Orpheus Girl

by Brynne Rebele-Henry

  “It is. That bad.”

  She sighs. “Well, there are other places. I’ll look into it tonight. I’ll ask Preacher Sam where he’s going to send Sarah now, and then I’ll come get you tomorrow. You can stay at home for the weekend, until I figure out the best place for you. We’re going to get you help, okay?”

  I hang up the phone and hand it back to Char. Then I sit down on the floor in the hall. I don’t want to cry anymore, so I bite the inside of my cheek until my mouth fills with blood.

  A tear lands on the back of my hand. Then another. I wipe them both away.

  Char waves over Jason and Diane, and they crouch beside me. “Everyone who wants to is getting out tonight,” Char says. “It might be the last chance you’ll have before you get sent home.” I stare in shock as she goes into the kitchen and comes back with an armful of plastic bags that she tosses in front of us. “Put your things in these.”

  She turns to me. “I couldn’t get the others to leave. They wouldn’t go, said they’d rather wait for their families.”

  For a second I see her as a girl, before she half disappeared. I see her smiling at the girl she loved, light reflecting off her face, blinding. I see her arms, years before mine, too, were covered in red marks. I see Sarah and me, wherever we end up going—lost and alone, yes, but together, free. Still ourselves. With the bright promise of a future away from here, the promise of a future for girls like us. I see Char again, laughing, the camera in one hand, her schoolbag in the other—the girl she was in that photo before she was turned against her own body, before she became something else entirely. But then I blink and the image is gone.

  Leon comes running up to me. “I’m leaving, Rainy. I called my father and he wants me to come. Tonight. New York where he is stationed. Clio will turn eighteen next week, so we leave together. She’ll go back to school. Find her girlfriend. Jason and Diane are coming to the station, but I don’t know where they go.”

  I think about their escaping, finally being free for the first time, and I can’t speak.

  He hugs me. “Don’t cry, Rainy. We’ll come find you too. Everyone’s leaving. Where are you going?”

  I shake my head, and after a moment I collect myself and step away. “Sarah and I, our families want to send us to another camp. We’re running. But I don’t know where.”

  Leon whispers in my ear, “Come to New York with us. We’ll have place for you, always.” He hands me a piece of paper. “It’s my phone. Call me when you get there.”

  I put it in my pocket. Then he slips something heavy into my hand, and when I look down, I see one of the socks with the silver dollars in it. I hug him back, hard enough that the electricity sparks in my skin and I know he can feel the wing scars through my shirt, though he says nothing and for once I don’t care.

  Before he goes upstairs to pack, he leans down. “You know, the thing about family is that you can choose it. And I choose you.”

  Only after he goes do I realize that he had tears in his eyes. Clio hugs me too, so tight it hurts. She’s crying and I wipe away her tears with my sleeve.

  “We’ll come find you, okay?” I say. “We’re getting out tonight. We’ll take a bus to New York and meet you both there.”

  She nods. “Okay.”

  Char drives them to the bus station, and Sarah and I watch them leave from the porch. We go upstairs to our room. For the third time since we’ve been here, we pack to escape. But this time I know we will, that we’re getting out. Char couldn’t fit everyone in the truck, but she said she’d come back for us, and I think I believe her.

  By the time Char comes back from the station, it’s late, and already the air is cold against my skin. In the muddy porch light, Sarah looks at me.

  For a second she’s illuminated, I remember the night that we lost everything we’d known. Remember the nights as girls when we chased the dimming lights of fireflies, cupping their tiny bodies between our palms, how their wings flickered like heartbeats. And now, I see a new future for the both of us playing out in her eyes.

  “I don’t have time to take you two to the station, so here’s the keys to the truck.” Something between a laugh and a sob rises in Char’s throat. “Don’t crash it this time. We just got it back from the shop. It’s too late for me, but you still have a chance. I’m sorry, for everything. Really. I just tried for so long.”

  She starts to cry, quietly. In the moonlight she looks transparent, ghostly.

  I tell her, “You can still find her again. Some things can’t be lost.” I think, for a second, that she can come with us, that she’ll get her last, small chance at redemption, become somebody, become whole, no longer a broken girl who got turned into a fractured woman.

  She just sighs. “It’s too late for that.” Then, almost as if speaking to herself, she says, “I still love her.” She blinks. “Her name was Ariana. Sometimes I think you look like her, back when we were young.”

  Sarah and I just stand there for a moment, but then she pushes us away.

  “You’re running out of time.”

  As I begin to walk away, I want to tell her something, to comfort her, but I don’t know what to say, and by the time I realize I should have said thank you, we’re running and she’s only a pale shape receding into the night—her face blurred with a grief I cannot understand, her cigarette burning, wisps of smoke filling the air around her. Then I see her stand up, brush her hair down from its clip with shaking hands, and wait for whatever ending will come next for her. Darkness envelops her like a shroud. I know this will be the last time that I ever see her.

  Though she hurt us, I don’t blame Char. I know that she was broken, that if we’d stayed here as long as she did, we would have died or turned out the same way. We would have become the people who hated us.

  I think about Grammy. She’ll be waking up in a few hours to make her too-sweet coffee. She’ll be tying her long gray hair up in a bun. Now that Paul is there, she’ll take the time to smear on some lipstick—though like it always does, it will catch on her thin lips and smear into a pink streak on her front teeth. And like always, she won’t wipe the stain away. Maybe she’ll think about me. Maybe she’ll wonder if she made the right choice. She’ll think about how after the early shift at the florist’s, she’ll drive out to get me. She’ll recite the words from the brochure of whatever facility she wants to send me to now. Remind herself that she’s fixing me, that it’s not her fault. In her mind I won’t be me, though. It will be my mother she’s fixing, and in her mind, if I don’t come back, that’ll be okay too. Because to her I’ve been gone for fourteen long years already.

  The real me will never be hers, so she can give me away without a second thought.

  Maybe my mom is waking up now too, or just getting in from some party. She’ll take off her heels, tie her hair back. Maybe she’ll look at the stars. Maybe she’ll remember the mother and the daughter she left behind, and maybe she’ll feel something sharper than sadness echoing in the space between her heart and her rib cage. But she’ll do nothing, having ignored it for so long. Maybe it has already disappeared entirely.

  Sarah’s family will be getting ready to send her away too. They’ll be sleeping still. I imagine Sarah’s mom turning over, her chest hurting with what she thinks of as the death of her daughter, as if Sarah’s already gone. Her daddy will think about the lessons he’s been learning since he was a boy about girls like us. And though it’s his own daughter, he’ll think that maybe she never was anything but a broken queer he couldn’t save, and his mouth will fill with a sharp, sweet taste that he can’t name.

  When they find out we’re gone, they won’t be surprised. They’ll think we ended up wherever all the queers go, dead in a lake somewhere or sleeping in a car in some city. Or if we’re lucky, at another one of the facilities that they try not to think about sending us to, clinging to the fantasy that these camps will fix us, that we’ll be
come the girls they couldn’t force us to be. When they sleep they’ll dream of whole girls, of the girls they always wanted: straight girls who walk a certain way, who wear skirts and sing and cook and speak with a lilt in their voice. Decades of disappointments leading up to and accumulating inside the bodies of teenage lesbians like us. So for them, when we’re gone, it will be a relief. One final disappointment versus a lifetime of small ones. Some nights after we leave, they’ll remember when we were young, before we became something they couldn’t control, and they’ll feel something hollow in their chests.

  The night air is cold on my skin, the skin that still burns like I’m being lit up again. We start to slow down now that we’re closer, Sarah and I. And this time I don’t look back. We get in the truck, lock the doors. The key slides into the ignition and the truck starts easily. I manage to steer it out into the road, and then we’re driving away.

  The road goes on and on. For a while I think we’re never going to escape—that like Eurydice, the two of us will be trapped in hell forever.

  But then the forest ends and the road opens up before us.

  We’ll go to New York to find Leon and Clio. Nobody will bother trying to find us. We’re just gay girls whose bodies became thin air—like all the other gay kids we grew up with. We have vanished. Yet for the first time in both of our lives, we’re visible by choice. And we’re completely free.

  As I pick up speed, I see the flash of lights in the distance, hear the faint wail of sirens, and when we get to the end of the road and onto the interstate, I see the police cars making their way down the long road to the house, and I know that it’s over.

  The sun starts to rise. It’s almost light now. I park the truck at the edge of the road, leave the keys on the dashboard.

  We grab our bags. The bus station is in the distance, with buses we could take to other cities, other states, to trains we could ride until we no longer know anything about where we are other than that we have succeeded: the two of us were gone. The expanse of road is stretching before us now, the sun’s rising high, the hell we’d escaped being washed out of our clothes with its light.

  Maybe I was wrong about my wings. I think that maybe the myth about Orpheus isn’t about losing your love: it is about learning how not to look back.

  For a minute, as we begin to walk into the sunlight, I see the two of us like we’ve always been—for thousands of years, since the beginning of time: two girls in the sun, their faces blurring into nothing but brightness as they leave, as they walk into the light, leaving everything behind.

  Index of Characters

  I’ve included an index of the characters in the book and their corresponding mythological references:

  Raya: Orpheus.

  Sarah: Eurydice, a nymph and Orpheus’s wife, whom Orpheus tried to bring back from the underworld after her death.

  Raya’s mother, Calli: The muse Calliope, patron of epic poetry and Orpheus’s mother.

  Raya’s father: Like Raya, the identity of Orpheus’s father was disputed, but most often he was thought to be Apollo.

  Jean: Artemis, the goddess of the hunt.

  Madison, Sherry, and Lacey: The Three Graces, who represent beauty, elegance, and joy.

  Aristo: Aristaeus, a minor god often credited with the discovery of beekeeping.

  Hyde: Hades, the god of the dead and king of the underworld.

  Char: Char represents both Charon and Cerberus. Charon is the ferrier for the underworld who brings the dead souls into the depths of the underworld. Cerberus is a three-headed dog who guards the underworld for Hades and prevents the dead from leaving.

  Clio: Clio (also sometimes spelled Kleio) is the muse of history.

  Michael: Meleager, a hero, and one of the Argonauts.

  Jason: Jason, a mythological hero and the leader of the Argonauts. In their quest to recover the golden fleece, Jason journeyed with Orpheus as a member of the Argonauts.

  Diane: Dysis, the goddess of the sunset who presides over the eleventh hour in the day.

  Leon: Orion, a huntsman in Greek mythology.

  Karma: Karmanor, the demigod of the harvest.

  Raya’s hometown, Pieria: Orpheus’s hometown and later burial place.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank my literary agents, Vicky Bijur and Alexandra Franklin, for believing in this book and for their advocacy and literary stewardship. Thank you to Daniel Ehrenhaft and everyone at Soho Press for bringing this novel into the world. Many thanks to Bronwen Brenner and everyone else who read early drafts of Orpheus Girl.

  Thank you to my mother, for being my closest friend and co-conspirator. And thank you to my father, for being my first reader and biggest supporter. Lastly, thank you to all the young gay people reading this. I wrote this book for you.