by Dan Josefson
As far as I knew, I was running away in the morning. Maybe that’s why Aubrey’s speech didn’t bother me too much. Or maybe he was right—that most words didn’t mean anything to us, that we were fortunate ignoramuses. The photo album was open again to the picture of the young couple. I looked more closely. The girl had dimples, and her fingers were entwined with the man’s. She wasn’t especially pretty but she seemed happy.
“That’s the daughter of the guy who built the Mansion,” Carly said. “Her name was Letitia or Lucretia or something like that. Lucretia, I think. Grafflin.”
“Who the town’s named after?” I asked. “Down the road?”
“Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. Lucretia’s dad was a chocolate manufacturer. Here he is.” She flipped some pages, smoothed the book open, and slid it in front of me. The photograph showed a short round man in a dark suit proudly holding a large birdcage in front of him. In the cage was nothing but a blur, a swirl of dark and light. At the bottom of the page someone had carefully printed his name, Cubit C. Grafflin. “The bird must have been flying around when they took the picture,” Carly said.
“She died at her wedding,” Bev whispered.
“The bird?”
“Lucretia,” Carly said. “Actually, it’s true. The story is that she wanted to get married in winter and to have the ceremony out on the lake. And the lake was frozen over well enough, but she insisted on having the altar lit with all these candles they put on the lake and that made the ice weak. And it cracked and she drowned with her groom and the minister.”
“No,” Bev said, “she did not want to get married in winter.” Her faint frizz of curls looked orange in the light of the fire. “She had to because she was pregnant. And now she haunts the lake and the baby haunts the Mansion. And the groom didn’t die either, they saved him out of the frozen lake. But he never could get warm again.”
“Did you hear something?” Carly asked. “There must be a draft or something, because I thought I heard someone talking.”
Bev leaned toward me. “Your girlfriend’s in the corner.”
“Bev! You’re not allowed to tell him that.”
“Well, you’re not supposed to be listening to me.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Please,” Carly said, “we’re not supposed to talk to her.”
8
Over the next few days, Tidbit’s black eye blossomed grotesquely. The dark bruise stretched down to her cheekbone and swelled around her eyeball. The color was a pearly blue-black, which faded to lighter shades of purple and red around the edges.
Aaron was watching her in the corner. He had spent days doing this and was still amazed, minute by minute, that nothing happened. Tidbit sat, facing the corner. He sat in a chair behind her. That was it, hour after hour. By now his anxiety had waned, and he was used to the idea that all he had to do was sit here and wait for his shift to end.
Tidbit studied her eye carefully during her short bathroom breaks, standing on her toes and leaning against the sink to get a closer look at the mirror. She noticed that the part of the bruise covering her cheek had faded to a kind of gray-green. At the bottom of the swollen bag under her eye, a poorly delineated crescent of jaundiced yellow had appeared. Tidbit would occasionally pull her lower eyelid down to look at the bright blot of blood that had congealed at the bottom of her eyeball. But the dull ache this caused was sickening and kept her from doing it too often.
She had no way of knowing that I’d abandoned our plan to run when I found out she was in the corner. As far as she knew, I might have tried and gotten caught, or I might have run on my own. Tidbit knew she should feel bad, but she didn’t. She told me later that she was relieved to still be on campus; she didn’t even mind sitting in the corner all day. And she thought it was funny picturing me waiting in the woods, trying to figure out what to do.
There was no word on how long Aubrey would make Tidbit stay in the corner, but Aaron was hoping it would be a while. The idea of going back to another dorm made him more and more anxious the longer he spent watching Tidbit. He liked how peaceful it was in the girls’ wing when no one was around, how he could just watch the sunlight coming through the window change direction as the morning and then the afternoon went on. And people seemed to appreciate and sympathize with him when they passed through the dorm.
It was on his sixth day of watching her sit in the corner that Tidbit turned around in her chair. “Do you think you’re going to stay here?” she asked him. “To work, I mean.”
Something pleading in the tone of her voice made him feel like he could reply. She didn’t seem to be testing him; she sounded worried that he would leave. “Yeah, I think so,” he said, although he didn’t know if he would.
“You should leave,” Tidbit said. “You’re still young. Nobody who works here has a life. You should get out and enjoy yourself.”
Aaron couldn’t think of anything to say in response, but it was nice of her, he thought, to think of him like that. “I like working here,” he said, surprised at how much he meant it. “And I didn’t have much of a life before, anyway.” This he meant as a joke, so he laughed. Tidbit didn’t.
She crossed her arms over the back of the chair. “What did you do before?” Her bruised eye looked shiny. Aaron thought her eyeball was a little yellow.
“I was a bike messenger. Actually, I rode a scooter.”
“Why’d you leave a wicked job like that?”
Aaron laughed. “It didn’t pay too well, so I was thinking about quitting anyway, but then my boss figured out that I had been driving around town for two months completely stoned. So I didn’t really get a chance to quit.”
“That sounds fun, though. Just don’t tell any of the RO-bots.”
Figuring this was something critical of the school, Aaron didn’t ask her what she meant. He was already talking to her when he shouldn’t be. “So what did you do to get sent here?” he asked instead.
“Me?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Well, at home I used to be in this band. I played bass and my best friend Eli was in it. We called ourselves the Broad Strokes. Anyway, we’d entered this Battle of the Bands they had at my high school every year. We were spending all this time practicing in Eli’s garage, not so much because we wanted to win, but Battle of the Bands was really fun, and we’d been going since we were in like fifth grade. But then out of nowhere one day at school, the principal calls us all into his office. And he’s like ‘I can’t let your band into this competition,’ and we’re all like, ‘Why not?’ And he says it’s because of our name, like that explains it. But I was like ‘What’s wrong with our name?’ And he looked at me like I was full of shit.
“But then Eli and our singer, Donna, were like ‘No, really, what are you talking about?’ The principal looked a little uncomfortable and started saying it was a double entendre, and we knew just what he meant, but we really didn’t. So he explains that ‘broad’ could mean a woman, and ‘strokes’ was like, well, basically he accused us of our name being a reference to a handjob. Which none of us had even thought of, but this pervert had. And that’s what I said, I said he was a pervert for thinking of that when we hadn’t even meant it. And I wouldn’t take it back, and he was like—”
Tidbit stopped at the sound of someone opening the front door of the dorm. She continued in a whisper, “Anyway, I wouldn’t take it back and got kicked out. You should probably tell me to turn around and face the corner.”
“Yeah, you should do that,” Aaron said. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” she said as Kavita entered the room. Nurse Kavita was a nervous, pretty Indian woman who was perpetually overwhelmed by the extent of her responsibilities. She had to pour meds for every student on campus, most of whom took a heavy mixture three times a day, the exact proportions of which were constantly being adjusted by Dr. Wahl, the school’s psychopharmacologist.
“Oh, what is that you’re reading?” she asked Aaron.
/> It took him a moment to realize what she was talking about. Over the past few days, whenever a faculty member had seen him just sitting there by the corner, they reminded him that it was okay for him to read a book or magazine while he was watching Tidbit. They looked at him strangely when he said he was fine just sitting there, so this morning on his way to the dorm, he had stopped by the Teachers’ Lounge and grabbed something off the shelf. He read to Nurse Kavita from the cover: She Stoops to Conquer.
“Oh. Is it any good?”
“I haven’t really started it yet. It looks good.”