Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 21

"Tight corners, ladies. We can't have wrinkles."

Guard Robinson, the staffer at Dearborn responsible for watching those of us on laundry duty, stood near the entrance of the laundry room in the basement of the Huron Building, my dorm at Dearborn. There were two large dormitories on campus intended to keep the younger girls separated from the older girls, but in my own opinion the separation strategy would have been more effective if the extremely dangerous girls had been kept away from the less dangerous girls. There were younger girls living in the Mackinac Building who I avoided with as much caution as girls my own age.

Being assigned to laundry chores on January eighth was a significantly miserable setback in my plan to escape from my campus. It was almost six o'clock at night, and in half an hour, Henry, Mischa, and Trey would be waiting for me nearly half a mile away on the road that circled our school. I had butterflies in my stomach as I withdrew piping hot gym clothes from the dryer to fold as Robinson watched us. This wasn't the way the evening was supposed to have gone down. I was supposed to have been on cafeteria duty. If I'd been there, doing pre-dinner prep, I'd have had my winter coat with me from crossing between my dorm and the cafeteria facility. I'd have been able to slip out the back utility door of the cafeteria where trucks dropped off big shipments of vegetables and government-issued blocks of cheese, and make my way toward the rural road that led to my school to wait for my ride.

But instead, for whatever reason, my name had been printed on the laundry list on Monday that week. I'd debated making some kind of appeal to Mrs. Freemantle, the disciplinary advisor in charge of assigning rooms to incoming girls and chores to all of us to occupy our free time on evenings and weekends, but had ultimately decided that it would be best to not bring attention to my preference of chores that week. It would have been easy to assume that Violet's spirits had something to do with my random reassignment since I'd previously been on evening dinner preparation every weeknight since I'd been admitted at Dearborn. Whether spirits had anything to do with my rather inconvenient assignment to the laundry room or not, the fact of the matter was that I was freaking out. I had only minutes to figure out how I was going to rectify this situation, and none of the possibilities I'd been entertaining all week seemed like realistic options.

I already knew from having been on laundry duty all week that at the end of our shift, we'd pile our organized bags of students' clean laundry in carts that would be wheeled upstairs by the facilities crew for delivery to dorm rooms. The eighteen of us on duty would form two single file lines, Robinson would count us, and we'd march up the stairs to our rooms to prepare for dinner. From there, I'd unenthusiastically greet Alecia out of social obligation, grab my coat, and we'd both stand outside our room in the hallway, dressed for the cold, at attention until Guard Carlitos, the resident assistant responsible for our floor of the dormitory until nine o'clock on weeknights, blew her whistle. All of the girls on the second floor of Huron would follow Carlitos from our dorm across the freezing cold courtyard to the cafeteria, and after our awful meal of chili and rice or chicken patty sandwiches, we'd be marched back across the courtyard to our rooms for homework and lights-out at ten. If I didn't make my escape before returning from the laundry room to my dorm room, my chance to split unnoticed would be shot for the night. There was no way I could fall out of line while crossing the courtyard to the cafeteria. Any girl who spotted me would snitch—while there was camaraderie at Dearborn, my classmates definitely did not extend it to me.

And worst of all, I'd have no way of getting in touch with Henry, Mischa, and Trey to let them know I was unable to get off campus. They'd be idling along the side of the highway, having no idea what was going on. Our whole plan for the night had been very carefully constructed around the obstacle of communication. Henry couldn't call me at school without my mom and dad putting him on my pre-approved communication list, and I couldn't exactly ask my mom to do that after her awkward insinuation that Henry and I were in the throes of some kind of romantic entanglement. Pretending to be Mrs. Emory, I'd called Trey's school on the pre-paid mobile phone that Henry purchased the morning of January third, before my mom drove me back to Dearborn, to request his leave of absence for the weekend. Of course they had asked for my passcode, and luckily, "turquoise" seemed to have worked. I had been shaking the whole time I'd been on the phone with the administrator there, all the while trying to sound convincingly like a middle-aged mom.