by Lisa Lee
Classes started at 8:45 a.m. On my first day of class, I had Spanish and French in the morning. A Mrs. Berger taught both languages. She was a petite, wiry woman who wore her hair pulled back into a tight bun with one lone curl escaping in the front. The silvery threads in her shining black hair matched her silvery dangling earrings. In time, I would come to realize that Mrs. Berger always wore black. On my first day of her class, she wore a beautiful blouse of black lace with a brocaded black skirt and black pumps.
My French and Spanish classes were each ninety minutes long with a fifteen-minute break in between. There were the same seven first-year girls in both classes, including Kaitlyn and Bethany. While the classes were conducted entirely in their respective languages, I found them to be very basic. My mother had made me do entire days of speaking in either French or Spanish from age six so that I could speak both languages fluently.
While the language part was not difficult, I didn’t know what to make of Mrs. Berger. Her face was hard to read, except when she was displeased. Kaitlyn got a turn of phrase wrong, and Mrs. Berger frowned her disapproval and told her to study harder. When Mrs. Berger turned to write something on the whiteboard, Kaitlyn stuck out her tongue. Bethany smiled and looked down at her electronic notepad, continually typing. I was sitting between them and wasn’t sure what to make of their little rebellion, so I kept my eyes lowered and kept typing like Bethany.
After morning classes, I was more than ready for a longer break and lunch. Mrs. Berger, however, told me to remain after class. Without preamble, she told me I didn’t belong in her class and that she would speak with Mrs. Grey about moving me to higher level foreign language classes. I should expect my schedule to change. She sat down at her desk, indicating that the conversation was over before I had barely mumbled my thanks.
After lunch, Bethany and Kaitlyn invited me to go for a walk. I was happy they asked, because I was unsure what to do with myself. My next class was more than an hour away at 2 p.m. I was also curious about where we could go. As we started the walk, Kaitlyn was full of conversation.
“Why was Mrs. Stout moved to another house?” Kaitlyn asked. “Moving from our house to the Jasmine House? That’s a big demotion.”
“I don’t know why you try to make sense of everything,” Bethany replied. “Nothing here makes sense. Why would someone pay two hundred thousand dollars for each one of us?”
I felt like an idiot. No, I was an idiot. I hadn’t even questioned Mrs. Grey’s statement about the money. There was no reason for anyone to pay such money! The world was full of nice, beautiful girls.
“Maybe we’re especially beautiful?” Kaitlyn asked. Both Bethany and I stopped walking and looked at her with our mouths open in shock.
“Well, you have to admit that the girls at the Jade Vine House are better-looking than average,” Kaitlyn persisted.
“No, we’re not better-looking than average. We just know how to make ourselves look that way. Can we walk, please? This conversation is getting stupider by the minute!” Bethany said before stalking away.
Kaitlyn and I stared at Bethany’s retreating back before following her on the path. Kaitlyn’s cheeks were bright red. While I was starting to think that Kaitlyn wasn’t the brightest star, I felt bad for her after Bethany’s insult. In Kaitlyn’s defense, I’d noticed there was an awful lot of emphasis on beauty at the Joseph Hyde School for Exceptional Girls.
Back home, the emphasis at church and at home was always on inner beauty and presenting yourself in a clean and modest way. Makeup was expected to be discreet and generally discouraged unless you were about to be married or were married. Clothing was expected to cover everything from the neck to just below the knee.
Women generally adhered to expectations, except there was a lot of leeway in how they covered themselves. Many women wore clothing that emphasized an hourglass figure. Government scientists had determined a certain waist-to-hip ratio as ideal for childbearing, so women wanted to emphasize the “ideal” waist, even if half of them would end up using a licensed surrogate.
Back home, discussions about makeup and clothes had generally seemed above my age range, and while I wanted to generally look presentable, I was not in any great rush to be considered an adult. I wanted to remain home with my parents for as long as possible. When I got my period, I cried. Mary was supposedly around fourteen years of age when she had Baby Jesus, but I was not yet ready for babies, celestial or otherwise.
I didn’t have a good feeling about someone paying money for me. It gave me a sense of obligation and not in a good way, more in a panic-inducing way. I resolved to shelve my uneasiness for the moment and focus on getting to know Bethany and Kaitlyn.
We continued beyond the campus green and on past the east building, moving along paths and trails that were not visible from my room window. I was surprised we had the freedom to go such a distance, but I supposed we really didn’t have the means to travel anywhere else. Walking relaxed me. Eventually, I moved to the front with Kaitlyn and Bethany behind me. I felt looser the farther we walked, as though everything inside me was not so chained and controlled.
I was almost fully seduced by the birds’ chirping, the sun shining, the grass waving, and the silent companionship, when I saw the wrought iron fence with barbed wire at the top and electrical wires running perpendicular to the iron posts. Just inside the fence, I could see an all-terrain mud-splattered dark-green jeep with two men leaning on the side, rifles held loosely in their hands. “Giovanni” and another man of about the same size and age both had on blazing white tanks, and their muscular arms were covered with tattoos. I remembered from my window gazing that the outer edges of the campus were surrounded by tall trees bearing heavy green foliage. I hadn’t realized the trees shielded this restraining fence.
Bethany touched my arm lightly and put her finger to her mouth, indicating that we should be quiet. We were hidden from the view of the guards, and the three of us quietly backtracked without talking.
When we were close to the Jade Vine House, Kaitlyn said, “Why were Giovanni and that other guy there? There are cameras everywhere, and the gate is sensitive to human touch. There’s no need for guards.”
“They were hoping to catch a girl from one of the other houses walking alone,” Bethany replied, her voice grim.
“You mean, if one of us walked alone, nothing would happen?” I asked.
“We’re untouchable by the guards. They can only restrain us if we try to escape,” Bethany replied. “We’re only touchable once we leave here.” She gave a quick, mirthless laugh.
“But how do they know who belongs to which house?” I asked.
“The logo on your uniform has a microchip with your info. They can read the chip with their phones,” Bethany replied. “They can use the logo to track us, too.”
“But the logo is on everything, even my . . . underthings?” I inquired.
“Exactly!” Bethany replied, rolling her eyes at the insanity of it.
I guessed the microchip explained our ability to wander the campus. “But do the girls from the other houses wander outside? I thought we’re not supposed to interact?” I asked.
“I’m not sure where they can go,” Bethany said, frowning.
“Then how do you know the guards catch the other girls?” Kaitlyn asked as she stopped walking.
Bethany and I stopped as well, but there was no answer from Bethany. She just looked at the ground, moving her feet back and forth and hugging herself.
“See, you don’t know everything,” Kaitlyn said as she rolled her eyes away from Bethany and resumed walking.
“I saw it,” Bethany said.
“You saw what? . . . Oh!” Kaitlyn said, her eyes widening as she stopped again.
“I feel bad for those girls,” Bethany said with a sigh as her shoulders slumped.
“Me too,” I said.
“Me three,” Kaitlyn said with her arms wide.
We all hugged, but feelings of guilt nagged at me. I knew
I hadn’t caused the other girls’ situation, but I felt guilt nonetheless.
“We just have to pray on it,” I said, something I had heard my mom say often enough.
Bethany and Kaitlyn nodded, and we rushed back to be on time for our next class.
I found Household Budgeting to be more interesting than I thought it would be. The course was about how to turn savings from spending money and gifts like jewels into wealth in your own name. Looking at the course syllabus, we would be learning about stocks, bonds, and interest rates. We were each assigned an imaginary household budget, and each week our assignment was to pretend-buy household items and figure out where to put the money saved. In your fourth year, the school matched “real” money with the amount of “pretend” money you saved or grew in value over the course of the four years. The real money match was considered your graduation gift.
I was not good at math. My mother would get very frustrated trying to teach it to me. She would get an edge to her voice that said she was out of patience but trying to pretend otherwise. I would start whining a little. Sometimes, on not very good days, the lessons would end with my mother sending me to my room where I would throw myself across my bed, sobbing while she drank tea and played worship music loud enough to drown out my sobs. When my dad came home, he would do the same lessons with me, but for some reason, I learned much more easily from him. He was able to break down concepts into small, manageable bits.
I found that the thought of having my own money when I graduated was a powerful motivator. Hopefully, my husband would allow me to keep an account in my own name once we were married. I wondered what I would do if my spouse was horrid to the point that I could not endure. With no money, what could I do? My mother seemed to control the money in our household, but my father hated sitting down and paying bills. My friend Eliza’s mom had to get permission from her husband for each expenditure. I would’ve preferred to be in my mom’s situation.
In any case, I liked the teacher, a seventyish-looking woman of Asian descent with totally white hair worn in a bun held back with two intricately designed silver hairpins. She exuded confidence and goodwill. I was surprised to learn later that she was one of the few teachers who wasn’t faculty and didn’t live at the school. Bethany told me the school was bequeathed a ton of money ten years before, and one of the requirements to receive the money was that an outside teacher be brought in to teach every student money management. Kaitlyn added that sometimes teachers joined the classes as students as well.
I thought English and History would be my favorite classes. I loved reading and discussing books, and I’ve always been fascinated by how ordinary people lived many years ago. I soon learned, though, that we were not allowed to read books that mentioned other religions, contained any kissing or touching, had characters in non-traditional gender roles, and/or contained swear words. I understood that the goal was to keep our minds pure, not defiled by false doctrines, but I was still bored by these classes.
It was not like my parents didn’t place restrictions on what I read, but the school seemed to take rules to the extreme. My mom hated books with poor grammar, run-on sentences, and glaring typos or misspellings. I was not allowed to read such books, no matter what the topic. She said she did not want me to have any inkling that such sloppiness was acceptable.
As for the books I could read, no topics were off limits if the content was not too explicit and if unchristian values were not portrayed as the right values. My mom was especially fond of assigning books with redemption as a primary theme. We would discuss the fictitious characters, sometimes for hours, as if they were real people. My father would sometimes interrupt our discussions to “bring us back into the real world.” All the books we read were available at the Sunny City’s lending library, which only carried books approved by the Home Inspectors.
Here, at the Joseph Hyde School for Exceptional Girls, the reading material was much more limited. Any character wrestling with questions of theology automatically made a book “unacceptable” as a book about “other religions,” a groom kissing his new bride was deemed “sexually explicit,” and a book with a teenage girl working in her family’s general goods store was pulled from the electronic library of books we could access because of her non-traditional gender role.
After reading my first assigned reading, I felt like I had eaten cotton candy. The words were sweet and fluffy, but there was no substance to them. I found myself hungering to read a book that would take me out of myself and take me to another world where my heart and mind would get caught up in another’s struggles and joys. Reality seemed more palatable when there were moments of escape. To say I was bitterly disappointed by the lack of reading choices would be an understatement. I was ashamed when I remembered how I needled my parents about censoring my reading choices, not realizing how much liberty they had provided me. Here, I couldn’t even write the stories I wanted to write and create my own fiction because that was censored as well.
As for History, we only learned about our country’s independence from England and the history of our country after the Savior’s Revolution. Everything in between was a downward spiral into immoral behavior and so deemed not fitting for our youthful ears.
I kept silent about the many hours my father and I had spent reading aloud from his old history books. With him, I had learned about the Native Americans originally in the country, the world wars, the civil wars, and the conflicts in some parts of the world that seemed older than time and yet never ended. I learned that over fragrant jasmine tea at a world leaders’ summit, representatives of America’s Saviors and representatives from Country X came to a mutually agreeable proposition. America’s Saviors promised Country X’s prime minister that he could increase the interest rates on the money the American government had borrowed from it. All Country X had to do to earn the fiscal bounty was lend enough soldiers to help rural militia groups fight the battle for true American values.
With the help of those loaned foreign soldiers, rural militia groups won the civil war that followed the summit. A constitutional convention was belatedly called. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was repealed, and Christianity was established as the national religion while other religions were explicitly banned. The government took complete control of all forms of media. Anyone who did not have the means to escape to other countries and who refused to profess Christianity as his or her personal religion was immediately executed. I cringed when I read about the executions. I was a Christian, but I thought right living was a better way to convert others than fear.
Still, my father’s history books seemed like fantastical stories, never quite real. He kept the books on an old memory stick that he hid in an earth-colored vase sprouting pastel flowers. He figured Chief Inspector Brown would never look in the vase, and he was right.
I overheard my parents arguing once about the books. I had gotten up to get a glass of water but stopped when I heard my mother’s voice. She was speaking quietly, but I could hear the tinge of annoyed anger in her voice.
“Stephen, you are putting us in danger by teaching her history. She’s not supposed to know all that stuff.”
I didn’t hear anything else for a long moment, and just when I was about to creep silently back to my room, I heard my father say, “I can’t not teach her history. If she doesn’t know it, how can she be prepared for whatever comes next?”
“Yes,” my mom replied. “I get it. But what if she inadvertently says something she shouldn’t? It would be a disaster for all of us, and she would believe she caused the disaster.”
My father continued the lessons, but he made me promise again not to mention them outside our home. I never slipped up and said something inadvertent in Sunny City, but I was homeschooled. There wasn’t much opportunity to slip up. At my new school, I was so afraid I would slip up in History class and reveal something I wasn’t supposed to know that I would frequently have tension headaches during the class.
To make matters
worse, the Art of Conversation, which I thought would be a moderately easy class, proved to be excruciating. We had to practice having conversations about the weather: “Nice weather we’re having this fall;” clothes: “That color really compliments you;” and gardens: “Those flowers are still fragrant.”
Find-A-Compliment exercises were the most difficult. Those were conversations where you listened mostly but prompted the other person to continue chatting by complimenting them about something they just disclosed. If you couldn’t think of anything complimentary, you just gave one-word enthusiastic responses like, “Wonderful!”
Kaitlyn, I discovered, was a natural in this class. She chatted on about virtually nothing with such grace, poise, and charm that you only realized afterward that she said nothing of importance. I looked at her with envy several times during the two-hour class when I found myself sitting next to my assigned partner in embarrassing silence, realizing I had once again answered a question with just a “yes” or “no,” leaving little room for the conversation to continue to flow.
Unlike Mrs. Berger, Mrs. Post let her expressions really show, and by the end of the first class, I had been reprimanded so many times I lost count: “Remember, Eden, to engage your partner. No one likes to chat with a log. Find a compliment.” Remembering that poor performance was not really an option, I resolved to do better.
At least Domestic Arts wasn’t too bad. Before the first class, Kaitlyn and Bethany put me at ease.
“This is the easiest class ever,” Kaitlyn said cheerfully. “Just easy-peasy assignments on running a house and making it beautiful. There are even a few lessons thrown in on managing household staff.”
If I was to be home as a wife, I wasn’t sure why I would need a staff to do basic things I could do myself, but I was too embarrassed to question it.
Kaitlyn looped one arm around Bethany and one around me, and we walked three abreast as she dragged us along to class. We all had to go to the class but I—and I suspected Bethany—would have preferred a more sedate pace.
