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River was normal once. Incorrect. River has been normal many times, the clock breaking down seconds into angles and forgetting how sometimes time moves like a tide: constant and changeable. River has been normal forever and, if the word forever has never been sounded out letter by letter and forever has never had to be explained or struggled over or marked down or thought wrongly of then to her it is still normal.
River fucks someone when she is seven. She has a few friends who sometimes eat with her and sometimes can run fast enough to play with her and sometimes ask her to do their homework for them and sometimes sit underneath shady shady trees calmly and sometimes build giant structures from chairs that are tall enough to hide them from adults. River is good at making battlements. No adult ever breaks into her world. She swaps pencils with her friends like dirty secrets and has eleven pen licences to use on her lined paper and has a special charger that was a present from her teacher so if her device drains of battery she doesn’t have to use the slow speed packs that the other children use.
A girl a few years older than her teaches her a swear word and she tells her dance instructor that she can jump higher than her and she shakes hands with her school’s principal and she sometimes feels as if her head is struck with thunder when, in some classes, they are made one by one to stand next to a candle and look very serious. If River scares her religion teacher by her eyes seeing nothing and her mouth filling with static until she walks herself outside without permission then it is fine. Her friends meet her out the other side of the door and they all look up rude words in the encyclopaedia until River is confident that the other girls won’t fail if they had to look up not-rude words and when the boys all run out to ask them they guess every single word except for the one River has. Her artwork is put in the magazine, her image is used on the electronic flyers for advertisement and she doesn’t win any award in the school talent show because the teacher takes her offstage before her music is finished because she doesn’t wear a costume, only a dark leotard like the older girls in her ballet class. Too rude, they tell her.
She practises dancing until there is light outside because she knows how to move all the furniture in her room silently so her parents don’t know she isn’t asleep.
At eight she wins an award and gets to go to a better school. She learns about finance and how, if you are smart enough, someone will pay for you to go through their school. She learns about percentage and adds it to what she knows already about time. She can accurately guess a minute without watching the clock and never ever gets it wrong.
A girl in the ballet class above her tries on her shoes and River stands and watches her spin with her back so straight and brain stuck between how pretty she is and an equation for the distance she travels in them. The girl seemed to move faster than River is used to seeing time going, if time could be divided into pieces like fruit cake. The girl takes longer to walk back to her and winks as she hands them back. River starts trying to move faster than anyone else; she does two grades in one year and has to do two pirouettes as well as come onstage before any of the other girls and her teacher yells at her so brutally to get her timing so precise that she cries. On stage, the lights are on just her and she understands why the timing was so important and forgives her instructor instantly. After that concert she gets to stand slightly behind her shoulder when the notes are being written next to the big dance instruction book and the bones of her teacher’s chest are so visible in that light. Her teacher does her hair for her exam and she feels the skin around her eyes pulled tight until she can’t forget to smile and her face turns ugly and elf like and her ears can be seen from the back by the next girl in line. She knows all dances of everyone’s classes, , knows how to lock both the inner and outer big doors, and talks to the parents of the new girls because her teacher doesn’t like to. Her arms are almost too skinny to hold herself up as she scrambles from the lower floor up to the raised stage and back down again but her teacher likes that too.
She does a project on probability and doesn’t get a good mark and wonders why it is so much harder to work in a team than calculate multiplication at speed. Why getting her own ideas across is more challenging than long division even in just her head. Her new school gets her to do a project on an inspirational woman and instead River walks down to the Grade 4 classroom where the teacher with short hair and a pretty necklace teaches her how to fold paper cranes. River folds paper cranes until she has to ask her parents for a pin to get the folds precise enough on a square less than a coin. She gets in trouble with her English teacher for refusing to answer a question she doesn’t know the answer to and instead folding her assignment into the tiniest birds she can. She gets asked to help another class fold paper cranes because her folds are sharper by then than those of the lady who taught her. She gets the exact role she wants in the play her class puts on: not the lead but the only one who gets to dance. Her science project is on mirrors and angles and she starts to think that angles might mean that time and reflection could hold hands; that they each behave differently when not being watched, when standing innocently next to each other, and she’s sure that they can be bent around a corner where the reality isn’t so set. She performs her dance on a very large stage, the largest in her city. She finishes her art project early and asks her teacher if she can watch the lady who paints in the residence cottage work. She sits as straight backed and dark eyed as watching someone else pirouette in her shoes. Her mathematics teacher draws a perfect circle on the board. In the same classroom someone teaches her about anorexia and she thinks about the freckles on her teachers chest and the bones that showed like a triangle pointing downwards.
Her parents take a photograph of her in her costume that cycle and her eyes are red.
During the break between one school year and the next her family takes her on a holiday and for the week she is given only food and not one scrap of company by them. She throws a rubber ball she bartered from the boy in the villa next to them at a blank wall for days and by the end of the week she is in trouble for the dirty marks across the whitewashing and she can catch anything and she can catch anything and she can catch anything. She isn’t old enough to know curves she doesn’t know gravity she doesn’t calculate angles but she does it with the light parts of her eyesight and when she finally gets to dance again she can do an extra turn because her eyes lock onto a nothing spot on the wall instead of needing the mirror to do it and her teacher moves her one more spot forward. She has to dance in the quiet noisy spot between two classes swapping over and the older group don’t clap and the younger group look at her harshly and her teacher doesn’t watch her because she is racing quickly outside to the dark bathrooms while River presses both play and stop on the tinny music they use. She starts helping teach the following week - herding toddlers to the bathrooms through the spiky dead grass between one door and the next and her teacher smiles when she fits into the costume of the younger group and so she gets to stay in that spot as well. The next time River stands behind her instructor she is wearing a loose shirt and instead of bone she sees straight down to the soft skin across her chest and it’s so pretty that River gets caught in her blush and gets her skinny arms brushed firmly yet fondly aside while her teacher adds olives to her salad.
The next rounds of auditions puts River in the centre of her new classroom. She sits with one other boy in a desk with only two spots and the old teacher in front of her pauses his talking to introduce a young woman to them and River forgets how smart she is supposed to be. The angles in the clock are above the woman’s head and River can see the door open only 45 degrees and she can still see her own desk but she doesn’t watch the man she is meant to listen to and instead sees the side wall of the classroom open wider and she can see the small lit up box that pressurises and cleans the air and she can see the rolling eyes of the woman and she can see the time and her hair flies into her eyes when the woman leaves and she has to turn back to face the front.
She gets kicked out of her mathematics lecture for showing her catapult skills and there’s a dark mark in the ceiling that reminds her of the tiny villa’s wall and she learns that gravity will cause an object to fall directly downwards but an impact with something above the object will alter the projected pathway in direct relation to the force of the hit and so she misses grabbing it out of the air before the yelling happens. It stays in her hand when she has to sit in the hallway and it’s her first detention but not the first argument she’s had with someone of authority and so her reputation starts to precede her. She misses two English assignments but gets full marks and learns that arguing a point is it’s own kind of skill and her teacher pulls her aside and pulls her aside and pulls her aside. An exasperated sigh starts to precede her name from them all and the women start to look at her like they are smiling at a secret she doesn’t understand yet and so she glares at them all until their admiration turns more like her dance teacher’s. Until it has a tinge of jealousy. She likes making the older women look at her as if she was standing very very tall and if it makes her fight arguments more fully or with more ammunition then she doesn’t care to find out what people think of it.
She continues to bow low in her leotard though and helps the new teachers pack up their things and her friend draws patterns across her skull with a metal pen and the cold makes her shiver in ways that feels like girls making her paper outfits in construction classes and like someone doing pirouettes in an arc around her and nothing at all like sitting on her friends leg at seven until the both of them come messily and noisily against each other and she gets asked to make a dance to teach a school travelling from another central planet and it’s during the break time they’re meant to have but River thinks of throwing a rubber ball continuously against a wall until a mark is left behind and so chooses to stay in the empty school with no one else she knows until the travelling group have to go back to their own home planet and her teacher doesn’t add it to her grade and calls it sharing instead and River’s parents start to not ask where she is spending all her time.
She sees the young woman teacher turn mindless circles around the outside courtyard without anyone else standing next to her and River doesn’t understand solitude but the pathway looks like the hands of a clock if the hands of a clock forgot about angles and turned into truth and she sits with all the other children her age but grows quieter as they start to all get louder. She maybe begins understand solitude. Her government mandated photographs that year have her hair straight down her back with a hair tie around her wrist and her dancing photos have her in a secondhand pair of shoes that her teacher doesn’t charge her for and the papier-mâché silk torture of them is pretty and she doesn’t just do one class but five and the older girls call her shoes ugly because they are the wrong kind of pink but they fit like lambswool in the toes to soak up the blood and her teacher stops correcting her and starts holding her legs around her ears and looking at her wildly in the eyes around her own leg. She performs on the large large stage again and gets to be in her own group and the group above her and her costume is uglier than she could ever imagine and no one comes to watch her because she doesn’t tell anyone that she is dancing because people start to equate it with shyness and she knows that her lipstick is already smudged by boys and girls lips on hers and so she doesn’t want to share what they all won’t understand. River would rather keep herself a secret than share it with people who misequate her.
She wins her schools sports day and wears her pointe shoes under the desk in her science and mathematics test and the teacher notices but she keeps them on anyway because there’s only one day until she has to dance with a partner on a new stage and they close the curtain as she walks forward and her dance instructor doesn’t know what this new teacher is getting her to do and she still stays on the very tops of her ugly shoes and the boy she dances with is years older than her and she still performs well enough that she gets invited to do another kind of dancing.
When she goes to the new studio the man who is teaching her is also dancing with her and if another teacher is there with her it’s irrelevant and she isn’t used to the shiny plastic floors but she spots her own reflection faithfully until it turns into a place that she can dance in and he pulls her confidently into places that smell completely of him and then lets her escape from his arms straight forward into the mirror, her eyes more open and wild than even she is used to. Her next performance has her in the auditorium afterwards with her stage makeup still on and she sees the young woman who stood under the angles of the clock and who walked circuits in the yard and so walks up to her to say hello, just once. She doesn’t quite remember what they talked about but she remembers the hesitation in the older woman’s eyes before the tinge of admiration showing through like sunrise. She starts to perform often, every few months, and each time she races to get out of whatever stupid or beautiful or itchy costume she’s been put in to try and catch the woman before she leaves. Her friends roll their eyes because they don’t see the value of having someone to run out to afterwards or the thrill of changing out of one costume and obstinately into another quickly enough or with brain clean enough to allow what the two of them are shyly building to continue. One night she looks straight at the woman and prays that her dancing was good enough for her and the woman looks back at her and looks back at her and looks back until they stay locked opposite each other for a single still moment. She understands most things but dancing for someone is such a new concept and it reminds her of her instructor telling all the young girls how they used to dance cygnets on a central planet and watch the crowd until they could see past the bright stage lights to spot the cute boys in the audience. It starts to remind her of aim and of the angles she made through search alone. River never knows if she’s going to be there or if they’ll catch each other right at the perfect time but through repetition alone River starts to find her in the audience through the quiet static hum of everyone’s blank thoughts. She starts to rifle through a crowd of brains like recipe cards and can sense the dark flash of someone both watching and thinking about her simultaneously. She smiles at them past the bright bright stage lights as if practising for how she knows they’ll see each other after.
Her device gets updated by a boy in her class and she can still feel the pen marks across her skull and she yells and yells when teachers think their homework is more important than her dance classes and her instructor has stopped charging her family full price and instead River cleans the storeroom and teaches the kids and helps the younger grades and makes up dances and models the costumes so doll-still until she is happy with the precise timing and the calm angry way her teacher watches her.
She learns to braid hair and she learns to trip over boys and her catching games turn into projectiles and billiards and she never never hits the sharp edge of the dart into the concrete behind a target and she goes away with the school just once and the young woman becomes her friend and so she leaves every one of her peers to watch whatever stupid thing is being broadcasted and instead climbs across a couch to sit next to her as proud and soft and wary as she sits behind her dance teacher. She reads and reads and reads until a man trips over her in the hallway and invites her into their room and she sits on her hands behind the woman and falls into her slowly like gravity and she pulls thought like life from her head as she is permitted to brush back the woman’s hair over and over until it’s soft and her eyes start to pull all the way through and she sees and knows rather than learns. She races the men directly down a mountain and wins and she learns curves and she learns acceleration and she sees straight through her own head to the inside of someone else’s and there are no more adults in her school who don’t know who she is. Her parents get a letter.
At the new institute they learn guns and sometimes her aim is so straight through the air that it moves objects closer and she starts to not think in physics and calculations and equations and starts to just see and not waver and they teach her mathematics and navigation and when they find out she sees the ticking through of a clock into the perfect angle of when to lift her leg to her ears they take her into smaller and smaller rooms and they flash lights in her eyes and they attach things to her brain and they tell her that the machines she is hooked up to tell them the answers and they ask her what the date is every time they come visit and the food isn’t food but a plastic container barely enough to sustain her and the drugs they give her muddle her brain and they never tell her about something that she can’t remember and she forgets how she got to the institution in the first place and she sees the edges of the light by her bed and the edges of light in the wild wild eyes of the attendant stationed next to her bed and when a needle gets stuck in her her own screams don’t echo across the strange rubber floors and she can hear the strange squeak of someone’s shoes as they sprint away from her, laughing and telling her to laugh in one, and she yells and she yells and she doesn’t know why they are keeping her there and her hair grows dark and oily and unbrushed against the paper crinkled pillowcase and they run tests and they run tests and they get bigger and older and better men walking into her room asking her questions and she steals the nothing from their eyes like knowledge from the source and she can’t remember why she can’t remember why she is in the institution and the screaming continues until they poke her too hard and the pain is as small and complete as the hole of a star. The machines around her grow sharp and the data on the screen is catalogued by people who don’t understand what it means and given to people who don’t know who River is and they bring in more people until she is propped up in a chair that holds her up and down at once and the man she is talking with has people that he is teaching but he needs River to teach them with him and they need River to teach them what they are making her forget and they need River to take off her paper paper gown to poke her again and they need River to tell them what shape she sees and they need River to say back a number until she forgets the number and it grows and it grows and the institution is the same as her brain and she stays awake with the machines around her and the lights that never go out and she never stops her brain but they don’t let her look behind her to see her friends or her school or her family and her brother isn’t allowed to see her and every time she looks up it’s at strangers and every time she screams they tell her to look at the lights until she is in the centre of the lighting and the machines around her rain magnetic bullets around every part of her brain and they look at the inside of it and they look at the inside of her and she is in the inside of it and she sees the inside of the lights they flash at her and she forgets the skyline and she forgets holding a woman’s head so carefully in front of her and she tells the people around her of what she is knowing without anyone telling her first and they don’t smile at her while they write down exactly what she says and she gets wheeled through the hallways without leaving the building and she looks up one day when she is not supposed to be able to look up and she sees the shadow of someone opposite her right on top of her own shadow and screams.
The metal inside her connects the sharp point to the metal of the machines and she sits and sees and she is only what her eyes tell the people around her and one day they ask her the date and she doesn’t understand the question. Her pointe shoes are with her but rolled up in soft fabric under her bed and her legs are no longer strong and her chest looks as skinny as her bony bony teacher’s and the darkness under her eyes isn’t painted and isn’t ink and isn’t love. She forgets that there is a sky and when they ask her to stand it feels like lying down and the edges of the light that put her shadow on the wall behind her become visible to her and she sits still as she learns to see in front and behind her all at once. She forgets that there is a sky.
The very first thought she has when a tiny bit of her brain comes back to her is Simon and she holds out her hands where they opened up holes in her arm to turn her into a sprinkler system and she feels someone take her hand even though no one is there and if she is blind then she sees the back of the blindness and reaches and reaches and reaches.
When a tiny bit of her brain comes back to her she learns why she was in the institution. When a tiny bit of her comes back she remembers. She screams and barely can see her brother when she looks at him and she can still feel it all. When she remembers she wishes she couldn’t. She touches people and feels the death inside them like a clock where the angles are too easy to read. She can tell authority patterns in eyes like knowing exactly when the minute is up.
And the minute is up. There’s no way for her to tell people that she is a body stripped of coating and that every touch goes down down down until she cannot stop the rambling about directions: inward and downward and that strange orbit again. How inward for people like her drag others along with her until they rasp out an apology or an admittance or a declaration and she is left alone with the quiet static of always knowing who is behind her. Sound hits her and she changes it, walking patterns in her new home like she once saw a woman walk around a schoolyard. She redirects her feet until the weapon is already in her hand and so it must have already been left there. The crew yell at her to drop it and yell at her to drop it and don’t for a second think that it was hers to begin with. It’s true that no touching guns is probably a good rule especially since it barely takes anything for a blank wall to flicker between metal and ceramic the way computers do before someone hits it with a screwdriver and how sometimes she growls before she even knows she is doing so and it’s a lower sound than Inara or Kaylee ever make and only Jayne notices, stepping both towards and away from her as if he wants the right tool in hand to hit her with too to take out the sound before it raises. No touching guns is probably a good rule but it takes metal to make her happy because she is metal built and so she climbs into Jayne’s bunk over and over until it feels less like a room and more like a cage and she holds them all except for Vera, which is Jayne’s, and her arms are bird thin and rail thin and steel bar thin and it would take nothing to snap them but nothing to pull the triggers of them all either. She only sneaks into Jayne’s bunk when he isn’t there and the shadows of his space are able to be moved so she can make it look new each time. She has a favourite weapon and she shouldn’t.
No guns is a good rule and, goggles firmly in place, she gets to go outside fully when they all finally see her adhere to it. All the knives don’t count however; Mal tells her about owning something and it takes her back to her full brain, back to before interference and she wraps her hands tighter around each of the weapons she is permitted. It helps. No one will attack something so small but so well armed so their fights start to get a bit less often on every planet. River can still adequately protect a full circle around herself and Kaylee, accidentally caught in the crossfire of River’s automatic attack every other week, has an uneasy laugh from their constant sidestepping and tussles over which of them will actually teach River about personal space. It’s a problem but a pretty one. If placed vs fought vs ignored follow her around the ship at a safe distance, each thinking that their solution over any of the others will work to heal her.
Inara’s care is still the best; more careful and constant than Zoe by half especially as River comes more and more often from the underside of a job, scarred up fully and wildness hidden under layers of dirt and grime and blood. Less often than Kaylee and never so luxuriously, but to be healed, taught, and talked to all at once is like a balm for the still open parts of River; all the space staying in a harmonious vibration with the engine and the noisy brains of everyone around her. Inara, she forgets, has training behind her as well and it shows at the still moments between one of River’s trains of thought and the next. River starts to breathe in knowing that everything won’t come unravelled in the meantime and starts to allow the sharp edges of Inara’s hands across the back of her neck while she is flying. None of the others on the crew are allowed to touch her, or at least are too scared to, but Inara’s fingers turn warm as soon as they start to thread and so she allows it: learns to glare out as far as the edges of the woman’s eyes reach to and not a step further.
She tells Mal to add new blades to his resupply list and steals ammunition for Jayne the second she’s loosed. It isn’t quite the same as schooling ever was and sometimes she even leaves a job without everyone knowing her name but success still happens in slow motion until she looks up one day when she shouldn’t and no longer sees only shadows. The unwobbling arc of her thrown knife becomes a tool she can follow through each time and she can calculate distance by number of rotations and her kicks gain four and a half inches of height and she can throw anything she can throw anything she can throw anything. When she licks into the air to taste the edges of conversation sometimes Inara licks back, sometimes Mal or Jayne. When she licks into the air she can taste the truth. When she licks into the air the black of space pushing against the window pauses in its intensity for just a second and lipstick coats her vision. A mouth that doesn’t feel like hers but is smiles back and she is becoming useful again, however slowly, until the usefulness takes up her full vision and she decides over and over to, once more, be the fastest. It takes conscious decision to but it’s a conscious decision she’s decided she can’t forgo. Achievements like maintaining her own brain for a whole day or being able to walk into the whitewashed ceramic showers without direct fear of losing her lunch or being gifted another blade from Jayne or Mal even though both of them have scars from her turn into achievements more along the lines of walking away from a job with an entire bag of new supplies for Kaylee or getting the machine gun mount she was trying to install on Serenity’s roof secure. She can talk with the others at the dinner table even as she isn’t quite sure what volume she should be speaking at and soon even Zoe starts to look at her carefully from her new lonesome seat like River is more than a hindrance; Kaylee starts to tussle her hair and only sometimes gets an elbow to the stomach. Automatic reaction is still ingrained in her very muscles, in her brain’s makeup, and she refuses to let all the twitches that doctors and scientists and men put into her be levelled out like imperfections in tree trunks. River decides to keep every single one of them and is quickly and quietly put to training under Jayne’s predatory yet knowledgeable gaze so as to not lose or loose any of her ruthlessness. She gets no reward for the training sessions but it gives the two of them something to grumble over at the noisy noisy table when Jayne’s goading of Inara or Kaylee causes them to give him a cold shoulder.
River likes sitting nice and tall next to Jayne but training is just that so her height doesn’t waiver as she stands next to others as big as him. It takes a year of being let out but eventually someone tries to poach her for their own team slyly enough that Mal jumps in raging and yelling and pulling her into him by the shoulder and away from the cargo traders and the feeling of being wanted by another team isn’t nearly as warm as feeling wanted by her own.
If Inara’s shuttle has a 45 degree open door to River and only River then she does understand that Kaylee’s open door is wider yet never so carefully guarded. Kaylee and Inara together is sunshine but River and Inara together tastes dark and heavy and perfumed and so, sometimes, the door at a perfect angle, she walks in. Sometimes when she drops her head to kiss Inara’s cheekbone she brushes her neck instead to hear the inhale. It is just a truth about orbit: a truth about growing up and growing awareness and of the parts of love that are unavailable to her lest she ask for them. Aware however, of Inara’s work, she tries not to ask too often. The clang of metal on another part of the ship and a skill River still doesn’t know if she should have or not. She pieces the sound to the exact location and walks there as if being led to arrive first. In the wide expanded part of her brain she dreams alongside Inara and uses the catalogue-able metal clangs to make sure they stay the right distance away from both each other and that edgeless drop of the sloped side of the ship. When she opens up her ripped wide head to allow the crew some access to the carefully guarded parts it is Inara who looks at her with eyes wild around the edges as if she is doing something beyond her capabilities even though it is something others have already taken. River reaches out with her mind as if to tell her it’s fine and the next time they touch River’s hand goes all the way through and she has to let her mind empty as the wider expanse of Inara’s fear and stress hits her hands. She has to let her mind empty of the noises that Inara must use as catalogue, of her work. River’s mind empties for a second and she feels her relax into her touch. It’s not at all new to her but it feels rusty and unused and heavier than she remembers. River’s skin doesn’t feel like it belongs to her anymore, her skin feels like a doctor's open text book, and she uses Inara’s slightest break in control to further practise her own. When she returns to herself she sees Jayne looking at them carefully. She both wants to be escorted elegantly out by Inara and also spit to her contracted left side to make sure he looks away. She is part of the crew, she is open to them all now, but she would blind a man if she thought for a second he wasn’t looking at Inara in the way she deserved. Instead she sits down at the table and pulls Jayne’s sharpening stone towards her at the same time as unsheathing her knife and doesn’t give him the satisfaction of looking like she was aware of how the two of them had looked. If she would blind a man for too long a gaze then she knows she would blind herself for the same ardour.
Mal gets her the new blades she requests and he pats the side of her too-big-but-tied-on-tight tool belt and the empty pouches where ammunition should be rattle but she’s never without Jayne or Mal and his pistol anyway, so she says nothing and never lets the appreciation she has for these strange people who decided to save her into the communicable parts of her eyes. Instead she practises aim and trains with Jayne and works as fast as she can make herself. She looks up at the sky and sees the skyline again, she looks forward into the black and sees direction broken into the angles of open doors, she looks into the sound of static and sees metal. She looks into Jayne’s, Mal’s, Kaylee’s, Zoe’s eyes, into Inara and Simon’s; she looks into the sight of the machine gun mounted perfectly and doesn’t take a single shot and the tinge of wasted training tastes metallic on her tongue. She looks downwards in shame at her own story, at her own history, and with enough brain to see the truth she knows it’s better to be silent about the worst parts of it and be considered slow rather than needle riddled with excuses. And they are excuses. Excuses on the behaviour that others put her through, excuses about the truth of certain places, about where she is and was. River doesn’t take a practise shot and instead climbs down the ladder and back into the shelter of Serenity, back to her discarded tool belt full of knives and wire cutters and device pens that attach directly onto the bracelet she still wears and drags it inside. She opens her own profile on the old screen that needs updating in the cargo bay to check her credits and realises she has enough for tea.
Something fresh, something pretty with flowers through the heat of it. Her muscles ache though and it finally feels once more like hard work, not like pain or atrophy or the dream emptiness of blood lost. Her muscles ache and she smiles at the sky and rises to her toes once, just for old times sake, and forgets to come down.