Orpheus Girl

by Brynne Rebele-Henry

  Char begins by showing me pictures of two girls holding hands. One of the girls has cropped hair and is wearing a man’s button-down. The other has long brown hair and a pink silk blouse. The girl with the cropped hair reminds me of Sarah, and when I see them I can’t help smiling a little bit, and that’s when she dips my fingers into the freezing water. The cold’s a shocking burn, and instead of looking away I smile wider in the direction of the pictures. I smile so wide that my mouth hurts and I know that I look crazy. She pushes my hands deeper into the freezing water and it makes my eyes well, but I blink back the tears and make myself start laughing.

  In a movement so fast I don’t register it until it’s happened, Char pulls my hands out—upending the bowl and spilling ice and water everywhere, smearing her papers and notes with water stains—and twists my arm behind my back.

  After that, Char marches me outside. She takes me to the football field and lets me go so suddenly that I fall. Then she sits down in the lawn chair and orders me to carry three wheelbarrows’ worth of rocks back and forth.

  I think about saying no.

  But I remember the list of names at the bottom of the whiteboard and the small electric machine on her desk. So I decide that my name won’t be at the bottom of the list in the kitchen today, and I pick up the first boulder.

  Soon my vision is blurring and my arms burn. I see Sarah watching me from the window until it looks like someone pulls her away to her own therapy session. If it’s with Hyde she’s probably better off, or at least that’s what I tell myself. I pick up another boulder and then another, and I keep going until eventually my vision begins to turn black and then dissolves into nothing.

  The thing about nice homophobes is that they’re the worst kind of homophobe. They’ll smile at you on the street, maybe say that it would be okay if everyone could get married, but wouldn’t it undermine the sanctity of marriage if the gays could too? They lull you into a false sense of security and make you feel safe enough that you’ll let your guard down, and for a moment maybe entertain the idea of dropping your disguise. And then they metaphorically cut your throat.

  I learned the type when I was in middle school: the girls who invite you over to dinner, girls whose parents will talk politics at the dinner table and say things about how they don’t mind gay people as long as they don’t have to see them or interact with them. They applaud themselves for their tolerance but vote for politicians who want to make gayness a mental illness again, then smile at you at church the next day. With every action they make to take away your rights, they adopt an air of phony shame, as if they actually cared about the consequences of their beliefs.

  So when I wake up to Hyde wrapping a blanket around me, gently putting a thermometer under my tongue, asking how I’m feeling, I’m suspicious.

  Sometimes I think it’s almost better when they outright tell you they hate you, when you know what to expect from the beginning. With men like Hyde, men who smile too kindly and act all fatherly while trying to erase your identity, the line between safe and not safe blurs in a way that scares me.

  Rosie from school was like that. When she saw me with Sarah, she became afraid of me in a way that I didn’t know was possible coming from her, but that I had always been scared would happen. I was always just so afraid. Afraid that someone would look at me with the kind of fear and recognition that turns into gay teens disappearing to places like this and ends with them never leaving, never becoming anything other than trapped inside their own gay bodies.

  My vision is still blurry. Other than the strange anxiety buzzing in my chest, I’m not sure what happened. I remember falling. I think I hit my head. The images come back disjointed: the heels of Char’s tan leather boots digging into the grass. Hands around my shoulders, pulling me up. The rock falling out of my arms and landing on the ground. A sharp pain in the back of my skull. Then nothing.

  I lean back on the couch in the nurse’s quarters, an area now run by Char—after the nurse apparently had a midlife crisis and quit last year, leaving behind everything but the empty planters in the windowsills. Weirdly, the nurse didn’t bother to bring the pots with her, and from my position on the couch, I can see the cracked terra-cotta forms that cast long and ominous shadows on the floor. I close my eyes, let the shadows melt back into nothingness.

  Before I wake up, I hear Sarah’s voice and forget where I am. I think it’s another morning when the night before was still a half-answered question and Sarah was waiting for me to wake up, sitting at the edge of her big metal bed with two mugs of black coffee (both hers) and watching me. Those mornings, she’d never do anything to wake me up even though she got up hours before I did. She would just sit and drink her coffee and wait for me before doing anything to start her day.

  Still, in the space between consciousness and not, I remember the dream I had: she and I were in an ocean and the tide kept pulling me under. She was wearing a white hospital gown, and my wings had returned. She called out, “Stop struggling; you’ll sink faster.” But I couldn’t stop, and soon the salty water was filling my throat and seeping into my lungs. I clawed at my mouth but I couldn’t breathe. My wings were too waterlogged to fly and hung limp and heavy from my back. Sarah was gone. And then I started to sink. Suddenly I felt her arms around me, pulling me out. But when we beached on the sand, I couldn’t feel my wings. When I put a hand to my back, there was only wet, empty skin.

  She whispered, “I had to cut them off; they weighed you down too much.”

  I wake up gasping, like I always do when I have dreams about my wings returning.

  Then Sarah is there, sitting next to me, and I remember everything.

  Hyde and Char are gone and we are alone. She puts her hands on my shoulders. “You scared me. Don’t do that again.”

  I kiss her, feel the tears drying on her cheeks. “Don’t cry.”

  She doesn’t say anything, just kisses me harder until we hear footsteps coming down the hall and pull away from each other. She hurls herself into the chair on the other side of the room and manages to slump down in it in a way that looks almost natural before the door opens.

  Hyde walks in. “Raya? You can leave now. You fainted, but Char checked you out and gave you a clean bill.” He grins, and it’s almost goofy in a way that makes me hate him even more. “Be careful about carrying those rocks from now on. We can’t have any more accidents. I had to go to town to pick up these electrolyte waters, and Char says that if you drink a couple bottles every few hours, you’ll be good. Mainly you’re just dehydrated . . .”

  He keeps droning on, but I’m not listening because I have realized something: the truck in the driveway. He must take it out on supply runs fairly regularly, and if he does, that means he keeps the keys somewhere close by—or better yet, they’re in his pocket.

  I glance at Sarah, but she doesn’t seem to understand.

  Eventually I start to nod and ask if I could have one of the waters, just to get him to stop talking. When he walks over to hand me the bottle, his left pocket jingles. He’s wearing those old, baggy jeans—made for a much bigger man, but that men like him wear and they think they’re cool even though their jeans look like the pants the bingo-playing grandmas wear. He constantly hitches them up, so the pockets gape open like an apron: easy to steal from without the wearer noticing.

  I smile too brightly and give him back the bottle with the fluorescent blue liquid in it.

  “Hyde? Sorry, could you open this for me? I can’t get it.”

  While he’s struggling to get the cap off, I slip a hand in his pants pocket and grab the keys.

  Sarah’s watching. Her eyes widen when she sees the flash of metal disappearing into my skirt’s compartment-pocket thing.

  The skirts here are true atrocities with kangaroo-like pouches built into them. I think the pouches are meant to carry pocket Bibles. Mine carry sugar packets to eat in the privacy of our room later
. Clio saw me taking the packets from the kitchen, and for a second I worried she’d tell someone, but she just laughed.

  “That’s a good idea; sometimes you need a little sweetness.”

  At lunch when nobody was looking, she slipped an open packet into my hand, winking at me. I turned and let the granules dissolve into a gritty sweetness on my tongue, and just for a second, I felt better.

  I’ve stolen only once before, when I was twelve.

  I’d gotten my period for the first time, and although I didn’t really understand what the dark mass of blood staining my pants meant, I knew that I was supposed to buy a box of sanitary pads. But I didn’t have any money on me and I didn’t want to tell Grammy. I didn’t want to hear her sigh and watch her get misty-eyed while she took care of me but thought about my mother and her girlhood, a girlhood that had disappeared, like mine disappeared—though mine was spent in hiding and Mom’s was spent being too visible.

  All I ever was to Grammy was a girl raised in the place of my mother’s shadow. A consolation prize. Whenever I hit any kind of milestone on my way to womanhood (getting breasts and buying my first bra, getting hips, getting a note in the mailbox from some boy, something that clearly thrilled Grammy and irritated me), she treated them as stepping-stones on the way to prevent me from becoming my mother—as ways to tamp down the girl inside me, to kill every part that reminds her in a bad way of my mom. To create instead the perfect substitute: a girl who resembles her in every way except the undesirable, wilder ones. And we both knew it, though neither of us ever said anything, except once when I was half-asleep on the couch. She shook me awake, and said, “We have to go to church.”

  But she called me Calli.

  I said, “I’m not her, you know.”

  Grammy bit her lip and said, “I know,” but the way she said it, we both knew that she didn’t.

  I never tried to address it, always just thought that one day maybe Mom would come back and I’d stop having to be her replacement, a knockoff version of her.

  The day I got my period, I rode my bike out to the convenience store. Sarah met me there to distract Jonathan, the man who worked at the register on Sunday afternoons, while I slipped the box into my backpack—almost knocking over a Twinkies display in the process. Back at Sarah’s house, I tried to wash the blood out of my pants but couldn’t. I got in the shower with my clothes on and turned the water on high so Sarah wouldn’t hear me crying. It was moments like that when my mother’s absence hurt more than I could stand, when a deep longing for all the things I’d never known took root in my belly and stayed there.

  Sarah must have been listening outside the door because she came in and got in the shower with me and held me until I stopped sobbing. She dried me off, taught me how to put on the wings of the pads so they wouldn’t bunch up.

  Then she slapped my face.

  I thought it was because she knew that the week before, I’d learned that I was truly gay, though I’d known, deep down, for a long time. I’d told no one and changed nothing about my appearance or demeanor, but I was paranoid that everyone could sense it. I turned away from Sarah, the realization that I’d been found out slowly sinking into me. But then she laughed.

  “Sorry. My mom said that my grandma slapped her after she got her period, and that my great-grandma did too, and so on. It’s some kind of family tradition. She slapped me when I got mine. I think it’s supposed to be good luck.”

  I was so relieved that I muttered, “Thank you.”

  Then I put on some of Sarah’s clothes, and we walked loops around her block until night fell and her parents were calling for us to return.

  Now we’re walking down the corridor to our second group prayer circle of the day. I think of how Hyde explained to Grammy that one of their techniques is having a twice-daily prayer circle where the patients confess some kind of sin to the rest of the campers. (It feels like it’s been weeks since she left me on the porch and I watched the green Volvo speed away, driving so fast she almost ran over the welcome sign.) What he didn’t tell her is that if one of the patients doesn’t have a sin to confess, the staff refuses to feed them or doubles their physical labor for the day.

  I tell myself that I won’t confess to anything, that I won’t let them make me pretend to become someone else, but I know it’s only a matter of time before they break me down. I know I’ll have to pretend to have become another person, a straight girl—and while I know they can’t make me straight, I’m afraid I’ll begin to believe them when they tell me I’m wrong, doomed.

  I have the keys to get away, and as long as Hyde doesn’t look for them or put his hand in his pocket and notice that they’re gone, I’m safe. As Sarah and I enter the room, I decide to say that the month before I got found out, I kissed a girl in the darkness of the school’s photography room while we waited for the pictures we’d taken for an art assignment to develop. My real school doesn’t have an art room, but Hyde and Char don’t know that. In the fake life of the fake girl I’ve decided to pretend to be, it’s true.

  In reality, my first kiss was in the bathroom after my seventh-grade dance with a girl named Dani. She just grabbed me, knocking her teeth against mine in the process. Then she let me go and walked out, slamming the bathroom door. I just stood there gasping.

  I ran after her, wanted to ask her not to tell anyone, thinking it was some kind of test the other girls had put her up to, to prove my dykehood, but she just flashed me a peace sign and walked off. She never spoke to me again. The next summer she was found kissing the other girl who got outed at prom. That night in the bathroom was the last time I saw her.

  The group starts. The kids who are “resting” are still gone, secluded somewhere. As we all get settled, I notice that Jason and Michael both look legitimately terrified. Jason’s voice shakes as he says—in the same tone you would use to admit to committing murder—that he thought about holding hands with a man today, though only for a couple of seconds, and that afterward he went into the bathroom and ran cold water and dipped his hands into it in an attempt to mimic Char’s treatments.

  The two saddest things about this place are seeing campers confess the most mundane parts of their queerness as if they were speaking to God himself, and seeing the “cured” patients come up with false sins.

  Michael says that today he tried to pull his bra around his body but pulled it so tight he couldn’t breathe, so for a few minutes he had a makeshift binder. And briefly, what he saw reflected back in the bathroom mirror was who he actually is, or at least as close to being himself as he can get in a place like this.

  Hyde puts a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “Maia, you need to accept your body and its purpose, to be a wife, a mother, a servant of the Lord, and only when you do will you find peace. But accepting yourself, your purpose, is the only way to salvation.”

  Tears are welling in Michael’s eyes, and Hyde kneels down so they’re at eye level. “You’ll return to the path that you strayed from. God will find you, Maia.”

  Michael won’t meet his eyes, just stares fixedly at the floor.

  Clio says that she thought of a girl she slept with the summer before her senior year of high school. The girl got married to her high school sweetheart shortly after, had a new baby before graduation, turned bright red and started stammering whenever she saw Clio in the halls, a protective hand held tight over her rounding belly. Hyde says that Clio needs to save herself like the girl did. “That girl, she recognized something sour in her, lurking beneath the surface, and she fixed it with something sweet. She fulfilled what she was always meant to be. And now you’re working to do the same.”

  Leon says he misses “beautiful blond-haired boys.”

  Char snaps at him, “That isn’t a confession.”

  Leon thinks for a minute. “Boys who I want to make naked?” he adds, and Char nods.

  Hyde then starts in on how Leon was too close
to his mother growing up, and because she raised him when his father was away, Leon grew inward—became womanly, got confused, tempted by the wrong forces. Leon smirks while Hyde says this, but I notice that his hands are shaking.

  Then it’s my turn.

  When I speak, my voice shakes too, for reasons I don’t entirely understand. “Um, well, last year I was in the darkroom at school, developing pictures for my art assignment, and the girl I had the assignment with, Lana, kissed me.” I trail off, blushing. Admitting my gayness out loud—even when I’m lying—is still strange. Even though I’ve been found, I’m not used to being seen. My heart starts beating too fast and I can feel my cheeks flushing hotter as everyone continues to look at me. Sarah raises an eyebrow at me. I shrug back at her.

  Char turns to me, and her eyes are icy, sphinxlike. In this light she’s so cold and pale it looks like she could be made out of marble. Her face has the same delicate fleshy quality as all those Greek sculptures I’ve seen pictures of—as if she’s flickering between being dead and not.

  “And what did you do?”

  “I kissed her back.”

  She smiles almost imperceptibly and turns away.

  Hyde says, “Admitting sin is the first step toward healing. Eventually, Raya, the life you led will seem like nothing more than a nightmare, a bad dream meant to test you. But you can wake up from this.”

  I nod, swallow hard.

  Sarah’s next.

  Looking at her, I think about that night she kissed me, about how she started to cry again after I kissed her back. “Raya? I’m scared.” How I held her against me and said that nothing would happen to either of us, even though we both knew it would. How I promised her that we’d both be safe. But that promise was broken. All I can do now is try to get her out of here.