by J. A. Rock
“What?”
Denson took my face in her hands. I was too startled to say anything. She looked at me through her thick glasses, which slid down her nose a bit. “We’ve assigned Allendara to your room.”
I went completely still. I didn’t even feel anger so much as a quiet despair. For the next two years, my life would be told to me like a story. This is your roommate. These are the classes you must attend. Here are your new clothes. I couldn’t stand it.
Denson continued: “Most of the staff members here don’t trust you to be civil to a roommate. I have insisted they are wrong. I would very much like it if you would prove me correct. Do you hear me?”
I scowled, displeased at being spoken to like a child. “I hear you.”
“And do you just hear me? Or do you also understand?”
Now I did pull away. “Why are you talking to me like I’m stupid?”
Her expression grew gentler. “It’s not about thinking you’re stupid. I know you’re a good girl. Please—please—be kind to Alle.”
“All right,” I muttered.
When she ruffled my hair, I stood there glaring, even after she’d gone downstairs. I didn’t want to find Bitsy anymore. I went to my room to wait.
“Are your parents dead, or did they give you up?” I asked as I lounged on my bed and watched Alle unpack.
She glanced at me but didn’t answer. She had an alligator-patterned suitcase that held a few clothes and three books. She stacked the books on the tiny table by the bed.
“Mine are dead,” I told her. “My mother split my father’s head open with an ax.” I yawned. “Then she—mmm, ’scuse me—poisoned herself.”
Alle didn’t look at me this time, but I was pretty sure I heard her mutter, “Uh-huh.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I believe you.”
I watched her fold a dress into a neat little square like a linen napkin and place it in the closet we shared, and I knew this was going to be a nightmare.
New Intake: A Beadurinc
Report By: Dr. Brenda LiPordo
New intake, A Beadurinc, #00986773, was very quiet as she was introduced to Rock Point. By all accounts a lovely girl, nonetheless there are unpalatable elements to her past that indicate she must be watched. Rollins feels that the logbook is not the place to discuss this history, but full records are available to those who must know. Miss A was given a tour and shown to her room. She is to room with T Ballard, a decision many have protested and yet I and Rollins feel that if there is anyone T might get along with, it is a very quiet girl like Miss A.
Bessie Holmes’s Note: That girl is bueatiful. & bueatiful often equalls trouble. Rollins, i will need to read all the files. i want to know what this girl have been up to that makes us untrust her.
Alle was a mystery. She rarely spoke. She was full before dessert; she was lovely beyond words. I desired to impress her for reasons I couldn’t understand, and I went about fulfilling that desire in the misguided way of suitors in stories, who, before growing up to be brave knights, are generally foolish and scorn-worthy.
I stamped on the centipedes that sometimes crawled on the dining room floor. Picked up their smashed bodies and leaned over Alle—she always sat beside me—to place them in Kenna’s stew. Kenna was a good one to include in this act, as she would make the centipedes talk before she slurped a bite of stew and swallowed without chewing, creepy crawlers and all.
Alle smiled at the younger girls in such a way that they all worshipped her, but many of the older girls thought she was stuck up and a prude. I didn’t know whether to agree. Alle also caught flak for her skin. She was darker than most of us, and in the same way I’d seen Bitsy, Tamna, and Denson whispered about for their paleness, and Franny Gammel teased for her extreme thinness, Alle became a target by virtue of being too noticeably different.
“You’ve got something right here,” Kenna said to Alle, the way you’d point out food lingering at the corner of someone’s mouth, except Kenna gestured to her whole face.
Alle stared right through her as if she didn’t hear. I thought it a sign of weakness that she didn’t fight back, but later I learned better.
“You shouldn’t let her say things about you,” I told her after a particularly brutal dinner during which Kenna had flung mashed potatoes into Alle’s hair, and I in turn had put Kenna in a headlock and scrubbed my knuckles over her scalp until she squealed.
“I don’t care.” Alle sat rigidly on the parlor sofa. There was a depth to her expression that made clear she was neither weak nor stupid. Her eyes were very large. Her lashes were short and curled upward. I’d always thought I hated prettiness in girls. It seemed a useless trait, and too many girls used it as license to act like dimwits. But Alle . . . I wanted, not just to know her secrets, but for her to want to know mine. Her beauty seemed indicative of goodness, which was a dangerous correlation, but one I couldn’t stop myself from making.
We arrived in our room that night to find that somebody had stolen the blanket off her bed. Alle stood by the bare cot under the flickering light, her black curls shaking almost imperceptibly. I couldn’t see whether she was crying. I got to thinking how damned angry I was—not just on her behalf. Who the hell had come into our room? Had they taken anything of mine? I checked my paltry collection of old toys and sweaters, but found nothing missing.
I stared at my own blanket for a few minutes, then tossed it over Alle’s head, turning her into a moth-eaten ghost. An hour later, both of us in our beds in the darkness, I heard her muffled whisper: “Thank you.”
I smiled and lay shivering.
I didn’t mind that Alle didn’t speak to the others, but I wanted her to talk to me. I wasn’t sure what interested her. She never seemed to listen when the others discussed boys. I had little invested in the subject either, but I at least knew lewd things to say to make the other girls laugh. Yet Alle never laughed at such jokes. She owned a dark-blue dress and a pale-yellow shawl. I sometimes thought about her when I shouldn’t. I imagined adjusting the shawl around her shoulders and holding doors for her—all sorts of embarrassingly civilized things I’d never been inclined to do for anyone else.
Bitsy started treating me coldly. I barely noticed at first, I was so focused on Alle. But soon I realized how much I missed Bitsy’s rants, her company. When I asked her to come to my room one night, she said, “You have her now. You don’t need me.”
And the sad thing was, she wasn’t wrong.
Alle was gentler than Bitsy, and though she lacked Kenna’s hardness, she was not soft, as I’d first thought. She was powerful in her silence, and she made me doubt my bullying ways and the wicked deeds I fantasized about. Her judgment hurt because I couldn’t know the extent of it. I imagined a set of preferences and morals for Alle that may have had nothing to do with what she really felt and believed. A soldier-ish loyalty grew on me ivy-thick, and I started to feel less like an awkward, angry child, and more like a warrior, with followers and a destiny and a tortured soul.
I noticed things about her—the way she held her pencil between her fourth finger and pinkie, instead of between her third and fourth fingers, as I did. The way she swept her skirt underneath her with one hand when she stood. The way she listened during story time, but didn’t gasp or laugh, or moan when Miss Ridges left off at the end of a suspenseful chapter. She carried herself with a gawky sort of confidence, her chin too far up, her strides too short. It was sometimes hard to decide whether she looked clownish or elegant. She did look ready, like she’d stoically outlasted many crises and would weather still more without protest.
I also noticed the way the Rock Point staff watched her—with a wariness that I at first believed was directed at me, because I was often by her side when I noticed it. But no, they were studying her. Alle did not participate in rec for her first week at Rock Point, and the monitors visited our table more frequently than the others during meals. But these oddities were eclipsed by my fascination with Rock Poi
nt’s latest addition.
“Hey,” I called to her in the hall one day after classes were done. When she turned, I felt a moment’s panic. “Where are your chores at today?” I didn’t need to ask. I knew she worked doing laundry.
“Laundry room.” Her voice was gravelly, like she’d just woken.
“Can I come down and look at the towels? Tamna asked me to find an old one to keep around the kitchen to clean up spills.”
It was all cow drippings, to be sure. But I went down with her to the laundry area in the basement, trying desperately to think of a topic of conversation. While I was there in that dank space, my chest grew tight. The shadow cast on the wall by the washbasin became sinister and seemed as if it might begin prowling at any moment. Alle headed for the towels, but I turned wordlessly and walked up the wooden steps.
She followed me to the top step, where I sat, clutching my knees and looking at all the lint my black trousers had accumulated. Being next to her gave me a merciful sense of quiet. I looked at the smooth skin of her hands. Smelled, in her hair, the cheap soap we all used. I nearly rested my head on her shoulder the way I sometimes did with Bitsy. She seemed, in that moment, familiar enough.
“I think we should be friends.” I didn’t look at her. “Really, I do. I think it would benefit both of us.”
“Nobody here wants to be friends with me.” She didn’t sound bitter about it. Just tired.
“That’s what I thought at first too. About myself, I mean. But now I’m friends with Bitsy, and Kenna—though she’s unpleasant.”
Alle pinched the hem of her skirt delicately between her thumb and forefinger and tugged it over her knees. My gaze flicked toward the movement, but I don’t think her eyes ever left mine. “I’ve heard about you.”
“Oh?” I couldn’t figure out why that made me nervous. What did I care what she knew, what she thought?
“I’ve heard you’re not nice.”
The sting flooded me. This was the sort of comment that would once have made me proud. Now, for the first time, I felt mortified. Alle was the sort of person who admired niceness. Anyone could see that. She probably enjoyed birdsong and sunsets. She probably wished all people would cut their food into small bites. I didn’t answer.
“I don’t think it’s true,” she said after a while. “Not entirely.”
I clutched my knees, digging my fingertips in. I was desperate to change the subject. “Do you know the story of the Minotaur?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t say anything else for a moment. “Do you think magic is common?”
“I don’t know.”
I was a cast-off daughter. What if there was a magic growing deep inside me—a magic that would cause me to crave blood and to loathe everyone, forever? And then to be shut away in a maze, where people would loathe and fear me in return?
If that were the case, why should I be afraid of my fate? I wanted magic. I wanted to be more powerful than anyone here. More powerful than my parents had been, more powerful than Auntie Bletch. I wanted people to fear me. And if, as appeasement, I was offered a palace, a grand world where my only job was to think up inventive traps for foolish tributes, then that was a good thing. Wasn’t it?
“I’m getting better,” I said softly. “At being nice.”
Alle patted my knee. “You wanna help me wash clothes?”
No, but yes, perhaps, certainly—I did.
Rec Report
Glenna Formas
Today was the first day #00986773 joined the other girls for rec. I have to say I do not see what we were so worried about. She plays well with the others. She manages to be gracious while also not being a wiener. This means a surprising amount to me.
I know it is not my business, but maybe we should put less stock in her past. Do you see what I’m saying? Sometimes people do intense things in self-defense. I have never seen a girl who seemed less capable of causing harm than #00986773.
Bessie Holmes’s Note: Glenna, may i say something? Often those who’s best suited to cause harm are being most efficient at concealing it. We disgust this the other day in my divorced women’s choir. So many of those women had relationships of abuse and mistrust. That is because nearly any man can act the part of a gentleman. & so, i’m sure, can children deceive.
Van Narr’s Note: I think it is no wonder the children don’t like you, Bessie.
I was staring just to the left of Dr. DuMorg, the psychologist. I’d stolen enough glances at her so far to know that her face was too serious and her spine too straight, her boots too stiff and her lips too red. Her bobbed hair was parted severely to one side, so that the bulk of it lay curved against her cheek like a massive hand was cupping her face.
We were in the reading room.
Dr. DuMorg believed in talking about our pasts. She had studied something called New Theory, which stated that children should be treated as adults, their feelings validated and their pasts thoroughly examined for clues about their futures.
Among us girls there was an unspoken rule that we did not talk about our lives before Rock Point. But in my sessions with DuMorg, she pushed me to remember things that made me feel like I was sitting on thorns. It was not that I’d had a bad childhood or disliked my family. But what I remembered of my parents was limited. And what I knew of my sister was colored by what I wanted her to be, rather than who she was. I had no interest in scratching at scabs until they balled up under my nails.
I pictured my family as insects caught in separate sections of a spider’s web—all condemned to the same fate, but unable to face it together. Each of us struggling alone in a thread cocoon, waiting. My mother and father had been taken first, and Auntie Bletch was to be devoured next, if she hadn’t been already. And Rachel and I . . . were we still trapped, or had we escaped?
“Your father.” DuMorg spoke very quietly. “Was he close with you?”
“I don’t remember. My parents died when I was six.” I’d decided to give up on the ax bit for a while.
“You don’t remember anything about them?” DuMorg pressed her red lips into a line. Rubbed them together until some of the lipstick faded.
Lizards. At our house in Rock Hill, there had been tiny geckos on the porch. I’d been obsessed with catching them, but they were too fast. My father had built a small mesh cage, and he’d helped me bait it with dead moths and spiders. I’d practiced lying perfectly still on the porch swing, a bit of fishing line tied from my finger to the cage’s sliding door. I remember my dad smoking while he worked. I remember the wire mesh cut him and he had a thin red line on the back of his hand. I remember he sanded all the sharp edges off the wire so I wouldn’t be cut too.
I didn’t tell DuMorg this.
“What about your aunt?” DuMorg laced her fingers around her knee. “How is your relationship with her?”
“She doesn’t like me.” I shifted, wishing my trousers would magically be three sizes bigger. My sweater today was blue with tiny silver beads forming what looked like the crests of waves. “She sent me here. So obviously, I’m not her number one.”
A trip to Main Street near Christmas time. Rachel, old enough not to want to be seen with Auntie and me, walked a few strides ahead, her back perfectly straight. I remembered thinking she looked like a bowling pin, like something I wanted to tip. In the distance, a train whistled. The crowds pushed against us like a tide and we were in danger of being separated, until Auntie grabbed my hand.
I remember feeling the soft, wrinkled skin, and thinking she wasn’t so bad. That maybe she did care for me. She looked stooped, oily, sick. I squeezed her hand and kept squeezing it as the shoppers barreled past us. She squeezed back, and we stayed like that as we headed toward the car, as though we would each come to mean something to the other by virtue of how hard we held on.
DuMorg continued to press. “You told me before that your parents were abusive.”
Had I said that? It wouldn’t surprise me. “I was having some trouble with a lust for medication
.”
DuMorg nodded, not even cracking a smile. “If you tell me the truth about your life, about what you remember of your family, I may be able to help you make adjustments. Be a happier girl.” I got the feeling that DuMorg didn’t care about the adjustments as much as she cared about the secrets. She, like everyone else here, was bored. Waiting for a good story.
There is something that happens—even now—when I try to remember details from my childhood. A sense that whatever memory or feeling I’m seeking is just around a corner, and I’m chasing a bit of its shadow. Every way I turn, there is that sliver of darkness, and I don’t know if I am playing a game or losing my mind.
DuMorg tipped her head, and her hair slid like fingers down her cheek. “Thera?”
I could have shouted, I supposed. Thrown something at her. But I thought of Denson asking me to prove her right by being kind to Alle. I thought of promising Alle I was getting better at being nice. I was chasing a shadow again, some long-ago feeling. I was warm, the sun on my hair. A cloud passed overhead, and I stopped and looked up, aware suddenly of how alone I was. That whatever I was seeking was hidden somewhere nearby, peering at me.
“I don’t remember,” I said again.
“Miss Rollins’s hair looks like a hornets’ nest.” Alle offered the observation with a shy glance at me. They were some of the first words she’d offered to me unprompted, and I held still, as though afraid to spook her back into silence.
I had invited her outside with me to find fallen leaves for a sketching project we were doing in a class called Arts, Health, and Living. I’d never considered Rock Point’s grounds particularly attractive, but today everything looked splendid—the leafless trees, the oozing patches of muddy yard, the old huddle of stones near the front porch that passed as landscaping. “What’s a hornets’ nest look like?”
“Have you never seen one?”
I looked away from her and tried to sort through my general tiredness at being reminded of what I didn’t know. “No.”