The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  Namely, Carmela. But after our loving exchange, Carmela must have privately declared World War III (definitely a cold war) against Dom because she won’t speak to him, much less acknowledge his existence—an inconvenient turn of events, in that she’s my number one resource to grill about the girl, and a convenient turn of events, in that I’m scared shitless of her.

  Silver lining: Dom himself hasn’t been in the mood to escalate the animosity on his off time, either, much less participate in the world at all. He exclusively smokes and sleeps during the short gaps I’m away from him. He needs me too now, I think, with a flutter of one-winged joy. But that’s only because I made him need me.

  I wander out of Dom, returning to Carmela’s quarters and newly intent upon spying. After all, I can’t do as much as a vitreous web of spirit, but at least I’m invisible and free to track Carmela. Research reveals that she spends a lot of time in her bathroom primping and in the sickroom, whispering to Sara and patting her hand.

  Sara, who was meant to be “doing better,” looks as pale and limp as a threadbare dishrag—to be honest, she looks this way most of the time, anyway—and doesn’t answer Carmela, much less lift her desiccated little head. There’s a cheerful, false desperation to Carmela’s voice that freaks me out—it’s the kind of tone the money-grubbing relative uses with the dying, loaded patriarch in old movies—but I guess she is where she should be for once: with the sick student.

  As Others drift in and out, never lingering long, I remain, convinced my spying will reveal a useful nugget. Believing the tenth girl will visit the sickest girl in this house if she deigns to visit anyone at all. I wait as boredom sets in. As I begin to feel feverish. Nothing out of the ordinary happens until just before dinner, when Morency walks in on Carmela Nightingale “caring.”

  “That’s quite enough for today,” Morency says gently to Carmela, moving as if to place a hand on her shoulder, but never breaching a foot-wide radius. She carries a folder in her right hand, and she extends it, as if it’s the only safe appendage with which to prod her boss. “You should leave the girl now, Madame. That’s quite enough. You mustn’t tire yourself out.”

  “I will remind you, for the dozenth time, that this is not your school,” Carmela says, swallowing Sara’s hand in her own, like a child hoarding a special shell. “These girls are not your responsibility. They are mine.”

  Morency pauses, with a glance at Sara. “If you were so concerned about them, Madame, you would send them home,” she replies, smacking the papers down on Sara’s nightstand.

  Carmela rises, swelling up like an affronted Napoleon. “How dare you speak to me that way.” She checks the wrist her watch should be on, but the skin is bare. “It’s time for dinner. Watch the girl, and don’t make a fuss. I shall return shortly.” She storms out of the room.

  This. House. Restless and overwarm, I feel a sudden urge to shake Morency’s shoulders. Jolt her into recognition, into action. You think everyone should leave? Don’t just tell your good-for-nothing boss. Shout it from the rooftops. But I don’t.

  Everyone here is so helpless.

  I float-pace the room, struggling as a new wave of unfamiliar heat passes through my crystal. Morency settles beside Sara, who is on the verge of sleep now, and dips her head close.

  “I’ve brought you more assignments,” she says, aligning the stack of papers with her bedside table. “As you asked. You completed the others so quickly.”

  Sara does not reply. Morency sits beside her for several long minutes, watching her with a furrowed brow, until my eyes glaze over. I’ve wasted the day, puttering around these fools. I should’ve stayed in Dom.

  With this thought, the blistering heat I’ve been feeling in my torso crescendos; it doubles me over, and a sudden, painful weight streams from the lengths where my arms and legs would be. It’s like I have gangly phantom limbs, having spent so much time in Dom, and a cramping agony overwhelms me, flooding in from nerve receptors I don’t have.

  “FUCK THIS,” I shout, reeling from this pain that shouldn’t be. New pain, at once shimmering and incinerating, like gastric reflux from hell. I know what it is: It’s my returning craving for concreteness, and it’s unbearable.

  Sara gasps awake, as if I’ve screamed in her ear, gulping in huge breaths as if it’s her first time breathing.

  “Oh my god,” I say as Morency mutters, “Goodness.”

  Sara looks straight at me, eyes burning bright as fireflies. “When are you going to bloody leave?” she asks. I point a crystal finger at my own chest area. Dumbly.

  “Language, Sara. Language. And I shan’t leave you until you fall asleep,” says Morency, leaning forward, as if to block her view. “I know it can be lonely to be ill when all your friends are in class without you.”

  “You must be dreadfully bored,” says Sara with an unusual crispness, looking through Morency as if her imposing form is crafted from glass. As if I’m the one draining all the heat and light from the room. I know for sure, in that moment, that she’s speaking to me.

  “You can see me?” I ask her shakily. Her pupils dilate. “Do you know the girl?” I ask her. “The tenth girl?”

  She scoffs, and those raw little eyes cling to me, like some ancient troll’s, defending its mountain pass. “Be gone. I’m telling you right now that I will not sleep.” She blows air from her mouth, and a thin strand of reddish saliva drips from the corner of her lip. “I will not sleep, damn you.”

  I stagger back. She says it as if I’m waiting to feed from her (I’m not). As if she knows I feed (can she?). I choke a little, her pupils tunneling into me and digging out my guts.

  She can’t just see me.

  It’s as if she can see beyond me: into the hellish gulch in my soul that holds all the cruelty and evil and misery I’m capable of. Every wrong I’ve ever committed. All the desperate needs and desires I try to conceal, too. Powerful, motivating shit I can’t even identify or understand myself. She smells the guilt—a fear of inadequacy. Feels the pain of loss that radiates from every cell of my being.

  “I understand,” says Morency, carefully, clinically patting Sara’s still hand. “But good little girls always do fall asleep. They always do.”

  A noise of disgust blasts from Sara’s throat. I drift back into the wall, with her eyes still hot on me. Contemptuous. “You can’t have me,” she rasps. “You can’t have me.”

  The wall engulfs me as I back farther away from her, and my crystal aches as I understand her meaning. I don’t want her. Jesus, I don’t want her.

  Sara and Morency sit in silence for a time, the lights dimmed, until Sara closes her eyes and appears to sleep, her frail chest moving rhythmically, her birdlike limbs weighed down by a thick blanket. Morency releases a sigh and rises with a series of cracks.

  “Sleep well,” she wishes Sara’s sleeping form. “You’ll need your energy.”

  * * *

  I drift out of the staff hall and back up to the desolate family’s quarters. I sluice up through Dom’s bedroom, where I left him to rest before dinner.

  He’s still asleep, his hair all mussed exactly the way Rob’s used to look, with this big cowlick at the right temple—the furred patch Rob would twirl and twirl and twirl when he was nervous and his blanket wasn’t within arm’s reach.

  It hurts to look at.

  Squinting, I can imagine Rob grown. I can imagine him closing his eyes on pain I can’t unsee, if only by virtue of being older than he was when the losses tore through us—with less of that youthful resilience. I can imagine him meeting a girl or guy as intriguing as Mavi. I can imagine him loving so much more than I’ve ever been able to love, and it’s a love that builds on itself, filling any old lunar craters left inside.

  I would’ve given him my life in a second. But what good does carrying that promise do me? It’s not proof of anything—not proof that I’m good.

  After all, I think of Sara—of all these girls whom Mavi cares so much about. I don’t torture them as the Others
do, but I’m still not moved to help them, no matter how much they appear to suffer. A good person might try to help them, but to me, they don’t feel real enough. Not like Rob.

  Not like Mavi, I think, and the thought sends a jag of fear through me. My time with her fills those same craters in me now, artificially or not.

  I turn to Dom: I want to cover him with the marled blanket on his bed, as I did Rob, were I able to with my crystal hands. But since I can’t, I let him sleep on.

  * * *

  As I’m flitting out, a sliver of light lines the leftmost threshold of Dom’s door for a moment.

  Someone’s watching him. Us.

  A thin strip of white.

  I fly around the bend, squinting at the light. It’s running away.

  A waif.

  I fly faster, as fast as I can go.

  Shit. She’s running. A little girl I’ve never seen in classes, in an ivory gown that skims her ankles.

  Unkempt blue-black hair in a fringe brushing the hollow below her narrow shoulders. A little girl with features as fleeting and ghostly as mine must be, to those who could see my ungodly flesh. She flips her head back at an impossible angle as she runs, and for a hot second her eyes look right at me. Not through me. Serious eyes, black and full of judgment.

  Immediately, I know she has to be the tenth girl Mavi saw.

  They’re not like you, the girl had said, according to Mavi. But they want to be like you. They want to live, to breathe, to laugh, to eat. But they cannot so easily. They need energy, and they cannot get it as you do. They borrow it from you instead. A little at a time, a little more, a little more, until you can’t lift yourself from bed.

  The girl’s right, of course; she’s nailed us on the crystal head. I can guess what she thinks the color of my soul is: black as a goddamn pig roast forgotten on the barbecue after an apocalypse.

  But I still bolt after her.

  I race after the wisp of white linen.

  She runs on two feet the length of my palms, as a little girl does, until I stop looking so close. And then she glides.

  Glides an inch above the air. She darts, dances, flies toward the window overlooking the ice.

  I only race.

  She climbs onto the windowsill, gripping the frame with her hands but bicycling her slender feet through the glass like it’s air.

  “Wait!” I lunge for her, falling several feet short. “You’re the tenth girl!”

  And thank baby Jesus on toast, she stops, swinging her feet around so she’s seated, facing me, chin pressed to her chest. Her blackened hair hangs in her face, shrouding her features. It’s so long it looks as if it’s never once been cut. She’s got a stain down the front of her dress, a greasy splotch that wavers in the low light. Trembling, she drops the frame and holds her belly as if the sight of me makes her sick.

  “I’m Angel,” I say.

  She doesn’t answer—only turns to gaze upon the ice like it’s calling her.

  “I know you,” I say, breathless and senseless as I can be. “My mother told me about you, I think. About how you were sacrificed, and how you gained powers. How you can connect lost family members and tell people the color—”

  She releases her stomach and holds out a solitary finger.

  I stop.

  “I don’t speak to your kind,” she whispers before crossing her arms over her chest like a corpse and falling back off the sill, through the glass, and into the ice. Her inky hair flies back and up, revealing and concealing a final look of calm on her face, as if she’s done this countless times before.

  I race forward and peer down into the abyss of snaking fog, looking for a plummeting body.

  “Wait!” I yell into the void. “Please!”

  I need to know how she can see me. How she can act like me but look like them. I need to know who she is and how she became it.

  But she has disappeared. Peering into the abyss, I don’t see even a wink of a white gown. She dove into the ice as if it’s a cool pond.

  Why was she wandering a house packed full of my kind with her impenetrable calm? Why did she peek in on Dom when she did? She must have heard me when I spoke about her in him. If only I’d stayed inside him a few minutes longer—I might have hid who I am.

  I don’t speak to your kind. I fall back into the suffocating confines of the house, as shapeless and empty as I feel inside. It’s not my fault I’m this way, I want to shout after her. There’s this power inside each of us that could flame up at any time, torching the world or igniting a revolution. There’s this power inside each of us that could extinguish itself and leave our insides an iced-over wasteland of suppressed passions and blunted points, freakish and half-grown, strewn with craters, by forty or sixty or eighty.

  Don’t you feel it?

  It’s not just me. It’s every single one of us that can feel love and loss. That’s our burden, in exchange for life.

  Without Rob here, without Mama here, it’s so much harder to protect my own flame, so much harder to give it enough kindling to manage itself, contain itself. I’m here alone, in the near darkness, waiting for some lost and hidden desire to surge out and take me by the throat. Like the one that brought me here.

  Who is the tenth girl?

  She might be a fiery Zapuche legend.

  She might be a mild-mannered mystic.

  She might just be a lost little girl.

  She is a pack of mysteries fit into one ivory tendril. But the only mystery I’ve solved is that she doesn’t want to speak to me, which is exactly what I need her to do.

  15

  MAVI: ARGENTINA, JUNE 1978

  The days after my strange quarrel with Yesi are especially gloomy; besides the ravenous fog, consuming everything around us, an angry drizzle spatters the skylight. I wake wondering how Michelle and Sara slept, since the former has napped through our latest classes, and the latter has yet to reappear in class at all.

  In the morning, I layer my heaviest corn husk–colored blanket over my coat, channeling an elegant woman wearing a shawl to the opera and succeeding at looking more like a wet newborn horse, complete with the greasy mane and quivering legs. Yesi must be furiously working in her room, because she doesn’t answer my knocks.

  As I head down to breakfast, a step cracks under my foot, and I lurch forward, clinging to the wall in shock and recovering my balance. An entire stair plank has rotted through—its stench thickens the air. I could have tumbled all the way down. I push the thought from my mind and hurry along to the breakfast room, only to find the patio doors locked shut, with kitchen staff posted by them, sullen guards who won’t answer my questions as to why. I cannot see the ice mass for the screen of grayish white outside the window; if I squint, I swear the ice has approached, but then again, these heavy clouds play tricks on us.

  I am seated, munching on an underdone piece of toast, when Mole enters the room, frazzled, strands of hair poking out of her head in every which way.

  “It’s Mr. Lamm,” she whispers to me, eyes swollen behind scratched lenses. “Oh God, Mavi, it’s Mr. Lamm. This damned place is going to kill us all. I don’t know how much more I can do on my own, I don’t. I’m telling you.”

  I want to settle and console her, but my thighs feel glued to my seat. “What is it, Mole?”

  “He suffered a heart attack last night.”

  I drop the toast and interlace my quivering hands together beneath the blanket. “Where is he?” I ask. “How is he?”

  Mole exhales. “He’s in his room, resting. He won’t be teaching for at least a week, I assure you, though the poor dear was mumbling about someone filling in his lesson plan. I gave him aspirin and nitroglycerin, and he stabilized. I think he’ll be fine—it was a minor one, if anything, but enough to give us all a fright. It was a reminder that we need a proper medical team up here for this school to be fully functional one day. I’m unsuitable to handle all the house’s needs. Oh, Jesus … And imagine if no one had found him in time? I shudder to think. Morenc
y—of all people—found him, you know. It is a miracle. He was alone on the hill,” she says. “By the funicular dock, shaking and soaking wet. He could have caught his death. It’s the strangest turn of events. I can’t quite wrap my head around it. He was half-clothed, and there were uprooted vines partially strangling the poor thing. Morency outright asked me if I thought he was suicidal, and I said no. What on earth could she be thinking? But I searched every corner of my mind for an explanation and found nothing—what exactly was the silly old dear attempting?” She nudges her drooping glasses up her nose.

  She doesn’t have a chance to continue, because Morency appears from nowhere in a flash of black. “Dr. Molina?” she says, scowling at the two of us. “I require your assistance upstairs at once.”

  With a heaving sigh, Mole shakily dabs at her temple and follows Morency out.

  * * *

  When class time arrives, the clouds have lifted the slightest bit, and I am surprised to find the girls huddled around the table, whispering like left-wing conspirators. They’re coloring in elaborate get-well cards for Lamb, it looks like—using Diana’s colored pencils and pens. It brings a smile to my face, until I notice the anomalies.

  Sara has returned—she alone sits back in her chair, arms crossed, her face so translucently pale that it looks bruised. I should be glad to have her back, but my stomach churns, feeling her deep-set eyes bore into my back. Lord help me.

  And there are only eight. There is no Michelle.

  “Welcome back, Sara,” I say as cheerily as I can muster, slotting my folder into the crook above my hip. “That’s kind of you girls to write cards for Mr. Lamm. I know he’ll appreciate them. But where is Michelle?”

  “She’s going to flip out,” whispers Luciana, drawing a blue pencil across her card in broad strokes.

  Silvina viciously zips her pencil case shut. “Favorite,” she coughs as I secure my blanket-shawl around me. It’s still freezing inside, and my stomach is a bundle of live wires.