Gallant

by V.E. Schwab

Home is a choice.

The word “school” conjures images of neat wooden desks and scratching pencils. Of learning. They do learn, but it is a perfunctory education, spent on the practical. How to clean a fireplace. How to shape a loaf of bread. How to mend someone else’s clothes. How to exist in a world that does not want you. How to be a ghost in someone else’s home.

Now it doesn’t matter what Olivia says. No one knows how to listen.

“These dreams will be the death of me,” it said. “When I am dreaming, I know that I must wake. But when I wake, all I think about is dreaming.”

“In my dreams, I am always losing you. In my waking, you are already lost.”

Everyone, it seemed, so full of noise. Except Olivia. She, who wanted to scream, not in pain but sheer exasperated fury that there was so much noise inside her, and she could not let it out. She’d kicked over a pile of pots instead, just to hear them clang.

Come home, the letter says. Stay away, her mother warned.

I am so happy. I am so scared. The two, it turns out, can walk together, hand in hand.

And then something marvelous happens. They reach the end of all those buildings, all that smoke and soot and steam. The last houses give way to rolling hills, and the world transforms from gray to green.

“She is Grace’s,” says Hannah, and the idea snags inside Olivia, the thought that she could be somebody’s, even if they are not here.

Olivia catches Edgar’s eye. Is he sick? He flashes Hannah a look and then says, “Matthew’s tired. Tired can be a kind of sick, if it lasts long enough.”

It was never this quiet when you were here. Isn’t that funny? How much sound a body makes. I hate the silence, hate the fact that I’m the only one making noise. I make so much of it, as if I can trick myself into thinking you’re here, just out of sight. Perhaps you are haunting me. What a comforting thought. Maybe it’s you in the darkness. I swear I’ve seen it move.

Olivia Prior has never been a quiet girl. She has always made a point of making noise, everywhere she goes, in part to remind people that just because she cannot speak, does not mean that she is silent, and in part because she simply likes the weight of sound, likes the way it takes up space.

When people see tears, they stop listening to your hands or your words or anything else you have to say. And it doesn’t matter if the tears are angry or sad, frightened or frustrated. All they see is a girl crying.

Beyond the window, the light is going thin. She looks down at the stone fountain, the woman with the outstretched hand, and she knows now it is a warning. Stay back, it says. But it is a message meant for strangers. She is a Prior, and Gallant is her house.