After Hope Dies

by Lilly Haraden

  Jan returns the brush to her the stand beside the mirror. But see there –a quick solution. Grab the pair of scissors, Janelle. Feel their good weight in your hand. Good. Snip snip. Now stand here, take a fist full of the white girl poison. That’s it. Ready the scissor mouth and feed the disease into the blades.

  Jan puffs out her cheeks, moments away from executing the color to an early death.

  The metal teeth bite. But the hair does not give. These sunlight threads simply bend and twist in the snip. Try and try and try, hack and hack and hack. Nothing. It’s impossible to go back.

  But her heart catches a little. She isn’t white just because she has this hair. Janelle is Janelle. Down go the scissors. Eyes take her image in once more and Janelle forces a smile. Girl twirls on the spot like a girl her age should and likes how the petals of her school dress unfold and furl. Nothing like her real dress, though.

  Corrina hasn’t left any money for lunch today. Janelle feels her stomach wince at the thought of Card food. Cardboard taste, cardboard texture, the menu restricted by whatever the council says she’ll be eating today. At least it’s free.

  A cold wait for the bus outside and a thirty minute drive in. Yellow slug-bus today – Big Bird stole Oscar’s home. Janelle sits behind the driver and cuddles her broken schoolbag tight. Looks around. Fifty-forty-ten mix of kids, more girls than boys. She’s not sure if that makes her feel safer or not – yes, considering both the racial or gender mix. It strikes her then that she has no friend to sit and talk with on her way to school. See how all the birds form sets in their seats? It strikes her then that she doesn’t have that many friends to begin with. Who’d want to be friends with:

  ‘Hey lurk, it’s the slut.’

  Someone new sitting behind her with wet eyes part-hidden by a deep beanie. Janelle turns and sees a deep, deep river of problems. Now here’s a thought: how might this same situation have ended with her old voice still in play? Most likely with a fist to the eye socket/nose/somewhere obvious and embarrassing. Not many girls or boys used to mess with Janelle. Obviously this one must have stepped on the wrong bus having come from a part of the school where all the kids substitute learning by burying their heads in the sand. Janelle’s got a reputation. Reputations require upkeep: see how all the other kids stop their talking and lean in like flowers to the sun, listening to the solar news. How will she respond? What will the devil-girl do to this poor kid with his third-hand beanie and momma jacket?

  Boy leans over his seat and flops his spaghetti arms about, continues, ‘My bro’ told me he fuck you up real good at the club. Tol’ me he cum in yo’ mouth and you just sat there like a fat bitch an took it, swallow it all, beg him for more, I heard.’

  Janelle hugs her bag tighter. Momma would combust if she heard such truth. Hidden inside the bag, her work clothes suddenly weigh down like a pair of guilty lead shoes. She didn’t take them out today, did she. Is she even going to go back there? No. What about Dani? She should call her. She’ll think about this later. The bus stops and lets on new students. They climb the stairs and stop. What have they walked in on? An entire busload of kids staring at…who? Oh, the slut and this new kid with his shitty-ass beanie. Yeah, this’ll end well.

  Janelle closes her eyes and wishes she were someplace else. Horrible arithmetic scribbles in her head, trying to make the best of this situation…

  ‘Well, if you workin’ today, he might com’ down agen, pay you a visit.’

  Think…

  ‘Maybe I can cum in that mouth too. What’s the goin’ rate, ha?’

  Think.

  ‘Ten, five? You worth that much, I rekon.’

  And Janelle feels a presence at the side of her head: bristly proximity. Weight on the words as they trickle silver into her ears. Words of poison. Words from another monster. Like this:

  ‘Are you going to let me rape you again, little slut? I saw you last night, wetting those sheets, spoiling your neat little panties. Was that just for me? Remembering the fun we had? You liked my cock up your ass, little slut. Didn’t you —’

  Enough! Janelle throws her bag into the window – hard – with the zipper scratching the glass. On her feet now and flipped around; the boy doesn’t have time to react as the fist rockets to his face. Connects. Crunches. Again, again, a triple-tap fury. The beanie creature yells sharp and worms back into his seat, hands over his face, blood trickling free. Janelle keeps her fist where it was, then puts it away, stands tall, and the whole bus watches her. Every eye. Beanie boy cries. She leans over the back of the seat again, presses forward into the cockroach, closer and closer until she can’t bare the smell of his breath. Girl brings up a closed fist once more, slow and threatening.

  Murmurs so the whole bus can hear:

  ‘If you ever talk ’bout my work again, I’ll take out botha yo’ eyes.’ Janelle extends two fingers and wiggles them around. Pokey Pokey.

  Welcome back, old Janelle. See? There’s still a perfect black girl under that white coat of paint.

  She sits back down as the bus takes them to school. Her face burns. Nobody bothers her for the rest of the trip. Nobody sits next to her either.

  Janelle thinks she might cry.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  There’s a small line of students at the front of school queuing to get in. She and her busload of non-friends join the sea of heads that congregate beside the Everden school board. Today, it reads: ‘With each kindness and every crime, we birth our future.’ Future? You fucking serious? Hah. Nobody cares about the future – the future consists of worrying if you’ll get another shift on the A-lines. Nothing more. Janelle slips her bag onto the security roller and waits as an instructor feeds the children into a scanner. Her turn. Inside the chamber, arms up and legs apart, the magnets whir and whir to peep under her clothes. Nothing on her. Janelle collects her bag from the other side and remembers mildly that day when the boy in front of her had a piece sticking down his trousers. The school was sent into lockdown for hours and Janelle had to call Dani to pick her up early.

  Right. She really does need to buy a phone and contact Dani. The school shop’ll have a cheap one. She can charge it to her school account – the nebulous debt that’ll never, ever get paid. What’s another hundred in the maze of thousands?

  A concrete square separates the buildings: north, south, east and west for different grades and subjects. Students swarm, bundled up in warm clothes, making passage through the grime and black of the school day. No building is particularly tall; Janelle can see the factories in the near distance and maybe a little glimpse of water out east. No, that’s just a rare patch of pure sky. Smokestacks and columns make the clouds now, these chimneys towering over them – a bright future and plentiful job prospects for the children of Stallwind. She follows the crowds to the west block where Grade 7 takes shelter but it’s clear that she won’t get there just yet. A little crowd of sharks have gathered having smelt the blood of conflict. Janelle wiggles through a gap or two and peeks into the scene.

  Two older students are having a fierce argument in Chinese. Cantonese, Janelle guesses, not that Americans really care for the difference because it all sounds Chinese (fun fact: it’s actually non-mainland Mandarin). Are they sisters? One is slightly taller than the other. She’s a senior – check out the stripy tie. Pointing and yelling. They jab each other on the shoulders in a universal sign of agitation. The younger sister (tracksuit girl) shakes her head violently and pushes past the elder. The crowd parts to let her leave and they all watch as she’s out the front gate in a heartbeat.

  Some smart ass yells, ‘What are you Chinks fightin’ about?’ to which the elder student responds by flipping the bird. She’s fierce, this one: short knife hair and eyes that tear you to pieces. Janelle feels their weight, but not for long. The senior storms off to her end of the school and Janelle can’t help but watch her as she goes. Vanishes.

  Janelle has to get to class.

  Off the girl goes.

  Her locker hinges need r
eplacing: hear how they squeak! hur-uhh-ha. A moment of darkness. Girl rests her head against the locker door, closes eyes, lets it come, lets it fade. Breathe. Janelle locks her bag safely away and slips into her classroom with a bitter seed foaming in her belly. Ignore it. Sit in her regular place? No. One of the spare seats at the front today. Front is the new black. As she sits down, she feels the students in her immediate vicinity up and leave, making a suitable fallout zone around the child. Janelle is irradiated. She feels too embarrassed to meet their eyes; sitting at the backs of classrooms all her life has really sheltered her from the judgments of regularly-behaved individuals. This is a strange thing to realize, and the implications do not sit well in her belly. Alongside the other thing. Focus now.

  Beige walls, broken desks, no view outside beige, broken windows. Classroom.

  Mr. Davis walks in and calls the roll even as more students enter the class. It’s a mixture of discipline – I start when I want to start – and laziness – I can’t be bothered to wait. When he calls out a name, his mustache dances with delight to match the flow of curly hair. Forty-four names, and then the lesson for the morning:

  ‘All right then, we’ll start with English.’ Janelle already has her copy of Huck Finn (nigger-less edition) on her benchtop, but Mr. Davis continues with, ‘As you know, we’ll be starting Slaughterhouse Five today. Mr. Vonnegut had lots of interesting things to write about war and conflict.’

  Oh. That’s right. Twain was first term. They’re already in the second and onto the next module. Remorse cuts hard and Janelle puts her half-read copy of Finn/Sawyer away. What a mess. Her new lesson plan is to dodge the eyes of her teacher who, thanks to the sordid facts of their shared past, has long since given up on trying to educate her. It works remarkably well. Worked remarkably well.

  They’re instructed to take a worksheet and pass the rest on. It has a quote on it; a girl is asked to read it out loud and everyone listens:

  ‘I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.’

  Kurt’s wizened face rests underneath, smiling. Janelle frowns. What a depressing quote. Mr. Davis takes a seat on the edge of this desk, asks the class what this particular piece of opinion means. Janelle volunteers a hand. Mr. Davis purposefully scans the rest of the class first, ‘please, anyone else,’ and then settles on Janelle with a look that says, ‘Ok, here we go, what’s it going to be today.’

  ‘Ms. Broadchurch.’

  ‘He…meant that there was no hope for the future.’

  Mr. Davis’s eyebrows take flight. He spreads his hands and declares, ‘That’s an awfully fatal assessment.’

  Janelle thinks about the quote and whatever she remembers about Slaughterhouse Five from the five minutes of Wikipedia weeks ago. Girl says, ‘If technology can’t make the human race better, nothing will. Humanity has had ten thousand years to figure out the best way of living together and all that we’ve come up with is more creative ways to kill each other. Technology was supposed to make our lives easier, like Mr. Vonnegut said, even to the point where we could discover the secrets of existence. Like God. But all we made was a bomb that killed hundreds of thousands of people. This is all people can do. In China, they have phones that deliver medicine into your skin so you don’t have to go to the doctors. But people still kill each other because they hack these phones and make drugs that they OD on. Or assassinate people remotely. So, this quote’s saying there’s no hope for a better world as long as there are people in it to abuse the very things that are supposed to help them. People will always be people.’

  Christ. What fresh hell is this? Mr. Davis, uncertain if he is stuck in a sordid nightmare where his students’ roles are reversed, asks the class, ‘Uh. What do the rest of you think?’

  ‘Yeah, what Janelle said,’ murmurs a boy from two rows behind (in the Janelle fallout zone).

  That settles it. Even though Janelle was wrong, right?

  An hour goes by. Recess is called and all the students rise to flood the halls. Not Janelle. She waits until everyone has gone and approaches Mr. Davis at his desk. Orange on the table next to the staplers. No mess. Just the two of them now, with the howls and chants of excitement pulsing down the hallway. Echoes, echoes. Quiet. The man looks up but his fingers hover over his ancient laptop keyboard. This won’t take long.

  ‘By the principal’s order, we’re not supposed to be alone in the same room together. Not after last week.’

  Janelle cups her hands in front of her and says, ‘Please forgive me for what I did last Thursday. It was inappropriate to suggest that, in exchange for an extension on my already late English assignments, I could give you oral sex. And then to continue to suck my finger in class while you taught—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear your false apologies,’ Mr. Davis says, turning his attention back to marking papers. ‘Frankly, there’s very little in my eyes that you can do to redeem yourself. You’ve failed to hand in your past three assignments on Tom Sawyer; I doubt you’ve even read the damned thing. No, I didn’t assign Huck Finn. I saw your copy today before you put it away. And I bet you’ve only glanced at a summary of Slaughterhouse Five too. One day of satisfactory behavior doesn’t undo a term’s worth of exactly the opposite.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, you’re not. Sorry is a word so watered down by you that it’s meaningless, especially in how often you’ve used it on me.’

  Her heart dances. ‘What can I do to make this right? I-If you give me a week, I’ll have the assignment on—’

  The man holds up a hand. ‘I’ve already given you a zero for the first term. You’ve got three more terms left to fail, so don’t you worry.’

  Janelle hangs her head and murmurs, ‘Then I’ll just try my best.’ She walks back to her desk, fetches her bag for the next session. Walks to the door. Tries not to cry. Mr. Davis catches her halfway through the threshold.

  ‘Janelle. Vonnegut never said there was no hope. Even though the future looked bleak to him…here we are.’

  Janelle finds her teacher’s eye, then looks away. ‘I would say this is a pretty bleak future…’

  Davis sighs, tries to think of the right thing to say. ‘When everything seems hopeless, I always ask myself one question: can you imagine a better world?’

  Janelle nods. ‘Of course I can.’

  Davis nods and shuts his laptop. ‘Then there is hope. Otherwise, there is nothing. I can hope that my class will do great things one day. If I didn’t have that hope then I wouldn’t be here teaching. Students are like my hope.’

  ‘Then what about me?’

  Janelle can guess the truth even before the forced answer arrives.

  They leave each other. It seems there are things in her past that she is unable to fix. Doesn’t that cloud and paint her future too? Is she already doomed like the reprobate of God’s angry world? [RE this section, Lilly. For a girl who has just been raped, Janelle seems far too comfortable being alone with men. This is one of those prickly problems when dealing with authenticity and trauma. Or perhaps this is how Jan chooses to deal with what happened to her as a contrast to Mirror? See also: Hugo and Janelle’s first meeting].

  Card food for lunch. Cat food for lunch. It doesn’t bear description but here’s a taste: hard on the tongue like sucking a school shirt, color of menstrual blood. No taste, no friends to sit with.

  At 3PM, the bell tolls the school day’s end and all the kids line up outside for the buses. These big silver beasts with different company logos shining on their flanks, all ready to swallow the students and take them to the factories for work. Foxconn, Quallcom, Great Wall, Shandian, etcetera. Janelle is on
e of the few students to be picked up from school by something or someone that is not a company transport bus. So she sits on a pillar along the front wall in her usual spot and watches, watches. Teachers stay behind to organize the students into orderly lines, making sure everyone’s in their right place. Apparently, they get paid a small cut to make sure the kids show up for the bus ride to slavery – I mean ‘work.’ Luckily, Janelle has that little card in her wallet that says she’ll let you do dirty things to her for the right price, so she’s exempt. A teacher walks out the front gate and gives her the eye, wondering why she isn’t lining up…or…and off he goes.

  A thought: would one of these teachers ever visit her at work? Do they think about the students in that way but mask their desires behind authority and indifference? Does it build up and up inside them so they unleash their urges at places like Janelle’s club, on girls like Janelle? Yes, probably. Mr. Davis’s ‘after school sessions’ were hardly ever innocent. But no teacher she knows has ever been to her club, at least. Though she has heard stories from other girls at her club, from other girls at other clubs…it bears no real thought. Like Card food, like future. If it happens it happens.

  Life and work never-ending. But what will she do about work?

  She doesn’t want to work. The thought of that terrible monster, those men…Yet, how will she get the money she needs to live? She’ll explain it all to Dani – why she can’t go back. Dani will understand. Or maybe she won’t. Maybe extracting yourself from this line of work isn’t so easy. But these are all unknowns. Janelle needs to call Dani.

  Out comes the new addition to her army of fallen devices. It’s an AT&T cheapie designed for students, picked it up for a hundred dollar dime at the shop. She logs into her Central profile and downloads her apps. Notifications waterfall across her screen. An army of likes and Piktcha comments that range from, “Yo hmu little miss you worken that body haaard,” to, “Damn how much to cum over them titties girl? Where you at?” Good advertisements for the club, right, Jan? You’re the literal definition of a poster child. Girl closes her eyes. Shame burns in her belly, shame and the echo of a raw thrill, a gurgling attention-seeking screech from her heart. You like all that attention, don’t you. Little slut swipes the peeping eyes away from her dash and finds the call logs. Nobody’s tried to call since Friday. Hmm…Dani must not have worried about her after all…