Lexicon Read online

  “Are you,” she said.

  • • •

  She showered and re-dressed. Where she’d come from, it was fine to wear the same clothes for days at a time; that meant you were busy following life’s opportunities. But she could see that here it was going to become an issue. She pulled on her jacket, at least, which was furry and had little biker studs she made fun of if anyone mentioned them but secretly thought were awesome. She brushed her hair until most of the knots were gone and clipped it out of her face. She had a faint memory of mascara left in her makeup bag and scraped together what she could to give herself smoky eyes. She had lost her deodorant somewhere. But she had soaped up in the shower. The reality was she smelled better than she had in a while.

  A bell rang somewhere: an honest to God bell, like a musical instrument. She opened her door to faces peering out of doorways. They were all young, mostly female. “Chow time!” said a black girl across the hall, and there were titters.

  The dining hall table had twelve places set on a tablecloth the size of a bedsheet but there were still miles of glowing wood stretching away at either end. The curly-haired boy came in, joking with a girl she hadn’t met, and sat opposite. She thought he might look at her but he didn’t. She tried to figure out the cutlery. A girl, no more than ten, climbed onto a chair beside her. Emily said hi and the girl said hi back, shyly. On her other side, a pretty girl with angel-blond hair slid into a seat. The curly-haired boy looked at the blond girl and away and then back and Emily thought, Yeah, okay.

  Charlotte, whom Emily still vaguely thought of as a nun, moved around the table, chatting briefly to each of them. Bread was served. Soup. The ten-year-old stared hopelessly at her spoons and Emily tried to help with educated guesses based on what everyone else was using.

  “I love your jacket,” said the angelic blond girl. “It’s so authentic.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I like your ears.”

  “My ears?”

  Emily had meant that as an insult but now realized the angel girl was serious. The girl had seriously tried to compliment her jacket. “Yeah. They’re like a fairy’s.” She elbowed the ten-year-old. “Fairy ears, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh,” said the angel girl. “Well, thank you.”

  There were silver plates with bite-size constructions of meat and bread and paste and whatever. She picked one up only because it got her out of this conversation. It was actually not bad. Weird, but not bad-weird. This was her whole day, on a cracker.

  Charlotte rose and gave a short speech about how happy she was to have them here and she hoped they would seize the opportunity with two hands because each of them had great potential and the Academy was dedicated to unlocking it. Then she said they should sleep well because the first examination would begin early, and the curly-haired boy asked what it would be, and Charlotte smiled and said that would be answered by the morning. Those were her words: Answered by the morning. You would get your head kicked in talking that way in Emily’s world, but she was kind of enjoying it. On the pier, under her floppy hat, she used words to make people smile and come closer and give her two dollars and not care about losing. Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled people’s brains for some reason, that just amused them. Puns, and exaggerations, and things that were true and not at the same time. Answered by the morning. Words like that.

  Afterward, they filed back to their rooms and she brushed her teeth alongside a girl from Connecticut. Everyone but her had pajamas. On her way to bed, a voice floated down the hallway: “Good night, girl in a doorway.”

  “Night, boy on a sofa,” she said. She closed her door. She couldn’t believe she had just said that. He was trouble, this boy. But the good kind.

  • • •

  In the morning, they were sat in a hall and given forms. The first questions she recognized: Was she a cat person or a dog person? What was her favorite color? Did she love her family? Even the weird one was right there: Why did you do it? It was at the very top of a page and the rest was nothing but endless lines.

  “Please answer with complete honesty,” said Charlotte. She moved between their desks, echoes of her heels bouncing between the floor and ceiling. “Anything less will not serve you well.”

  They asked her favorite movies. Songs. Books. She hadn’t read a book since she was eight. She glanced around. The ten-year-old was three desks behind. Her feet didn’t even reach the floor. Emily twirled her pen. She wrote: Princess Lily Saves the World. It was the only one she could remember.

  Charlotte collected the papers and disappeared for a while. People leaned across aisles and compared answers. She noticed a man in the corridor, tall with brown skin and eyes like rocks, watching them through the glass. She felt flustered for some reason and looked away, and when she looked back, he was gone.

  Charlotte returned with a TV on a trolley. “You will be shown a series of rapidly changing images. One of the images will be of a type of food. You are to write down the name of the food. Are there any questions?” She looked around. “Very well. Good luck.”

  Emily picked up her pencil. Charlotte pressed a button on the VCR. On the screen, text appeared—SERIES 1-1—then faded away. There was a second of blackness. Then a jumble of images flashed by and was gone. Emily blinked. The screen said: END OF SERIES 1-1. Heads bent over desks. Emily looked at her paper. That had been a lot faster than she’d expected. What had she seen? A laughing face. A family around a table. People kissing. Grass. A cow. A glass of milk? She wasn’t sure. Which was strange, because she was observant. She had quick eyes. So why wasn’t she sure about the milk? She glanced around. Everyone but her was writing. She chewed her lip. She wrote: MILK.

  “Pens down, please.”

  She glanced around. The curly-haired boy to her right had SUSHI. She felt cold. Had there been sushi? Maybe. She looked left. The angel girl: SUSHI.

  Charlotte prowled the desks. “Yes,” she said, passing a boy at the front. “Yes. Yes.” She stopped at Emily. “No.” Emily exhaled. “Yes. Yes. No.”

  She turned to see who else had fucked up. It was the ten-year-old, who looked devastated. Before she hid her paper, Emily saw: MILK.

  “Series two,” said Charlotte.

  Obviously, what she’d done wrong was let herself be misled by the other images. Breakfast, a cow, and there had been a glass, but empty. Her brain had filled that in. She was too imaginative. And the reason she didn’t get sushi was she didn’t know what the fuck sushi looked like. She kind of remembered now. But it wasn’t exactly a familiar food. These other guys probably ate sushi twice a week, with caviar and quail and whatever that paste was on the crackers yesterday. Pâté. That. She would get the next one.

  Images flickered. The screen blanked. Terror gripped her. There had been a banana. Definitely a banana. But also a sun, which kind of looked like a banana, and at the start she’d caught a glimpse of what might have been a fish. She had definitely seen palm trees and an ocean. She wasn’t sure about the fish. Or the banana. The banana could have been an afterimage of the sun. Why were there palm trees? Was that random, or was it trying to make her think of fish? She squeezed her pen. She wrote: FISH.

  “Answers, please.”

  She looked around. The curly-haired boy: BANANA. The angel girl: BANANA. The ten-year-old: FISH.

  “Yes. Yes. Yes.” Charlotte reached her. “No.”

  She had outsmarted herself. She should have trusted her instincts. She didn’t want to meet the curly-haired boy’s eyes but couldn’t stop herself. His eyes were closed, as if he was focusing, clearing his mind. Dick, she thought. But maybe she should do that.

  “Series three.”

  The screen barfed images. This time it talked, which took her by surprise: A man said, “Red,” and an old woman laughed, and was that a strawberry? No, a blood spot. It ended. She had definitely seen ice cream in a cone. She wrote that
down before she could second-guess herself. She covered her paper with her hands and stared holes in the girl in front of her.

  The curly-haired boy put down his pen. She couldn’t see his paper, so she mouthed: Ice cream? His eyebrows rose. She didn’t know what that meant. She felt a surging desire to pick up her pen and write something else. But she hadn’t seen anything but ice cream.

  “Answers, please.”

  The curly-haired boy moved his hands. STRAWBERRY. “Double fuck,” she said. She didn’t bother to look at the others. Charlotte reached her and confirmed that she had gotten it wrong, again. There were two more nos: Along with her and the ten-year-old, a skinny guy in the back had messed up. Emily was glad for this, but mostly furious. Give ten dollars to each of the people in this room, wait two hours, and Emily would have it all. Drop them on the street with no cash and no place to sleep, she would be the one with her shit together twenty-four hours later. These tests, though, were making her feel like a moron.

  “Series four.”

  Fuck you, she thought. She looked at the screen but her heart wasn’t in it. It was the longest sequence yet. When it ended, she looked at her paper and thought: I have no idea.

  The girl in front of her let out an explosive sneeze. It was the kind of thing Benny would do when she wanted a moment’s distraction, and without thinking, she flicked her eyes right. Beneath the curly-haired boy’s arm: APR. The rest was obscured. “Bless you,” said the angel. Someone tittered. “Quiet,” said Charlotte.

  She couldn’t think of a food that started with APR. She was mentally stuck on APPLE. Could he have written APP? If she couldn’t think of an APR food in five seconds, she was going with APPLE. Charlotte opened her mouth. Emily scrawled: APRICOT.

  “Answers, please.”

  She glanced right. Yes. Charlotte began to walk the desks. “Yes. Yes. Yes.” By the time she reached Emily, Emily had noticed a problem. The boy had APRICOTS. She was short an S. Charlotte paused. Emily said nothing. Come on, she thought. Apricot, apricots, what’s the difference? “Yes,” said Charlotte.

  She glowed. This was what she should have done from the beginning. This was how she’d accomplished everything in her whole life: by skirting the rules. She should not have forgotten that.

  “Yes. Yes. No.” Charlotte walked to the front and turned off the TV. “Thank you. This concludes the first examination. Please enjoy the rest of the day.” People began to talk, rising from their desks. “Gertie, remain behind, please.”

  Emily looked at the ten-year-old. The kid looked miserable, so Emily leaned over. “It’s just a stupid test.” She’d been wrong about this girl’s age. Gertie wasn’t even ten. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Emily Ruff,” said Charlotte. “You may go.”

  “You’re just too young,” Emily said. “I was here a couple years back and failed everything. Next year, you’ll smash it.”

  Gertie looked at her hopefully.

  “Thank you, Emily,” said Charlotte.

  She gave Gertie a wink on the way out, the kind that tickled people on the pier.

  • • •

  “Thought you were history,” said the curly-haired boy. She had been passing by his room but now she stopped. He was splayed on his bed. The angel girl was in there, leaning against the stone wall.

  “Just warming up.” She went to move on, but the girl peeled herself from the wall.

  “Hey. I want your opinion. Why do the teachers here have fake names?”

  Emily looked at her, confused.

  “Charlotte Brontë. There’s a teacher named Robert Lowell and a Paul Auster, too. Did you see the main board in the lobby? It says before Brontë, the headmistress was Margaret Atwood.” She raised her eyebrows.

  “And . . . ?” said Emily.

  “They’re famous poets,” said the boy. “Dead famous poets, mostly.” He looked at the angel girl, amused. “She didn’t know.”

  “Like I sit around memorizing poets,” Emily said. “This is why I’m going to destroy you in the tests, because everything you know is useless.”

  The boy grinned. The girl said, “It’s okay,” in a tone that made Emily want to hit her.

  “And the school has no name. They just call it the Academy. Kind of weird, yes?”

  “You’re kind of weird,” she said.

  • • •

  Gertie didn’t come back. “The tests are eliminations,” said the curly-haired boy, through a mouthful of rye bread. This was at lunch. He had taken Gertie’s seat. “Fail one, that’s it. Pack your bags.”

  She paused midway through buttering a roll. “Who told you that?”

  “No one. I figured it out. It’s obvious, don’t you think?” He chewed and chewed.

  • • •

  Charlotte came in during lunch and looked at Emily in a way Emily didn’t like. Then she left. Emily continued eating, but her stomach formed a hard ball. Afterward, Charlotte and another teacher were waiting for her in the corridor. It reminded Emily of San Francisco, where you’d step in the front door of your squat and there’d be two skinny bitches there, hips jutting, lips like cats’ asses, trembling with righteous outrage about something or other. Some debt, or thing you did. Charlotte beckoned. “Emily. If you please.” Her heels clacked down the hall.

  In her office, Charlotte gestured at a chair. The office was larger than Emily had thought. It had doors to other rooms, one of which Charlotte must sleep in, since she’d said to come see her any time of day. It had a single window that looked onto a courtyard, and a messy desk, on which stood a vase of fresh flowers. “I’m disappointed.”

  “Are you,” she said.

  “We gave you a sizable opportunity. You will never know how great.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The examination room is monitored. Carefully.”

  “I see,” Emily said. There was silence. “So you’re saying I did something wrong in some way.”

  “Cheating? Yes. That was wrong.”

  “Well, you should have said that. You should have said, ‘Actually, we have three rules, the third one is don’t cheat.’”

  “You think that bears stating?”

  “That guy in San Francisco who sent me here, Lee, he knew I cheated people. That’s what I do. I’m a hustler. You bring me here but suddenly I can’t cheat? You never said that.”

  “I said honest answers were essential.”

  “In the test before. Not the video test.”

  “This isn’t up for discussion,” Charlotte said. “A driver is coming to collect you. Please collect your things.”

  “Well,” she said, “fuck.”

  “You may have been promised compensation for your time here. Unfortunately, that will not apply, due to the cheating.”

  “You bitch.”

  Charlotte’s face didn’t change. Emily had expected some kind of reaction, from someone so nunnish. She had assumed Charlotte was quietly furious, the way people got when you broke one of their made-up rules, but the truth was Charlotte didn’t seem to care. “You may go.”

  “Forget the driver. I don’t want anything from you.” She got up.

  “The airport is twenty miles. The driver—”

  “Fuck your driver,” she said.

  • • •

  She went to her room and stuffed clothes into her Pikachu bag. Until this point she had felt nothing but anger, but abruptly she was heartbroken and shaky with tears. She threw the bag over her shoulder and banged into the corridor. “Hey!” It was the curly-haired boy. “What happened? Where are you going?” But she didn’t answer and he didn’t come after her.

  There was no sign of a driver and she began to trudge down the driveway. About a thousand windows looked onto her back, and she imagined eyes in each one. But that was silly; the fact was, nobody would care. She would be gone five minutes and they would forget she’d existed, because the place made more sense without her.

  Halfway down the driveway, a
car crunched up behind her. “Emily Ruff?”

  “I don’t want a driver.”

  “I’m not . . .” She heard the hand brake crank, the door open. “I’m not a driver.” It was the tall man she’d seen through the glass during her test. “My name is Eliot. Please come back to the house.”

  “I’ve been evicted.”

  “Hold up a second. Stop.”

  She stopped. The man scrutinized her. He had a stillness about him, which made him hard to read.

  “You cheated. Your defense is that nobody said you couldn’t. I agree. Go back to the house.”

  “I don’t want to go back to the house.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not going to make it, okay? It’s pretty clear that everyone here but me is incredibly smart and knows, like, the names of poets, so . . . thanks for the opportunity.” She started walking again.

  He matched her pace. “There are two types of exams. The first tests your ability to withstand persuasion. The second measures your ability to persuade. This is more important. And from what I’ve seen, you have a good shot at those.”

  “Charlotte said—”

  “It’s not up to Charlotte.”

  She looked back at the school. It was kind of tempting.

  “It would be a shame to never discover what you were capable of.” He shrugged. “My opinion.”

  “Oh, fine,” she said.

  • • •

  She returned to her room and dumped her bag. She didn’t think she’d have to wait long and she was right. The curly-haired boy came in and looked at her angrily. “I thought you left.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Or someone changed it for you?” He folded his arms. “They only take one of us.”

  The angel girl appeared in the doorway. Emily said, “They only take one?”

  “I never heard that,” said the angel girl.

  “On the last day, if there’s more than one candidate left, you have to persuade the others to quit. That’s how you make it.”

  “I never heard that,” said the girl, “and I say, welcome back, Emily.”