The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls (18 page)

Beneath each head hung a sign, and each sign showed a different word.
FEAR. JOY. ANGER. DESPAIR
. Each head wore the matching expression. The
JOY
head was little more than a giant, toothy smile. The
FEAR
head’s skin hung in long folds like pulled taffy. Victoria couldn’t look away from that one’s sagging eyes and screaming mouth. The longer she looked, the more it felt like only her and this
FEAR
head, all alone in the dark, quiet Home.

“We have classes every day,” said Jacqueline through her teeth, careful to speak only a few words at a time. “They’re always different. Very confusing. No patterns. She teaches us things. How to be good. How to be better.”

A pretty iron nameplate topped each classroom doorway. The first one they entered said
CLASSROOM OF MANNERS
. They took their seats in desks much more old-fashioned and much less ergonomic than the modern desks at the Academy.

“See?” whispered Jacqueline.

Victoria looked out the picture window—and down into the hanger.

There, in something that looked sort of like a sad playground swing and sort of like monstrous marionette strings, hung Lawrence. He was a fly wrapped up in spider silk.

All around him, the floor and walls writhed.

For the first time in her life, Victoria thought she understood the word “heartbreak.”

“Is he—?” Victoria whispered.

“No,” said Jacqueline, “he’s not dead.”

Victoria gulped. “What will happen to him?”

“He’ll just be—well, people are always different after a hanging.”

“Enjoying the view?”

Victoria and Jacqueline whirled to face Mrs. Cavendish, who seemed somehow taller, sharper, and hungrier than before Lawrence’s hanging. Victoria clenched her fists.

“You—you—” she said, but she couldn’t think of words that wouldn’t get anyone in trouble.

Mrs. Cavendish smiled. “You learn quickly. Sit down.”

Manners class was about manners, and the books in each desk were
Fitzgerald Flannagan’s Guide for Youngsters
, 616 pages of tiny text about how to be good boys and girls.

“Open to page one,” said Mrs. Cavendish. She flipped a switch at the front of the room, and a projector whirred to life. Page one appeared on a screen at the front of the room, on all the walls, shimmering across the picture window, and across everyone’s skin in wiggly, lit-up tattoos.

The children began to read the first paragraph in unison. It was about how important this book was, and how it would serve as a guide for young people who wanted to be respectable, and how Fitzgerald Flannagan had studied this thing and
that thing, which showed just how much he knew about manners.

Victoria opened her own copy and stared at the first page, hardly able to breathe. She had never before been so angry. The hot rushes through her chest and up her arms shook her whole body.

It’s fortunate
, she thought,
that I’m so disciplined
. One could not lose one’s cool and be the best year after year.

She started to read along with the others, even though doing something so stupid while Lawrence dangled in the hanger made each word hurt:

Children, whether they are boys or girls, educated or ignorant, must be as silent as possible as much as possible. Children are neither clever nor experienced enough to judge for themselves what is and what is not to be said. They must therefore and at all times defer to the wisdom of their elders. They must never speak out of turn. They must never be contrary. They must be extraordinary without being out of the ordinary.

At each paragraph break, the children stopped. The first time, Victoria watched in astonishment as they opened notebooks from their desks and began scribbling the first paragraph as quickly as they could onto lined paper. They wrote so fast and finished so close together that it seemed synchronized, some kind of frantic, scribbly dance.

Then they started reading again, paragraph two. Read, write, read, write. After the first read-write, Victoria joined in, too. She didn’t want to; it was an outrageous waste of time. But she couldn’t ignore Mrs. Cavendish, who was circling the room with leisurely clicks of her fine heels. She held a thin black switch, its leather braid coming apart at the end. The switch gleamed like a serpent in her hands, and whenever someone stumbled over words, or whenever someone’s handwriting got messy, Mrs. Cavendish would flick the switch. It whistled through the air, leaving behind little red marks on sweating cheeks and shaking hands.

After an hour of this, Mrs. Cavendish flipped the lights off, and everyone hurried to the door and down the hall for the next class, and so on, all day long, to and from classes about how to dress just so and talk just so, what was appropriate to learn in school and what was not, and what they should think about science and presidents and art and yard
trimming, and everything was repetitive and pointless. Worst of all, Victoria felt, was the indignity of being herded around in her pajamas.

“Don’t we ever get real clothes?” she whispered to Jacqueline at lunch.

“No. It’s to make us like prisoners, I think,” said Jacqueline over a mouthful of cold meat slices and toast. Mrs. Cavendish and Mr. Alice weren’t there. They never ate lunch, according to Jacqueline. No one knew where they went at lunchtime. But gofers slunk around in the shadows, and even if Victoria had wanted to try anything risky—like escape or help Lawrence, even though she didn’t know how to do either of those things—she thought the Home might tell on her. Each of its lamps and curving rafters seemed like an eye, or an arm ready to snatch.

“To make us like prisoners?” Victoria repeated.

The boy across the table nodded. “It’s to keep us feeling like animals, like we’re nobodies.”

“Well, she’ll have to try a bit harder than that,” said Victoria. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m definitely not a nobody.”

“Just because you’re Miss Goody-Goody doesn’t make you safe,” said the boy. “I’m Harold, by the way.”

Victoria shook his hand. Some of the other children
glared at them and whispered behind their sandwiches.

“I don’t know, though,” Harold said. “Being such a rude snob all the time might actually help you here. Might keep you from letting things get to you, you know.”

Victoria recognized him at last. “Harold? Hyena Harold?”

“Yeah,” Harold said. He laughed, but it sounded weird. “That’s me.”

Taking a bite of her sandwich, Victoria thought about this. She could only vaguely remember Hyena Harold. Harold . . . Norbett? Noble? Something like that. He had been a troublemaker at the Academy, a class clown. He had loved pranks and tricks, and when he laughed, he would shriek and howl, winding up all the students into a frenzy, so he was Hyena Harold.

But that had been years ago. In another city, maybe. Or was it a dream? Were these memories even memories, or was she imagining things?

Victoria narrowed her eyes at Harold.

“Can’t remember me all the way, huh?” he said. “It’s okay. That’s part of it. You come here and people forget about you. People don’t like to notice. They turn the other way.”

“
She
turns them the other way,” said Jacqueline. “Pushes them around, confuses them. But they let her. It’s easier than fighting.”

“How long have you
been
here?” said Victoria. She put down
her sandwich. The meat was rubbery and rank with a strange spice.

“Me? Oh, a few months,” said Harold. He squinted at the ceiling. “I think.”

“I’ve been here eight weeks,” said Jacqueline.

A tiny girl with two black braids squeaked, “For me it’s been five days.”

“How long will she keep you here?” said Victoria.

“Depends on how well we do what she wants,” said Harold.

The girl with black braids choked on her food. Jacqueline thumped her shoulder and said, “Pull it together, Caroline.”

“So we don’t really know how long anyone’s going to stay,” Harold continued.

“But we
do
know,” said Jacqueline, leaning closer, “that nobody stays past their thirteenth birthday.”

The children nearest them nodded solemnly as they ate.

“Mine’s next week, you know,” said Harold, grinning. “I’ll be out soon.”

“What happens on your thirteenth birthday?” said Victoria.

“Either you get out before then or . . . she takes you,” said Harold.

“Everyone?” said Caroline tearfully.

“Everyone,” said Jacqueline.

“But where does she take you?” said Victoria. “What does she do with you?”

“Nobody really knows,” said Jacqueline.

“I wouldn’t think about it, if I were you,” said Harold through a mouthful of meat and toast. “Don’t worry, though. As long as you do what she says, you’ll get out fine.”

Victoria slammed down her lunch without taking a bite. “But Mr. Tibbalt told me—”

A cold breeze hissed up the table, like Victoria had felt at the Academy. She glanced around, but Mrs. Cavendish was nowhere to be found.

“He told me,” she continued, lowering her voice, “that his brother got taken here, and when he came back, he was really different. He wasn’t himself.”

“It happens,” said Harold, licking his fingers. It was only then that Victoria noticed how false everything about Harold appeared, from the movements of his eyebrows to the way he chewed his food. His skin was waxen. Like that boy Peter, Harold seemed new and different from what he should have been, and false, like a doll or a toy.

“Best thing you can do is try to get along with her and keep quiet, and then you can go home.” Harold wiped his mouth. His eyes shone a little too brightly. When he smiled at Victoria, it stretched his face into an ugly shape. “Easy as pie. Oh, I hope she makes her pies tonight. They’re the best.”

That night, Victoria lay on her cot after lights-out, staring
at the ceiling. She would have liked to go to sleep, but she couldn’t erase Harold’s fake, grinning face from her vision.

Nobody stays past their thirteenth birthday.

Victoria’s birthday was in August. That was easy enough. There was a lot of time between then and now. And surely her parents would start looking for her soon, no matter what Mr. Tibbalt or Harold said. They were Wrights. They wouldn’t fall for Mrs. Cavendish’s tricks for long.

But Lawrence’s birthday was November 1. Two weeks away.

She remembered this because his were the only birthday parties she had ever gone to—the two of them, Mr. and Mrs. Prewitt, and sometimes Mr. and Mrs. Wright all in party hats (Victoria hated party hats; they messed up her curls). Once at the Prewitts’ dining room table, once at a table at the city park (which had offended Victoria’s sense of hygiene), once at a fancy Uptown bistro. Victoria would tell Lawrence that he wasn’t blowing out his candles correctly and then tell him
how
to blow his candles out, and Lawrence would joke about all the fancy gifts he didn’t like and ask if his parents would ever get him music like he asked. The parties were really quite sober affairs.

Only now did Victoria realize how much she had enjoyed herself.

Victoria’s fists clenched in her blankets.
How dare Mrs.
Cavendish take him so near his birthday
, she thought.
He doesn’t have a chance
.

But then she remembered how small and shriveled and beaten Lawrence had looked when Mr. Alice took him out of the hanger after supper. Mrs. Cavendish made everyone watch. There were red marks on Lawrence’s wrists and ankles where the straps had bound him. His head hung low, like his neck had gone rubbery. Mr. Alice had had to half drag him by his collar.

Maybe Lawrence had more of a chance than she thought. Maybe he was already on his way to being changed.

Victoria got out of bed, ignoring the quiet sobs she could hear from various cots—and the utter silence from Gabby’s cot—and tapped on Jacqueline’s shoulder.

“Too scared to sleep?” said Jacqueline.

“I need to talk to Lawrence,” said Victoria. “How can I do that?”

Jacqueline sat up. “You can’t. He’s in the boys’ dorm.”

“And how do I get there?”

Jacqueline stared in horror. “You can’t walk around after lights-out, remember? It’s not safe.”

“But is the door locked?”

“Well, of course it is.” Jacqueline paused. “People have tried, you know. To sneak around before bed. They slipped out past
the gofers when they shut us in for the night and ran down the hall. But then it was lights-out, and they never came back.”

Victoria ignored the quiver of fear in her throat. “There has to be a way. I won’t just sit here like a dog or something, all tied up. I need to talk to Lawrence.”

“But there’s no way to—”

“Of course there is.” Victoria started at the corner nearest her and started working her way around the room, patting the walls. “I always find ways to.”

Jacqueline followed. “People are watching, Victoria.”

And they were; as she crept close to the walls, kicking around in the shadows and peeking behind furniture, Victoria felt the eyes of the other girls upon her. Some were sleepy and some were sharp and hard, and some of them whispered things to each other. Victoria was glad she could not hear what they said.

“I don’t care, let them look,” she said. “There has to be another way out, and I’ll find it.”

“But there
isn’t
. Let’s go back to bed, Victoria.”

At the door, Victoria jiggled the doorknob and hinges. She shoved hard against it. She poked her fingers beneath the door, into the hallway beyond.

Something rustled past her fingertips, stinging them.

She yanked her hand back, glaring at the red marks on her skin.

“Victoria,
please
,” Jacqueline whispered. “I don’t like this.”

Victoria scoffed.
No wonder Jacqueline isn’t top of the class
, she thought.
She whines too much
. She turned and looked back down the aisle of beds, trying to ignore the other girls’ stares. At the bottom of the opposite wall stood a tiny black spot.

The fireplace.