M. David glared down at us from the auditorium stage. He had spent the past half hour trying to confirm that we were ready for the new semester—that we’d finalized our class schedules and refilled our supplies, submitted our grades and picked up our laundry. But none of us were listening. His sign-up sheets drifted down rows and crammed themselves between seats. He kept clearing his throat with a snippy raise of his eyebrows. I might have been the only one who noticed.
It wasn’t our fault we couldn’t pay attention. It was dozy late afternoon, and we were full on a rich lunch of the last summer produce: peas in butter, mushrooms with braised lettuce, and for dessert, pineapples filled with berries, almonds, and vanilla ice cream. We didn’t care about the fall semester. We just wanted to nap.
Yaya leaned her head against my shoulder. “Wake me up when I’ve graduated,” she mumbled.
One year ago, I had sat in this same auditorium for Catherine orientation. I had been up in the balcony, far from the introductory video with its long shots of then-unfamiliar rooms and explanations of rules I had no intention of following. Back then, every aspect of the auditorium—the nap of the navy velvet seats, the bronzed ceiling’s greasy sheen, the water-damaged walls—had seemed softened and blurred by distance. Now I sat down in the front with Yaya, Theo, Nick, and Anna—kids who were my friends, actual friends—watching M. David pace the stage in his sharp, familiar way, and I could hardly remember this room ever feeling new. What had the auditorium smelled like then? Did it smell like this, like clover? Had I been able to hear the lawn mower outside, droning like a lazy bee? Had the sun shone in this lemony way? And the students who lounged around me, faces so recognizable as they flickered with whispers and giggles—had they all been here, too, back then?
The door banged open. M. David scowled at the students trooping in late, but they didn’t seem to notice him. They were too busy whistling and waving at their friends in the back. M. David rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“Name three cars,” Anna said. She and Nick were playing MASH.
Nick idly twisted a blond curl around his finger. “Dodge Viper. Aston Martin DB5. A Mustang, let’s say . . . 1967. Oh, or a Porsche, the 911 Turbo. My uncle got one last year. He’s going through the most fabulous midlife crisis.”
“Well, that’s all very nice, but I said name three cars, not every car.”
“Can I do a motorcycle?”
“No, and you’re taking too long, so I’m deciding for you. You’re getting a Dodge, a Mustang, or a Ford Probe.” She scribbled on her paper. “Now, three girls.”
“Wait,” Nick said. “Come on. Put in the Porsche.”
“For those only just arriving, please seat yourselves quietly, if you can possibly manage that,” M. David called toward the back of the room. A peal of distracted laughter rang out from up in the balcony.
“How many kids do you think you might have?” Anna asked Nick. “Three? Four?”
“Zero? Babies are foul.”
“Let’s say five to eight.” She scribbled again.
Theo gave Nick a thoughtful look, chin on his fist. “I could see you with babies. Eight fat babies.”
“If you have not already discussed your semester plan with your advisor, I would advise you to set up a meeting to do so at your earliest convenience,” M. David said, louder now. “This is your second year. That means the work will become harder, not easier. We aren’t going to hold your hand anymore. Your studies are your responsibility. And— Where are you going?”
A girl was hopping by the door. “I have to pee,” she said.
“Please be seated.”
She sat down right where she was, cross-legged, on the rug.
“You’re going to marry Claudia Schiffer,” Anna said, “and drive a Mustang, and have seven babies, and live in a shack. Congratulations.”
“Please also keep in mind,” M. David was saying, “this summer, in just a few short months, you will find yourselves on this very stage, at forums, presenting your work to your peers and to this community of scholars.”
Somehow, the auditorium had quieted.
“Your studies of the past year, and those of the coming semesters, all converge into this one presentation, and that will lead into your tutorial. While you do not need to have already finalized your topic, each of you should be planning with your advisors. Make sure you’re taking the requisite classes. Get yourselves on track. I know that right now it seems like you have all the time in the world, but these semesters go quickly. Before you know it, the year will be gone, and you will be here.”
M. David gestured toward the stage.
“Now is the time,” he said, “when you must decide what you are doing here at Catherine. And you must be sure.”
He cleared his throat. He seemed uncertain what to do with our attention now that he had it.
“That is all for now,” he finally said. “Please pass the sign-up sheets to me.”
“My advisor has no idea what she’s doing,” Nick said as we slunk through the hallways. “I think she’s been trying to seduce me. It’s wonderful.”
“Mine’s terrible, too,” Anna said. “And she’s still disappointed because I decided against new materials. Speaking of . . .” She tugged Theo’s sleeve. “Congratulations on getting into the concentration. Aren’t you excited?”
“I’m kinda nervous, to be honest,” Theo said, though he didn’t look it. He was focused on peeling an orange. “Lab starts next week.”
“Don’t be nervous,” she said. “They don’t accept anyone who couldn’t do it. But this is probably going to be the last time we ever see you. That course load is no joke.”
“Goodbye, kid,” Nick said. “Claudia and I are going to miss you.”
Theo threw an orange slice at him.
* * *
So Catherine swung into the new year. The dining rooms served dishes I remembered from my first few months here: squash soup, zucchini salad, cold rainbow trout arranged on glittering beds of ice. Our shorts and sandals were taken away and our closets restocked with the familiar jeans, sneakers, and sweaters, sized to fit our new bodies. Somehow, despite all the rich food, we were all skinnier.
One night I was reading one of my old Betty and Veronica comics in bed when I suddenly shivered. A cool, mossy breeze had slipped through my open window.
I got up, stood in front of the cracked window, and closed my eyes. The breeze smelled like fall and decay and the woods—like my first days at Catherine.
M. David’s words rang in my head: You must decide what you are doing here.
Did anyone really know what they were doing here? Was anyone sure?
Baby had known. Baby had been sure. She’d hurt, yes, but she knew what she was doing.
I closed the window.
Much was the same as that first fall at Catherine, but not everything. The third-years were gone. Baby was gone. And I was older.
A new class of students arrived. I spent their move-in day hiding in the Molina library, but even there I could hear the noise of their invasion. Suitcases clunked on stairs and sneakers squeaked down the halls as they ran back and forth to the commissary. They yelled to their ushers, pleading for more soap, refilled prescriptions, and phone credits. They were idiots. I napped with a pillow over my head.
By the next day, the halls were filled with their unfamiliar faces, smells, and hair they seemed to shed like dogs. They hovered together outside bathrooms and below stairways, trying not to seem as lost as they were. They referred to their professors as Mister and Miz and spent hours arguing with the pharmacists about their prescriptions. And they never knew where to sit in the great hall. They just lingered around the dessert service.
But they were nice enough, and they were new. They were suntanned. Their hair was shiny and cut into deliberate styles. When we asked, they gave us hints as to what was happening outside. America’s president had been reelected and a new Nintendo system released. They spoke in unfamiliar voices with unfamiliar accents. They had unfamiliar bodies. They came to our parties, and we watched them, and they felt us watching them.
“They think they’re such hot shit,” Anna said, eyeing the girls on the other side of the morning room.
“They are hot shit,” Theo said through a mouthful of banana.
“Just because they’re, like, the new kids on the block,” Anna said. The girls were sharing a plate of pear slices, giggling as their eyes darted around the room. “Like their shit doesn’t stink.”
“I just feel bad for them. They don’t know how stupid they are.” Yaya stirred at her yogurt. “Anyway. Growing up is fabulous. I plan on getting better with age.”
“I can see that,” Theo said. “You’re going to be a very sexy grandma.”
Yaya licked yogurt from the corner of her mouth. “I’m looking forward to it.”
Some days, when I was avoiding everyone and everything, I holed up in the reference room, a dim, humid alcove wedged in the back of the Harrington library that housed Catherine’s collection of dictionaries and encyclopedias. In addition to rows and rows of dusty leather-bound volumes, the shelves held old Catherine ephemera. It was easy to forget that this place had existed before we arrived, and that there were hundreds of men and women out in the world who had lived at Catherine before us. But here was the evidence in graduate circulars and annual reports, old Blue Books and director’s office scrapbooks, taped-together newsletters and boxes of microfilmed press clippings. According to the microfilm canisters, the clippings dated all the way back to Catherine’s founding in 1851, when the house was first officially chartered as a school. But I couldn’t get the reader to work to see for myself.
Instead, I flipped through the scrapbooks. The linen pages were filled with memos, mission statements, and celebratory dinner menus. There wasn’t much information about plasm, except for one memo dated thirty years ago announcing the new concentration: A concentration in the revolutionary, transdisciplinary science of new materials. M. Shiner, as the concentration’s first head, was described as a well-respected chemist with a background in cancer research. The accompanying photo depicted a goggling, white-haired man, hunched and shy.
I didn’t recognize the names of any of the previous Catherine directors until Viktória’s arrival about twenty years ago. Her hiring was announced with an article and press portrait. She stood at the top of a glass stairway in a serious black dress, arms folded and legs crossed. “Art World Phenom Viktória Varga Tapped for Catherine Director.”
I ran my finger over her unlined face. She looked young, maybe in her twenties. Not that many years older than I was now.
M. Neptune was named head of the new materials concentration about ten years ago. There were no clippings about M. Shiner’s departure. M. Neptune must have been some kind of boy wonder; he’d gone directly from graduation to head of the department.
The scrapbooks also held letters from the directors to the Catherine community at large. I didn’t know when the house had stopped doing those. The letters from the old directors were perfunctory and dull, but Viktória’s first few were sweet, with long, eager descriptions of new programs, schedule arrangements, and fund-raising efforts for exciting renovations, classrooms, and labs. They didn’t sound much like her. The letters became more reserved over the years. One from six years ago sounded like her voice as I knew it. It referred to the recent death of a student. We hurt, Viktória wrote, because we miss him.
That was what she had said about Baby.
The letter included a small school portrait of the boy who had died. The photo was hard to make out, reprinted in blurry black-and-white, but he looked friendly. I ran my finger over his face. I wished the image was clearer. The only details I could see were his dark curls, his crooked smile, and a mole by his lip. It was hard to believe he’d once been a real boy.
Baby’s little hairs had been swept from the bathroom sink. Her bed didn’t smell like her lotion anymore, her drawers were emptied, her shoes taken away. But the new students, the first-years, didn’t even know she was missing. They had never met her. For them, she was never anyone at all.
* * *
M. Rogers, the professor of my Russian and Italian Futurisms class, was a giant woman who loomed over even the tallest boys. She wore her iron-gray hair combed up into a robust beehive and had the biggest hands I’d ever seen, and her voice was coarse and loud. The class was mostly reading. As we hunched over the texts, M. Rogers would pace the room, her voice resounding with a godlike boom as she read manifestos about the death of old, gray art and the birth of speed, technology, youth, and violence; drunken, rambling stories of burning down museums and building brass future machines; experiments in breaking down language into its component parts and building it up again to re-create the chaotic whoops and blares of a city street. M. Rogers spoke faster and faster as the class went along, punctuating her words by slapping the chalkboard until the dust rose.
We spent the first few weeks with only the grayscale reproductions in our text packets for reference. (“These fuckers won’t even give me slides,” M. Rogers would thunder, “while the labs put in orders for whatever shit they want. I swear to God, you want to see fascism? The politics of the place, I swear!”) It wasn’t until midterms that she finally received the slides she’d ordered and found a projector to rent. The day before our test, we sat in gray shadow as she clicked through painting after painting, a fusillade of commentary following each flashing image. “Here we go, zang tumb tumb, the city rises!”—a carnival of color, figures storming to work—“and Balla, lovely, lovely, a master of movement”—there, an image of a dachshund on a leash, its legs a scurrying blur.
The boy beside me snorted.
M. Rogers swiveled in her seat. “And just what is so funny, hot stuff?”
The boy hesitated, as if deciding how much of a debate he wanted to get into right now. Finally he said, “It’s just . . . how can they think these paintings are revolutionary? We’ve spent weeks reading these treatises about blood and violence, revolutions in technology and culture, and this is what it comes down to? A painting of a puppy with blurry legs to show that it’s running?” He lifted his chin. “It’s not even a new idea to depict motion like this. Muybridge published Animal Locomotion in, what, 1886, ’87? So, twenty-five years before this. The futurists write like they’re conquering the world, and then they make these paintings that are just . . . silly.”
“Hah!” M. Rogers said, slapping the table. “Yes. They are very silly paintings.”
The boy looked at me, as if for defense.
“But don’t you see where this is going?” M. Rogers said. “Remember Boccioni?”
She bounded up as she clicked forward to a slide of a Boccioni sculpture. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.
We had seen the sculpture in black-and-white, but it was different now to see it in color, in bronze. Here was a man running, his body warped by its own velocity, his arms and legs mangled into motion. He wasn’t just human; he was a speed machine. He was action itself.
“You’re right,” M. Rogers said. “These paintings are pretty shitty. That’s obvious.” She ran a hand along the screen. “But look at this. This is all right. Remember Boccioni’s manifesto of Futurist sculpture? What did he say?” She slapped the screen for emphasis. “Futurist sculpture creates ideal new forms by using motion to break down the barrier between an object and its surroundings. To join the object’s exterior plastic infinity to its interior plastic infinity.”
She let her hand drop. She shook her head.
“Interior plastic infinity,” she said. “It’s like they almost knew what they were talking about.”
She clicked forward to an image of another sculpture. This one wasn’t a person or an animal or any recognizable object. It was a bronze ovoid, abstract and nowhere, polished to a mirror shine.
“Brancusi,” she said, “The Beginning of the World. Not that Brancusi was a futurist. Brancusi wasn’t anything. But look at this. Look at this—this plastic infinity.”
She touched the screen again.
“What is it?” she said. “An egg, maybe. A baby’s head. A womb. The instant when one cell splits into two. It is the moment of life, the generation of a world, all in one object, one surface, reflecting this. An exterior and interior plastic infinity. Here. Can’t you see it?”
She turned back to the boy, still pointing to the screen.
“Here,” she said, “is your futurism.”
* * *
Plastic infinity. Was that what Baby had been looking for?
At session, I sat by the windows and folded my hands. These sharp fall days, the sun set earlier and earlier, turning the light in the great hall a deep gold. Viktória was standing far from me, by the windows, her body shadowed against the sunset. I couldn’t see her face.
I closed my eyes.
I am in the house, we chanted. The house is in the woods. My hands are on the table. The table is in the woods.
I opened my eyes.
M. Neptune’s students were sitting toward the back of the hall. I’d noticed that even among the new materials concentrators, his students stuck together. I watched as the seven of them chanted, The door is in the hall, the hall is in the house, eyes fluttering in beatitude. Their voices disappeared into the collective sound.
I closed my eyes again. I squeezed my hands tighter.
When session was over, everyone else drifted out of the hall, but M. Neptune’s students still sat smiling in dazed bliss. They didn’t move.
One of the students, a girl with long princess-blond hair and mean blue eyes, was cradling something in her lap. I craned to get a better look.
It was a rabbit. A real rabbit, white, with silky ears and sleepy eyes.
No one else seemed to notice the girl’s pet, and none of the professors reacted to it, either. The other concentrators lounged near their table, waiting for everyone else to file from the room. The girl stroked the rabbit’s little head.
Finally, the concentrators all stood and left together, the girl still holding the rabbit.
I followed them.
I walked slowly at first, quietly, a few paces behind. I don’t know why I bothered to be so careful; they were too engrossed in their conversation to notice me. They wandered down the hall, past a basement passage, up a stairway, and around a corner. They took turns holding the rabbit as they argued about an episode of The Twilight Zone.
I crept behind them. Up more stairs, this staircase illuminated by a bright skylight, and down a long yellow hall. I thought maybe they were going to the umbrella room. Instead, they walked toward the main plasm lab in Harrington.
They went into the lab and closed the door behind them.
I stared at the door for a while before turning back. I was a long way from Molina.
* * *
Someone knocked on my door with a high-spirited rap, then opened it without waiting for an answer. It was Yaya in her new favorite fur-collared wool coat and electric-pink lipstick.
“So, I’ve discovered the trick,” she said, with no preamble. “From a very enterprising first-year whom I completely detest, and I’ll tell you why on the way there.”
“On the way where?”
“To—” She looked me over. “Are you coming dressed like that?”
It was late afternoon, and I was lying on my bed in my pajamas, eating toast with tangy lime marmalade. I hadn’t realized I’d be following her on any adventures today.
I climbed out of bed. I held the toast in my mouth as I pulled on a jacket.
“It’s muddy out.” Yaya plucked the toast from my mouth and took a bite.
I slipped my feet into boots. The pajama pants bunched at the ankles.
She slipped her arm through mine. “Excellent, dear friend. Open.”
I opened my mouth. She put the toast back in.
As Yaya led me down the stairs and out into the cool October twilight, she outlined her plan. “Okay, so you know how the commissary gets new items on Wednesday? Well, everything comes in through the loading dock on Monday, and it’s processed out there. And the manager used to be a total hard-ass, but now he’s about to retire and kind of stopped giving a shit. He’s become much more lax about letting kids in during processing. So, this first-year—oh, and I hate her because she’s used half, fucking half, of that nice honey-lavender lotion I’d been saving in the bathroom, which we apparently now share, but after a little discussion she knows to keep her hands off my shit. Anyway, she imparted this delightful little intel to me in the spirit of restitution. I hope some good stuff’s come in. I’ve been dying for something new to play with.”
Out on the yard, raw purple dusk had fallen. We huddled close together as we walked over the twisting footpath, past the tennis court, and through the grass, the same way I had gone to the tower. Crickets chirruped in the pines. Like the tower, the storage silos and loading dock were far to the house’s southeast, where the shipping truck came in from the back road. It was easy to forget about the back road and that, even here, so far from the house, we were locked inside, everywhere, by the gate.
“This way,” Yaya said, leading me around the loading dock, a squat cement building with fluorescent white windows. We walked up three steps, knocked on a metal door, waited a minute with no answer, and then entered.
The door opened into a wide, bright room as cluttered as a thrift store. The walls were lined with cardboard boxes stacked haphazardly against each other and metal shelves filled with books, toys, and toiletries. Commissary goods, still untagged. Some of the cardboard boxes were labeled—cans x, xl, carrots, bedsheets (twin xl)—and others not.
A side door was open to the back of a truck. A man stood in the truck taking notes on a yellow legal pad.
“Bunny?” Yaya said.
The man turned around. He was short and white, with thin gray hair, pudgy around his face and belly. He glanced from one to the other of us with slow, shy eyes.
“I’m Yaya,” Yaya said, extending her hand. “Sarah Beth King said we could come by? And this is Ines.”
Bunny shook her hand, then mine. His hand was soft as a girl’s. He looked at us each in turn again.
“So,” Yaya said, “can we look around?”
“Yes,” Bunny said. He had a lisp. “I don’t think—don’t think there’s much that you girls would like, though. You should come earlier.”
“We will. Next time. But for now . . .”
Yaya wove her way expertly to one of the shelves. Something had already caught her eye.
I ran my fingers over the shelf nearest me. It was stacked with old faded coloring books and packets of crayons. Silly things like that came through the commissary sometimes. Catherine graduates donated back to the school without really considering what we might want or need. They probably couldn’t remember what life was really like here. I couldn’t blame them; even being here now, the days blurred.
I flipped through a Sesame Street coloring book. Ernie giggled back at me. He was getting ready for a bath. He had a nice towel and scrub brush.
“Do you like it?” Bunny said. “The book?”
I turned to see that he had been staring at me. I couldn’t read his expression.
He handed me another coloring book, on top of the one I had, then gave me a packet of crayons, too.
“They’re nice books,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said.
Through the window, in the last shadows of daylight, I could just make out something there, in the trees across the lawn: the white wall of a building. I blinked, thinking I must be imagining things.
No, of course; that was the tower. I hadn’t realized it was this close.
“Ines,” Yaya said. “Come look.”
She had found a string of fake pearls at the bottom of a Tupperware full of toys. I helped her unknot the pearls and do the clasp. They shone plasticky-white as she wound them around her neck.
She turned to me, touching them.
“Aren’t they everything?” she said. “Aren’t they just divine?”
“Yes,” I said. “Divine.”
She turned to look at her reflection in the dock’s darkening window.
“I’ve always loved beautiful things,” she whispered. “It’s stupid, I know. I’ve gotten into the worst messes for stupid, beautiful things.”
She smiled at her reflection. She stroked the pearls.
* * *
I had been keeping up with my Shakespeare readings, more or less, but the midterm was going to be brutal. Half of the terms listed in the study packet read like a foreign language. Anna and Diego were in the class, too, so I asked if I could study with them. It seemed like a friendly thing to do.
The three of us holed up in the Molina library with books and blankets and pots of tea. We took turns quizzing one another, editing our review answers, and napping. Later in the evening, silly and stupid, we gave up on studying and helped Anna write a love letter to the first-year she liked. Dear Robert, it began, Thee art the man of my dreams, the prince of my soul, the architect of my joy everlasting.
“Tell him you want to fuck him in the parlor,” I said. “The one on the second floor of Ashley. They fixed the leaking there, it’s nice again.”
Anna laughed, shaking her head. “You are something else.”
I sipped my tea. It felt nice, pretending to be normal.
After I took the midterm, I slept, though not for long, and woke late that night. I blinked until the gray bedroom settled into shapes. I patted my belly. I stared at the ceiling for a long time.
I slipped out of my bedroom.
I walked downstairs, past the baths in the Harrington basements, then farther, winding my way through the moonlit halls until I was in Ashley. My head felt two sizes too big. I hummed to myself, a French lullaby I hadn’t realized I remembered.
Somehow, I ended up in the hallway with the umbrella wallpaper. The hallway with the door to M. Neptune’s lab.
I found myself in that hallway a lot. I didn’t know why; nothing ever happened there. I hadn’t even seen anyone go in or out of the door since that one student many months ago.
I continued on, passing through a crooked burgundy hall that held a painting of an owl. The hallway led to a humid green glass-paneled conservatory that opened, suddenly, onto a balcony.
The broad stone balcony was rimmed with a balustrade and decorated with a profusion of potted plants: impatiens, zinnias, and funny little lemon trees. The plants’ leaves were gray and crabbed, their blooms theatrically drooped. Abundant ivy tangled over the stone.
I walked to the balustrade. It was an unseasonably warm night for late October. The air smelled rich with damp earth and dying leaves. The sky was high, vaulted, and starlit, the clouds sublime purple and white.
“Ines.”
I turned.
Theo stood in the cold moonlight at the other end of the balcony. He was holding a sheet of paper, big as a road map. A mess of fabric and string was bundled at his feet. Nick down there, too, sprawled on his stomach, openmouthed. For one uncanny moment I thought, Nick’s dead, Theo killed him, but then Nick snorted.
Theo flashed one of his loose smiles. “Man, we’re never really alone here, huh?” he said, slurring. “Even at four in the morning on a secret balcony, you might run into some ghost.”
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Making a kite.” He flipped over the paper. It was covered with instructions and diagrams. “We got this kit in the commissary. Nick was supposed to be helping me, but he’s drunk as shit. We finished our Ethics test, then we were playing cards, and then we were gonna make the kite, but Nick’s out.”
“You’re a little drunk, too.”
He was smiling. “Yeah.”
I went over to read the instructions. The kite was supposed to look like a sailboat.
A dream ship floating through the ocean-sky. Something about the image made my nose hurt, as if I might cry.
I sat on the cold stone and hugged my legs. Nick honked again but didn’t wake up.
Theo sat down, too. He was watching me. His stare, even drunk, was intensely direct.
“Do you remember?” I said. “A few months ago, I came to your room and you played music for me. You played that pretty girls’ song.”
“Of course,” he said. “When was that—March, April? Feels like, I don’t know, longer. I think.” He rearranged his legs on the stone.
“You’re different now,” I said.
“Am I?” He patted his hair. “I don’t know.”
“Yes. You fit in here more.” I rested my chin on my knees. “You didn’t feel well then.”
“No,” he said.
“Do you feel better now?”
He nodded slowly. “I’m getting there,” he whispered. “I’m getting better. The doctor here . . . she’s good. I take three pills now. One in the morning, two at night. They’ve been helping. A lot. I never thought I would feel better. But here I am. Feeling better.”
I thought of the photograph I’d found in Theo’s room, the one of him with his grandmother. Her fragile body in its flannel housecoat, the casual way Theo had slouched beside the stove. I assumed they lived together, that they loved and took care of each other. There had been a sweet comfort between them. Maybe I recognized it so sharply because it’d always been missing for me.
But could his love for his grandma really have been so simple? Weren’t there nights when his friends were off having fun—drinking on rooftops or kissing on fire escapes—and he was alone, watching his grandma fall asleep in front of the TV, her hands twitching as they reached for something he couldn’t see? On those nights, had he felt his love for her turning into a sick, shameful hate? Had he sometimes gone to bed in the dark and thought, What if I never get out of here?
Theo looked up at me.
“What about you?” he said.
“I’m the same,” I said. “I never change.”
He laughed. “We’re supposed to be getting smarter, anyway.”
“I guess.”
He leaned back on his hands. “You’re doing all right. I see you. You’re working. You’re studying.”
“I have to, now. I was going to fail out.”
“Shit.”
“Yes. What about you? You’re dating Sophie now.”
“Mmm.” His lip quirked into a smile.
“You like her.”
“Yeah. You should hear her—she has this laugh. It cracks me up, just hearing her laugh at any stupid shit.”
Theo was running a hand over the concrete, still staring at me. I thought, He always likes to be touching something.
“What?” he said.
“You see,” I said, “such wonderful things. You look around, and all the world is wonderful.”
He smiled a little. “Not all the world. But all of Catherine? Yeah, maybe. I mean, don’t you realize how lucky we are? Sleeping in these nice rooms, eating these ridiculous meals, reading and drinking and playing with friends? How can you see this any other way but wonderful?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I never see anything right. My eyes are backwards. Everything I see is upside down.”
Theo picked up one of the dowels. He rolled it between his fingers.
I reached for the instructions. “So,” I said, “how is this supposed to come together?”
We tried joining the ribs of the kite with the string, but they kept coming loose. It was a long time before we realized that Theo, in his drunkenness, had left part of the kit in his room. I pushed him. He couldn’t stop laughing. The moon lowered and the sky paled.
We shook Nick awake. As we dragged him back to his room, he leaned all his weight against Theo, mumbling about ethics and love. After we finally got Nick into bed, pulled off his shoes, and tucked him in, Theo sang him a Boyz II Men song as a lullaby.
Theo and I went to the morning room. We filled two bowls with oatmeal and took them to the parlor. We ate them cross-legged on the parlor rug.
“You know,” Theo said, stirring at the mush, “everyone thinks you’re cool, but I know you’re not.”
“I am,” I said. “I’m very cool.”
“Nah. You’re, like, gorgeous and mysterious and act like you don’t give a shit about anything. But I bet there’s something you give a shit about.”
“I don’t think there is.”
He raised his eyebrows.
I took a bite of oatmeal.
“What’s your favorite animal?” he said.
“Snails.”
“Okay. You like snails. What about places?”
“I want to go to Egypt one day,” I said. “I want to be buried in a pyramid.”
“Me, too. Let’s go together.” He set down the bowl. “What about movies? Do you go to the movies?”
“Everyone goes to the movies.”
“What’s your favorite kind?” He didn’t blink as he watched me. “Horror? Action?”
“I like musicals.”
“Really?” He cocked his head. “Huh.”
“Yes,” I said. “I like dancing. And big happy endings.”
“Sure,” he said. “Who doesn’t like happy endings?”
He stuffed his mouth with a huge bite of oatmeal.
I said, “I wish I cared more. Gave more of a shit. The way you do, and the way Baby did. How you care about your studies, and about plasm. I wish I loved anything like that.”
Theo put down his bowl. He yawned.
“What is it?” I said.
“What’s what?” he said.
“What is plasm?”
He glanced at me, then down.
“Everything,” he said tonelessly. “It’s just . . . everything.”
I stirred at the oatmeal. Suddenly I was angry. Just tell me the fucking truth, I wanted to say. Use actual words.
Theo lifted his bowl, then set it down again. He stood up.
“I’m going to fall asleep if we keep sitting here,” he said. “Let’s go explore.”
We crept out of the parlor and up the pink marble stairs, ending on Molina’s fourth floor, in a room with mauve brocade-covered walls and heavy rosewood furniture: a dresser, an armoire, a bed frame with no mattress. The dresser held only a packet of bobby pins and, in the bottom drawer, a box full of faux-ivory elephant statuettes.
We clattered the little elephants to the floor. We staged a tiny war between them on the rug.
When Theo fell asleep by the bed frame in the midmorning, I kept playing. I danced a little elephant over his arm and onto his neck.
* * *
In my first days and weeks at Catherine, everything happened for the first time. I attended my first class, failed my first quiz, and ate my first butter cake. I lost my first game of bid whist, then won my second. I took my first nap in the library sun.
But first times became many times. The house, in the architecture of its rooms, schedules, and surfaces, had a pattern, and I patterned into it. This was the way I twisted the bathroom door handle to get it to turn; this was how my face looked in the mirror over the sink; this was the way condensation beaded on the wallpaper over the tub. This was how I walked to the morning room, class, great hall, and parlor, and this is how I walked back to my room. Small sensations—tea trays clinking down at our bedroom doors, pink mornings glowing on the yard, cold bowls of egg salad for lunch—repeated and fluxed. Breakfasts, tests, and teas, essays, festivals, and baths. Days cycled into weeks, weeks into months. And now here we were, in November again.
On bad days, I could feel the whole year swinging underneath me like a dead thing. But there were good days, too. Days when I didn’t think about Baby, and Yaya made me laugh, and the hall served maple ice cream for dessert. Days when I felt okay.
When I first came to Catherine, the house’s repetitions made it feel dull and small. Now, somehow, the house felt bigger. Catherine didn’t twist in on itself; it recurred infinitely. Pencils and T-shirts and slices of melon flashed against one another like mirrors against mirrors, continuously unfolding into smaller and smaller details: the swan pattern on a parlor’s wallpaper, a broken tile in the courtyard, and the humid smell of wet stone and moss, in one vague moment of a rainy afternoon.
* * *
Catherine’s annual fall festival was held the day after our finals. My first year, I hadn’t watched the parade, though Baby and I could hear the noise from our room. We heard the drunk third-years march through the courtyard with whoops and stomps, the underclassmen cheer as wine and vomit splashed against stone. But inside, I was painting Baby’s toenails. I used a bottle of sparkly blue polish I’d found abandoned in the Ashley music room. Baby stared at my hands as I worked and flinched from my touch. “You can relax,” I said, but she didn’t.
I did watch the parade this year, though. From my window, I could see the mummers, the third-years costumed as homemade ghosts, monsters, and aliens with plaster heads and fuzzy ears. They screeched, banged on drums, laughed, and danced as they paraded across the courtyard and back into the hall. My Molina classmates gathered by the trees or leaned out of windows to watch. They cheered as they tossed streamers, candies, and noisemakers to the crowd below.
I curled up on my windowsill. I hugged my legs.
Could I ever stop thinking of Baby? Would she ever stop haunting me?
Theo and Nick stood among the crowd in the courtyard. I saw them slouching against a fig tree, watching as the parade passed. Every few minutes, Theo clapped his hands above his head in stupid pleasure. The two of them looked very drunk and very glad.
What did it feel like? To be so glad?
Theo and Nick were eyeing a first-year girl now. She was dancing with her friends. Every time she laughed, she turned to make sure the boys were still watching. Theo looped his arm over Nick’s shoulders and whispered something in his ear. I wondered what he said. The girl was pretty, but I was more beautiful than she was.
Viktória had said my past life was over. That felt true. I was new, here at Catherine. But I would never be a good student or a good person, like Baby. Not really. There was no point.
But I had other ways of learning things. I had done it before, outside, and I could do it again. I could pretend to be normal. I could have friends. I could kiss boys nicely and whisper in their ears, and get them to whisper in mine. Because Catherine was my home now, the whole house, all of it—its bright places and dark ones, its conspiracies and secrets—and I wanted it all. I wanted everything in me.
Someone banged on my door.
“Ines, are you in there?” Anna called. Her voice was loose and drunk. I could hear Diego laughing behind her. “What are you doing? Come down!”
“Yes,” I said brightly and prettily. “Yes. I’m coming.”