The Broken Girls(5)
She saw her parents twice a year, once in summer and once at Christmas, and she’d never told them she was sorry.
There were four girls per room in Clayton Hall, the dormitory. You never knew whom you would get. One of Katie’s first roommates, a stringy-haired girl from New Hampshire who claimed to be descended from a real Salem witch, had the habit of humming relentlessly as she read her Latin textbook, biting the side of her thumbnail with such diligence that Katie had thought it might be grounds for murder. After the Salem witch left, she was replaced by a long-legged, springy-haired girl whose name Katie had never remembered, and who spent most of her nights curled up in her bunk, quietly sobbing into her pillow until Charlotte Kankle, who was massive and always angry, rolled out of her bunk and told her, Stop crying, for the love of Jesus Christ, or I promise you these other girls will hold you down while I give you a bloody nose. No one had contradicted her. The sobbing girl had been quiet after that, and she’d left a few weeks later.
Charlotte Kankle had since moved down the hall—after she and Katie got into a fistfight, one of Katie’s victories—and now she had a set of roommates here in 3C that, she had to admit, might not be a total failure. Idlewild was the boarding school of last resort, where parents stashed their embarrassments, their failures, and their recalcitrant girls. Hidden in the backwoods of Vermont, it had only 120 students: illegitimate daughters, first wives’ daughters, servants’ daughters, immigrant girls, girls who misbehaved or couldn’t learn. Most of them fought and mistrusted one another, but in a backward way, Katie felt these girls were the only ones who understood her. They were the only ones who just shrugged in boredom when she told them how many times she’d run away from home.
She sat up in bed after curfew one night and rooted beneath her pillow for the pack of cigarettes she’d stashed there. It was October, and cold autumn rain spattered the single high window in the dorm room. She banged on the bunk above her. “CeCe.”
“What is it?” CeCe was awake, of course. Katie had already known it from the sound of her breathing.
“I want to tell you a ghost story.”
“Really?” There was a muffled sound as CeCe slid over on her bunk and looked over the edge, down at Katie. “Is it Mary Hand?”
“Oh, no,” came a voice from the top bunk across the room. “Not another story about Mary Hand.”
“Ssh, Roberta,” CeCe said. “You’ll wake Sonia.”
“I’m awake,” Sonia said from beneath her covers on the bunk below Roberta. When she was half-asleep, her French accent was more pronounced. “I cannot sleep with all of your talking.”
Katie tapped a cigarette from the pack. All four girls in the room were fifteen years old—Idlewild had long ago grouped girls of the same age, since the older girls tended to bully the younger ones when they roomed together. “Mary Hand is in my Latin textbook,” she said. “Look.”
She pulled the book—which was decades old and musty—from beneath her bed, along with a small flashlight. Flashlights were forbidden at Idlewild, a rule that every girl flouted without exception. Holding the flashlight steady, she quickly paged through the book until she came to the page she wanted. “See?” she said.
CeCe had climbed down from her bunk. She had the biggest breasts of any of the four of them, and she self-consciously brought a blanket down with her, pulling it over her shoulders. “Oh,” she said as she stared at the page Katie had lit with the flashlight. “I have that in my grammar book. Something similar, at least.”
“What is it?” Roberta was lured from her top bunk, her sleek calves poking from the hem of her outgrown nightgown, her brownish blond hair tied into a braid down her back. She landed on the floor without a sound and peered over CeCe’s shoulder. Katie heard her soft intake of breath.
Along the edge of the page, in the narrow band of white space, was a message in pencil.
Saw Mary Hand through the window of 1G, Clayton Hall.
She was walking away over the field.
Wednesday, August 7, 1941. Jenny Baird.
Looking at it gave Katie a blurry, queasy feeling, a quick pulse of fear that she refused to show. Everyone knew of Mary Hand, but somehow these penciled letters made her more real. “It isn’t a joke, is it,” she said—a statement, not a question.
“No, it’s not a joke,” CeCe said. “The one in my grammar book said Toilet, third floor, end of west hall, I saw Mary there. That one was from 1939.”
“It’s a message.” This was Sonia, who had gotten up and was looking over Roberta’s shoulder. She shrugged and backed away again. “I’ve seen them, too. They have never changed the textbooks here, I think.”
Katie flipped through the musty pages of the Latin textbook. Its front page listed the copyright as 1919, the year Idlewild opened. She tried to picture the school as it had been then: the building brand-new, the uniforms brand-new, the textbooks brand-new. Now, in 1950, Idlewild was a time machine, a place that had no inkling of atomic bombs or Texaco Star Theatre on television. It made sense, in a twisted way, that Idlewild girls would pass wisdom down to one another in the margins of their textbooks, alongside the lists of American Revolution battles and the chemical makeup of iodine. The teachers never looked in these books, and they were never thrown away. If you wanted to warn a future girl about Mary Hand, the books were the best place to do it.