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 the dragon invisible, but there is still truth in that. I don’t want your dragons devouring me.”
Agnes, lost, ventured, “Like… when someone takes a picture of a primitive person? They’re stealing the soul?”
“Like that, perhaps,” said Sophy, shaking her head in confusion. “If you cannot feel it as I do, then pretend for my sake that it’s real. Pretend it’s possible. I don’t want them using me that way.”
Carolyn nodded. “Then you want to be invisible.”
“Exactly,” Sophy whispered. “Oh, if I could be invisible.”
Carolyn rose to her feet, hands on hips, jaw jutted. “Then we’ll help you become so.”
It took the others a few moments to catch up with her.
“She doesn’t have to be beautiful,” Carolyn said scornfully in the face of their doubt. “No law says she has to be beautiful.”
And she gathered the five of them up into her hands like a deck of cards and dealt them out again: You go here, you go there, fetch this, fetch that, supervising Sophy’s makeover without a moment’s hesitation. Clothing first, baggy skirts and too-large tops, shapeless and of indeterminate colors, borrowed from Carolyn herself; a little liquid makeup on the lips and brows, fading them into the face; a little more on the lashes, making her eyes look bald. Faye saw to that. Hair pulled straight back into a knot, Bettiann’s contribution. A touch of olive base, Jessamine’s, to take the bloom from those cheeks. Ophy provided the glasses, frames only at first.
It was Agnes who suggested the book. “You need a heavy book,” she said. “You can carry it up against your chest and walk sort of bent over. You’ll look like a brain, armed with the shield and buckler of the female intelligentsia.”
“I’ve got a
