Tortall (40 page)

Lou ran upstairs, laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe. X-ray shook her mangled head. “Let’s clean up that mess and finish the homework,” she told us. “And then it’s getting on toward bedtime.”

“Why aren’t you mad?” demanded Maria. I think she
was angry that X-ray kept all her feelings hidden. “I’d be mad.”

“I’m upset,” X-ray said, looking straight at us. “I’m human, and I didn’t want to look like a dazed porcupine this week, thanks all the same. Still, the damage is done; it can be fixed. If I didn’t learn anything else growing up, I learned that you do better if you just deal and move on. When you keep meeting people from different cultures, you can get yourself in real trouble by losing your temper. Homework.”

We got to studying, and she went upstairs. When she came back down, she had wrapped a scarf around her head and made it into a kind of turban. We knew then she wasn’t going to wash her hair until we were asleep.

Lou came down with her; when we looked at Lou to see if X-ray had yelled at her, Lou shook her head. “She said I might want to get lessons before I cut any more hair,” whispered Lou when X-ray went into the kitchen for some water.

The next morning when Rowena came to drive us to school, I was the only one downstairs, setting the dining room table. I heard Rowena gasp when X-ray let her in. “My God, girl, what happened to your head?” Sometime the night before X-ray had shampooed what hair she had left and gotten rid of the turban.

I couldn’t hear X-ray’s answer, but I heard Ro: “Dr. M is gonna be pissed.”

“No,” X-ray said flatly, loud enough that I could hear. “I asked Lou to cut my hair—I don’t want her getting in trouble for something I asked her to do. Besides, once I get it trimmed, it’ll be easier to take care of.”

“But aren’t you mad?” I heard Ro ask, just like one of us.

X-ray laughed. “When you get back, I’ll tell you something worse that happened to my hair once.”

I told the rest what she had said on the way to school. Lou seemed thoughtful, like maybe she was sorry she had done it now. If X-ray hadn’t stood up for her, Lou would be on restrictions forever; we knew that.

But Maria was still the hardcase. “She’s just trying to suck up and make us her little buddies,” she told us as Ro was paying for gas. “You wait. It’s all a fake.”

When we got home from school that afternoon, we found X-ray with her hair trimmed and shaped short, like a boy’s. She actually looked okay. And she had stopped off at home, because a scrapbook sat on the dining room table. It was open to a picture of her at our age. Orange clay caked her head, turning a pair of braids she wore into orange turds. We laughed till we cried.

Then Janice wanted to look at the rest of the book. Keisha and Elsie did, too, partly because they were interested—what was X-ray doing in
Morocco
?—partly because that was the next plan. I wanted to hear the stories, too, but I was in our latest test, never mind being up for two hours in the middle of the night with an attack. While the other girls kept X-ray busy, Maria, Lou, and I sneaked out the back door. Our yard was circled by a hedge six feet high. Nobody but girls or staff was allowed in there.

Our boyfriends were right outside the back gate. We’d set it up at school. Lou and her boyfriend ducked low until they were past the kitchen and dining room windows, then
went to the far side of the yard, where they couldn’t be seen from the house. Maria and I stayed close to the gate, talking with the guys. I was too nervous to kiss Pete in front of other people, and Maria and Chuck weren’t that far along yet. They were actually talking about books when X-ray walked through the gate. She must have left the house through the front door and come around the yard so quietly that we didn’t hear her.

I never thought someone who was so medium could go so cold. Chuck and Pete actually seemed to shrink, even though they were taller than she was. “We—” Pete began to say.

X-ray pointed at the gate. “Out,” she said flatly.

Chuck and Pete left. X-ray walked over to Lou and her boyfriend. They were so busy she had to tap his shoulder. When he looked around and saw her, he actually backed away from Lou. X-ray pointed to the gate, and he left.

Back came X-ray with Lou. We all went inside. When we got as far as the dining room, the other girls looked at us with horror. They told us later she’d gone to answer the phone in the office. They never saw her leave the building.

“I’d like to think the rest of you didn’t know about this, but I’m not so sure,” X-ray told us. “In any event, up to your rooms till supper, all of you. And you know I have to report this to Dr. M.” The way she said it, not even Janice tried to talk her out of it. We all knew the rules; there were no exceptions. And it had just occurred to us that medium, quiet X-ray could be strict.

On our way up the stairs Maria whispered in my ear, “She’s quick, you gotta give her that.”

We complained to each other. We swore we were running away. Elsie, who had a knack for being over-the-top, said the home was just as bad as prison, though we knew it was no such thing. Maria had been in prison for a week; Keisha had been in jail for a month before they placed her in the home. From what they said, we
never
wanted to go to a real prison.

We came down for supper, cleanup, and homework. By then Dr. M had arrived to give the lecture and hand down the punishment. After that, we went to our rooms.

Friday night was when the staff took us out for pizza, to the mall, or to a movie. With everybody on restrictions, Friday should have been a major pain, but it wasn’t. X-ray showed us how to make stir-fry for supper. Then we had ice cream and she told us stories from the photos in her scrapbook.

“Why take so many pictures?” Maria asked as she paged through. “You have, like, all kinds just from Calcutta, and you were only there a week.”

“I’m a photographer,” X-ray said. “I like taking pictures. It gave me something to do when I didn’t have friends to hang out with.”

“So if you’re a photographer, how come you’re working here?” Ana wanted to know.

“Because everybody has to start somewhere, and I have to eat till I get rich and famous,” X-ray told her. “I have to build my portfolio, to show what I can do. Besides, I took social work in college.”

Maria ran a finger over a picture of a beggar who sat
beside a soda machine. “Would you show us how to take nice pictures like these?”

“Yeah!” cried Elsie. “That’d be cool!”

We begged X-ray to teach us. She looked us over with a wary eye. Maybe she was remembering we switched the sugar for salt at breakfast, or that her
Evita
CD, that she had played for us the day before, had gone missing. “Tell you what,” she said finally. “You’ll have to find your own cameras, even if they’re the throwaway kind. We’ll start with that, and I’ll develop your photos on my time off. Beyond that, we’ll see.”

Now we looked at the pictures in her scrapbook differently, asking her how she’d taken them. Friday night ripped by. We hardly remembered to be mad because we were on restriction.

We had to wait for the next test till Sunday afternoon, when we took our nature walk. Keisha really fought that—she was afraid X-ray would kill an animal. We finally talked her around, and on the walk she found a nice garter snake. We left it in X-ray’s bed. Then we had to wait till bedtime. X-ray stayed downstairs for hours, it felt like, writing in the log. Then she climbed upstairs. We all went to our doors to listen.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Her light went out, and still nothing. Some of us waited till midnight, thinking we’d hear the scream any minute. We didn’t hear a thing.

Keisha could be so dumb. She and Maria were on the schedule to fix breakfast. As soon as they got to the kitchen, where X-ray was starting the coffee, Keisha said, “You killed it!”

“Nope,” X-ray replied.

“I don’t believe you,” Keisha said. She started to cry. “You killed it.”

Maria said X-ray sighed and went upstairs. When the rest of us came down to breakfast, there was a shoebox with airholes punched in it on the kitchen counter. The snake was curled up inside, under some paper towels, with a jar lid full of water next to it. “I’m taking it back where you got it,” X-ray said when we sat down to eat. “And shame on you for yanking animals from their homes for a joke.”

“That’s it,” Keisha told us when we piled into the van for school. “No more animal tests. X-ray’s right.”

“Get us all in trouble, why don’t you,” muttered Janice as Rowena got in.

X-ray didn’t report us or the snake to Dr. M.

“Everybody listen,” Maria said when we met for a planning session at lunchtime. “No more of the test stuff till Wednesday. We hit her with everything on her last day.”

“Why?” Janice asked. “I like her.”

“Me too,” said Keisha.

I raised my hand. If X-ray stayed, maybe the attacks would stop. Things would be calm again.

Maria put her hands on her hips and glared at us. “We liked Penny, but she turned up wrong. And Mrs. Bertoldi just dumped us, ’cause we were extra work. We save it all for her last day, all right?”

So we were angels for three whole days, except for Maria and Ana getting in a fight over Maria’s plum nail polish that Ana said was hers. And Lou sneaked a long-distance call to her dad, who she still thought was going to take her back. Ro caught me smoking behind the work shed—more restrictions. Janice thought someone stole her cheapoid camera and ran around accusing everybody, but when we looked, it turned up in the mess under her bed.

Wednesday afternoon, when we got back from school, we hit the ground running. Even Renee got tired some by Wednesday. In their first couple of weeks new housemothers were always wrung out by the end of their shift, which is why we had saved up. At snack time, supper time, and homework time, when we were supposed to be together in one room, a couple of us always made sure to be gone, so X-ray couldn’t sit for five minutes without having to get up and hunt for missing girls. Our school friends called off and on all night, so X-ray kept having to run to the office to get the phone; they always hung up when she answered. Lou put a “Kick Me” sign on X-ray’s back—just like Lou, so immature.

Just as homework time was ending, the phone in the office rang again. X-ray actually
growled
. We waited for her to walk into the office and close the door. Then Ana and Keisha, who were the strongest, grabbed the knob and hung on. Doors at the home opened in—with those two on the outside, there was no way X-ray could escape. She rattled the knob, tugged on it, banged on the door and yelled, “Girls, this isn’t a good idea.” Ana and Keisha hung on, giggling.

The office went quiet, and everyone but Ana and Keisha
ran upstairs to do what they had planned. I was disgusted by the whole thing and went into the dining room to finish my homework. I didn’t hear—nobody heard—X-ray pull the chair over to the window and open it. We found out later that she climbed out, quiet like a ghost, slipped under the dining room window, slid out the back gate, and walked around. I saw her when she very quietly opened the front door with the home keys and let herself in. My jaw dropped. She held her finger up to her lips and walked, not tiptoe but still without a sound, down the hall. She waited until she was right behind Ana and Keisha before she said, “Did you girls need something?” as if they’d never locked her in. They screamed, and jumped, and ran upstairs. X-ray went back into the office.

We had a snack before we went to bed, and a last look at the scrapbook. I couldn’t help but think that if she quit, we’d never know about the islands that were just tree-covered rocks, eaten away by waves at the base, rising out of a perfectly blue sea. She wouldn’t explain who the men in blue head veils were, or the women who wore masks that were made of coins. We’d never find out how to get to the buildings that were carved into a pink stone cliff. I’m pretty sure Janice was thinking the same thing, because she lingered over the scrapbook, turning pages with a gloomy look on her face. X-ray had to gently take the book from her and tell her it was time to go to bed.

We lay awake with the lights out once more, waiting for X-ray. When she came upstairs, we all went to our doors to listen. “Yick,” was her only comment when she tried the
doorknob at her room and found oil on it. It wasn’t even a
loud
“yick.” She went inside.

We went to listen at her door, for what good it did us. She had to have found we’d soaped half of her toilet seat and honeyed the other half, just as she must have discovered we’d restuffed her pillow with old Easter grass and short-sheeted her bed. The problem was, if she did anything when she found all those surprises, it wasn’t noisy. We heard a thing or two that might have been sighs—that was all. We gave up and went to bed once she turned out her light, after we did one last thing. We got macramé cord from the crafts room, a thick, braided rope of it. First we tied it around X-ray’s doorknob, making sure it was tied tight. Then we pulled it across the hall, wrapping it first around Keisha’s doorknob, then Maria’s. We figured X-ray would go nuts when she found she couldn’t get out.

I was up with an attack an hour before my alarm rang, so I showered and dressed. I figured it wasn’t
so
bad: at least I could see what happened when X-ray tried to go downstairs. I tiptoed into Ana’s room: if I watched through the door, holding it barely open, I’d get a view of X-ray’s room. Ana didn’t even stir when I came in—she slept like the dead.

I heard the muffled sound of the housemothers’ alarm clock. Ten minutes later, I was half-asleep when I heard a knob rattle. X-ray’s door opened a bare inch, no more. The cord shook twice, as if X-ray had really yanked on the door. Then it eased.

She
couldn’t
give up so easily.

The cord tightened again as her door opened as far as it
would go. Then I saw a silvery gleam. A knife began to saw at the cord. Within seconds it fell to the floor, cut through. X-ray came out, looking tired. Calmly she folded up her penknife and stuck it in her pocket. Then she gathered the cord, undoing it from Keisha’s and Maria’s doors without a sound. She coiled it, yawned, stuck it in her pocket, and went downstairs.