The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan

Author:Cathy Marie Buchanan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2012-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

Antoinette

A jailer with breath like boiled onions clomps ahead of me, past a string of weighty doors opened up onto dingy cells the breadth of two arms spread wide. Each is bare plaster, except for the iron grate forming the far wall and the single chair just in front. “These cells are for those coming to visit?” I say, and his highness slows his clomping and bothers with a flicker of a nod. “Don’t see why I been made to wait.” For every cell with a caller sunk onto the chair, a dozen more are as empty as my week’s been long.

The jailer halts, grunts, pointing the muzzle of his rifle, and I cross into the cell and hear the groan of the door closing behind my back. The cane seat of the chair has a gaping hole, a hole tearing wider when I plop down, not bothering to be light. I peer through the iron grate, across an intervening passageway, to a long row of cells, and guess Émile is to be put in the cell exactly facing my own. Another jailer, this one patrolling the length of the passageway, trudges by, his footsteps growing fainter as he retreats and then louder until he is again in front of my own cell. Three times more he passes by on his way to either end of the passageway, and I wait, feeling a breath away from my breakfast—fried potatoes nicked from a street vendor—rising up in my throat. It was Marie who started with the yelling, Marie who shoved first, Marie who screamed “murderer” when already my arm was raised. The hunched back of Charlotte, the bony rises of her ribs, were like the rolled-up shell of a pill bug awaiting a squashing fist. But I did not strike. I got up from Marie. Charlotte will forget. And Marie, she would have clobbered me worse than I did her if she had so much as a clue about how to fight. But still, the grease of the fried potatoes churns in my gut. I told a lie to Marie, a lie that was not white, and she knew it. I explained the rigmarole of getting an appointment, but already it was too late. Already I lied, saying I had not gone to Mazas. I only wanted to leave without a fuss, without Marie’s lip trembling and her eyes welling with tears, to hang on to the scrap of hopefulness that morning, finally arrived, had brought. But Marie yelled and shoved. The shoving back was a mistake. The hitting, too. I scared those two girls, and already they have more than enough to be fearful of in their lives.

The patrolling jailer passes by yet again, and still the cell exactly facing my own stays empty of Émile. I swallow hard and curl my fingers around the iron bars and wonder about him getting delivered to the wrong cell. Such dopey jailers. Such callousness. I lean my face in close to the

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