The Broken Girls

Looking at it gave Katie a blurry, queasy feeling, a quick pulse of fear that she refused to show. Everyone knew of Mary Hand, but somehow these penciled letters made her more real. “It isn’t a joke, is it,” she said—a statement, not a question.

“No, it’s not a joke,” CeCe said. “The one in my grammar book said Toilet, third floor, end of west hall, I saw Mary there. That one was from 1939.”

“It’s a message.” This was Sonia, who had gotten up and was looking over Roberta’s shoulder. She shrugged and backed away again. “I’ve seen them, too. They have never changed the textbooks here, I think.”

Katie flipped through the musty pages of the Latin textbook. Its front page listed the copyright as 1919, the year Idlewild opened. She tried to picture the school as it had been then: the building brand-new, the uniforms brand-new, the textbooks brand-new. Now, in 1950, Idlewild was a time machine, a place that had no inkling of atomic bombs or Texaco Star Theatre on television. It made sense, in a twisted way, that Idlewild girls would pass wisdom down to one another in the margins of their textbooks, alongside the lists of American Revolution battles and the chemical makeup of iodine. The teachers never looked in these books, and they were never thrown away. If you wanted to warn a future girl about Mary Hand, the books were the best place to do it.

Through the window of 1G, Clayton Hall. Katie struck a match and lit her cigarette.

“You shouldn’t,” Roberta said halfheartedly. “Susan Brady will smell it, and then you’ll catch hell.”

“Susan Brady is asleep,” Katie replied. Susan was the dorm monitor for Floor Three, and she took her job very seriously, which meant that no one liked her. Katie switched off the flashlight and the four of them sat in the dark. Roberta tossed a pillow on the floor and sat with her back against the narrow dresser. Sonia quietly moved to the window and cracked it open, letting the smoke escape.

“So,” CeCe said to Katie. “Have you seen her?”

Katie shrugged. She wished she’d never brought it up now; she knew these girls, but not well enough yet to trust them. Looking at the penciled messages in her Latin book again had unsettled her. The fact was, she wasn’t entirely sure what had happened to her, and she wished that it had been as simple as seeing Idlewild’s ghost in the bathroom. It had seemed real at the time, but to put it into words now felt impossible. She swallowed and deflected the subject. “Do you think she was really a student here?” she asked the other girls.

“I heard she was,” Roberta said. “Mary Van Woorten, on the field hockey team, says that Mary Hand died when she was locked out of the school on a winter night and lost her way.”

“It must have been years ago.” CeCe had crawled onto the bunk next to Katie and propped up the pillows against the headboard. “I heard she knocks on the windows at night, trying to get in. That she begs girls to come outside and follow her, but if you do it, you die.”

CeCe was the roommate Katie had had the longest, and the one she knew the most about, because CeCe was an open book. She was the illegitimate daughter of a rich banker, sired on one of the housemaids and packed off to one boarding school or another for most of her life. CeCe, amazingly, held no animosity toward her father, and was close to her mother, who was now a housekeeper for a family in Boston. She’d told Katie all of this on their first meeting, as she’d hung up her Idlewild crested jacket and put away her hockey stick.

“You can sometimes hear her singing in the field when the wind is in the trees,” Roberta added. “A lullaby or something.”

Katie hadn’t heard that one. “You can hear her?”

Roberta shrugged. She had been at Idlewild for only a few months, whereas the other girls had been here for at least a year, and Sonia for three. Roberta was smart, a natural athlete, though she didn’t talk much. No one knew anything about her home life. Katie couldn’t figure out what she was doing here of all places, but from the hooded look that she often saw in Roberta’s eyes—that look of retreat, of watching the world as if from behind a wall, that was common to a lot of Idlewild girls—she guessed there was a reason. “I’ve never heard her myself, and I’m at practice four times a week.” Roberta turned to Sonia, as she often did. “Sonia, what do you think?”

If CeCe was the easiest to understand, Sonia was the hardest. Pale, thin, quiet, flitting in and out of the crowds and the complicated social cliques, she seemed apart from everything, even for an Idlewild girl. She was an immigrant from France, and in the aftermath of the war, where so many of the girls had lost a father or a brother or had men come home ragged from POW camps, no one asked her about it. She’d been at Idlewild the longest of any of them.

Sonia seemed completely self-contained, as if whatever was happening inside her own head was sufficient for her. For some reason Roberta, who was swift and fit and graceful, had become smitten with Sonia, and could often be seen by her side. They were so easy together, it made Katie want that, too. Katie had never been easy with anyone. She’d always been the girl with admirers, not friends.

Sonia caught Katie’s eyes briefly and shrugged, the gesture cool and European even in her simple white nightgown. “I have no use for ghosts,” she said in her sweet, melodious accent, “though like everyone else, I’ve heard she wears a black dress and a veil, which seems a strange outfit if you are outside in the snow.” Her gaze, resting on Katie in the darkened gloom, missed nothing. “You saw something. Did you not?”

Katie glanced at the cigarette, forgotten in her fingers. “I heard her,” she said. She tamped out the smoke against the brass back of the sophomore achievement medal someone had left behind, and ground the butt with her thumb.

“Heard her?” CeCe asked.

Katie took a breath. Talking about Mary Hand felt like speaking of a family secret somehow. It was one thing to tell ghost stories in the dark, and another when you opened your locker before gym class and felt something push it closed again. There were always small things, like a feeling of being watched, or a cold patch in a hallway, that you were never quite sure you’d experienced, and you felt stupid bringing up. But this had been different, and Katie had the urge to speak it out loud. “It was in the common, on the path that goes past the dining hall.”

The girls nodded. Idlewild’s main buildings were arranged in a U-shaped square around a common, dotted with unkempt trees and weedy flagstoned paths. “That section scares me,” CeCe said. “The one by the garden.”

It scared Katie, too. No one liked the garden, even though the curriculum included Weekly Gardening, when they had to reluctantly dig through its damp, rotten-smelling earth. Even the teachers gave the garden a wide berth. “I was sneaking a cigarette after dinner, and I left the path so Mrs. Peabody wouldn’t see me—you know she smokes her own cigarettes out there, even though she’s not supposed to. I was beneath the big maple tree, and I just felt something. Someone was there.”

CeCe was leaning forward, rapt. “But you didn’t see anything?”

“There was a voice,” Katie said. “It was— I didn’t imagine it. It was right there next to me, as if someone was standing there. I heard it so clearly.”

She could still recall that moment beneath the maple tree, standing on a bed of old maple keys, her cigarette dropping to the ground, the hair standing up on the back of her neck when a voice somewhere behind her right ear had spoken. Idlewild was an old place, and the fear here was old fear. Katie had thought she understood fear until that moment, but when the voice had spoken, she’d understood fear that was older and bigger than she could imagine.

“Well?” Roberta prompted. “What did she say?”

Katie cleared her throat. “ ‘Hold still,’ ” she said.

They were all quiet for a moment.

“Oh, my God,” CeCe said softly.

Strangely, it was Sonia that Katie looked at. Sonia was sitting on the floor, against the wall beneath the window, her thin legs drawn up, her knees to her chest. She was very still, bathed in shadow, and Katie couldn’t tell if Sonia’s eyes were on her or not. Far off, a door slammed, and something tapped, like dripping water, in the ceiling.

“Why?” Sonia asked her, the French lilt soft. “Why did she say that to you?”

Katie shrugged hard, the muscles wrenching in her shoulders, even though it was dark and the other girls couldn’t see it. “I don’t know,” she snapped, her voice growing sharp before she tempered it. “It was just a voice I heard. That’s all I know.”

A lie, a lie. But how could some old ghost even know?

Hold still. She couldn’t talk about that. Not to anyone. Not yet.

“What did you do?” Roberta asked.