Snowsisters Read online

  Peggy, Keisha, and I work pretty efficiently, and it’s much easier without Chris. Keisha is funny and smart and she takes notes on her laptop since I don’t have one. She offers to let me use it after lunch so I can draft some parts more easily. I’m a little uneasy about that, because she says she’s going to hang out with Chris while I use it, but I decide to try to be friends.

  At noon Joan ends the session, and we go to lunch. When I sit at the table next to Keisha, I find that Chris is there already, talking to Clover and Janaye in low tones about why Orly shouldn’t be here. Clover beckons me, but I look away. I really don’t want to do this. When Soph comes in with Orly, Chris and Janaye stop talking. I’m liking this less and less, and now I think I should say something to someone. None of the adults have arrived when Soph looks out the window of the dining room as she’s pulling out her chair and asks in a loud voice, “What the actual fuck?”

  We all turn to see what she’s pointing at. Our snowsisters from the other night are lined up outside. They’re a little ragged, since it kept snowing, and most of them have snowdrifts clinging to them. But I see it immediately. Someone took the carrot nose from the snowsister Soph and Orly built, with its lacy black bra, and shoved it down lower. To make a penis.

  * * *

  From Soph Alcazar’s Writing Journal,

  February 14, 2018

  Come out, join the group, acknowledge yourself.

  Those who persecute us can go to hell.

  Chapter Fifteen

  From the Fan Fiction Unbound Archive,

  posted by conTessaofthecastle:

  Daphne hid behind a tree as the carriage passed by. Much as she wanted to wave down the driver and ask for a ride, it was too risky. She closed her eyes and tried reciting the shape-shifting spell again. Nothing happened, except that the sound of carriage wheels stopped.

  “Who’s there?” called a voice. A horse shook its bridle.

  Daphne froze.

  Soph.

  I can’t believe it. Someone put a dick on our snowsister. I have no doubt it was Chris. I’m still in socks or I’d go out there, grab it, and stick it right in Chris’s face. But before I can say anything beyond my initial outburst, I see Tess come around the corner outside the window. She trudges through the fresh snow over to our snowsister and grabs the carrot. Then she trudges back around the corner. A minute later, she’s inside, and everyone is frozen in their places. She doesn’t close the door all the way behind her.

  “I don’t know who did this,” she says, looking in the direction of Chris, Keisha, and Yin. Tess doesn’t yell, but her voice is clear and firm. I’m surprised and impressed. I realize that she has an accent, but not the New England accent you hear on television. Hers is softer, and it gives her steady voice force. “But if people have something to say, they should say it. And if they aren’t going to say it, they should keep it to themselves.”

  Chris lifts her chin at Tess. “Who are you to judge, Tess?” She doesn’t say she was the one who did it. But she doesn’t deny it either.

  Tess stares her down; her blue-green eyes are very hard. “I’m not judging. I’m saying if anyone is going to judge, they should do so openly so everyone who is judged can respond. And everyone else can see what’s going on.” Wow! I didn’t expect this from Tess. She keeps talking. “You know, I’ve tried to be friends with everyone here. And I tried to stay out of it. But this isn’t okay anymore. This is just—” She searches for the right word and then finds it. “Mean. Just plain mean.”

  When did Tess start to talk like this? For the last two nights, she hasn’t wanted to get involved. She could barely defend her own writing, the first day.

  I’m nervous about how Orly will react, but she rolls her eyes and says in a calm voice, “Well, bless your heart, isn’t that a tall drink of iced tea, Chris?” A few of the girls titter.

  Chris looks back at Orly with her eyes narrowed. She turns on her heel and walks out of the room. Not even Keisha and Yin follow her.

  After Chris leaves, Orly says, “I generally expect at least eighteen karats on Valentine’s Day, maybe twenty-four.”

  Lunch is very quiet.

  * * *

  When I go back upstairs to get my laptop charger, Chris is coming out of her room with a duffel bag. I don’t see Orly.

  “Are you leaving?” I ask her. That might be for the best.

  “Moving up to one of the third-floor rooms,” she says, her voice clipped. “I don’t need y’all hassling me anymore. I’m here to write.”

  “Did you do it?” She ignores me and strides down the hall toward the third-floor stairs.

  I find Orly in a corner of the lounge, reading off her phone. “Are you all right, Orly?”

  “I suppose I’m fine,” she responds. “This is nothing new. But I appreciate that Tess called them out.”

  I want to say something like “I support you,” but I realize that sounds pretty patronizing. Instead I say, “I wanted to know if you have any extra socks I could borrow. Tess loaned me these, but I don’t want to keep them all week, and I forgot to pack extras.”

  Orly shakes her head. “Sorry, hon. I don’t own many pairs myself and I didn’t bring any extras. Y’all have some cold weather up here!”

  As I’m about to leave, Orly asks me not to say anything to the instructors. “Chris is gone,” she says. “I don’t want everyone here to think I’m a problem.”

  I try to tell her she’s not the problem, but she seems pretty convinced. “Soph, it was pretty clear from the beginning that me-’n-her weren’t gonna mix. I’ve got no need to keep this on everyone’s plate.”

  Rather than argue, I tell her I’ll keep quiet. On my way back to our room, I think about the fact that Tess confronted Chris about the carrot, but Orly referred to “everyone here.” We have time, so I take out my phone.

  [From Soph to Gordon, Lally, and Mibs] UR not going to believe this.

  [From Mibs to Gordon, Lally, and Soph] Wut?

  [From Soph to Gordon, Lally, and Mibs] Jerk put a dick on our snowsister.

  [From Gordon to Lally, Mibs, and Soph] Who’s your snowsister?

  He adds a winky emoticon.

  [From Soph to Gordon, Lally, and Mibs] Snowman, but a woman. Mean girl made carrot nose a dick.

  [From Mibs to Gordon, Lally, and Soph] More transphobes. What do they care?

  [From Soph to Gordon, Lally, and Mibs] Right. Then room8 got salty af!

  [From Gordon to Lally, Mibs, and Soph] Military room8 with BF?

  [From Soph to Gordon, Lally, and Mibs] Yup.

  [From Gordon to Lally, Mibs, and Soph] She sounds cool.

  * * *

  In the afternoon, we are supposed to have a check-in meeting with our instructors about our individual work. I sign up to meet with Grace later in the afternoon. I’m working on a sonnet about how this week is going. It’s not in couplets, but still the simple Shakespearean style.

  Here I came, my purpose only to learn.

  I quickly found the perfect one to teach

  Me. Instead her scorn is all I can earn,

  Though her attention I try and beseech.

  Meanwhile, my peers I don’t understand.

  One of us they have needlessly maligned.

  We should be enlightened, offer our hands,

  All of us writers, interests aligned.

  Disharmony under the surface lurks,

  Divided, scattered, and not together

  On subjects much less worthy than our works.

  Progress impossible, oeuvres no better.

  I’m stuck in gloom, all my spirits weighted,

  My objectives all being frustrated.

  I give this to Grace when I see her. I know the poem is not great. But it does reflect how I feel, and I don’t have much else to show her. She sighs when she finishes.<
br />
  “Soph, are you having that bad a time? I heard you were a star at skating and plenty of the other girls want to hang out with you.”

  Now I feel like a whiny brat. But Grace is only talking about the stupid social stuff, and it’s not as if I met a girlfriend or anything. I change the conversation to my writing. If Yin is right, I might be able to use Grace as a reference for Minerva. The admissions office would probably be impressed with that.

  “I’m fine. I feel as if my work isn’t going anywhere. I expected something different from this week.”

  Grace adopts a frank tone. “Soph, you want to write according to specific structures, right? You already know how to make a template with a spreadsheet. The hard part, and one you can work on, is capturing emotion and using words with feeling. Poetry is not only saying something in a patterned way, but pulling the words together so that their sound and their meaning contribute to the verse.”

  I nod, even though I’m still skeptical.

  “Let’s go over a few of your lines. The second to last one, ‘I’m stuck in gloom, all my spirits weighted,’ is exactly what I’m talking about. That line is dark and heavy, not only the meaning of the words, but their sounds and shapes as well. ‘Weighted’ and ‘gloom’ and ‘stuck.’ The other words in this line don’t interfere, they let the meaningful ones stand out.”

  We go through some other lines, and I’m surprised that she is so good at analyzing the strengths and weaknesses in my work. Maybe she is a decent instructor for me.

  Tess.

  Late in the afternoon, after a really quiet individual writing session, Soph and I go up to our room.

  On the stairs she says, “Hey, Tess, that was nice of you, sticking up for Orly. How come you decided to do that?”

  Before I think about it I say, “Because Chris crossed a line. And Joey would have wanted me to do something about it.”

  She starts a little when I say that and asks, “Why would your boyfriend care?”

  I realize I’ve said too much and just shake my head at her. Before she can press the issue, we reach our room, where a box addressed to Soph is sitting on the floor outside the door. The logo on it is L.L.Bean. She must have ordered herself a brand-new pair of snow boots and had them shipped overnight. I still do not understand the world Soph lives in.

  “What?” She shrugs as we go inside. She plops down on the bed, pulls the boots out of the box, and works on the laces. I smile, not wanting to disturb the truce we forged when I stood up for Orly. I know why I did it, even if I’m not ready to talk about it here with these girls.

  I change the subject. “I talked to Yin and Keisha. They said they didn’t do it. Yin was willing to go talk to Professor Forsythe with Chris, but now she doesn’t want any part of Chris. They both said this went too far. So, I’m pretty sure Chris did it.”

  Soph looks impressed.

  I wish I could talk to Joey. Even though I know that he would tell me to talk about it, sometimes it helps to hear him say it out loud.

  Soph’s phone goes off with an incoming text, and she groans.

  “Your mom again?” I ask, since that’s how she reacts to all of her mom’s texts.

  “Yes,” she says, annoyed. “Listen to this.” She reads, in a high-pitched voice. “‘S—what about upswept hair? You used to love when we did that with the Castilian comb.’”

  “What’s she talking about?” I ask.

  Soph flings herself on her bed dramatically. “That stupid debutante ball again,” she says. “She’s actually planning how I’m going to wear my hair a whole year ahead of time!”

  “It sounds really formal and fancy, like a wedding,” I say. “What’s the what’s-it-called comb?”

  “It’s a Spanish thing. You start with this ornate metal comb called a pieneta and then you overlay it with a scarf, which goes down the back of your head. That part is the mantilla.”

  I like the way she says the Spanish words with an accent. Her t’s are softer, and the vowels roll. She shows me pictures of the Spanish royal family on her phone.

  “See how Queen Sofia wears it? My mom loves that because she’s not Spanish herself, the same way Queen Sofia isn’t, but everyone appreciates how she wears the pieneta y mantilla for special occasions. Here is Sofia at her wedding before she was the Queen. My parents called me Sophronia partly because of her. She was Princess of Greece and Denmark before she married Juan Carlos.”

  “Wow! It looks like you’d have to practice to keep it from falling off your head.”

  “You do,” she says sullenly.

  I want to ask if she knows any of the queens or princesses in the photos, but her tone stops me. “Don’t you like Queen Sofia too?”

  “I don’t know. She’s not too big on the gay community. She’s against gay marriage, because she’s Catholic. She has a right to her opinion. But she has hurt a lot of feelings. Maybe the new Queen, Letizia, will be better.” She pronounces it Lay-teeth-ee-a. She shrugs.

  Soph’s indifference surprises me. If Queen Sofia is anti-gay, I’d expect Soph to take a stronger stand. Instead of asking her more I say, “I think you’d look nice in it, the… pieneta.” I try to say it right but it comes out like piñata. “The comb would stand out against your hair.”

  “I did used to love playing dress-up with that comb when I was little,” she says, and a smile plays on her face. “My grandmother Alicia gave it to my mom for her wedding.” A-leeth-ee-a. I love how she says the names. “I think it was made specially for her mother at the end of the 1800s.”

  The smile fades quickly, though, and she says, “But it still feels wrong to me. I mean, I don’t want to be dressed up like a pretty little doll on the arm of some guy I don’t know or care about, so that I can see my picture in a social-set story.”

  I laugh, and Soph pouts. “No, I’m not laughing at you. I guess I have a hard time thinking of you as anybody’s pretty little doll.” She smirks at that. “Don’t you know some boy who is a friend you could ask? If you went with someone you know, it might turn out to be more fun than you think. And you’d make your mom happy at the same time.”

  “I don’t know,” she sighs. “I think Mrs. Peckett, the one who gave me a ride up here, wants me to ask her son Freddy.”

  “So why not do that?” I ask.

  “He’s not…” She stops.

  “What?” Now I’m curious.

  “He’s not the person I want to dress up for like that,” she finally says, “but I guess I could think about it.”

  * * *

  From Soph Alcazar’s Writing Journal,

  February 14, 2018

  Friends from afar are the ones who get me.

  I try not to let these girls upset me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  From the Fan Fiction Unbound Archive,

  posted by conTessaofthecastle:

  Daphne knew she couldn’t stay hidden. Whoever was in that carriage must have magical powers also, to have felt her presence. She recalled the words her mother spoke, the night before Astoria and Daphne left the Coven, “When a witch acts, she must do so deliberately or not at all. Magical intent must be chosen, not stumbled upon, or its effect will be disastrous.”

  Soph.

  At dinner, Professor Forsythe announces that Grace will read her poetry in the lounge later, and everyone is invited to attend, but it isn’t mandatory. Grace tells one of the other girls that Professor Forsythe, Joan, and Celestine are planning to take the evening off and go into town, which explains why the three of them disappear before dessert.

  Before we leave the table, Grace stands up. “Even though I’m reading from my own recent material tonight, I thought we’d put on an impromptu poetry slam first. Let’s be very casual about it. You don’t have to prepare anything. Instead, plan to just say something if the mood strikes you. It can be serious or silly, topical or not.
Let’s all put on pajamas and sweats and have fun with it.”

  As we clear our places, I hear rain outside, something I didn’t expect since it has been so cold. Climbing the stairs, I ask Tess if that means winter is letting up already.

  “I don’t think so, Soph. Joey texted that a surprise ice storm just passed through there. He’s stuck at home.” Her face clouds over before she changes the subject. “Those teachers shouldn’t be out in this. Listen to that wind.”

  Back in our room, the tip of a tree branch brushes against the window as it whips around. It’s too dark to see outside. Tess remarks, “That means the roads will be bad. It rains, then it freezes. Everything will be covered with ice.”

  I change into yoga pants, noticing that Tess keeps her jeans on, rather than putting on pink sweats or her camouflage pajama bottoms. We go back down to the lounge with everyone else, taking seats on one of the couches which line three sides of the room. I guess no one decided to stay in their room.

  Grace stands up at the front in a sweatshirt and plaid pajama bottoms. “I’m sure some of us know what a poetry slam is, but for those who don’t, it’s a performance competition. People get up and deliver poems about whatever subjects matter to them. Usually the audience judges which are the best, but I thought we’d try something different. We won’t bother with winners or losers. However, each girl’s poem should be linked somehow to the poem that went before it. If you have a different topic, think about how you can connect it to the girl who’s just gone. This is from a Persian practice called mushaira. Let’s try it.”

  At first, no one volunteers. We stare at each other until Orly puts a hand up. “May I go first, Grace?”

  Orly stands. She looks around at the group.

  “With best intentions, kindly or not, you all empathize with my dilemma.

  Only you don’t.