by Sara Faring
“How dare you steal this from me,” she said. She had a real uppity streak, something to do with being a real Aryan looker built in a lab while the rest of us looked like overdyed mistakes; she was swinging around the fancy monogrammed bag she bought like it was a weapon of poor taste.
I wanted to laugh, I did, until I saw Rob’s eyes look all wounded. He’s the kind of kid who felt bad stepping on grass for a summer because he didn’t want to hurt a single blade. Her eyes scanned his handmade sign reading DONASHONS FOR ANIMALS!!!! (Spelling not necessarily a strength of future veterinarians or entrepreneurs.)
“When will you realize that you’ll never be a vet, Robert? Do you know how many years of school that takes? Don’t you understand no one has the money for it?”
“Scholarships,” I said, crossing my arms in Rob’s defense.
“You’re delusional,” she said, desperately trying to hold herself still. I saw that Rob was suppressing tears; he hated when people raised their voices (probably because of the loud fights that erupted over my dad, or, rather, the empty space that should have contained my dad), and all Liese did was raise her voice for stupid-ass reasons. “Your mother was a bit of an idiot, wasn’t she? Living in fantasyland for years—look where that got her. Stuffing all these ideas into your head and going ahead and—well, I shudder to think what will become of you now with this idiot caring for you.”
The second idiot being me, of course. Rob was crying softly, and I was clenching my fists. I took the jug of lemonade and held it out to her. “It’s lemonade, Liese. Lemons and water. I’ll buy you some more. Take it.”
“It’s cold-pressed and organic.” Her mouth ejected the words automatically, and she flushed. “But that’s not the point,” she snapped, ripping the jug from my hands.
That’s when her husband sauntered up, with—no joke—a pastel bag of supplements and protein powder in tow. He-who-must-not-be-named.
“What’s going on here?” he asked. He was a faceless creature the size of a centaur, with thick veins threading through the skin of his arms; they popped up when he was hot or turned on (don’t ask, please don’t ask) or pissed off. They looked like writhing snakes—like something lurid. He set down his shopping bag and put his hands on Liese’s shoulders as if she were a doll he could massage or crush, depending on his mood (she was). He smelled like beer, or yeast, and stale sweat mixed with bad cologne (Macho Icy Mountain Fre$h!).
“Angel took something without asking again.” Liese turned red, looking chastened yet still superior.
His flat eyes flicked from the lemonade container to Rob to me.
“You need to learn your place, kid,” he said. Learn your place. And his casual tone made it sound like a workout regimen suggestion, like You need to do a dozen crunches, and that’s why his put-downs were so insidious. “You’re living in our house, on our dime. You aren’t some special dandelion.” Snowflake, I thought. “And you shouldn’t be indulging the kid.” He nodded at Rob, who had gone silent. “That’s the best advice I’ll ever give you.”
“You’re right about that,” I whispered to myself.
His eyes, which had gone unfocused, landed back on me as Liese averted her gaze.
You shouldn’t be indulging the kid.
I would kill for the kid. Indulging him—encouraging his dreams, few and paltry and Skittlesy as they were—was a given. And could it even be considered indulging him when he’d gone through so much, so young?
He stepped closer, his fingers the size and color of singed mini-sausages tightening around Liese’s collarbones. “What’d you say to me?” he asked, veiny-armed and amused. It was a challenge, not a question. A challenge he knew I could never take him up on, because I could never win.
I was silent.
“Speak up.”
“Babe—” Liese started speaking, but he tightened his grip. There was even a smile playing on his lips, and I would’ve done anything in that moment to take a tire iron to his stupid skull and gouge a dozen gaping holes. A workout regimen I could get behind.
“Shut up, Liese,” he said as casually as some people say I’m fine, thanks.
She tensed under his grasp, and I knew she was going to defuse the situation with some ditzy remark, like Babe, leave it, I bought the T-bone steaks you like for dinner but you always know how to grill them up so nice so we better get cracking on the marinade, because Liese, a bully herself, recognized that her husband was a bigger one. Takes one to know one, and all that.
His nostrils flared. “Speak up. Say whatever it is you have to say.”
“Babe—” Liese said again, and it was more of a baby-animal squeak-groan. Babe! That fucking word! People have killed over less, and my hands were in fists, and I said, “Oh my god, be quiet, Liese,” under my breath, and her face iced up (God was a touchy subject, He-who-must-not-be-named was a Big Fan), and he dropped his shoulders and in one fluid motion hit me with a brick of a hand, casually again, but so hard that I felt it in my deep-down face bones and sported a welt on my cheek for a week.
It was the kind of pain that was a delicious reminder of my hate—of his boring, ham-handed cruelty. I would have killed myself hundreds of times, just for him to have to mop up my subhuman steroid-free blood, just for it to stain his veined arms up to the elbows, really soaking down into his pores.
Rob stayed curled up next to me in my bed all night. I sang him the old lullaby Mama always sang him—the only time she mentioned God. He gave me his banana-yellow blanket to press against my cheek because his blanket helped everything, as magical blankets typically do.
“Did Mama get sick because she gave us her ideas?” he asked, as if Mama lived on ideas as we lived on air, on food, on water, or something mystical and absurd and childlike and beautiful like that. I told him no, even though I thought Liese’s gaffe had helped him mine some deep truth about people. He asked again when we would go home, real home, and much later, when he thought I was asleep, he tugged his blanket back toward him and let silent tears drip into its tropical stripes. After that, I let him play with his scoogi whenever he wanted. And I—I shut down around Liese and He-who-must-not-be-named, learning my place.
But not here.
That’s when I’m overcome with an Others-approved urge to scare the living daylights out of these schoolgirls, before they check a mental box that says, Yes! casual cruelty—the thoughtless kind—is totally funny and okay.
But how to accomplish a little thing like that?
“BOO!” I shout, hovering over them like a banshee. “BOO BOO BOO BOO BOO!”
They don’t even budge. Fine. Way too predictable to work. Kill the ghost dead for trying.
My foot punts at the blonde’s hair (kicking her head feels a little too much like curb-stomping a kitten), and girlfriend doesn’t even register the breeze.
I can’t lift anything good to throw, either. I try a forgotten notebook—nope. I try a nearby lantern, for the ghostly symbolism of shattering its glass. I’m struggling to deadlift a pebble on the roof above them when out of nowhere, I hear a rumbling. A roaring.
Feel it, more aptly.
An entire plane of roof tiles above me becomes dislodged and slides down the roof—shuttling through me, like it’s a subway car, but also dragging me, like I’m a deflated balloon on the tracks. Slamming into the ground next to the girls. Shattering with a thunderous crash like a hundred terra-cotta pots.
If I were the lucky owner of one grade-A body, I would’ve been elegantly decapitated in front of this group of five-foot-tall seventh graders. Not even these brats deserve that.
Commence the shrieking (me included), the cigarette-smoking blonde shrillest of all. A few of them have scratches on their ankles from flying shards. Like little dancing rodeo clowns, they leap up and dust off their clothes and stub out the cigarette and collect their book bags and curse with varying degrees of success (“Good Lord!” is heard more than once).
“Um, I’m going to head over to class,” says the shy girl. The
creepy girl drifts with her.
The group splinters as more and more girls hustle toward the class cottage. Only Mariella tidies her braids as she watches them retreat. “Losers.”
I sit back and wait, shaking, wondering if I caused a roof to literally break in two or not. I examine the blank swath from my spot on the ground. It must have been me, fiddling with the lower tiles, disrupting the balance, and causing the whole avalanche. Do I not even know my own strength? Damn, Hercules.
When the entire group—Mariella included—heads to class, I pat myself on the back for a pretty good-natured haunting. Whether or not poor roof maintenance was involved.
As I’m heading off, a cloud passes overhead: puffy, cotton-white, enormous. Your stereotypical dream cloud, the sort of thing baby angels pop out of, cooing and shooting arrows. I want to bury my face in it, suffocate in it, kind of like that girl who’s famous for rubbing her face in fresh bakery bread (I always feared crust on her behalf). The sky beyond, a deep-lake blue, is richer and realer than any sky I knew. It vibrates, as if it’s swirling with invisible, gelatinous fish. My eye catches on the ridge of the main building and travels along the seams of every cottage running down the hill.
That’s when I see them, perched on the crest of the cottage I was messing around on, invisible to me until now. Sitting and watching.
At least a couple of dozen frizzing shadows—if you can call static shudders as much—of men above me. Hulking, bulky masses, twice my size. Not one or two—but two dozen. Concrete in a way I’ve never known.
Bile laces up the threads of my non-throat, knowing these Other reptiles were above me.
Knowing they did this.
Revel in it, I hear Charon say in my head. Hercules. One raises an arm to wave, a semitransparent, glassy arm as thick as my torso, and I hear laughter, the faintest baritone laughter, carried on the wind.
Every crystal light in me shorts out and goes dark.
7
MAVI: ARGENTINA, MARCH 1978
Mole joins me and Yesi for a lively—and private—lunch on the patio over the ice, which has softened in the midday light. I’ve come to learn that only dinner is eaten at one table together—as if night truly requires more community security on our part. During the day, it seems, we are safe. We settle in front of chicken milanesas, fried to a golden crisp and topped with chopped fresh tomatoes and basil, and Mole proceeds to spill her guts about everyone at the school, including Morency herself. It helps, after the embarrassment of my first class, to gossip. I wish I was better than it, but Marguerite’s God knows I need it.
“I heard from the kitchen staff that Morency had an affair with an Indigenous man years ago, conducted entirely under the cover of darkness,” Mole says. “When her parents found out, they insisted she marry the man. But when he saw her in the light before the ceremony, he ran off in quite the hurry.”
“Oh, please,” I say, looking at Yesi. “It’s too good to be true.”
“I found a photograph of her in her ghastly wedding gown,” Molina replies, dropping to an elated whisper. “I’ll bring it to you.”
I do feel a bit of pity for Morency. But only a bit.
“To be quite frank she looks utterly different. Sad-eyed and small and charming,” adds Mole.
“Small?”
“Yes, small. I swear it. A bit bloated already, perhaps. But it’s as if the energy of that early disappointment funneled itself into overgrowth of the bones, joints, hair.” She brushes a tendril of a vine dangling from the patio wall off her shoulder. “Like Vaccaro School itself. She’s a derailed number one, through and through.”
Yesi and I catch each other’s eyes. For a scientist, Mole can be quite whimsical.
“So is that why she’s at Vaccaro School?” I ask, setting down my knife and fork. “She’s an old maid with nothing better to do than be a matron of a house?”
Yesi looks to Mole, whose nose twitches. “She must have known Carmela before. She’s certainly loyal to her. I can’t imagine why else she’d be here. When she found Mariella and Gisella smoking cigarettes with Domenico on the first night—”
My skin tingles. “What?”
“Well, yes. They were being silly. But Morency erupted into this rather magnificent rant about how no one should take one’s safety for granted—not in this house. If she thinks it’s so dangerous, you would think she wouldn’t be here, no?”
I bite my lip.
“What’s your theory, Mole?” Yesi asks. “Your theory as to why the school exists.” She looks at me. “It’s Mavi’s favorite game. She has no idea why it should exist. She doesn’t buy Carmela’s reasoning.”
I inaugurated the game at breakfast to beat the nerves. We invent more and more outlandish reasons: because it’s a tax haven for Carmela (though we don’t exactly know how—operating on the grounds of a national park, perhaps, and reaping government subsidies); because Carmela’s using it as a front to slyly harvest a special goat’s fur to make pashminas; because they’ve run out of money, and as destitute pseudo-aristocrats, they’ve managed to persuade the ignorant wealthy to send their girls here—they need the tuition as much as we need the final lump sum. I ignore the idea developing in my brain that this is a haunted house hungry for lost souls; no teacher or student has given me any explicit reason to think they are in a situation similar to mine. But after digesting my unpleasant classroom encounter with Carmela, I am certain there is more to this school than meets the eye—she hides darkness with her polished veneer, as no such person hides an educator’s heart of gold.
Molina’s nose wrinkles. “Carmela has been taking the airs,” she says.
My breath catches. “What?”
“Carmela isn’t well,” she says, pushing up her glasses. “Mentally, I should say. Emotionally. She’s up here to recuperate and feel useful. That’s why the school is entirely off the grid. Unreachable by phone, satellite, you name it. Devoid of new technology. It’s like a sanatorium. She needs the peace, you see.” She drops to a whisper again. “You know she ran the second-largest cement company in Argentina for a dozen years, ever since her husband passed? Typical eight. Money and power-focused. Then her daughter fell ill.”
Yesi and I look at each other.
“She has a daughter?”
“Well, yes. Had. Her princess. Domenico’s younger sister. They held a quiet funeral, family only, a month before they approached me. Before they reinstated the school.”
“No!” Despite the salaciousness of it, I feel an ache in my throat for Carmela. As cold and unfeeling as she seems, there must be a kernel of humanity there. Whether it’s been lacquered with too much foundation and lipstick and dye to ever see the light of day remains to be seen.
“And how did they find you?” I ask.
“Pure, wild luck. I was an assistant biology professor in Bragado,” she says. “My husband had just passed away—”
Yesi’s face crinkles up. “Oh, I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“Yes, yes, thank you, dear. He was a terrible bore, however, and we hadn’t said more than Pass the salt to each other in thirty years. In any case, we lived near the center where her daughter was seeking treatment, terribly elite place, thousands of pesos a day, out in the country. And she asked the head of the school if he knew of any teachers without families willing to relocate—”
“Ah.”
“Yes, ah. So here I am.”
We sit chewing on bites of chicken breast for several moments.
“So some of us are lost sheep,” I say. “Looking for a new path.”
Molina considers this. “It makes perfect sense to me that Carmela would seek teachers who could be entirely devoted to the school.”
“At least for the term.”
“That’s right.”
“Or be incentivized monetarily to be devoted.”
Molina laughs. “Ah. Well, yes. I won’t mind retiring in a few years. That’s my plan, you know. Watch the girls graduate and leave. I’ve a cousin who live
s in Miami whom I always forget about until I’m absolutely sick and tired of my present circumstances.”
“You in Miami, Mole?” Yesi laughs. “Even the brash, thonged Floridians would shrivel up and die at your antics.”
“If only there were more men here, my dear,” she replies, fluffing her limp strands. “Only that divine creature Domenico. But he’s far too young for me. Too much juice in him, and not enough fiber, if you know what I mean. I would suck him dry in a week.”
We fall into hysterics; I spit out a chunk of tomato. “Molina, no!” Wiping my lip, I whip around to make sure he’s not turning the corner.
“One of you should engage in a torrid affair with him,” she says. “Or is one of you doing so already? Oh, please do tell me if you are. It would so brighten up this dreary mountain life of mine.”
I look at Yesi and find her staring at me, smirking.
“I’ve been here less than twenty-four hours, for God’s sake,” I say.
“She wouldn’t dare,” says Yesi in a drawl.
“I’m certain he’s an absolute savage in bed, though,” adds Mole.
“Mole!” I whisper-shout as Yesi laughs at me.
“Mavi could get thrown out, Moley. Hush hush.”
Mole sniffs the air. “Carmela wouldn’t be all too concerned.”