The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls (23 page)

The next day, Victoria went to breakfast. She ate her egg casserole and all the meat bits, leaving only some grease behind. When she started following everyone to the classrooms, Mrs. Cavendish grabbed her arm and pulled her away.

“Oh no, Victoria,” Mrs. Cavendish said, tucking Victoria into a hug. “No class for you today.”

Victoria found Lawrence’s worried eyes and halfheartedly reached for him, but Mrs. Cavendish yanked her away. Then she kissed Victoria’s hair. “Don’t make me punish you any more than I already have to, Victoria.”

“Where are we going?” Victoria managed to say, her
throat dry. She tried to be brave, but they were going toward the hanger now, and every step made her want to throw up.

“Don’t be stupid. You know where we’re going.”

Tears formed. Victoria held them back. She might be afraid, but she wouldn’t let Mrs. Cavendish see her cry. “Again? But
why
?”

“Because I’ve seen your kind before,” said Mrs. Cavendish. She threw the hanger door open and shoved Victoria down the steps. “Nosy. Intrusive. Stubborn. You think you’re so special. Oh, Victoria. “ Mrs. Cavendish crouched down and pet her hair. “You’re finally going to learn some manners. You’re going to learn how to be quiet and
mind your own business
.”

Mrs. Cavendish shut the door. Victoria crawled to huddle beneath the hanger in the lightbulb’s glow. Silence filled the room, except for the sounds of all the roaches in the shadows, clicking and scuttling and waiting for the lights to go out.

“Une bestiole,”
Victoria whispered, plugging her ears. “A bug is
une bestiole
.”

A light came on in the far wall. Victoria squinted and saw shapes.

“Mother,” she gasped, jumping to her feet. “Father.”

She stumbled over to the wall with the window in it. Through the glass, she once again saw the blurred shapes of
her parents—bald head, bright head. She saw Mrs. Cavendish. She heard the muffled sounds of conversation.

“Let me out of here,” Victoria said. She started pounding on the window. Roaches scattered everywhere, dropping off the wall and plopping at her feet, waving their legs in the air. “Let me out! Mother!
Father!
I’m right here! Me, Victoria!
Let me out!
”

Once again, they didn’t hear her. She pounded and screamed till it hurt too much to keep going, crawled back to the lightbulb, and half slept through a few nightmares. Later, she woke up to dozens of buggy black eyes staring at her from inches away.

Once again, Mrs. Cavendish fetched her for supper. “And how was our day, Victoria?”

“It was fine,” Victoria mumbled. She tried to raise her head high, but for some reason that made her want to cry more, so she tucked her chin down, went to supper, and went to bed.

The next few days passed just the same—in the hanger, surrounded by piles of bugs, pressing her face to a dirty window, and calling for her parents. On the fourth day, she couldn’t scream anymore. She could barely drag herself to the window.

She heard voices.

“These interviews have gone well,” Mrs. Cavendish was saying. Victoria could hear her through the window—muffled, but easy to understand. “I’m
so
glad.”

“Us, too,” said Mrs. Wright.

Mr. Wright said, “
So
glad.”

Mrs. Cavendish held up a blur of papers. “I’ll send these home with you, then. Adoption is a complicated process, I’m afraid, but I’m sure you’ll manage.” She smiled. Even through the smeared window, Victoria could see her flashing white teeth. “Before you know it, you’ll have one of my dear, precious children for your own.”

Victoria sagged against the window. “What?”

Mr. Wright put his hand on Mrs. Wright’s shoulder. “We’ve always wanted a child.”

“A little girl, I think,” said Mrs. Wright, dreamily. “I’ve always wanted a little girl.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Cavendish, and then they were saying other things as Mrs. Cavendish ushered them out. Before she left, she turned to the window and smiled just for Victoria to see.

“But they
love
me,” Victoria whispered. “Don’t they?” She could not remember if they did or not.

She sank to the ground. It took her an hour to crawl back to the lightbulb because she kept stopping to cry and fall half asleep and wake back up with burning eyes.

“They’ve forgotten me,” she said dully, and fell asleep in the hanger’s shadow.

At supper, as always, Mrs. Cavendish fetched her. “And how was our day, Victoria?”

Victoria couldn’t say anything. It was too hard. Mrs. Cavendish laughed prettily, her smile stretching back into her shiny brown hair.

“Excellent!” Mrs. Cavendish said.

Victoria went to supper. She went to the girls’ dorm. She crawled into bed, stared at the ceiling, ignored Jacqueline trying to get her attention, and fell asleep. In her dreams, Mrs. Cavendish ate her parents for supper and made a piano out of their bones.

The next morning, she waited for Mrs. Cavendish to take her to the hanger again, but instead, Mr. Alice shoved Victoria toward the classrooms with the other children.

Victoria blinked in confusion but didn’t say anything. What was the point in saying anything? No one cared what she had to say. All her efforts toward perfection meant nothing. Her parents didn’t care about her and her trophies and honor rolls and awards. No one did. And without that, who was Victoria? Nothing. She was nothing.

She followed everyone to the classrooms, the birds in the gallery swooping and fluttering in the darkness overhead. Being nothing felt quite the same as being something. Maybe she had never been
something
at all.

When the birds’ wings flap, it makes the air stink
, Victoria thought. But she wasn’t disgusted or scared or angry. She just . . . was. She noticed things without caring.

Victoria looked up dully at the nameplate over the door of the first classroom they came to.
THE CLASSROOM OF ART
, it read.

Art
, Victoria thought. She took her seat.
Art is paintings and drawings and sculptures
, she thought. She took out the notebook and pencil from her desk and waited.

“Vicky,” Lawrence whispered from behind her. A hand nudged her shoulder. “Vicky, what’s wrong? What happened? Where have you been?”

There didn’t seem to be any point to answering Lawrence, and even if she had wanted to, Victoria couldn’t find the energy to do anything but wait with her pencil poised over her notebook.

“Vicky,
please
,” Lawrence said. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Victoria mumbled.

“Take your seat, Jacqueline,” Mrs. Cavendish said, standing at the front of the room, the black switch gleaming and curling in her hand. Jacqueline climbed up onto a high stool beside Mrs. Cavendish and sat facing a blank easel and an array of brushes and paints. Mr. Alice, smiling, stood on Jacqueline’s other side, his gloved hand at her neck. Grime covered him, like he’d just been out in the gardens.

Through her numb haze of thoughts about her parents and her desire to just go back to the dorm to hide, Victoria saw how pale Jacqueline was and how she held her mouth in a tight line.

“Whenever you’re ready, Jacqueline dear,” purred Mrs. Cavendish. She squeezed Jacqueline’s hand.

Jacqueline took a deep breath, picked up the widest paintbrush, and dabbed it in blue.

Victoria waited and stared at her blank piece of paper, her pencil ready for whatever notes Mrs. Cavendish instructed them to copy.

Smack!

Looking up without much interest, Victoria saw a reddening mark on Jacqueline’s painting hand. Mrs. Cavendish’s sharp eyes watched Jacqueline’s face.

“Careful, Jacqueline dear,” whispered Mrs. Cavendish, curling her fingers around the black switch in her hand. “That was a bit off, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Jacqueline. Smooth, pretty blue streaks covered the top part of the canvas. A tiny bump in the paint showed where Mrs. Cavendish had slapped Jacqueline’s hand. Jacqueline took another deep breath and started again, but not before Mrs. Cavendish clucked her tongue.

“Quite a sigh there, Jacqueline. I hope you’re not annoyed?”

“No, ma’am,” said Jacqueline. Her voice shone as prettily and inoffensively as her newly pretty hair.

Mrs. Cavendish drew two long, shining fingernails around her mouth, thinking. “Continue.”

Jacqueline did, painting quietly and carefully—except for when Mrs. Cavendish caught a brushstroke that was too bold, a color that called too much attention to itself. Whenever that happened, Mrs. Cavendish would flick out the switch to whip Jacqueline’s hand. After a few times, Jacqueline whimpered each time this happened. Her hand and wrist were turning red.

Victoria heard Lawrence growing restless behind her.

“She’s hurting her,” he whispered.

Well, yes, it does seem so
, Victoria thought. She shrugged.
That’s what happens in coaching
, Victoria supposed.

Lawrence made a small sound of disgust and pushed his desk as far back from Victoria’s as possible.

As Jacqueline continued to paint, Victoria let her eyes unfocus and watched the colors on the canvas grow. In her blurry vision, she noticed the exact same colors all around her. She blinked and focused her eyes again.

On the walls, covering the classroom windows (except for the window looking down into the hanger), on the ceiling, everywhere—were paintings. In fact, it was the same
painting that Jacqueline was working on now, over and over and over again. They all looked exactly the same, like they’d been run through a copier—a pretty gray house with smiling children in the windows, green trees, a blue sky, sunshine, flowers. It was a brighter, sunshinier version of the Home.

It was also perfectly boring—pretty, but boring. Victoria remembered the pictures Jacqueline used to draw all over her books and notes, and sometimes even on her own skin, while she sat hunched over in the back of class—monsters and dead people and dying things. They made Victoria uncomfortable if she looked at them for too long. These paintings of the Home were the exact opposite. They were very respectable. Victoria could imagine her father hanging a copy alongside all the other boring, respectable paintings hanging in the stairwell at home.

Victoria knew it must be difficult for Jacqueline to make herself do this over and over. But she couldn’t really bring herself to care that much. Thinking of her mother’s parlor made her feel even more dead inside. She slumped over in her seat and watched Mrs. Cavendish beat Jacqueline every time she moved her brush wrong or tried to add a bit of yellow to the trees this time, or a bird to the sky.

“Don’t you dare,” Mrs. Cavendish hissed. “Don’t you
dare
deviate from how I’ve told you to paint this picture,
Jacqueline. You must do exactly as I say.” Her lip curled. “There is no place for your ugliness here—not on your face, not on this canvas.”

Jacqueline began to cry. “I’m trying,” she was saying to Mrs. Cavendish. Mr. Alice tightened his hand on her neck. His giant, dirty hands left marks on Jacqueline’s pajamas. Jacqueline started to sweat and shake.

“I won’t have you ruining my pretty pictures,” said Mrs. Cavendish, slapping Jacqueline again. “Now finish. Correctly. Or would you like to go pay my little darlings a visit?”

Mrs. Cavendish glanced delicately over at the hanger window, where her “little darlings” swarmed in the shadows. A few of them traced sinister images on the glass with their feelers and jagged, pinching legs.

“No.” Jacqueline began sobbing.

“Well, then,” said Mrs. Cavendish, dragging her fingers through Jacqueline’s silky red hair. She found a frizzed knot and pulled till the hair ripped free. Jacqueline yelped, and Mrs. Cavendish’s lip curled. “I see you’ll need to be made over again soon.”

Jacqueline shook her head. “No, I—please, not that.”

“But isn’t it better to be beautiful?”

“I—”

“Careful, careful,” Mr. Alice said, laughing.

Little Caroline in her black braids, who shadowed Jacqueline everywhere, began to cry too.

“Yes,” Jacqueline said quietly. “It’s better to be beautiful.” Then she returned to her painting.

Mrs. Cavendish smiled. By the end of the coaching, Jacqueline’s hand was red and bleeding with welts from Mrs. Cavendish’s switch. They left her finished painting to dry at the front of the classroom. The last thing Victoria saw as they filed out into the hallway was one of the smiling girls in the windows of the painted Home. The girl had golden curls, just like Victoria’s.

This went on for days, weeks, hours. Victoria didn’t really keep track of the time.
But it can’t have been two weeks yet
, her brain reminded her every now and then,
because Lawrence is still here, isn’t he
? And at some point soon, he would be thirteen years old.

And then he would either leave or be . . . gone.

Sometimes when Victoria thought about this, fear jolted her awake for a second or two. But then something would remind her of how big the Home was, and how strange, and how her parents were replacing her, and how all of Belleville didn’t care about her or any of the other children, and how she was nothing and no one, and she would shrug and go quiet again. If she was nothing and no one, that meant the other
children here were nothing and no one, too, and it shouldn’t matter what happened to any of them. And it wouldn’t.

Every day, there was a new coaching, and everyone attended and watched.

Peter had been an embarrassment to his father because tall, pale, skinny Peter preferred his computer games to the outdoors, and Peter’s father had once been a football star. Mrs. Cavendish made him run lap after lap through the gardens till he lost all his color and passed out, time after time.

“Thank you for your patience, Mrs. Cavendish,” he said after Mr. Alice threw a bucket of ice-cold well water over him to wake him up. Peter was shivering and could barely stand up, and later that night, he lay awake with horrible cramps and cried into his pillow with the pain—but he didn’t show that to Mrs. Cavendish. He smiled adoringly at her and let her hug him close and kiss his forehead.