This place resists me as much as I resist it. Doorknobs fall off into my palm, windows stay stubbornly shut, the lights flicker, the lift never works. The four of us make a discordant echo down the halls. We haven’t learned to talk to one another. With so little else to love here, I’m infatuated with the building.

Alice remarks on the of the arrangement of the place with idiot wonder, calling it a huge aviary. The school is more like a kind of hospital with its seclusion and it’s sterile, uninterrupted space. The fractal edged windows number in the hundreds and reach from floor to ceiling. And, like birds in an aviary, we spend much of our time looking out.

The scale of the place can seem irrational to strangers. My room contains a white marble fireplace large enough for me to crawl inside and recline my legs over the grate where the wood should sit. I light match after match.

We stay inside our rooms, until without warning, we wordlessly enter the large white room at the end of the hall, one by one.

When it can wait no longer without awkwardness, we introduce ourselves. Already formless thoughts take the place of conversations, as if we are at once kin. My mind buzzes like an insect and grows large with guesses and questions. Our stories aren’t told but felt in weird vibrations and in glances.

Mara, the dark haired one, shifts under layers of soft wool over tights. She is impossibly thin and cold limbed. Her lips crack in the middle. She has only weak hot tea at mealtime and is unnaturally quiet and slow moving. Just looking at her makes us tired. Her fingernails are bluish. Her skeleton’s collarbone asks us to stay silent.

Mara smiles weakly and says goodnight. The light here is slanting and blue. As the moonlight leaves the expansive hallway, we scatter like deer. The moon hates us because we are failures. It shines with hostility. We move to keep our hair out of its reach.

The mornings lessons go by quickly and seem familiar somehow. From the outside corner of my vision I see a gentle flash, like light reflected from an earring. It is there and not there. I blink and its gone. We burn the lessons to memory. We wait all day for night to come.

We meet in the large oval room at the end of the hall again tonight. The confusion of patterned green and black marble is impossible to walk a straight line over. We hold tight to each other and wait for a flash to light The Window. My field of vision narrows to a spinning pinwheel. Mara, blank eyed, eats away at the end of her braid leaving it wet and stinking.

We try The Door, but it refuses us again, its crescent doorknob opening into nothing. The light jeers at us from that place.

Harm’s Way.

Lou morbidly fears forgetting him. A game we play: I have her describe him for me.

“His hair, the near blonde if it.”

“No, something else, something real about him.”

“He never knew his father and he doesn’t care”

She will be up again tonight, crying.

Lou’s room is even darker than mine.

She can hear us avoiding her.

Mara looks into her only mirror. She looks deep and sees her mother. Her eyes have grown large in her face. Her cheeks made sharp from eating just what she likes. She likes almost nothing. She counts one hundred brush strokes. She counts fifty bites. She eats nothing at all. She eats plaster. She eats soft paper, chewing and chewing. She likes this.

Her eyes have grown sunken, but she has her dark hair. She has her dancing. She brushes and brushes at her hair, at her scalp. Without thinking she places soft paper into her cheek and sucking, smiles slowly before dipping into low, perfect plié.

She bites at a knuckle hoping to draw her private, savage joy. What’s it taste like? You don’t want to know. You can’t imagine how hard it is to stop after.

Down the endless hall there is a hush of high violin. Jane tightens her bow and pulls her red gold hair into a bun. She hangs her violin on its hook. Jane puts her black pumps on over snug black tights. Her dress hits mid thigh. She hooks the clasp of her choker in the first notch. Under the choker’s ribbon is a red collar mark, newly healed. Jane’s sleeves are capped and barely cover her slight shoulders.

I wait until she leaves for dinner to go in her room. The bed is made hospital tight, curtains drawn. The violin is wrapped in muslin and secured to the wall by hooks. I open a drawer to touch her sweaters, angora and cashmere. Charmeuse silk undershirts line the deep drawers. Her underthings are extravagant, even for this place. They all appear to be hand made lace. I take a dress from her closet. It would be a perfect fit for me. It’s three sizes too small for Jane. All her things are.

We’ve been brought together. It’s about as arbitrary as being stuck between floors on an elevator but we’re together. I don’t belong here. It strikes me at once that the others probably feel the same.

Alice is up, serving tea. She is as blank as a piece of chalk. There’s a smell like rotted meat in the dining room. Alice doesn’t complain. She never complains.

Jane says she smells violet perfume, not looking up from her book. Alice picks at her dinner. Everything on her plate is as beige, pre-chewed and pliable as Alice herself. I’d die of shock if she used anything other than plain butter. Mara needs a salt lick, like a deer. She gives off something mineral. She still drinks the tea but adds salt, pouring it in without looking. She’s covered a hamburger patty in a fine layer of grit. Our shoes grind the grains into the floor.

“Mara, can you lay off that shit while we are trying to eat?”

She looks at me without understanding. All at once I take a spoonful of honey and deliberately place it on my tongue.

“Do you miss it, normal food?”

“No. I don’t like it.” She says this slowly, like it’s incomprehensible, like its the most obvious, plain fact in the universe. This is the first thing she’s said in days. Her fingernails are rimmed with something black, like soot.

“You’re a freak. A freak. You’re going to die from this, you know?” I’m scared of Mara. The way she moves.

Alice looks at me with fright and with motherly anger.

So she can react, just not for herself, only for others. Always for others.

“You know she can’t. If you’re so perfect.” I know already what she will say. What we Never say.

“Then Why Are You Here? Why are you here then?”

Once she’s said it, she can’t stop.

“Why Are You Here Then? Tell Me. Why? Tell us. Tell us what you’re doing here.”

***

“Do you think this was someone’s dream house once?”

Alice loves this house almost as much as I do. I don’t want to share it. Jane works on her diorama. She hasn’t let up in about eight hours. It’s a pop-up scene from the Princess and the Pea painted with watercolors. It’s a story about sensitivity. I want to laugh out loud. I can barely contain the laughter. Jane, who wouldn’t notice if she were sleeping in the cellar, Jane who grinds her teeth and has raw rings around her wrists. Jane, who has taken the rope we found by the well. After last night I don’t want to make waves. I swallow the laugh down hard.

“That’s lovely,” Mara walks to her. “It’s like how I feel about ballet.”

It’s anyone’s guess what this means. Jane sits, rigid as a stone. She smiles slowly, without effort. For a second I see who the person she might have been, had she allowed herself.

I still don’t like Alice that much. She looks like a Denny’s waitress. You can say looks don’t mean anything. You can say that. If Mara weren’t beautiful, if she were plain, would we go and get her when it’s freezing out and she’s eating snow? Maybe. Maybe not.

Alice loves everyone even she can’t help Lou. They are almost never in the same room together, entering and exiting like two well timed actors on a stage. I haven’t figured it out.

I start to feel bad about these Thought Crimes. I’m a bit of a hypocrite. When Alice asks me into her room later, I don’t say no. I’m too lonely to say no. She shows me stuff, things she’s kept. She has an x-ray of her father’s lung. There’s a dark spot the size of a nickel. Alice doesn’t say anything for a long time. I worried she’d present me with saved kidney stones next.

“I didn’t want to throw it out.” She looks at me for a long time, like she wants to say something more.

She’s going to get sentimental.

“Can I be honest? I’m saving it to watch the Solar Eclipse through.”

I think I like Alice after all.

Mara

I lost weight first in November. I noticed right away but she didn’t. I was knocking into furniture even though I was careful. My elbows and knees were bruised. I started wearing two or three pair of tights and a sweater. Mother bought a tall mirror. She said to look at myself. I think she thought I would be ashamed and I was but not for the reason she believed. It’s not that I don’t want to try. I just feel like it’s contaminated. Butter. Cream. Chicken. It’s poison, somehow. It’s irradiated. My teeth are getting soft.

I guess the first thing that was different was a cigarette. I ate ten in one night. It was right, somehow, like ballet. It felt like my pupils were expanding. I worried someone could see, that it would give me away, Like blushing. I reach behind the bed for the spoon. It’s plastic and it lasts longer. I have to work at a piece a long time, chewing and working the toxins out. After a while they flow free, as if they’re a part of me. To get better, I need to eat. To get better is to have a long life. To have a long life is so many meals.

Mary

The moon left us alone for awhile but soon enough it was at it again. My hometown has been getting ready for the solar eclipse for years. It’s the first one for three hundred years that’s been visible in this part of the country.

Jane has been preparing for longer still.

“This is a cosmic event. You realize that? It’s not a weekend snowstorm.”

Jane has told us this again and again. She seems less tense as the day approaches. I have to admit I like Jane. I like the Jane of the daytime, anyhow. What she does after dark is a different story. During the day she’s like a genius. Maybe that’s why she keeps herself tied up.