The Sweet Girl (4 page)

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Jason,” he says.

Daddy nicknames him Myrmex, Little Ant, for his black black hair and black black eyes and busy busy ways. Always this way and that, never sitting still. Daddy says he’s bright. The letter says so, and over the next few days Daddy himself takes him for
walks and plays tiles with him and asks him to help with his specimens and books.
Feeling him out
, he calls it. I watch from a distance. I don’t think he’s so bright as all that. His reading is halting and he can’t do basic syllogisms. He gets bored even more quickly than I do. His main loves are horses and walking through the streets with Daddy, seeing the way people treat him. Behind Daddy’s back he mocks him, to Nico and me, but in public he likes nothing better than Daddy’s hand on his shoulder, Daddy’s quiet word in his ear, while around him men and boys look enviously on. “My son,” Daddy introduces him, from almost the beginning.

“Oh, you know Daddy.” Herpyllis’s dislike of the new boy has hardened into something they both have to peer through, like a piece of resin. “He’ll get tired of him after a while. And he’ll realize you’re better with the books, baby.”

“Meanwhile, I’ve nothing to read.”

Herpyllis looks exasperated. “Just go knock on his door and ask.”

“I can’t. He says I have to stay away from his room until—”

Herpyllis looks blank for a moment, then her face clears. “The smell.” She nods. “He doesn’t like it on me, either. Never mind. You’re almost done for this month. Has it changed colour yet?”

“It’s darker.”

Herpyllis nods. “And there’s less blood, yes? There, you see. You’ve done very well for the first time. You haven’t soiled yourself once.”

That would be because I change the rag so often my room flutters like an aviary, laundry as birds. An awful thought hits me. “Do you suppose Myrmex smells it, too?”

“He’s young still. He probably won’t know what it is.”

At my friend Gaiane’s house, we discuss my new brother over our looms. “
Who
is he, again?” she asks.

“The son of some distant cousin of Daddy’s. They can’t afford to keep him, but he’s bright supposedly, so they thought Daddy might take him in and educate him.”

“Supposedly?”

I yank at a thread and it snaps.

“Jealous.”

“Yes,” I say. “No. Not exactly. Only Daddy can’t see anyone else, at the moment. He’s convinced Myrmex will run the school one day.”

“What about Nico?”

“Nico’s not clever enough.”

“You are.”

“I’m a girl. A bleeder.”

“It’s not all bad,” Gaiane says. “You can get sick now, you know.” She sets her wool down and looks at me. “Wandering womb, it’s called. It gets you out of all kinds of things. You can get tired, dizzy, breathless, hysterical. Whatever you like, really. It’s your womb migrating through your body, searching for moisture.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“Really,” she says.

Gaiane’s mother, gauzy and fragrant, drifts in to check on us. “It’s so nice to have you here, Pythias,” she says. “It seems we hardly ever see you anymore. Gaiane’s always saying how much she misses you.” She leans over Gaiane’s shoulder, inspects her work, and kisses her hair. When she looks at my loom, her eyebrows go up.

“Daddy’s been teaching me—” I decide not to finish the sentence.

“Not weaving, he hasn’t.” She picks at my work, trying to correct it. “You should come here more often.” I understand this is criticism of Herpyllis, whom she never mentions by name. Gaiane’s parents are wealthy citizens. Herpyllis, once a servant, has never been to their house.

“Pythias started her bleeding,” Gaiane tells her mother. “And she has a new brother.”

“Oh!” Her mother colours. “I didn’t know—” Her fingers drift through the air, alluding.

“Herpyllis wasn’t pregnant,” I say. They both flinch; the word is for animals.
Expecting
, I should have said, or
blessed
. “A cousin has come to live with us.”

“A cuckoo in the nest,” Gaiane says.

“Has Gaiane told you about the wedding plans?” Her mother rises. “I’ll have them bring you some juice. It’s so hot, isn’t it? Gaiane can tell you all about it.”

“I’ve offended your mother,” I say after she’s gone.

“Mummy lives on a cloud,” Gaiane says. “She just floats along. She’s never trusted you since that time she caught you teaching me the alphabet. Is he handsome?”

I bite a thread with my teeth. “Who?”

“The cuckoo, of course.”

Gaiane affects her mother’s sweet vagueness, but she has a sharp streak that keeps us friends. Sharpness and lust; she’s told me frankly she can’t wait to be married, though she pretends to be frightened, like any well-brought-up girl.

“I don’t know,” I say honestly.

“Do you like him?”

“I feel sorry for him. I don’t think he’s used to people being nice to him. When he showed up on our doorstep, his face was all bruised.”

“Has he tried to touch you?”

“No. Herpyllis keeps asking me that, too.”

“Too bad for you.” She’s told me her betrothed can’t keep his hands to himself. “Well, if his being here means you have less time with your father and more time for us, then I’m all for it.”

I say something nice back, like
me, too
.

When I get home, Herpyllis takes one look at my face and says, “That was a normal girl’s day. Get used to it.”

“Where’s Daddy?”

“At the school.”

“Where’s Nico?”

“With him.”

“Where’s Myrmex?”

She shrugs, meaning
with them, too, obviously
.

“Daddy usually waits for me on the days I visit Gaiane,” I say. “Why didn’t he wait for me?”

Her look says,
Pytho, don’t
.

I help her in the kitchen, getting ready for tomorrow’s symposium. I don’t slam the knives around or anything. I don’t make the chicken feet do a little dance or ask to keep the beak. When the men get home, Daddy goes straight to his workroom. I follow him there. “I have a headache,” he says.

“I’ll make you a poultice.”

“No, that’s all right. You go eat with the others.” He touches his forehead with his fingertips, here and there, experimentally.

“Gaiane’s mother has invited me to go weaving with them again tomorrow. I don’t want to go.”

“Pythias, please.”

“Herpyllis will make me.”

“It’s very stuffy in here.”

“I’m not bleeding anymore.”

“Pythias,
please
.”

The next night, the night of Daddy’s animal symposium, Myrmex is in my corner in the big room and I’m at Gaiane’s house, where her mother has set her loom up next to mine. “Now, let’s start simply, shall we?” she says. “It seems tricky to start, but you’ll get the hang of it. You need a decent teacher, that’s all.”

“Is it stuffy in here?” I hold the back of my hand to my forehead and weave my head a little. “Maybe I should lie down.”

Before I’ve even finished speaking, Gaiane’s mother nods, smiles gently, and says,
Nice try
.

I should hate Myrmex. I try. The next morning I cut him dead.

“Hey,” he says. “Hey, Pytho!”

He follows me out to the garden, where I commence pinching blossoms off the quince tree so the remaining fruit will thrive.

“What did I do?” he says.

I give him a look.

“They talked about you last night,” he says.

I’m not asking I’m not asking I’m not asking.

“Pytho,” he says, laughing. “Don’t sulk.”

I ignore him.

“Akakios made your father angry,” he says. “He was talking about—oh, what was it? Something about plants. The difference between women and plants. Or there was no difference.”

“The nutritive faculty versus the intellectual faculty,” I say.

He laughs again. “You were listening!”

“I was at Gaiane’s. Weaving.”

“Ha,” Myrmex says.

I punch him. Then we’re rolling on the ground, wrestling. He’s stronger, but I have no honour. I kick and bite and scratch. “You don’t even care,” I hiss. “You’re stupid and you can’t read and you might as well be a plant yourself. That party was
mine
.”

“Stop.” He tries to pin my hands, but I bite his shoulder and he yelps. I sense someone coming, someone big and quiet. I free a hand and manage to stick my finger in his eye and my thumb in his mouth and yank. He bites my thumb, hard, and then big hands lift me by my armpits, clean into the air.

Tycho.

“Young master,” he says. “Young lady.”

Myrmex’s eye is red and weeping. My thumb is bleeding.

“What did Akakios say?” I ask.

“I’m blinded,” Myrmex says.

Tycho puts me on the ground. “What did he say?” I demand.

“He said plants were vivified by the presence of the gods in them, and they died when the gods withdrew.”

“That’s dumb,” I say. “What about a tree with one dead branch?”

“That’s what your father said.”

Tycho goes back in the house.

“Lookit,” I say, and show him the ring of teeth marks at the base of my thumb.

He takes my hand and licks the blood off with his warm tongue. “Sorry.”

“Sorry about your eye.”

“Sorry about your symposium.”

“You’re not sorry.”

“Well, I wouldn’t rather be weaving,” he says. “But I guess I’d rather be doing something else. Getting out into the city, that’s what I’d like. Seeing the world.”

“Daddy will let you,” I say. “But you have to go to his parties. You’ll hurt his feelings if you don’t. Plus then you can tell me about them.”

“You’re weird,” he says.

The bite marks will scar into a ring of white crescents around the joint.

Myrmex settles into the household. Herpyllis never warms to him. Daddy seems to pity him. Nico is afraid of his bullying. The servants treat him as a guest. But he and I, he and I. I’ve never held a person’s weakness in my cupped hands, the way I feel I do his. Weakness and secrets: his loneliness, his hurt, his fear, his ordinary brain. He brings the world to me in
pieces, the world I’m now shut out of: conversations he doesn’t understand, specimens he can’t name, manuscripts Daddy has set him to read that he can’t make head or tail of. He even gets to attend classes at Daddy’s school. I walk him through it all and help earn him Daddy’s gruff love. In return, he teaches me to ride a horse and fake a fever and gamble at dice. I’m afraid for him, afraid of where he’d be without me to guide him. It’s quite a responsibility.