Catherine House

by Elisabeth Thomas

  “Yes,” I said brightly and prettily. “Yes. I’m coming.”

  Omens

  The house’s heating had been malfunctioning all week. Mornings had turned black cold and harsh as wind whistled against the windows and through the cracks in our doors. It was hard enough getting out of bed; a long night in the chasmal great hall sounded unbearable. So we decided to bring our beds to dinner. Yaya, Anna, Diego, Nick, Theo, and me, we all bundled up our blankets and pillows and dragged them down the stairs. Our table became a sleepover nest. We snuggled in.

  “What’s the difference between leopards and panthers?” Anna said. She struggled to butter the slice of white lemon bread in her hand, wrestling with the blanket draped over her shoulders.

  “Panthers are black,” Diego said.

  “Black panthers are black,” Nick said. “What about other panthers?”

  “All panthers are black,” Diego said. “Panthers are black leopards.”

  Anna said, “That doesn’t seem right.”

  “What about jaguars?” Nick said.

  “What about jaguars?” Diego said.

  “Aren’t jaguars something else?”

  “Everything else is everything else,” Yaya said. “Oh my God.”

  I put my head down on the table. Yaya petted my hair.

  “I thought mountain lions were bobcats,” Anna said through a mouthful of lemon bread.

  “Ugh,” Diego said. “Look at them.”

  A group of Molina first-years was sitting down the table from us. One of them, a tanned, golden-eyed girl with a compact gymnast body, had the most obvious crush on Nick. She always tried to sit near him at breakfast and laughed too hard at whatever dumb shit he said. Now she was staring at him with her chin lifted, her lips painted glossy red.

  “That lip stuff cost her a fortune in points,” Yaya said. “I saw it in the commissary last week. Oh, Nick, take pity on the girl.” She shook our empty platter. “Go get us more bread. She’ll be right behind you.”

  “She does not need any pity,” Anna muttered. “I know that kind of girl. Looks cute, but watch out.”

  “How awful.” Nick winked at Anna. He slunk out of his blanket.

  The girl followed Nick as he loped over to the dessert service, smoothing her hair into place before scurrying up to him. In that moment, in one quick flash, I saw Nick as the first-years did: one of the house’s happy golden princes, tall and rich and laughing and bright.

  I wondered if I would remember this feeling after Catherine. The feeling of seeing a friend—someone I knew and who knew me, too, someone who cared about me—walking in through a door or waving from across a hall or bending to whisper in another friend’s ear. Of being inside, so inside, such an intimacy, and at the same time seeing it from outside. A feeling of being seen, beautiful and young, seated at a mythic table.

  It was a nice feeling.

  I took a bite of the white lemon bread. It tasted sweet, with a tart bite. The wine warming my insides was good, too. I had to study later tonight, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I wasn’t thinking about anything. I was being a good friend. I was doing okay.

  I touched Theo’s arm. “Want to make milkshakes?” I said.

  The milkshake machine was this semester’s new addition to the dessert service. Most people stuck to basic chocolate and vanilla, but we’d become more inventive with our creations. That night, Theo wanted to try mixing brandy applesauce with peanut butter and vanilla ice cream. I helped him spoon in the applesauce as he held the mixer. The applesauce fell off the spoon in slurping gloops.

  “Oh no,” I said, watching as the machine stirred it all up into brownish sludge.

  Theo took a sip. He made a face.

  “Is it good?” I said. “Or are you going to throw up?”

  He covered his mouth.

  “Let me try,” I said.

  Someone bumped into me as I did. One of M. Neptune’s students, the short one with grayish skin and dark curls.

  I swallowed the milkshake. “Sorry,” I said.

  The boy was grasping the arm of another student of M. Neptune’s, the girl who wore her hair in a black braid. She loomed over him, even though she wasn’t very tall, as she piled mini-cheesecakes onto a dish. The boy didn’t help. He just stared up at the ceiling. I followed his eyes upward. I couldn’t tell what he was looking at.

  I had never seen a face quite like his before. His eyelashes were so long I almost couldn’t see his eyes. He had a slack mouth with a little mole near his lip.

  “Hi,” I said.

  The boy lowered his gaze. His eyes were slow to focus on me.

  “Hello,” he said.

  The girl glanced at me and tugged his arm. “Come on, Sandy, let’s go,” she said, pulling him away.

  “It needs more applesauce,” Theo said, eyes narrowed at the milkshake. “That’s the problem. I think.”

  I lifted the porcelain lid off the applesauce tureen.

  By the time we returned to our table, most of our friends were gone. Only Nick was still there, chatting with the girl at the other end, their heads close together. Everyone else had probably gone to study. Everyone always needed to study.

  I snuggled back in my blanket.

  Theo sat across from me. He sipped the milkshake. His face puckered.

  “Stop drinking it,” I said.

  “It grows on you.”

  “It does not.”

  He took another gulp before handing it to me. I sipped. It did taste a little better.

  *

  That night, I slept with a Harrington girl I’d met in Intermediate German. I liked watching her mouth work around those harsh syllables. Now, in her room, I bit her neck and pushed her onto the bed.

  In the dark, after she had fallen asleep, I stared out her window at the murky clouds and thought about M. Neptune’s student, the one at the dessert service. His eyes had been so white, so imprecise. Even when they’d focused on me, his stare had still been off somehow. Like he hadn’t really found my eyes but was looking slightly lower. At my mouth, maybe.

  Did that happen to all of M. Neptune’s students eventually? Did they lose themselves in the insane studying, the numbing grind, the endless hours in the lab? Would they all become phantom shadows of the boys and girls they once had been?

  Would it happen to Theo?

  I couldn’t imagine it. Theo with his warm skin and bright eyes—Theo was so human.

  I turned to the girl again. I stroked her shoulder.

  *

  Wind shuddered through the house’s windows and wheezed over the yard. We huddled around radiators, rubbing each other’s hands warm. The air was so dry and brittle it made our noses itch.

  The first snowflakes fell as I was working in the Molina library. I was curled up on my couch with a pad of paper on my lap, drinking hot water with moonshine and drafting an essay on Bosch’s Haywain Triptych. I closed my eyes to take a sip, and when I opened them again, there was the snow: white, all white.

  By the time I finished my essay, dawn was rising and snow covered the yard. I went to sleep and dreamed of being weightless. I didn’t have a body at all.

  When I woke up, I looked out the window. The snow was already trampled by the tracks of students going back and forth to class and, judging by the mess, having snowball fights. But the rooftops were a dreamy, dazzling white.

  I stuck my head out of the window. The air smelled like a cold fantasy wonderland. I breathed.

  I pulled on my boots and went downstairs.

  I was on my way to the Ashley tower when, in the back of Molina’s courtyard, I found what at first looked like a giant snowbank. As I came closer, I realized it was far more thoughtfully constructed. It was an igloo.

  I paced around it. The igloo was big, human-sized, about as tall as I was. A couple of milk crates lay abandoned by the courtyard bench. From the pattern on the igloo’s hump, I supposed its engineer had used the crates to form snow bricks, then packed them into shape.

>   “Ines,” someone called from inside, “are those your feet?”

  I peeked inside the entrance.

  Anna and Nick were crouched in the dim interior among a mess of blankets, tea trays, chemistry notes, and flash cards. Theo was there, too, sleeping in the back, cradling his head against a pillow.

  “Crazy, isn’t it?” Anna said as I crawled in. “We helped, but really it was all Diego. He has that engineering presentation tomorrow, remember? I think this was his way of dealing. Look at these bricks.” She patted the igloo wall. “Totally solid.”

  Theo let out a sudden snore. He was puffed up in a fluorescent-pink-and-yellow ski jacket, one of his recent treasures. His soft mouth fell open.

  “That doesn’t even look comfortable,” Nick said, glancing at Theo’s sleeping form. He poured himself more tea.

  I snuggled up next to Anna. She pulled a blanket over our legs.

  “Who’s studying chemistry?” I said.

  “Me,” Nick said. “With M. Olsen. Who’s amazing, but a bit of a bitch.”

  “Want me to quiz you?” I said.

  “Weren’t you going somewhere?”

  “It’s okay.”

  He handed me the flash cards.

  The igloo was surprisingly warm inside. It was late afternoon now, the snow shadowed ghostly blue. I quizzed Nick. He got a lot of the answers wrong, but didn’t seem to mind. He barely noticed when I finished. He’d leaned in to Anna and was braiding her hair, eyes half closed in sleepy disinterest.

  I set down the cards and snuggled closer to Anna, too. She smelled like toothpaste and soap.

  Theo still lay asleep on the igloo floor with his mouth open, gently snoring.

  “He’s so exhausted,” Anna said.

  “We’re all exhausted,” Nick said, though there was a lazy drawl to his voice as he said it.

  “Well, him especially.”

  “Young Theo Williams does not need your pity.” Nick combed through Anna’s hair to redo the braid. The first one had been terrible. “He knew what he was getting into when he applied for the concentration. Other kids work just as hard and don’t get nearly as much glory.”

  “We work hard, yeah,” Anna said, bending toward Nick’s hands. “But not as hard as new materials concentrators do. Haven’t you noticed? He’s gone for hours at a time. He keeps missing sessions and feasts—he barely eats and drinks. He’s fucking miserable. And he’s just getting started.”

  I sat up.

  “Please,” Nick said. “He’s not miserable. He loves it.” He patted Anna’s head. The new braid didn’t look any better than the first. “Don’t be jealous. I know you were rejected from the concentration.”

  Anna shrugged. She didn’t look bothered. “I’m not jealous, and I wasn’t rejected,” she said. “I dropped out.” She poured herself more tea. “And when I dropped out, I thought I didn’t have it in me—that I wouldn’t be able to keep up. But that’s not true. I have new materials concentrators in my chemistry classes, and I get better grades than them. I’m smart enough. I’ve always been smart enough. But there’s more to the concentration than ability.”

  “What else is there?” I said.

  Anna glanced at me. She waited, considering, before she said, “The concentration—the professors, the structure of the curriculum, everything—it asks more of its students than I could give. It asks for them to be brave. Brave in ways that I’m not.”

  Last week, I had watched Anna eat two earthworms on a dare. She’d popped them both into her mouth at the same time. She hadn’t even seemed grossed out as she chewed, just bored. What was she not brave enough to do?

  “Are you kidding?” Nick said. “Sure, it’s an intense department, but it hasn’t done anything interesting since M. Shiner was laughed out of town. Those kids are just running numbers and mending broken tennis rackets over and over again. Reproducing the same experiments because they can. It’s all theory. Honestly, the house probably doesn’t have the funding for anything else.”

  “Do you really think we need funding?” Anna said. “Have you been in this house?”

  “Yes, I have,” Nick said. “A windowpane fell out of the Harrington music room last week. Literally fell out of the wall.”

  “Okay, there are some upkeep issues,” Anna said. “But we’re not paying room and board. Listen, Catherine is structured differently from other schools. Our endowment, our graduate network, and our plasm—and plasm really is ours, in a way, for whatever reason. We’re totally self-sufficient.” She hugged her legs, shivering. “The department’s only gotten more radical, not less, since the Shiner scandal. Because now they know we have something extraordinary here, and they’re going to protect it. Plus, with M. Neptune running things, instead of an actual chemist? They’re not just pinning tennis rackets, they’re pinning animals and people. They’re pinning us. You’ve been to the nurse. And … you remember. You know what they did to us.”

  Nick narrowed his eyes. “The coming in was important,” he said, in a low, serious voice. “And it was a long time ago.”

  “Sure, it was a long time ago,” Anna said. “But we have sessions every week. Maybe they don’t use pins in sessions, but it’s all part of the same experiment—the experiment of us, in this school. And I don’t think the coming in was the last time they’re going to pin us. I heard, after forums … I heard they try something else.”

  I slunk down in the pillows.

  Nick scratched at his jaw. His eyes were still hard.

  “You could be right,” Anna finally said. “Maybe the concentration is just numbers and figures and critical theory now. But when I think about when I was applying, all those interviews and tests …”

  Anna chewed at her lip.

  “They wanted more from me,” she finally said. “They wanted devotion. And I wasn’t ready to give that.” She shrugged again. “And that was just for the regular concentration. The ones who work in M. Neptune’s lab? I can’t even imagine.”

  “What about Theo?” I said.

  Anna turned to me again. “What about him?”

  “Do you think he would give it?” I said. “His devotion?”

  Anna stared at his sleeping figure. His cheeks were flushed a strange, feverish pink, like a marionette’s.

  A gust of wind blew past the entrance of the igloo. For a moment I thought I heard, in the wind, someone shouting my name.

  *

  As second-years, we were finally allowed to have jobs—or “trades,” as the Blue Book called them—to earn extra points. With trade points, we could afford better things from the commissary, things like running sneakers, romance novels, cake mix, and barrettes. Before, such toys had been the economy of upperclassmen and those who slept with them, as Yaya did. Now we were the upperclassmen, and we were the beautiful people with the beautiful things.

  Yaya had come to love Bunny so much she applied to trade on the loading dock. Anna was one of the many second-years assigned to the great hall; we whooped and slapped our table in glee whenever it was her turn to serve us. Nick’s trade was in the main library, where he spent most of his time lounging, gossiping, and making out with whoever else was at the desk.

  Somehow I was accepted to work for the art gallery, the one in the Ashley basement, one of the more coveted trades at Catherine. I wasn’t even going to apply for the position, but M. Owens wouldn’t sign my class schedule until I promised I would. I shouldn’t have won the spot. I doubt they were impressed by my application essays or transcript. M. Owens must have put in a good word for me, though, because soon I was spending my Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in the gallery office, a tiny gabled room on the third floor of Harrington. I reorganized the library, updated object cards, and sorted through donor files until it was time for dinner. I liked the work. I liked rubbing my finger across the names on the donor cards. Gift of Stephen Charleston, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David Kingsley. I could imagine them, the powdery-pale, wildly rich fairy people dressed in lace and silk, hosting their man
y diamond parties in penthouses, estates, and mansions whole worlds away from here.

  Those winter nights I slept in Yaya’s bed. Her neck and shoulder were warm beneath my hand, and the rosy smell of her hair cream made me feel drowsy and calm. We shared scary stories, gossiped, and farted on each other. We made each other laugh until we cried. When we fell asleep, I felt like we were babies, wrapped up after a bath.

  I still didn’t like being in my own room, alone in the night. I heard Baby there. Baby turning in her bed, Baby humming as she rifled through her closet, Baby padding to the door. I heard the click of the pipes as she turned on the faucet in the bathroom. I heard her slip into the bath. I heard her sigh.

  On Mondays Yaya wasn’t in bed but at the dock helping unload the truck. When I couldn’t sleep on those nights, I’d bundle myself up and tramp alone across the yard. The dark felt as cold and tremendous as black outer space. At the dock, Bunny ran a space heater and played music on his tape deck. I wasn’t sure if he was supposed to have music, but when I asked, he just stared at me. He did what he wanted, whether it was playing cassettes or letting Yaya filch all the good clothes for herself. So while Bunny and Yaya inventoried the goods, I sorted through Bunny’s tapes and chose new songs to play. He had a good collection of disco mixes.

  I stood by the open dock and watched the road. It must have been around five in the morning, so early that the truck hadn’t arrived yet. The road stretched out wide before me, and the grass glowed alien-gray with the coming dawn. I was drinking cream soda from a glass bottle. I was so tired my whole body felt heavy. I rubbed my face.

  “Just go to sleep,” Yaya said as she reached to pile some books higher on a shelf. “I don’t know why you’re still up.”

  “I had to finish my Environmental Geometry project.”

  “Which one? The leaf patterns? God, I hated that class.”

  “Yes. And now I’m waiting for breakfast.” I shivered. My voice was coming out in white puffs. “And if I fall asleep, I might die.”

  Yaya sat beside me. She was dressed up in a long woolen skirt, tights, and white pearl earrings. She wasn’t wearing any makeup. Her eyes looked tired. She took the cream soda from me.