by Lierre Keith
(first 10 pages)
Dreary. That was the word Kalyn was looking for. Though it surprised her now that she’d found it. The room was clean, and bright, and…dreary. The desks lined up as neatly as the cinder blocks in the walls, and the students slotted into place behind them. Each one had a notebook and a pen, and they wrote down exactly what they were told. And each one had the right clothes, marked with the right logos: Null & Void, Never-Never, Oblivion. There were windows that didn’t open, and a door she couldn’t use, except when the bell rang and they were all supposed to scurry to their next dreary forty minutes.
"1712, the Newcomen Steam Engine" the teacher wrote on the board, underlining it twice. "The Industrial Revolution," he said. "For the first time in history, machines could do the work of human hands."
We are the machines, Kalyn wrote in her notebook.
The bell rang and she scurried as she was supposed to. In the hall, the current of noise--voices, laughter, stomping feet--threatened to drown her. Nothing as alive as air in this building. Rage flared up in her and she held her head higher.
I will not give up, I will not give in, she swore, I will not be one
of them.
But holding her head up was always a mistake. Because someone was bound to notice.
"God, what is she wearing?" a girl said from behind her. Meant to be overheard, of course.
"Didn’t anybody ever tell her she’s a foot too tall?" a boy laughed.
For one second, she hesitated. Did it do any good to defend herself?
They always laughed at her. They always won. But winning wasn’t the point. Fighting back was.
"Leave me alone," she demanded, staring hard at the boy.
Of course they laughed, the boy, the girl, their friends. There was no way to win. And then she had to turn around, expose her back to them, keep walking. Who knew what insults would come next, what jabs or blows would follow. All she knew was that she had to be ready, always ready for their assaults.
She plunged forward, losing herself in the crowd. One more class, one more, and she was released for the day. Released for three hours, until her father got home. Then the cage would tighten again. But she wouldn’t think about that now. Now she’d count down forty minutes, until three hours of blessed freedom.
Her stomach tightened. Outside her next class, Michael Gerase was holding court. He was handsome enough that no one saw the ugliness of his smile. Their fathers were friends. But Michael ignored her, and so his friends did, too. No, not quite ignored. It was more that they didn’t see her. Nothing existed for them, the crown princes and ladies in waiting, the royalty of this closed kingdom, unless it was something they wanted. So if they weren’t looking for something to hurt, she wasn’t there.
The room was on the third floor and from her seat by the window Kalyn could see her tree. While the teacher droned and the students copied, Kalyn pretended to listen. She’d years ago found the right expression: receptive, but not too eager. And at all costs, keep quiet. Then she was free to let her mind wander. Or to watch her tree.
There were other trees in the neighborhood, a few lined up like soldiers on the edge of the playing field, here and there a small dogwood contained on a lawn like a specimen under glass. And once in a while, on the boundary of a wild place, at the back of a parking lot or along the railroad tracks, a group of skinny saplings broke free, racing upward toward the light. But her tree was a real tree. She knew it was real, the way trees should really be. Not clipped into order, not pruned and displayed, not desperate and doomed. Her tree embraced the sky like a bird. It was massive and old, its branches dense with leaves that shimmered and sighed and tried to tell her something. A message, a secret, something she ached to hear but didn’t know how to understand. Day after day she watched it, keeping faith with what it said.
The tree was behind a house she passed on the walk to school. She didn’t ride the school bus. She wouldn’t spend one second more than she had to confined with them, with their sharp blades of smiles and dead eyes. She walked instead, trying to feel the sun, refusing to fear the rain. Each year it got harder. She was twelve now, and she could feel herself longing for the dull comfort of numbness. But she wouldn’t give in. Pain was better than feeling nothing. Anger was better. Hate. Hate was better. Anything that told her she was still alive. Each time she passed her tree she tested herself: did she still feel it? Did she still long to be free, no matter how much it hurt? Did she still know there was something real and true, something of beauty beyond their concrete and their cruelty? And everyday she said yes, swearing it like a sacred oath as she passed her tree.
The tree was in a garden surrounded by a brick wall. Kalyn ached to be inside. To see her tree. The house was the last of its kind on a street that had grown weary and given up. On one side was a dirty restaurant, The Bottomless Cup, with a hand-lettered sign, "Eat to your heart’s content." On the other side was an abandoned store front once called The Beauty Supply Company. "Cosmetics! Hair! Great Advice!" said the faded sign.
The old house was still grand but it must have been glorious once. There was a huge porch and two balconies and a rounded tower. There was a stained glass window of white doves and green vines against a blue, blue sky. Kalyn never saw anyone coming or going, never saw a light on, or a car in the driveway. Yet the flowers in the front border were weeded and the bird bath was always filled. Sometimes she was afraid for the house, and her tree. There wasn’t room for a house like that on the street any more. It had given way to cinderblocks and cracked cement and listless old men. But year after year the house remained, protected, she thought, by the tree.
When was the first time she’d seen the house? She couldn’t remember. It had always been there. Once she’d made the mistake of asking her father to drive that way.
"Can we go down River Street?" she’d called from the back seat, and then regretted it.
Ronnie snapped her head around and stared with eyes like knives.
"Why?"
Kalyn had shut her mouth tight. The house. The tree. Don’t give it to them or they’ll destroy it. She was old enough to know that.
"Answer your stepmother," her father had said in his slow threat of a voice. He never got louder. Only softer.
Don’t show fear or they’ll find a way in, she told herself,
desperately trying to think of a good enough lie.
"There’s a candy store," she said, though where the words had come from, she didn’t know. She stared back at Ronnie. Look easy. Look normal. Open eyes, loose mouth. But she could feel her hands getting damp, the backs of her knees. In a few more seconds her face would glisten with the truth.
But her father had believed her. Or couldn’t wait to strike.
"Tell me, Kalyn, what exactly have you done that deserves a reward?" he asked.
"I don’t know," she mumbled, relief passing over her like a cool
breeze.
"You know what happens when you don’t speak so I can hear you," he said, getting softer.
"Yes," she answered, loud and clear. Because she did.
"So what have you done that deserves a reward?" he asked again.
"Nothing."
But he wasn’t finished.
"Does being surly deserve a reward?"
"No."
"Ah. Well then, does lying deserve a reward?"
There was no point in defending herself. Yes, she had lied. She’d found a book at the school library, The Wind In The Willows, and loved it too much to leave it there. Bringing it home had been a mistake. Ronnie had found it and her father had questioned her until she’d said it was for school, a book report for school, hoping he’d believe her. But he hadn’t. He’d called her teacher, then called the school library. To tell them she wasn’t allowed to use it. No books, he told her, enjoying her powerless pain like a slow sip of wine.
"No," she said, "lying is wrong."
No books, no music, no drawing. Anything beautiful. Anything she loved. When they took her music away--no radio or CDs--she learned to sing in her head. Then on the way to school she’d sing softly as she walked, trying to hang on to melodies and words, to keep them as long as she could. She’d had to give up drawing. Her parents looked through her room whenever they wanted. Kalyn had to stand against the wall and watch as they opened every drawer, pried into every small place. There was nowhere to hide charcoal or paints. There wasn’t even anywhere to hide a pencil and a notebook.
But when he took her books away, she’d learned a despair she’d never known. Her refuge, her only hiding place. Gone. There would be no escape. No other world to dissolve into. No stories to take her pain and turn it to meaning. No one to teach her to be brave. I’ll have to teach myself, she thought. Only it was more like taking a vow. They will not defeat me. They will not.
That first night, lying in bed, she started at the beginning. Her
first favorite story. East of the Sun, West of the Moon. The Blue Fairy Book, and the yellow one, the red one. She told them to herself. Once upon a time. And then the Princess. Into the forest. A castle of thorns. The Silkie. The Morrigan. A woman who turned into a seal, a horse, a crow, a star.
The next day at school she’d made a list of every book she could remember. The Secret Garden. The Children of Greene Knowe. King Arthur. During recess, she sat even further from the children and their games, shut her eyes and started again. Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter. Bilbo told the dwarves he didn’t want to go. The Psammead granted their wish. Day after day, until it became one story. Her story. There was a sword and a ring and a magic horse and a final battle. A battle on which everything depended. The world would be saved or fall into darkness, and she couldn’t give in. Not now. Not before it was over.
At dinner her father watched her. She could feel his eyes examining her like she was a secret he would expose. She looked back. I am bland I am boring I am nothing. There is no battle. There is no secret. There is no me.
"How was school today, Kalyn?" her father asked. Softly.
Not enough to mumble, fine. She had to answer in full sentences. Like she meant it.
"It was good. I got an A on my math test."
Silence as he stared at her. He had expected to break her. But here she sat, normal, polite, answering.
And so he captured the baby squirrel. Because he’d seen her watching the squirrels play. Only one of you gets to eat today, Kalyn, you decide who. She’d picked the squirrel, then lain awake until her father and Ronnie had gone to sleep. Slipped down the stairs without breathing.
Wrapped the squirrel in a dish towel and carried it outside. Was it
old enough to survive on its own? Another decision she’d been forced to make. But a quick death in the wild was better than a slow death in a cage. That much she knew.
Take me with you, she want to cry, as the squirrel slipped into the darkness.
But there was nowhere to go except back inside, where her father was already waiting.
"So," he said, very softly.
Kalyn tried to look fearless, but defiant was all she could manage.
He didn’t use violence very often. Didn’t have to. Because when he did, he made sure she remembered.
"You are going to be very sorry," he said, backing her into the wall.
He grabbed her around the throat and held tight. Even now she could still remember how it felt. The absence of air. The desperation. Fighting him with everything she had, but his hands held. Tiny sparkles like stars as the darkness closed in. I’m getting my wish, she thought as she lost consciousness, following the squirrel into the night.
Just as he’d let go. She’d never tasted air before, its sweetness, pouring into her. He’d made her say the words: I’m sorry. But he hadn’t won. Lying in bed, staring out at a tiny edge of moon, she’d known he hadn’t won. You could make someone say anything if you hurt her enough. But could you make her mean it? Because she wasn’t sorry. With every beat of her heart, she was glad.