Chapter 27: The Stigma

27. The Stigma

Her ebony skin glistened in the darkness as she tossed her head from side to side. I wanted my dream eyes to look down to see the pain that she was enduring below, but I couldn’t make them. It was too horrible. I was dreaming the night that Michele received her branding, as if I had been standing there in some dirty room concrete room that smelled of piss and semen. There was the smell of burning skin, so much like when you burn your hair with the straightener, but a thousand times worse. One of the men watching was actually touching himself, excited by her pain. In Michele’s face the tears streamed down, and she screamed, but no one seemed to even notice. I don’t know why I dreamed that. I had my own nightmare to deal with now.

I woke up to the pale light of early morning, shaking with cold. Under the single sheet I was naked and the bed was still damp. I pulled my hair in from either side to cover my face, finding comfort in its softness, and then remembering the fight – pain and blood. And my hair was still filthy dirty, too dirty.

Swinging my feet out onto the floor and wrapping my arms around myself I shivered. The cold from the floor seemed to travel up through my calves and hips to my back and suddenly I was aware of how much I hurt, everywhere. My head was aching where I had hit the wall, and I remembered the anger in Erika’s face as she leaped at me, snarling like some depraved unnatural beast. And I remembered the surge of power as I used something within me to throw her off of me hard enough to send her sailing across the room, power that was somehow connected to the fear that I had felt when I touched the amulet Phyla had shown me that one afternoon. It was like … the power wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t felt my life was in danger.

I let out a long breath and flopped backwards onto the bed, with feet still on the floor. Another image. In those few seconds before Erika had come for me I had seen bruising both on her hip and on her breasts, areas that were always covered by her clothing, and the nakedness of her vagina as well as razor cuts on the back of her upper thighs. Someone was abusing her, and maybe she was abusing herself. Maybe it was the man I had seen her with in the basement, or maybe it was someone else.

The man in the basement would have to be a staff member to get into the house, but I had never seen him anywhere other than that. But in any case it also seemed likely that he was the one who had given her the razor, a razor that she had used not only to shave herself, but also to cut herself. It was all so twisted, and did any of it have anything to do with the identity of the person who had thrown Michele into the river?

And now, did I play the snitch and report the fight to Ms. Slanick? Then I instantly realized that there was no point in that - everyone would hear about it soon one way or the other. There were no cameras in the shower, but it was the type of the thing that would not remain hidden, so there was no need to make myself the cry-baby telling the principal. Or in trying to find a way I had managed to fend off a much bigger, more athletic girl like Erika.

I pulled my hair up over my face once again as I lay there and once again recalled how dirty it was. My one instinct was to say that I was never going in that shower room again, but a more reasonable part of myself knew that Erika was probably hurting as much as I was, and would feel the same. The daylight was just changing the sky outside, which meant it was really early. I lay there and listened closely, trying to hear if there was water running in the bathroom or footsteps in the hall. There was nothing.

I grabbed my wet towel, wrapped it around me cautiously found my way down the hall to the bathroom, each step jarring my spine and sending pulses of pain up to my the ache in the back of my brain. When I got to the bathroom there was no one, so I hurriedly turned on the water, hung my towel on the hook and stepped in the rapidly warming water.

The first thing was to shampoo my hair with the cheap shampoo that Holshue House kept there for us to use communally. Some of the girls had nicer shampoo that their parents brought in care packages on visiting day, but most of them were like me in that respect. No one came to see them. No one brought them anything. Although we all had our unspoken stories, it seemed most families wanted to simply forget their delinquent daughters.

I lathered the soap in my hair for a long time, letting it cut through the grease. Closing my eyes and breathing deeply I relaxed into the sensation of becoming clean once again. A good thing about arriving so early in the morning was that there was plenty of hot water, steaming up the whole room, strumming along all miscellaneous areas of exposed skin. The pounding and the heat felt like a massage on all those places that hurt from the night before, and that was pretty much every place. Somehow I think even my toes hurt. 

Once I had rinsed my hair I grabbed a bar of generic soap from the little holder to start cleaning the rest of my body, beginning with my hairy armpits. I couldn’t remember if I had noticed Erika’s armpits the night before, but they were probably shaved, unless she intentionally didn’t to hide the fact that she had access to a razor.

I had finished my underarms and started on the rest of me when I noticed it. There was a green tattoo on my right shoulder, a circle about an inch and a quarter in diameter with a little less-than sign at the top. It had never been there before! I wanted to awaken Allison from her deep sulking, to ask her if she had ever had a tattoo, one that had somehow vanished in the last eight months that we had been sharing this body. But she didn’t respond.

I turned off the water, and this time had the sense to wrap myself in my towel before stepping out to where the mirrors were. They were crappy steel chrome mirrors, but I could still see the mark there, on my shoulder, as obvious as anyone else’s tattoo. It was then that I finally looked at my face and saw that my eyes had been blackened by the fight of the night before and there was more bruising around my throat where Erika had tried to strangle me, all proof that the fight had been real.

But that didn’t explain the tattoo. I walked quickly, quietly down to Phyla’s room and slipped into the door. She was sleeping, on her side, curled up with her knees halfway up to her chest, her hands fisted together at her face. I wanted to be angry at her, and to spring on her, shaking her and demanding an answer. But I couldn’t. I had never seen her sleeping, at least in the set of memories that I still carried, and it ignited a tenderness in me that I didn’t understand.

Instead of pouncing I shook her shoulder, “Phyla, wake up!”

She turned over drowsily, her ears still pointed. A smile crept across her face when she saw me through half-opened eyes. “Agapimeni mou.” She said softly in whatever language it is that we must have shared, then I saw her expression shift as she remembered that we were fighting and not currently lovers, apparently. But still there was tenderness in her voice as she asked, “What is it, Ges.” It was the first time she had ever shortened my other name.

I was shaking, but something in her presence was calming me, slowing me down. I turned and showed her the shoulder. “What is this?” With my left hand I pointed to my right shoulder while still trying to keep the towel from unraveling and exposing me.

“Your stigma. Your mark. It’s the letter delta, short for doulos.”

“But how did it get to be there? It wasn’t there last night? Did you …? While I was sleeping?”

“No. Of course not. I would never claim anyone in that way, even if I had the wealth. Maybe you are starting to remember. You can’t unleash your power like you did in the fight last night without pulling in some of the old Gesama.” She smiled a little. My remembering was a victory for her, since it seemed to be what she kept demanding of me. “You need to let yourself remember more.”

What I remembered was the horror of what I had experienced when I touched the amulet, the one I knew she had in a bag under the bed somewhere. I could almost feel its presence. Instead I needed to get something more out of her, since she obviously remembered so much of who I was. “What is this doulos?”

“It means slave. Your owner marked you after the first time you tried to run away.”

I started to drop the towel as the shock swept through me. I had been a slave? And I was even marked. Like Michele. Part of me wanted to tell Phyla about Michele’s mark, but then I remembered my promise to Michele – of all the things that she had told me or shown me, that was probably the biggest secret of all. I began backing out the door to retreat to my own room.

Phyla sat up in bed, resting on one elbow. “You look like you’ve been in a fight. So people are going to ask. Just thought I had better tell you.”

I bit my lower lip for a second, trying to think of something. “Tell the teachers and everyone I got bad cramps, that it’s my period and I’ll just stay in my room all day.” I was hoping that the timing worked out okay with the night that I had pulled Michele from the river because I remembered that I had used my period as an excuse then too.

“Okay,” she nodded.

I slipped back to the door, frightened of what I might start remembering with a day alone in my room. But then I thought of something else. “And Phyla?”

“Yes?”

“Can you bring me some food, please. I’m really hungry.”

She smiled, “Yes, agapimeni mou.” I could tell that the foreign words were some term of endearment, but that she now spoke with a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

I didn’t care. At least my hair was clean and I knew that I could focus on getting it combed out before it dried all the way, before I would have to face the danger of remembering more stuff that I probably didn’t want to know.