Punished

13. Anne-Risten

ANNE-RISTEN

1954

Anne-Risten heard his footsteps outside the dormitory; she had learned to recognize the sound and knew he thought he was sneaking around in perfect silence. Why weren’t they allowed to lock the door? Why couldn’t Housemother hear the creaking if she heard every other little noise?

Anne-Risten’s bed was near the window, a bad spot because it was drafty in the winter. She almost always had a runny nose and sore throat. Even though she slept in Enná’s thick knitted socks, she was never warm enough. But right now she was glad to be farthest from the doorway Nilsa had just slipped through. She didn’t dare move, but she wanted to throw herself into Else-Maj’s bed. He was like a scary shadow. The moon was out tonight, but that didn’t scare him off. She squinted and saw him heading for Laila, one of the older girls. Why didn’t she cry for help?

Nilsa bent down and moved his hands along the blanket. And underneath. It was hard to see, but Anne-Risten thought Laila sat up and tried to hit him. He laughed, then ran off, waking up more girls who pulled their covers higher up over their chests in fright. Now he would brag to the other boys, saying he had touched boobies.

The big girls went over to Laila, who was sobbing.

Anne-Risten ran a palm over her nightgown and flat chest. She was so thin that she could feel her ribs through the fabric. But no boobies. She never wanted to be like Laila. If they started to grow, she would wrap them tight, hide them. Her heart beat fast beneath her fingertips, and her chest felt constricted, as though it were already bound. Was that dangerous? And why were her ears pounding? She could even feel an alarming pulse swelling in her belly.

Beside her, Else-Maj had woken up. “Was that Nilsa again?” she whispered.

“Juoa.”

Else-Maj, who was eleven, should be getting boobies any day now. But she was small, almost as short as Anne-Risten even though they were three years apart, and she didn’t look like someone who would grow breasts soon. Twelve-year-old Laila looked like a grown woman with breasts and a round bottom. Nilsa’s hands were there as often as he could make it happen. None of the grown-ups noticed. How could they not notice?

Anne-Risten was sometimes paralyzed by this feeling of being completely abandoned, that there was nowhere to turn. If only Anna slept in the building, Anne-Risten could have slipped over to seek comfort. But the only adult there was Housemother, and she hated the children, wanted them to suffer. She didn’t care about Anne-Risten when she was sick, either. That was the worst part, getting sick at school and crying silently for Enná.

Anna had helped her call home once last spring, when her throat felt unusually thick, almost as if she were suffocating. She had cried to Enná on the phone, saying she would probably stop breathing overnight. Because of this, a doctor had come to look at her, but he said she was telling tall tales, crying wolf when nothing was wrong. But when Anne-Risten opened her mouth wide and stuck her tongue way out, she could see for herself that her throat was bright red and swollen on each side of the little dangly thing in the middle. When the doctor prodded the lymph nodes in her neck she squeaked with pain, but he didn’t seem to care. Housemother had been angry, of course: calling for the doctor when you weren’t really sick! After he left, she hauled Anne-Risten out of the dormitory and shoved her up against the wall in the corridor, threatening her with the switch between clenched teeth. But instead she took a firm grip on Anne-Risten’s hair and yanked. Her scalp burned like fire, and the shock of it made her moan aloud. When Housemother let go, she flapped her hand in disgust to shake off the strands of hair. Anne-Risten wanted to touch her scalp to see if it was bleeding, and she couldn’t stop staring at the tufts of hair on the floor.

“Ann-Kristin will go to bed without her supper,” the witch had snapped.

Ann-Kristin. She had a hard time getting used to that. Teacher was the one who had given her a Swedish name, or, at least, had used it during roll call. She had no idea who’d changed her name in the enrollment records. Several children had been surprised and offered a hesitant “here” when their Sámi names were distorted to fit in at the nomad school.

“That’s you,” someone had whispered to Anne-Risten, who’d sat in silence after Teacher, annoyed, repeated “Ann-Kristin.” But my name is Anne-Risten, she wanted to protest. Yet she was forced to say “here” and in doing so had accepted that she was now a different person.

Laila stopped crying at last and the girls padded back to their beds.

“I hate Nilsa,” Anne-Risten whispered to Else-Maj.

“Everyone hates him.”

“Can I move my bed closer to yours?”

“Are you crazy? They’ll hear it all through the building.” She turned over in bed. “Now go to sleep.”

“Can’t we talk for a little bit?” Anne-Risten so desperately wanted the anxious buzzing in her head to go away. She wanted to ask if Else-Maj was thinking about Sara, still at home after having the mumps. She wanted to know what Sara’s throat had felt like. It had looked so scary, with her face all swollen.

Her fingers slipped over the lymph nodes on her neck and she cleared her throat. Maybe she had the mumps too. Her throat felt thick again. She threw the covers off even though it was cold, and opened her lips so she could breathe through nose and mouth both. What if her throat closed overnight? The thought made her gasp for air.

“Else-Maj,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”

No response. No, there was no help to be had anywhere. In the morning, the other girls would find her cold and dead in her bed. What if it really happened this time?