by Kai Kazi
Classes went by in their usual manner, but some of the children surrounding Nita could not fight the battle against their tears. Sometimes when the teacher would call them, using their Christian names, Nita would look across to see wet trails beginning to shimmer on their faces, but they’d answer.
Nita struggled to etch out his new name on the paper. His hand instinctively spelled out the “N,” the “I,” and then a “T,” and he’d strike it out quickly before a teacher could notice. His penmanship was better than most, and he could hear frustrated whimpers all around him as the other boys struggled. Tension and anxiety was in the air like thick humidity after a rainy day, but the teachers went on like nothing had changed. They went on like these new names were something to be excited about.
As the students filed out of the classroom, Nita fell into step with Pamuy; he glanced at his chest to read his tag. David. He looked at his roommate and Pamuy was as indifferent as ever – his eyes seemed as if he’d just awoken from a long sleep, unable to enter reality. Nita refused to say the name; he wouldn’t be able to remember it for long, even if he did. Instead, they let silence take them over as they walked to lunch.
Nita couldn’t take it anymore. When the sun finally set and they were released to walk to their rooms, Nita didn’t have the energy to try and push out the hate boiling inside of him. He could feel the life being sapped out of his body like the sun sapping out his strength, and he had tried – tried for his mother, tried for himself, tried for the school. If he stayed, they would not only change him into one of them, they would ruin him -- until he was nothing but a shell. A shell that could write and speak English, and comb his hair properly, but not think or feel or have the will to breathe.
They’d taken him from his mother, and she was becoming sicker and sicker by the day. He knew it. He needed to be there; wasting time here was killing him, while his mother was dying without him.
He needed to get out.
As he walked back to his room, passing boy after boy, he knew he was Albane in all of it – he couldn’t tell any of them. In the tribe, it was good for the older boys to manage the young ones – to help their parents in raising them, in correcting them, in reporting their wrongs and their rights. The school had perverted it. They had used the older children as spies, and now the kids Nita may have trusted had to be hidden from. Here, the elders were not people who deserved respect. Nita once felt terrible for thinking such a thought – his father told him elders were people who needed to be respected, always. But these white-faced teachers had long since burned any respect out of Nita.
When night fell and the pitch darkness enveloped them in their rooms -- lights out permanently for the night -- Nita crept over to Pamuy’s bedside. He waited to hear an end to the shuffling footsteps or the low, muttered voices from the hall. His words were the deepest hushed whisper he could manage, but they were still in English.
“We need to leave,” Nita barely whispered, looking behind him as though somebody might be able to hear over his shoulder.
“We will. We will get out of here as soon as we can,” Pamuy replied, not needing to be coaxed. “As soon as someone’s back is turned, we will run.”
Chapter Eight
Alba
Where reality left off, Alba’s dreams picked up.
Alba was held down by the suppressing lack of sleep, keeping her from pushing it away and gasping up to awareness. It pinned her to the table as the shadowy specter her nightmares saw as the headmaster grabbed her and beat her and thrust inside her. It would hold her down as she cried -- her limbs feeling weighted -- and screamed for it to stop; but her nightmares had less mercy than the headmaster.
One night, when it finally let her go, she came up with a cry and a cold sweat on her skin, her heart thudding in her chest. The face of the headmaster filled her vision, and she didn’t know if she was still sleeping or if she’d ever been sleeping at all. Dreams dashed away as a hand clamped over her mouth, shoving her into reality with a hand behind her head to restrain her.
She didn’t dare to glance to Korra’s bed; whether she was asleep or not, Alba didn’t want her to see. Weeks ago, Alba might have screamed for her, begging her to help – begging her to get help. But the pain between her legs hadn’t had time to fade, and she knew now – better than she had ever before – that help didn’t exist. It had not been there for Korra, and it wouldn’t be there for Alba.
The headmaster pinned her to her bed, and she didn’t make a sound as he pushed up her skirt, bruising her skin and her body and every part of her he could touch. She was silent as he whispered sweet words and cruel ones in her ear. When his hands that made her stomach roll grazed over her skin, she kept her mouth a firm, thin line. He told her not to scream, and he’d bruise her skin as a warning, but she wouldn’t scream anyways, because she knew the secret – the secret none of them had told her when she first arrived.
No one was going to help her anyways.
When the headmaster left, finally arranging his clothing back into place, she pushed her skirt back down, pulled her thin blanket up over her shoulders. When he was gone from the room, she let the tears pour into her pillow that smelled like her fear and his sweat. When her sobbing lessened to the point where her ears weren’t dulled and her senses weren’t clouded, she could hear a soft sound across from her in the darkness. Korra was crying.
Something soft twisted in Alba, tender and sympathetic, but just as quickly as it flickered, it died. Anger bloomed in its place, rising like the hot sun’s rays as she listened to the muffled tears pouring out across from her.
She wanted to kill him; she wanted to hold a knife in her hand and know what to do with it – like her father would know. She wanted to take a pistol and aim it, pulling the trigger as easily as she had seen an elder from her tribe do. They took life so easily; she wanted to hold the headmaster – over a foot taller than her – by the throat and have the strength to crush it to nothing.
But she knew she didn’t have the strength. Instead she laid in the darkness, blood staining her sheets with a throbbing between her legs that refused to lessen, and she waited for sunlight. She waited like Korra waited – and perhaps she had waited more times than Alba. She waited for the dawn to break like she had watched it so many times at home, and she wondered how she could ever go home.
How could Alba return to her village and look them in the eye? How could she ever manage to hold her father in a hug, or have her mother kiss her on the forehead, or be the little girl they had sent off? A fresh wave of tears that nearly crippled her flooded in, and she wondered how she would ever fit in with her family when she got back; however countless days that would take.
The sunlight came, and a routine she had come to loath hid the blood, hit the tears in her clothes, and had her sitting with a painful ache at her classroom desk. She felt his hands all over her as she listened to the teacher without ever hearing a word. She couldn’t meet the teacher’s eyes; couldn't force her sight to shift from a blank spot on the wall. Absentmindedly, her eyes caught a calendar.
Months, it had been now. That first time in the headmaster’s office -- that could make bile rise up her throat even now -- had been weeks ago.
It felt strange to count time in weeks and months like they had taught her. They demanded she learn the increments of days, following their special chart and their special method precisely. Alba’s mind strained to remember the old way she knew – the method her mother had taught her, even before she was strong enough to tend the fields or craft the pots. She couldn’t call it up. She remembered counting the seasons, and noticing the way the moon looked every night.
Now she never saw the moon, and whatever lesson her mother had taught had vanished.
The only thing as reliable as the moon was her monthly bleeding. It had started two years before and came every month after that like clockwork. Though, she realized now as she looked at the calendar, the cycle had been broken in the month past.
A spike of
anxiety shot through her; a million possibilities running through her head. Was she sick? Had some illness come on her that she hadn’t noticed? She shifted her weight and felt an ache shoot up from down below – maybe the headmaster had hurt her, and the injury distorted the cycle that never faltered.
That fear, like all fears, was suppressed like her thoughts and her cares under the numb, dull sound in her ears; voices didn’t carry their usual meaning, and the tasteless food was particularly tasteless.
Later, Alba listlessly choked down the meal the school had set before her at lunch, with Korra beside her. Silence sat between them like a third person, and only a low, quiet – proper and polite, as the headmaster had called it – chatter from the other children kept Alba’s ears from ringing. Finally, she swallowed the tasteless chunk of meat on her fork and muttered the first thing that came to her mind – not directly at Korra, but not indirectly either. She mentioned the time it had been since she last bled.
The sharp, startling clatter of a fork hitting a plate sounded out beside her, and Alba’s eyes darted to Korra’s. Expecting a sheepish smile and an apology for her un-ladylike behavior, Alba instead found a look very akin to terror on her roommate’s face. Korra’s dark eyes latched onto Alba’s, like they could hold her in place, and shimmering tears bubbled in her eyes before spilling over. Too shocked to speak, Alba watched as the tears overwhelmed her friend until Korra pressed a hand to her mouth, muffling a whimper.
A chill washed over Alba, like an ill-intentioned spirit brushing by her, and she felt a burning in her own eyes – she didn’t know why, but the sight of them in Korra knocked back the wall that held her tears hostage.
“What is it, Korra?” Alba asked, reaching out a hand to rest on her shoulder, “What did I do?”
She was ready to pour apologies from her mouth, begging for forgiveness for whatever she’d done – whatever that would be. But Korra shook her head, her face falling to look at the table.
Korra’s breathes were becoming labored, and she gasped out a harsh whisper, leaning close to Alba like it was the most dangerous of secrets. “You’re with child.”
Icy water, as if from a winter creek, rushed through Alba’s veins. Her mouth fell open, gaping at her friend; the terror was in her eyes now. All the pieces of the pattern were coming together at once; all the little mysterious, shadowing questions suddenly stepping into light.
When her mother was pregnant with her little brother, she’d pressed Alba’s hand to her belly and told her what was happening inside her – how long it would take, and what should be done before the birth. She’d told Alba how she needed more food and more water, and how her cycle would no longer plague her. Alba remembered pressing her hand to her mother’s skin, feeling the tension and, much later, the kick of her brother.
She daydreamed of one day lying with her own hand on her own belly, feeling for a child. Alba had longed for the day when she would have her own daughter to lean against her, and Alba would tell her the secrets of being a mother.
But this wasn’t it. This was nothing like her dreams had conjured up – this was sick. It was vile, and it made her stomach turn around the putrid food; there was a child in there now. The father would not be some strong warrior with rich black hair, who would hold her and whisper love in her ear. The father was Headmaster Morris, and he was destroying her.
When Alba found her voice again, she shook her head, “It can’t be, I will bleed again.” She mumbled, wrapping an arm around her friend to pull her into a hug. She listed a million possibilities – she was anxious, she wasn’t being fed properly, she had not soaked up the sun in some time – and so many things she hoped it could be.
But like her hope of seeing her family again, she felt those reasons sink away like grains of dirt dropped into a moving creek; falling beneath the surface and never being seen again.
Lunch ended, and what little energy she had summoned to speak to Korra -- the first little flicker of life she had felt in days – faded like the sun as the day went on. She could not hear teacher’s words, she could not see children passing her by; her feet moved with a mind of their own, trained to turn at the right corners and cross through the right doorways to attend class. All she could feel – the only life inside her – was the phantom weight of the child in her belly. As if it had materialized from nothing, all at once breathing and living, she could feel tension against her dress; she could feel hunger that she’d ignored, and thirst she never craved.
Without shame, without a second though, she wished she could reach inside of herself and tear it out. It didn’t feel like a baby in her; it felt like poison the headmaster had planted, wanting it to fester and kill her – wanting it to shame her and ruin her.
Alba put her arm over her belly as she sat in class, as if that could hide the swell; as if the pressure of her hand could silence it from proclaiming its presence to the teacher, to the class, to the headmaster. She had been quiet and meek and kept her head low so they would never know, and yet this thing inside her was going to ruin it all. Didn’t it see there was no help? Didn’t it see that the only way to live was to be silent?
Didn’t it see it was the worst thing that could have happened to her?
Sitting at her desk, Alba crossed both her arms in front of her; the simple thought of the headmaster – what he might do – sent chills through her. He would kill her; she knew it like she knew her father would murder Headmaster Morris the moment he saw him, the second she guessed.
When Alba first saw girl after girl wander into the headmaster’s office, she had thought perhaps they had done something wrong. She never guessed what lurked behind that door.
Alba had seen a girl, two girls, three girls attend class one day and then be gone from the school the next. Perhaps they had gone home; perhaps they had ran away and finally were free.
Or perhaps they hadn’t.
Chapter Nine
Nita
When Nita was old enough to walk, his father had taken him out into the forest. He taught Nita how to step quietly, how to sense the movement of the forest, how to breathe in tune with the breathes of the trees, and how to let his eyes see what others could not. When Nita was old enough to run, he managed to sneak – ever so quietly, ever so patiently – close enough to an elk to reach out and brush its side. As expected, it exploded into movement, dashing off into the forest in a frenzy of kicks. Nita had remained unscathed, and it was worth it; to be quiet enough, to be patient enough. His father had been proud.
There were no trees inside the concrete walls, but Nita retained his observation skills. As he watched the white-faced administrators walk down the halls, speaking to one another, not paying attention at all, he couldn’t understand how they managed to survive. They talked, and they walked, and they ate – but they never watched. They never looked.
Nita was grateful that they didn’t. And so was Joshua.
Joshua, a child only slightly taller than Nita, slipped under the attention of the teachers one late evening and was gone into the night. The name Joshua -- bland, devoid of meaning -- had been too much for the Indian child; Nita knew why. This Joshua couldn’t stand the hollowness in his chest, and he couldn’t stand the betrayal of his tribe any longer. Nita had never spoken to him, but he knew the feeling as well as his own name – Nita. Not Nicholas. Nita.
It had been days. What filled Nita’s chest with new air was how the administrators reacted; indifferently. The initial uproar in the morning – searching the rooms, searching the halls, taking Joshua’s roommate by the scruff of the shirt and demanding where he had gone – had been the only effort exerted. Nita had seen Ms. Wright kneel in front of the younger child who spent the most time with Joshua, asking him in soft but firm tones if Joshua had said anything before he left. The child didn’t meet her gaze, but said reluctantly, “He said he… he…” Nita could tell, even from his distance, that the child was choking on the word “hated” with any relation to the school. “He wanted to go home.”
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Ms. Wright pursed her lips, nodded, and thanked him for telling her. Nita couldn’t summon up any sympathy for the disappointment splashed across her features. Perhaps she didn’t put the bruises on the back of that child, stunting his words, but she didn’t open the door for Joshua to run either; and she wouldn’t hold it open for Nita.
As the day went on and the uproar deadened, he realized there were no men swarming out the door after Joshua. They did not rally the children to go find their escaped comrade. They didn’t even say something to the other children – warning them against running, warning them against leaving.
Like a bountiful harvest laid out before him -- the kind his uncle helped bring in every year -- Nita smelt opportunity in the air. He was more encouraged than ever; he was going to run.
But to where? The journey to the school had been so long, and the surroundings changed over and over again – far beyond what he had known from home, and far beyond what he had seen on hunting trips. It felt like defeat in his chest when he realized he didn’t even know which way to go. At home, he always knew the pattern of the sky – in the night and in the day – and where to turn to find the river, the valley, his village, the crops.
And if he ran into a town, asking where he could find his people, they’d see the uniform pinning him in like chains. They’d take him back, pushing him back into the desk before him with those teachers in front of him.
He wouldn’t stay in the school, he decided – more firmly than his decision to go home. He’d never stay in this place, no matter what. And once he left, he’d never go back.
Nita sank into his classroom chair, muttering a curse in English too low to even be heard by his ears, and looked up at the chalkboard at the front of the class. They were teaching him how to speak to an employer – what skills would be wanted.