by Rachel Klein
Lucy got out of the bath and came into the room with a towel half wrapped around her. I looked up from my book. Her skin was so pink and clean. But there was surprise in those blue eyes. Ernessa stood just inside the doorway of the steamy room, with the sweet smell of powder already hanging in the air, and she seemed for a moment more like an animal. Frozen still.
Lucy wasn’t exactly embarrassed, even though she was naked and the towel didn’t quite cover her. There’s not much to see anyway. She still looks like a little girl. She barely has any tits or behind. She didn’t know what to do, and Ernessa didn’t move.
I remember how lucky I felt to be friends with the girl in the light blue room. But Ernessa just walked into the room, without bothering to knock, and Lucy didn’t object. This is something we have always done together, every night, when all the other girls are in their rooms getting ready for bed. I don’t want to give it up. Ernessa had no reason to be in the room. She leaned over to see what I was reading, shrugged her shoulders, and, without a comment, sat down on the chair and began to quiz Lucy about her German.
Then Ernessa interrupted herself and said, “Your skin is still burning red from the bath. How can you stand such hot water on your skin?”
“It’s relaxing,” I said from the bed. “We always take a hot bath before bed.”
Ernessa ignored my comment and went back to the German.
Lucy looked at me the whole time. It was I, not Ernessa, who made her uncomfortable. The whole time Ernessa acted as if she were keeping an eye on Lucy, and Lucy didn’t object at all. I knew she wanted me to leave them alone, but I wouldn’t leave.
Why is this happening to me?
October 31
All I wanted was to be not too smart, not too sensitive, not too beautiful, not too anything. Ordinary. But here no one is ordinary, not even Lucy. There is always some problem, some secret, even for the girls who are here because all the girls in their family have gone to this school for the past fifty years. Why else would you be here, locked away in a castle with dormer windows and sloped roofs and tall red chimneys and copper ornaments? It always comes out. Everyone has something that embarrasses them. Secret love affairs, liquor bottles in the closet, stepparents who hate them. Death. Charley’s mother is an alcoholic. Sofia’s parents are divorced and hate each other. Her father lives in Italy. Dora’s parents are on sabbatical in Paris, but she doesn’t get along with her father, so she decided to board at school for the year. Claire fights with her stepfather and calls him a racist bastard. There is a girl in the class below us, Alison, whose parents died in a car crash. A flaming wreck. And so on. Und so weiter. I’m probably the only girl at school who loves her mother, except for Lucy. My mother and I are like pieces of driftwood, rising and falling on the ocean’s swells. I’m always afraid I’ll float away and lose her. My father was a poet; my mother is an artist. Nothing was ever normal in my house. A suicide is not normal.
Ernessa would scoff at this. She doesn’t care about anything ordinary.
NOVEMBER
November 1
Dreams bore me. Other people’s dreams really bore me. I can’t stand to listen to people reciting their boring dreams in great detail. I’m only writing down the dream I had last night because I’m not sure if it was a dream. Everything looked exactly as it does when I am awake. Usually when I’m dreaming, I know it’s a dream. But this felt more real than my life. I was asleep, and my upper lip started to swell, and my mouth suddenly felt so dry. My tongue was thick in my mouth. It no longer belonged there. I stood up, and my legs were stiff as wood. In just a few minutes, I would be unable to move. I recognized the feeling. I was beginning to die. I went into Lucy’s room and asked her to help me. She was sitting in her chair, facing the window, and she turned around to look at me when she heard my voice. She smiled sweetly, but she didn’t say anything. There was an immobility in her expression that betrayed a sternness underneath. She would smile that blank blue smile while I died. I woke up and found myself back in my room, sitting on the edge of my bed. At first I felt all right, and I was relieved that it was only a dream, but then a heaviness in my feet started to spread like heat up my legs. I bent over to take off my shoes. Underneath, my socks were soaked through with sweat, and I had to peel them off. My feet were thick and swollen and covered with blue marks. I thought, they look like blueberry pancakes, where the berries have erupted in the batter.
I struggled hard to wake myself from my dream; it didn’t want to let me go. Each time I awoke, I found myself in another dream. I staggered out of bed and into the bathroom. My mouth was as parched and swollen as it was in the dream. The water caught in my throat.
Afterward I was afraid to go back to sleep. I won’t be able to look at Lucy in the same way after this dream. I now know how hard and unfeeling she can be behind that insipid smile. She’s always been that way.
After dinner
It’s late Sunday night, and I need to polish my shoes. I always put it off to the last minute. Lucy has the polish. I’ve been avoiding her.
It’s been weeks since I’ve polished my shoes. That’s why Lucy and I decided to get brown oxfords this year – you don’t have to polish them every week. Oxfords are like orthopedic shoes, but saddle shoes are like nurses’ shoes. (The bottle of liquid white shoe polish even has a picture of a nurse on it.) I’d rather look like a cripple than a nurse. Besides, saddle shoes get so dirty. I got so many comments last year for dirty shoes. I had to stay for study hall after school practically every Friday. Miss Bobbie stands by the assembly room doors on Monday morning, her hands on her hips, staring down at the floor, and she checks every shoe that goes through the doorway. Our plan worked. This year I haven’t gotten a single comment. Our oxfords are like wing-tip shoes with a flap of leather over the laces. They look like golf shoes. They are so clunky that I almost like them. It’s just that they are heavy and hard to break in.
I can’t believe it. I just went into Lucy’s room to get the shoe polish from her. She was sitting at her desk, spreading white shoe polish over a pair of saddle shoes.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She was totally flustered, but what could she do? The shoes were covered with wet polish. She couldn’t exactly hide them.
“I’m polishing shoes,” she mumbled.
“Whose shoes are they?”
“Ernessa’s. She doesn’t know how to polish shoes. I said I’d do it for her. She’s gotten so many comments.”
“It’s not really a skill, polishing shoes. I’m sure she could pick it up.”
“She’s never done anything like that before.”
I wanted to scream at Lucy, but I just went back to my room and closed the door on her. I didn’t bother to ask for the polish. I don’t care if Miss Bobbie gives me a comment tomorrow.
I’m going to keep the door closed. Lucy is always playing her Cat Stevens records, over and over again. I keep hearing the words of that stupid song about being followed by a moon shadow. I’m being followed by that song. The needle gets stuck on those words, and now they’re stuck in my head. I can’t concentrate on my homework with that music playing.
Lucy doesn’t seem like Lucy anymore.
November 2
Study hour
I was lying on my bed, reading, and my eyes were just about to shut. I couldn’t keep them open another second. Suddenly there was a piercing scream out in the corridor. I jumped out of bed and ran to the door. Everyone else was standing by their open doors. Only Ernessa’s door stayed closed. And in the middle of the corridor stood Beth, screaming and clutching her wrist. At first no one could figure out what was the matter. Beth wouldn’t answer our questions. Then she raised her arm, and a sickly little dribble of blood ran down to her elbow.
“I’m going to die!” she shrieked. “I’m going to die!”
We all stood at our doors, staring at her. No one went to help her. Mrs. Halton finally emerged from her room, took Beth by the arm, and dragged her up to the infi
rmary. I could tell that she was annoyed. Beth had probably interrupted her television show.
“I don’t know why she was screaming,” cracked Kiki. “If you cut yourself with a razor, you have to expect some blood.”
Usually Beth is such a little mouse. No one notices that she’s around. I don’t know how she ended up on our corridor. She isn’t friends with any of us. But she got a great number, and she wanted a single room, so she picked the room next to Charley. Sofia tried to trade rooms with her, but she refused.
There are other, less painful ways of getting attention. This isn’t going to make any of us feel sorry for her or want to be her friend.
Girls are always saying things like, “I’m so unhappy that I’m going to overdose on aspirin,” but they’d be awfully surprised if they succeeded. They have no intention of dying. At the first sight of blood, they panic.
She disturbed me for no reason. I love that moment, when you stop struggling to stay awake and your eyelids sink down and you slip effortlessly into another realm that’s beckoning to you. Now I’m wide awake.
November 3
Who is Carmilla? Dark, depressed, death-drawn.
“Her name was Carmilla.”
“Her family was very ancient and noble.”
“Her home lay in the direction of the west.”
Who is Ernessa?
November 4
My mother’s parents were orthodox. My mother always hated not being able to drive a car or turn on a light on the Sabbath. She didn’t care if she ate pork or mixed meat and dairy. She says she no longer feels like a Jew, even though she can recite every single prayer. Sometimes I wish I knew all those prayers.
At my first assembly, I reached out for the red hymnbook, tucked into the little rack in the chair in front of me, along with the other girls, and opened to the correct page, just as Miss Rood instructed us. But when the music started and everyone rose to sing the hymn, I became so flustered I could barely get out of my chair. Was I supposed to sing a Christian hymn? Would I be punished if I refused to sing? Would I be punished if I did sing? Why had my mother sent me here? I looked around, and everyone held their hymnbooks open and sang along, even the girls who thought they were so cool. I moved my lips around the words and did not utter a sound. That night I called my mother and asked her what to do. She laughed at me and told me I should do whatever made me feel comfortable. But I need to know. It is important to me. Sometimes I mumble the words, sometimes I sing, sometimes I move my lips, sometimes I do nothing. I haven’t figured out what to do.
Ernessa understands this. Today in assembly, when we started to sing, her face got red. She grabbed the chair in front of her so tightly that her knuckles were about to pop out. Her dark hair fell over her face, and she stared straight down at her feet. She didn’t even bother to take out the hymnbook and pretend to sing. I held the hymnbook open, but I kept looking over at Ernessa, two rows in front of me and off to the right. Then she turned slightly, just enough to let me see that she wasn’t suffering; she was smirking. Had she read “Carmilla” over my shoulder?
Of course, Lucy sits next to Ernessa, the luck of the alphabet: Blake, Bloch. A convenient coincidence.
After assembly, I ran to catch up with Dora in the Passageway. I pulled her aside and asked her if she had seen Ernessa when we sang hymns this morning.
“What are you talking about?” said Dora. “No one cares that you’re Jewish. This is turning into a full-blown persecution complex.”
Ernessa can’t do this every morning. One of the teachers would notice.
After dinner
I found the passage I was looking for in “Carmilla”:
She sat down. Her face underwent a change that alarmed and even terrified me for a moment. It darkened, and became horribly livid; her teeth and hands were clenched, and she frowned and compressed her lips, while she stared down upon the ground at her feet and trembled all over with a continued shudder as irrepressible as ague. All her energies seemed strained to suppress a fit, with which she was then breathlessly tugging; and at length a low convulsive cry of suffering broke from her, and gradually the hysteria subsided. “There! That comes of strangling people with hymns!” she said at last. “Hold me, hold me still. It is passing away.”
Ernessa = Carmilla?
Maybe a vampire is just someone who wants to take over someone else, to see their reflection not in a mirror but in another person’s face.
Lights out
The most horrible thing has happened. It’s taken me an hour to calm down enough to write about it. My hand was shaking so much that I couldn’t hold my pen. I came into my room after my bath this evening, and Charley was sitting at my desk with my open journal in front of her. She was reading it.
“This is some weird shit that you’re writing about,” she said.
I grabbed the journal away from her.
“Don’t get all bent out of shape,” she said. “I just came in your room and sat down at your desk to wait for you, and the notebook was lying open. I couldn’t help reading it.”
“It’s private,” I said. “You shouldn’t read someone else’s private writings.”
“Then you shouldn’t leave it sitting around for everybody to read. I don’t think Ernessa would appreciate some of the things you write about her. What are you making such a big deal about? I didn’t find out any deep, dark secrets about you. Like you’re a dope fiend or something.”
She’s right. I should never have been so careless.
“No,” I said, trying to appear calm, “there’s nothing interesting like that. It’s notes I’ve been making for my English paper on vampires. Creatures who come back from the dead and suck the life out of young girls.”
Charley started to laugh, and I realized that I’d managed to turn the whole thing into a joke. When I finally got her out of my room, I closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed, hugging my journal. I didn’t feel safe until she was gone. I’m going to hide this from now on. All the time. It would be much worse if anyone else saw it.
I’ve spent so much time on this journal, composing each entry carefully to get it just right. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not ruined because Charley read a few lines. She had no idea what she was reading.
November 9
His last day on Earth.
November 10
I haven’t written much. Whom am I confessing this to? I already know I’ve broken my resolution to write every day, and I don’t care. I haven’t done much of anything. I’ve felt almost too sad to exist. I can barely get out of bed in the morning, and then all day I think of nothing but crawling back into bed and pulling the covers over me. Yesterday Sofia came to my room in the evening, and we lit candles and sat in the dark, without speaking. I don’t know what I would have done without her. When I started to cry, she came over, put her arm around me, and cried too. I was glad she cried.
My mother didn’t call. I didn’t expect her to. What could she say that would make either of us feel less abandoned?
I can’t get the words out. They stick in my throat like fish bones. Once, last year, I was in the drugstore eating French fries after school with a bunch of girls. We were all joking around, not really talking about anything, the way we always are when we stuff ourselves with fries. Suddenly, Sarah Fisher said, “I miss my mother so much. Right now. I used to come home after school and lie on the kitchen counter and stare up at the ceiling and talk to my mother and eat snacks while my mother made dinner.”
No one said anything. We thought about her dead mother, and we were embarrassed. I was the most embarrassed of all. I wanted to cry, but Sarah didn’t cry.
I can’t say a word.
Every year I think it will be easier, because I have grown away from the living person he was. I’m not panicked the way I used to be, when I held on to thoughts of him so tightly that I couldn’t draw the air into my lungs. Now I want to know him only as a dead person. I’m beginning to feel that he was always dead
.
Lucy didn’t notice anything. Sweet Lucy the betrayer. This was her test, and she failed dismally. I knew she would. She acts as if nothing has changed, but all our private rituals are over – quiet hour, going down to meals, getting ready for bed. I always used to know where she was, as if there were an invisible cord binding us together. She’s drawn lines around herself and pushed me outside them.
November 12
I’ve survived another year without him. Lucy apologized to me for not thinking about my feelings. Sofia must have talked to her. I don’t care. I’m much happier.
I practiced the piano for the first time in weeks. I haven’t played, even though I hate to disappoint Miss Simpson with a terrible lesson. I am playing Chopin’s Nocturne no. 11, Bach’s Prelude no. 4, and a new Mozart sonata, no. 7 in C. The Mozart is so long – twenty pages. But it’s not too hard. I love to play. I can’t understand why I didn’t touch the piano for two weeks.
Maybe it’s because I hate the practice rooms on the bottom floor of the Residence, and the only other place to play is in the lobby by the front desk. I like to be alone when I play, but the rooms are dank and cold. My fingers get stiff, and the piano keys stick. You have to pull them up with your pinky as you’re playing. Also, the smell down there bothers me. It’s gotten much worse. Sometimes I want to retch. I found the janitor and asked him if there was water in the basement or something because it smelled so bad, and he said no, but some of the girls must have gotten in there and made a big mess. There was dirt all over the place. There were also dead rats and a dead squirrel. That was causing the wretched smell. Anyway, he’s cleaned the whole basement out.
