I.
There’s a little old lady on the block across the street who the Kids on the Block call the tooth fairy
M get’s a lot of joy out of being able to say “the kids on the block.” She says that in the recess yard when they’re taking off their shoes for freeze tag, and her friends ask her which block. Montgomery? Balboa? There’s so many names, so many different people who were with her. No, not a block! The block, the block she lives on. It doesn’t matter that it’s called fifteenth, because to her and the kids on the block it’s the only block. One block, fifteen houses on one side. Five houses from the left there’s a big house, The Big House. The one that M lives at, without the other kids on the block. They live in the other fourteen houses.
One is the most harmlessly annoying. He is convinced that he’s the fairy queen, and refuses to play any games with toys or devices because he claims that it’s hurtful to his true roots. Two is the shyest, except when he starts to talk about books. Three is a ding dong. Four is a bully. Five ought to be a part of the little rascals. Six is the biggest nerd in the world. Seven is the most pretentious nerd in the world. Eight is always gentle when dealing with her He’s the most amiable with the nuns, and gets snuck the most sugar cookies. Nine is the first twin. Ten is the second twin. Eleven is what M, with her easily influenced vision of wonder, views as magic. Twelve is an ignoramus. Thirteen is actually one of the nuns, but with her hair cut short. All of the kids on the block know that she is an ex-nun, so whenever the nuns come out to yell at the kids, they hide Thirteen. Fourteen is a ditzy idiot with zero acting skills.
The sky on the block turns darker than the sky further away, at least in M’s brain. She’s mentioned this to a number of nuns, but they’ve all told her that it’s a trick of the light, or it’s scientifically proven to be in her head, or it’s true but none of her business to try and find out. She’d listened to the last response, not from fear or obedience but because she was too lazy to try and figure out something so far away and logically not something that affected her.
Whether or not she had figured it out, the fact stood that the sky on the block was ridiculously dark and, even for someone who had never seen a different sky up close, unnaturally dark. There were no stars, and not that she would be able to see them even if they existed, that was how dark it was!
“You’re wasting water.” The Reverend Mother had snuck up on her M dropped her pot into the sink full of dirty water.
“I was only leaving it on for a minute, please, don’t think it was such a waste!”
The Reverend Mother pursed her lips. Her face was often completely impassive, but knowing someone your whole life helps to discern their feelings. Blank eyes conveyed that she did not believe M, and did not appreciate her telling her things that she viewed as lies.
“I have been standing here for the past eight minutes and all you’ve done is spin that pot back and forth in your hands.” The Reverend Mother sure wasn’t pulling her punches tonight.
(M had learned the phrase “pulling your punches” from the Kids on the Block, and had been stealthily inserting it into every possible conversation since.)
“M, do you know how much I adore you?” The Reverend Mother was known for throwing around her affection at any chance she got, and yet no matter how often she professed
her love, she always looked expectantly for a returning sentiment. M really couldn’t help her sigh at the look of expectant-ness she got.
Her mouth upturned slightly now, the Reverend Mother took her finger, gently as always, into her cobwebby hands. Though her face was young and her body concealed, her fingers always seemed as if they belonged to something unreal, like a corpse that had been cleaned up and breathed just a little bit of life back into, but not enough to fully revive it. One time, when M was younger, she’d mentioned that to the Reverend Mother during embroidery lessons, and got a strong lecture about the etiquette of discussing a lady’s hands.
M watched, curious, as the Reverend Mother took her ring finger and inserted it into the crack between the sink and the counter As it was slowly eased in further, then quickly shoved in up to her knuckle, M felt a blossom of pain shoot up her wrist, forearm, and eventually settling in her shoulder and wrapping itself around her entire arm. She attempted to twist her hand out slightly, slowly, without the Reverend Mother noticing. It did not work.
M squished her face up in exaggerated pain, pitching her voice a few octaves higher.
“This is an awful punishment. Really mean and doing noooothing!” She turned her chin downwards and batted her eyelashes. “I wouldn’t prefer it, obviously, but wouldn’t it be so much more enjoyable if you took me upstairs and held a bar of soap in my mouth? I’ll recite anything you want, sutras, prayers, I’ll even sing if you give me permission.” M kept her eyes trained on the smooth face above her, enunciating slowly on the longer words and wetting her lips slightly. Anything to get out of this blasted kitchen.
The Reverend Mother seemed to hear her thoughts and decide to spite her wishes. What would normally be a foolproof plan to get out of solitude punishments, instead led M to find her head being shoved into the sink below her, finger still stuck in the crack. Blood gushed out of her
nose quickly. The Reverend Mother ’s voice was firm, giving no reassurance that her seduction had worked to lessen the punishment. “You think this is your punishment? You haven’t done anything to deserve any negative repercussions for tonight. This is simply insurance to keep you on task. And I won’t have this turning this into something it’s not.” The Reverend Mother let go of her grasp on M’s head, turning to the door. “I have no interest in you tonight. Go to bed on time.” With that, M was alone in the room with what the Reverend Mother said, which was a punishment in itself.
A wretched twenty minutes passed before she got company to complain to. There was an arrangement with the nuns, who wanted to do some sort of good for the children alone on the block, and they had settled on providing daily mince pies for whoever came around. Personally, M felt that if she was a Kid on the Block she would rather starve to death than eat a mince pie every day, but the Reverend Mother had smiled sweetly and assured her that the Kids on the Block heartily enjoyed them.
Tonight, the cook delivered the pies to the drop off windowsill swiftly and silently, ignoring M’s pleas for some company, and some sort of reprieve from the heavy silence of the dishes. It was alright though, M couldn’t hold it against her She knew that soon enough, some of the Kids on the Block would appear, and she wouldn’t have any lack of company
Sure enough, after only letting the pie cool for two or three minutes, a trio of scruffy teenagers came into the view of the window.
They were slicing the pie up with the knife that the cook had left inside of it when the tallest one noticed M standing looking at them.
“Hey! You’re the Kids on the Block?” M waved with her not-stuck hand, scattering a small bit of bubbles onto the pie. The kids didn’t seem to care, and continued eating as they addressed her.
“We’re not the only ones, just three,” the medium height one said, undaunted. It was unfortunate for M, having the status of being a nun but being a child and receiving none of the reverence.
She scoffed, showing her offense. “Obviously there’s just three of you, I have eyes.”
The medium didn’t like this response. “How should I know that you can count, and holed up in your stupid nunnery doing your stupid prayers. I’m surprised you can say any words other than ‘God.’”
While M didn’t particularly like being a nun, and she wasn’t particularly close or loyal to the more devout nuns, she didn’t think this Kid on the Block had any right to insult something that she was obviously attached to. She opened her mouth, about to retort that at least she could count, when the tallest one interrupted in a hurried voice.
“Thank you for the pie, and don’t mind him! He really does like mincemeat. Really.”
Flushing, M closed her mouth, suddenly realizing the pettiness of arguing with homeless children. She let out a small “you’re welcome,” before turning her eyes back to the dishes, planning on ignoring her only chance at escaping silence and stewing in loneliness for the rest of the night.
The tall and kind one did not seem to approve of this idea. He cleared his throat, waiting until she looked up again and locked eyes with him. “I’m Nine,” he said, pointing to himself.
“This is Four,” he pointed to the medium one, “and Two,” pointing at the smallest one. M gave another unstuck handed wave. “I’m M.”
Nine stared blankly, apparently expecting more. She wasn’t great with many of the Kids on the Block, besides Eight, who alternated in her mind between being a total suck-up and the sweetest kid in the whole wide world.. Oh well, it couldn’t hurt to throw in a bit of lingo once in a while. “Tubular to meet you!” She finger-gunned Nine. He still looked at her blankly, and Two started blushing a bit.
Four coughed, as if to suppress a laugh. “Seriously, we’re homeless as it is, we don’t need any more struggles.”
M laughed a bit, not quite understanding the joke. “Oh, yes, you want the pies, how silly of me to keep you waiting.”
Four didn’t even try to hide his laugh in a cough this time. Far more than a little rudely
“As if that’s what we’re here for.”
Well! After the night that she had, M wasn’t about to settle for some sub-par flirting..
“And it’s all you’re going to get.” She roughly smushed the pies towards them and gave up on trying to wiggle her finger out comfortably. If M wanted to shove it in these no-good divinity-smooching pimple-teasing losers’ faces, then she sure wasn’t going to let a lost fingernail stop her. She did not look back, and did not care if they watched her and her blood soaked finger glory walk all the way to the chapel.
An unbiased observer might have seen M walking resolutely away from an uncomfortable conversation, comfortable in her habit, politely quiet, and assumed that she was going to pray to Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. But unfortunately to our unbiased observer, M was as religious as a more normal nun was a drug dealer. An unbiased observer should refrain from making any more assumptions, especially about what M’s drug dealings might have been in her lifetime on God’s green planet. Sleep did not come easily. Her conversation with the kids, hadn’t raised her from the foul mood that the Reverend Mother had put her in. It wasn’t that M particularly enjoyed the taste of soap, and she never quite understood if the sutras she chanted were going to have any positive effect on her religious devotion, but she was still mildly offended that the Reverend Mother had not shown the least bit of temptation at her offer. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t done anything together before! It wasn’t as if she was a new recruit, found abandoned and exposed on one of the neighboring streets, having to go through conversion exercises and not even having earned their coverings yet. Perhaps M was a bit more than mildly offended, and she pondered whether or not she should distance herself a bit more from the Reverend Mother Had she started to enjoy the hag’s presence? No, that would be impossible. She couldn’t even follow the most basic of orders, there was no possibility that she’d develop a taste for them.
The doctor ’s office did not resemble what she had been told. When Nun Number Forty had gotten her tooth knocked out by a falling pot, she had spent three nights away from her bunk, and when she had returned was wearing a blank and unfocused expression. The rumor mill had exploded after that, with the more friendly nuns fawning over her like she was an injured rabbit. M hadn’t outwardly shown much of an interest in her blank stare and unfocused gaze, but at night and whenever she was alone, M had let herself gawk at Nun Number Forty’s loss of sanity, and openly allowed herself to ponder the implications of it. It wasn’t as if getting her mind squished into smoothness was something particularly disgraceful, but the entire nunnery had acted as if whatever the doctor had done to her was completely necessary and alright. M didn’t think so, and had been sure to hide all of her loose baby teeth whenever they fell out. She didn’t trust that so-called doctor ’s office, which was surely a scam for black market body parts, or something like that. Maybe Nun Number Forty had been lobotomized… or something just as interesting.
And yet here she was, sitting in the wretched waiting room, preparing to completely lose her sentience within the hour While the office didn’t look particularly menacing, and certainly did not live up to the wild theories that the other nuns had had—cages, axes, guillotines, etc.—there was certainly an anxious quality to all of the other patients, as if they wished that they didn’t need treatment. M tried to calm herself down a bit. After all, why wouldn’t sick people look nervous? It made perfect sense. Everyone wants to be healthy, all the time, no matter the cost! Being put into a hospital was basically an assurance that you weren’t healthy, that there was something wrong with you, and worse, you weren’t able to deal with it yourself. Yet M was sure that there was something wrong, something more wrong than just normal doctor
nervousness. Especially when an entire platoon of little girls walked out, single file, looking like dolls with their slacked jaws and gray faces. M didn’t think it would be very difficult to outrun the Reverend Mother and the rest of the staff if it meant preserving her own sanity for another few years, until she got caught under the floorboards again.
Nobody had taken kindly to the trip, and M knew that it was only a matter of time before she got punished. As soon as they got back to the nunnery, the Reverend Mother ’s normally passive face had contorted itself with anger She ignored M’s cries of pain as she was hauled upstairs by her ear, ignored M’s assurances that she’d tied her wrists tight enough, and ignored the unfortunate amount of blood coming from M’s mouth as she kicked her into the headboard.
She did, however, take a moment to breathe and adjust her habit. Her eyes were still livid and focused dangerously on M, but this was territory that M could deal with. Open ears, open hearts. Definitely open.
M spat a bit of blood out of her mouth before taking in a breath and putting on her most sorrowful voice. “Reverend Mo—!” Before M could even get an address out, she felt the back of her head being slammed into the wood board behind her, splinters digging into her exposed skin. Strange, hadn’t she been wearing her habit just a moment ago?
The Reverend Mother ’s voice appeared to her left, startling M into jerking her neck painfully at the sound. “Did you think I would not notice?”
M tried to gather her consciousness up to answer the question, but was interrupted with another onslaught of blows to her head. She whimpered pathetically, and found the blows halt at her cries. She tried again, tentatively, to explain herself. “Reverend Mother, I didn’t-”
“Listen to me.” The Reverend mother had her ears closed and her heart barred against any of M’s wooing tactics. She had both her hands wrapped around M’s throat, kneading at the muscles underneath without even a glimmer of attraction in her eyes. Curses, God was not on M’s side tonight. “You are perfectly aware of what you’ve done wrong, and somehow that makes the entire thing even more insulting to me.” She squeezed gently, slowly, blacking out M’s vision
for a moment before lessening her hold. M couldn’t stop coughing, squirming, smelling the Reverend Mother ’s frustratingly terrible breath. “Is this a personal attack on me? Are you vying for attention, you whore? Do you think you can get away with anything you want, dishonoring everyone here just so that you can prance around and sniff all the roses you wish?” M was pretty sure that Nun Number Fifty-Two had done much more dishonorable things to everyone here, but she was also pretty sure that the Reverend Mother wouldn’t appreciate her saying that. She was even more sure that her mouth was in no fit state to tell her anything at all, whether to beg for forgiveness or make a quippy remark.
The Reverend Mother wasn’t done, though she’d been kind enough to set M’s quivering body down on the bed. She paced about next to it, robes disheveled and expression even more so. “After all the work I’ve put in, all the effort I’ve put into you? Why won’t you listen to me? Why won’t you take any of this seriously.”
M considered shrieking, or moaning, or anything to make the Reverend Mother even more disheveled. She had enjoyed this turn of events, and if she had known that getting beat up would lead to the hag losing a couple dozen more brain cells than normal, she would’ve broken a bigger rule a long time ago. Not wanting the Reverend Mother to go so far as accidentally killing her, M settled for a low-toned wail, and was rewarded by God with the Reverend Mother putting her head in her hands and echoing it.
The Reverend Mother was silent for a moment, allowing M to awkwardly cough up a bit more blood before continuing with her rant. “It pains me the most to know that you know exactly what you did wrong. There has been no miscommunication in making sure that you are well aware of the proper etiquette befitting your station, you know what you’re allowed to do and it’s not as if you’ve often been defiant, it’s not as if you’ve often broken many rules, Lord, it’s not as
if you’re normally like this.” At her last words, she yanked M off the bed by the ankles and gave her a few solid kicks to the chest.
M found the silence impossibly awkward, and wished that the Reverend Mother would continue berating her It would be considerably less insulting than making M listen to her own heavy breathing and blood getting the floor all messy. She was about to tell the Reverend Mother that, when she abruptly (luckily or unluckily, she wasn’t given a chance to ponder) slipped away from the world of consciousness.
M had already been curled in her favorite hole for a while before Five met up with her.
M’s territory was mainly underneath the floors of the nunnery itself, with different levels connected through holes in the insulation. It was nearly impossible to navigate quickly or with someone else, due to the number of twists and turns that made it necessary to move both slowly and back and forth very often. On the other hand, Five’s territory was mainly under the street and the foundations of other houses on the block, with longer straightaways and fewer nooks to curl in. After the first time they had come across one another, they’d teamed up to make a larger common area that allowed them to sit slightly far apart and less uncomfortable than in a hallway. It was, at M’s instruction, dug out underneath the cabinet holding embroidery supplies. It was an area that rarely changed in weight, and the nuns always treated the things above it with much care.
This time, however, M had not made the trek down from the entrance to the bottom of the underpart of the house. She wouldn’t exactly say that it was because she was nervous after going to the doctor ’s but she was definitely off, somehow. It might have been the Zoloft that he’d given her, that would make sense.
M wouldn’t know, but the Zoloft would be the reason for her passing out. Luckily for her, rather than getting her body tied up in the Reverend Mother ’s bedroom, she woke up in the Tooth Fairy’s house with Five, Eleven, Thirteen. While not as much as the Reverend Mother, the Tooth Fairy made her very uncomfortable. This was because the Tooth Fairy had an obsession with taxidermying the kids' bodies. She has a deal with the Reverend Mother that she will give her the bodies of children that were poisoned by mince pie so she can taxidermy them. She pays special attention to grind up the teeth and return them to the nuns, which they use to put in their cookies.
VIII.
M had never been so confused by a person before. Every moment before Eleven opened her mouth, M was absolutely positive that she’d be able to understand what she was thinking, what she was feeling. M hated it, she hated all of it. She hated that whenever she talked to Eleven she’d without fail end up as a puddle in her arms. She hated that curled into Eleven was the only place she felt safe. She hated that she didn’t care if she was being a nuisance to the other kids on the block that were trying to help her if it meant that she could be close to Eleven, be next to Eleven, be as realistically inside Eleven as unsexually possible.
Yet, it wasn’t as if Eleven was all she thought about, no, she was perfectly normal in that regard. M spent plenty of time mulling over the possibility of Six being a Kid On The Block version of her nun-turned-bad-kid decisions, whether or not it was okay to make non-sugar cookies (given the crisis at hand), and what position she liked the Reverend Mother to spit on her eyelashes in. She spent even more than plenty of time mulling over whether or not she ever wanted to get within spitting range of the Reverend Mother again. Ever since her doctor ’s appointment, maybe it had been the Zoloft, she’d felt strange around the Reverend Mother. M wasn’t sure exactly how to put it into words, but she’d felt as if there was something the Reverend Mother held over her As if there was something that the Reverend Mother was controlling, and that M had no way to stop from affecting her.
It was normal for M, to be stuck with an aggressive, annoying, and aggressively annoying old hag. It was not, however, normal for her to be stuck with another person. Every breath one of them took seemed to bounce across the room, impossibly loud. M knew that logically, humans were not capable of echolocation, but there had to be an explanation as to why the moment Thirteen told her that they needed to start to hide from the Tooth Fairy, every sound they made seemed to quicken the pace at which she was climbing up the stairs.
“She’s going to kill us, don’t you understand--she’s going to kill me, she’s going to kill me I don’t know what to do.” Her voice had past whispering and was worryingly toeing the line of the old woman’s hearing.
Eleven couldn’t have that, after she’d spent so many days hauling old nickels out from under the bed. This was the most fitting hiding place for two girls, and she was not about to let that be ruined by her attraction to those with poor character. “M, I am going to give you a moment to snap out of this, before the Tooth Fairy comes over and takes the rest of the moments God gave you and grinds them into sugar.”
“Oh--” M laughed, wildly, far too loudly “God hasn’t been the one giving me moments in quite a while.” She was beyond snapping out of it at this point. Eleven and her hiding spot felt painfully exposed, the bedclothes nipping at their ankles and every noise that the Tooth Fairy let out seemed to be funneling under the bed and into their ears. It was as if the three of them were in their own private bubble, making it impossible for M to run her brain away.
Two tablespoons of baking powder went into the bucket. M put down the measuring spoon and lifted up her apron, scrunching her face around the dampening fabric. One hand clutching the apron to her face, she groped around blindly for the eggs. After so much experience, surely she could bake a few dozen cookies without her eyes? Surely, surely she did not need to face the embarrassment of responding to whatever blank stare Nun Number Twenty-Three was giving her. Surely, surely she could bake a few dozen cookies without any trouble.
The Reverend Mother thought so, told her so, and confidently watched her fail to do so She kissed M and promised that when the idiot Tooth Fairy finally catches Eleven, they can put her body in her bedroom.
How sweet. Maybe M was wrong about the old hag. Maybe she wasn’t a hag, just old.