Against it, I feel like a stain.
A nasty little thing that shouldn’t be here. And if I had my way, I wouldn’t be.
The paint is gloss; my breath leaves a faint mist on it if I angle my mouth just right. It’s the only proof I have that I’m alive, that I’m really here. There is no texture on the walls except for the subtle waves where the paint thickened and dried wrong.
I have learned those waves like a reader learns the heartbeats between chapters. I know where one bulges like the knuckle of a fist, and where another thins like paper over flame. My fingertips learned those curves weeks ago when I was first shut away here.
There is a bed.
There is a chair.
There is a table that pretends to be a desk but has no drawers. There is a light panel that cuts across the ceiling and obeys someone else’s hand because there are no sockets, no switches, nothing for me to control. There isa door without a visible handle on my side. There is a camera set into the upper corner of the room, a black little bead embedded like a tick in plaster.
The air is so clean it hurts. It carries the faint sting of antiseptic and something medicinal, like the ghost of diluted bleach, as if this room is perpetually preparing for an injury that never arrives.
I sit on the bed with the sheet folded into a precise rectangle, the way Mrs Vale prefers. This is not because I care what Mrs Vale prefers I, it’s because I refuse to give her the gift of saying I’m sloppy and making me redo the whole thing again.
One thousand, four hundred and thirty-five days. That is the number that sits behind my eyes when I blink. One thousand, four hundred and thirty long or short, depending on how you count time, and then I’ll be twenty-one, the age of the auction block. The arithmetic of our empire is exact, the ledger of flesh impeccably tallied. I become no longer a thing in waiting but a trophy, a spoil of war bought and sold to the highest bidder.
I remember the world beyond the white; the luxurious expanse of my father’s houses, the marbled floors that drank the stride of our shoes, the rich red of the finest wines, and the glittering gold of power moving about my parents like flies. It’s the one I should be living in, the one I deserved to live in.
I sit purposefully, my back a staff, my chin level with the door, burying that rush of rage.
It does no good to think it, it does no good to feel it. Rage is useless now. Anger, bitterness, all emotions that in the end will do nothing but add to the maddening torture of my current existence.
There is a camera watching, and beyond the camera there is a woman watching the feed with what she claims is care, and what I know is counting. She counts how often I move, how long I sleep. How many ounces of water I drink by the calibrated glass, how many calories I accept, how many I leave.
I know beyond her there are others. Men, politicians, CEO’s, all of them Lords. All of them waiting just like I am until that clock finally strikes midnight, and I become the pumpkin whose flesh they can devour.
The camera clicks as it adjusts. I do not look at it.
“Miss Ratcliffe.”
The intercom’s voice is Mrs Vale’s voice made lightly metallic, like pouring tea through a sieve. I feel the vibration of her words in the air vent. I do not answer, and I do not move. She does not wait for me.
“It is time.”
The lilt of Mrs Vale’s voice is British by way of finishing schools. Her mouth is a perpetually thin line of disapproval. She has hair that could be called silver if silver did not imply softness, and glasses she doesn’t need, both for reading the screen and for seeing me. She puts them on when she wants to look like a headmistress in a bedtime story, the kind where bedtime is when you pray your stepmother won’t come.
The door opens with a wisp of noise, and all I can see beyond is more white. She is there in her grey suit, holding a tablet as if it were a hymn book.
I do not say good morning. Morning is a word you earn by seeing the sun. I haven’t seen the sun since I was locked away here. I haven’t seen the moon, or the stars, or anything to prove I am not actually dead and damned in purgatory already.
She eyes the bed and the sheet, and she makes that small hum when I pass the test.
“How are we feeling today?” she asks me, as if a plural could make the singular more manageable. We, as in you and me, as in my jailer and I. A pretend sisterhood drawn in powder, always ready to be blown away.
“Alive,” I say because I am, and because the word is a stone skipped across her lake. It will sink eventually, but while it arcs, it makes circles.
Her face does not show that she hates my diction, my composure. The way I do not pant, pace, gnaw or plead. She thrives on collapse, and I am a spoiled feast when I refuse to collapse.
She hates the way my mouth lifts at one corner.
She hates the way my hair refuses to be contained in their approved braid, an odd curl making a rebellion of its own near my temple. I see the way she wants to tuck it behind my ear, the way her fingers itch to do it whenever she stares atit. But she will not, because to touch me is to compromise the role she plays; that of the observer who is above the mess of sweating bodies and bleeding hearts.
There will be time for touch later, when my body will belong to someone willing to use their hands.
The tray comes after her. A boy wheels it in. He does not look at me. He is the kind they breed for this: smooth, immaculate, politely blank.
