Karen Russell - St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Ahem. The time has come,” Sister Maria coughed, “to do the Sausalito.” She paused. “The Sausalito,” she added helpfully, “does not in any way resemble the thing that you are doing.”

Beads of sweat stood out on my forehead. I could feel my jaws gaping open, my tongue lolling out of the left side of my mouth. What were the steps? I looked frantically for Jeanette; she would help me, she would tell me what to do.

Jeanette was sitting in the corner, sipping punch through a long straw and watching me pant. I locked eyes with her, pleading with the mute intensity that I had used to beg her for weasel bones in the forest. “What are the steps?” I mouthed.

“The steps!”

“The steps?” Then Jeanette gave me a wide, true wolf smile. For an instant, she looked just like our mother. “Not for you,” she mouthed back.

I threw my head back, a howl clawing its way up my throat. I was about to lose all my Skill Points, I was about to fail my Adaptive Dancing test. But before the air could burst from my lungs, the wind got knocked out of me. Oomph! I fell to the ground, my skirt falling softly over my head. Mirabella had intercepted my eye-cry for help. She’d chewed through her restraints and tackled me from behind, barking at unseen cougars, trying to shield me with her tiny body. “Caramba!” Sister Maria squealed, dropping the flashlight. The music ground to a halt. And I have never loved someone so much, before or since, as I loved my littlest sister at that moment. I wanted to roll over and lick her ears, I wanted to kill a dozen spotted fawns and let her eat first.

But everybody was watching; everybody was waiting to see what I would do. “I wasn’t talking to you,” I grunted from underneath her. “I didn’t want your help. Now you have ruined the Sausalito! You have ruined the ball!” I said more loudly, hoping the nuns would hear how much my enunciation had improved.

“You have ruined it!” my sisters panted, circling around us, eager to close ranks. “Mirabella has ruined it!” Every girl was wild-eyed and itching under her polka dots, punch froth dribbling down her chin. The pack had been waiting for this moment for some time. “Mirabella cannot adapt! Back to the woods, back to the woods!”

The band from West Toowoomba had quietly packed their instruments into black suitcases and were sneaking out the back. The boys had fled back towards the lake, bow ties spinning, snapping suspenders in their haste. Mirabella was still snarling in the center of it all, trying to figure out where the danger was so that she could defend me against it. The nuns exchanged glances.

In the morning, Mirabella was gone. We checked under all the beds. I pretended to be surprised. I’d known she would have to be expelled the minute I felt her weight on my back. Walter came and told me this in secret after the ball, “So you can say yer good-byes.” I didn’t want to face Mirabella. Instead, I packed a tin lunch pail for her: two jelly sandwiches on saltine crackers, a chloroformed squirrel, a gilt-edged placard of St. Bolio. I left it for her with Sister Ignatius, with a little note: “Best wishes!” I told myself I’d done everything I could.

“Hooray!” the pack crowed. “Something has been done!”

We raced outside into the bright sunlight, knowing full well that our sister had been turned loose, that we’d never find her. A low roar rippled through us and surged up and up, disappearing into the trees. I listened for an answering howl from Mirabella, heart thumping — what if she heard us and came back? But there was nothing.

We graduated from St. Lucy’s shortly thereafter. As far as I can recollect, that was our last communal howl.

Stage 5: At this point your students are able to interact effectively in the new cultural environment. They find it easy to move between the two cultures.

One Sunday, near the end of my time at St. Lucy’s, the sisters gave me a special pass to go visit the parents. The woodsman had to accompany me; I couldn’t remember how to find the way back on my own. I wore my best dress and brought along some prosciutto and dill pickles in a picnic basket. We crunched through the fall leaves in silence, and every step made me sadder. “I’ll wait out here,” the woodsman said, leaning on a blue elm and lighting a cigarette.

The cave looked so much smaller than I remembered it. I had to duck my head to enter. Everybody was eating when I walked in. They all looked up from the bull moose at the same time, my aunts and uncles, my sloe-eyed, lolling cousins, the parents. My uncle dropped a thighbone from his mouth. My littlest brother, a cross-eyed wolf-boy who has since been successfully rehabilitated and is now a dour, balding children’s book author, started whining in terror. My mother recoiled from me, as if I was a stranger. TRRR? She sniffed me for a long moment. Then she sank her teeth into my ankle, looking proud and sad. After all the tail wagging and perfunctory barking had died down, the parents sat back on their hind legs. They stared up at me expectantly, panting in the cool gray envelope of the cave, waiting for a display of what I had learned.

“So,” I said, telling my first human lie. “I’m home.”

I would like to thank Denise Shannon, my sorcerous agent; my brilliant and endlessly supportive editor, Jordan Pavlin; Sarah Gelman and the excellent team at Knopf; the all-star poet and editor Carin Besser; all of my teachers, with a special debt of gratitude to Ben Marcus, Sam Lipsyte, Stephen O’Connor, Jaime Manrique, Sheila Donohue, Brian Bouldrey, Marie Hayes, and Edith Skom; and my workshop groups at Columbia University and Northwestern, who inspired me with their own terrific writing and were the first readers for many of these stories. Without you guys, this book would not exist.

To the editors that I was blessed to work with this past year, for their lightning-insights and wonderful suggestions: Fatema Ahmed, Bradford Morrow, Michael Ray, and Carol Ann Fitzgerald.

A huge thank-you to my incredible friends, who have stuck it out with me in Miami, in Chi-town, and here in the Big Apple — I love you guys so much. To my family, the Russells and the Romanchucks, you make me feel like the luckiest kid alive. Thank you for the swamp trips, Papa! Finally, I’d like to thank the faculty and students of the Writing Division at Columbia University and the Henfield/Transatlantic Foundation for giving me the time and the courage to write.

And a big hug and high-five for Madeleine Timmis, the world’s greatest seventh-grade teacher.

Karen Russell

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Karen Russell, a native of Miami, has been featured in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker ’s debut fiction issue, and New York magazine’s list of twenty-five people to watch under the age of twenty-six. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program and was chosen as one of Granta ’s Best Young American Novelists; her fiction has recently appeared in Conjunctions, Granta, Zoetrope, Oxford American , and The New Yorker . She lives in New York City.