Orpheus Girl

by Brynne Rebele-Henry

  When I turn to leave, he’s still dancing, swaying his arms and whisper-singing some garbled version of that song, though instead of getting the lyrics right, he keeps muttering, “Too too sexy, too too. Sexy. For my sexy. Vest. For my sexy sexy. On cat’s walk.”

  I shake my head and wave goodbye.

  There are two bathrooms: one at the end of the hall with girls scrawled on the door in pink chalk, one adjacent to the girls’ bathroom with boys written neatly in blue chalk. I go into the boys’ room, start rummaging through the plastic bins with each boy’s name on it.

  Eventually I find what I’m looking for in Jason’s basket: a pair of clippers. I think I hear a door open downstairs, so I run into the girls’ room and lock the door. Inside there are two sinks and a window that looks out onto the forest, but other than that, it’s exactly the same as the boys’ room.

  I let my hair down. It nearly reaches my collarbone, the curls messy and my makeup streaked so badly that my features are almost indistinguishable, my face blurred with fear and running concealer. In the cracked mirror, my face is small and sad-looking, like I’m disappearing into myself. I look older, wilder. Like someone I’d veer away from if I saw her on the street.

  I plug the clippers in and take a deep breath, bite my lip so I don’t cry. I bite down hard, too hard, and my lip splits a little bit. I can feel the blood in my mouth and it tastes metallic. First I buzz the top of my head, push the clippers down firmly enough that the hair falls away from my scalp cleanly. I buzz the sides next. Leon’s razor is cold in my hands, heavier than I expected. I lather soap over my head before I start shaving, sliding the blades along the stubble, and what’s left of my hair disappears. My head is burning, and when I tentatively put a hand to it, it feels raw. I can feel a few nicks from the blade, and my scalp stings.

  I don’t look in the mirror. I don’t want to know what I look like because I know I’ll be ugly, and I don’t want to add that to my list of problems. But there was no alternative. If I hadn’t gotten rid of my hair, they would have forced me to wear their trappings. To put on costumes that I might start to believe were real.

  I run my hand over my scalp.

  Finally I can’t help myself. When I see myself in the mirror, I start crying. I don’t look like the girl I once was anymore. I look broken. Still, for the first time in my life, I look like the girl I really am, not like a girl whose entire life has consisted of passing unsuccessfully as someone she can never truly become.

  It’s almost dark now, and there’s a full yellow moon hanging low in the sky. The bathroom window is too small to climb out of and the drop from the second story is too far, but there are windows in the front room downstairs.

  I know what I’m going to do.

  But first I gather up what was once my hair and throw it out the window. I watch it scatter in the air. I feel lighter. Run a hand over my head again and marvel at the smoothness, at how easily I changed from hiding to, for the first time in my life, being purposefully visible.

  I knock on Leon’s door, ajar the way I left it, and when there’s no answer I push it open. He’s asleep on the floor, cradling his pillow, tears still stuck to his eyelashes. He whispers a woman’s name, a name I think I heard him say when he talked about his mother. I leave the razor on his desk. Then I bend over, pull his blanket off his bed, and drape it over him. He stirs in his sleep a little. I slip out before he wakes up, closing the door behind me.

  Sarah’s half-asleep when I get back. She starts when I turn on the light. “Where did you go?” Her mouth falls open when she sees my head. “Oh, Raya.”

  She sounds like she’s going to cry, so I climb up and sit next to her.

  “I didn’t want them to try to change me.”

  She nods, and a single tear falls down her cheek.

  I take her hands in mine. “Look, I think I figured out how to get out of here, but we’ve got to do it tonight when there’s a full moon. There’s a forest outside of the house, and I think if we run through it, we’ll eventually get to a highway and then I’ll figure out what to do from there.”

  Sarah doesn’t say anything. But she nods again, wiping her eyes.

  I jump down and get my backpack, stuff in the clothes I’d unpacked only hours before, pausing only to check that the picture of me and Mom is still there. I touch it, rub the corners of the photo between two fingers for good luck. There are some bottles of water on the chest of drawers, and I add those as well. Sarah packs what little she was able to bring in her suitcase, and I put her stuff in my bag too.

  Though everyone’s asleep, I tell her to take off her shoes so they don’t hear us.

  We walk barefoot down the hall. It’s dark in the house, but the moon sheds enough light through the windows that we can just make out the shapes of furniture. When we get to the front door, it’s locked. There’s a padlock above the door handle. I find a window, manage to jam it open, and think that soon we’ll be free. But I don’t know what we’ll do once we are.

  It’s a short fall to the ground, and we both land on our hands and knees. I can feel rocks scraping my palms but don’t let myself worry about it. Then we’re running. My heart’s beating so hard I can’t breathe, but the forest is right there, the trees looming ominously in the moonlight.

  We’re so close and I’m thinking that I’m saving her, that like Orpheus I found her in hell and now we’re leaving for good. We just need to get into the dark of the forest and then we’ll be safe. They won’t be able to find us in there. By the time it’s light, we’ll be gone. On our way to somewhere else.

  The woods are opening up before us.

  We’re close and I half whisper, “I love you.”

  She doesn’t reply, just grips my hand tighter and keeps pulling me in the direction of the forest. Suddenly she lets go.

  “Raya?” Her voice is panicked. “We need to go back inside now.”

  I turn and see Char about thirty feet away on the porch, a cigarette in hand, watching us.

  My breath catches in my throat. I walk up to her. “Sorry, we just wanted some air.” It’s obvious that I’m lying, but I don’t care.

  She just nods.

  Suddenly I realize that she’s still wearing her riding pants and doctor’s coat. Her eyes are stained with half circles of exhaustion, the same color as the cigarette smoke. I exhale shakily. If she’s an insomniac, then there’s no way we will be able to escape at night. During the day we can’t possibly get out without someone seeing where we’re going. For the first time since I got here, I know that I’m actually going to have to go through this, that I’m not leaving, that I’m trapped here in hell. Embarrasingly, I start to cry.

  It’s getting light now, dawn seeping through the corners of the sky like a photograph left in the developer for too long, trapped in the moment before the image disappears. Sarah and I walk back to the house.

  Char follows us. She’s silent until we reach our room. Before we close the door, she says, “I’m sorry, you know. I didn’t want this either.”

  I don’t understand what she’s saying, but I think about what she might have meant long into the next day.

  Part Four:

  The Depths of the Underworld

  I failed to escape. Failed to save Sarah.

  That’s the first thing I can think when I wake up. I must have slept for only a few minutes. I go outside, my bald head like a giant fuck you to everyone, to Grammy for sending me here and to the counselors for thinking that they can break me. Sarah is still asleep. I walk my proudest, gayest strut into the dining room, where everyone is eating Froot Loops and whispering among themselves.

  There are supposedly more than seven people here, but I’m starting to get the idea that only Leon, Sarah, Clio, Jason, Michael, Diane, and Karma regularly participate in the activities. And Karma looks like she’s about to leave; I can see her standing next to some packed b
ags by the front door.

  Hyde sees me looking around. “Patients who have accepted Jesus can return to their families,” he says. “Patients who have progressed further in their therapies rest during the day.”

  I decide that I don’t want to know what that means or why they need to rest.

  Clio is pouring herself a bowl of cereal. She glances up, winks at me, mouths “nice hair.”

  Leon whoops, “This one, she’s a cracker-fire!”

  After breakfast Leon joins me on the porch swing. He looks at me sideways.

  “You know here, they try to break you, but if you just pretend it’s a dream, it’ll be okay. I like to think of it as big gay party. Or summer camp. When I get out of here, I’m going to start a club.” His eyes sparkle. “For people like us. And I’ll play the ‘too sexy’ song every night, like they did at that place in Moscow. It was called Scissors and I think it was for the muffin eaters, but I went anyway.”

  I wonder if Leon knows he’s getting American slang wrong, but I don’t correct him, just let him dream about his club.

  When Leon and I go back inside, I see her. I watch her drinking the coffee that she talked Hyde into giving her. She told him she gets migraines and it’s the only thing that helps, though really she just likes how bitter it is, how it makes her teeth ache. She likes it better when coffee grinds fall into her mug and she can feel their grit on her tongue with each sip.

  In the morning light her eyes always look gray. Today her short hair is fuzzy and so scruffy and sad-looking that it gives her the air of a sick baby bird.

  Outside she rips off the pink clip and gives Char a look, like she’s daring her to say anything. Char just looks down at her cigarette; she’s let it burn down so far that it’s singeing her fingers.

  I wince, holding my breath.

  When Char notices me noticing the burns, she only brushes the ash off, ignoring the raw welts already rising up on her hand.

  Leon says that Char uses experimental injections and pills that are designed to drug us into heterosexuality. Says she can’t sleep because of her own experience with the therapy, which is why she smokes and drinks so much coffee, like she’s trying to chemically compensate for however her body doesn’t function right. Says that she works here because she herself had been converted by this camp and apparently was converted to the point that she decided to devote her life to saving the young homosexuals and transsexuals of America. He whispers in my ear, “My father told me that Hyde’s father put him and Char in charge because he didn’t think they could make it in the outside world. That he had the church buy this place years ago, but he signed it over to Hyde. The checks go to Hyde’s father, I saw the one mine sent. This whole thing, like smoke screen. Stacked against us.”

  Friendly Saviors saves the kids in it by enforcing two activities. The first is making them perform pointless acts of menial labor every day. I learn this from Clio, who doesn’t specify the labor. I assume she means we have to play sports.

  She leans in so that her mouth is next to my ear and says, so quietly that I almost don’t hear her, “I saw you two leaving last night. Don’t ever try to get out by yourself again. There isn’t really a way, unless there are more than a couple kids. Getting caught will only make it worse for you. If you need to, just pretend it’s working. I pretend to date Jason, though he doesn’t know I’m pretending. It works because I only have to talk to him when they’re around, and they give me more privileges and stopped reading my mail.”

  Clio smiles. “I’ve got a girl back at college. Her name’s Iris. She’s a painter. We met in school, before my parents found out. As soon as I can find a way out of here, I’m gone.”

  I consider telling her about Sarah and me, but decide it’s too dangerous and just nod and say nothing. Instead I study the schedule written on a whiteboard hanging over the table. After breakfast we have exercise, which lasts for four hours, and then lunch, a prayer/confession circle, individual meetings with counselors, free time, and then more exercise. Dinner, another prayer circle, and then we have what is left of the evening to ourselves. The board is divided by names. Sarah, Leon, Clio, Maia (Michael), Jason, and I all got the top.

  At the bottom, though, there’s a list of names of people who, except for Diane, I haven’t met. All they have are three treatments per day, “recovery,” and an individual meeting with Hyde. I swallow the lump in my throat that tells me their treatments aren’t going to be something you can recover from.

  Hyde stands up. “It’s time, everyone.”

  I walk outside, thinking we’re going to go running or play ball, only to find thirteen wheelbarrows—each filled with small boulders. The rocks are about the size of basketballs, the kind of rocks that the wealthier people in Pieria use to line their driveways and gardens. It turns out that “exercise” is lifting each boulder, carrying it across an empty football field, then going back to pick up another boulder—again and again until the wheelbarrow is empty. It’s as if they want to exhaust the gay out of our bodies, as if it were something that can be beaten into submission.

  I pick up the first boulder, trying not to outwardly show the pain of its weight in my arms, and walk as proudly as I can to try to prove something to Grammy, to Hyde. I speed up until I’m half running, and I finish the boulder moving before everyone else. I think that now I’ll get to go inside and lie down. Instead Hyde wheels the empty wheelbarrow back to me.

  “Now put them all back in and do it again.”

  The Texas sun is beating down on me like a bruise and I can feel the skin on my face and scalp burning. My arms ache so badly I think they might be splitting open. But I won’t let myself grimace, scared that Hyde—or worse, Char, who’s perched at the edge of the field on a lawn chair, still smoking one of her ever-present cigarettes—will sense my pain and my weakness and exploit it.

  I start the long and terrible task of carrying the boulders back. Like Sisyphus, I think my rock moving will never end, that I’ll die with my arms broken, that even in my death I’ll be carrying the boulders’ weight. But finally I reach the last rock. I can’t look at Sarah, don’t want her to see the exhaustion breaking across my face like hives.

  I walk inside with sore arms that feel they’ve been turned to nothing.

  We all file into the kitchen. There, we’re given dry peanut butter sandwiches with moldy-tasting bread. Then we’re led back to our prayer circle. As we take our places, I try to watch Sarah for any signs that all of this is working. What the signs would be, I don’t know. I only see the sunburn spreading out across her shoulders in red patches.

  When it’s my turn to go, I talk about all the years I spent in hiding, trying to be straight. In my new version of events, I had a fake boyfriend who was also gay, and a girlfriend named Mariana who wanted to be a dancer and had eyes so green they looked blue. I tell the group that it never went further than us holding hands because she moved to New York City to chase her dream of being a prima ballerina.

  When I’m done, Char says I’m possessed with something unholy, that I am dirty, infected with the filth of hell. She says it was because I had no mom that I turned out this way.

  Then Hyde sets in, though his tone is gentler than Char’s, Grammy must have told them about the wings, because he says that my wings are devil-spawned, proof that I’m twisted, that something was wrong with me from the day I entered this world. He tells me that whenever I feel my old ways coming back, I should visualize what will happen to me if I can’t allow myself to be saved—how hell will claim me like it claimed so many other queers.

  As they’re saying these things, I have to remind myself that I’m not disgusting like they say, that there’s nothing really wrong with me.

  While it’s happening, I avoid looking at Sarah and meet her gaze only when they’ve moved on to Jason—who confesses that sometimes he wishes he’d never been born at all. They tell him that if he’s going
to live in sin, maybe he shouldn’t have. Jason covers his mouth with a shaking hand, and in the light his skin is so sallow that it’s as translucent as paper.

  When they get to Clio, she rolls her eyes.

  “I got here because I met this girl, Iris, and we got together. You know, anywhere but Texas, two girls together is basically a normal thing. My parents opened a letter she sent me when I was home from college for the summer, and that’s how they found out and sent me here. It’s wrong, I know now that I’m ready to rejoin the outside world, but I love her”—she glances at Jason and quickly corrects herself—“loved her, that is. I love Jason now that we’ve both made such progress together.”

  Hyde nods. “Very good, Clio. But remember, it’s not normal.”

  Sarah’s staring at me, her eyes wild, and it takes me a minute to realize that she’s afraid.

  I can’t go to her, so I stare back until they’ve finished the circle, until everyone has stood up, and we’re the only ones still seated, holding the pocket Bibles they make us open at the beginning and end of every session.

  After that, I have my first private meeting with Char. We walk to her office in an uncomfortable silence. The room is covered in books with titles like Homosexuality: The Truth Behind the Mental Illness, and although she’s still wearing the same pair of tan riding pants and her coat is stained at the sleeves with flakes of tobacco, she has showered. A pencil holds her silver-white hair in a twisted bun. It’s still wet, leaving little droplets on her jacket.

  I sit down at the mahogany desk, which looks older than the both of us. The top has long, catlike scratches on the surface. I notice framed pictures at the edge: one is of a young Char posing with a horse.

  The room is dusty, books strewn over the floor. I feel the pit drop out of my stomach when I see a bowl full of ice, a bowl of steaming water, and a small silver device with clips that look like they attach to your fingers. Briefly and irrationally I think that she’s going to kill me, that I’ll be murdered and nobody will ever know, that my body will never leave this place. She won’t tell anyone, and Sarah will think that I ran away and left her here alone. Grammy will think that I just ran away, that I left everyone and my one shot at a normal life behind.