The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  I grasp at an empanada in front of the uneasy Shirley Temple look-alike for kicks, and the pastry moves a millimeter or so, to my surprise. The girl startles. I wave a hand before her, and she squints at the faint glow. Maybe I’m imagining her reaction. But I feel a weird little kick in my chest, like a leprechaun’s giggling his ass off. I laugh to let it out, and she shoots up, her chair scraping against the stone floor.

  Everyone at the table looks at her, at us, and at the icy-blond woman at the head of the table. The specter smolders, and not in the sexy, Liese-approved whitewalker way.

  “Whatever is the matter, Yesi?” says the icy-blond woman. “You haven’t been excused.”

  “Right,” Yesi answers. “A bit of a cramp in my leg. That’s all. I’m sorry, Madame De Vaccaro.”

  “Please sit.”

  With a crooked smile, Yesi obeys. Her hardened face tells me she’s much older than I thought.

  Within minutes, Madame De Vaccaro dabs at her mouth with the corner of a napkin and rises from the table. The little girls and the whitewalker follow her in one direction. The others follow the specter in a loose congregation back toward what must be the staff quarters. I wait for Yesi. I follow her down a hallway, toward her room. She makes a wrong turn, separating from the pack, and stops in the dark, blinking at the bare walls with clouded eyes, lost and blind.

  “I’m Yesi,” she whispers, caressing the face of an invisible person. “I know you’re there.”

  “You do?” I ask. I remember: She must be Yesi of the crumpled lesson plan. Another teacher.

  “I know you’re there,” she repeats, her fingers curling closed. I can’t tell if she can hear me. She trembles. A vein forms a ridge on her forehead. “Please. Won’t you talk to me?”

  And though I should be relieved to be sensed—even thrilled—I only bubble with an acidic rage, hot and thick in my invisible belly.

  A teacher shouldn’t be trying to make friends with us, just as I shouldn’t be making friends with them. It’ll make life more difficult for her. For everyone.

  She should be locking herself in her room and praying. She should be guzzling bleach. She should be jumping from the roof onto the ice.

  The Others like me don’t even remember what good is. The Others want to suck the joy from the lives of the usurper-innocents, to instill fear and suspicion, to breed weakness and mistrust.

  Sure, maybe some of them are like pixies, wreaking innocent, small-potatoes havoc. But some are the kind of soulless creature that likes to watch live-feeds of thirteen-year-old girls hanging themselves to feel something. And they think they’re owed a cosmic hall pass here, as if something of theirs was taken from them in the past, as Zapuche holy land was taken from its tribe.

  “You should go,” I say to her. “You should hide.” I shudder, watching the vein pulse near her scalp. “Stop talking to us.”

  She doesn’t respond. As I float off, she stands in silence, waiting for an answer that will never come. Attempting to quiet her quaking forearms with unsteady hands. Despite her fear, she looks as innocent and trusting as Mama in her hospital bed, nodding yes at the doctor telling her she might squeeze out a few more weeks if she followed his painful instructions. I feel sympathy for her, this stranger. I feel guilt for not helping her.

  I look at my own crystal hands as I float. I thought that I would be free here. I thought I could distract myself with pathetic stabs at humor, with random bursts of activity, and with that old friend anger, if all else failed. And truth be told, my familiar pain does feel lighter, more diaphanous, as if it’s threaded loosely through me instead of a weighty, suffocating chain around my neck.

  But the guilt hasn’t dissipated like the rest of that physical crap. It seems to be growing. Now it’s tumorous, enormous, the size of a little boy clinging to an ankle. Why did you do what you did, Angel? Monster. Imbecile. Waste of space, even when hardly anything is left of you.

  I stop in the hallway outside room 7 and flit up through the skylight. It’s inky-dark outside, and there are so many stars—dozens of them carpeting the sky.

  Angel. Am I blessed to have been spirited to this place, when all I wanted was to be a body, sealed in a coffin, soul fogging up the lid like steam until it dissipates?

  I watch Patagonia’s constellations for a sign—finding nothing. You’d think a damn lucky star could guide you instead of winking all self-satisfied over your head.

  3

  MAVI: ARGENTINA, MARCH 1978

  The bedroom light blinds me like a flashbulb, so my first impression of my new domain is the smell of mothballs, with a spine-tingling top note of antiseptic. My eyes adjust: The walls are painted in the palest of oranges—the color of the moon on nights when it hangs low in the sky. The room is small—the size of a postage stamp—and spartan. It’s also windowless. Yes, windowless. It’ll be a minor miracle if I wake up in the morning. I also have a bed that looks like a mere sliver of a single, sagging but neatly made, a minuscule dresser, and a chair fit for an elf.

  Three mismatched doors break up the blank apricot walls. The hall door through which I entered, a door that opens into a shared bathroom (I try the other room’s knob to no avail), and a closet door. That’s what it looks like, at least—the door itself is jammed and smaller than the others, as if built for a sneaking goblin.

  Nothing in here would set the average heart aflutter.

  But: It’s my room! All mine!

  I fall across the bed and grip the sheets in hand—so soft, if paper-thin. And I’m grateful. Absurdly grateful to be given a chance in this extraordinary (in the most literal sense of the word) place. It’s a stroke of luck to be granted entry into this privileged world of ancient stone and fine carpeting, even if I will be an outsider in street clothes at first. Here, I am not shapeless, unwanted, a coward drifting through life—I am a young woman in my room. A decent adult, not a ghostly little reminder of my mother’s tragic end. I have been given the chance to own a real life, such a rare thing, and all I must do is abide by the house rules until time scrubs my past clean.

  I move toward the dresser and open the top drawer to unpack my little clothing: It’s empty, but for—ah, yes—an old Bible, the one touch of personality, if you can call the most popular religious text in Argentina such a thing. The inside cover is inscribed with the name Marguerite in looping script, plus the year 1918. A shiver works its way up my spine, and I slam the cover shut. My name, Mavi, stands for Margarita Victoria. It’s possible nothing’s been changed in this room since Marguerite lived and died—that I’m her new incarnation. I check beneath the dingy orange floral bed skirt to make sure she isn’t still holed up there, and breathe a sigh of relief when I see the bare baseboards.

  I try the jammed closet again next, kicking at it until the knob rattles and turns. I recoil: Inside, there is a cramped, dark, dust-filled hole that reeks of decay, with a faint whiff of urine. I feel for a light switch along the wall, and a splinter nips me, lodging itself into the meat of my hand.

  Cursing, I suck it out, and that’s when I get the feeling I’m being watched. Something lurks in the corner. Something malicious, wheezing in the dark.

  I tremble and slam the door closed. I don’t need the closet; I’ve never owned enough clothes to fill the dollhouse-size dresser. I only wish the closet door had a keyhole and a key with which I could lock it shut for good.

  I take an irresponsibly lengthy hot shower in the fully functioning bathroom (thank Marguerite’s God, it has a skylight!), wondering if I’ll be surprised by a sour-faced resident of Vaccaro School—real or imagined—barging through the connecting door. Once I’m warmed through, I drop back onto the bed. I try to fall asleep—I really, really do—but as the minutes pass, I could eat my own arm I’m so hungry, and my mind won’t slow. Soon, I’m shivering beneath the thin blanket on the bed.

  I’ve no choice but to defy Morency and venture out into the house at night to forage for food. Locate a pantry. A bowl of dried-out sweets in a foyer. Someth
ing better than Bible leather to chew on. I throw my lumpy winter coat on over my pajamas, as if to look more civil, and creep out of my room and into the dark of the hall.

  The corridor is as dead as before. Musty, too, as if bowls of mothballs have been set out as potpourri. Too quiet. I’m overwhelmed by the feeling that a group of teachers, clownishly giggling and watching from behind their keyholes with port in hand, will leap out at any moment to either greet me or threaten to scalp me in the style of the old locals unless I spill my secrets. Tiptoeing down the hallway, I try doors as a matter of curiosity—hesitantly—and they are all locked. I turn up the collar of my coat. The cold is the damp kind, the kind that seeps into my joints if I stand still, as if the air hopes to curl its way around the delicate skin of my neck and sicken me.

  I will give Morency this: The house unsettles at night. I hear nothing behind the doors, only the softest creaking and whistling as the house rests. Drafty old beast. A part of me dreads wandering farther—one is not safe alone in the house at night—but the starving part beats the cautious part down.

  I climb down the stairs and find two routes to choose from—the winding maze with damask wallpaper leading back toward the front door, reeking of clove and tobacco, to the left—and a second, low-vaulted stone hallway I hadn’t noticed earlier, to the right, glowing faintly under a hidden source of moonlight. I take the latter, always susceptible to scratching the itch of my own curiosity. The softest scrape of my shoe’s soles on stone echoes here: The house can feel me in its belly.

  The hallway extends in darkness for some time—at least sixty miserable footsteps, during which I watch my back every couple of seconds, my own ragged breath spooking me. It’s frigid and bare but for lines of golden sconces modeled after gaucho heads, hanging from the walls as if the men were put in pillories. Every face is unique: one toothless, grinning in his wide-brimmed hat, another bearded and scowling, and one winking lecherously with eyes of amber.

  Only my mother would have appreciated the impossible layout of this house—if she could get past its colonial lavishness. Throughout my adolescence, we had young women and men in and out of our tiny apartment, staying in a hidden room behind a cupboard; lanky, sweating, keen strangers who patted me on the head and back and arm, desperate for human contact, while I waited on pins and needles for my mother to tuck me into bed. Sometimes I would eavesdrop on their conversations in the kitchen until I fell asleep; when they spent nights inside the cupboard, they told me in the morning it was a secret game. Of course, they were guerrillas, the lot of them. As I grew older, I came to understand that many were my mother’s own students, awed by the powerful light of her idealism, as I was. I met only one who was afraid, and that was likely because he was too intelligent for his own good; a young college student, Manuel, who came from a nice middle-class family and proudly told me at dinner that he had a magic tooth. I racked my brain to guess what he meant, and late that night, I decided to ask him. As I crept toward the cupboard, I heard someone sobbing in the bathroom. Not my mother, no. A boy’s cries. When I knocked quietly on the door, Manuel opened it, bright-eyed, as if nothing had happened, only the reflections of tear trails, a piglet’s pinkness to his cheeks, and the faintest quiver in his smile. My mother found us there in her nightgown. She hustled me off to bed with a stern look, before ushering Manuel to the kitchen. I listened at the kitchen door, hearing nothing of their exchange except these words of his: I never thought this life would be so lonely.

  Only this year, I learned that his false tooth was filled with cyanide. When the military arrived at his aunt’s doorstep some months after his stay with us to take him into custody, he bit down on the tooth in the middle of a family dinner, the poison leaking down his throat.

  We could all stand to share his courage, my mother had said, retelling the story, aglow with a sick cousin of pride. He will always be remembered. It was the first time her moral certainty didn’t inspire me: Instead, it chilled me to the bone. It chilled me almost as much knowing I would disappoint her in not sharing it, too—questioning coward that I was. Hers is a certainty about the world I crave but refuse to feel blindly. Hers is a certainty that I could have used in Buenos Aires and that I could use now in this otherworldly place, but I’ve never felt more removed from it.

  I press through one more door, this time on my left, expecting another claustrophobic stretch. But this time I’ve broken into a room that is vast and grand. It must be a ballroom: It’s full of slipcovered furniture, looking like elegant black-robed guests whispering and conspiring in tight social circles. The soaring ceilings dizzy me after tunneling here. I stagger across the veined and patterned marble floor, passing fading murals of eerie pastoral scenes painted on the walls, silvery sconces shaped like clouds, friezes with a storm theme. Lit by that same hidden moon, yet the room also lacks a single window. The air, despite this, is frigid—my breath clouds before me. On the wall, a placid shepherd girl with a milky complexion sits below a slavering, red-faced, Indigenous demon in a charcoal cloud. Poor things, fixed in place and doomed to their narrow definitions for eternity, or until this detestable mural is painted over by some saintly creature.

  A draft kicks up, brushing the slipcover skirts around, and I half expect furious heads to turn in my direction. I hear a peal of laughter, falling water, and whispers, building in desperation. Teeth chattering, I spin around to find the source, curiously out of breath, and bump into a covered chest, rebounding off. I curse in the darkness, but the words have no weight to them. I’ll have a bruise the size of an apple on my hip.

  Somewhere, another muted cackle. Something creeps nearby, flitting in between the pale folds of the covered furniture. Hungry, I think I hear it murmur, thumping on the walls, scampering around on the ground behind that one chair, dragging something heavy behind it, like a bad leg … I swear I smell a roast, too. A fatty roast with crispy bits, like the asados of my youth. Could it be a student, playing a joke? A mountain animal that snuck in through an open door? For me, at least, there is nothing worse than questioning my senses, because they are what remains to position me in the world when all other points of reference disappear. I shudder and run forward, knees weak, and I see, at last, the palest flicker of light down another arched stone hall. The broadening specks of gold—they are my salvation.

  More strained and mournful whispers seep from the walls, the ceiling. An acoustic trick. I turn to glimpse the origin, possessed, while still running. And I slam into something, hard. Pain tears through my side. Falling to the stone floor, I see a face. Pale. Devilish.

  “Oh,” comes a groan. From where, I’m not certain. Perhaps it was me, again. Oh.

  I find myself looking at a girl, a girl with hair so pale that her scalp disappears into her skin, who looks a little younger than me, rubbing at her forehead and standing above me in the dark. Small as a doll with consumption—the ideal owner of the furniture set in my room.

  “Lord Almighty. I thought you were a creature,” I say, hands coming to that soft space between clavicle and throat to steady my breath. “A ghost or something.”

  “If only,” the blonde says. Her voice is deeper than I would have expected. Raspier.

  I scrutinize her: She looks Swedish at best. Like a sickly pageant girl at worst. It’s a kindly face, to be sure. Verging on delicately gaunt.

  “What fun.” She nods in the direction of the footsteps and wags a sliver of an eyebrow, a thread of silver in the dark. “We’ve been discovered.”

  She pulls me to my feet with teensy hands, her fingers cool and slick as marble. We dart through another doorway to the left, into a closet full of coats and wintry odds and ends, the first evidence of contemporary human life I’ve seen since leaving my room. I close the door behind us, and we’re forced to huddle together in a pool of thick wool worked full of dust, as if all the nastiness that should be outside has been piled in here. I half choke on a scarf and throw the weave away from my face before falling forward in the open space at the back
of the closet. It’s huge. She eases herself onto the floor and crosses her dainty legs, two toothpick spindles, before lighting a flashlight the size of a pen beneath her chin, lighting up the craggy bags under her pale eyes, the elfin, upturned nose with a smattering of freckles.

  “Who’s out there?” I ask. “Was that you whispering?”

  “Whispering? Oh, sure. Nothing helps me get to sleep like whispering sweet lullabies to myself in abandoned ballrooms.” Her lady apple cheeks rise in a smile. She’s dimpled, for goodness’ sake. Dimpled. “You shouldn’t be here, you know.” Dimpled with an attitude. She has a rich, almost masculine forties film star’s drawl. It makes me forget that she’s young like me.

  “I was lost,” I snap back.

  “I gathered. No explanation needed,” she says, winking. “I have a minor passion for rule breaking, myself. But you shouldn’t be in the ballroom now because Morency is on your scent.”

  She’s right, of course: My stalker must be Morency. I peel more wool threads from my tongue, a torturous reminder of my hunger.

  “She doesn’t trust newcomers,” she adds, scratching the dainty tip of her nose. “She won’t like that you’re out of your room. Not that the ghosts care.”

  I pause, and she grins wickedly, uplit in stark patches by her flashlight. “A joke. Remember? You thought I was a ghost. Goodness gracious.”

  I hesitate to offer a polite laugh: I’ve trapped myself in a closet, hiding out from an administrator. It’s deeply incriminating. Deeply pathetic. I straighten my coat and appear more official—to ignore the fact we are packed into this outerwear like stray hangers. “So who are you?”

  “Frighteningly adept at small talk, are we?” A dark chuckle. “I’m Yesi.”

  I raise a brow. “Yesi?” It isn’t a name I’ve heard.