“You can report me,” says Proserpina, “and I can report your improper attitudes and behavior toward me.”
“My what?” says Miss Havisham, in honest surprise.
“How else,” says Proserpina, “would I be able to draw your tattoo?”
Miss Havisham stares for a moment. “Is this how you see everyone who’s kind to you?” she says quietly. “Your classmates, who adore you, and your Radiane, and that little fox Iala. Does every one of us have a use?”
Then the shame building deep in Proserpina’s belly becomes painfully physical, and she sits down with her boy’s shirt ripping in one tight fist.
She reenters the main wing as if she still has a lookout, like every other night; which of course she doesn’t.
“Miss Macnair.”
Flat of foot and red of hand, Proserpina considers her tactical options. She can probably outrun Miss Havisham: this is at best a stall. She can open with a jab to “thanks to an eyewitness” plexus, followed shortly “all hours of the night” and a right hook, which should finish things up “explain your behavior?”
Frowning in thought, Proserpina suddenly realizes she’s expected to answer.
“Oh,” she says, “no, but I do have the other thing. Er, blackmail?”
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
“No, not tonight.”
“Oh please! Black Jack Sullivan? And the Dooley Kid!”
“I have a nurse’s appointment.”
“It’s nearly evening,” says Proserpina blankly.
“It’s a…” Radiane smooths her dress. “Whatsit. Woman. Thing.”
Proserpina thinks about her dreams and doesn’t push it. She just goes to the closet in the abandoned wing, dresses down and goes to the fight alone. It doesn’t occur to her that she could be in danger; and indeed she gets nothing more than a nod and a shoulder-squeeze from the man at the gate. The whole night is quite routine.
Which is how she gets caught.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
In the abandoned wings there’s no one around to notice the smoke, and anyway, it’s actually outside on the stone stoop. Proserpina sits just in the doorframe. In her hand is a crude haft, bound to the same sewing needle with which she once made sock-bunnies for crying girls. She waits until the fire’s heat turns it opalescent.
She bares her forearm. She drags the hot needle through ashy blue ink, and jabs three times.
Then she throws it aside, claps her hand over the broken skin and says some words she picked up watching boxers, because it really hurts.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
“It’s not really appropriate discussion for someone your age,” Miss Havisham says.
Proserpina just waits.
“Very well, if you insist,” says Miss Havisham. “But I’m not undoing my bodice again: I’ll trace it. Here.”
Proserpina watches her finger. “Where did you get it?” she asks.
“A harbor town on the far side of the world.” She shakes her head. “Quite a lifetime ago. Your lifetime, nearly.”
“Is it like a brand?”
“Hardly! The King of England has tattoos, you know.”
“Miss Greenbrier says the Romans tattooed escaped slaves.”
“We’re women, Proserpina,” says Miss Havisham tiredly. “To what else do we aspire?”
The first time Proserpina explicitly notices one of her teachers is during choir practice. She herself is an unspectacular alto (Iala, by popular acclaim, first soprano; Radiane doesn’t sing).
The teacher in question is Miss Havisham, their choirmistress, nearly thirty and prone to occasional lectures on Liberation about which the school administration probably should not know. The way she attracts Proserpina’s notice is a simple, straightforward sobbing breakdown. Iala’s contingent bustles into comfort formation, and soon all is right again; but when she loosens her bodice to breathe more easily, Proserpina spies the blue point of a tattoo between her breasts.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
“Again, from your left,” says Proserpina. “You saw what that Pole did at the match last week–he had just one little routine, pop pop swish crack, but all he had to do was reverse it and the other man was flummoxed. You’re better than that.”
“Give me a moment, can’t you?” Radiane pants. “I already had field hockey practice today, and it’s harder from this side.”
And Proserpina almost pauses, remembering her father, and her left hand tied behind her back as she wrote shaky As.
“There’s no hugging under Queensberry rules,” she says shortly, and Radiane blushes and scowls.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Dacelo’s handwriting tilts as it advances, like a man on a drunken boat, until by the ragged right edge it’s nearly horizontal. It always starts again straight and tall on the next line, though. It speaks to Proserpina of an endlessly misplaced optimism.
He spells everything right but misplaces the ends of his adverbs; his stationery is scented, filched from a woman’s desk. Proserpina remembers the absence of his mother at their dinner together.
She folds the letter and slips it under the lining of the chest at the foot of her bunk. Very sincerely, he says in closing. Your servant.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
This is school: Latin and Greek, deportment and dressage, the lineage of the House of Wettin. They learn to waltz with each other and how to address a Duchess. They learn which fork to use.
Proserpina and Radiane sneak out in boys’ clothes to watch the fights, and Proserpina vomits the first time she sees a man’s blood drooling through his mustaches. Radiane doesn’t. They go again and again, and on the nighttime walk back they talk out every step. Did you see his feet, they say. Did you see how he fell apart as soon as he touched the ropes?
Thursday, November 15, 2007
“But he was being coy,” Proserpina will muse to Iala at the start of the new semester, “and he wasn’t just there about Father’s holdings. He’s in a different kind of business altogether.”
Iala wrinkles her face. “You really think he wanted to marry you? To his son?”
“Only as a short-term goal,” says Proserpina absently, “he wants something else in–” She stops and blinks. “Wait, do you think it’s improper? It’s not unusual to plan these things.”
“It’s not that–he’s from down there.”
“The world’s getting smaller.” Proserpina’s smiling now.
“I’ll wager he killed someone,” says Iala darkly.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
