Four by Four

by Sara Mesa

  “She uses us because she can’t do it by herself,” says Valen, not entirely convinced.

  Teeny—her voice ground down by the others—repeats herself again and again until they hear her. “She didn’t force us to go with her. We all wanted to. It sounded fun.”

  “She should just go back to her neighborhood,” Marina says. “I’m sure she misses it.”

  “What’s her neighborhood like?” Cristi asks.

  “Rats, hooligans, graffiti, needles, all of that.” Marina wrinkles her nose.

  “And people like that?”

  “Of course. People who grow up there want that. They complain if you take them out. Like Celia.”

  They hear her coming down the hallway, her ragged breath reaching them.

  They cover up by pretending to show each other their tits, as they’ve done on other occasions.

  They discuss how they’ve grown, their shape, color, variation in the nipples. Then they agree on a vote-based, numerical ranking.

  When it’s her turn, Teeny lifts her shirt and bares two pale, tiny little sacks at her ribs. The girls laugh at the hint of breasts that aren’t really anything at all. Celia joins the group and sees Teeny; she laughs, too, pointing out the bit of fuzz that grows on her nipples.

  Teeny blushes and covers herself quickly. She looks away, unsure which expression will best hide her discomfort.

  THE BOOTY

  The Booty pays the occasional visit to the Headmaster’s office. Sometimes she notifies him beforehand, but often she goes without any warning.

  Her coloring is different after those meetings. Fine, zigzagging veins lace the apples of her cheeks. Her eyes tend to shine, oily, and she walks—staggers—like a drunk woman.

  What happens in that office concerns no one but the two of them, yet it swells through the school day like an underground tide, its fluctuations leaving an inexorable mark. The whole colich—teachers and students alike—feels the flow of that more or less secret relationship.

  Inside that room, the Booty humiliates herself while the Headmaster sits impassively or snorts cocaine. Sprawled comfortably in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, he watches and speaks to her slowly. His sentences are short, lacerating, and he doesn’t squander them.

  “It’s sad to look at you. Not just pathetic—useless. You’re rotten, you know that? You’re spoiled. There’s nothing in your veins but pus, or poison.”

  He enjoys the show, her obstinate silence, for a short time—five minutes, half an hour—or the whole afternoon. She’s in no hurry. He directs her what to do, how to position herself. She obeys. She submits without complaint. She’ll only spit her reproaches later, as she dresses, never even having been touched.

  “No one knows what a fake you are.”

  The Headmaster laughs, and sometimes responds.

  “Of course they do. You know it, and you still come. The children’s parents know it, and they still send them. Those same children know it, and still they admire me.”

  “They don’t admire you, they fear you.”

  “No, darling. They fear you. Do you know what you represent for them? A weed.”

  “A weed?”

  “Yes, a dried up weed.” He laughs.

  “You could have had me long before we came to this.”

  “I could have, but I didn’t want you. It excited me more to have you at a distance, when you were appealing. Now I enjoy myself a different way. It’s a question of nuance.”

  The Booty slows her movements, takes her time rolling up her pantyhose so he’ll continue to insult her.

  But he doesn’t. He metes them out in doses. He watches her dress, scowling in disgust. The lamp casts a greenish-yellow light. The Headmaster likes her—prefers her—like this.

  The Booty also seeks that light, and craves it when she’s denied.

  THE NIGHT

  They’re not allowed to leave their rooms and there are always snitches prepared to rat them out. But Ignacio sneaks out anyway, tripping over his pajama bottoms. Shadows overlap in the hallway. He feels his way along the wall.

  On other nights he’s heard the scuff of footsteps, footsteps that didn’t exist before the New Kid came. The New Kid, who after a week of classes, is just Héctor, now. And as he earned his name, he broke his stubborn silence with monosyllables and the odd, short sentence. To Ignacio, everything Héctor says is an expression of his audacity.

  He admires him blindly.

  Ignacio goes in search of those footsteps, a moment to speak with him alone.

  He advances slowly—alert and hopeful—and his eyes adjust to the dark.

  He makes out Héctor’s door and stands outside, sifting through the sounds of the sleeping boys. He concentrates on the silence and tries to sense his hero’s presence. He waits and hears no more than the murmur of a dream—a nightmare, maybe—and Ignacio, defeated, turns back toward his room. But then, heavy breath at his back.

  His heart leaps before he can turn.

  He spins around as the hand grips his shoulder like a claw, squeezing his bones.

  The face isn’t Héctor’s. Almond eyes, wide jaw, and greater stature reveal Adrián, alias the Goon.

  The Goon squeezes him harder and punches him in the stomach. What the hell is he doing there? Spying on them? Is he one of the Booty’s rats?

  His punches don’t make a sound, but they hurt. Ignacio falls to the ground and protects himself with his arms and knees.

  “Leave me alone!” he shouts. “I couldn’t sleep! I was just taking a walk. I wasn’t spying on anyone!”

  The Goon looks down at him, his face distorted by the angle. Sleepy voices of curious boys hungry for a fight, stirring behind the doors.

  No matter how he aches for Héctor, none of the voices are his.

  LUX

  The cat arrives and it’s a small Persian with a wrinkled face and just the hint of a nose, wet and squished like rat shit. I would’ve preferred a Roman cat, one off the street.

  “But a stray is always more trouble,” the Advisor tells me. “It would run for the woods and you’d lose it right away. This is a unique specimen, genetically altered to be gentler, smaller. Look, it barely even has claws. It’s designed to be with people. A stray cat is a selfish animal: it uses you. It doesn’t want your company. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

  “It must have cost a lot of money,” I say.

  The Advisor dribbles around this. He’s skilled at keeping possession of the conversation.

  “Don’t worry about the money. Money is no object as long as it makes you happy. Wybrany doesn’t waste—we invest.”

  I hold the animal under its belly. The kitten meows, indifferent, and moves its small, hairy paws. I don’t want it. I say it with my face, without a word.

  “Celia, dear, it’s the thought that counts. When someone does something for you, out of kindness, you musn’t reject it.”

  “It isn’t moral to spend that kind of money on this when there are plenty of stray cats,” I insist.

  “It’s not immoral. What do you know about what is or isn’t moral? You’re still too young to be talking about those things.”

  The Advisor doesn’t reprimand me. His tone is sweet, deliberate. I can’t argue with him, nor do I want to. I put the cat down and look at it in disgust.

  “You promised you’d take me to Cárdenas.”

  The Advisor nods. A new expression forms on his face—a tautness in the arch of his brow—and then he speaks: “I promised you and I’ll follow through. I only ask for a little patience. We have to find the right time. And remember: not a word to anyone.”

  “Are you asking me to lie?”

  His eyes harden. He turns toward the window, as if looking for courage. The right thing to say. I watch as he considers my question. His face is bathed in shadow. I attack again: “You always say that lying is the greatest betrayal we can commit against ourselves.”

  He traps my pass, thinks a moment, and shoots: “But Plato spoke o
f the ‘noble lie’ and believed there were lies similar to truths.”

  I don’t remember hearing this in Philosophy class, and I say so.

  “There are many things you haven’t heard yet,” he responds. “There are many things you still have to learn.”

  He picks up the cat and shows it to me again, smiling.

  “I’ll take care of it myself, don’t you worry. At least until you change your mind. One cannot avoid one’s responsibility—we can’t return it simply because you don’t want it. Now, that would be immoral.”

  I get up. I’m getting tired of his speech. He lets me go.

  But before I reach the door, he raises a hand to stop me.

  “I’ll call him Lux. But we can change the name if you don’t like it. Remember: you will always have the final say over this animal. I will act only as an intermediary.”

  THE TEACHER

  There is a new teacher. Young. Héctor looks at her differently.

  She looks back at him from behind her reading glasses. Her eyes are icy and move constantly.

  She waves her hands as she talks about social movements, revolutions, monarchies, republics that follow one after another, about dictatorships and democracies, calling on students randomly, spontaneously, and surely, a flurry that always ends with Héctor, in the back row. She rests a finger lightly on her desk and makes him repeat what she’s just said.

  He repeats, parsimoniously, each of her words one by one. The only difference is his maturing voice, the boy he was and is no longer occasionally surfacing.

  “I always listen to you,” he says one morning. “You don’t have to test me.”

  She inspects him in silence.

  The class is quiet.

  Ignacio turns his head very slowly and sees them staring at each other, and the way they look at each other stabs him in the stomach.

  “How old are you?” she asks.

  “Thirteen.”

  “And why are you here, if you’re thirteen?”

  Surely she knows. She’s only asking to humiliate him.

  “I stayed back a year, in another school.”

  “What kind of school? One like this? Or public?”

  “No, not public. Not like this, either.”

  The other students hold their breath, watching them. The air thickens when they look at each other. At times, she seems impatient, annoyed, but never flustered.

  The new teacher is a rival, distracting Héctor, drawing him away from Ignacio.

  Ignacio bows his head over his desk and purrs like Lux. The telepathic connections aren’t always present, and when they are, the messages arrive clouded with interference.

  Language is useless. Words are corrupt and he doesn’t know how to go back to the beginning.

  THE WIFE

  The Headmaster has a wife, and she comes to the colich to see him every once in a while, at irregular intervals.

  The Booty never knows ahead of time when she will have to suspend her office visits. Only when she sees the wife’s car—a pigeon-shit-resistant minivan—parked next to his does the Booty retreat, resigned and in pain.

  The Headmaster’s house enjoys views of Wybrany’s facilities: the immense grassy park and paths of packed earth, the stain of the forest crowding the metal fence stitched with CCTV cameras. The house is solid and luxurious with large windows, classically decorated but with all the comforts of home automation.

  To the left, the Booty’s home is plainer, more feminine perhaps. She adorns it with dried flowers, porcelain, a shrine of framed pictures setting off her face, beautiful in earlier years.

  The Advisor just has a room, en suite, like the other teachers at the colich. This seems to satisfy him. He claims not to be attached to material things. It’s rumored he has—or had—a thin, bony girlfriend whose picture presides over his desk. It must be a sporadic relationship, because no one has ever seen her visit, and he himself (he claims) rarely leaves the colich.

  So it’s just the Headmaster who has a spouse, a smooth-looking spouse: silky hair and silky clothes, a quality to her flesh that the Booty now lacks.

  She comes occasionally, and when she comes she shuts herself in the house with the Headmaster and no sounds come from inside—no voices or laughter, moans or shouts.

  The Booty leans on her windowsill and incessantly watches the Headmaster’s house. She performs mental exercises, trying to picture herself from the outside. She always imagines herself differently: not idealized, but different, yes.

  Though she misses him, she’s accustomed to his absence: the Headmaster is known to spend long periods of time away from the colich. Even she doesn’t know where he is sometimes, or how long he’ll be away. When he could reappear. He simply takes his car and leaves. Other times, he uses a chauffeur or is collected by private helicopter.

  He’ll appear unexpectedly, randomly. Then he’ll set off to tour the classrooms, surprise inspections accompanied by the Booty, who is swollen and satisfied by his return. He smiles with an impeccable set of teeth and hitches his pants above his waist, pretentious, as she questions the teachers. She doesn’t stop to hear their answers. They stroll between the desks and their eyes slide over notebooks, computers, over the bent heads of the students.

  And with every pass, it’s like they’ve turned the page of a book.

  BEATINGS

  The days are slow and marked by a steely cold, the railing that runs down to the fields increasingly frozen and damp.

  Despite the beatings, Ignacio still waits for a connection.

  They hit him routinely, rhythmically, taking turns, every day, every evening. They spit in his face, steal his food, his school supplies, money. They take his sheets and blankets and he spends the night curled up, trembling on the bare mattress.

  He doesn’t ever rebel, doesn’t tell anyone what’s happening. He understands this is the price he must pay for living alongside his classmates. It doesn’t even seem wrong. He doesn’t think about things in those terms.

  Sometimes there are marks—everyone sees them when he changes for gym—but no one ever says anything. No one thinks it’s strange, in any case.

  When a bruise turns yellow, another one—violet—appears. There are always stains of various colors on Ignacio’s legs, his arms, sometimes on his bony, boyish face. They even split his lip, a fact that bothers no one.

  But last week, the Advisor takes him out of the line at practice, leads him over to a corner and touches the bruise on his thigh.

  “What’s going on here?” he asks.

  Ignacio sputters an unsatisfactory answer. When he sets himself to it, the Advisor knows how to interrogate. But Ignacio remains impassive, even feels proud of his silence, despite his questioner’s tactics.

  The Advisor is pensive for a moment, then states:

  “If you don’t report them, you’re complicit as well.”

  Complicit, sure, but Ignacio expects the beatings, he’s grown up with them. He thinks, perhaps, that his telepathic efforts will lead directly to Héctor, his savior.

  He believes in his religion. He subscribes fully to its asceticism and penitence.

  THE WOODS

  I follow the fence, watching the woods. I know how to get out. I know where the holes are. Everyone knows about them, I think, but they all keep quiet.

  In any case, the woods are forbidden. Supposedly, they’re dangerous. Not because of animals or the rough terrain, but the possibility of vagabonds, thieves, terrorists: people who want to blow up what this world is becoming.

  There were field trips in the past. Field trips to collect plants for botany class, dirt and water samples for experiments on oxidation and weather.

  But now the woods are contaminated—a toxic spill in the river—so they’re not even good for that.

  The gaps in the fence put the colich in jeopardy: an outside that could enter, catching us off-guard in the middle of the night.

  But I come from outside and I’m not afraid.

  For me, this c
omfort is exile.

  I think about the Advisor, about how I can manipulate him, and it’s then that the owl flies over my head, its call suspended in the sky. A long, reedy cry that flaps clumsily toward me.

  Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo.

  The mastiff Cayetana lifts her muzzle and sniffs at the owl’s trail as it flies away. She’s also unsettled. The sun is setting and the light retreats brusquely, violently.

  The night speaks and you just have to listen carefully to hear it.

  I pace the fence once more, dragging my feet. I don’t feel like running today.

  Covered in shadow, the school’s buildings are sketches in the distance. Our brightly painted building is shorter, more modern; experimental architecture for an experiment we participate in unknowingly.

  The lights are shining in the dorms and I can imagine how warm and comfortable they are inside.

  The nicer it is in there, the more disturbing it is to go out.

  My classmates used to come with me. We held each other’s arms and advanced as a united front, protection against the suspicions of the Normal girls, and the boys who were mouthier with us than with them.

  Now they stay inside and seem more and more like the others.

  Even Valen wants to lose weight now, though she still eats around the clock. She craves the slender figures of the other girls. Julia’s. Teeny’s mother’s.

  The screech owl marks its territory with its cry. A warning for me: get out, these woods are mine.

  The owl doesn’t want any competition. Neither do I.

  GERASIM

  Since Ignacio’s conversation with the Advisor, things have slowly started to change for him. It’s possible that the Advisor alerted the Headmaster to his circumstances, and that’s why he’s become interested in Ignacio and fixes him with his usual, steady stare.

  Something about the boy is seductive. The Headmaster is drawn to his submission, that passive acceptance of his fate. A sweetness that has yet to be—is about to be—corrupted. This excites him irrepressibly.