The Letting Go

by Deborah Markus

“Alarms don’t go off all by themselves, genius,” another girl told her. “Somebody set it off.”

  “That’s enough, Sarah,” Ms. Lurie snapped, and that frightened us more than anything so far this morning.

  Ms. Lurie never snaps. She sighs sometimes. She gives Improving Lectures that would sound straight out of the nineteenth century if they weren’t so laced with urgings to be Present. She smiles a lot, which would be annoying except she actually means it. Before this morning, I’d never heard her say anything harsher than Is there another way you could have phrased that, Emily? And believe me, I’ve given her plenty of reasons to say plenty worse.

  And now she’s snapping at us.

  And that, more than the unfamiliar slant of light and the memory of alarm bells, made Hawthorne a strange and terrifying place.

  This is My letter to the World

  That never wrote to Me—

  Phone reception is spotty at Hawthorne. Everyone who comes here figures out pretty quickly where the good spots are, and none of them are in the lounge.

  I don’t have anyone to call, of course, but some of the girls are crying. One of them practically threw a fit about being allowed out of the lounge just for a minute, why can’t we go for just one minute?

  The only thing the teachers will tell us is that everyone at Hawthorne is fine, but something terrible has happened and we all have to sit tight for a little while longer and let the police do their jobs.

  “What jobs?” the girl practically shrieked. “What’s going on?”

  No answer.

  It must be starting again.

  But who could it be?

  I’ve been playing by the rules. For years I’ve played by them—certainly the whole time I’ve been at Hawthorne. I barely even know anyone’s name here—and, anyway, they said it isn’t anyone at the school.

  I thought it would be safe here

  I felt safe here

  I want to be

  The girl in the white nightgown is sitting and watching me scribble. I glared at her once, but she just smiled until I looked away again.

  I think she’s new here. She has to be. Everyone else has gotten the message to leave me alone.

  The last thing I need right now is to have to fend off yet another friendly, well-intentioned idiot who doesn’t know what fire looks like.

  Not that this girl looks friendly, exactly. More like amused, I guess.

  It’s hard to write with someone watching my every pen stroke. Not that she’s anywhere near close enough to see what I’m writing, but the way she’s staring makes me wonder if it’s possible to read pens the way some people can read lips.

  If so, I hope she can read this message that’s just for her: Piss off.

  ’Tis not that Dying hurts us so—

  ’Tis Living—hurts us More—

  But Dying—is a different—way—

  A Kind behind the Door—

  The Southern Custom—of the Bird—

  That Ere the Frosts are due—

  Accepts a better Latitude—

  We—Are the Birds—that stay.

  Still here on lounge lockdown.

  The police are everywhere, looking for maybe even they don’t know what.

  They’ll want to speak to us at some point.

  I’m not looking forward to having to try to seem shocked at the idea of murder.

  Not that anyone has told us that’s what happened, but what else could it be?

  MINE enemy is growing old,—

  All right, I admit it: I thought it might be over by now. It’s been so long since the last time.

  I thought maybe I was safe now.

  Not that I’ve been taking any chances. Of course I wouldn’t. I’ve grown used to living like this. It’s almost all I remember. (Almost.) It’s practically a point of pride now—being unspeakably rude to someone and seeing that look on her face: Did she really just say that? And me thinking, Yes. Yes, I did. And you’d better hope you never learn how big a favor I just did you.

  It’s funny how startled people are by rudeness. If you asked a random person out of the blue, they’d probably say, Oh, yes, people are horrible and good manners are dead and that goes double for teenagers. Triple for rich ones.

  But then say to them, “If you have to be a moron, I’d appreciate it if you could at least be a quiet moron,” and watch how shocked they look.

  I guess it’s just that people are used to there being some kind of reason for things. They don’t have to like the reason; they just want to know it’s there.

  My nonstop unpleasantness must seem completely random. Like Iago: Why was he such a jerk to Othello from scene one? You can read the whole play and then read it again and not be any the wiser.

  Maybe Iago just enjoyed being cruel.

  I don’t, but I’ve gotten used to it. Anyway, it beats the alternative.

  But now it’s started again. Maybe.

  (Could they just tell us, already?)

  I’ve been so careful for so long.

  Was it all for nothing?

  Othello killed his wife for a reason. It was a completely wrong reason, and it would have been a bad one even if he’d had his facts straight, but the motivation was there. He wasn’t just lashing out at whoever happened to be next to him.

  People can learn to live with almost anything if they think there’s a reason for it. Something like a reason, anyway. A rationalization. Even just a pattern.

  I thought this killer was an Othello, and now it seems he’s an Iago.

  What am I supposed to do?

  God gave a Loaf to every Bird—

  But just a Crumb—to Me—

  I dare not eat it—tho’

  I starve—

  Hawthorne is all about letting us find our own paths and go our own ways, but those ways had better bring us to the breakfast table at 8:30, lunch at 12:30, and dinner at six o’clock sharp. Prompt and regular appearance in the dining room is practically the only rule here. Hawthorne isn’t just about the joys of self-discipline and the freedom to follow one’s own motivation, Ms. Lurie says. It’s about building community and fellowship and everything else they talk about in the brochure.

  Breakfast at Hawthorne is usually whole-grain porridge, whole-grain toast, fruit, grass-fed milk, and honey made by proud local bees. No bacon, no refined sugar. Coffee only on Sundays; tea the rest of the week.

  Today, while we were still huddled in the lounge, Ms. Young and Vera brought in take-out cups of hot chocolate, lots of paper napkins, and pink boxes of what turned out to be the most beautiful pastries I’d ever seen.

  (Breakfast the morning after my mother was murdered was Lucky Charms cereal. I don’t think they did it on purpose.)

  The girl in the nightgown laughed. “Looks like my crystal ball is working,” she said.

  “Things are a little … disordered in the kitchen right now,” Ms. Young said.

  “Still crawling with cops, she means,” the girl murmured.

  “So we had this sent from Sunrise Bakery,” Ms. Young continued, ignoring or not hearing her. “Please try to eat something, girls. You should be able to go back to your rooms and get dressed soon.”

  “I don’t want to eat!” a girl cried. It was the same girl who was yelping before about the police and their jobs. She’s pretty pale on any ordinary day. This morning her skin looked whiter than nightgown-girl’s nightgown. “I want to know what’s going on! I want to talk to my mom!”

  She shook her friend’s arm off her shoulders and stood before Ms. Young. “Tell us what’s going on!”

  Ms. Young is one of the mentors. She’s also Bianca Young, the poet. She lives the writer-as-wide-eyed-waif stereotype, and looks as if a baby’s breath could carry her away. She looked at Vera, who’s a sculptor and is built like one of her own sturdy statues. Vera met her eyes bleakly and then turned to the rest of us.

  “We’ll tell you more as soon as we can,” she said.

  It would have starved a Gnat—
r />   To live so small as I—

  And yet I was a living Child

  With—Food’s nescessity

  Opon me—like a Claw—

  I could no more remove

  Than I could modify a Leech—

  Or make a Dragon—move—

  I was scribbling away when the girl in the white nightgown sat down next to me.

  “I took too much and you didn’t take any,” she said. “Here.” She put a covered paper cup of hot chocolate on the arm of my easy chair, and then a chocolate croissant on top of a paper napkin.

  I glared at her. “I don’t want anything.” I should have left it at that, but like an idiot I added, “Anyway, I don’t like chocolate. Or croissants.”

  (The part about croissants is true, anyway. If I want to eat plastery flakes, I’ll gnaw on a wall.)

  Her expression brightened. “Oh, good. More for me.”

  She took the croissant back and left a small, soft apple pastry in its place. “Better?”

  “No.”

  The terrible thing was, in spite of everything, it looked wonderful. I caught a whiff of cinnamon and cloves. This was exactly the kind of thing I might pick up for a treat on one of our field trips into town. And it had been a long time since dinner last night.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “We have to enjoy this while it lasts. We won’t see the likes of this breakfast again. Not at Hawthorne, anyway.”

  I couldn’t help noticing that several of the other girls seemed to share her philosophy. The low-level terror that had dominated the room had subsided into bafflement and a bit of carpe diem. So much refined sugar at Hawthorne was as foreign as the police presence, and the consensus seemed to be that if we had to put up with the one, we might as well enjoy the other.

  And could things really be that bad if they were feeding us like this?

  Even the girl who’d been making such a fuss was sitting in a consoling circle of friends, with Bianca Young next to her offering little sweets like a tiny mother bird.

  “I could have gotten something for myself if I’d wanted it,” I said, hoping my stomach wouldn’t choose this inopportune time to growl.

  “I figured you were just being polite and leaving plenty for the rest of us,” she said.

  A girl sitting across from us snickered. “Being polite isn’t exactly Emily’s hobby,” she said.

  Which was so accurate that I didn’t bother replying or even glancing up. The girl in the nightgown, however, looked at her wide-eyed for a long moment. “That’s fascinating,” she said.

  “What?” the other girl asked suspiciously.

  “The way you really seem to believe anyone’s interested in your opinion,” she replied. “Why is that, do you think? Have you been clinically diagnosed as delusional, or are you just an idiot?”

  I sat frozen, trying not to let my jaw drop and break something. This must be what trying to start a conversation with me is like, except I’m sure I don’t sound that nineteenth century.

  The girl across from us glared. She’s white, but her skin is kind of brown, with nutmeggy freckles. “You’re new here, right?” she asked in a patronizing tone.

  “This is my first year, yes.”

  “Well, since you obviously haven’t had time to figure it out on your own yet, I’ll do you a favor and tell you that Emily isn’t exactly worth defending.”

  The girl in the nightgown was gazing at her with almost scientific interest. “Sorry—what did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t,” the other girl said, “but it’s Madison.”

  “That is such a coincidence!”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a bitch at my school named Madison!”

  Madison’s face flushed deep red faster than I would have thought physically possible. Without answering, she shoved her chair back, picked up her pastries, and stomped off to sit with a small group of girls across the room.

  “And speaking of coincidences,” my strange companion went on to no one in particular, “just last week I was telling my mother how glad I was my name doesn’t relate to a city where she forgot to use birth control.”

  The Madison group was whispering and casting glances in our direction. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I said in a low voice.

  “Why not? It was fun. I can see why you make such a habit of it.”

  So she had heard about me.

  “I don’t do it for fun,” I said.

  “No? Why, then?”

  The room felt colder all of a sudden. I wanted to cup my hands around the hot chocolate she’d brought me for warmth, but that would have looked weak.

  “Just leave it alone,” I said instead. My book was next to me, and I opened it at random. You can do that with poetry and it works fine, even if you really are reading. “Leave me alone, while you’re at it.”

  She didn’t look shocked, or hurt, or angry, or all three, the way other people do when I talk to them. She just looked curious. “Why?”

  I gritted my teeth. “I don’t know. Maybe because the bitch named Emily at your school said to.”

  Most people are happy to stay away from me just because I’m aggressively unpleasant. I don’t usually have to go in for attempts to sound menacing. I guess my lack of practice showed, because she laughed.

  “Actually,” she said, “there are two bitches named Emily at my school. And don’t look now, but one of them’s sitting right next to you.”

  for several years, my lexicon was my only companion.

  My independent study project focuses on Emily Dickinson.

  The best thing about Hawthorne, other than the fact that up until recently everyone here was willing to leave me the hell alone, is that I don’t have to say much more than that about what I do all day. I’m drawn to Dickinson’s work, and I want to read it and explore it and learn about her life as well as her writing and see where that takes me next.

  That’s the kind of language that gives the staff at Hawthorne a thrill. It also happens to be true.

  Most of the actual writing I’ve done isn’t anything I can show my mentor or Ms. Lurie, since it’s mostly things I’m not allowed to share. But Hawthorne is giving me a peaceful place to work, and they say that’s what they want to offer their students.

  Emily Dickinson wanted, for reasons only she knew, to keep her poetry mostly to herself.

  That’s the strangest thing about her, and maybe the most famous part of her life. People who don’t know anything else about Dickinson know she was quiet and mostly stayed at home, and that she wrote ridiculously brilliant poems and shut them away until her death gave them to the world.

  She did publish a few poems while she was alive, though. Not many people know that, but it’s true.

  I guess it isn’t quite right to say she published them. They got published, but no one seems quite sure how. And she didn’t sign her name to them.

  Maybe Dickinson just needed the world to know she had a voice, even if in the end she was too shy to sing for a living.

  Maybe that’s why I show my mentor some of my writing now and then. Not much and not often, but some.

  I want to know if I’m any good.

  Not that it matters, since the only story I really want to tell is the one I need to keep to myself until death sorts everything out.

  I keep scrawling things down in weird bursts that sometimes barely make sense, even to me. I stick them into this notebook any old way.

  I like the look of so many random scraps of paper, all different sizes and colors. It’s comforting, like a quilt.

  Maybe I’ll edit them someday, or stitch pages together the way Dickinson liked to sew some of her poetry into little booklets. Maybe I’ll write different versions of the same event the way Dickinson kept different versions of the same poem and didn’t tell anyone which one she liked best.

  Maybe no one will ever care about what lies under all my enforced nastiness, but there have been books written about the events that caused it, so i
t’s not conceited for me to think someone will be interested in what I have to say someday.

  I wish there were better reasons for people to want to read about me. I wish I were a brilliant poet, or a brilliant anything; but all things considered it’s probably best that I’m not.

  I’m tired of considering all those things.

  Surgeons must be very careful

  When they take the knife!

  Underneath their fine incisions

  Stirs the Culprit—Life!

  Everyone stopped talking when Ms. Lurie came into the lounge. Before she could say anything, two senior girls rushed up to her. “What’s going on?” one asked loudly. “What happened? When do we get to—”

  “You can go back to your rooms whenever you’re ready, girls,” Ms. Lurie said, putting her hand on the girl’s shoulder in a silencing gesture. “Finish your breakfast and then go in pairs or small groups to your rooms and get dressed.”

  We all looked at one another nervously. I don’t know what anyone else was thinking, but I was hoping Ms. Lurie wasn’t going to be too insistent on the pairs-or-groups part of those instructions. I also hoped she’d let me bring breakfast with me rather than making me finish it here, since I now desperately wanted the apple pastry—but there was no way I was going to eat it in front of that other Emily.

  “When you’re finished, come back out here,” Ms. Lurie continued. She hesitated, then: “A detective would like to speak to each of you, one at a time. Just for a few minutes. I’ll be there, of course.”

  The stunned silence was broken only by the sound of hair swishing as heads whipped around to see if everyone else had heard this. My stomach clenched.

  “Tell us what’s going on,” someone said. The voice was so sure of itself that for a minute I thought it was a teacher. But then I saw that it was Lucy, the bossy girl from the corridor. “We need to know. We’ve waited long enough.”

  Ms. Lurie looked at her, and then at the girl whose shoulder she was still holding, and gave a little sigh.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you’re right.”

  She squeezed the girl’s shoulder gently and let it go, then smiled at her and tucked a curl of hair behind the girl’s ear in a caress that looked like a farewell.