The Broken Girls(12)

Ginny Smith and Brenda Averton were the team captains, and they conferred quietly just outside the eave, the rain gathering in drops in Ginny’s frizzy hair. Roberta was good enough to be team captain—she was a better field hockey player than either Ginny or Brenda—but she had been at Idlewild for only a few months, and neither Ginny nor Brenda was budging. Roberta didn’t mind—all she wanted, really, was to play.

“Team Seven,” Ginny said, turning to the girls, waving an arm, and trotting to one end of the hockey pitch.

“Team Nine,” Brenda echoed, leading off the other half of the girls.

There weren’t nine field hockey teams at Idlewild; the numbers came from the archaic team schedule, written in a pencil schematic and pinned to the wall of the locker room by some long-ago team captain, the graphite fading after years of display. Roberta was Team Nine, and she trotted after the other girls, stick in hand, as Brenda, her thick legs making an audible chafing sound beneath her hockey skirt, shouted strategy at them.

Then, finally, she got to run.

These were the elite field hockey players at Idlewild—the girls who chose the game as their class elective, the one part of the curriculum that was not mandatory. Twenty-two girls, no alternates, each with a stick except for the goalies. Though they’d seemed half-asleep a minute ago, as soon as the game began, they ran with teenage vigor, following the play of the ball back and forth over the field, circling, hemming, cutting one another off. There was no real reward for the winning team, no league that Idlewild could play in, no other schools to beat. Idlewild was an island on its own, just as it was in everything else, so the girls only played one another. Yet they still did it with all the energy of a team aiming for a championship.

This was where Roberta’s mind stopped, where it all went away and she was just inside her body, every part of her moving in sync. There were no chattering girls on the hockey pitch, no cliques or alliances, no gossip or lies. The girls played in near silence in the gloom, their breath huffing, their expressions intent. She stopped feeling homesick, remembering her bedroom, its view out the window down their neat, tidy street, the quilt on her bed that her grandmother had sewn, the jewelry box on her dresser that her mother had given her as a thirteenth-birthday present. She hadn’t had the heart to bring the jewelry box with her to Idlewild, where it could get stolen by the other girls, strangers who could put their hands all over her private things in their shared room.

Pat Carriveaux passed her the ball, and Roberta quickly handled it down the field, dodging girls coming at her right and left, her shoes squeaking and squelching in the grass. Her hair in its braid was soaked, the rain running down her neck into her collar, but the cool felt good on her heated skin. She circled the goal, but Cindy Benshaw made a fast move, leaning in to steal the ball nearly from the end of her stick, and Roberta jerked back to avoid tangling with her. Cindy ran with the ball, and Roberta steadied herself and ran after her.

Now she was flying, her body fully warm, barely feeling her feet as they hit the ground, the breath raw and painful in her lungs. She was unstoppable. She no longer pictured the face of her uncle, Van, her father’s brother, who had come to live with them last year after his wife left him and he lost his job. Uncle Van, who had fought on the beaches of Normandy and now could not sleep or work, who carried a terrible scar down the side of his neck that he did not talk about, whose big, callused hands always seemed lethal, even when they were curled in his lap as he listened to the radio hour after hour. She did not think about how she had opened the door to the garage one day and found Uncle Van sitting there, alone, hunched over in his chair, how she had seen—

The birds called overhead, and a spray of water hit Roberta’s face, mixing with the sweat rolling down her temples. Her body was burning, the sensation pure pleasure. She never wanted to stop.

She had screamed that day, after she opened the garage door, and then she hadn’t spoken again. For days, and then weeks, and then months. She would open her mouth and her thoughts would shut down, a curious blankness overtaking her, wiping the words clean from her mind. Her concerned parents had taken her to a doctor at first, wondering if something was physically wrong. Then they’d taken her to another doctor, and finally—to their burning shame—to a psychiatrist. Roberta had sat through it all in numb silence. She knew that everyone wanted her to be her old self again, to do something, to say something, but all Roberta saw was the garage door opening, over and over again, and the blankness. She couldn’t explain to all of them that her words had left her and she had nothing to say.

And so she’d come to Idlewild. Her parents didn’t know what to do with a stubborn teenage girl who wouldn’t speak, except get her out of the house. Roberta was silent for her first week at Idlewild, too, and then one day a teacher asked her a question and she answered it, her voice as rusty as an old bucket in a well. Her first words in months, spoken at this horrible boarding school that every girl hated so much.

It had felt miraculous, saying those words, and yet it had felt natural, too. She had seen the garage door in her head less and less. And on the hockey field the garage door disappeared entirely and the quiet was the peaceful kind as her body took over.

Brenda whistled through her teeth and called a break when the first half of the game ended, and the girls began to leave the field. Roberta dropped her stick for a moment and leaned down, her hands on her knees, catching her breath as the other girls trotted past her. Something caught the corner of her eye, a swish of fabric, and she turned her head, expecting to see another girl holding back as she was, but there was nothing there. She turned back and stared at the ground, panting. Her roommates were probably getting up now, shuffling with the other girls down the hall to the communal bathroom, bumping into one another as they dressed for class.