She curled up on her bed and thought about the otherworld. One of the demons tugged on her sleeve. A tiny lost creature with wings the color of blood. Human beings had been just as cruel to the demons as they had been to her. She pitied them and she pitied herself. If only she hadn’t been stolen from her true life, she could have been happy. She let the demon lie down beside her, the poor, sweet thing. She let it crawl under her skin.
ELV HAD BEEN doing Michael’s schoolwork in exchange for cigarettes. Though at first she planned to skim the books, she’d actually begun to read the novels assigned. Recently she’d been making her way through The Scarlet Letter. It was surprisingly good. She remembered when Meg had been reading it, she’d thought her sister was wasting her time, but she liked the way Hawthorne seemed to take Hester Prynne’s side. She knew what it was like to be marked. When she gazed at her tattoos in the mirror, she felt set apart in the very same way as Hester did, revealed and ruined, exposed for all to see.
The only time when Elv didn’t slip into the otherworld was when she was taking care of the horses. She loved the job. That was why she didn’t dare tell anyone, not even Miss Hagen, who was usually on her side. She was afraid that if anyone knew she was happy, it would all be taken away. The horses were called Daisy and Cookie and Sammy and Jack. They’d been left behind when the person who owned the estate went bankrupt and sold his land to the school. He’d abandoned the horses along with the real estate and the furniture, as if they were nothing more than goldfish in a pond. Daisy and Cookie were young, high-spirited. But Sammy and Jack were her favorites. Sammy was a little palomino, skittish with anyone he didn’t know. Jack was old and huge and dignified with enormous hooves. The horses all knew her and were waiting for her no matter how early she arrived.
Christmas had come and gone. There was a turkey dinner, and then Elv escaped out to the stables. Winter went on, darker, the days so short they passed by quickly. North Point Harbor was so far away it might as well have been on the other side of the world. Elv lost weight, but she got stronger working with the horses, hauling around bales of hay, mucking out the stalls. All through January and February the weather was so cold the horses had to wear wool blankets. When they breathed out, they looked like steam engines. Elv loved being with them; she loved the smell of hay. She thought about Central Park and the horse that had run away with her sister. Better to die than be a slave of men, tied up, an iron bit in your mouth.
Jack banged his body against his stall and whinnied like crazy when Elv got there in the morning. When she whistled, he came right over, like an enormous, well-trained dog. Sometimes she sat in the straw in his stall and just talked to him. He looked at her with his big dark eyes and she felt tears rising. Not crocodile tears, but real ones. Maybe when she left she would steal him. Or she would leave his stall door open and he could run away and be free. The horses didn’t judge Elv by the way she looked or discern that she was marked and ruined. They didn’t care that something bad had happened to her and that no one saw who she was. They didn’t care that she wore ugly clothes, or that she burned herself with cigarettes, or that she sat in the hay and wept when she thought about how long Claire had waited for her at the corner, all day, until darkness fell and the mosquitoes filled the air. Claire was the one who had been crying for hours, her face streaky and hot. It was Elv who’d had to comfort her.
Sometimes Elv and Michael would hide out behind the stables and smoke the cigarettes his brother smuggled to him on visiting days. Elv was now doing all of Michael’s schoolwork, even the math. Lately, she skipped evening activities in order to get back to The Scarlet Letter. Sometimes she chose it over drifting into Arnelle. She hated Dimsdale and wanted to see him get his comeuppance. It wasn’t real life, so perhaps a horrible human being really would get what he deserved and the girl who’d been ruined would turn and walk away.
SHE WAS HEADED back from the stables one windy day as Michael was leaving the administration building. He was an honor student, due to Elv’s hard work, and as such he was allowed unsupervised visits with relatives. He had only one visitor, his brother from New York City. Elv was standing in the tall grass, which had turned a pale green. It was early spring and the ground was muddy. The air was chilly and fresh. She had been away for six months. The outside world didn’t even exist anymore. She could barely picture her mother’s face. She didn’t bother opening her letters. Everything that came before her time at Westfield was a blur. Elv was ready for the next thing to happen. She was waiting for a new life.
On the first day that it seemed as if winter might actually be over, she left her jacket behind, even though the air was still cool. In New Hampshire, people were desperate for spring, and she was among them. She wore oversized jeans and a sweatshirt over her green T-shirt—hideous clothes she knew were supposed to make her feel less like an individual. Everyone was equal at Westfield, even if that meant feeling ugly. Elv had on tall rubber boots that were splattered with mud. Her long black hair was all she had of the person she used to be. Still, she felt hopeful when she stood out in the grass. Another world must surely exist somewhere, one where she would be known in some deep way that was far beyond words.
Michael was telling his brother about some guy from their old neighborhood who had just been busted, but Lorry wasn’t listening. He was twenty-five, his own man. There was a gap of eight years between the brothers and they were different people entirely. Whereas Michael was a braggart, Lorry was more of a storyteller. Whereas Michael was a car thief, grabbing for what he wanted greedily, always getting caught, Lorry liked people to hand over what was precious to them, convinced that they had made their own decision to do so. He was tall and thin, handsome, dark, with hooded eyes and an uncanny ability to read people. Women said he had a lethal smile and that he was difficult to resist. Everyone agreed—he could talk himself out of just about any kind of trouble. In the city he was known for his tattoos. On one hand there was a crown of thorns, on the other a crown of roses. Above each was a black star. The back of the hand was one of the most painful places to be tattooed—the skin was paper thin—but Lorry hadn’t minded. He told himself there was a price to pay for any story worth telling, and that his tattoos would tell the story for him when he didn’t have the time, or the energy, or the heart to tell it himself.