The Story Sisters (13 page)

A
T LAST THEIR
parents came back. They got inside, bringing the damp and cold with them, not speaking. They slammed the car doors shut. Alan turned the key in the ignition. There was
nothing to say anymore. It was the last time they would all be together. Alan saw his daughters less and less frequently after that, and they never reached out to him. When they did see him, they would always be reminded of this day when he cried as he started up the car, sorry not for them, or for Elv, but for himself.

“If you’d been stricter with her, none of this would have happened,” he said to their mother.

Annie didn’t answer, and the girls didn’t blame her. She still had bramble scratches on her face from chasing through the woods after Elv. She had lost ten pounds without trying. Claire and Meg stayed where they were, on the floor of the car, as they drove away. They were too old to be acting so childishly, sixteen and fourteen, as tall as grown women. Ordinarily their mother would have insisted that they wear their seat belts, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t even seem to notice they weren’t in their seats.

It was bumpy going on the rutted driveway, but as soon as they turned onto the paved town road the ride was smoother. The car twisted through the mountains, went past the town, then reached the highway. Claire leaned her head against the seat; she nearly fell asleep. It rained and rained, and then it stopped. They had been driving for a long time. All day. Alan pulled into the parking lot of a diner. The sandwiches Annie had made were ruined, soggy after so many hours in the cooler. Nobody wanted them. By then the light was fading and even the red leaves looked dark. All four got out of the car. Anyone would have thought they were a family. The wind was blowing and Annie was still shivering.

“Let’s have hot chocolate,” Alan suggested.

They were exhausted and cold. They couldn’t wait to get out of New Hampshire. None of them had eaten, not even breakfast, and their stomachs growled. Their father didn’t know that Claire
and Meg didn’t like hot chocolate anymore. He didn’t know the first thing about them. They had started drinking coffee. They were old enough for that now. They smoothed down their hair, their coats.

“What happens next?” Claire asked her sister. She could still feel her throat closing up. Her loneliness was like a black stone she couldn’t swallow.

They were walking behind their parents. They had no idea where they were, if it was a town or just a spot on the map no one had ever heard of. The diner had a blue neon sign that looked like rain on a black road.

“Don’t ask,” Meg said.

W
HEN
E
LV WOULDN’T
calm down, they put her in a straitjacket for thirteen hours. She should have been released after seven, but the shifts changed and she was forgotten in the behavior room. The nurse on duty who found her apologized. She said it would never happen again. Surely it wouldn’t if Elv had anything to do about it. She knew how to mind her manners until she could get free. After that initial incident, she was so quiet anyone would have guessed she was calm, quite well behaved. She had good reason to appear so: The buckles from the jacket had left marks in her skin. She understood iron. She knew what sort of marks rope could leave. When she refused to eat, they threatened to force-feed her. She quickly accepted their bread. She was a quick learner. What happened once would never happen again. She grew quieter and quieter still, crouched in Arnelle, biding her time.

The doctor who examined her gave her Tylenol for her ribs. He said that if she wanted to behave so poorly, there would be consequences. She went to the room she was assigned and didn’t
complain, not about her ribs and not about the cold linoleum floor or the little black bugs that skittered away when she turned on her bathroom light. She approached everyone and everything with caution. She felt anxious, panic-stricken, and often woke from her dreams gasping. She’d been betrayed and tricked, but she wouldn’t let them destroy her. The same thing had happened to the new Queen of Arnelle. The old dying Queen had warned her to trust no one. To never once shut her eyes. Betrayal was quick, sharp, unexpected. One of her sisters was jealous and petty, the other was kindhearted but weak. They had joined forces with the human world. Elv had come to despise faeries, those simpering backstabbing creatures. The story had changed, and so had her allegiance. She realized now that there was a grave distinction between a demon, who was a pure dark spirit not unlike herself, and a goblin, a human with an evil heart. As the new Queen she chose to recruit demons. They alone were powerful enough to come to her aid, unwinding the black vines used to tie her beneath the stump of a chestnut tree.

She made certain to adhere to the Westfield rules. She didn’t mouth off to the guards or the counselors or whatever they were supposed to be. She sat through group therapy and pretended to listen. Sometimes she even spoke, tentatively, not giving too much away. All the while she let herself wander more deeply into Arnelle. What was a demon but a lost soul, one that had been forced to use his skills to survive? She found sanctuary among them, escaped from the vines that tied her, ran far into the woods. She found a garden of black roses there, the perfect place to hide from faeries and goblins and humans alike.

Before long Elv was able to be in both places at once. It was a great triumph and an even greater relief. She was able to speak to a teacher and at the very same time be in the black garden. She made an Arnish promise, one she planned to keep. She would get
through this, then she would make them pay for what they’d done to her. She and the demons would take back Arnelle from the rebels who were after her still. The faeries and their human coconspirators were scooping up demons in butterfly nets, then releasing them into the waking world, in New York City, in Paris, right there in the New Hampshire woods. Each of these demons had been betrayed just as she had, cast out and reviled. Each one was utterly alone.

The brochure said Westfield was a therapeutic school, but as far as Elv could tell, it was simply a holding tank for spoiled, drug-addicted brats with personality disorders. Most of the students came from middle-class families. Those who did not were there via court orders that ensured that the state or county or town where they’d lived would pay the academic fees. By the end of the first month Elv had come to understand the school’s philosophy. They swiftly broke you down until you were nothing. They destroyed you, then built you back up again. Only they did it their way, the Westfield way. What they wanted were clones, people without minds of their own who had the Westfield agenda imprinted on their souls. They hammered at people, tearing them apart in therapy groups. During the first month, Elv had a piece of cardboard strung around her neck that proclaimed
I AM A LIAR
. She had told a teacher she had missed class because she felt feverish, but when her temperature was taken it had been normal. Well, she’d hated that class. And if she was a liar, at least she was good at it. They’d have to do a whole lot more than dangle a sign around her neck if they wanted to humiliate her. Thankfully, she wasn’t in the group with the therapist who insisted his patients strip naked and stand in a circle so they couldn’t hide their inner selves. They would have had to tear her clothes off, and even then she wasn’t about to reveal anything.

E
LV HAD HEARD
about the worst Westfield technique from her one and only ally, Michael. Michael came from Astoria, Queens; he’d dodged jail time for car theft in exchange for a year at the school. For those students who didn’t improve and continually refused to cooperate he told Elv they did something called blanketing. They wrapped you up and wouldn’t let you move for hours, no matter how you might struggle, until at last you were reborn with a fresh, compliant ego. It was meant to be a rebirthing, but it was total control. Sometimes they held you immobilized for hours. If Elv had thought the straitjacket was bad, Michael said, this was a thousand times worse. When you could barely breathe, when you were choking on your own fury and bile, you had no choice but to give in. That was the way in which you were converted to their world.

Demons were said to be cruel, but a demon would never have been so brutal as this. A demon merely called you by name, threw his arms around you, whispered his plight, understood yours, then took you for his own. The extent of human cruelty continued to amaze Elv. If you wanted to survive in this place, you had to let them think you had given in. The harder you fought, the harder they broke you. You had to hide yourself away. She understood that. She had once talked a goblin into setting her free. She had spoken so sweetly he had untied the ropes, turned his back on her, left her alone to fetch her a cup of water. The window was open. Even at the age of eleven she had known that there were no second chances.

F
OR THE FIRST
three months Elv had level-one privileges—no phone calls or visits. She was given latrine duty, meant to break her down. It was filthy, disgusting work. She didn’t complain.
She wasn’t going back to solitary under any circumstances. Every day she took a mop and a pail of soapy water and did her job. There were beetles in the bathrooms. Elv was supposed to kill them with bug spray, but she let them live. She wished she could slip them into envelopes and mail them to Meg.
Thank you for betraying me
, she would write on her note. She was a fairy-tale girl, scrubbing away at the first break of light, but she had fur and teeth and wings. She didn’t mind getting up at five thirty. She loved the dark blue color of the sky at that hour. She treasured the feeling of being alone in the world.
You’ll be repaid for what you’ve done to me
.

The girls at Westfield didn’t like Elv. She wasn’t surprised. People were jealous and petty and mean. She didn’t care what they thought. She was already alone. When a volatile girl named Katy came after her, calling her names, shoving her, it was hard for Elv not to fight back, but she stuck to her plan. Play them all and you had a better chance of getting what you wanted. Let the person in power think you were on their side.

“Did anyone ever tell you you were a bitch?” Katy said. She’d had it in for Elv ever since Elv had suggested she had an anger management issue during group therapy.

Elv had already decided that the more trouble Katy made, the better off she herself would be. When Elv turned to walk away, Katy grabbed a glass vase on the reception table and slammed it into Elv’s head. There would only be plastic vases allowed after that. The glass shattered into hundreds of jagged pieces. For weeks afterward tiny star-shaped bits of glass were swept up.

When the counselors ran into the room to separate the girls, anyone could clearly see Elv was the victim. Shards from the vase were threaded through her hair, where they shimmered like beads of ice in a thin trail of blood. Her face was pale. Her eyes
closed. She was in the garden in Arnelle as they carried her to the nurse’s office.
Reveal nothing, say nothing, and you’ll get what you want in the end
.

Katy was immediately transferred to solitary. Elv, on the other hand, was released from latrine duty. She wanted to jump up and cheer. Instead she said “Thank you” in a solemn, soft voice. “I’m grateful for your trust and support.” She had the language of self-help down pat. In group therapy, she told sorrowful stories that shocked everyone. It felt as if she was lying even if it was the truth, how she’d been fed bread and water, how he’d tied her down. When she cried, her tears were made of glass. They broke in half when they fell to the floor. No one noticed; they thought they were real. As if she would ever cry over what had happened.

The staff began to like her, she could tell. They pitied her. They thought she’d been treated unfairly at home, that she’d came from a dysfunctional family of divorce and shared secrets and was trying to reclaim her life. She was a model student and had soon won over her teachers. She attended all of her classes, even though they were a waste of time. All you had to do was show up and you’d pass. Westfield wanted to boast that 100 percent of enrolled students earned a high school diploma, even if no one learned anything. It was all a big show for the parents.

Soon Elv was granted permission to walk around the grounds. She searched for the robin’s bones, those glinting opalescent shards, but too many leaves had fallen. She couldn’t find a single one. She lay down in the leaves and listened to her name being called by those below. She hated herself for crying, even if they had been false tears. Right here, right now, she intended to give up all of her human traits. They had gotten her nothing. They’d gotten her here. In Arnelle, she was the one who freed demons
from the nets that trapped them. She was known as their savior. In their world, she mattered. In their world, she was a queen.

E
LV’S MOTHER SENT
a present at Thanksgiving—a black cashmere sweater.
Now that the weather is getting cold
, Annie had written. Was she kidding? She never wanted to know the truth about anything. She wanted to believe everything was just fine—no skin and bones, no goblins, no rules. Students weren’t allowed to wear their own clothes at Westfield. Elv gave the sweater to Julie Hagen, the counselor in charge of job assignments. Elv couldn’t have anything but the ugly jeans and green T-shirt everyone was forced to wear. What did it matter? She might have been trapped in Westfield, but she was hiding out in Arnelle. She picked up the fragrance of hypnotic black roses as she walked down the corridor to the cafeteria. She could feel her wings emerging through her skin, feather by feather, bone by bone. She hadn’t expected it to hurt so much.