The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  A character. It’s that word that eviscerates me. I expect the world around me to crumble as it is said. I feel myself gasping for air; I can no longer feel my limbs. I want to feel a hatred for Angel. I want to disbelieve him. Because if I am not a human being, I don’t know what I am. I can’t be a string of numbers—beyond its not making any sense, it’s impossible to develop this richness of detail that way. My existence can’t be condensed down into a stranger’s dream. And what about the existences all around me? The military regime and its horrors cannot have been faked, even if sometimes this awful world felt like a cosmic game. I’m weak-kneed as I think of the girls. Of their fears, their love, their strength. Their humanity, which melted from them in the past days, like it was their god’s afterthought. We aren’t doomed to leaving behind pieces of ourselves here—we are the shards left behind.

  My skin hardens around me into a shell of sorts.

  No. He can’t be right. I know who I am. I know where I came from. I’m a professor’s daughter. I came here on a boat.

  “How could you say this to me?” I ask, rising to my feet.

  Angel’s mouth falls open. “Because you asked. And I want you to know the truth. I think it’s the only way to help now.”

  “Don’t manipulate me. Don’t lie to me. Tell me the honest truth. Why exactly are you telling me this? And what happens now, in this fantasy of yours, Angel?” I say sourly. “How does this end?”

  “I—I don’t know. I guess the girls’ suffering ends, but so will their consciousness. And so will everyone’s. And the game will restart with new players. New Others.”

  My stomach heaves. I want to wretch on the ground. It is the cruelest answer possible. I try to find sadism, bare in his eyes. It isn’t there.

  This is Angel. Angel doesn’t lie to hurt—he holds back incredible truths to protect. He isn’t a sadist. No. Even if he’s mad, I know he’s not a sociopath. His eyes may not be his, but they are wide and carry all this world in them, including an image of me. I know he would not tell me the truth behind a situation were it utterly hopeless; I cling to this hope.

  “But there’s a way out,” I say, folding my arms to stop the spasms. “There must be a way out. You’d only be telling me this if there was a way out.” My teeth chatter even though the room is a sweltering pit.

  “Mav?” Angel asks, brow wrinkling. He’s beautiful. Real. I can touch his face—a face that isn’t his—and mine. “I don’t know if there’s a way out. All this normally resets; you, Yesi, the girls—everyone resets and repeats this life indefinitely. I thought if you knew, we might figure out a way to escape together.”

  He can’t be right. He can’t. Because if he’s right—if I’ve been thought up by a man and existed only during my time at Vaccaro School, that would mean everything planted in me is a falsehood. My time with my mother, her cousins, my messy history, my fear and loneliness. It would be so cruel to plant those horrors in someone who isn’t … who isn’t real. And these memories burned so brightly in me, once. They sustained me, once. Before I knew Yesi and Angel.

  Even if the painful memories were implanted to put my good experiences and memories in starker relief—to allow me to appreciate them—I would still fail to understand why someone would create a loop centered on the abuse of children. The girls; Morency as a child; Carmela’s own daughter—their hurt is a pillar of this world.

  And if what he says is true, we are all doomed, like the Zapuche. Somewhere, they relive their torture and extinguishment over and over again. Circular time is no blessing to me in this moment—it is the cruelest curse of all, far more merciless than those any of their shamans could have inflicted upon their colonial oppressors.

  “You can’t be right,” I say aloud before rushing out into the dark hall. “Don’t follow me.”

  * * *

  The knife is in the kitchen block, where I remember it. It takes a few tries to gather the nerve, but I slice open the palm of my hand; I feel an acute metallic pain, and I drop the bloodied blade to the ground, curling over my throbbing hand.

  “Goddamnit.” He is wrong. He is wrong. I rock my hand in my grip before edging over to a dishrag to wrap around the gash. But the air still smells wrong, too; has blood always smelled of dirt and iron? I can’t trust my memories, which flicker in and out of my head now that doubt chases them.

  I unwrap the bloody rag and wash my wound clean. Much of the pain has subsided—it was a clean cut. But when I look at the washed palm, free of blood, I find a healthy flap of skin hanging atop another healthy layer of skin. I tear it aside, though it sends a shudder through me. My heart speeds up, my neck throbs: Is this how I’ve always healed? What is normal? Surely not enough time has passed for that …

  I’m overwhelmed by my efforts to retrieve a memory of being hurt. How can I not recall a single incident of cutting myself? My memories from the boat trip onward possess a different texture and weight than those from my time before Vaccaro School. I pick up the knife, and I rush upstairs to the sickroom.

  Yesi is curled up on the sofa, napping beside the girls and her many papers and books. A shoddily bound manuscript sits atop them all—her book, I imagine. The work she has toiled over for the past months. The fruit of her labor glows faintly, drawing me toward its pages; I pick it up. Eager for proof that we can only be human, I lift the cover to peek inside.

  What I see is etched into my memory forever. That is, if I even have true memory.

  It is not a book. It looks like a list of accounts one might find in a shop that accepts credit—a ledger of some kind. There are no words. Each page has a date, and streaming below it, there are lines of numerals, followed by dashes and more numerals. Each is written in Yesi’s unmistakable handwriting. I read an entry from early on:

  Wednesday the 11th

  2019-750 +50EXP for creative haunting (braiding a student’s hair)

  2020-1200 +100EXP for repossession of a secondary character

  2021-550 +25EXP for standard haunting (spooking student into a fall)

  I drop the book as if it has singed me. This? This is what Yesi has sunk her free hours into since we’ve met?

  I flip to the beginning and find the corresponding numbers, with more identifying details:

  2019—Room 6, Yesi, baby blue

  2020—Room 7, Mavi, light apricot

  Our names. Assignments. And the damned bourgeois paint shades on the room walls. I knead my eye sockets, trying to make sense of what I see, and the magnitude of Angel’s admission slices up through my gut once more. I must clear my head of these thoughts; I must wipe their grime—

  “Yesi?” I say, dropping to my knees and joggling her with my free hand. Panic floods hot and fast into my voice through my tender throat.

  She gazes at me, eyes hazy. “What’s happened? Is it over?” She doesn’t raise her head nor move from her position. If I squint, I can see her shape shimmer in and out of view. Or perhaps my imagination is aflame.

  She doesn’t register my knife.

  “Yesi, tell me about your grandmother,” I whisper as calmly as I can bear. “Won’t you?”

  “My grandmother?” she asks, glancing at the girls. “Why?”

  “I want to know more about you. I want to know everything there is to know. Everything you’ve saved up in that beautiful, creative head of yours.”

  “She was a dear woman. We used to get into arguments, silly arguments, over what my poor memory meant. That was then … I can’t imagine what is now.”

  “But what else? Her laugh, her clothes, her mannerisms? Old stories from when she was young, her aspirations?”

  Yesi is lost in thought. “She was like every other grandmother, more or less,” she says at last. I can tell she is dissatisfied with her answer. “But I loved her. I loved her very much.”

  Her eyes flutter once, twice, closing as she drifts toward a shallow sleep.

  “Yesi?”

  She blinks awake, the whites of her eyes stained red.

  �
�What else? What can you remember about her from before Vaccaro School?” I ask.

  She yawns. “That was a long time ago. I think my grandmother fell a bit too deep into the unsolvable mystery of existence. Always hung around the river’s edge, fingered knives too long, that sort of thing. L’appel du vide, the French call it. What do you remember?”

  And I think I remember.

  My mother’s last night. They come at dinner: three men in suits and a woman who smiles at me with perfect Chiclets teeth.

  I am reading inside on the old sofa. On the nubby chair.

  I am locked inside the cabinet I wasn’t meant to enter until things went wrong.

  Old newspapers. Corinthian oak. Marie’s closet, the broken latch.

  A woman urges me out, her voice an assured, caramel purr.

  I am yours, my mother says to me. You are mine. The color cannot be stripped out of us.

  Words that Angel said to me, too. Angel, right? Vibrant kaleidoscope memories blink in and out, terrifying me.

  I have an image burned into me of a thin girl with a round face and bangs smiling. My dead classmate, ripped from the world by a bomb. My sleeping student, her consciousness carried from this world by an unseen foe. The two blur together, smiling with teeth made of poison.

  We take these memories for granted, we do. It could be trauma that is causing Yesi to forget. Causing me to forget. It could be ghosts robbing us of these memories. Or I could be insane. Unreal. Artificial. Corrupted numbers.

  I never thought this life would be so lonely, two men said to me.

  “We must go, Yesi. We must leave.” I bundle her into a seated position; she’s so weak from her nap, or something more malignant.

  “We can’t go anywhere,” she mutters. “The storm.”

  “The storm is a lie,” I tell her. “It’s all a lie.” We can’t be lobbed back to the beginning. It’s not right, knowing what we know. I explain what Angel told me in rushed streams of words. “You were right. It’s all a game.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Yesi says. Softly, gently, lest she hurt me. “A game? That’s not what I thought at all. We’re greater than all that—we’re supernatural, we’re…” She notices the knife in my hand, stares at me openmouthed. I think of the girls, of Lamb, of Mole, of Morency, even of Carmela. I think of all the people who need freeing. Including Yesi herself, who has written a scorebook for villains. She has been their pawn without knowing it. It’s all a game.

  It isn’t enough to say that the rules in my life—the rules I so desperately tried to follow to live well—have never mattered.

  No. If Angel is right, there is one rule to our existence: that there shall be no relief. And I need to prove or disprove it, now.

  So I stab myself in the neck with a steak knife in front of Yesi and eight sleeping little girls.

  32

  ANGEL: 2020–3900

  “Angel,” Mama said, waking from a shallow sleep on one of her last days, motioning for me to approach her hospital bed. She was gaunt, her eyes huge moons. Sometimes they flashed with scenes from somewhere else, a place she didn’t tell me about, a place closer to where she was going soon. I didn’t want to look at her too intently, because I didn’t want the sight of her like this—hollow, clinging to those last fibers of life in her grasp—to erase how she used to be in my memory. And I felt guilty about that. Guilt is a fear you’re inadequate, right, so I felt like I should be stronger. But it was always worse for me if I tried to hide how I felt from myself.

  I crouched next to her bed on the cracking linoleum. “Mama?”

  “I didn’t know cancer could be so damn fast.” She swallowed with effort. It was the first time she’d said the word, and the two syllables—can-cer—sounded like a harbinger of doom to my ears. As if by hearing its name uttered, it would gain courage. “I should’ve listened. But I thought—”

  I took her frozen, withered hand, avoiding the IV needle. “It’s okay, Mama.”

  “There was a lot I wanted to tell you,” she said, gripping my hand. Her nail beds were purple-blue, her nails overlong. “There was a lot. About Argentina. About your family—”

  “It’s okay, Mama.”

  “Stop interrupting me with that empty it’s okay shit,” she snapped, her old fiery humor sparking life in her eyes, and I remembered where my potty mouth came from. “I wanted to believe we would have more time, Angel.”

  My eyes watered. Talk of time reminded me of how much of a fucking fair-weather friend it could be. “We—”

  She fixed me with a warning look. “I can’t tell you everything I wanted to tell you one day. When you were older, or when I was older and could revisit it. I screwed up, and none of that’s going to happen now. I need to spend the rest of my time making sure you and Rob will be okay,” she said, and I flashed to the endless paperwork she’d been filling out, in between half-eaten cups of Jell-O. The heated talks with Liese that I wasn’t allowed to participate in, even though I was old enough. “I need to make sure that you’ll be fed and clothed and housed and turn into normal people. You get that, right?”

  “We’ll never be normal,” I mumbled, and she burst out with a single laugh, like she used to, even though it sounded like a wheeze.

  “Happy kids,” she clarified. But she and I both knew happy wasn’t normal for anyone.

  “Listen,” she said. “I made something for you without even realizing it was for you. It has my stories in it. It has pieces of my past—the ones I meant to tell you. And others I didn’t.” She exhaled, hiding the pain as best as she could. “I thought it was my biggest mistake. I thought I’d created a new type of hell. And maybe I did—but it means I can tell you some of what I meant to tell you in the only way left.”

  “What?” My throat had gone dry. “What is it, Mama?”

  “Do you remember the Zapuche legend of the girls?” she whispered, eyes alight.

  * * *

  Mama made the game for me. She didn’t know it until the end, but she did.

  * * *

  In the game, Mavi’s blood is carmine red (255, 0, 56); the color, Mama once said, is made from the scales of certain insects. The thing is, neither Mavi nor her blood exists. The hookup tricks my brain into thinking they do—into seeing blood spurt out of her warm body in warm gushes, into seeing it paint the floor, a floor that also doesn’t exist, carmine red. It’s a cruel magic trick, really. It could take someone’s breath away with its obscene extravagance, but knowing the truth behind it is enough to ruin its beauty. Our senses are nothing but receptors sending signals to the primitive parts of our brain. Receptors can be toyed with; brains can be fooled. This world that Mama made has become the fresh hell she thought it was for so long, torturing its occupants with fake horror, that hallmark of psychological warfare, for others’ entertainment.

  They say that some people succeed in wartime—even excel—and flounder in peace. The violent ones, the apathetic ones, the ones unmoved by or unsuccessful in routine life. Maybe I’m one of them. I was a sack of shit when all was good. It took the death of Rob to get me here; and here, inside Vaccaro School, this strange war zone, I began to build myself from scratch, by accident. I firmed up my human defenses, by accident. I got my hands around the stupid grenade that is love again, by accident. Maybe there’s no better way for us to live than all in, even if that means fearing a catastrophic explosion might blow us back into bits at any moment.

  And I learned all this only because I came to know Mavi. I’d like to say that was an accident, too, but I don’t know anymore.

  Every day of my life after Rob died, I wondered what Mama would have done. But the truth is, I know now, because she showed me again, one last time.

  She would have seen me as clearly as she always did and known the freakish truth of it. She wouldn’t have dared to say everything would be okay—I know that much, too. She would have held me, to start. And she would have been there, warm and unyielding next to me, however long it took for me to remember to
be the same for her.

  As Mavi did.

  Would she have hated me for more than a second, even if she didn’t say she did? No. Would she have pitied me forever and let me fold in on myself, thinking it was just typical grief from a broken person? No. Would she have let me drop myself into harm’s way daily, desperate as I was to extinguish myself, to scatter my useless cells like dust? No.

  I was the one who treated myself that way until Mavi came along.

  I know this world is a nightmare. But there’s nothing in Vaccaro School that is less real to me than it is in the Other Place. Mavi is real to me, my feelings for her so tangible that they’re dangerous. They’ll say it’s because Mama made her. But everyone was made by someone.

  And now I know how to show my love and gratitude to her.

  I make a decision.

  I need to shut down the game for good and move its inhabitants elsewhere. Quickly, too, because it’s ending—I can feel it—and soon I won’t have a way back inside.

  I first believed that the end was near when Carmela fell apart in front of me and Mav. It’s my first time playing, my only time, so I couldn’t know for sure. But flitting through the teachers’ rooms out-of-Dom in private is like reverse Halloween; every door opens onto a more bizarro display torn right out of the pages of a sketchy Japanese asylum horror comic. It would honestly have been less weird if two little girls appeared down the hallway and chanted Redrum. By the time I see the inside of Mole’s garbage-dump-meet-den-of-sloth, I know for certain: We’re moving toward the end of this life cycle in the house.

  So I spill all the guts I have to spill, and Mav runs from me again. I drop off Dom and speed toward the sickroom in time to see her gurgling on the ground from a ghastly self-inflicted gash on her neck. I know she didn’t stab herself to die. I know she stabbed herself because she was trying to prove me right.

  I hurry to the cloud house, hyperventilating—everything unraveling faster now because of me.