Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls

by Claire Legrand

  “It’s too bad that you have to suffer for your friend’s poor judgment, isn’t it, Lawrence?” Mrs. Cavendish smoothed Lawrence’s hair and slowly gathered up his collar in her hand. “It’s not your fault Victoria behaved so poorly, but you want to help me teach the others, don’t you?”

  Rising to her feet, Mrs. Cavendish came to horrid life. “Breakfast is over,” she said, and everyone dropped their forks and knives onto their plates, and as she yanked Lawrence out of the room, everyone else followed, like this was routine. The gofers began cleaning up, shoving whatever they could into their misshapen mouths. Some of them fought over the biggest meat scraps, slobbering over one another’s scabbed, knobby hands.

  “Quickly,” said Mr. Alice, his gloved hand on Victoria’s neck, pushing her forward.

  “But I haven’t eaten yet,” said Victoria.

  “Oh, you’ll get your chance.”

  Mrs. Cavendish led them down a hallway. The columns on either side were snakes with long, sculpted hands that clutched the carpet. As she stumbled alongside Mr. Alice, Victoria felt those sculpted fingertips inching toward her feet.

  “This is yet another example of what we’ve talked about, children,” Mrs. Cavendish called out. “Rule fifteen. Do you remember?”

  Some of the children recited brightly, others choked back tears:

  Be careful of what friends you pick.

  You’ll catch their faults, they’ll make you sick.

  “This morning, Victoria demonstrated to us some of her faults,” said Mrs. Cavendish. She opened a door in the wall and pulled Lawrence down a staircase with pictures of swings and trees and ship planks hanging from banister to ceiling. “Can anyone tell me what they are?”

  “Being impetuous,” said one of the boys.

  “Yelling indoors,” said one of the girls. Another said, “Speaking out of turn.”

  “Associating with degenerates,” said the tallest boy. They all came out at the bottom of the stairs into a low, deep room of damp stone. The tallest boy kept his hands folded at his waist and a cruel smile on his face. His sharp face also looked like something had been sucked out of him, but instead of looking tired and gray-faced about it, like Lawrence, this boy had glittering eyes and a hard smile. I know him, Victoria realized, startled. He goes to the Academy. Remembering him was like trying to remember a dream.

  Some of the children snickered in Lawrence’s direction. The word “degenerates” lingered in the air.

  “Very good, Peter,” Mrs. Cavendish said to the tallest boy. She smoothed his collar lovingly. “Maybe—just maybe—it’s near time for you to leave us.”

  Some of the children huddled as close together as they dared. Victoria couldn’t tell if it was because they were afraid or excited. Peter kept his eyes on Mrs. Cavendish, smiling. He didn’t look quite right; the smile was too automatic. Victoria remembered how Mr. Tibbalt had talked about when his little brother, Teddy, came home: “He was someone else, like someone had broken the old Teddy and built a new one.”

  That was exactly it. Although Victoria’s memories of this boy Peter—yes, she had to have known him; the longer she stared at him, the more flashes of Academy memories came back to her—were a bit fuzzy, she could tell he looked . . . different. He looked not-quite-right, false, new. The tight smile on his face stretched his cheeks like rubber.

  “But, first things first. Lawrence, do you have anything you’d like to say to Victoria before we begin?” said Mrs. Cavendish, curling one finger around Lawrence’s jaw. “It’s her fault, after all, that you’re about to spend a day in the hanger.”

  “The hanger?” Victoria opened her mouth to say, but Jacqueline shook her head again.

  Lawrence said nothing, his skunk’s hair falling over his forehead. For once, it didn’t annoy Victoria.

  Mrs. Cavendish slapped Lawrence’s face. Victoria felt like she had been slapped. She couldn’t contain her gasp. Fury turned her skin hot, but she clenched her fists till her nails pricked her palms. Speaking up might make things even worse.

  “Do you have anything you’d like to say?” Mrs. Cavendish said again.

  “No, Mrs. Cavendish,” said Lawrence, and that was the most terrible part, because there was very little Lawrence in his voice. All his Lawrence-ness—his mischievousness, his laziness, the things that made him annoying (like his humming and singing and waving his fingers in the air like he was playing an invisible piano), the things that made people avoid him in the Academy hallways and made Victoria force her friendship upon him for his own sake—all that was gone.

  “Hang him,” said Mrs. Cavendish. She turned, and the other children started following her out.

  Victoria stared at Lawrence in horror.

  A tiny lightbulb switched on, dingy and buzzing. It illuminated a device of thin, unfriendly straps, attached to the ceiling and hanging low to the floor.

  “Hang him?” Victoria whispered. Her skin froze.

  The hanger.

  “No . . .”

  Someone grabbed Victoria’s wrist—Jacqueline, pulling her out.

  “No!” Victoria shouted, digging her heels into the cold, hard ground. She reached out toward Lawrence and hit Jacqueline and grabbed for the wall, but Jacqueline wouldn’t stop dragging her away. Just before a gofer slammed the hanger door shut, Victoria caught sight of Mr. Alice strapping Lawrence into the hanger. The walls surrounding him began to move.

  The door slammed shut, separating them.

  Lawrence was gone. Again.

  “WHAT JUST HAPPENED?” SAID VICTORIA AS THE gofers herded them upstairs. Speaking out loud made it harder not to cry. She stamped her bare feet on every step to distract herself. Her cheeks burned. She wanted to curl up and hide with Lawrence, somewhere far away from that awful, dirty room. “What’s the hanger? What are they doing to him?”

  “The hanger’s for punishing degenerates,” Jacqueline said, hiding her mouth behind her shining red hair. “It’s for when she wants to make an example of someone. I’ll bet she’s hanging him because she doesn’t want anyone to like you or trust you. The hanger’s not as bad as the parlor, though. You remember that?”

  Victoria nodded. That cramped, dark room, the drip-drip of water, the feeling of not knowing who or where or when she was—oh, she remembered the parlor, all right.

  “The parlor’s for when you do something really bad, something so bad that she just wants you out of the way,” said Jacqueline. “Most people who go to the parlor don’t come back. Gabby did. She was in there for a week straight. She’s never been the same. She doesn’t sleep, she barely talks. Mrs. Cavendish just lets her get left behind everywhere, lets her get scared and go crazy. It’s to keep the rest of us in line, I think.”

  “But will he be okay?” Victoria said, not caring about Gabby or parlors or anything but Lawrence. Well, and herself. And maybe Jacqueline, a little. Maybe, for now.

  “I don’t know,” said Jacqueline. She wouldn’t meet Victoria’s eyes. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  Life at the Home was like life in other places, but not quite. For one thing, they went to school, which was normal. But on the second floor, classrooms lined the hallways in a grand circle. Each classroom had one wall of windows that faced the main gallery, and two walls of dark murals and books, and one wall that consisted entirely of a giant picture window facing a dark space, like in Mrs. Cavendish’s parlor. Along the windows overlooking the gallery hung rows upon rows of those paper heads Victoria had seen before.

  Beneath each head hung a sign, and each sign showed a different word. FEAR. JOY. ANGER. DESPAIR. Each head wore the matching expression. The JOY head was little more than a giant, toothy smile. The FEAR head’s skin hung in long folds like pulled taffy. Victoria couldn’t look away from that one’s sagging eyes and screaming mouth. The longer she looked, the more it felt like only her and this FEAR head, all alone in the dark, quiet Home.

  “We have classes every day,” said Jacqueline through her teeth, careful to sp
eak only a few words at a time. “They’re always different. Very confusing. No patterns. She teaches us things. How to be good. How to be better.”

  A pretty iron nameplate topped each classroom doorway. The first one they entered said CLASSROOM OF MANNERS. They took their seats in desks much more old-fashioned and much less ergonomic than the modern desks at the Academy.

  “See?” whispered Jacqueline.

  Victoria looked out the picture window—and down into the hanger.

  There, in something that looked sort of like a sad playground swing and sort of like monstrous marionette strings, hung Lawrence. He was a fly wrapped up in spider silk.

  All around him, the floor and walls writhed.

  For the first time in her life, Victoria thought she understood the word “heartbreak.”

  “Is he—?” Victoria whispered.

  “No,” said Jacqueline, “he’s not dead.”

  Victoria gulped. “What will happen to him?”

  “He’ll just be—well, people are always different after a hanging.”

  “Enjoying the view?”

  Victoria and Jacqueline whirled to face Mrs. Cavendish, who seemed somehow taller, sharper, and hungrier than before Lawrence’s hanging. Victoria clenched her fists.

  “You—you—” she said, but she couldn’t think of words that wouldn’t get anyone in trouble.

  Mrs. Cavendish smiled. “You learn quickly. Sit down.”

  Manners class was about manners, and the books in each desk were Fitzgerald Flannagan’s Guide for Youngsters, 616 pages of tiny text about how to be good boys and girls.

  “Open to page one,” said Mrs. Cavendish. She flipped a switch at the front of the room, and a projector whirred to life. Page one appeared on a screen at the front of the room, on all the walls, shimmering across the picture window, and across everyone’s skin in wiggly, lit-up tattoos.

  The children began to read the first paragraph in unison. It was about how important this book was, and how it would serve as a guide for young people who wanted to be respectable, and how Fitzgerald Flannagan had studied this thing and that thing, which showed just how much he knew about manners.

  Victoria opened her own copy and stared at the first page, hardly able to breathe. She had never before been so angry. The hot rushes through her chest and up her arms shook her whole body.

  It’s fortunate, she thought, that I’m so disciplined. One could not lose one’s cool and be the best year after year.

  She started to read along with the others, even though doing something so stupid while Lawrence dangled in the hanger made each word hurt:

  Children, whether they are boys or girls, educated or ignorant, must be as silent as possible as much as possible. Children are neither clever nor experienced enough to judge for themselves what is and what is not to be said. They must therefore and at all times defer to the wisdom of their elders. They must never speak out of turn. They must never be contrary. They must be extraordinary without being out of the ordinary.

  At each paragraph break, the children stopped. The first time, Victoria watched in astonishment as they opened notebooks from their desks and began scribbling the first paragraph as quickly as they could onto lined paper. They wrote so fast and finished so close together that it seemed synchronized, some kind of frantic, scribbly dance.

  Then they started reading again, paragraph two. Read, write, read, write. After the first read-write, Victoria joined in, too. She didn’t want to; it was an outrageous waste of time. But she couldn’t ignore Mrs. Cavendish, who was circling the room with leisurely clicks of her fine heels. She held a thin black switch, its leather braid coming apart at the end. The switch gleamed like a serpent in her hands, and whenever someone stumbled over words, or whenever someone’s handwriting got messy, Mrs. Cavendish would flick the switch. It whistled through the air, leaving behind little red marks on sweating cheeks and shaking hands.

  After an hour of this, Mrs. Cavendish flipped the lights off, and everyone hurried to the door and down the hall for the next class, and so on, all day long, to and from classes about how to dress just so and talk just so, what was appropriate to learn in school and what was not, and what they should think about science and presidents and art and yard trimming, and everything was repetitive and pointless. Worst of all, Victoria felt, was the indignity of being herded around in her pajamas.

  “Don’t we ever get real clothes?” she whispered to Jacqueline at lunch.

  “No. It’s to make us like prisoners, I think,” said Jacqueline over a mouthful of cold meat slices and toast. Mrs. Cavendish and Mr. Alice weren’t there. They never ate lunch, according to Jacqueline. No one knew where they went at lunchtime. But gofers slunk around in the shadows, and even if Victoria had wanted to try anything risky—like escape or help Lawrence, even though she didn’t know how to do either of those things—she thought the Home might tell on her. Each of its lamps and curving rafters seemed like an eye, or an arm ready to snatch.

  “To make us like prisoners?” Victoria repeated.

  The boy across the table nodded. “It’s to keep us feeling like animals, like we’re nobodies.”

  “Well, she’ll have to try a bit harder than that,” said Victoria. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m definitely not a nobody.”

  “Just because you’re Miss Goody-Goody doesn’t make you safe,” said the boy. “I’m Harold, by the way.”

  Victoria shook his hand. Some of the other children glared at them and whispered behind their sandwiches.

  “I don’t know, though,” Harold said. “Being such a rude snob all the time might actually help you here. Might keep you from letting things get to you, you know.”

  Victoria recognized him at last. “Harold? Hyena Harold?”

  “Yeah,” Harold said. He laughed, but it sounded weird. “That’s me.”

  Taking a bite of her sandwich, Victoria thought about this. She could only vaguely remember Hyena Harold. Harold . . . Norbett? Noble? Something like that. He had been a troublemaker at the Academy, a class clown. He had loved pranks and tricks, and when he laughed, he would shriek and howl, winding up all the students into a frenzy, so he was Hyena Harold.

  But that had been years ago. In another city, maybe. Or was it a dream? Were these memories even memories, or was she imagining things?

  Victoria narrowed her eyes at Harold.

  “Can’t remember me all the way, huh?” he said. “It’s okay. That’s part of it. You come here and people forget about you. People don’t like to notice. They turn the other way.”

  “She turns them the other way,” said Jacqueline. “Pushes them around, confuses them. But they let her. It’s easier than fighting.”

  “How long have you been here?” said Victoria. She put down her sandwich. The meat was rubbery and rank with a strange spice.

  “Me? Oh, a few months,” said Harold. He squinted at the ceiling. “I think.”

  “I’ve been here eight weeks,” said Jacqueline.

  A tiny girl with two black braids squeaked, “For me it’s been five days.”

  “How long will she keep you here?” said Victoria.

  “Depends on how well we do what she wants,” said Harold.

  The girl with black braids choked on her food. Jacqueline thumped her shoulder and said, “Pull it together, Caroline.”

  “So we don’t really know how long anyone’s going to stay,” Harold continued.

  “But we do know,” said Jacqueline, leaning closer, “that nobody stays past their thirteenth birthday.”

  The children nearest them nodded solemnly as they ate.

  “Mine’s next week, you know,” said Harold, grinning. “I’ll be out soon.”

  “What happens on your thirteenth birthday?” said Victoria.

  “Either you get out before then or . . . she takes you,” said Harold.

  “Everyone?” said Caroline tearfully.

  “Everyone,” said Jacqueline.

  “But whe
re does she take you?” said Victoria. “What does she do with you?”

  “Nobody really knows,” said Jacqueline.

  “I wouldn’t think about it, if I were you,” said Harold through a mouthful of meat and toast. “Don’t worry, though. As long as you do what she says, you’ll get out fine.”

  Victoria slammed down her lunch without taking a bite. “But Mr. Tibbalt told me—”

  A cold breeze hissed up the table, like Victoria had felt at the Academy. She glanced around, but Mrs. Cavendish was nowhere to be found.

  “He told me,” she continued, lowering her voice, “that his brother got taken here, and when he came back, he was really different. He wasn’t himself.”

  “It happens,” said Harold, licking his fingers. It was only then that Victoria noticed how false everything about Harold appeared, from the movements of his eyebrows to the way he chewed his food. His skin was waxen. Like that boy Peter, Harold seemed new and different from what he should have been, and false, like a doll or a toy.

  “Best thing you can do is try to get along with her and keep quiet, and then you can go home.” Harold wiped his mouth. His eyes shone a little too brightly. When he smiled at Victoria, it stretched his face into an ugly shape. “Easy as pie. Oh, I hope she makes her pies tonight. They’re the best.”

  That night, Victoria lay on her cot after lights-out, staring at the ceiling. She would have liked to go to sleep, but she couldn’t erase Harold’s fake, grinning face from her vision.

  Nobody stays past their thirteenth birthday.

  Victoria’s birthday was in August. That was easy enough. There was a lot of time between then and now. And surely her parents would start looking for her soon, no matter what Mr. Tibbalt or Harold said. They were Wrights. They wouldn’t fall for Mrs. Cavendish’s tricks for long.

  But Lawrence’s birthday was November 1. Two weeks away.

  She remembered this because his were the only birthday parties she had ever gone to—the two of them, Mr. and Mrs. Prewitt, and sometimes Mr. and Mrs. Wright all in party hats (Victoria hated party hats; they messed up her curls). Once at the Prewitts’ dining room table, once at a table at the city park (which had offended Victoria’s sense of hygiene), once at a fancy Uptown bistro. Victoria would tell Lawrence that he wasn’t blowing out his candles correctly and then tell him how to blow his candles out, and Lawrence would joke about all the fancy gifts he didn’t like and ask if his parents would ever get him music like he asked. The parties were really quite sober affairs.