Chapter 8: Short Hair

The very few children older than Vekaya showed her an indifference that bordered on a type of hostility. Nerod and his friends enjoyed seeing children get punished – it didn’t matter who. All of the children Vekaya’s age or younger treated her as though they had never seen anything quite like her before. They openly gaped at her. They averted their eyes. But, they did not speak to her. So, she did not speak to them. During one of the first meals of her new life, the wall of silence cracked.

Apparently, dinner was one of the few times when the children were awake enough and allowed to talk somewhat freely, and Vekaya’s ears filled with a flurry of indistinct noise from every direction. Several days after Vekaya awoke in the storeroom, a boy finally approached her during dinner. He was nervous, younger, and of average size. His bright blue eyes stared out from behind a mass of straight black hair. The boy’s skin was tan, but it must have just been that way, Vekaya reasoned, there wasn’t very much sun in the House of Civius.

“Is it really you?” he said.

There was no good way to respond to this question. And, anyway, Vekaya didn’t care. This was someone who appeared to know her.

“I… I… I’m not sure what you mean,” she said. “Do I know you? Did I know you before? I can’t remember anything.”

The boy’s eyes went wide.

“You can’t remember anything?” he said.

She shook her head.

“You can’t remember… You were… Everyone says…”

“What?” said Vekaya, getting slightly annoyed. She wanted this boy to get over his shock so that she could learn what he had to say. He might be interrupted and taken away at any moment.

The boy’s already wide eyes widened and showed no sign of calming as he shook his head. It had apparently been enough for him because at that point, he moved to leave. But before he could, Vekaya’s arm jumped from the table, grabbed his hand, and pulled him back down to the bench with her. She squeezed his hand very hard. The boy looked at her imploringly, and she returned the look.

“Ow! Let me go!” he whimpered.

“What is it? What was it?”

“You- They turned you to-” said the boy, as he struggled against her.

“What?”

“You used to be Vekine! You- You used to be a boy!” he said.

Vekaya let go of his arm so quickly that he tumbled out of the table, crashing into someone carrying a tray of food. There was an awful din as the plates came clattering to the floor. The boy jumped up and stabbed an accusatory finger in Vekaya’s direction.

“She did it! I didn’t mean to! She made me fall into him! I’m sorry! She did it!”

Vekaya might have sighed at the boy’s stupid betrayal, but she was so aghast that she couldn’t even muster that. Turned into a girl? She had been a boy? What could that have meant? And somewhere, deep in her mind, wheels were turning. There was something wrong with what the boy had said, but it wasn’t all wrong. There was something to it, but what?

Before Vekaya could even get close to comprehending the various possibilities of what the boy could have meant, a shamasson was towering over her and looking down with the toothy smile of a cat over a mouse. The voice would be coming in seconds. Her brain screamed at her to do something, but she was too panicked to think of what. The thought of the tea and its attendant nightmares scrambled her thoughts even more.

Before Vekaya knew what she was doing, she had turned her foot on the stone floor so that the nail of her biggest toe was bending against it. It hurt a bit, but the shamasson’s cooing over her was now competing with the slight pain for the very brain in her head.

“Is there a problem?” had echoed out of the mouth with its perfectly white teeth. Vekaya knew that she had to respond, but she was wrestling with how. In the end, the pain in her foot was not enough to keep the shamasson’s voice at bay. Her foot straightened on the floor. She felt herself receding into the corners of her own mind, watching as she answered the shamasson’s questions.

“He said that I got turned into a girl,” she said.

“That’s silly,” replied the shamasson. “You’ve always been a girl.”

Even deep in her mind, this was a relief to her, but then…

“We just didn’t know. Ah, but you wouldn’t remember, would you? When you first came here, with your short hair and dirty pants, calling yourself, ‘Vekine,’ well, we thought you were a boy. You didn’t have any of the delicacy that Civius has imbued girls with. We still don’t know why you didn’t tell us that you were a girl.”

The realization spread through Vekaya’s head. That certainly was strange. Why would she have done that? Short hair? Vekine was just the boy’s version of Vekaya. Was Vekaya her real name or had it been something else? Short hair? Why had she adopted it? Who had she been before any of this? But even these questions were just ghosts. Short hair? They flitted around her head formlessly and beyond any real language. With the shamasson’s voice muffling her thoughts, she couldn’t concentrate well enough to remember anything.

“You’ll have to clean this up,” said the shamasson, motioning to the spilled food.

Vekaya nodded a response and felt her legs straighten beneath her as she stood and went to get a mop from where she had seen them beyond the kitchen. As she walked, she tried to gather her mind as much as possible – why might she have passed herself off as a boy? Who was she before whatever had happened to her? What had happened? She felt herself doing the mopping. Before long, the voice had worn off of her. She glared at the floor, trying to remember something – anything – about her former life. Just then, she saw a piece of one of the broken bowls, sharp and small. She picked it up. Apparently, almost standing on her big toe was not enough to drown out the shamasson’s voices. Vekaya grimaced as she thought about digging the shard of crockery into her leg, but it seemed like a better choice than being unable to make any choices at all.

The thought of Vekine and “short hair” occupied her thoughts as she finished the mopping, as she went through her classes, as she took lashes for not listening. It so consumed her that she almost walked right into a shamasson when the throng of children she was with headed to the dormitories. Just in time, she pushed the shard into her upper thigh. Just beneath the hem of her dress, her fingers pushed the jagged edge against her leg.

“Be careful where you are walking,” said the shamasson. “The Pillar of Society teaches us to look out for others.”

“I’m sorry,” Vekaya said as she assumed a blank stare, so that the shamasson would think that her voice had worked.

The moment that the shamasson’s glowing white robes were out of sight, she sighed and resumed walking normally. Just before she was in the dormitory, a young man stopped her. He looked like he was probably fifteen. Thin, like most of the children in the House of Civius, he had pale skin. His face was round. He had brown hair and brown eyes.

“It’s you,” he gasped, having apparently just run from somewhere.

Vekaya was still unsure of how to respond to this, but the statement was somewhat reasonable. Almost panicked at the level of familiarity and the opportunity it presented, she blurted out, “Do you know me?”

“Only you could have gotten around a shamasson stare like that,” said the boy, “I thought you were gone forever.”

“Who are you?” Vekaya asked.

“There’s no time. Take this. Take it and… and don’t talk to me again. I don’t know who you really are or what you are, but I don’t want to end up like you.”

With that, he thrust a small piece of paper into her chest and took off toward the dormitory. Vekaya watched him go, unable to think of anything that might stop him. Calling “Wait!” seemed absurd under the circumstances. She lowered her eyes to what had been given her. As the other children milled past into their respective dormitories, she unfolded it. The handwriting seemed oddly familiar, like a memory somehow older than she was. For all of the cloudiness surrounding her identity and where she had come from, she had already found that she had no trouble making the letters on the page into thoughts in her head. Reading was fantastically still there.

It said:

Dear me,

If you’re reading this, you’ve gone and gotten your memory erased. That was foolish, but it probably wasn’t your fault. Anyway, this is you, Vekaya, I’m you. This is the only clue that you’re going to get as to where you can find out more

Sincerely,

You

Sketched crudely on the bottom of the note were five rectangles in two rows, three on the bottom and two on the top, with the inscription: “in the kitchen, like your arm.” Now, what could that possibly mean?