I just got home from school.  I ‘get home from school’ the same way that every kid does.  I heave my self through the door, dump my personal belongings onto any nearby table, or the floor if there isn’t one, and collapse onto a chair.  My body feels like lead, I’m exhausted.  I feel this way every day, as if there was something physically tiring about class, something that wore me out so much that the walk home took the last of my energy and all I can do is flop helplessly onto a piece of furniture while I recover my strength.  There’s not of course.  All over the world, in every time, school is synonymous with sitting, being quiet, daydreaming while the words of the teacher filter in through the background noise to fill your head with just enough information to pass the test.  There is nothing demanding about it.  Nothing to exercise your mind or your body. 

My exhaustion is a result of boredom.

I wish I could go to sleep.  That was what I used to do, back home.   I passed out as soon as I got home, slept through the afternoon, and woke up sometime in the middle of the night to enjoy the solitude and late night TV.  Sometimes I even did homework.  Then I caught another nap between four and seven a.m. before dragging myself back to school.

I can’t do that here though.  Sleeping during the day is not allowed.  In fact, I’m only alone for a second.  I’ll have to change, and be back downstairs for dinner.  And then after dinner I’ll keep Mrs. Lyon company until I’m nodding in my chair. She will finally make a few clucking noises in sympathy and send me to bed, at which point my eyes will snap open like a light turning on, and I will stay that way all night.  I have never been able to sleep at night.  At first it really bothered me, being here, awake at night, because I’m not allowed to turn a light on.  I would rather roam around my tiny closet-like room, but it’s so dark that I kept bumping into things.  Now I just stay in bed, and actually, I don’t mind it so much, being stuck in bed wide awake, with my legs itching and crawling, wanting to get up with an energy I never possess during the day.  I’ve come to treasure my late night hours.  They are the only ones which are truly mine.  I let my mind carry me to other places, to fantasies, beautiful realities that contain pain, and terror, and even violence, those wonderful dramatic things that make you feel alive and which my own life is so empty of. Or sometimes, I just lie awake and enjoy being the master of myself, no being forced to be polite, or to speak, or to listen, or any of those signs of powerlessness which I chafe against so much in my waking life.  As the sky lightens o purple outside my slit of a window, I will finally fall asleep.  Then I will be woken up what feels like seconds later at the crack of dawn for morning mass.  And there is no rolling over for ten more minutes, I learned that lesson quickly.  Mrs. Lyon thinks that rising early is a good quality, so she wakes late sleepers with a glass of icy cold water in their face.

Mrs. Lyon is a very kind woman, in a way which I absolutely hate.  She reminds me of my grandmother back home, who was a very sweet, Christian woman, who made lots of baked goods and always had a smile on her face.  In her conversation she would find a hundred avenues to kindly mention the ways in which I did not measure up.  No one could ever understand why I disliked her, so I stopped mentioning it. 

Her trouble was, of course, that she was trying to give me a good old fashioned Catholic guilt trip when I had long ago decided that guilt was something I was not going to indulge in. 

Guilt is a pointless, needling, uncomfortable emotion.  I refuse to acknowledge it. 

Mrs. Lyon calls from the next room.  I had better go.  I tug uselessly at my corset strings, trying to loosen them enough to breathe.  I hike up my skirt, which I still have trouble walking in, and leave my little cell of a bedroom.  It’s time for dinner in what they call the ‘hall’.

The thing is, I’ve always had a sensation of being trapped.  Really, my whole life.  I was trapped in my home.  Trapped in middle school.  Trapped inside my own head, with its relentlessly depressing view of life.  I always assumed adulthood would come, and provide me with hitherto unknown courage, breaking me out of my unhappy shell and transporting me to a life where I made some decisions.  My own place to live.  A horrible, low paying job, where I do light manual labor and actually get to move around all day, and maybe feel some sense of accomplishment.  Those things are what I long for.  My idea of happiness, since I have never been happy, and don’t really believe that I can be, is control.  Control over my life, that precious commodity so lacking in the existence of a thirteen year old.  And it might have happened that way, I guess.  I mean, it could have, right?  I could have moved out, found a way to support myself.  Maybe I would have found some friends who I had something in common with, although I didn’t hope for that too much.  School has taught me that scenario was unlikely, and any way, I can get along pretty well without companionship.  But it didn’t happen that way.  Because it turns out that no matter how trapped I felt, in my twentieth century school, in my cage of jeans and t-shirts, it is absolutely nothing compared to the day I woke up in the goddamn middle ages.

I sit here now at dinner.  The hall is an enormous room, with many long wooden tables.  I could imagine a great feast being held here, like a wedding party, or something.  That’s how I figured a castle would be every night, a big party.  Turns out we mostly eat porridge, every night but Sunday, when we get to have meat.  Being high up on the social hierarchy doesn’t seem to count for much except a big house.

The tables are rough and full of splinters.  The floors are covered with hay, it looks more like a barn then anything.  I sit in a row with all the other girls who are here, with Mrs. Lyon sitting in the middle of us.  I steal a piece of bread and hide it in my dress.  It’s my way of fighting back.

I haven’t figured out exactly why we’re here yet.  I think maybe we’re orphans, and the lady who lives in this castle wanted to do something charitable, so she hired Mrs. Lyon to take care of us.  I’m not sure, but it’s as good an idea as any.

I didn’t create any fuss when I arrived here unexpectedly after falling asleep at my home.  In movies, if someone ends up in an alternate reality, the person would insist with everyone around them that they were from reality A (“What year is this? No!  It can’t be!”) and make a big dramatic scene, often ending with men in white coats tranquilizing the screaming victim, if reality B happens to be one of those realities that has hypodermics.  I have none of that screaming person’s courage.  I just don’t.  I woke up, was told to get dressed, and I obediently did as I was told and went to breakfast in the hall of an old castle.  After playing a game of what’s wrong with this picture, I realized no one else thought that anything was odd, and I wasn’t going to be the first to point it out. 

Part of this is because I think maybe I’m crazy, and I imagined the twentieth century.  It which case, if I tell them, I’ll probably suffer that fate of whatever happens to crazy people here, which can’t be any better than what happens to crazy people where I’m from (or where I think I’m from.)  Or, possibly, I am crazy in the present, (my present), and I am imagining this.  In which case, I am most likely already in a mental institute, and simply am not aware of it yet.  I find this the most disturbing possibility, and so I would rather this was not the case.

The only way in which I am not crazy, is if all of this is real.  My mind spins with thoughts of wormholes and Star Trek-like explanations of the space time continuum.  Hmmm.  Maybe.

I have also considered that my dad finally gave up and raising such a difficult child as me, and sent me to some school with a creative take on how to fix depressed teenagers (“See kids?  Your lives could be worse!”) and eventually someone will pop out and tell us the truth, or I’ll see a plane fly overhead, and breath a sigh of relief, fiction returning firmly to fiction.  However, I have dismissed this theory as the most unlikely.  My dad just doesn’t have it in him. I don’t mean the streak of sadism, although I don’t think he has that either.  I mean the effort it would take to arrange something like this.

I play with my mush and Mrs. Lyon looks on disapprovingly.  I take a bite.  It tastes terrible, like always, although I am hungry enough to eat it.  The reason I don’t is that I can’t breathe; I am being constantly crushed by my corset and dress, as if I go through life with a weak boa constrictor around my middle.  Every piece of space sacrificed to food means less room for air, and right now I suffer more from suffocation than hunger.

Eventually we leave dinner, to go upstairs and have our ‘evening entertainment’, as Mrs. Lyon calls it.  I am excited by the prospect of a change in scenery, though I am not sure why, since I hate everything in this world almost equally.  For some reason I wait, on the edge of my chair, for each activity to give way to the next one, even knowing full well that I will not be happier at that task then I was at the previous one.  I did the same thing at school, growing desperate as the clock ticked closer to the end of class, knowing I hated the next period’s class too.  Maybe it was because if I ran, the break provided me with a few minutes of reading time in between. 

I live for transition periods, walking from one hated chore to the next.  It is the closest thing I have to satisfaction in my life.

Actually the entertainment hour isn’t that bad.  We mostly play bridge, which I might enjoy if I wasn’t so tired.  Finally we are allowed to go to bed. 

I now have hours of lovely dark freedom before I have to go to the chapel in the morning.  We have mass every single day.  Ugh.

I take the roll of bread out of its hiding place in my voluminous dress and stash it in the back of my closet.  I have like twenty now.  As I said, it’s my way of rebelling.  The growing pile of bread in my closet gives me incredible satisfaction, as though I’m working towards some goal.  A stash of food.  My ticket to freedom.  Even though I know I’ll never use it.

I sit in class now.  We have class here, though not the same kind.  We don’t learn very many subjects.  We have the history of our country read to us from a book.  We practice writing in cursive, something I am atrocious at.  The beautiful loops and swirls of my classmates speak of long practice, they belong to this time period.  They are not, after all, trapped here and afraid to speak out about it, like me.  I really am alone. 

We also occasionally have a class in which we study the basics of Latin language, and the great Greek and Roman thinkers.  Still thought of so romantically in our own time, here they are gospel.  Treated like the lost Atlantis, Rome was more advanced then we could ever hope to be, and we must study hard to come even close.  After consideration, I decide that this is true.    But these engaging classes are few and far between, as are our occasional stabs at poetry.    

Mrs. Lyon says that anyone who is not very bright should remain conscious of that fact, so that they will not make it obvious or hinder others, and should strive to learn as much as they can from those around them who are more brilliant than they.  I think I agree with this philosophy.  It is kind, in its own demeaning way.

These classes take up only the morning.  The rest of the afternoon is spent on our other class, sewing.  Apparently, sewing is the most important thing we can learn as young ladies, for it takes up so very much of our lives.  It never occurred to me how much time it could take to sew an entire garment by hand.  To sew clothing for an entire castle takes an enormous effort.  We do as much as we can, trying to keep everyone clothed.  The most advanced seamstresses among us make clothing for the many bachelors who live in the castle and have no wife to sew for them, including the soldiers, a fact of which they are incredibly proud.  

Of course, the time it takes to sew their clothing is nowhere near the ridiculous amount of trouble it is to sew our own elaborate dresses.  So many layers of clothing must be worn that it would months of us all working together to make a single full outfit, the result being that most of us have only one dress apiece, with perhaps extra undergarments that can be washed slightly more often.  Everything is handed down until it falls apart.

Really, it is an awful lot of trouble to go through just so we can be the cause of our own discomfort.

I do not sew clothes yet.  I am still practicing my stitching on little samplers, since I am not skilled enough yet to be trusted with an actual garment.  I use the time to mentally explore the merits of nudist colonies.

‘Sewing class’ drags on for an unbelievable amount of time.  The sun filters in through dusts mites swirling in the air, bits of fluff knocked off of our many yards of fabric.  The light is terrible in here, not just that there is not enough, but the quality of the light leaves me feeling sick.  My head hurts.  I am nauseated.  My brain feels like a thick ball of cotton inside of my skull. 

I desperately want it to end.  Want to move, stretch, fill my lungs with fresh air, unrestricted by whale bone wrapped in laborious cloth and tight strings. 

I sigh deeply.  Mrs. Lyon gives me an evil look, sighing is unladylike.  Slouching is unladylike.  Squirming and fidgeting in my seat is unladylike.

The muscles of my legs crawl and itch.  I want to scream.  I actually want to scream.  I can feel it rising in my throat, my throat hurts, think how good it would feel, like stretching a sore muscle, to just open up and let a wrenching scream tear its way out of me.

I don’t scream.  I sit here in my straight-backed, laced up prison, suffocating.  But not suffocating enough to kill me.   Never that much. 

I think about death.  I try to decide if I would like to die.  I look out the window and see green.  I try to transport myself away in a daydream, go someplace else, like I do so often.  But for some reason, that release is denied me.  I need the dull murmur of a boring teacher in the background, or else the freedom of darkness to kick my legs as much as I want.  This silence, this boredom, is too complete, it gives me no vehicle for escaping it.  I concentrate, trying to force the daydreams that normally come so naturally.  I pull up an old favorite of mine, one that I am familiar with, that feels comfortable to me.  I use this one to sooth me to sleep at night.

It’s no good.  I can’t stay in it.

Why do I daydream so much?  To get away from here, obviously.  My dreams are engaging, exciting, filled with car crashes and guns, fiery sex, karate fights to the death with improvised tools. 

I know why I daydream.  Because I want those things.  I want them desperately.  People might say that wasn’t true.  That those things might be fun to watch in movies.  But no one really wants to live like that, with danger, pain, violence, the constant threat of loss and suffering.

But I know that deep down, I do want those things.  I want them badly.  Because if I was stabbed, or shot, or betrayed, I would feel alive.  For one moment, I would feel truly alive.  And that is what I want more than anything in the world.  If I could just feel alive for one moment, I would gladly die.

At least that’s what I like to think to myself.  But if that’s the truth, what’s stopping me?  Why don’t I get up right now, just get out of my chair, and scream, and scream, and scream, just like I really want to?  What is holding me back?

I’m a coward.  I am.  What will happen to me?  Who knows.  Absolute worst case scenario is death, isn’t it?  Am I afraid to die?

No.  I’m not, I really don’t believe I am.  Death may have seemed like something pretty bad to me a while back, but not anymore.  Death is nothing compared to the purgatory of being forced to sit still and be bored for every second of every day.  I suppose if they think I’m crazy they would just lock me up, which might actually be worse than this. 

Though, if I was locked up for being crazy, I could scream and bang against the walls as much as I want to.  The freedom of the mad.  It sounds delicious.

So why do I sit here like a semi-good little girl?  No chains hold me to my chair.  Not even cowardice, I think I could probably be brave if I had to be.  It’s inertia, the difficulty of change, of the unknown.  My inability to go against the grain, my self-defense mechanism earned through years of school, where to disappear into the woodwork was to survive.  The fourth law of physics, teenagers in a state of rest shall not rock the boat.

Actually, when you think about, my whole life has been a self defense mechanism.  In thirteen years, have I ever made a single choice?

When I go to bed that night, I am still disgusted with myself.  I ate one bite of porridge at dinner.  Literally, one bite.  My stomach churned until I thought I would throw up, I couldn’t eat any more.

I lie in bed, awake, like always.  I am thinking once again about worst case scenarios.

Death.  Not so bad.  Death by starvation I think I can handle, I’m told that after the first few days you don’t even feel hungry anymore.  Dying from an illness would also be acceptable.  Freezing to death isn’t supposed to be so bad, they say it’s like falling asleep, but I hate being cold so I’m not sure I believe that.  Still, its summer, I could have a good four or five months before that becomes a problem.  Death by drowning or hanging is absolutely unacceptable.  My asthma has developed in me a terrible fear of not being able to breath.  Being burned to death would be even worse.

I look back to my history lessons, the ones from my time period, not this one.  I try to remember when the whole witch hunt thing happened.  Of course, I don’t even know what the year is now, so it wouldn’t help me if I did remember.  Could a woman wandering alone be considered a witch and burned at the stake?

It doesn’t matter, as I have already realized that to continue to be a woman in this time period would be a bad idea.  Being free means being male.  I stole a needle today, from sewing class, and some thread, and my tiny pair of scissors.  Luckily I have almost nothing in the way of a feminine physique, so my transformation shouldn’t be that difficult.

I stop turning the matter over in my head.  The truth is, I’ve already made my decision.  I turn over, and fall asleep.

The next morning I claim illness.  After explaining all of my symptoms in a weak and helpless voice, I am allowed to stay in bed that day.  A lie.  An aberration.

It’s a big step for me.

When I’m alone I rip apart the stitches in my lovely threadbare dress, destroying it.  I am left with a large piece of fabric.  I spend the rest of the day making ugly but serviceable boys clothes.  I put them on.  I feel good.

It is now afternoon.  As good a time as any.  But so far, I haven’t done anything irrevocable yet.  I haven’t done anything dangerous yet.

How can I ever take the next step?

I count my bread rolls.  I have twenty-one of them, and I didn’t even start stealing them until I had been here a good week.

Have I been here that long?

I push my hair underneath a small cap.  I decided I should wait for the final mutilation, since if I leave hair lying around they will know to look for a me with short hair.  I don’t know if they want me bad enough to chase after me, but I won’t take any risks.

I have my clothes, my shoes, my hair hidden well.  I roll a blanket into a sack to hold my meager belongings.  I am pretty sure I look like a useless boy, no one that anyone would want to stick around.  Surely no one will stop me from leaving?

I climb, slowly, slowly, into the window.  Its narrow, but I am small, I can fit.  I sit there, poised on the brink.

I know I’ll never do it.  I can’t.  I look down at the ground below me.  Its far, not that far, but I am on the second story.  It wouldn’t kill me.  It probably wouldn’t injure me.  But it was far.

I think back to my childhood, to leaping off the seat of the swing in the highest point of the forward arc, easily as high as this window.  I flew though the air, I mean flew, I felt as free as a goddamned bird.  I was fearless, without a single thought to being hurt.  When I landed on the ground, I landed on my feet, my tender young ligaments absorbing all the shock of the impact, I felt no pain.  I knew this would not be the case now.  When I landed, it would hurt.  I longed for the flexibility of my youth, even more, I longed for the courage I realized had once been mine.  What on earth happened to that girl?

I sit in the window, staring down.  I’m not going to jump. I know I won’t.  And do you know why? 

Because, I’m a coward.  I let people tell me what to do.  I let them push me around.  I spend all my time waiting for the freedom of a few moments when I can escape in my daydreams.  I waste my life thinking about all the things I’ll never have the courage to do.  Loathing fills me like a bitter taste in my mouth.  I hate myself so much, I actually wish I could turn around, walk away, and never have to see me again.  Almost before I realize it, I am hurtling toward the earth.  I had jumped.  My self hatred took me farther than any amount of outside misery ever could.

I hit the ground.  I hear my ankles crack and I buckle, hitting the ground with my hands and knees.  It hurts.  But I am not injured. 

I get up.  No one saw me.  No one cares.  I walk towards the cut in the walls that must be a gate.  People look right through me.  The guard at the gate scans me.  He would have stopped me if I wore a dress, I’m sure of it.

He lets me pass, but as he does he looks closely at my face.  I turn away, trying to hide from his gaze. 

And then, I’m free!  A short walk takes me to the small wood I could see from my window, and I am as alone and safe as I could have possibly wished.  I wander far into the woods.  They are beautiful.  Alive, green, full of color and sounds, chirping birds.  Everything that the indoors can never be.  My muscles feel stretched, comfortable for the first time in so long.  I don’t feel like screaming any more.

Then I realize I can!  I can scream if I want.  So I do.  I open my mouth and throw back my head and I scream and scream as loud as I possibly can. The screams turn to shrieks, unbelievable loud, shaking, tearing my throat apart.  My body literally cannot contain that much noise, I feel like I might tear from the force. 

Afterward my throat hurts a lot, but I feel good.  I am afraid that someone might have heard me scream so I run, fast, fast, darting and leaping around the blessedly interesting obstacles, feeling strong and powerful each time I launch myself over a log without slowing down.  I breathe deep, lung splitting breaths.

I don’t have any muscles to speak of right now, so I get tired quickly.  At nightfall I stop moving.  I have no light, and no way to get one.   I will be alone, in the woods, in the pitch black of a complete absence of night.  I will be stuck that way all night, maybe eight or nine hours.

I open my makeshift bag and take out the tiny pair of scissors.  I cut my hair.

I start crying, but not because I’m scared, even though I am.  I cry because I am ugly.  I want my hair back.  Eventually I fall into a fitful sleep.

The sun rises in the east, casting colors all over the landscape of a shade you never see during the day. I discover that in the woods sunrise is not just something you watch, it surrounds you.  The night had been as terrifying as I thought it would be.  But somehow, I didn’t mind.  The fear cleared my head, I heard every sound around me clear as a bell, the birds singing and leaves rustling, sounds of a waking forest.   My headache is gone, as is the awful feeling that my mind is fuzzy and slow.  I breathe deep breaths full of clean fresh air.  I’m starving.  I ate only one roll, I’m afraid of the day when I finally run out.  The hunger is extreme, a painful feeling in my stomach.  It feels clean.

As the world comes into focus under the strengthening light, I realize I had stopped on the top of a hill, the landscape falls away beneath me.  I see almost nothing but woods.  I am surrounded by a foreign landscape, one in which I cannot survive.  In the distance I see a small hamlet of a few thatched houses.  I do not know these people. I have no idea how I might integrate into their society, or if I would be as miserable there as in the castle, or if they will realize I am not a boy.  I have no reason to hope.  I have five months to either join them, or die of exposure in the woods in the coming winter.  But that worry is far away now.

I sit and look out over the landscape, just watching.  I am afraid that if I close my eyes, even for a second, I will open them and be back in my home time, in my jeans and t-shirt, maybe finding myself sitting through another eternal class of algebra 2. 

I honestly can’t think of anything worse.