by Sara Wolf
There’s yelling again. He’s yelling at Mom, again. Why are they fighting? Don’t they love each other? Something breaks downstairs. Something glass.
My room is too open. He’ll find me again if I hide under the bed. I can’t go out the window - I’d die, probably. The bathtub doesn’t work, either. He sees me through the shower curtain.
Something dark. Something safe.
My chubby little fist reaches for the closet. It’s darker, and quieter. The yelling and the breaking isn’t so bad, in here.
I’m safe.
I want to be safe. I want Mom to be safe.
I don’t want to be scared, anymore.
Time, I’ve decided, does not make things easier. It makes things harder, actually. Unless you are a fruit. Or a human. Then it just makes you all soft and mushy.
“Are people fruit?” I whisper into my oatmeal. Ana looks up from her tea and toast and textbook, her braids amassed on top of her head and held back with a vibrant pink scarf.
“What?”
“I think people might be fruit,” I say.
“Whyyy?” Ana leads.
“Because I’m going bananas,” I sigh, thinking back to last night.
“Is this about the homework? I couldn’t find your paper under my door.”
“I didn’t slip it under the door, actually.” I admit. Her cherubic face flashes disappointed.
“Why not?”
“I just figured…I have to figure it out on my own, right? You’ve got your own bitchin’ life to live.”
“Sometimes it is ‘bitching’.” She agrees. “But I don’t mind helping you, Lilith.”
“I know! And that’s exactly why I do! I hate taking advantage of nice people!”
“You’re not taking advantage.” Her voice goes soft. “I’m offering.”
“Yeah. Still.” I jab my spoon into my bowl, suddenly feeling both incredibly not-hungry and incredibly not-mature. Can’t tell her the truth - that in my worst moments I suspect her of trying to get an angle on me. That I suspect everyone of that.
Ana’s quiet, and then she says; “It’s okay to let people help you, you know.”
“Theoretically,” I murmur.
“Well, tonight I’m staying up until you knock on my door. Let me help you with your homework -” She flashes me a smile. “ - theoretically.”
The tight lump in my throat loosens, and my eyes water. It’s nice, to have someone insist. She’s so damn nice to a scared, prideful baby like me. I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed someone as cool as her even wants to hang with me. The bell rings, and before I can say ‘thank you’ Ana sweeps up her bags and is swallowed whole by the crowd, her pink scarf bobbing as she waves back at me.
She’s just trying to help.
Helping, but you can’t rely on her. You can’t rely on anyone but you.
I drown out the darkness with a chocolate, unwrapping the gold thing and popping it in my mouth. The sweetness is a nice distraction from bad moments. Always has been. Always will be. It’s too bad Borbeau didn’t take one. Her loss, I guess. They really do work.
It helps. I promise.
I shake out Alistair’s voice and trudge to my first class of the day - Beginner’s French - and it takes me three seconds of the lecture to realize French is, to put it politely, fucking bonkers. There’s a lot of letters that aren’t even pronounced, the word for cat sounds like shat as in shat yourself, and all the words are either male or female.
I raise my hand. The professor - a woman with watery eyes and a frizzy ponytail - points at me.
“Are there, like, non-binary words?” I ask. “Maybe, uh, genderfluid?”
“Wh-What sort of fluid?” The professor’s face goes pale. “Please, Miss Pierce. Save the more visceral anatomical questions for your sexual education class.”
It doesn’t take long for the snicker that goes around the room to devolve into full-blown laughter. I sink down in my chair and disguise my face with my entire backpack as the professor crows desperately at everyone to quiet down.
“I was just trying to be, like, considerate,” I whisper into my bag’s folds.
“You’ll have no luck with that,” A girl leans in to my right. “We’re slow to change out here in the middle of the countryside.”
I look over at her - she’s shorter than me, but her face is round and sweet, her cheeks wide and her nose small. Her hair is jet black and cut in a fashionable lob, and the pad in her lap is alive with vibrant colors - a drawing program of some sort.
“My parents do global textiles.” She smiles. “Chunhua Zhao. Nice to meet you.”
“Lilith Pierce,” I scratch my cheek. “And my parent does, uh, nurse things.”
She cocks her head. “Just one parent?”
(people who hurt us don’t exist)
“Just one.” I assert.
“Ooooh, so -” She squints at me closely. “ - you’re the new girl from America, right?”
“Guilty as charged. Are you drawing something?”
Chunhua looks down at the pad in her lap. “I’m just doodling a background for the ranking meeting tonight.”
“The…what?”
“Ranking. You know.” She taps the pad, putting it on the roundtable so I can see it better. She zooms in on the beautifully drawn flowers with her fingers, revealing columns of text overlaid on it. It’s a massive list. Way bigger than Strickland’s hate-list. “The ranking for the boys.”
“We’re…ranking people?”
Chunhua giggles. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s just a game to pass time, you know? My sister says it’s kind of like American fantasy football, and she goes to college in Virginia, so.”
“So…” I lead.
“So it used to be just the four of us; me, Jihyun, Sadeen, and Alice, and we’d eat snacks and drink soda and talk waaaay late into the night,” Chunhua purses her lips in a pout. “But then! Someone left their ranking list lying around! Probably Alice because she’s so scatterbrained sometimes - you should’ve seen her in fourth year before I helped her, she was a mess - anyway, it got really popular and people started showing up, and we couldn’t have it in our room anymore so we had to schedule a room from the headmistress, and now it’s every Wednesday night in Room 239. In Knight Roux.” She inhales hugely. “You’re welcome to come. It’s pretty fun. We have high tea. Little sandwiches and stuff. But nobody wears a dress or does the etiquette.”
I’m winded just listening to her. “I’m lost. What do you do, exactly, at this meeting?”
“Oh.” Chunhua blinks. “Well, we rank the boys of the school by a combination of their looks, their smarts, their personalities, and their fortunes. The list changes through the year, depending on how they act or what they do. Sort of like The Bachelorette. My sister tells me about that show all the time. I don’t watch it because I prefer K-dramas and I keep trying to tell Jia that but she never listens to me, and I’m always like ‘JIA! It’s two in the morning there in Hong Kong and Mom’s going to kill you! Just because Dad’s company’s doing well again doesn’t mean she’s stopped checking the phone bills!’, but she just ignores me -” Chunhua stops. “I’m blabbing, aren’t I? Anyyyway. We do it for the girls, too!”
“All of them?” My eyes widen.
“All of them! All four-hundred students at Silvere.” She nods proudly. “Well, except Noel, and Wu. Oh, and St. James and the Ramirez siblings. They asked us to take their names off, so we did. I mean, we’re reasonable about it, you know? We take people off if they ask us to. But most people wanna see how they measure up. Wu was cool with still being on the girls’ list, though, but that one doesn’t get updated as much. Most people just come for the boys’ list because it’s more fun to be mean to them.”
My mind blurs at all the last names being used and I nod like I understand. I watch her rose-gold nails flick through a few pictures on the pad, her tongue stuck out thoughtfully between her teeth.
“Let’s see…aha! There I am, number 56. And look
- there you are!”
Sure enough - at the very bottom of the girls’ list, in the 214th slot, is my name. Chunhua pats my shoulder sympathetically.
“Don’t worry. It’s just because you’re new. In a few weeks I bet you’ll move at least four spaces up. You can definitely get past Theresa who eats that rancid herring stuff every lunch. Maybe. If you stop saying weird shit about Destiny’s Child.”
“How do you - you weren’t even in that class with me!”
“Everybody talks,” She asserts. “About transfer students most of all.”
“I can’t help it if I’m chock-full of discography.”
“And chock-full of yelling at Alistair Strickland about his little nuts,” she adds.
I inhale. “That…was a stroke of misguided genius.”
“Oooh,” Chunhua coos, biting the end of her stylus thoughtfully. “You’re good at words. That’s at least worth one space up.”
“I’m not - look, I’m sure it’s fun and all, but I don’t care about this ranking -”
“Not-caring gets you five spaces up!”
“- but back then I didn’t know about Alistair,” I finish. “I thought he was just beating up Gabe for the fun of it, not for being a pedo.”
“Oh.” She thinks on this. “Yeah, Gabe’s nasty. And it probably would’ve been fine, you yelling about Alistair’s little nuts. If he wasn’t number two.”
I blink. “Sorry? Like, poop?”
“No! Like, Alistair,” she says simply, pointing to the boys’ list. “He’s number two. He’s, uh, Danish royalty, I guess? Or, uh, Austrian -”
“Belgian.”
“ - And he’s got a je ne sais quoi terrible about him. Or something. That’s what Jihyun says.”
Her French accent is perfect. I’m starting to think I’m the only one in the world who doesn’t know how to say anything. And also the only one with any taste. She lets me take the pad from her and scour the list - sure enough, in the number two slot, higher than 220 other boys who are probably much nicer and much funnier and much sweeter, is Alistair Strickland.
“He - He doesn’t smile!” I gape.
“A minuscule smirk is technically a smile,” Chunhua corrects.
“He never tucks his shirt in!” I argue. “And he doesn’t wear his tie right!”
“A lot of girls think it’s cute that he’s sloppy. And that he has cheekbones.”
“Oh my god.” I facepalm softly.
“Listen, I agree with you; Alistair orders people around, he’s rude, he uses too many big words, he gets into way too many fights, and he hands out punishment for the slightest thing! And he’s super hard-assed! He doesn’t even give passes to people he likes. Not that he likes anyone, anyway. He’s not my personal taste, but I don’t judge anyone with an asshole fetish,” Chunhua pauses delicately. “Not, actual assholes, just -”
“Yeah.” I wheeze. “I get it.”
Chunhua fearlessly pushes on. “Actually, that’s rule number one in the meetings; ‘Don’t judge anybody’.”
My mouth hangs open, my eyes darting between her face and the entire list of people on her lap that have been and are constantly being judged.
“Except if it’s for the list,” She finishes with a sweet smile.
“Do you guys,” I manage to re-hinge my jaw. “Don’t you guys have anything better to do? Art, maybe? Or a bath bomb?”
“Ciel Lautrec is number one, by the way.”
I freeze. “Your list is brilliant, actually.”
Chunhua looks genuinely touched, putting her hand over her heart and beaming at me. “Thank you!”
Both impressed and terrified by the power of teenage boredom, I focus on my French with renewed vigor. The lunch bell chimes finally, and Chunhua cheerily waves to me in the hall before she bounces into the crowd pulsing towards the cafe. I’d follow her, but the weight in my backpack reminds me I have a whole rulebook to read through in t-minus two days. So I meander through the halls in the quiet peace of the crowd’s wake, looking for a room to sit in by myself and just focus.
But how can I focus when a kid with ESP drew my future? I look at my phone for the billionth time today - Ruby texted me a blowing-heart face before she went to bed three hours ago, but that’s it. No mention of the weirdness. Logic has to have an answer. Someone has to have an answer. Someone who’s been around Silvere and it’s weird shit longer than me. Someone like…Lionel.
I open his number and text; Can u meet me outside the dorm after dinner?
His answer comes twenty seconds later. Of course. Do you want me to bring you anything?
My mouth twists in a smile. Got any chalupa supremes?
No. But I can bring you a burrito. Switzerland’s idea of a burrito, anyway.
Deal.
Lionel’s gotta know something. He’s been here at Silvere longer than I’ve been alive. Or at least menstruating. I lean against a wall and sigh up at the high ceilings and the glowing, sunshine-kissed wood. Completely out of nowhere, it creeps up on me; that awful cottonball-mouth feeling. A dark cloud seeps into my heart and lungs, making my whole body heavy. That irrational fear that I’m not going to make it - past eighteen, past graduation. Like I’ll disappear off the face of the planet the moment I stop being in high school. Like there’s nothing left for me after.
I joked about it with Ruby. But it’s true, and real, and it’s followed me here.
Why am I like this? Why does it pop up at the worst times; when I need to concentrate, when I’m trying to make new friends? Why does it crawl into my eyes and bleed out my ears so silently, so stealthily? Why couldn’t it just come barging in banging pots and pans? At least then I’d have a warning, time to prepare. I could brace myself for it. But no - it crawls on feather-light centipede legs, dripping tar up my spine before it lodges in my brain stem.
And it’s always the same feeling.
Paranoia.
I pull out another chocolate. This is the last one, but god, is it the most important one. I knew these little suckers would come in handy. Sugar helps everything. Or at the very least, it lets you pretend everything is okay for a while. I learned that from Mom - whenever I was feeling really sad, the kind of sad where you can’t think about anything but crying, she’d use her sixth-mom-sense and appear with a piece of candy. And it would always, always make me feel better. No matter where we were. Even if my knee hurt like hell. Even if the kids at school had called me weird all day. Even if we were sitting in a police station being interviewed for four hours straight. A little sweet thing, and the world would always seem brighter afterwards.
Maybe an actual room would be a better place to enjoy my treat. Too much space for pointless thoughts to echo in these high-ass ceilings. I test the row of doorknobs along the hall. The third and fourth doors don’t budge, but the fifth’s doorknob gives easily, and I swing it open. Sunshine blazes white over my eyes, sparkling off the oiled table in the center of the room. It’s a long one, like a banquet table, the usual haughty paintings and marble statues carefully placed around the room. A person sits at the head of the table, a lunch of a sad-looking, droopy sandwich and a thermos of tea laid out before him.
Him. A dark rosebush-tangle of hair. Green eyes. Fierce brows that knit the moment he sees me. He drops his sandwich suddenly, bread and cheese splitting on the floor, and his chair screeches over the floor as he stands, looming tall over the table.
“Get out.”
Alistair Strickland’s voice bounces off every wall and statue in the empty room. Completely empty except for the two of us.
“I - I didn’t know anyone was in here -” I start.
Confusion makes me still, makes my eyes roam. Why is he in here all alone? Where are Rafe and Maria? They’ve stuck to his side like glue until now. And he’s actually eating - something I didn’t see him do all day yesterday, or this morning at breakfast -
“I said get out.”
It isn’t a shout, or a scream. It’s an animalistic snarl, furious and rea
ctive, with the taste of blood to it. Anger. Anger like I poked him with a spear, wounded him. Even fighting Gabe, he sounded calm. Tired.
Not now.
His eyes aren’t tired, anymore. They’ve reforged themselves, snickering sharp like axe blades against a whetstone. His shoulders are squared, tense. Sharp. Ready. Every part of him. The fox is inside its own tunnel, this time, and it’s baring its teeth at an intruder.
He’s the first to move. He thunders over the floor and I scrabble backwards, clinging to the door as I slam it closed and back away. On the other side of the wood, his boots come to a stop, and then I hear the lock click into place. There’s a second - just a millisecond - where I consider asking him what’s wrong.
“Are you…” My voice cracks. “Is everything okay?”
The streak of light beneath the door and the shadow there stays still. He doesn’t make a sound. Not even a scoff or a ‘mind your own business’. If I could hear his boots moving, he can definitely hear my words now. But he says nothing.
The shadow disappears all of a sudden, and I hear thudding as he walks away from the question.
Because he’s Alistair Strickland, isn’t he? And he doesn’t answer to people.
Because they’re subjects, not friends.
I stare down at the last chocolate in my hand. It looks a lot better than that pathetic sandwich did, all shiny gold in its wrapper. Happier.
It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just me, scribbling on a corner of paper. It’s just a chocolate, and there’s a bowl of a hundred of them at breakfast every day. He’s probably seen them a million times, ate them a million times. I don’t know why he’s so freaked right now, but…something sweet lets you pretend everything’s okay. For a little bit.
I put the chocolate on the floor in front of the door, on top of the note, and it glints there in the sun.
14
The Regret (Or, How a moment comes and goes and leaves you behind forever)
Alistair Strickland regrets it.
He regrets the fear that clawed at his throat the moment he saw her. He was still half-swallowing when she came in. She couldn’t have known. She couldn’t have known what it means to him, to eat alone.
