R Is for Rebel by J. Anderson Coats

Author:J. Anderson Coats [Coats, J. Anderson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

DAY 145

AT BREAKFAST SISTER GUNNHILD READS out the day’s schedule. I’ve been in rehearsals for five days in a row, so I’ll be heading to instruction in the morning and vocational training in the afternoon. Getting the production together has made everything topsy-turvy—it took me a while to work out how long I’d been below—and girls from all four ranks are thrown together at random without their chambermates so the nuns can still comply with the Education Act, which mandates how much instruction we get while also making sure the Curs don’t have to wash their own dishes or scrub their own privies.

I report to classroom 8 as directed, where a nun I’ve never met smiles bright and pleasant as she asks what reading group I’m in. I’m not used to nuns being kind, so it’s a moment before I manage, “Beginning, honora.”

“Splendid!” She says it like a I’m a pet or a toddler, and she clearly doesn’t notice how I’m gripping my skirt to still my hands because even though Master Grenallan taught us how to lie with a straight face, I never could get rid of all my tells. “Why don’t you get a primer and find a seat?”

A primer. I blink away sudden tears, because I should have said intermediate. That way I’d get a stupid storybook with no pictures to remind me how awful and selfish I was. I choose a primer at random and take it to my table. Just holding it feels like the same failure as that first day, when I unbound all my pigtails and stood nameless and helpless and compliant. Jasperine’s great-granddaughter must have felt that way too, but she didn’t slink to her seat and do as she was told.

Only schoolmasters can make new songs, but I can remake this primer. In honor of the ungovernable girls at Forswelt who came before me, who gave me hope, and for all the girls who’ll come after me, even if I’m not here to meet them. They’ll need to know they can resist, and not just in costly ways. They’ll need to know they’re not alone.

Me, I’m going to need a stick of drawing lead. The permanent kind.

So that afternoon I steal one from Maude Cur’s huge, ridiculous desk. It’s not even difficult. When the surveillance nun is at the opposite end of the corridor, I walk into the captain’s office with my half-full bucket of wash water like I have every reason to be there. The room is empty, and blocks of glorious sunlight glide through the floor-to-ceiling windows and spread over the plush blue rug. There’s an enamel cup on the edge of the desk that’s full of writing things, and I grab a lead stick and weave it into the plait hidden in the underside of my hair. Then I’m out the door, bucket in hand, heading toward the next privy down, trying not to grin. We’re never searched, either coming or going to vocational training, but I can only breathe again once I’ve safely stashed the drawing lead at the bottom of my trunk.

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