If the school has money for landscaping, they should turn up the heat. They should let the mothers wear their contacts. They should be able to room by themselves.
Someone asks who’s the worst of the worst, the baddest bitch. Lucretia points out a chubby, baby-faced Latina mother sitting alone near the exit. Linda. From Kensington. A friend of a friend of Lucretia’s cousin used to fuck her. Lady stuffed her six kids into a hole in the floor. Found some secret passage to her building’s basement. Their lungs got fucked up from black mold. They got bitten by rats.
“You should have seen them walking down the street,” Lucretia says. Her kids are all different shades of brown. Different dads. Total freak show.
“I feel sorry for them,” Lucretia says. The mothers stare and whisper. Linda is round all over and prettier than her transgressions would suggest. She has a high, clear forehead, a proud set to her shoulders, wears her hair scraped back into a tight bun, her eyebrows plucked into exaggerated arches.
“Used to be hot,” Lucretia says. “That’s how she got so many kids.”
They gossip uncharitably about Linda’s body, making crude circles with their hands. She must be like taffy down there. Like a water bed. Imagine her stretch marks. Her stripes.
Frida tears at her toast, feeling like a spy, an astronaut, an anthropologist, an intruder. Anything she could say now would be wrong. Tone-deaf. Offensive. She’s never met anyone with six children from six different fathers, or anyone who’d put their kids in a hole. Some of her nastiest fights with Gust and Susanna were about brands of water filters.
* * *
Classroom assignments have been posted to a bulletin board outside the dining hall. Mothers push and jostle. Women in pink lab coats distribute campus maps. Buildings for training mothers of daughters are marked with pale pink dots; buildings for training mothers of sons are marked with baby blue. The majority of mothers have children under the age of five. There are four cohorts of mothers in the daughters, twelve to twenty-four months, category.
Frida runs her finger down the list. Liu. Morris Hall, Room 2D. Setting off alone, she soon encounters baddest bitch Linda, who follows her out of the building and shouts hello until she turns.
“You’re Liu, right? Nice glasses.”
“Thanks.” They’ve been assigned to the same cohort. Frida forces a smile. They proceed in the direction of Morris, up Chapin Walk, noted on the map as the allée. They pass the bell tower and the stone courtyard.
Linda wants to know what got said about her at breakfast. “I saw you all looking.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Did that girl Lucretia say my kids got sick or something?”
Frida walks faster. Linda says Lucretia doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It wasn’t every night. Only when her kids were fighting and stealing food from the pantry. She had to keep the pantry padlocked because they’d finish all the groceries in a day. It was her super who called CPS. He’d been trying to get rid of her for years. Her kids are now in six different foster homes.
“You don’t have to justify anything to me.”
“What’d they get you for?”
Frida doesn’t answer. She waits out the awkward silence. Linda says Lucretia is a snob, that Lucretia thinks she’s hot shit. She knows ’cause they’re friends on Facebook.
They pass the music-and-dance library, the art gallery. Both buildings stand empty.
Frida tries to walk ahead, but Linda keeps pace.
Morris Hall is an imposing five-story stone building on the western edge of campus, one of the only classroom buildings above three stories. It’s been remodeled with a set of modern glass doors that are nearly impossible to push open. The front of the building faces a quad, the back faces the woods. Behind the building, the electrified fence is visible.
Mothers dawdle on the steps leading from the foyer to the second floor but move aside for Linda, giving Frida quizzical, amused glances. Frida hangs back. She’d like to clarify that she’s not Linda’s bitch, that this isn’t a women’s prison. Let no one think that she’s been made a bitch already.
They’re in the old biology building. Classroom 2D, a former lab, still smells of formaldehyde, triggering memories of frogs and fetal pigs. There’s a frosted-glass door marked EQUIPMENT, a dry-erase board, a teacher’s desk, a clock, and wall-mounted cupboards, but no chairs or other furniture. The mothers deposit their coats in the back corner. They look up at the clock. There’s a camera above the door, another above the dry-erase board. Four high, arched windows overlook the woods. Sunlight warms the room, warms the mothers, who’ve been told to sit cross-legged on the floor.