by Cat Winters
I slid my arms out of my coat and caught the reflection of my movements in the standing oval mirror by my window. A tired girl with a plain face and a distinct lack of fire in her pale brown eyes peered back at me from the glass. Stray strands of hair the color of wet river sludge had fallen out of my topknot and stuck to my cheeks after my ride through the city and the scramble through the rain with Percy. I brushed the hairs aside with the back of my hand and heaved a sigh that made my shoulders rise and sink.
The only other evidence of mischief on my body, the only sign my seventeenth birthday wasn’t quite as proper as it should have been, was a dusty pair of footprints on my dress, right above my stomach and thighs.
y the time I had dressed for school and was heading downstairs the next morning, the house smelled like poached eggs, black coffee, and a touch of rosemary from the Macassar oil Father used for slicking down his hair. He was already seated at the breakfast table, below his favorite photograph: an appetite-souring image of a pair of bone dentures, with six of the bottom teeth missing.
“You’re in the newspaper, Olivia,” he said from behind a sheet of newsprint.
My stomach tightened. “I am? Why?”
Before he could answer, Gerda, the Swedish girl we hired to help with the cooking and cleaning, blew through our swinging kitchen door with the silver coffeepot. She smiled when she saw me, her butter-blond hair and crisp white apron cheery contrasts to our moth-brown walls and dim lighting. “Oh, good morning, Miss Mead,” she said in her lovely Swedish lilt.
“Gerda”—Father rustled the newspaper down to the table—“return to the kitchen, please.”
Gerda and I exchanged a look.
“Gerda,” said Father in a warning tone, “a private family matter needs to be discussed.”
“Yes, sir.” Gerda nodded and disappeared through the door, which flapped shut behind her as if it were swatting her away on her posterior.
I clenched my fists and prepared for the worst.
Father slid the paper across the table. “This is why you’re in the newspaper.”
My lips parted at the startling image on the front page of the Oregonian: an illustrated picture of me, lying supine in my hypnotized state. As Kate, Frannie, and Percy had all told me, I was propped between two chairs, supported beneath my neck and ankles, and my body looked as rigid as the Steel Bridge crossing the Willamette River. A sketched version of Henri Reverie stood on top of me with his arms stretched out to his sides, as if he were balancing on a tightrope instead of a girl.
Below the picture was a caption:
Young hypnotist Henri Reverie stands atop mesmerized Olivia Mead, daughter of Portland dentist Walter W. Mead.
“I’m so sorry.” I scooted the newspaper back across the table and sank into my chair. “Kate volunteered me to go on the stage with that hypnotist, but I didn’t even want to do it. I had no idea Mr. Reverie was standing on top of me after he put me in my trance.”
Father picked up the paper again, but instead of bristling and grumbling, he sat there with the flames of fascination flaring in his pupils. “Young Mr. Reverie’s persuasion over you was clearly quite powerful.”
“Yes,” I said, a nervous quaver in my voice.
“I’m curious about hypnotherapy myself. I’ve read several articles about dentists who use trances to subdue their thrashing patients.” Father scratched his beard with an audible rustle of hairs. “The article states that between performances, Mr. Reverie is offering his hypnotism skills to help individuals overcome their addictions and fears. He’s staying in Portland until next week.”
“Oh.” I unfolded my napkin. “I’m sure he’ll be helpful to men addicted to drink.”
“Are you also becoming a temperance crusader, Olivia?”
I looked up, caught off guard by the question as well as the squeak of fear in his voice. “I beg your pardon?”
“I keep reading about that lunatic of a woman, Carrie Nation—the old hag who’s smashing up saloons in Kansas with stones and bricks and billiard balls.” He stared me down with probing brown eyes that themselves resembled billiard balls. “Do you ever harbor urges to commit violent acts against men?”
“No! Of course not. Just because I want to vote doesn’t mean I’m going to turn savage.”
“Women who want the vote seem hell-bent on outlawing liquor, too. They’re ready to attack.”
“Father, I just—”
“I’m considering telephoning this Henri Reverie and hiring him to help you.”
I half slipped off my chair. “Help me with what?”
“I want him to put an end to your growing signs of rebelliousness.”
“I am not rebellious.” I gripped the edge of the table. “I may have gone to a suffragist rally and upset one snobby patient, but no one else has ever complained about my behavior. Not at school—not anywhere. You’re just punishing me because of Mother.”
“I’m ensuring you won’t become like your mother.” Father folded the newspaper into two crisp halves. “If Percy Acklen drove you home last night because he has marriage on his mind, what do you think he’ll do if he catches word you were at that protest?”
“He probably won’t—”
“I’m not done talking, Olivia. If Percy feels he won’t be able to command his own domestic ship, if he worries you’ll turn wild on him, he’ll run as far as he can in the opposite direction. You’ll never again have a young man with means and money take an interest in you. You’ll have no options for your life.”
“I’m only seventeen. I don’t care about marriage right now. My schoolwork is good enough that I could go to college and study to be a teacher. Or a writer.”
“You are not going to be a teacher or a writer.”
“Why not? Plenty of young women are taking jobs these days.”
“Only desperate and unfeminine ones. The only reason I even allow you to go to that school is because I hate to think what would happen if you were on your own while I’m at work.”
“What?” I gasped. “School is my key to the future, not my nursemaid.”
“Your future is to become a respectable housewife and mother. Women belong in the home, and inside some man’s home you’ll stay.”
I squeezed the table’s edge until my fingers and my voice both shook. “You’re angry because you couldn’t keep my mother inside this home—that’s what this is all about. But it’s not my fault you drove her away.”
Father’s mouth fell open, and his eyes refused to blink, as if I’d stabbed his heart with the barbed tips of my words.
“I—I—I’m sorry,” I said. “Please, Father—please don’t hire that hypnotist to remove thoughts from my brain. My mind isn’t like a rotten tooth. You can’t just take it away.”
He stabbed at his egg with his fork, and that angry blue vein from the night before throbbed again in his forehead.
“Father, please—”
“Don’t you understand?” He slammed his fist to the table and made the dishes jump. “I’ll be making your life easier for you by freeing you of these unladylike dreams. It’s for your own good, so don’t make me out to be the villain here. The world will seem far less difficult when passions that can never be fulfilled are gone from your stubborn head.”
“I don’t want them to be gone. I’d rather be able to dream and fail than to never feel the pull of another way of life.”
“That’s a silly, frustrating way to live.”
“But—”
“The subject is closed. If I decide it best to hire the hypnotist, I will.”
ON MY WAY TO SCHOOL, I PASSED POSTERS FOR HENRI Reverie’s performances, taped to utility posts and shop windows. The corners of the papers curled and fluttered in the cool November breeze, and each notice resembled the other: a black background, tall yellow letters, and a pair of large blue eyes staring out from above the phrase YOUNG MARVEL OF THE NEW CENTURY!
I plodded onward, but every other block, Monsieur Reverie watched me trav
el through the city.
Up ahead of me, the high school’s spire clock tower pierced the gray sky high above the corner of Fourteenth and Morrison, a sight that always reminded me of a postcard my mother sent me from Notre Dame Cathedral on her thirtieth birthday. Our school was actually quite colossal and impressive on the inside, too, with dark wood fixtures, electric lighting, fifteen classrooms, a library, a laboratory, a museum, two recitation rooms, an art room, and an assembly hall. The curriculum was modern. The classrooms were integrated and coeducational.
He sent me to a progressive school. And yet my lunatic father was still considering hiring a stranger to obliterate my thoughts.
Algebra was challenging enough without worrying about a cure for female rebellion, but with that new fear bearing down on me, I failed to complete five equations on the weekly examination. In domestic science I somehow lost my little white baking cap and caused a small grease fire that singed the cuff of my right sleeve. History was a blur of dates and long-dead generals (although, to be fair, that tended to be the case every day in history). And in physical education, down in the musty high school basement, I twisted my ankle when Mrs. Brueden squawked at us to jog faster in our whooshing black exercise bloomers.
English fared somewhat better.
Percy was in that class with me.
My eyes drifted to the back of his combed auburn hair one row over and three seats up, and with nearly soundless squeaks, I swiveled back and forth in my stiff oak chair, my elbows resting against the steep slope of my desk.
Percy scratched his shoulder with his chin, his eyes turned downward, and I held my breath, wondering if he had caught me staring at him. His eyelashes rose. His gaze met mine. The right side of his mouth curved into one of his sly grins, and I smiled, too, while the back of my neck prickled.
“Mr. Acklen, what do you believe Longfellow meant in this last stanza?” asked Mr. Dircksen, our white-haired teacher with furry sideburns that reminded me of rabbits sticking to his cheeks. His broad shadow loomed across Percy’s desk and somehow chilled my own arms with gooseflesh.
Percy returned his attention to his reader and straightened his posture. “Um . . . I think it means, sir, we’re all trying to see more in life than what there actually is to see. The moon makes everything look more . . . spiritual. I think.”
“Are you positive about that?”
“Yes. That’s my interpretation, at least.”
“Mr. McAllister, would you care to go one step further?”
Quick-witted Theo McAllister launched into a detailed interpretation of the poem, and Percy’s shoulders relaxed. He peeked backward again to see if my eyes were still upon him—which, of course, they were.
I mouthed three words to him: “I brought Dracula.”
“What?” he mouthed in return.
“Dracula.” I pointed to my toffee-colored book bag hanging on a hook on the wall next to all the other bags.
“Ah.” He nodded, and with an eyebrow cocked, he added, “Corrupt me.”
My cheeks burned. Percy snickered.
“Mr. Acklen!” Mr. Dircksen whacked Percy across the head with the palm of his hand, hard enough to knock him out of his chair. “The first rule in this classroom is respect.”
Everyone in the room collectively stiffened. My stomach turned with guilt as Percy—red-faced, shoulders hunched— crawled back into his chair and rubbed his ear.
Mr. Dircksen stood up tall above Percy’s desk with his hairy neck stretched high. “Turn around in that chair one more time, and you’ll be facing the paddle in the principal’s office. Do I make myself clear?”
Percy combed his hand through his hair. “Yes, sir.”
Mr. Dircksen then pointed a bony finger at me. “You, in the back there. I forgot your name.”
I choked on my own saliva.
“What is your name?” he asked in a voice that slapped me on the back and made me cough out the words.
“Olivia Mead.”
“Miss Mead”—Mr. Dircksen tapped his reader against his opened hand—“do you require a firm reminder of the first rule of this classroom?”
“N-n-no, sir.” I shook my head until the classroom went fuzzy.
“Good. Now, where were we before this interruption?”
I clutched my desk, doubled over, and spent the rest of the class trying to remember how to breathe.
AT PROMPTLY ONE O’CLOCK, MR. DIRCKSEN EXCUSED US. I grabbed my book bag and hustled out to the hallway ahead of my classmates, hoping for a whiff of fresh air, but all I inhaled was the smell of pencil shavings and other students. Even worse, Henri Reverie’s eyes haunted me from another black poster that someone had pinned with thumbtacks to the burlap-covered bulletin board across the hall, next to a notice for the school’s banjo club. The dramatic yellow letters—all capitals, all screaming to be seen—peeked at me from between the passing hair bows and the male heads with severe parts combed down the middle.
THE MESMERIZING HENRI REVERIE
“I’m glad he didn’t wallop your head, too,” said Percy from behind me.
I spun around, my book bag sliding to my elbow.
Percy walked toward me, his satchel slung over one shoulder, his hair falling into his eyes. He rubbed his ear again. “I’d use a word to describe teachers like him, but that would guarantee I’d get the paddle.”
“I’m so sorry about that. Here”—I dug into my bag and tugged out Dracula—“keep it. It’s yours now.”
“Keep it?” he asked. “But you love it.”
“It’s the least I can do.”
He flipped the novel over and studied the cover illustration of Dracula’s angular castle perched atop a lumpy hill. “I like the way the little bats are soaring around the towers. It looks like a corker of a book.” His eyes returned to mine. “But I don’t know. I think you owe me more than just a ghost story. Don’t you?”
I shrank back. “I—I—I don’t—”
He cracked a smile and nudged my arm with his elbow. “Don’t look so terrified, Olivia. I just meant I think you need to work even harder to persuade your father to let me take you to that party.” He reached out and stroked a piece of my hair and, with it, my cheek. “Will you do that for me, Sleeping Beauty?”
“Yes, of course.” I peeled my eyes away from his red ear. “I’d be happy to.”
“Good.” He dropped his hand to his side. “Tell him I won’t bite, unlike”—he patted the novel—“your friend Dracula here.”
He tucked the book into his satchel and wandered away.
Frannie’s face came into view from around the corner to the stairwell, and as she approached she peeked over her shoulder at Percy disappearing down the steps. Without slowing her stride, she grabbed me by the elbow and steered me toward the music room at the opposite end of the second floor.
“So,” she said, “was he kind to you when he drove you home last night?”
“Very kind. But something awful happened to him just now.”
“What?”
We passed a boy named Stuart from English who was pantomiming Mr. Dircksen’s attack on Percy to a group of his friends in front of the library.
I lowered my voice. “Mr. Dircksen smacked Percy in the head in front of the class . . . and he threatened to send him down to the principal for a paddling. Percy and I had just been exchanging whispers about Dracula.”
“A paddling on the backside?” Frannie lifted her chin, her eyebrows raised. “Well, now. That’s highly appropriate.”
I stopped and shook her arm off mine. “Why on earth do you hate Percy?”
“It’s nothing,” she said, but her face went red and splotchy.
I took her by the arm and pulled her aside, one door down from Stuart and his friends.
“It doesn’t seem like nothing, Frannie.”
“I just . . .” She shifted her weight between her feet. “I just think he’s a snob, that’s all. And snobs are only fun in Austen novels.”
“Are you sur
e you don’t have a particular reason for hating him?”
“Just watch yourself with him—that’s all I’m going to say.” She hooked her arm again through mine and pulled me toward the opened chorus room doors. “I’ve heard he flits from girl to girl and doesn’t care about their reputations. Watch out for his hands.”
“His hands?” I asked.
“On your bottom, you ninny. I’ve heard he’s a grabber.”
She tugged me into the music room, and we sealed the subject of Percy closed.
I OPENED MY MOUTH AS FAR AS MY JAW COULD STRETCH and joined my girls’ chorus sisters in rehearsing “Silent Night” for the Christmas concert.
In the middle of the second verse, just as my vibrato was gaining strength and feeling good in my chest, my friend Kate entered the room with a folded piece of paper tucked between her fingers. Her new black shoes with buttons on the sides clip-clopped across the floor to the beat of the metronome sitting on Mr. Bennington’s piano.
Mr. Bennington stopped conducting and scratched his waxy mustache. “Let us take a short break, ladies.”
Kate handed the teacher the note. Mr. Bennington pulled his wire reading glasses out of his striped coat pocket and squinted through the lenses, as if he couldn’t quite decipher the words.
“It’s for Olivia,” said Kate.
My insides liquefied. I wondered why the devil someone was sending me a message in the middle of the school day.
“Olivia.” Mr. Bennington peeked up at me. “Come read this note and then return to your position.”
“Yes, sir.” I climbed down from the risers, out of the depths of the deepest altos stuck in the back, and took the piece of paper. Kate patted my back as if I were receiving a summons to the gallows and clip-clopped out of the room.
I unfolded the note.
“Let us take it from the beginning,” said Mr. Bennington.
My classmates cleared their throats and stood up tall, while I read two sentences scribbled in Father’s squiggly cursive: