Alice noticed the open window the second she woke. She quickly shut her eyes. To be the first one to notice, to call out the alarm, could implicate her in the elopement. Even if they believed she had nothing to do with it, she’d still spend the day inside someone’s office explaining the fact that she had nothing to do with it… and they’d all be writing, writing, writing in those notebooks. The doctor, the nurse, the matron, the attendant, all scribbling away about her. Recording what?
Everything. They recorded everything. How loose her bowel movements were. How often she dragged her foot when walking the morning circle. How quickly she ate her soup.
When Alice had been ten and the nurse had left her alone in the room, she’d snatched a sheet from one of the files on the desk. It was the only thing she’d ever stolen. She’d stuffed the page into her underwear and quickly sat back down. The nurse returned, and Alice blinked at her as she always did, with perhaps a few extra blinks. The nurse didn’t notice the extra blinks or the missing page, which struck Alice as funny. Not that she’d ever laugh. It wasn’t something Alice did.
Later that day during a session of Domestic Training, which just meant changing the diapers of the low-grades, Alice had crouched behind one of the beds and read.
Brother is a laborer. Home fair to inferior. Parents both dead. A hasty examination shows that Alice has no scholastic ability. She is burdened with a defective foot, and there are suspicions of constitutional inferiority. Alice is a child troubled by unhappy thoughts who seems to have a great capacity for sorrow. She can remember vividly all that happens in her day, recalling these scenes with great exactness. Had she been normal, one feels she might have been clever. She is also rather good-looking if one does not hunt for appearances of intelligence. Alice will develop but little further. Belongs at about the middle-grade to high-grade moron.
The special training we can offer Alice will no doubt be of great benefit to her, but no training can supply the mental fiber that is lacking, and whatever improvement may result, the expense and the trouble are thrown away if the child, later on, is tossed out into the world without being able to protect and care for herself. Therefore, protection, shelter, and care of Alice must be lifelong and permanent.
Flipping the paper over gave Alice the measurements of the circumference of her head, the length of her arms, her legs, her fingers. They’d measured everything, even the crushed toes on her right foot. The paper had her weight… her eye color… her bust size… the shade of her teeth…. Alice ripped it to shreds. Tiny, tiny shreds. Shreds that she plucked from the floor and stuffed into the old diaper from an inmate she hadn’t yet washed. She tried not to count the shreds, but it was as if she had to. She counted each and every one, wrapped that number she would never forget inside the diaper, and tossed it into the dark water of the soaking bucket.
Now, with Alice lying on her cot, the morning whistle blew.
Alice kept her eyes closed. She wouldn’t be the first person the morning attendant, Miss Sweeney, saw when she noticed that the window was open and the girl was missing. Alice waited until she heard the gasps, the commotion, and then she stretched and slowly opened her eyes.
Maxine was looking straight ahead, her features loose and relaxed. Alice did the same. Rose was still asleep. Alice could see the tip of her stick poking out from under the covers. Maxine had forgotten it in the midst of all the screaming Miss Sweeney was doing as she called out over and over again to the matron on the first floor. It would be blamed on Miss Sweeney, this elopement. Part of her job as night attendant was to bed-check every hour. Alice was a few feet away, but the girl’s bed looked quite cold. She hadn’t slipped out a half hour earlier.
Alice cleared her throat. Maxine’s hand moved to Rose’s stick and hovered over it, waiting. As soon as Miss Sweeney ran from the room, Maxine dropped to her knees between the cots, plucked the stick from the covers, and slipped it into the heating vent. Then she gently roused Rose, who woke up smiling, until she heard the screaming, at which time she clutched at Maxine.
“Out of bed!” the matron shouted. “All of you. Out of bed. Now!”
The girls sprang from their cots. They understood the drill. This was certainly not the first elopement at the school, and it wouldn’t be the last. They’d all spend the morning sitting the benches for sure.
Alice had never thought of running. So many had. Some had made it. More had not. But it wasn’t the statistics that kept Alice from ever considering it. She had no place to go and no money to go with. Every inmate knew you needed clams and a sandbar—money and an address. Without these two things, a runner got caught, dragged back, and thrown into the cages.
The girls shivered at the ends of their beds. The window that the girl with the wild hair had escaped through had not been closed, and the cold morning chill that had left a wet film on the glass now made its way through their threadbare sleeping clothes. Dottie made the mistake of picking up her blanket and wrapping it around herself. The matron swiftly had Dottie’s ear between her fingers and was pulling her out of the room.
“The rest of you. Get dressed. You’ll be spending the day on the benches.”
No one so much as twitched their lips into a frown, let alone groaned, but Alice could feel every heart in the room falling. It would be ten long hours of sitting still. Alice finally risked a glance over at Maxine. Their eyes met. The benches inevitably meant more bad things would be happening today.
* * *
They sat the benches in the day room until half past six, at which time they were herded first into the toilet room to take care of their business and next into the dining room, where they were given just enough time to gulp down their breakfast. Then it was back to the benches of the day room… with almost four hours to sit before lunch.
With the girls lined up, feet on the floor, eyes straight ahead, backs against the hard wood, the minutes did not move quickly. To make sure everyone knew this, a large clock with the loudest ticking Alice had ever heard had been placed over the entry to the room, so even if you couldn’t see it from your position on the bench, you could hear it, slowly ticking each second of every minute.
You didn’t get to choose your position on the bench like you did for the hour they normally spent in this room each afternoon. Instead you were placed on it, except for Maxine and Rose, Helen and Sarah, and Edwina and Neddie. If you were in charge of a low-grade, you always had to be next to her. Although as soon as Miss Sweeney turned her back, the girls silently moved to the places where they wanted to be and the people they wanted to be next to. When the attendant returned, she never noticed the difference. They were all “girls” and were all “lined up on benches,” which is how she’d left them. Girls. Inmates. Idiots. Imbeciles. Morons. Undesirable. Feebleminded. All interchangeable. All degenerates.
Alice snuck a peek at Maxine. She didn’t want to catch the girl’s attention because if Maxxie was quietly dreaming, which she looked to be, it was best to let her stay in her head, and not remind her of the hours and hours they had left to sit.
Rose sat between them tapping her thigh lightly with her pointer finger. Tap, tap, tap, tap. One, two, three, four. It was a sequence Alice was familiar with. Rose did it all the time. She tapped things four times before she ate them. If she brushed up against you by accident, she’d quickly tap you there three more times in the same manner. It was just part of Rose. Alice had seen her do it when she was distressed, but she’d also seen Rose tap Maxine’s heart four times in moments of joy. She seemed especially nervous today, but then again, sitting the benches made them all nervous.