of what you do,” she said. “I’m heavy for my size. But—fine. If you insist.”
Daisy
“I’m heavy for my size”? That had been my brilliant rejoinder? He knew how heavy I was. He’d carried me. And why hadn’t I been more gracious? If he’d really take me to get the girls, and then … and then what? I had no clue—anyway, if I wanted him to do anything at all, I needed to be nice to him. Why hadn’t I done that?
I was still vaguely wondering as Gray led us both upstairs to the tune of the dog’s toenails clicking on the hardwood floors, through a sleekly modern and extremely posh house, all white walls, pale wood, black-framed photos that tended toward black and white as well, and gray leather, that didn’t seem to exactly fit his mum. My judgment of things like that was obviously still impossibly bad, though, because clearly, it did fit his mum. It must. It was her house. Gray took me all the way to the end of the corridor and through double doors into an extra-large, expensively but starkly furnished bedroom I tried hard not to look at—though it was his mum’s, so why was it making me nervous?—and opened the door to a bath that was like something out of a magazine, beyond anything I’d ever seen in real life. He pushed switches and said, “Use anything you need.”
“We don’t have time,” I said, trying not to be seduced by glamour. It was all so … clean.
“We don’t have time to argue. Come on, girl,” he told the dog. “Downstairs. Food,” and shut the door.
I undressed—well, I took off my blanket and borrowed jacket—under the welcome heat of some sort of overhead infrared-type thing, then climbed into the shower. Actually, I walked in. Quite a way in, because it was long.
It had eight showerheads. Eight. I am not joking. It also had a soaking tub at the far end, with glass blocks to let in filtered light, and lush ferns on a ledge.
I’d lived in apartments smaller than this bathroom, and it was made of marble, walls and floors and all. The benchtops were as well, at least I thought it was marble. No seams. No grout.
I didn’t have time, but I turned on seven of the showerheads anyway. In my defense, I was cold. A big rainfall-type one sprayed down from overhead, and three more in a line down either side sprayed out horizontally, bathing me in sprays of warm water from my neck to my knees. It was ecstasy, and yet what I really wanted was to get into that bath. It was deep, and it had spa jets and a wide marble rim around the edge. I was going to count it as a moral victory that I didn’t succumb.
I was shuddering under the hot spray in that way you do when you’ve been chilled to the bone and now you’re not, tipping some spicy-smelling shampoo into my palm, when I realized it.
This was my first time ever showering in an ensuite bath. One that was in a bedroom, and reserved for you alone.
In Mount Zion, there’s no such thing as an ensuite bath. There’s no such thing as a family bath. There are two baths on each floor of the hostels, one for men and one for women. The women’s have a long trough sink made of gray concrete and an open shower room, plus twelve toilet stalls. The men’s substitute urinals for some of the stalls. I knew that, because scrubbing in and around the toilets and urinals of our hostel had been my daily job during the months when I’d been on Bath Rotation, starting at eight years old.
They had the younger girls do the toilets. They were smaller and could crawl around behind more easily. You could think that it was also because they were too young to argue, but girls in Mount Zion don’t argue. They know better.
The reason for so many stalls is that even though there are four private rooms per floor in the hostels, that private room with its wall of bunks, each with a drawer underneath it, is the entire living space for your family. My family’d had twelve kids in it, and we’d shared those two baths on our floor with three other families.
I didn’t want many things in life. Or, rather, I did, but not material things, not usually. I did crave a bathroom, though, that was—well, not like this,