Out of Place

Every night Rim dreamed of her parents—what even were parents? She didn’t know, but they were clearly nightmares since they looked just like her. Seeing them made her whole chest ache. They were calling for her, asking her to do things. That was another way she knew they were nightmares. She wanted to do what they said, but the first time she ever had obeyed those dream instructions—simply to open a particular door—Matron had caught her, and she’d been whipped.

She would wake up every morning, clenching her jaw tight to hold off the headache, wincing away pictures of her father and mother, calling for her. She couldn’t afford to do anything to make herself stranger than she already was. 

All the other girls got up and combed their grey, straight hair and washed their grey faces, and put on their grey jumpsuits. She stood in front of the mirror staring at pink curls. The Matron had tried to dye her hair once, but her hair seemed to swallow the dye and go on being horribly, inexorably pink. And even worse, she had iridescent wings that sprouted from between her shoulder blades. She tried stuffing them into her grey jumpsuit, but they didn’t fit.

Yesterday she’d stolen a marker off the teacher’s desk to try and color her iridescent wings a dark gray like their uniforms, but it hadn’t worked, and Matron had scrubbed them, hard, with a nasty, gritty soap. Then she’d informed the entirety of Grade Six that nobody would eat today because they had allowed theft amongst their ranks, changing the general dislike of Rim into pure hatred.  One of the girls at the mirror deliberately jammed her elbow into Rim as she passed her to line up for school.

Rim, her head down, followed her into line. The proper color was gray. She was a freak. She tried to fit in, to be a good girl, but the headaches just kept getting worse, and nobody ever forgave her for being strange.

She crept into her first class of the morning, eyes squinted, trying to ignore the headache, ducking her head to avoid the glares from her fellow pupils. She tucked her wings in behind her as she sat so that no one could see them, even though they felt raw.  She glanced over at the girl in the seat beside her, Jane.

 Jane’s straight grey hair was cut in the regulation bob, just under her chin. Jane never got called to the front of the class to be mocked. Jane always did everything right, and if she saw you mess up, even if your messing up was just you trying to fix your stupid, dumb wings, she’d tell Matron on you. At least she hadn’t eaten today, either.  The headache pounded, almost audible, Let us in let us in let us in! Rim, panicking, thought back, I can’t! I don’t know how!

Then Jane caught Rim’s eye and glared at her. “Keep your eyes to yourself, freak!” She hissed and turned back to listen to the teacher.

A familiar rage flared up in Rim, contradictory and fierce. She knew she deserved their dislike for being so out of place but surely someone should notice she didn’t want to be this way. It was too much: the pain from her wings, the pounding in her head, the continual shame at being such a misfit. She reached out, grabbed a hank of Jane’s perfect, straight hair and jerked on it, hard.

The eruption was immediate. Jane squealed. The rest of the classroom stood up to see the next awful thing Rim would do and how she would be punished. But Jane had no intention of letting the teacher handle discipline this time. She jumped to her feet and shouted, “Don’t you touch me!” And slapped Rim across the face.

The boys whooped. The girls screamed. In a moment, books were flying through the air, erasers being thrown, someone pulled off their shoe and hurled it. Teacher 45 shouted and bellowed at them, but they were beyond containment, not targeting Rim after the first few seconds, simply hurling things into the air in an excess of violent and unhinged hysteria. It was not a rebellion so much as simply the escape of steam from a pressure cooker.

Teacher 45 left the room and returned with the Matron, and six large Enforcement men. The entire classroom was herded down the hallway. As they marched under the cold glare of fluorescent tubes, jostling against one another, a radio crackled on an Enforcement belt “Deviant break in—Quad A, all units.” Rim watched as Enforcement stiffened, glanced at once another, and changed directions. They went down another hallway, through a door marked Staff Only, herded the kids into a small, windowless room and shut it with a bang. A single lightbulb illuminated grey cement walls and fourteen frightened sixth graders.

There was silence for a moment. Somebody said, “When will we get out?”

Then everyone spoke at once, getting louder, trying to be heard. Rim felt the pressure building in her head again, like she was being squeezed, intolerable. She cut in, her high, trembling voice silencing everyone else. “When will we ever get out?! Does anybody even remember how long we have even been here, at school? Where did we come from? Doesn’t anybody want us?!”

There was silence, fourteen grey stares. None of them remembered where they were from. It was a shock; she wasn’t alone in not remembering where she came from. But before she could process that tiny nubbin of togetherness, Jane stalked up to her. She got in Rim’s face, her eyes wild, her breath hot.

“We don’t need to know that! We belong here! We’re going to become useful contributing members of society, and you clearly never will! It’s you that doesn’t belong! This is all your fault!”

It was not until she was an adult that Rim could look back on that memory and recognize the fear in her schoolmate’s eyes for what it was. In that moment, she only knew grief and an absolute, crushing loneliness. She bent her head and began to sob. Tears ran down her face, splashing on the concrete under her hands.

“Awww,” one of the boys groaned. “Now look what she’s doing. They’ll never let us out now!”

“What is going on with her tears?” Jane said. There was a pause, only broken by Rim’s soft sobs, as all fourteen children looked at the pool of tears forming on the floor by Rim.

“Is that …moss?

Like tiny, arched terrariums, moss laced out on the underside of Rim’s tears, rippling and waving soft fronds of green. The children in the grey world were stunned into silence at the vibrancy of color.

Suddenly the moss fronds burst out of the water, reaching for dry air, and in seconds, the cement floor was covered with a rich, soft carpeting, dotted by tiny sprigs of flowers or miniature saplings. Rim reeled back, too shocked to cry any more, and yet the tears continued coursing down her face unabated.

 Jane squeaked as a stem shot swiftly out of the moss and began unfolding leaves in front of them. The floor shifted every so slightly and they heard a dull crunching sound under their feet.

“What is that?” One of the girls said.

Jane turned to Rim with wide eyes. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice shook.

The moss had continued to grow, bringing plants with it, and it reached the ceiling, where a woody, dark-leaved plant began to spread.

“The ceiling!”

“Get out of the way!”

But it didn’t fall so much as crumble softly to powder, trapped by the network of leaves and roots spread on the ceiling. Sunlight streamed through the foliage, dappling the children, and as one they inhaled, breathing sweet, fresh air for the first time in a very long time. No one said anything now. For the first time, they tasted hope, wordless and desperate. No one bothered Rim or objected to her tears now; they were watching the ceiling.

Fourteen frightened faces looked sidelong at each other in the sunlight. They looked better, brighter. Their skin was turning pink and brown and tan instead of grey. Rim said softly to Jane, “Your hair is turning purple.”

Jane put her hand up to her hair, eyes wide.  

All over the room, the children’s grey hair was turning pink and green and blue and curling. One boy had a tiny pair of horns sprout from his forehead. He felt them with a look of wonder on his face. “I think I…I think I always had these….”

The door handle turned. The door shifted—and stopped. The moss had climbed up it, blocking the seam, and tendrils of roots were forging their spidery way along the door, wrapping the doorknob. Someone started pounding on the door, shouting. It sounded like Matron. The boy with the horns jumped for the vines, out of reach. “We have to get out!”

But they didn’t have to do it themselves. Suddenly arms appeared, faces, half obscured through the root ceiling. Branches began to fall away, and a ladder slowly descended. Someone up above said, “Watch your heads!”

And a girl started, her eyes welling with tears. “That’s my mom! I have a mom! MOM!”

In a mad rush they were up the ladder, shoving through the leaves, bursting out the top with shrieks of joy. The door still rattled and something larger than a fist was being used to hammer at it. But Rim stayed at the bottom. Rim hesitated. She hadn’t belonged in here; would she really belong out there?

And then feet appeared on the top of the ladder and her father came down. Rim knew him immediately. His hair was wild and pink and curly just like hers and as soon as he was far enough down to see her he slid down the ladder and scooped her into his arms.

“Rim! We’ve been trying so long to get you out! Did you hear us calling?”

She hung her head. “I didn’t know it was you! I didn’t do anything you told me to do! I’m all wrong!”

“If you hadn’t been ‘all wrong’, we couldn’t have found you.” He said, “They destroyed our connection with the other kids as soon as they kidnapped you, but they never could break yours. We were able to get a spell into you, to do this,” he waved towards the plants. He pulled back to look in her eyes. “You’re not all wrong, Rim.  You’re exactly what you needed to be.”

 She hesitated, shyly searching his face for the disgust she had seen in everyone else’s faces as long as she could remember. It wasn’t there. There was only love. “Are you ready?” He said.

“Yes,” she said, and she went up the ladder into her mother’s arms and to freedom.