Orpheus Girl

by Brynne Rebele-Henry

  The burning often wakes us in the middle of the night, and we stumble to the bathroom to drink the lukewarm water straight from the tap, convinced in our dreaming haze that the burning is because our throats, our bodies, are catching fire. Sometimes we begin to shake uncontrollably, but other times our limbs grow numb and it takes us hours to be able to feel them again. After one of my first treatments, I couldn’t feel my right arm for three days. Sometimes my skin hurts like something in me is teething, like my body is changing in ways beyond my control.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t find you. I was too scared.”

  She looks at me. “Don’t be. Don’t. Okay?”

  I nod, say yes, though we both know I don’t mean it. I settle in next to her with my head resting against her chest.

  That’s when I see Mom.

  The rec room TV is almost never on, and when it is, they usually play old movies, but there she is: my mom. She’s wearing a dress with a train attached to it that makes it look like she’s underwater, and her eyes are rimmed with sparkling flecks of gold. For a second I think she’s looking at me. Then she turns to the man on the TV who’d just tried to stab her.

  “You can’t kill me,” she says. “I just come back.”

  She has a knife in one hand and a torch in the other. I know now that I can fight this, and for the first time since I got lost in hell, I realize that I can still escape.

  Sarah lets me go. Puts a hand over her eyes. “Raya? I don’t feel good.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Her face is gaunt, and her body is shaking even though the house is warm. I notice that her ribs are sticking out through her T-shirt.

  “I couldn’t eat much for a few days, until I got too sick for the treatments and they had to stop.” She starts to cry. “I was just so scared, Raya. I thought I was going to die, it hurt so much.”

  I don’t know what to say. I should have saved her. I should have refused the treatments. Should not have crashed the truck that night. Should have run faster. Should never have let her end up here in the first place.

  I catch her hands in mine. “I’m going to stop this, okay?”

  She nods, then curls up in my lap, falls asleep. I think about how to get out of here: maybe if I set something outside the counselors’ quarters on fire, they’d be forced to extinguish the flames before running after us and everyone would be able to escape. I could find Leon and Clio and tell everyone first so they’d have a head start. I can feel something inside myself that they broke coming back together.

  After we were taken to the second house and the days became indistinguishable from one another, we slept so much that it was like we were awake the whole time. The only difference between night and day were the cracks of light seeping through the bathroom window and into the hall. We were like the lab animals I’d read about, like rats that are trained to wake only when the fluorescent lights are shining down on them.

  But here, in the light, I think I can finally wake up. I can find the strength to fight again.

  I close my eyes to help myself think and drift off to sleep.

  I wake up to screaming. Char is standing over us, crying. Her face is twisted up and her hands are fluttering around in the air like falling leaves.

  It’s dark. Sarah is still asleep, and Char is the only one in the room.

  I stand up. “Char?” Then I see the blood that’s staining her hands.

  She slumps against the wall, half falls to the floor. I think at first that the blood is hers, that finally she succumbed to the sadness that I’ve always sensed is about to explode out of her, but I don’t see any wounds.

  “What did you do?”

  She’s shuddering, shivering so hard her teeth knock against each other and make an eerie clicking noise.

  Hyde comes running in, his white shirt is stained red. “You two need to go upstairs, with the others.”

  In the moment we’re both too shocked to resist. It’s only after the door to downstairs is locked from the outside that we think that maybe we shouldn’t have listened to them, should have gone to help whoever needed it.

  I remember that soon after I got here, Jason turned to me and said, “Every holiday here is like the apocalypse. First there’s all the crying kids who want to go home but aren’t welcome anymore, at least not until they’re fixed. And they’re all haunted by their memories of the holidays before it all happened. I know I always think of my brother before my parents abandoned me, and how we’d spend Christmas mornings together, making coffee and breakfast for our parents, and I’d let him open my gifts for me. He’s only eight, you know. And Hyde always has us pray more than usual and do extra therapy and exercise, to try to keep us from lapsing. Then sometimes, and I think this is the worst, our families call us, and though I know it’s wrong and I know they do too, we beg them to take us back and say we’re cured, that it doesn’t matter, but they always say no. And we wait for them to call back, but they never do.”

  Some parents and relatives send mail, which arrives a few times a week. Afterward there are always letters from all over the South scattered around various trash cans. Once I picked up a letter from Clio’s mother, begging her to reply, saying that she had no choice but to send her away. But I never got any letters from home, as if in my absence Grammy had forgotten about me and the years we spent when we were all each other had. As if I had never really existed.

  The depression and the isolation surface differently in everyone at Friendly Saviors. I can see it in the hunch in their shoulders, the odd glint in their eyes, a certain hollowness to their voices, the way they move, kind of like Grammy did. Like they want to disappear inside their own bodies. Sometimes it’s a quiet sadness, but it’s still there: unwashed and greasy buzz cuts, the stale scent of a body that’s gone too long without being clean, shoulders turned into themselves.

  In the depressed kids at school, it was different: little self-inflicted bruises or other kinds of wounds. Cuticles ragged from being chewed. Chapped, bloody lips. Pale lines on their arms like the roads on a map, charting out all the various ways they’ve tried to escape. But here it eventually becomes a desperate numbness.

  Back home I always swallowed down the pain, except for on those rare nights when I would let myself cry. I would run the shower so I could break down, could cry without Grammy hearing. Like me, most of the kids here have known they were gay their whole lives. And also like me, most of them lived in a near-constant state of terror that they’d be discovered. And like me, they were all found out before they were ready. So tonight maybe Char delivered too many shocks, or maybe someone had to carry too many boulders across that field. Or maybe they were tired of constantly breaking apart, compartmentalizing and recreating themselves. Somebody—I don’t know who—gave up.

  I try to swallow the lump rising in my throat. Someone got pushed too far and did something—I don’t know what. And so for the first time in over a week, I feel like I’m back in my body, and I hurl myself against the door and keep throwing my body against it, even when I can feel something twinge in my shoulder.

  Sarah starts throwing herself against the door too.

  I hear sirens in the distance, slowly getting louder. Eventually we get the wire they’d looped over the door handle on the outside to break, and we run down the stairs.

  The first thing I see is the trail of blood on the floor, the flashing ambulance lights. Char’s in the corner of the room, holding herself steady against the wall.

  Then we see him. Michael.

  He’s on a cot and his arms are covered in bandages. When I was getting treatments, I never saw him in the building, but Jason said it was because he was always alone. Since Michael had been here for a few months and wasn’t showing any signs of being cured, they gave him more and more shocks. Jason told me he’d stopped speaking. I didn’t believe him at first, but now I can see he was telling the truth. I t
ry to run to Michael, but Jason holds me back.

  Michael had only a foster mom, and his brother died when he was fourteen. His foster mom found him wearing his brother’s old clothes one day, and after he told her, she sent him away to get fixed. He doesn’t have any biological family left. His mom died when he was ten, and he never knew his dad. He’s all alone. He tried to kill himself last year but it didn’t work. He thought his foster mom would come for him for the holidays, but she didn’t show.

  He’s only seventeen.

  I throw myself toward him. I don’t know what to do. I try to pull the blanket that slipped off the cot over him, but the ambulance attendants have arrived and push me away. I fall down on my back, hard enough that the breath knocks out of me.

  I see that Michael is still breathing.

  After the ambulance leaves—Hyde had jumped in to go with Michael—Sarah and I and the other lost kids find ourselves alone in the front room.

  The door to the kitchen is open, and there’s a reddish-brown splotch on the tiles. Char is there, but she’s been crying too hard to clean it up. For the first time, everyone is angry. Their rage is a seething thing. Leon picks up a vase and throws it at the front door. It shatters, shards of glass scattering across the floor. Clio punches the wall and keeps punching it until I grab her and hold her back.

  Char and Hyde broke Michael with no intention of putting him back together. They would do the same thing to any of us. Jason, for once, is perfectly still—except for the vein in his jaw, always twitching. Sarah is crying into my shoulder. In place of numbness comes a blind fury. I want to burn this place down, to swallow it in fire. But instead I wrap one arm around Sarah and the other around Jason. We stand there. I stare at Michael’s blood on the floor. I realize, suddenly, that I can end this now.

  I walk up to Char, who’s still sobbing. “Don’t clean it up. Leave it for when the cops come.”

  She nods. “If they’re coming, it will take them a while to arrive. The EMT told me Michael’s going to be okay, so maybe it will take longer if it’s not a police emergency. They said they won’t need to keep him more than one night, Hyde’s going to call his foster mom when they get to the hospital.”

  After that, we all stand together in the front room and wait. For what, I don’t know.

  Sarah’s eyes are fluttering closed. I see that she’s starting to fall. I try to catch her but can’t. Leon helps me lift her onto the couch. I shake her but she won’t wake up.

  Terrified, I run into the kitchen to get a glass of cold water, throw it over her, and she stirs.

  “What?”

  I kneel down beside her. “You passed out.”

  She turns over. “I’m just so hungry. But I don’t think I can eat.”

  I find some yogurt in the fridge, a spoon, and come back like everything will be okay, like a boy didn’t just try to take his life. But we both know it isn’t going to be okay. My hands are shaking until Sarah reaches out. She holds them steady.

  “What will we do now?” she asks me.

  “I don’t know. Char said the police will be coming soon.”

  “Police?”

  “Because of Michael.”

  I look at her, but I don’t have to say anything. She already knows what I’m thinking. For now, we decide to rest on the couch in the rec room.

  I fall into a deep sleep. In a dream, my wings grow back but they grow out wrong and twisted. When the feathers emerge from my back, they crack the skin open and make it bleed. The pain is terrible, and as my vision begins to blacken, I think I hear her voice, but then she’s gone and I’m alone. I’m Orpheus in hell without my girl. Then I wake up.

  Sarah is watching me. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Just had a bad dream.” I rub my eyes. I couldn’t have been asleep for too long since the light looks the same.

  She nods, stands up and walks away, comes back with Char, who sits down next to me. “Hyde called, and the authorities will be coming in a few hours. I don’t know what will happen then, but there’s time for you both to get out.” She speaks almost mechanically, and she’s paler than usual. “This is my last chance, I mean, to make things right. To try to, anyway.”

  I nod. When I first thought about escaping, I thought I’d go back to Pieria, back to Grammy. Now I know I can’t return. Something inside me will die if I have to go back to being invisible. I would have to pretend to be cured, return to having half-coded conversations with Grammy that always leave my heart pumping in my throat. Tonight is the night I get out. If we go home, our towns will destroy us. Towns that have already broken us down, taught us shame, sent us elsewhere to be disappeared. What do any of us have to go back to?

  That’s why so many patients stayed here for so long, why they didn’t run, even when maybe they could have. They didn’t want to return to the places that had rejected them. What chance do we have if we get sent back? At best we’ll always be scared, weighed down by the knowledge of what was once our secret, afraid of our sudden visibility. We will always be watched. We will never fit among the people who were once our families and our friends. On Sundays we will dig our nails into our hands during church and leave little half-moon wounds in our palms. Like the nymphs who were turned into trees or wild animals, we will be hunted by the people we once knew. We will never be safe, never escape that feeling, at least not until adulthood or college if we can afford it. And even after we’ve moved on, we will still look over our shoulders. We will wake up in the middle of the night with the icy fingers of panic creeping down our spines, the half-suppressed memories of the years we’ve tried to forget trickling back until we eventually drown in them. We will be weighed down by all the years we’ve spent being hated for something we can’t control. So I know now that the gray morning Grammy drove me here was the last time I would ever see Pieria.

  I ask Char if I can borrow a phone. Since arriving here I’ve tried to call Grammy only once, but she didn’t pick up.

  Her phone rings, but she doesn’t answer. I bite my lip and dial the number again. I know that she won’t answer when she recognizes the area code flitting briefly over her caller ID.

  After I try for the fifth time, I give up, go to the bathroom, and look in the mirror. Maybe I’ve already lost myself. Maybe it started on the day they made me carry all those boulders, or the day when I first recognized what I was. Maybe it started when I realized I needed to hide, to invent a girl other than myself and try to become her. But now after years of pretending to be other girls and inventing new personalities for myself, I don’t know who I am. I can still feel the shock of electricity in my body that sparks whenever I touch my skin, and when I bring my hands to my face, it stings. After all this time, I never got to become anyone other than a girl trying to survive. A girl in love with another girl. And now I’m scared that I won’t be able to keep even that.

  Yesterday when Sarah reached for my hand, I could feel the electricity again, the shock that reminded me that while it isn’t wrong, everyone else thinks it is, and I had to move my hand away, had to pretend not to be in pain just from her touch.

  I splash cold water on my face and try to smooth down my eyebrows and arrange my features in a way that looks normal, natural—even though in my time here I’ve gone feral, forgotten how to even appear to be normal. I take in my makeup-free face, my shorn head, the bland and oversized clothes. I look like a prison escapee, or maybe a cult member, two things that will prevent me from passing into the real world unnoticed.

  I need to find the clothes I was wearing when I arrived here. I think they threw them out or put them in one of the locked filing cabinets with our medical information and behavioral files in Hyde’s office. With Hyde at the hospital, there’s no way I’m getting them back. I tie the ends of the shirt up, try to roll up the long skirt’s waist so it looks like it almost fits me. My lips are chapped; I rub the Vaseline they keep underneath the sin
k over them.

  In the mirror I practice looking normal, but I can’t do it.

  Eventually I give up. If I’m running, I’m running. Tonight is the night that Sarah and I will escape. I don’t know what we’ll do or where we’ll go, but I know that we’ll be gone.

  After I leave the bathroom, Char walks toward me, holding out the phone. “Raya? Your grandmother is calling for you.”

  “Raya?”

  When I hear her voice, I start crying. I feel a sudden rush of longing to go back to the way things were, when it was just the two of us floating around the empty house. For her to again wrap an arm around me in the car on the way to church, her gospel faintly playing in the background.

  “Raya, look, I’m sorry I didn’t call. I just thought it would be too painful, for the both of us.” I can hear her voice catch. “Paul and I got married. At the church. I wore the scarf you gave me. I wish you could have been there.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. I wish you could have been at the wedding.” She sounds surprised.

  “You should have waited for me. To get back, I mean.”

  “Oh, Raya.” She says it quietly, but the way she says it, I know she never intended for me to come back. It hurts me more than I’d like to admit.

  “You didn’t think I was coming back.” But it’s not a question. I already know the answer.

  She’s quiet for a long time before she says, “Did they help at least, you know, with the problem?”

  I’m silent.

  “I just couldn’t raise a dyke.” She almost whispers it.

  “Why? What’s so wrong with being a dyke?”

  “Oh, Raya. It’s because you can’t see what’s wrong with it that you’re so sick. It’s my fault; I should have known sooner. I just didn’t want to believe it. You always were so pretty, like your mother, and you seemed happier than she did. Didn’t seem like you got as much of her wildness. I thought I was getting a second chance to get a girl, to raise her right. I failed your mom, honey. I didn’t want to fail you like that too. I thought I could save you. The lady on the phone said something had happened, but Friendly Saviors isn’t that bad, is it?”