you at dinner.” He turns and walks to the far end of the hall, disappearing behind another door.
Ruby Jo rolls her eyes.
I’m the one with the free hand and the key, so I catch the first glimpse of our apartment. It isn’t as bad as I expected, but then again, I was expecting a five-by-nine Alcatraz cell, the kind you can stand in the middle of and still reach each side wall. This is more like a scaled-down Motel 6 suite: one large open living area with a kitchenette in one corner, a round table with four chairs, and a crowded sofa–love seat combo arranged at the back wall. There’s a window, but no television.
I wheel my bags to an empty space, checking out the bedroom we’ll be sharing. It’s as scantily decorated as the main room. Three beds—two bunks and a twin—draw the walls in closer. Everything in it is a shade of institutional beige.
“I’ve seen trailers better decked out than this,” Ruby Jo says.
It’s Lissa who goes to the window first, pulling back the brown blinds and coughing as a cloud of dust rises from them. She doesn’t say a word; she doesn’t have to.
There are bars on the windows.
In my experience, bars serve one of two purposes. They either keep people out or they keep people in. I wonder, with an ill feeling building in the pit of my stomach, which purpose these bars serve.
FORTY-ONE
We take turns using the bathroom, a cold and sterile cube on the other side of the kitchenette wall. If State School 46 had a decorating budget, it didn’t stretch as far as the faculty residences.
While I wait for Lissa and Ruby Jo to finish up, I read through the information binder left on the round dining table.
Not surprisingly, it’s more a list of rules than information.
“There’s a lockdown every night at nine,” I read aloud so my roommates—soon to be extremely intimate friends—can hear. “‘Main door secured. Emergency exits’—and this is underlined—‘will sound an alarm if used.’ What the fuck?”
If my cursing bothers Lissa’s ears, she doesn’t say so.
“What the fuck is right,” Lissa calls from the bathroom.
“Wait until you hear this next part,” I say. “‘Faculty must keep to their gender-assigned floors. No exceptions. Rooms are equipped with smoke detectors.’”
“So where can we smoke?” Lissa says.
“We don’t, apparently,” I tell her, leafing through the binder’s five pages. “Nothing in here about a smoking area. Oh, and by the way, alcohol is another no-no. Maybe that’s what Tweedledum and Tweedledee were looking for in our bags.”
Ruby Jo giggles.
“What?”
“Tell you later,” she says. There’s mischief in her eyes. “Anything else? They gonna give us them military haircuts next?”
“Just a class schedule,” I say. “And we have to wear our uniforms at all times when we’re not in our quarters. Quarters. Jesus.” I keep reading all the you wills and you musts and you will nots, pages filled with directives and warnings. Nowhere in the binder is the word “please.”
Twenty-four hours ago I was on a bus, trading jokes with Ruby Jo and moving forward one seat at a time until the smell of urine and disinfectant was as far behind us as the dimensions of our ride would allow. Twenty-four hours before that, I was eating roasted chicken and drinking Spanish sparkling wine while my husband pretended his brilliant family was still intact.
I feel somewhat less brilliant now as I trade the softness of my blue jersey dress for a skirt and jacket combo that hangs heavily on me, irritating my skin.
“Penny for ’em,” Ruby Jo says.
I don’t have pennies’ worth of thoughts. I have hundred-dollar-bill thoughts, starting with how much Anne must hate me and ending with what brand of temporary insanity made me pack a bag and board a bus and travel halfway across the country without a clue as to what I was getting myself into.
Maybe all mothers are semi-insane. Maybe that’s part of the deal we make when we decide to let our bodies become hosts, when we lie with our legs spread and