FOXGLOVE

In my hometown—quiet Canmere, carved into the mountainside—there was a rhyme about us Saulmon girls. It was a chant of Sulphur and silver and everything bitter set to the scrape of skipping ropes against pavement, and Blair would tuck her face into the waist of my coat as though she could dissolve into me. The red of our hair gave us away; the sun would light it on fire, and those too old for rhymes would turn to whisper behind cupped palms instead. “There are those Saulmon girls again. Did you hear about what the eldest did this time? Can you believe it?”

In my memory, peoples’ grins split their faces; their voices climbed higher until they shook the ravens from the trees. The details had gone damp at the edges, but the humiliation still lingered, and the shame. They’d sung that rhyme when we were sent away. Amidst the confusion of Grandfather Ghormley’s fingers locking like a shackle around my wrist and Blair screaming for our mother, the townspeople’s faces had looked like cracked plates, all closed eyes and smiles cut jagged with glee. The otherness of our grandfather—the crispness of his suit, the way sun damage hadn’t yet creased his face—kept them in a half-moon around us. He visited only once every few years, but each time the townspeople would ogle the curtain of his beard, the very un-Canmere way he had pulled his thinning hair into a bun. In a place where even acid-washed jeans were a strike against God, Grandfather Ghormley was another species altogether.

“Freaks,” the town glassblower muttered. I spat at his feet. My grandfather ushered me into the backseat of the minivan and slammed the door closed. From behind the tinted window I watched as Blair—eight at the time, her hair still a cloud of frizz—wept at the foot of our front door. Her knuckles were white around the handle.

“I don’t want to go.” I heard her voice as though it was from underwater. “Mom! Mom. I didn’t do anything. I don’t want to go.”

I watched as Grandfather Ghormley bent to say something to her, his lips brushing the shell of her ear, and her body crumpled in on itself like a deflated accordion. He hoisted her up into his arms as though she weighed no more than a collection of bird bones. When he dumped her onto the leather seat beside me, she did nothing but convulse in hiccupping sobs.

“There’s nothing to be worried about,” he said after sliding in behind the wheel. “You’re simply coming to stay with me. Canmere is nothing but backwater, anyhow.”

The engine coughed to life. Blair pressed a wet cheek to my kneecap and I reached around her, pulling the seatbelt across the both of us as gently as I could. A backpack I recognized from our last and only family vacation—Disneyland, another lifetime ago—sat at my feet, its stomach bloated with whatever toiletries had been crammed inside. Neither Blair nor I had packed it.

“We’re staying at the school?” The words felt like a knife in my throat. Whenever Grandfather Ghormley would visit, him and Mother would stow away in the kitchen. Blair and I would press our ears to the door, words like correction and therapy and concerning coming to us in snippets. “Just talking about school matters, my girls. It’s busy being the principal of a reputable establishment such as mine, you know,” he’d say afterwards, and that would be the end of the discussion.

A bubble of snot ballooned from one of Blair’s nostrils. “Grandpa, is Mom coming with us?”

Grandfather Ghormley lifted one blue-veined hand to adjust the rearview mirror. In the glare of the mid-morning sun his eyes were the colour of half-melted snow, devoid of laugh lines. “She’ll visit, but don’t cry. You’ll be scholars. Visionaries.” He glanced back towards the roads, and the car lurched into motion. “And one last thing: it’d be best to call me Headmaster from now on.”

*

“Aoife,” Ghormley said now. He fingered through the syllables slowly, deliberately. Ee-fa. I could hear the wet flick of his tongue against his teeth. “My girl, I see none of your tutors have issued you a detention slip yet today. Consider me proud.”

            “Well, it’s not noon yet.” The lighter he confiscated from me two days ago sat in the lap of my skirt. Five years in and he still hadn’t learned to lock his cabinets. “Speaking of, how is Sister Damaris today? Haven’t seen her since the other night.”

            His face went a magnificent shade of scarlet. Ghormley Saulmon’s Rehabilitation Center for Troubled Girls was marketed as a Catholic etiquette school, but no parent or child believed that: it was a fancy form of foster care. Handpicked nuns taught us the art of cooking, and cleaning, and keeping our mouths shut. In the gap between classes, in true Sunday school spirit, they’d be bent over their desks by my dear grandfather. Sister Damaris seemed to be his favourite—I always seemed to walk in when her skirt was up over her head.

            “Aoife,” he said patiently, “what is our most treasured teaching here?”

            “Hypocrisy?”

            “Discretion.” His smile tweaked the edges of his moustache, made the piece of éclair stuck in it dangle dangerously close to his lower lip. “Nineteen years old, my girl, and still no closer to leaving. Even Blair is closer to rehabilitation than you are, and there wasn’t a thing wrong with her in the first place. A prime example of the perks of preventative measures, if I do say so myself.”

            My thumb slid over the ridges of the lighter. “And you do, Grandfather,” I said. “Oh, you do.”

            He sunk further into his leather chair. His entire office was a museum of luxury, from the leopard-pelt carpeting to the ivory stature of the Virgin Mary that sat in the middle of his desk. It made my stomach twist every time I walked in. “I’m trying to help, Aoife. I don’t want to see you fail. You just need to cooperate with me. Even Blair’s a prefect now.”

            “Yeah, I feel like I’m really missing out on that one.”

            His sigh was a full-body affair, rattling up though his ribcage. “I’ll grant you an ultimatum,” he said. “There is a new student joining us today. Not only do I want you to act as her guide, I want you to act as her role model as well. Understood? That means no detention slips, no graffiti on the underside of the Sisters’ desks, no skipped sermons.”

             I blinked at him. “And this appeals to me, why?”

            “Think of it as a test of conduct. Besides, my girl, you know what happens when our students turn twenty.”

            Everyone knew what happened at the center when its students turned twenty. Or at least, those of us inside the school did. “We have a success rate of one-hundred percent,” I’d hear Grandfather say to potential patrons. “By twenty, all girls are effectively rehabilitated and ready to be immersed back into society.” He wouldn’t mention the girls who weren’t. Last year, one night before her twentieth birthday, Aria Davis was wrestled out of the girls’ bunker. She had slept on the bed right above mine; our shared ladder had trembled as though it was undergoing its own private earthquake. There had been a muffled scream, and then nothing. All I saw was the swing of her long blonde hair as two Sisters hauled her off the bed and into their arms, the split-second glimpse of her wide eyes, the blue cloth stuffed into her mouth. I had laid there in the dark, not breathing, until I lost sense of my eyelids. What if I one of us had gotten up? I’d thought after. Would that have changed things? Will we ever know? None of the staff spoke about it after, and eventually we learned to stop asking.

            “Aoife,” Grandfather said. The shriveled pads of his fingers—the texture of raisins, dry and soft—reached up to linger on the ridge of my bottom lip. The present snapped back into place around me. “Aoife, my girl, I’d just loathe to see anything happen to you.”

Grandfather’s school was a scarecrow of an old cabin, gutted of anything authentic and replaced with only the most frivolous of upholstery, the front doors gated by oak trees. The sky always seemed to be frozen in a permanent state of gray. Outside the borders, the wheat fields stretched towards the horizon in a sea of gold. Some days I thought I could see Canmere: a white blip on the blue-gray of the mountains, half-receding into the clouds. Some days I convinced myself that that it was impossible, that even from this far away I wouldn’t be able to recognize it anymore.

            I sat on the concrete steps, the pavement leaching the heat from the underside of my bare thighs. Plaid skirts, ironed ties, hair pulled back into uniform braids—it was a wonder the Sisters could tell any of us apart. “Such bullshit,” I muttered.

            “I ought to issue you a detention slip for that.” My head snapped to the left. Blair stood on the step above me, shoulders rigid as a board. At thirteen, the school had aged her worse than it had me: the steep slope of her nose tapered off into a pencil-sharp point, and the overhang of her top lip was caught in her typical scowl. Tufts of frizz stuck out from the knots of her braid. The tips of ears—with their rounded lobes, and the piercing I had given her on her seventh birthday long healed over—had turned pink from the chill.

            “Always an honour to be ratted out by my own sister,” I said. Her nostrils flared, but she had mastered the art of not flinching by now: I’d watched her teach herself. “What are you doing here, anyway? Don’t you have empty hallways to patrol?”

            She cleared her throat with a prim sort of indignation. “As a matter of fact, I was patrolling the west wing, outside of the headmaster’s office, and overheard. As a prefect, I thought it best to come monitor the situation.”

            “And as a sister?”

             “I thought it’d be just like you to sabotage this.” She adjusted the strap of her bra through her blouse, the ridged shell of its padding pressing white against the fabric. “It wouldn’t make me look good if you did.”

             “Puts a tear in my eye, truly. Thanks for all your concern.”

A blush stained the skin beneath her cheekbones. I knew by the twitch of her ankle that she was resisting the urge to stamp her foot. “I looked up her file. Eighteen, fourth-time offender. Same issue as you.” Her eyes darted to something behind me, and her expression hardened. “You only have five months left. Stop messing up.”

            With a little huff she turned on her heel and marched back inside, the metronomic click-clack of her shoes against the stone following her even after she had slammed the doors shut.

            When I turned back towards the oaks, I don’t know what I expected. Another tomboy with a shaved head, maybe, or another one of those prim girls who came in with mascara already streaking black down their cheeks.

            The girl standing there was neither. The oaks cast leaf-shaped shadows across her hair, her eyes, her mouth. I saw her in snippets: her dark skin, the way tears had rubbed her mascara off in flakes. Her curtain of black hair looked as though it hadn’t been combed in a week, and her eyes were the kind of blue that shot you right in the stomach. The hem of her dress swept the cobblestone.

            My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. It took a moment to detach it. “You’re the new girl?”

            Her throat bobbed in a swallow. “Yeah. Ophelie.” Her voice broke on the name. For my first two months at the school, the only person I spoke to was Blair; I had hated that feeling of my voice giving out, of it breaking like a wave on the rocks of my emotions. No else had deserved to see me that way.

            I took the stairs two at a time, sweat already beginning to slick the inside of my palms. She looked small in her dress—even the sleeves swallowed her. When I came closer, I saw that teardrops still clung to the tips of her eyelashes. “Well, welcome to hell,” I said. “I’ll be your guide.”

            Her eyes froze mid-blink. She pressed her lips together as though to keep it from trembling, her smile threatening to cave in at any moment.

            “I guess that’s one kind of greeting,” she said weakly.

            I stopped two paces from her. There was a vulnerability about the way she stood there, shoulders sloped in defeat, her duffel bag hanging loosely from one hand. Most girls came here already half-hardened. “Listen,” I said, glancing behind to make sure none of the Sisters had crept outside to eavesdrop, “once you get in there, it’s going to be nothing but rules and regulations and rulers slapped across your knuckles if they think you’re smiling wrong. If you want to cry, get it all out now.”

            The laugh she sputtered out dissolved into a sob. She pressed a fist to her mouth, twisting away from me. “Thank you,” she said. “God, I’m sorry. I appreciate it, really. I’m just such a mess. Look at me, dripping snot everywhere.”

            I pulled my tie out of its knot with practiced ease, and handed it to her. “I’ve always said that ties are just fancy nooses, but I’ll be damned if they don’t make excellent handkerchiefs.”

            Her eyes crinkled in a watery smile. Her fingers brushed mine when she took the tie from me, the tips of them still damp from tears. She turned her back to me, dropping her duffel bag to the ground and giving her nose a hearty blow into my necktie. “I’ll wash it for you,” she said. “Thank you. You’re being so nice to me and I don’t even know your name.”

            “Aoife.”

            “Aoife,” she echoed. She held each syllable in her mouth for a moment as though she was tasting them. The tips of my ears warmed. “Aoife, thank you so much; the ride here was miserable. My dad didn’t even come with me, he just paid a cabbie to help me with my luggage and everything. I need to go check in but I get so panicky when I’m by myself, and my sense of direction is horrible, and now I’m rambling, and it’s the middle of the day so you must have class-”

            “I’ll walk you,” I said. On a typical day, anything that would make Grandfather hum with contentment was something I kept myself fifty feet away from. Blair would say that it was because the compass of my heart always pointed self-sabotage, but this time it was more the bags under her eyes, the downturn of her lips when she’d said, “Stop messing up.” 

            I took Ophelie’s bag in one hand and turned. There was a flicker of red hair in the center’s gaping front window, a quick flash of Blair’s eyes. This is your last chance, they said.

*

A month in, it seemed to hit Ophelie that Grandfather offered a curriculum that was simultaneously spectacular-sounding to parents and spectacularly useless to those of us taking the classes. It was etiquette class in the morning, Ophelie’s fingers trembling uncertainly over the dinner and dessert spoons; a sermon before lunch; a class on the language of flowers at two o’ clock, pressing foxglove petals between our textbooks instead of reading them; and dance lessons after supper to wind down the day. “This is different than I thought it’d be,” Ophelie confessed in a murmur, her dark hair falling in a rope over her shoulder. She kept her eyes trained on Sister Damaris’s stretches and arched her back in a clumsy parody, the basin of her collarbones glistening with sweat.

I swallowed. “They want to teach us to be complacent,” I whispered. “Why do you think they aren’t making us crack open a Calculus textbook?”

           The fringe of her eyelashes fell to hood her eyes, a gravity settling over her features. Most of the girls sat cross-legged on the hardwood, defiance written in the way their hair cascaded freely down their backs. Earlier, Sister Damaris had caught Susanna Lee nibbling at a pastry stolen from the dining hall, and had dragged her by her hair to the bathroom. Ophelie’s eyes had gone wide in horror, and she had moved to follow, but I’d caught her by the wrist. “Don’t,” I’d said softly. “You don’t want to be on her radar this early in.”

            Now, after changing out of our dance attire—all of us ushered into separate stalls, Sister Damaris keeping a hawk-like eye on each one—Ophelie trailed after me as we all filed out into the hallway. “What happened earlier—is that a normal thing here?” she asked.

           “Normal as porridge for breakfast,” I said. “And lower your voice.”

           Her footsteps fell in time with mine. The heat of her wrist still tingled on the tips of my fingers, ghostlike, and in my peripheral I watched her hand swing dangerously close to mine. “It just doesn’t seem real that no one cares,” she muttered. “Does no one write home to complain? Does no one report it?”

           “Even if you could write home, would you?”

           “No.” It came out in a sigh. “Of course not. My dad would think I’m exaggerating, I think. Or just fibbing so I could come home.” Her voice hitched on the word. Ophelie had been assigned Aria Davis’s empty bed, and every night the bedframe shook with her sobs. Last night when her hand fell to dangle in my line of sight, I sat up to hold it until the shaking stopped. She had let me.

            “Exactly. ‘Discipline’ is something that’s marketed to parents straight away. They just conveniently leave out how far that discipline goes.”

            Her silence was pensive. The chatter of the other girls floated down from the other end of the hallway, echoing hollowly off the walls. Our shoulders brushed once too many times. “Aoife, how did you end up here? I’m sorry if that’s too-”

            “It’s not.” I cast a quick glance over my shoulder and grabbed her hand, hauling her into one of the side corridors. It spooled into the east wing’s courtyards. I kept to the shadowy alcove, the grass matted and parched underfoot. “This will be empty for half an hour, until Sister Tamara comes to do her rounds,” I said. “Just keep an eye out.”

            The sky had gone soft above us, watered down by the sunset. Her hand was hot in mine. I moved her into the shade of the wall, keeping her face shadowed. “How did you end up here?” she repeated.

            “I don’t know. I mean, I guess I do. The headmaster is my grandfather.” I watched the shock take root in her eyes. “I come from a long line of renowned professors. My mother teaches biomed and my father travels, teaching architecture. We lived in Canmere—up in the mountains—and there was always this pressure to be the best at everything. It came from everywhere: my mother, my teachers, my grandfather. I felt like I didn’t have room to breathe, and what was frustrating wasn’t that I felt like that, but that feeling like that wasn’t interesting. I felt like a walking teenage stereotype. And that made feeling that way even harder.”

            Her fingers curled into mine, gentle. I took a breath.

            “It’s a small town, and there were only a handful of ways to act out.” The words started to shake and I took a moment, sucked in a lungful of air through my nose. Counted to three. Started again. “My teacher spotted a lipstick stain on my collarbone. My mother found out, obviously. Flipped, because I was gathering bad press for her and my dad. And my grandfather had just started up his dream rehabilitation facility, so he figured, what better way to market it than saying he’d rehabilitated his own troubled granddaughter?” My shoulders jumped in a shrug that tried too hard to be nonchalant. “Got my sister dragged into it, too. They thought she’d had too much ‘exposure’ to me; that she’d turn out like me because of it. They just wanted to try out their ‘preventative measures’ ideology.”

            Tentatively, she reached up to wind her fingers through my hair, pushing the thick curls of it back behind one ear. I never knew it was possible to be so physically aware of a person. The last rays of sun made her hair gleam, dark as an oil slick. Her eyes were eclipsed in shadow.

            “My dad’s a pastor,” she said. “He travels too, advertising his book. His manager caught me with a girl.” It came out as a whisper, as though she was having to scrape the words from her throat. “All his signings got cancelled. There was this huge uproar. So he sent me here, because what better thing for a pastor to write about than his daughter being ‘coaxed back into the arms of God’?”

            The silence stretched heavy between us. Her hand still sat between the both of mine. It seemed like such a monumental thing, touching the skin of her palm like that. In my mind’s eye I could see myself lean into her in snippets: her mouth on mine, our teeth clicking. Her fingers curling against the bare skin of my knee. The pad of my thumb pressing hot against the skin above her waistband.

            I squeezed her hand, exhaling. “Thanks,” I said. I willed my voice not to shake. “It’s been a long time since I had someone I could talk to.”

                                                                         *

Blair wasted no time in cornering me the next morning. I was washing my pollen-coated hands in the west wing’s bathroom, the fractured mirror splitting my reflection into slices. In floriography class we’d pressed foxgloves again, and Sister Tabitha had talked about how they were used to both hurt and to heal. Ophelie had met my eyes from across the room, and, for the first time in years, my mouth had twitched into a smile.

            Blair scanned the stalls for feet before locking the door behind her. “Are you insane?” she said.

            I kept the water running, prying the soil out from under my nails. “What are you talking about?”

            “Yesterday,” she hissed. “Somebody saw you.”

Dread pressed its clammy hands against the back of my neck. “What are you talking about?” I said, quietly this time.

            In the dirt-streaked mirror, I watched her slam an open palm against the brick wall. Her reflection had twenty seven fingers; all five of her arms were shaking.

            “Susanna Lee is telling people that she saw you and Ophelie alone in the courtyard,” she said. I had never heard her wound this tight before—her voice was shaking like a coiled spring. “All over each other, she said. She was laughing about it in front of Sister Tamara.”

            I turned. She had pressed her mouth into a knife-sharp line, as though that would stop it from quivering. “So Grandfather knows?” Anxiety stripped my mouth dry.

            “Yes—no. Probably. He will soon.” She swiped at her eyes. “Aoife, do you hate me that much?”

            The words twisted something inside me, deep and sharp. “What?”

             “When they took Aria Davis away, I was there. I was the one that had to help the Sisters get her into the car. Grandpa—Headmaster—only cares about his success rate. If one or two girls ‘run away’ every few years no one will investigate; when Aria Davis’s parents came, he said that she was troubled, that she didn’t conform to the teachings here. And they believed him.” She blinked, and the first handful of tears escaped. “You need to get out of here.”

            I reached out and cupped my sister’s face for the first time in years. Her cheeks were wet to the touch. “Come with us,” I said. “Blair, come with me and Ophelie. We can go back to Canmere, back home—and if they won’t have us then we’ll figure our own way out. We just need to be anywhere but here.”

            Her eyes bored into mine, as though she was memorizing my face. Slowly, she lifted her hands up around my shoulders, pulling me into her. We leaned into each other stiffly, awkward from a lack of practice.

            “Take the path outside the east wing’s courtyard; they won’t be expecting you to know yet.” She pulled away from me, and the sight of her—brave and steadfast, with her unapologetic blue eyes and shock of red hair—hit me all at once. “I have access to every student’s schedules; I’ll track down Ophelie. Headmaster Ghormley is probably being notified right now.”

            I gripped her by the shoulders. I’m sorry for everything, I wanted to say, but the words stuck in my throat. “I’ll wait for you, okay?”

            The sink began to overflow. Waterfalls spilled out onto the floor, creeping towards our shoes. “I don’t forgive you,” she said, “but I don’t blame you for anything.” And opened the door.          

My heartbeat thundered in my ears. I didn’t look back; I took off running. My wet shoes slapped against the hallways floors, each step loud as a gunshot.

            When I reached the bunker, I emptied the pillow from my pillowcase. Crammed my spare uniform into it and raided the other girls’ mattresses for the food I knew half of them had stowed away. Knotted it off tightly.

            I cast one last look up at Aria Davis’s bed. Aria Davis, who no one had stood up for. Who no one had tried to save.

            “I’m sorry,” I whispered, and turned away.

            I kept to the shadows, my ears straining for any trace of voices or footsteps. The midday sun tracked me like a spotlight. Sweat slicked the length of my spine.

            By the time I got to the courtyard, my heart was thudding like a fist against my breastbone. My breaths came heavy. I pressed the case to my chest as though it could calm my heartbeat.

            “Aoife!”

            I whirled. Ophelie stood there, chest heaving, eyes wild. She barreled into me and I could feel her heartbeat pound against my chest. “Aoife,” she said again, “we have to go. They tried to take me away. Somebody must have seen us yesterday.”

            Ice-cold terror dumped itself over my entire body. “They tried to take you away?”

            Her eyes were red with tears. “Tried to drag me into a car.”

            “How did you find me? How did you get away?”

            She sucked in a deep, wavering breath, and the grief struck me before she even opened her mouth to say it. “A prefect got in the way and yelled at me to go find you,” she said. “The little one. The redhead.”

I never knew the school had an alarm until today. It rose up in a wail, breaking through the mid-afternoon fog.

            Grandfather and his lackeys were clustered outside the front doors. Ophelie and I crept out from the side path, her hand clammy in mine. Grandfather had his back to us, veined hands white around the peaks of Blair’s shoulders. She was turned towards us. One eye was swollen violet. 

            We stole towards the front gates—flung open, for the car—and each step was measured with held breaths. My head throbbed with fear.

            Blair kept speaking—I saw her mouth moving, rapid, forming tumbling apologies and excuses and misdirection—but her eyes flitted to rest on us, just briefly. One side of her bruised mouth lifted in the smallest of smiles.

            The air was thick with the promise of an oncoming storm. Clouds brewed overhead, darkening.  We veered off the gravel path outside the gates, through the fortress of trees, into the ocean of cornstalks.

            Ophelie glanced behind us, back at the school, at its looming gates and bleak brown walls.

            I kept my eyes turned upwards, towards the mountains. Some days I thought I could see Canmere: a white blip on the blue-gray of the mountains, half-receding into the clouds. Today I didn’t think it was impossible, that no matter how far away I was, I’d recognize it anywhere.