Frost 3rd, Year 4604
When Thomas woke up, he was in his bed, fully dressed, glad he’d worn his hat to bed because the chill from the window had frozen the water in his mug again. The first bell had not yet sounded, which meant he had some quiet time before he would have to get up and go to work. He liked waking up early, and he liked having time to himself. It was like a little treat. Some of the other boys in his dormitory had memories of their families, and they spoke of sleeping in until school, or of fancy breakfasts with sausages and fried potatoes and the like.
He didn’t. There had always only been Lady Ryan’s Home for Wayward Children. He’d never understood why they just said wayward, which meant lost, or out of place. He wasn’t lost, after all. He was in the only place he’d ever remembered living. Before then, insomuch as he remembered much of anything, he was pretty sure he hadn’t had a home. He remembered a lot of buildings, some big and stone like castles, others small and wooden, like cabins.
He wasn’t sure how much of that was even real, though, and how much was just dreams. Some boys talked excitedly of their dreams: they were soldiers, they were princes, they were wealthy beyond belief. Thomas didn’t see the point in being excited about that stuff; it wasn’t true.
Finally, he didn’t see any point in delaying it any longer. His spot all the way at the end by the window was the envy of everyone during summer, but during winter it was scarcely warmer inside than out, and his cotton blanket was not really helping matters much. He stood up, exchanged his pajamas for his uniform before neatly making his bed and folding the pajamas back on top for that evening, put on his shoes, and was padding out of the dormitory just as the first bell rang.
Which meant he had ten minutes before anyone would come looking for him. He started windmilling his arms, trying to get some life and feeling back into them as he exaggerated his gait to do the same to his legs. During the cold months of Ash and almost all of Frost, he woke up stiff, and he found getting his sluggish blood circulating was important or his morning shift of cleaning the houses of the fortunate was unpleasant in addition to being merely tedious.
By the age of thirteen, most boys had found an apprenticeship, or something approaching it. The skilled ones went to learn some kind of trade, the smart ones went to work as clerks in offices for important people like lawyers or customs officials, the strong ones got work as laborers or dock workers. Thomas was soon to celebrate his fourteenth birthday, if he really was fourteen, and if really was born in Glade 60th, which no one really knew, because no one could say when he’d been born or how old he was, but this was besides the point. For all intents and purposes, he was almost fourteen years old, and though he worked diligently when he was given a try out, no one ever asked him back.
He wasn’t sure why, but Miss Hannigan had not been shy about telling him her opinion: “You’re a dull, forgettable boy, Thomas. When I’m doing bed counts, I have to remind myself that you’re all the way there on the end, or I undercount and get worried if one of the boys snuck out.”
Other boys in the dormitory hated her, but Thomas didn’t mind her, not particularly. She threatened him often with beatings and thrashings and the like, but she rarely followed through, if only because she had bigger issues to worry about. Like she said, he was a bit forgettable. He blended into the background while the rowdier boys stole the show. This was great for things like shirking work or getting out of trouble or not doing to lessons, but a problem for things like finding work that wasn’t cleaning houses.
He retrieved the hand mirror he’d stolen from Miss Hannigan from behind the broken radiator in the hallway. Then he went upstairs to where the girls slept, avoiding the squeaky floorboards, then up another flight, to the barred door that led to the roof. He pulled off the bar and used it as a prop so the door wouldn’t close completely, trapping him outside.
It was freezing up here, but that was fine. He didn’t need it to be warm to practice. So he began, moving around to stay warm. He started with smiling; he thought about how the families in the houses he cleaned looked when they smiled. The corners of their mouths turned up, and their eyes kind of crinkled a bit. It was easier to see with older people; sometimes their eyes actually made little wrinkles, but on young people, there was still the little crinkle. When he smiled at people, his eyes didn’t do that, and maybe they saw that and knew it was a lie. So he was practicing, because maybe the difference between a grateful smile and a fake one would land him a ticket out of here.
He wasn’t sure what he could do, exactly. He didn’t pay much attention in school, or to anything, really. He was good at sums and the like, but harder math confused him and as far as he could tell even though clerks mostly just added up numbers, they wanted to see proof that he could do algebra. It was the same with everything. He could do the basics, but everyone wanted more than that. Well, apart from heavy physical labor. He just pretended he was too weak to carry much because it didn’t appeal to him. He wasn’t sure what his future held, but it wasn’t going to be working on a sodding dock, unloading goods for foreigners.
It wasn’t working. He could kind of squint his eyes, but it wasn’t the right kind of crinkle. He tried making other expressions in the mirror, then just ended up laughing a bit as his eyebrows made him look surprised, and then angry.
Oh. That was the problem.
Thomas tried to think of a time he’d been happy. When none immediately came to mind, he made some more goofy faces in the mirror, and then held onto that feeling, calling it up and smiling. When that didn’t work, he imagined other things that made him happy: pocketing money he found in houses, when it snowed so hard they closed school, skipping out on kitchen duty by pretending to be sick, waking up before the first bell like he had today, and enjoying a rare moment of quiet solitude. He kept practicing until he heard Miss Hannigan’s clunky shoes coming to hector the girls who were still in bed. She always did the girls before the boys, which meant he had a bit of time, but not much.
He returned indoors, re-bolting the door and holding it so that the wind didn’t blow it shut and blow his hiding spot. Unexpectedly, he heard Miss Hannigan heading for the end of the hallway. There was nothing but the staircase up to the roof in this direction and he cursed himself for spending so much time up on the roof practicing his smile, but he couldn’t help it. It had been nice. It had almost been fun, even. He pressed himself to the darkest corner of the doorway and hoped that she wouldn’t catch him with her precious hand mirror. That would earn him a thrashing for sure.
When she appeared at the base of the steps, he held his breath and closed his eyes, thinking really hard of being a wall. Fortunately, as was so often the case, one of the other kids unwittingly came to his rescue. Miss Hannigan whirled so fast her ugly shoes squeaked and Thomas stifled a giggle.
“Alice,” she barked, “no running in the halls! Those lousy clodhoppers of yours will fly off and damage my nice walls. I just had ‘em whitewashed. Stupid orphans, the lot of yous.”
Thomas breathed out a sigh of relief, listening for Miss Hannigan’s constant grumbling as she retreated down the steps and returning to the boys’ floor and stashing the stolen mirror, unnoticed and unremarked upon as everyone set about the business of having breakfast. He didn’t understand why everyone was so excited. It was always gruel in winter because Miss Hannigan could make them do it the night before while they cleaned up the kitchen after dinner, which they also made while she “supervised.”
There wasn’t even any molasses for it, just salt. It was food, though. Life at Lady Ryan’s had prepared him for the fact that food was mostly just there to be eaten as a way to assuage one’s hunger. It was rarely a pleasurable act, but that was fine. It beat being hungry. He practiced smiling while he ate his bland breakfast until David, one of the smart boys across from him, asked him what he was so smug about.
“Nothing,” he replied, letting his expression settle back into being neutral. It wasn’t much, but he’d taught himself something, something he knew not everyone could do, and he’d done it all on his own. No patrons, no teachers, no masters. Just himself and a mirror and a quiet moment.
If he could do it once, he could do it again.
