Out on the yard, raw purple dusk had fallen. We huddled close together as we walked over the twisting footpath, past the tennis court, and through the grass, the same way I had gone to the tower. Crickets chirruped in the pines. Like the tower, the storage silos and loading dock were far to the house’s southeast, where the shipping truck came in from the back road. It was easy to forget about the back road and that, even here, so far from the house, we were locked inside, everywhere, by the gate.
“This way,” Yaya said, leading me around the loading dock, a squat cement building with fluorescent white windows. We walked up three steps, knocked on a metal door, waited a minute with no answer, and then entered.
The door opened into a wide, bright room as cluttered as a thrift store. The walls were lined with cardboard boxes stacked haphazardly against each other and metal shelves filled with books, toys, and toiletries. Commissary goods, still untagged. Some of the cardboard boxes were labeled—cans x, xl, carrots, bedsheets (twin xl)—and others not.
A side door was open to the back of a truck. A man stood in the truck taking notes on a yellow legal pad.
“Bunny?” Yaya said.
The man turned around. He was short and white, with thin gray hair, pudgy around his face and belly. He glanced from one to the other of us with slow, shy eyes.
“I’m Yaya,” Yaya said, extending her hand. “Sarah Beth King said we could come by? And this is Ines.”
Bunny shook her hand, then mine. His hand was soft as a girl’s. He looked at us each in turn again.
“So,” Yaya said, “can we look around?”
“Yes,” Bunny said. He had a lisp. “I don’t think—don’t think there’s much that you girls would like, though. You should come earlier.”
“We will. Next time. But for now …”
Yaya wove her way expertly to one of the shelves. Something had already caught her eye.
I ran my fingers over the shelf nearest me. It was stacked with old faded coloring books and packets of crayons. Silly things like that came through the commissary sometimes. Catherine graduates donated back to the school without really considering what we might want or need. They probably couldn’t remember what life was really like here. I couldn’t blame them; even being here now, the days blurred.
I flipped through a Sesame Street coloring book. Ernie giggled back at me. He was getting ready for a bath. He had a nice towel and scrub brush.
“Do you like it?” Bunny said. “The book?”
I turned to see that he had been staring at me. I couldn’t read his expression.
He handed me another coloring book, on top of the one I had, then gave me a packet of crayons, too.
“They’re nice books,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said.
Through the window, in the last shadows of daylight, I could just make out something there, in the trees across the lawn: the white wall of a building. I blinked, thinking I must be imagining things.
No, of course; that was the tower. I hadn’t realized it was this close.
“Ines,” Yaya said. “Come look.”
She had found a string of fake pearls at the bottom of a Tupperware full of toys. I helped her unknot the pearls and do the clasp. They shone plasticky-white as she wound them around her neck.
She turned to me, touching them.
“Aren’t they everything?” she said. “Aren’t they just divine?”
“Yes,” I said. “Divine.”
She turned to look at her reflection in the dock’s darkening window.
“I’ve always loved beautiful things,” she whispered. “It’s stupid, I know. I’ve gotten into the worst messes for stupid, beautiful things.”
She smiled at her reflection. She stroked the pearls.
*
I had been keeping up with my Shakespeare readings, more or less, but the midterm was going to be brutal. Half of the terms listed in the study packet read like a foreign language. Anna and Diego were in the class, too, so I asked if I could study with them. It seemed like a friendly thing to do.
The three of us holed up in the Molina library with books and blankets and pots of tea. We took turns quizzing one another, editing our review answers, and napping. Later in the evening, silly and stupid, we gave up on studying and helped Anna write a love letter to the first-year she liked. Dear Robert, it began, Thee art the man of my dreams, the prince of my soul, the architect of my joy everlasting.
“Tell him you want to fuck him in the parlor,” I said. “The one on the second floor of Ashley. They fixed the leaking there, it’s nice again.”
Anna laughed, shaking her head. “You are something else.”
I sipped my tea. It felt nice, pretending to be normal.
After I took the midterm, I slept, though not for long, and woke late that night. I blinked until the gray bedroom settled into shapes. I patted my belly. I stared at the ceiling for a long time.
I slipped out of my bedroom.
I walked downstairs, past the baths in the Harrington basements, then farther, winding my way through the moonlit halls until I was in Ashley. My head felt two sizes too big. I hummed to myself, a French lullaby I hadn’t realized I remembered.
Somehow, I ended up in the hallway with the umbrella wallpaper. The hallway with the door to M. Neptune’s lab.
I found myself in that hallway a lot. I didn’t know why; nothing ever happened there. I hadn’t even seen anyone go in or out of the door since that one student many months ago.
I continued on, passing through a crooked burgundy hall that held a painting of an owl. The hallway led to a humid green glass-paneled conservatory that opened, suddenly, onto a balcony.
The broad stone balcony was rimmed with a balustrade and decorated with a profusion of potted plants: impatiens, zinnias, and funny little lemon trees. The plants’ leaves were gray and crabbed, their blooms theatrically drooped. Abundant ivy tangled over the stone.
I walked to the balustrade. It was an unseasonably warm night for late October. The air smelled rich with damp earth and dying leaves. The sky was high, vaulted, and starlit, the clouds sublime purple and white.
“Ines.”
I turned.
Theo stood in the cold moonlight at the other end of the balcony. He was holding a sheet of paper, big as a road map. A mess of fabric and string was bundled at his feet. Nick down there, too, sprawled on his stomach, openmouthed. For one uncanny moment I thought, Nick’s dead, Theo killed him, but then Nick snorted.
Theo flashed one of his loose smiles. “Man, we’re never really alone here, huh?” he said, slurring. “Even at four in the morning on a secret balcony, you might run into some ghost.”
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Making a kite.” He flipped over the paper. It was covered with instructions and diagrams. “We got this kit in the commissary. Nick was supposed to be helping me, but he’s drunk as shit. We finished our Ethics test, then we were playing cards, and then we were gonna make the kite, but Nick’s out.”
“You’re a little drunk, too.”
He was smiling. “Yeah.”
I went over to read the instructions. The kite was supposed to look like a sailboat.
A dream ship floating through the ocean-sky. Something about the image made my nose hurt, as if I might cry.
I sat on the cold stone and hugged my legs. Nick honked again but didn’t wake up.
Theo sat down, too. He was watching me. His stare, even drunk, was intensely direct.
“Do you remember?” I said. “A few months ago, I came to your room and you played music for me. You played that pretty girls’ song.”
“Of course,” he said. “When was that—March, April? Feels like, I don’t know, longer. I think.” He rearranged his legs on the stone.
“You’re different now,” I said.
“Am I?” He patted his hair. “I don’t know.”
“Yes. You fit in here more.” I rested my chin on my knees. “You didn’t feel we
ll then.”
“No,” he said.
“Do you feel better now?”
He nodded slowly. “I’m getting there,” he whispered. “I’m getting better. The doctor here … she’s good. I take three pills now. One in the morning, two at night. They’ve been helping. A lot. I never thought I would feel better. But here I am. Feeling better.”
I thought of the photograph I’d found in Theo’s room, the one of him with his grandmother. Her fragile body in its flannel housecoat, the casual way Theo had slouched beside the stove. I assumed they lived together, that they loved and took care of each other. There had been a sweet comfort between them. Maybe I recognized it so sharply because it’d always been missing for me.
But could his love for his grandma really have been so simple? Weren’t there nights when his friends were off having fun—drinking on rooftops or kissing on fire escapes—and he was alone, watching his grandma fall asleep in front of the TV, her hands twitching as they reached for something he couldn’t see? On those nights, had he felt his love for her turning into a sick, shameful hate? Had he sometimes gone to bed in the dark and thought, What if I never get out of here?
Theo looked up at me.
“What about you?” he said.
“I’m the same,” I said. “I never change.”
He laughed. “We’re supposed to be getting smarter, anyway.”
“I guess.”
He leaned back on his hands. “You’re doing all right. I see you. You’re working. You’re studying.”
“I have to, now. I was going to fail out.”
“Shit.”
“Yes. What about you? You’re dating Sophie now.”
“Mmm.” His lip quirked into a smile.
“You like her.”
“Yeah. You should hear her—she has this laugh. It cracks me up, just hearing her laugh at any stupid shit.”
Theo was running a hand over the concrete, still staring at me. I thought, He always likes to be touching something.
“What?” he said.
“You see,” I said, “such wonderful things. You look around, and all the world is wonderful.”
He smiled a little. “Not all the world. But all of Catherine? Yeah, maybe. I mean, don’t you realize how lucky we are? Sleeping in these nice rooms, eating these ridiculous meals, reading and drinking and playing with friends? How can you see this any other way but wonderful?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I never see anything right. My eyes are backwards. Everything I see is upside down.”
Theo picked up one of the dowels. He rolled it between his fingers.
I reached for the instructions. “So,” I said, “how is this supposed to come together?”
We tried joining the ribs of the kite with the string, but they kept coming loose. It was a long time before we realized that Theo, in his drunkenness, had left part of the kit in his room. I pushed him. He couldn’t stop laughing. The moon lowered and the sky paled.
We shook Nick awake. As we dragged him back to his room, he leaned all his weight against Theo, mumbling about ethics and love. After we finally got Nick into bed, pulled off his shoes, and tucked him in, Theo sang him a Boyz II Men song as a lullaby.
Theo and I went to the morning room. We filled two bowls with oatmeal and took them to the parlor. We ate them cross-legged on the parlor rug.
“You know,” Theo said, stirring at the mush, “everyone thinks you’re cool, but I know you’re not.”
“I am,” I said. “I’m very cool.”
“Nah. You’re, like, gorgeous and mysterious and act like you don’t give a shit about anything. But I bet there’s something you give a shit about.”
“I don’t think there is.”
He raised his eyebrows.
I took a bite of oatmeal.
“What’s your favorite animal?” he said.
“Snails.”
“Okay. You like snails. What about places?”
“I want to go to Egypt one day,” I said. “I want to be buried in a pyramid.”
“Me, too. Let’s go together.” He set down the bowl. “What about movies? Do you go to the movies?”
“Everyone goes to the movies.”
“What’s your favorite kind?” He didn’t blink as he watched me. “Horror? Action?”
“I like musicals.”
“Really?” He cocked his head. “Huh.”
“Yes,” I said. “I like dancing. And big happy endings.”
“Sure,” he said. “Who doesn’t like happy endings?”
He stuffed his mouth with a huge bite of oatmeal.
I said, “I wish I cared more. Gave more of a shit. The way you do, and the way Baby did. How you care about your studies, and about plasm. I wish I loved anything like that.”
Theo put down his bowl. He yawned.
“What is it?” I said.
“What’s what?” he said.
“What is plasm?”
He glanced at me, then down.
“Everything,” he said tonelessly. “It’s just … everything.”
I stirred at the oatmeal. Suddenly I was angry. Just tell me the fucking truth, I wanted to say. Use actual words.
Theo lifted his bowl, then set it down again. He stood up.
“I’m going to fall asleep if we keep sitting here,” he said. “Let’s go explore.”
We crept out of the parlor and up the pink marble stairs, ending on Molina’s fourth floor, in a room with mauve brocade-covered walls and heavy rosewood furniture: a dresser, an armoire, a bed frame with no mattress. The dresser held only a packet of bobby pins and, in the bottom drawer, a box full of faux-ivory elephant statuettes.
We clattered the little elephants to the floor. We staged a tiny war between them on the rug.
When Theo fell asleep by the bed frame in the midmorning, I kept playing. I danced a little elephant over his arm and onto his neck.
*
In my first days and weeks at Catherine, everything happened for the first time. I attended my first class, failed my first quiz, and ate my first butter cake. I lost my first game of bid whist, then won my second. I took my first nap in the library sun.
But first times became many times. The house, in the architecture of its rooms, schedules, and surfaces, had a pattern, and I patterned into it. This was the way I twisted the bathroom door handle to get it to turn; this was how my face looked in the mirror over the sink; this was the way condensation beaded on the wallpaper over the tub. This was how I walked to the morning room, class, great hall, and parlor, and this is how I walked back to my room. Small sensations—tea trays clinking down at our bedroom doors, pink mornings glowing on the yard, cold bowls of egg salad for lunch—repeated and fluxed. Breakfasts, tests, and teas, essays, festivals, and baths. Days cycled into weeks, weeks into months. And now here we were, in November again.
On bad days, I could feel the whole year swinging underneath me like a dead thing. But there were good days, too. Days when I didn’t think about Baby, and Yaya made me laugh, and the hall served maple ice cream for dessert. Days when I felt okay.
When I first came to Catherine, the house’s repetitions made it feel dull and small. Now, somehow, the house felt bigger. Catherine didn’t twist in on itself; it recurred infinitely. Pencils and Tshirts and slices of melon flashed against one another like mirrors against mirrors, continuously unfolding into smaller and smaller details: the swan pattern on a parlor’s wallpaper, a broken tile in the courtyard, and the humid smell of wet stone and moss, in one vague moment of a rainy afternoon.
*
Catherine’s annual fall festival was held the day after our finals. My first year, I hadn’t watched the parade, though Baby and I could hear the noise from our room. We heard the drunk third-years march through the courtyard with whoops and stomps, the underclassmen cheer as wine and vomit splashed against stone. But inside, I was painting Baby’s toenails. I used a bottle of sparkly blue polish I’d found abandoned in the Ashley music
room. Baby stared at my hands as I worked and flinched from my touch. “You can relax,” I said, but she didn’t.
I did watch the parade this year, though. From my window, I could see the mummers, the third-years costumed as homemade ghosts, monsters, and aliens with plaster heads and fuzzy ears. They screeched, banged on drums, laughed, and danced as they paraded across the courtyard and back into the hall. My Molina classmates gathered by the trees or leaned out of windows to watch. They cheered as they tossed streamers, candies, and noisemakers to the crowd below.
I curled up on my windowsill. I hugged my legs.
Could I ever stop thinking of Baby? Would she ever stop haunting me?
Theo and Nick stood among the crowd in the courtyard. I saw them slouching against a fig tree, watching as the parade passed. Every few minutes, Theo clapped his hands above his head in stupid pleasure. The two of them looked very drunk and very glad.
What did it feel like? To be so glad?
Theo and Nick were eyeing a first-year girl now. She was dancing with her friends. Every time she laughed, she turned to make sure the boys were still watching. Theo looped his arm over Nick’s shoulders and whispered something in his ear. I wondered what he said. The girl was pretty, but I was more beautiful than she was.
Viktória had said my past life was over. That felt true. I was new, here at Catherine. But I would never be a good student or a good person, like Baby. Not really. There was no point.
But I had other ways of learning things. I had done it before, outside, and I could do it again. I could pretend to be normal. I could have friends. I could kiss boys nicely and whisper in their ears, and get them to whisper in mine. Because Catherine was my home now, the whole house, all of it—its bright places and dark ones, its conspiracies and secrets—and I wanted it all. I wanted everything in me.
Someone banged on my door.
“Ines, are you in there?” Anna called. Her voice was loose and drunk. I could hear Diego laughing behind her. “What are you doing? Come down!”
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