19 THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE
19
T HE C YCLE OF V IOLENCE
Finch, Caroline, and I were the last of us left on campus at the end of the semester. The camaraderie of fall break was nowhere to be found—while Finch and Caroline had inched away from wanting to kill each other, they were still tense anytime they found themselves in the same room. The Manor was mostly empty. Finch gave Amrita a ride to the airport; she’d spend the next week in North Carolina collecting photos of her new niece to share. Saz would be gone for two—her flight to London had left before any of us had even started to pack. In two days, I’d fly back to Virginia.
Rotham took on a deathly quiet—the woods spindly and eviscerated, the promenade blanketed in snow and salt. It was the three of us, the remaining Banemast staff, and a few international students. I wanted everyone back the moment they left, but it was also nice to share the Manor with only Caroline. After our mutual distress in Kolesnik’s classroom, I liked being able to keep an eye on her.
Still—there was something clawing at Caroline that she clearly hadn’t fully admitted to me. I never saw her return to Slatter, but she continued to talk to herself through our wall. The timbre was too low to ever make out the words, just a constant hum. We spent a day in Grainer together, though when I left to find something for dinner, she just promised me she’d meet me later. I left her sitting on the floor of her studio and staring at the painting nailed to her wall—her back to me, knees pulled to her chest, T-shirt strained over the prominent knobs of her spine.
And over those last isolated days, I found that Caroline was saving her hair. I stepped into the shower early in the morning when the sun was only fingers of light beyond the bathroom window, and discovered swirls of shed hair plastered to the tiles where she’d gathered and left them to dry. Against the gleaming white, they looked like runes. Symbols of a darker intention. Or she was just a forgetful slob and she’d left them for eventual cleanup.
I wanted to believe in the latter. But the festering fear inside of me wouldn’t be banished. I kept seeing things out of the corners of my eyes everywhere in the Manor. It took me hours to fall asleep—there was an insect in my room that just wouldn’t die and the pervasive smell of something chemical that made me lightheaded. Everything I touched in the studio seemed to turn to waste beneath my hands. I’d finished several paintings in a row, only to wet a rag with turpentine and wipe them clean again, solvent burning my nose with every inhale.
On the last day before break, I met Finch in the library for our final shift of the semester.
She arrived at work before me to make up for the shift she’d missed the other night. I awaited a text—something full of horror telling me that they smashed the display case where the Boar King’s suit used to live, there’s glass everywhere, you were the last person seen downstairs. But nothing ever came. And when I arrived at the archives again, the case was perfectly normal, the Boar King’s stand still an empty white pillar.
Finch never went home if she could help it. Her parents lived forty minutes from Rotham—she told me she’d make the drive on Christmas Eve and come right back the next day. She didn’t want to spend any time away from the studio.
“You should stay too,” she coaxed as she leaned over the desk. It was still piled high with materials that the two of us were meant to catalog—there had been a rush of last-minute returns that morning, Rotham’s least reliable students rushing to avoid the late fee that would come with film equipment sitting in their dorm rooms. “You can come home with me if you want Christmas dinner and everything, though I can’t promise the food won’t be shitty.”
I clicked around a spreadsheet and pretended to be intently focused. The library basement emitted a bone-deep cold, and the hand I kept on the mouse trembled. Finch raised her eyebrows when I shivered. “Okay, it won’t be that shitty,” she said, but I just laughed and rubbed my hands up and down the sleeves of my hoodie.
“My parents would kill me,” I answered, though I wasn’t sure if that was even true. They hadn’t thrown that big of a fit over fall break, despite our subsequent calls being a little tense and even less frequent. They would likely be disappointed if I stayed again. But they were disappointed even when I did return home. I was never there long or often enough. Something about going back reduced me to a child again, unequipped for the expected role.
Finch didn’t answer. I could tell she was disappointed, too, though that lit a different sort of fire in me. I was buoyed by her apparent desire for my company. I imagined a Christmas with her. The two of us curled in her twin bed, acutely aware of all the places we didn’t touch. I’d been to her parents’ place once, back when we were sophomores and we decided to thrift some frames to make collages with. Finch claimed there were a ton of spots by her childhood home where we could find cheap options, so we piled into her car and let her lead the way. The whole time, all I could do was imagine her growing up alone—her brother and sister more than a decade older and already building their own families by the time she was a teenager, her mother overly polite and reserved and her father a distant force. It made me too sad, even then, when we were still new to each other. The house had no life, save for the relic of her room. There were still magazine clippings stuck to the walls with clear tape. Alternative Press and Paramore , Manic Panic jars scrubbed clean and stuffed with colored pencils, early self-portraits where she was scrappy and frowning, fragments of poems she loved, like the Emily Dickinson one that I’d also memorized as a kid. I pictured her reading it—her rough voice softened by youth, hair chin-length and mousy, mouth unbraced. I imagined how her recitation might ignite something in my heart. How I might come to believe that hope really was the thing with feathers.
Spending Christmas there would be like witnessing a version of Finch that neither of us wanted to unearth. I knew she’d only invited me to be nice. Still. In the darkest recesses of my hope, I wanted to fall asleep on her shoulder in a childhood bed, sharing her dreams.
But beyond that, I wanted to know that by staying at Rotham, I was one of the few willing to make a sacrifice. That, like Finch, I would give up my holiday again, and my family, all in favor of toiling away in the studio until the overhead lights shut off for good. As alluring as the idea was, the logical part of my brain hoped that leaving campus might be the reset I needed.
“I’ll try to come back early,” I said instead when she didn’t answer my first deflection. Finch fell back into her seat with a shrug and started to tap away at her laptop. Somehow her iced coffee had melted—I couldn’t imagine how, or why she’d picked iced in the first place in this frigid room—but she sipped it as if it were fresh and went back to her work.
When I returned to the Manor that evening, raised voices cascaded down the stairs. I hesitated in the kitchen, listening. Caroline’s was sharpened to a point—it sparred with her mother’s piercing tone and had me immediately turning to face the back door, considering if I should try to slip out unnoticed. I always tried to hide in my room when the Asters arrived, and I had missed my opportunity to disappear. They were already coming down the stairs and still arguing the whole way.
“You look malnourished,” Mrs. Aster said, her heels clicking like a tongue against teeth. “Normally I like it when you thin out, but you look drug addled.”
“You know how to give a compliment.”
Caroline led the way down the stairs and spotted me hovering in the doorway. Her face softened, an apology. “Mom, you remember Jo,” she said as they descended.
Mrs. Aster gave me a polite smile. Her eyes landed somewhere other than my face, distant and removed. “Right, hi. Caroline, I’ll meet you in the car. Please don’t take longer than five minutes.”
I stepped out of her way. The door closed with a polite click, and Caroline reached for me. The hug she pulled me into was too tight, a staked claim and a desperate plea, her fingers a vise where my T-shirt collar met my neck. “Don’t make me go with her,” she mumbled against my hair. “She asked me if you and I were fucking after she saw your sweatshirt on my desk. And when I said no, she asked if you were the one giving me drugs.”
The idea made me flush red. “Did you tell her that you’re the one always corrupting me?” I offered, hoping to hear her laugh. She rewarded me with one.
“Bitch. Maybe I won’t share my drugs with you anymore, how about that?”
It probably would have been a smarter promise. Temptation consumed me, the longing to filch every substance from her room and flush it away, leave us unaffected and alive.
Instead, I said, “You love me too much to follow through with that,” and she just squeezed tighter, exhaling one long breath as Mrs. Aster laid on the horn where she’d parked her sleek black car in front of the Manor. Caroline’s stiffening traveled across her body, echoed through me where we were connected.
“Yeah,” she murmured, “I do.”
The flight home left me delirious, some other girl’s body shuffled through South Bend’s airport. My dad picked me up when I landed and drove the hour and a half it took to get us back home. I rode the whole way with the window rolled halfway down, and he only chided me about it once, giving up with a smile he tried to hide when I admitted I just wanted to smell the air. There was snow on the mountains. The world held that frosty scent of wet earth. It was warmer than Indiana but freezing for Virginia, and the cold was different, smokier and heavier as we twisted down I-81. The interstate gave way to two-lane highways, everything endlessly perse, the houses tucked away in the hills decked out in mismatched Christmas lights—mostly the kind my mom hated, multicolored bulbs clashing against gold clashing against Technicolor blue.
I was the last to arrive. The rest of the house was already asleep. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve, and Caleb had driven in from his school the day before. My room was given to my grandmother, which left me with the couch. The living room smelled of laundry. The decorated tree cast the only light. A blanket draped over the back of the couch boasted the insignia of Caleb’s university, all maroons and golds. There was nothing in the house signaling Rotham’s existence, save for a photo of me and my parents on the mantel posing in front of Lysander Gate from my first move-in. The sight of it was unbearable. I wanted to turn right back around. I wondered if my women felt the same way—wanted to know where they were now, if Caroline and her mother had fought more, if Finch was alone in her apartment feeling as lost as I did.
“Let me know if you need anything,” Dad said, giving my shoulder a squeeze before he ascended the stairs to their bedroom.
My first year at Rotham, I used to call my mom at all hours of the night, stomach tossing with anxiety. I had dreams of fire erupting in the kitchen, alarms melted down to pools of battery. Where had that girl gone? When did I stop wanting to go home?
I changed in the bathroom, my pajamas just a Rotham shirt and a pair of boxers, and pulled the couch blanket over me. Past the windows the night was a black curtain. The Christmas tree still twinkled—I didn’t want to turn it off, afraid that I’d find the Boar King had followed me home, waiting to show his face in the dark. I closed my eyes against the idea. For the first time in what felt like months, I slept.
Christmas Eve passed in a mad flurry of last-minute shopping, wrapping, and cooking. We always had an ornate dinner before Grandma left the next day. That meant Caleb spent the afternoon on the phone with his girlfriend, conveniently unable to be conned into any help, while I was trapped in the kitchen with Mom and Grandma.
“At least you’re here this time,” Mom said, cutting her eyes at me. “I still can’t believe you didn’t come home for Thanksgiving. Sometimes I think the only thing that school teaches you is how to avoid real life.”
“Oh, lay off her,” Grandma said, touching my back as she passed behind me to rinse peeled potatoes under the sink faucet. “Jo is the only chance this family has of making a memorable impact on the world. Isn’t that right, honey?”
Memorable was close to correct, though I doubted its truth would be for any of the right reasons. It was difficult to delineate exactly when I had become so out of place in that house, but it likely fell somewhere along the timeline of my queerness. I came out to my family two years ago in a restaurant, a few months after I cut my hair scalp-short for the first time and got tired of answering “of course not” every time my mother asked if I was a lesbian. It went about as well as I had expected it to—my parents stated that they loved me no matter what, and each gave me a cursory hug. Caleb made a joke, asking if I was a boob or butt guy.
Now my mom looked at my clothes like she could burn them with her gaze alone, cook Saz’s old shirt off my body, sear away the paint-stained jeans I wore in place of the flared ones with the heart-shaped back pockets she’d bought me last summer. Examined my sloppy haircut kept haphazard by Finch’s scissors with the kind of intense stare that willed it longer.
What they didn’t understand was this—it was never about being out and proud or feeling understood by them. I never expected my family to kick me out or disown me. I was lucky in that way, unlike Caroline or Amrita whose parents might never forgive them for being queer, both safer keeping their interior life just that—interior. But I’d known the direction my life would turn once my parents knew I was a lesbian. That I’d never be free to act like myself without that knowledge souring the idea of me in their minds no matter how much they loved me.
And while I knew the reality of the situation—that I’d always been a lesbian, even if it took time for me to come to that understanding and even longer to share it—my parents associated my coming out with my Rotham education, further resenting the hold it had on me.
We sat down for dinner at a table laden with our usual favorites: sugar-glazed ham, frothy potatoes mashed with garlic, carrots roasted and curled, butter beans spiced in their bowl, parsley dusting everything like green confetti. Rolls swollen and yeasty, olives in the good crystal, gravy in the good china, yams in the good stoneware.
Grandma said grace with her head bowed. I clasped my hands in front of my nose and closed my eyes, thinking please let him be gone forever, please leave me be, please let me wake without needing to scream.
We ate. I wanted to scratch at the tattoo under my sweater but was afraid to draw attention to the scabby wound of the hyacinth. I didn’t want to listen to them curse me for doing something as foolish as getting a stick-and-poke dorm tattoo. But I was more concerned that I was incapable of healing. What was wrong with me? What made it so impossible to move forward?
“You know, Joanna was selected for her art show,” Dad said proudly between bites.
“Oh, that’s wonderful! That’s what you wanted, right? That means you get to show all your work?” Grandma’s enthusiasm was a kind balm, but it couldn’t prevent the words from cutting. I swallowed a stone of half-chewed meat.
“They’re just narrowing down which students have an opportunity to show their work in a Solo presentation,” I clarified. “I’ve been chosen with four other students to reach the next level of selections, but the Soloist hasn’t been decided yet.”
Caleb snorted. There was a beer beside his plate, something that pissed me off to see. Our parents would have killed me if they saw me have even a sip of alcohol while underage. “Seems like a waste of time if you’re not the one chosen,” he said, simmering the heat in me further.
Mom laughed. “We spend so much money on your education, and you come back with ghost stories and—crafts.”
The hitch in her words made me think she intended to say something different and decided to soften the blow at the last minute.
“Ghost stories? I’d like to hear some of those,” Grandma prompted.
“Joanna says her dorm is haunted,” Mom sneered, wineglass in her hand.
It had been a throwaway comment over the phone intended to make light of reality, a weak grasp at connecting with her. But now I regretted opening my mouth at all. Dad cleared his throat and asked for more potatoes. I pushed mine around on my plate.
“You’ve barely eaten your dinner,” he tried, and I just shrugged, said that I wasn’t feeling well. It was the truth. Anything I swallowed felt like it had the potential to come back up. There was an acidic curdle in my stomach.
I imagined telling them the truth. Kolesnik’s death and the smear of his blood across my shirt, Saz’s nose dripping over the scarecrow’s body, the hallucinated slits in Goya’s painting, the creature shattering its way through the display glass. It was all too much, entirely unbelievable. They’d pull me out of school. I’d leave Rotham with Solo just out of my reach and an empty room in the Manor. I let the silence fester and scraped my full plate into the garbage.
Grandma sat on the porch after dinner, long after everyone had gone to bed. The forecast said more snow—my phone kept lighting up with the alert, a little red exclamation point promising the first white Christmas in years.
I went to find her with a blanket hooked over one arm in case her coat wasn’t enough. There was a cigarette stubbed out in the ashtray beside her hand and another lit between the fingers. The familiar smell seized my heart—she had always preferred a box of Benson & Hedges. Smoke rose to the slats of the ceiling and coiled there.
“I won’t tell,” I said when she startled and turned to find me in the doorway. The smile that crossed her face was an instant comfort. She patted the swing beside her with a wrinkled hand, and I went to sit, leaning my head on her shoulder. The blanket made our laps two hilly expanses.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked. She shook her head against me.
“I’ve always loved winter.” She coughed once and cleared her throat. “I like how clean the air feels.”
We were safe under the awning as the first flakes started to fall. The sky was starless with storm. I was cold down to the bone, my jacket not thick enough and my hands fisted in the blanket, but I didn’t want to leave that moment behind.
“You know,” she said finally, after I gave a hard shiver against her side. “I see your uncle at the foot of my bed all the time. He’s this hazy, black outline, and yet somehow I know it’s him as soon as I open my eyes. He talks to me just like he did when he was alive. He calls me Mama, and he tells me he’s okay, and not to worry too much, and to go back to sleep.”
We rocked slowly, the swing’s chains creaking and stiff. Her hand patted my knee. My eyes traced all the lines around her knuckles, the evidence of her years. “I’ve never told anyone that. I didn’t want them to think I was already losing my mind and put me in some home to die. But I thought you might be the only one who would believe me.”
Snow piled upon the dead grass. I inhaled cold and cutting air. She was right about the cleanliness—I felt its sharpness revive me, slicing down my throat and all over my lungs, leaving holes for the hurt to seep in.
“I believe you,” I said, and I meant it.