I dreamed that I’d aced all the upcoming exams, that my name flashed from the very top of the merit points chart. I’d crawled to the top of the rankings, and now I owned the school. Until Ms. West called me into her office and accused me of cheating and stealing points from other students…
I woke with a start, my forehead slick with sweat. My head lay across Ayaz’s bare chest. He wrapped his arms around me, holding me close, while the ratsscritch-scritchedabove our heads.
Ayaz slipped out early after planting one last, languid kiss on my lips. I lay in bed, curling my toes under the sheets and tracing the map of fire his lips had traced across my body. His opium scent clung to my skin and lingered in the air. As light from the high window pierced the room, I lifted the covers off my knees, noticing for the first time the damp patch on the sheets between my legs, speckled with a few droplets of blood.
Gross.
This was one of the things about sex they never told you in class.Great.Now I had this big wet patch in the middle of my bed. I used tissues to clean myself up as best I could, pulled on some jeans and Dante’s old basketball tank, took the tank off again because it felt weird for some reason, and shrugged on one of my rumpled uniform shirts instead, and gathered up my sheets.
There was a laundry chute on the dormitory floor, near Quinn’s room. Us scholarship students had to lug our linen up the stairs in order to send it down to the laundry. We didn’t get room service the way the rest of the student body did.
As I lugged the ball of sheets down the hall, students jostled me on either side. “Getting ready for your life of servitude,” Amber sneered as she elbowed me in the ribs. I didn’t dignify her with a response.
As I neared the chute, I noticed Andre was already there with a pile of his sheets, scribbling something on his pad.
“Are you a neat freak or something?” I grinned at him as I threw my sheets into the wide chute. “I just saw you up here the other day and…”
I remembered why guys might need to change their sheets all the time and snapped my mouth shut. Andre shifted his weight to his other foot. But his expression wasn’t one of embarrassment. He looked like he was trying to decide something.
“You okay, dude?”
Andre’s pen flickered across his pad. He handed me a note.
“Do you trust me?” he’d scribbled.
“Of course I do.”
Andre lunged at me, planting his huge hands on my shoulders. He shoved me with all his might. I slammed into the wall and toppled headfirst down the chute.
Chapter Thirty-One
I landed in a soft pile of white clouds. The smell of stale sweat and… other bodily fluids invaded my nostrils, followed a moment later by the overwhelming whiff of bleach and lemon.
I swam my arms through the mass of linen, fighting my way toward light and air. A heavy object flopped down beside me.Andre.He grabbed me under his powerful arm and dragged me to the surface. I gasped for breath as my head emerged from an enormous pile of dirty sheets, but the air around me was humid and stale.
“What did you do that for?” I demanded. Andre just kept on grinning as he swam to the side of the tub and pulled himself out.
I tried to put my feet down, but they were tangled in the sheets. Andre grabbed both my hands in his and dragged me out. I fell over the side and collapsed against him, grateful to be back on solid ground again.
I peered around me, trying to figure out where we were. I was only able to make out faint outlines through the haze of steam. My eyes stung from the bleach that permeated the air.
All around me were tubs of steaming water. Figures in grey smocks bent over the tubs, stirring them with large wooden paddles and rubbing the linens on wooden washboards. It looked like a literal sweatshop. Above the noise of sloshing water and gushing steam and wet fabric splashing was the constantscritch-scritch-scritchof thousands of rats swarming inside the walls.
“This is barbaric,” I yelled to Andre over the din. “There are industrial electric washing machines for exactly this reason.”
Andre tried to scribble a note. He got as far as, “Keeping them busy stops them from reb—” before the dampness ruined his pen. He shoved it into his pocket, shaking his head. He grabbed my hand and dragged me between the vats.
Already the bleach stung my eyes. I had to squint to see through the steam as Andre yanked me through a low door into another room. Bleach still clung to the air in here, but it was less noticeable. Instead of the oppressive heat of the washroom, frigid air from a vent on the far wall blasted the workers as they placed the sheets under a large steam press before folding and stacking them on a central stainless steel table. All of this under constant supervision from the rats in the walls.
Andre marched straight up to a girl who worked on the assembly line, folding sheets into neat squares. He took her hand in his, and I was shocked at how cracked and calloused her skin was. Andre pointed to me. The girl’s eyes widened, and she staggered back.
I recognized her. I was certain she was the girl Andre had been signing to at the Halloween afterparty. But I felt as though I’d seen her face somewhere else, in a photograph or something. I knew it was important, but I couldn’t connect the dots.
“It’s okay.” I tried to give her a reassuring smile. Andre shook his head at me and I quickly wiped the smile away. Smiling wasn’t really in my repertoire. “I promise I won’t hurt you. I’m Andre’s friend. You like Andre, don’t you?”
Andre turned her head towards him, gesturing in a series of hand signs in front of her face. She slapped his hand down and made her own signs in return. I could tell from the few signs Andre had taught Greg, Loretta, and I that this was not ASL. It was an altogether different language.
The pair of them signed back and forth, before Andre turned to me, shrugging his shoulders as if to say, “she’s all yours.”
