The defining incident happened in early November. Despite Faye’s marvelous voice, she wanted a career in art, not music, and even so early in her studies she visualized things as artworks. This defining incident was remembered as a painting—perhaps of the Dutch or Flemish school, dramatically sidelit: Interior with Figures. The interior was the room that she and Sophy shared, full of the golden light of an autumn afternoon, amber sun-fingers reaching toward dark corners and along dusky walls. The figures were themselves: Carolyn crouched on the window seat, the slanting light making a ruddy aureole of her hair, the dorm cat sprawled bonelessly across her lap. Faye herself, wild hair bushing upward, walnut skin, eyes glittering like a jungle creature, catching glimpses of herself in the mirror as she stalked back and forth. Ophy, heaped on a corner of the bed like a disjointed marionette, wide mouth pulled into a jester’s gape. And Agnes, sitting solemnly, straight-legged, against the door, staring at the trio before the mirror: Jessamine’s sleek olive-brown presence at one side. Bettiann’s tousled blondness at the other, and between them, staring into the mirror as into a crystal ball. Sophy.
She was like a rising star, lovely as the morning. Where had she come by that lovesome body, that perfect face? Doe-eyed Sophy. Night-haired Sophy. Sweet-lipped Sophy. Closemouthed Sophy.
Sophy at that particular moment with swollen eyes, an angry mouth, and burning cheeks. “What do I say to discourage him?” she cried into the mirror at their reflected presences. “Think of something.”
Ophy threw up her hands. “Sophy, he’s the best catch in the whole school! He’s good-looking. He’s rich! Have you seen that car of his? Besides, he didn’t try to rape you! All he asked you to do was go on a date with him!”
Sophy’s head went down, her eyes spilling, while Agnes sprang to her roommate’s defense.
“What he wants isn’t the point. Sophy doesn’t want to go on a date. That’s the point. She doesn’t want to be asked to go. That’s the point. She doesn’t want to be begged, harassed, chivied, or wooed. She wants to be let alone.”
“Then she should have gone to a religious college,” opined Bettiann. “Or some girl’s school.”
“My … my scholarship was to this place!” cried Sophy, tested past endurance. “I didn’t have a choice!”
There was a metallic quality to her voice, rather like a hammer striking an anvil to make first a clang, then a lingering reverberation that faded slowly into silence, an inhuman hardness coupled with an all-too-human desperation, as though two people … two creatures spoke at once. Faye stopped pacing; Ophy stopped grinning; Carolyn’s stroking hand stilled. Even the lazy cat looked up, suddenly alert to a tension, a presence in the room that had not been there a moment ago. They all ceased breathing as they searched Sophy’s tear-streaked face staring at them from the mirror, surprised to see only her face when that Gorgon’s voice should have come from another, more terrible creature.
In later years Carolyn occasionally wakened from a sound sleep or turned from a present task, thinking she had heard the clang of that voice, like the door of a distant vault being closed, shutting something in, or out, a ringing adamant, weighty as fate itself. Yet, so she told herself, the sound was not unnatural. It had force, like the roaring of cataracts or the spume of a geyser, and it was earthly, not alien. So she felt when they heard that voice for the first time, when Sophy cried woe into the mirror:
“I don’t want men to ask me out. I don’t want them to think of me that way. I can feel their thoughts. It’s like being raped inside their heads, little pieces of me ripped off and taken into them, used up. I want them not to think of me, not to discuss me, not to make bets with each other, can they get me to go out with them, can they kiss me, can they take me to bed!”
A silence came while the reverberations stilled. Then Bettiann said:
“It’s only words and thoughts, Sophy. Words can’t hurt you.”
“Words can’t hurt?” Sophy cried. “Why do you believe they can’t? Words have hurt all of us! It’s your mother’s words that make you throw up your dinner almost every night, Bettiann. Words made you believe you’re unattractive, Aggie! Words may make you marry a man you don’t love, Carolyn! Words are as powerful as weapons, as useful as tools. They can injure like a flung stone, cut like a knife, batter like a club. They can open heaven or they can ruin and destroy!”
“Shh, now,” Carolyn cried in sudden inexplicable terror, afraid to let silence settle upon that outcry, afraid to let it go on to another word, phrase, sentence. That voice, that particular voice of Sophy’s, had to be stilled, quieted, put at rest, or it could destroy them. “You don’t need to fight with us, Sophy. We’re with you. Just explain what you mean.”
Sophy wiped the tears angrily, using the back of her hand. “I … look at the lives of those who are greatly desired. I see pretty girls who burn hot, with sunny faces, their bodies like flame. They sing. They dance. They appear on the covers of magazines. I ask myself if it is merely coincidence that so many of them have such great troubles, so many die so young. It is as if they are eaten up alive, their souls nibbled away by all those who have fantasized about them, leered at them, used words and thoughts on them. In my people’s stories maidens lean against the dragon’s great scaled side under the shelter of a wing and learn secrets. In your stories maidens are chained to a stake for the dragon to burn or devour! The maiden may be mythical and
