The Broken Girls

by Simone St. James

  But Katie’s attention was drifting. In the back corner, Alison Garner and Sherri Koustapos were arguing at their table, their heads lowered. Sherri had an angry snarl on her lip. Katie watched them warily. She seemed to have a radar for trouble, as if she could detect it from any quarter.

  CeCe tried to distract her. “Hey, there’s Roberta.”

  Roberta was crossing the room, carrying her wooden tray with her dinner on it. She sat at a table with her field hockey team, the girls jostling and giggling while Roberta was quiet. CeCe looked down at her plate and realized she’d already eaten everything on it, so she put down her knife and fork.

  “Do you ever wonder,” Katie said, “why Roberta is here? Her grades are good, and she’s an athlete. She doesn’t seem to belong.”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” CeCe said without thinking. “Her uncle came home from the war and tried to kill himself. Roberta walked in on him doing it, so they sent her away.”

  “What?” Katie stared at CeCe, and CeCe realized she’d scored an even bigger point than she had with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. “How do you know that?”

  “Susan Brady isn’t just the dorm monitor, you know,” CeCe told her. “She knows everything. She heard Miss Maxwell telling Mrs. Peabody about it, and then she told me.”

  Katie seemed to process this. “That doesn’t make any sense. If the uncle is crazy, why was Roberta the one who was sent away?”

  “Maybe she saw blood,” CeCe said. “Maybe she had a nervous breakdown or something. If I saw something like that, I’d want to get as far away as possible.”

  It was a fair point. They looked at Roberta, who was eating her dinner in silence, her face pale. “Keep your head down,” Katie warned after a minute. “Here comes Lady Loon.”

  The argument at the back table had escalated, and Sherri Koustapos had jumped up, shoving the bench with the backs of her knees. Alison was still sitting, eating her creamed corn, but her face was red with silent fury. CeCe had felt Alison’s wrath only once, in her first month at Idlewild—Alison had called her a “fat cow” and hit her with one of the broken badminton rackets from the locker storage room—and she never wanted to feel it again. Alison hated everyone, and when she hit, she hit hard.

  Striding across the room, heading for the commotion, was Miss London, the teacher everyone knew as Lady Loon. Her dirty blond hair was frizzing loose from its topknot, and the armpits of her flowered polyester dress were damp. She was in her twenties, Idlewild’s youngest teacher, and after only six months of teaching here she was still woefully unprepared. The girls’ moods drove her crazy, their dramas riled her up, and their lack of discipline always enraged her. With over a hundred teenage girls, most of them unsalvageable, riding her nerves every day, she spent most of her time in a crazy rage that would have been funny if it didn’t have an echo of hopelessness about it.

  “Ladies!” CeCe heard her say over the din of the fighting rabble of girls. “Ladies. Sit down!”

  The girls didn’t notice. With a gasp, CeCe watched Sherri lean over and spit on Alison’s plate. Alison barely paused before she jumped off her bench and hit as hard as she could, her heavy, waxy fist making contact with Sherri’s nose with an audible crack.

  The other teachers, who had stood milling at the edge of the room, reluctantly began to move, muttering. Lady Loon—it was her habit of calling the girls ladies that gave her the title—wrenched Alison by the arm and dragged her from the table. The din was deafening. Girls were shouting, Sherri was screaming and bleeding, and the teachers were moving in as a group. CeCe couldn’t hear her voice, but she could see Lady Loon’s lipsticked mouth forming the words: Calm down, ladies! Calm down! She watched as blood dripped between Sherri’s fingers and spattered on the floor, and she inched a little closer to Katie. “I hate blood,” she said.

  She followed Katie’s gaze, which had left the melee and focused on something else. Sonia was standing in front of one of the large windows, behind a knot of excited girls. The French girl was still, her face pale. How had CeCe never noticed how small she was? Sonia always seemed so strong, like a blade, narrow but impossible to break. Yet she was shorter than all the American girls around her, and when one of them bumped past her to get a better view, Sonia was knocked almost off-balance, like a rag doll.

  But it was her face that made CeCe sit up in alarm. Sonia’s expression was empty, as blank as a piece of notepaper, her lips slack. Her usual look of quick, quiet intelligence, as if she was thinking fascinating things without saying them, had vanished. Her hands dangled at her sides. Her eyes, which were normally observant and a little wry, were open and seeing—they must have been seeing—but they contained nothing at all.

  Lady Loon was restraining Alison, who was kicking and screaming now. Sherri had sagged to her knees, and one of her friends had fainted. The teachers had descended on the group, tugging at Sherri, trying to clear space around the fainted girl. Mrs. Peabody held Alison’s other arm, and CeCe could hear her booming voice. “It’s Special Detention for you, my girl. Do you hear? Get moving. Move!”

  CeCe looked back at Sonia. She was watching, watching. Her skin had gone gray.

  From the other corner of the room, CeCe saw Roberta get up from her table and try to make her way across the room toward Sonia, her face tight with fear.

  “Katie,” CeCe said over the noise. “Is Sonia sick?”

  Katie touched CeCe’s wrist. “Quick.” She rose from her chair and CeCe followed, the two of them winding their way through the sweaty, excited crowd of girls toward Sonia. Roberta was coming from the other direction, but her progress was slower, impeded by a thick section of her hockey friends.

  Katie dodged expertly through the cloud of wool uniforms, using her elbows and her knees. CeCe followed in her wake, thinking of the color of Sonia’s face. There’s something wrong with Sonia, she thought. How did we not know? How did we not see that there’s something wrong with Sonia?

  Sonia was still by the window, unmoving. Katie swooped past her, took her hand, and tugged it. Without thinking, CeCe took Sonia’s other hand so the girl was protected from both sides.

  When CeCe was a girl, her rich father had sent her a Christmas present at her first boarding school: a baby doll. The baby had unsettling marble eyes, a hard skull, and two hard hands, molded into tiny fingers that formed into an impossibly adult shape. Sonia’s hand reminded CeCe of one of those hands now—small, cold, folded in on itself, alive but somehow dead. CeCe kept hold of it as she and Katie maneuvered the French girl out of the room. From the corner of her eye, she saw Roberta following, her long legs eating the ground to catch up to them easily, her braid swinging, her forehead stamped with worry.

  Sonia made no sound, no protest. Her feet stumbled between Katie and CeCe, but her hands and arms did not move. They left the dining hall and came out into the wet air, the four of them moving as one toward Clayton Hall. “It’s all right,” she heard herself say to Sonia, even though she didn’t know what was wrong. “It’s all right.”

  “Should we get her to the infirmary?” Roberta asked. The infirmary was across the common, in the teachers’ hall.

  “No.” Katie’s voice was flat. “We’re not taking her to Nurse Hedmeyer. She can’t help anyway. Just get her to the dorm. Keep walking.”

  “We should tell someone,” CeCe said.

  “Tell who?” Katie turned to her as they walked, and her eyes were so angry that CeCe felt herself pale in shock. “Lady Loon? Mrs. Peabody? About this? They’ll just discipline her. Have you lost your mind?”

  “Shut up, Katie,” Roberta said. “She’s trying to help.”

  CeCe looked at Sonia’s ashen face, her half-closed eyes. There was something going on she didn’t understand. She was always so stupid, so stupid. “What’s wrong with her?”

  No one answered. They entered Clayton Hall, and they helped Sonia up the stairs to the third floor. Sonia
tried to walk between them, but her ankles buckled and her head sagged. She said something in French that sounded like a recitation, the words spilling automatically as her lips moved.

  None of the other girls knew French, but CeCe watched Sonia’s lips as the four of them hit the third-floor landing. “I think she’s praying.”

  “She isn’t praying,” Katie said.

  In their room, they put Sonia to bed in her bunk, laying her on top of the covers and pulling off her shoes. Sonia muttered again, and this time there were English words mixed in with the French. CeCe put her ear to Sonia’s lips and caught some words: Please don’t take me there. Please don’t. I’ll be quiet. She was repeating it under her breath. Finally, the girl rolled over on her back and put her shaking hands to her face, shutting them out, her thin legs sticking out from beneath her rucked-up skirt.

  Roberta sat at the edge of the bed. Katie stood, looking down at Sonia with an impenetrably dark expression on her face, and then she said, “I’ll get a glass of water,” and left the room.

  CeCe looked at Roberta, her long, plainly pretty face, her blond hair tied back. Roberta’s expression when she looked at Sonia was troubled, but deep with understanding. She didn’t think anyone wanted her to talk, but she couldn’t help herself. “How did you know what was happening?” she asked. “How did you know what to do?”

  Roberta shook her head. “I didn’t.”

  “You’ve seen her do something like this before, haven’t you?”

  The pause before Roberta spoke was a beat too long. “No.”

  Roberta’s expression slowly closed down, the emotion leaving it. She became as impassive as a statue. Maybe it was Roberta who had had a fit like this, after her uncle tried to kill himself. Maybe, beneath her quiet demeanor, Roberta wasn’t as calm and confident as she seemed. “What does it mean?” CeCe asked her. “Is she sick?”

  “CeCe, shut up.”

  But she couldn’t. When CeCe was afraid, when she was nervous, she found it hard to shut up. “Katie knew, too. She’s seen this before.”

  “No, I haven’t.” Katie was in the doorway, a glass of water in her hand. “I just think on my feet. She’s had a shock of some kind, and she was about to faint. We had to get her out of there so the teachers wouldn’t see. Sonia, drink this.” She reached down, pulled one of the other girl’s hands from her face, tilted her head back, and looked into her eyes. “Listen to me,” she said clearly. “People saw us leaving. It’s over if you don’t get hold of yourself. Girls who faint get sent to Special Detention for being disruptive. Now sit up.”

  CeCe opened her mouth to protest, but to her amazement Sonia swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. She swayed for a second, then held out her hand. “Give me the water,” she said, her voice a rasp, her French accent sharpened by exhaustion.

  A knock came on the door. “Ladies.” It was Lady Loon. “What is going on in there?”

  Katie nodded to Roberta, and Roberta stood and opened the door. “Nothing, Miss London,” she said. “Sonia had a fit of dizziness, but she’s well now.”

  Sonia had been gulping the water, but she lowered the glass and looked at the teacher. “I hate blood,” she said clearly.

  Lady Loon ran a hand through her disastrous hair. “Afternoon class starts in twenty minutes,” she said. “Anyone not in attendance will be noted for detention. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Miss London,” CeCe said.

  The teacher looked helplessly up the hallway, then down again, then wandered off toward the stairwell.

  CeCe looked at the faces of the three other girls. What had happened in the dining hall had nearly given Sonia a nervous breakdown. What could be so horrible that it could be brought back by the sight of two girls fighting? She usually felt like the stupid one, but she thought maybe she was starting to see. She didn’t know everything about her friends, but these were Idlewild girls. Idlewild girls were always here for a reason. They were rough, like Katie, or impassive, like Roberta, because something had made them that way. Something they instinctively understood in one another. They hadn’t known what exactly was wrong with Sonia—they still didn’t know—but they had recognized it all the same.

  Please don’t take me there, Sonia had said. CeCe didn’t know what it meant, but it was something terrible. Maybe more terrible than anything the rest of them had seen.

  CeCe hadn’t been wanted, not by either her father or her mother, but she’d always been safe. She’d never been in the kind of danger that she thought Sonia was seeing behind her eyes. She’d never had anything really bad happen to her. Not really bad.

  Except for the water. That day at the beach with her mother, years ago, swimming in the ocean. Looking up through the water, unable to breathe, and seeing her mother’s face. Then nothing.

  But the water had been a long time ago. And it had been an accident.

  And as CeCe’s mother had told her, girls had accidents all the time.

  chapter 7

  Barrons, Vermont

  November 2014

  It was a twenty-minute walk over the hardened, muddy ground to the well. Fiona walked behind Anthony Eden, glancing at his black-clad back as he scrambled in his expensive shoes. She kept her hand on her camera so it wouldn’t bounce against her chest, and she was grateful she’d remembered to wear her hiking boots. She had simply followed him from the dining hall after he got the call, without a word, and so far he was so flustered he hadn’t yet thought to send her away.

  Through the gaps in the trees she glimpsed the sports field, where Deb had been found. There was nothing there now but empty, overgrown grass. Closer were the indoor gymnasium and girls’ lockers, the building dilapidated and falling down. In the eaves of the overhang at the edge of the building, she could see tangles of generations of birds’ nests.

  The workmen were gathered in a knot. One of them had pulled out a large plastic tarp of cheerful, incongruous blue and was attempting to unfold it. The others watched Anthony as their foreman stepped forward.

  “Are you certain?” Anthony said.

  The man’s face was gray. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It’s pretty clear.”

  “It isn’t a hoax? Teenagers have been using this property to scare each other for years.”

  The foreman shook his head. “Not a hoax. I’ve been in this business twenty years and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Anthony’s lips pursed. “Let me see.”

  They led him around the rise. There was a digger of some kind and a backhoe, both of them parked and silent. Dug into the slope of the rise was a huge ragged hole, the edges of mud and crumbling brick. Though it was full daylight, the center of the hole was pitch-black, as if it led into the depths of somewhere light could not go.

  “In there,” the foreman said.

  There was a smell. Wet, rancid. Digging into the back of the brain, traveling down the spine. Anthony took a large flashlight from one of the workmen and approached the hole, carefully climbing over the mud and the broken bricks in his leather shoes. Swallowing the smell, Fiona followed at his shoulder.

  He clicked on the flashlight and shone it into the blackness. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Lower, sir. You’ll see it.” The foreman paused. “You’ll see her.”

  Her.

  Fiona stared at the circle of light, watching it move down the well. The far wall was still intact, the bricks damp and slimy. Her hands were cold, but she couldn’t put them in her pockets. She couldn’t move as the light traveled down, down.

  And then, her.

  She was not a hoax.

  The girl was folded, her knees bent, tucked beneath her chin. Her head was down, her face hidden, as if bowed with grief. Rotten strands of long hair trailed down her back. One hand was dropped to her side, hidden in the darkness; the other was curled over one shin, nothing but a transluce
nt sheen of long-gone skin over dark bone. The shin itself was a mottled skeleton. Her shoes, which had probably been leather, had long rotted away, leaving only rubber soles beneath the ruins of her feet. But there were ragged remains of the rest of her clothes: a thin wool coat, mostly decayed away. A collar around her neck that was the last of what had once been a blouse with a Peter Pan collar. A skirt, discolored with mold. Threads dangling from her skeletal legs that had once been wool stockings.

  “There’s no water in the well.” This was the foreman’s voice, low and strangled. “It dried up, which was why it wasn’t in use anymore. The water, it drained away down . . .” He trailed off, and Fiona wondered if he was pointing or gesturing somewhere. Neither she nor Anthony was watching. “So it’s damp in there, sure, but—she’s just been sitting there.”

  Fiona swallowed and said to Anthony, “Give me the flashlight.” He seemed to have shut down; he handed the light to her immediately. She hefted it, swung it down to the girl’s skirt. “The color is bleached away,” she said. “Idlewild uniforms were navy blue and dark green.” Her research last night had drawn up more than one class picture, girls lined up in rows, wearing identical skirts and blouses. “I can’t tell if she’s got the Idlewild crest.”

  “She’s a student,” Anthony said. His voice was low, his words mechanical, as if he was not thinking of what he was saying. “She must be. Look at her.”

  “She’s small,” Fiona said, traveling the light over the body again. “She looks like a child.”

  “Not a child.” His voice was almost a whisper. “Not a child. A girl. This is a disaster. This will end us. The entire project. Everything.” He turned and looked at her, as if remembering she was there. “Oh, God. You’re a journalist. Are you going to write about this? What are you going to do?”