby was the one speaking.
“Last year,” Baby said, “I was at the Macy’s parade. I went there alone. I had—we’d gone to New York to visit my aunt for Thanksgiving. Her apartment was ugly and hot, and all my cousins hate me. So I went to the parade. And next to me, there was this pretty little girl. She had the longest pretty curls, really nice brown, chocolate-brown. And pretty eyes, and dimples. She was sitting on her dad’s shoulders and she was laughing. And—I hated her.”
Baby’s voice was stronger now.
“I hated her. I really did. I hated her so much it hurt. I could see how nice her life would be. She was going to be invited to sleepovers and pizza parties. She was going to go on dates with pretty boys. She would have nice, pretty children. And then she would die, and she would be happy. She would be happy. And I was angry—so angry I cried—at the parade, because that will never be me. I will never be someone happy. Because I am someone alone. That’s what I thought.”
Her voice was strong, though softer now.
“But now I see I’m not alone. Because here, in the house, I have everything. I have teachers who care about me. I have books. I have the lab. I’m still not pretty or sweet—but I don’t care. Because I have work to do. There can be something good in me. Something mine.”
“You can be good,” Viktória said. “In the house.”
“In the house,” Baby said, and we all echoed, “In the house.”
“In the house, downstairs, down the hall, in the ballroom.”
I could see Viktória more clearly now. She stepped around us as she spoke.
I touched my throat and felt the vomit still there, rising in waves as if pumped by my heart.
The chandeliers hummed.
“You are in the house and the house is in today,” Viktória said. “Today is not a moment. Today is not a point. Today is an infinite area. Today is forever. Everything that has happened and that will ever happen is now. Everything that has been and will be is here. And everything is good. Everything is fine.”
I closed my eyes again.
“You are not sad. You are not afraid. You are not hateful. Because you are here. You are here. You are inside. And you are ready.”
Some of the students’ eyes were open, others closed. But all of their faces were slack with pleasure.
“You are here,” Viktória said.
No, I thought lightly. I’m not here. You can’t catch me. I’m too gone.
Footsteps echoed near my head.
“You are in,” Viktória said. “And doesn’t it feel good?”
I turned to the sound of her voice.
The eye contact hit me with a shock. Viktória was watching me with a slight smile. Her eyes drifted to my skull.
She knew I hadn’t fixed the pin.
The Tower
In the days following the coming in, I attended my classes, like I had promised M. Owens I would. I raised my hand and sometimes gave right answers. I did the readings, or at least sat in front of the textbooks and turned the pages.
But as I turned those pages, my mind drifted, and I remembered Viktória’s smile. Her clear gaze, eyes steady on me, and her little teeth. The slow click of her shoes as she’d walked away.
She knew. She knew I’d felt the pin come loose and done nothing to fix it. I thought I had disappeared in the crowd of students, that I was invisible, but she saw me. She knew.
What was she going to do? That kind of resistance had to be a serious offense. Was she going to throw me out? Or pull me further in—into some tight, airless room where she could properly examine me?
My stomach squeezed at the thought. I couldn’t let her see my insides. I couldn’t.
No one talked about the coming in afterward. But I could feel the weight of it everywhere, in the quiet way students picked at their breakfasts or how they slunk quickly back to their rooms after class. Even generally open, sunny people like Nick avoided the topic. I was sitting with him in the great hall once, a few days after the ceremony, chatting about breeds of dog, when he suddenly stopped mid-sentence, stood, and left the room without a word.
I’d watched his retreating back in shock. Then I dimly remembered someone telling a story about a dog during the coming in. Had that been Nick? What had he said?
I couldn’t understand it. So I tried to forget about the coming in. I concentrated on my finals.
In the end, I passed every class. My grades were awful, but I passed. That was enough. I decided to concentrate in History of Art, as I’d told M. Owens I might. It was as good a concentration as any, and I’d already registered for the second half of the survey course.
Diego Jimenez, a small, serious boy who lived upstairs, was applying to the concentration, too. According to him, I should start working on my chronological and geographical distributional requirements, and
Black Visual Cultures was supposed to be a good course this semester. Also, I would need to take German.
“I don’t need German,” I said. “I already speak French and Spanish.”
“Well, you need German, too.” Diego shuffled the cards with a dignified shwip before dealing a hand to himself and Yaya. They were playing gin rummy. “Art history was invented in Austria.”
Diego flipped over a card from the deck. His fingers were short and tidy, with buffed, clipped nails. They made everything he did appear elegant and correct, whether it was slipping on gloves, draping a napkin over his lap, or peeling a grapefruit and arranging the slices in a starburst on a saucer. He wore his chin-length, otter-brown hair neatly combed behind his ears and his T-shirt tucked into his jeans. He walked slowly, talked slowly, and ate slowly, with the deliberate relish of someone who considered consumption an art form.
“It’ll be fine,” he said as he discarded. “German is wonderful. And art history is the most beautiful concentration, really.”
Yaya frowned at the hand she’d been dealt, brushing absentmindedly at her sleeve. She was wearing the faux-mink coat she’d had since fall. It was much shabbier now.
We were in Molina’s music room, an incense-perfumed space furnished with brocade chairs, music history books, Chinese black lacquer screens, and a grand piano polished to a high gloss. Watercolor paintings of foxes and herons hung on the white damask wallpaper. Diego and Yaya had taken to retiring to the music room after dinner to drink and play cards. Sometimes, after a few bottles of wine, Diego would sit at the piano—his posture perfect, even drunk—and drawl out wandering, melancholy nocturnes while Yaya sang along, swaying like a flower. She made up the lyrics as she went. She wasn’t a very good singer.
“Have you been to the gallery yet?” Yaya said to me, without looking up from her cards. “It’s unreal. Totally gorgeous.”
“Are you applying to art history, too?” I asked.
“Yaya’s doing mathematics,” Diego said. “She’s brilliant.”
She laid down her cards. “Gin.”
“What?” Diego bent to look at her cards. “Oh dear.”
“But I don’t want to take German,” I said.
“Wie schade,” Diego mumbled. He glanced at me, and then said, “Oh, don’t worry. You still have time to sign up for the introduction. It’s not too bad.”
The days distended as winter melted into spring. Snow dripped down the house’s walls and mucked up the yard. Outside, the maples molded green. Inside, the rooms grew stuffy with a feverish humidity.
Following Yaya’s suggestion, I visited the art gallery, a suite of three rooms in Ashley’s basement used to display Catherine’s collection. The first two rooms were filled with paintings—landscapes, portraits, abstract color fields—from floor to ceiling, like a Parisian salon. The third was larger and exhibited only a few artworks, each hung with a more modern sense of display.
My footsteps echoed as I walked through the third room, up to a painting of a ballroom.
The girls in the scene whirred in dance. Their cheeks and lips and frothing skirts were all the same shade of pretty pastel pink. On the table, a champagne coupe beaded sweat.
Somewhere out in the world, real girls were drinking real champagne. They were eating cherries and kissing each other with flushed, rosy lips. They were prancing on tables. They were laughing.
Soon after I left the gallery, I was lost. I turned a corner and realized I didn’t know which direction I had come from.
I got lost in Catherine a lot. Usually I found made my way out to the yard and from there back to the entryway into Molina. This time, I kept going.
I went down one hallway, up another. I passed an empty sitting room with cornflower-blue wallpaper, then a closet full of brooms. Behind another door, a bathroom with the toilet removed.
Then the hallway twisted into one with burgundy wallpaper patterned with tiny gold figures. I looked closer. They were little umbrellas.
Was I still in Ashley?
There was a stairway at the end of the hallway. Before that, in the middle of the hall, was a door. The door had a keypad by the handle.
I tried the handle. It was locked.
“What are you doing?”
I turned.
A new materials concentrator, the girl with the long black braid, strode toward me with an irritated frown.
“I’m trying to open this door,” I said.
“Well, don’t,” she said. “You’re not allowed in here.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re not.”
She stepped in front of me. She pulled a card from her back pocket.
She turned when she realized I was still watching her. “Could you, like … stand back, please?”
I stood back.
She swiped, and the door clicked. She frowned at me one last time before slipping inside.
The door clicked shut behind her.
I walked down the umbrella hallway and back up onto the yard.
*
Theo had been right; after our coming in, our class was allowed into weekly sessions. Our ushers gave no announcement about the change, nor did we receive any notice or letter from the administrators. But before our coming in, any first-year who tried to enter the great hall during session was turned away. Now we were in.
Session began at sunset. Beneath the weak glow of the chandeliers, the great hall felt like an in-between place, a room between here and nowhere. Our shadows shifted as we filed in. None of us sat at our usual tables; even the professors abandoned their dais to be among the students. Only Viktória kept herself apart. While we settled into our seats, she stood by the windows, arms folded.
Once we were quiet, white cakes and clay cups of wine were passed around, as they had been during our coming in. But there were no plasm pins. Apparently that part was over.
After we ate the cakes and drank our first sips of wine, Viktória straightened. Then any noise stopped.
She waited, eyes fluttering behind her closed eyelids. Then she began:
Your hands are on the table. The table in the hall, across the yard, in the house. The house is in the woods. In the woods, across the yard, in your hands, is the cup.
The cup is in your hands. Your hands are in the house.
Her voice echoed through the hall, as compelling as a hallucination. And we chorused in response:
The cup is in my hands. My hands are in the house.
The house is in the woods. The woods are in my hands.
At least, that’s what everyone else did. I didn’t chant. I didn’t say anything. I thought some aide or professor would scold me for sitting stubbornly silent, but no one seemed to care. And I went to session only twice before I decided I hated it. I hated Viktória’s voice and the droned response, the minutes slipping into hours as the crowd hummed on. Their chants made my brain buzz against my skull, so bored it felt like panic.
During my second session, I watched Baby as she chanted. She was sitting two tables away from me. Tears streamed down her face. Her lips were moving, but her voice was lost in the chorus. She squeezed her hands tight and raised them high.
Joyful. That’s was she was. She was full up with joy.
The pins and the sessions, and our classes, and the house—somehow they were all part of the same experiment. I could tell. It made me nervous. But no one had said anything about sessions being mandatory, so I didn’t go. Instead, I found the back entrance to the kitchen, where aides set cookies and pastries to cool after baking. They let me take some before laying them out for dessert service. I ate them alone in my room.
*
A bland night in March. The aides had mowed the yard that afternoon, and the whole house smelled green and harsh. I was walking back to my bedroom when I heard a quiet electric noise.
I stopped. I was in the boys’ hall down the way from ours. It must have been long past midnight, because the hall was silent except for the faint melodic thrum.
I crept close to the wall. I leaned my ear against it.
Music.
I knocked on the door.
There was a long hesitation before I heard feet patter over. Theo opened the door, his eyes wide with surprise.
“Can I come in?” I said.
He stepped back to let me pass.
Theo had a single, like Yaya, and his bedroom was the neatest I’d seen at Catherine. The bed was made, the floor swept, the notebooks on his desk arranged in a meticulous stack. Even the baseboards looked scrubbed. The only signs of life were the Keds by his door and a plate of almond cakes on his desk.
I loved the messy rooms of the boys I slept with. Dirty teacups cluttered their desks and sweaty wads of Tshirts lurked under their beds. Their sheets always had a sour animal smell. I liked the smell. I liked how their rooms, like their bodies, felt so dumb, casual, and warm.
But Theo’s room didn’t feel warm. And his sneakers, lined up so tenderly by the door, made my heart hurt.
I picked up an almond cake. “I think they’re serving these all week, you know,” I said. “You don’t have to hoard them.”
Theo, watching me from the doorway, gave a little smile. “Habit, I guess,” he said. “No one forgets being hungry.”
I set down the cake. I could feel Theo’s big Bambi eyes, so stupidly easy to read, staring at me with bright curiosity.
“What about thirsty?” I said. “Do you have any wine?”
He opened his closet, reached far into the back, past crisp Tshirts and jackets all hung and ordered, and pulled out a half-empty bottle. He passed it to me.
I took a swig as I sat on the edge of his bed. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand before giving him the bottle. He took a swig, too.
He lounged on the floor. He may have kept his room ruthlessly neat, but every gesture of his body was easy and loose. He was watching me.
I said, “What were you listening to?”
Surprise flashed over his face. “Listening to? What do you mean?”
I took another swig from the bottle.
He opened his mouth, then closed it. He shook his head with a slight smile. “Look under the mattress.”
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