Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (best short novels .txt) 📗

dreary poetry—rhyming couplets intended to celebrate the beauty of the seasons but that thumped along forever. Then there was a girl who read a monologue, in the voice of Theda—a scandalous thing. And finally, for wholesomeness’ sake, the Graces.

And then the two women who had been at the piano stood. Louisa Habit and Experience Northmoor. Louisa sang alto and Experience sang soprano. The two of them singing together, that first night I went out, made a kind of joyful noise—sweeter than what it sounded like when the LIS sang together at home or when the choir sang on Sunday. I watched them as they sang—I could see, under the cloth of their bodices, where their lungs expanded for more air, where they were holding in their stomachs to force out the lighter sound. To watch Experience and Louisa sing was the same as seeing a fast, small boy run or a man swing an ax and break up a tree. It was the same singularity of form and muscle, the same pushing of a body toward a single point on the horizon. I wanted, right then and there, to be as close to them as I possibly could.

Experience was tall and thin, with sharp elbows, and skin like a bruised peach. When she stood up to sing, she slumped her shoulders, as if she was afraid of her own height. Louisa, in contrast, was short, and as dark as me, and fat, with a flare of a burn scar down her forehead, which draped dramatically over her left eye. Whoever had tended to it when she’d gotten it had done well—it was nearly perfectly healed, only a dark flush color and, of course, raised above the rest of her smooth skin. She made up for it with pretty, round cheeks that flushed with red undertones whenever she took in breath to sing more loudly, and when she opened her mouth, I could see she had perfect pearls for teeth.

Mama had taught me long ago—the first tell of good health is the mouth. Louisa has probably never had a toothache, I thought, longingly. Experience, on the other hand, most definitely had. When she wasn’t singing, she kept her fist curled at the bottom of her chin, at the ready to cover her mouth whenever she was called upon to speak, because her bottom teeth were rotten.

I imagined a whole life for them there, while I watched. I thought they would never be what Madeline Grady said everyone at the college was: colorstruck. They moved together as they sang, and I thought they had found an escape from this world. I thought if I got as close as possible, I could maybe escape, too.

When the evening was over, I stood beside them.

“You are wonderful,” I said to Experience. Her eyes widened, and her shoulders shot back. I had startled her. I regretted it immediately.

“Well, thank you,” she said.

“You and Louisa, you are both really marvelous.”

“Mm-hmm,” she said uneasily. She was looking through the crowd, for her companion.

“Are you first-years here? I haven’t seen you yet.”

“This is our second year here. We are close to graduation. We are the only two women in the music department,” Experience said. “We wish, I wish, to be music teachers.” She had spotted Louisa, and made to move toward her. I followed, determined to keep speaking.

“If you wish to practice teaching,” I said, “then I would make an excellent practice pupil.”

“Who’s this?” Experience had reached Louisa, with me trailing behind, and now they both were looking at me, Louisa expectant, Experience as if she wanted to flee.

“Libertie Sampson,” I said. I held out my hand for a strong handshake—a gesture my mother had taught, which the proctors here, at least, discouraged.

Louisa took it, and I started to speak again.

“I was saying to Miss Experience—”

Louisa snorted at that.

“Experience,” I corrected myself, uncertain, “that if you needed to practice teaching a pupil, I am happy to do that with you.”

“Do you sing, then?”

“A little. In church, of course.”

“Well, come to where we practice. Near the market plots, by the river. It’s easier there,” Louisa said. And then she carefully pulled her hand out of mine and linked arms with Experience.

It was easy enough to convince them to let me listen to them practice. It was harder to learn their histories. Louisa was the more personable of the two. She was witty and liked to flirt with the boys, and even the lightest ones flirted back with her, because of the mark and her height and her chins. It was clear, everyone knew, that this was only in fun. She could imitate any animal sound with a whistle or a fold of her tongue—the call of a loon, the cluck of a turkey, the growl of a cat in the bush. She would use this menagerie to give a running commentary on the affairs of everyone at college. The handsomest boy, she referred to with the lurch of a katydid, and the prettiest, stubbornest girl, with a billy goat’s whinny. Everybody liked Louisa.

Experience was harder to know—she seemed to walk about in a kind of mist, the only thing dispelling it the sound of an instrument or Louisa’s voice. She was terribly serious about music. She could play any instrument you put in front of her. Her most prized possession was a small, battered metal pitch pipe. When I and the other students would gather to sing with her, she liked to mournfully blow it to call us to attention.

She would sit in the bare square of the future green, her skirts spread out before her, working on her scores, making notations, following the scrip of music.

I learned that Louisa and Experience were not from the same place. Louisa was from Virginia, and Experience was from South Carolina. That’s all they would tell me when I accosted them, giddy with the sound of their breath, after the first practice. The way they said it, quietly, with no more elaboration, I