Free Black Ice by Lorene Cary

we had managed to get to St. Paul’s School. How we got there, how we found our way to their secret hideout, was not the point. The point was that we had been bred for it just as surely as they. The point was that we were there to turn it out.
    When I got back to my house, I concentrated on learning names. Alison, Ruthie, Sara. Those were the first I picked up, because they were the old girls, the most assured and welcoming. They told me where the storeroom was, how many coins the washer and dryer required. They told me that there was an iron and ironing board upstairs, and a hot plate. They told me that another master—a woman—lived just above me in a tiny apartment.
    They also asked questions. Where was I from? Who did I know? Had we driven? Take long? What Form was I in? What classes? Everyone asked and answered the same queries as if there were nothing else in the world to talk about. And, yet, I had nothing else to say, either. Helplessly, I answered their questions and asked the same questions back.
    So it went while I unpacked until Pam Hudson moved into the room adjoining mine. She was a new Fifth Former, too. She used her husky voice to curse liberally as she shoved handfuls of clothes into drawers. She was more delicate in her handling of her stereo and guitar.
    Pam wanted to know whether I felt as “weird” in this new place as she did. She wanted to know if I was scared, whether I smoked, what I liked to eat.
    She looked in a few times while I cleaned. I washed andwaxed my linoleum floor, re-creating in myself the anxious thrill of my mother’s housecleaning. I hummed to myself as I scrubbed the tiny space.
What can wash me white as snow? Nothin’ but the blood of Jesus
.
    I closed my door so that the girls would not see me on my knees or hear me hum. Pam Hudson saw, but I didn’t mind. It calmed me to hear her on the other side of the half-open door just as it calmed me to rub a rag in circles across the floor.
    “I can’t believe you’re doing that,” Pam said.
    “Shhh,” I said to her when I finished. “Now I am going to sit here in the middle of the bed and let my nice, clean room seep into me.”
    “You’re nuts.”
    I laughed with her as if I had been joking. But when she closed the door, I waited for the onset of the brittle serenity I had sought. The Westminster chimes pealed and crickets chirped, but peace did not descend, and time did not slow down. I had not wiped away fear and the chaos it could bring. I went upstairs to find Fumiko to see if I couldn’t be of some use and find a friend to bind to me.
    I awoke the next morning to birdsong from the meadow. The bathroom was a different story. Fluorescent light splashed off the mirrors; metal stall doors banged, toilets flushed, showers sprayed full blast. A window was open to clear the steamy air. In rushed the roar of the waterfall below.
    Having grown up with bathtubs, I hated showers, but I took one. When I opened the curtain to reach for my towel, I saw that a girl was waiting to take my place. She started for the stall as I stepped out for my towel, effectively barring my path back to where I had intended to dry myself. A geyser of angershot up inside me and subsided. Next time I would not leave my towel so far from the stall.
    The ablutions were not complete. I had yet to brush my teeth, but I’d left the toothbrush and toothpaste in my room. I had to comb my hair, but those implements, too, were in my room. I started out of the bathroom for the toothbrush, but had not finished drying, and before I could dry, I had to put my soap down. By now, the sinks were crowded with spitting, face-washing, hair-combing girls, some groggy, some chatty and refreshed. I tried to find space to rest my soap. It slipped. When I picked it up it was fuzzy with dust and hair.
    By the time I dressed I felt as if I had been awake a long time. I trucked to the Upper with girls from Simpson. In the dining room, a group of black students motioned me to