cinammon girl
“I happen to think you look like someone’s going to eat you alive if you don’t have backup.”
Or, in which Mia Kelly acquires a Kennedy.
She later learns she’s supposed to be the quiet one.
Word Count: 3.7k
note: I usually post on ao3 but I thought I’d upload chapters here too <3 I’m still figuring out how to format everything on tumblr lol… enjoy!!
i.
1942
Mia Kelly was twelve years old, and she understood the war the way she understood most things: better than most of the adults around her.
She read the newspapers her father left folded beside his chair. She knew where Bataan was. She had known before April, which was more than could be said for most of East Falls. She knew that the Kelly brickyard was running double shifts on government contracts, and that her father said the war would be won with steel and concrete and brick, by which he meant, at least partly, by him. She knew that her mother had quietly stopped playing her German records. She knew that the ocean, which had always been the safest place Mia knew, now had submarines in it, and that this was not discussed in front of the children, which was precisely how the children knew it was true.
What she did not know, on a warm Thursday evening in May, was that the entire shape of her life had already been decided in a letter she would never be shown.
She had come downstairs after her bath to fetch her book. (Jane Eyre, for the fourth time. Her mother said it was bothersome for a girl to read the same book four times, and so Mia had privately concluded her mother had never loved a book in her life.) The house on Henry Avenue was big enough to get lost in and quiet enough to hear everything, and the door to her father’s study stood two inches open.
“…nothing left to teach her.” Her father’s voice made her stop right on her tracks. “That’s what it says. Read it again if you like. The girl is twelve years old and they’re out of runway.”
“I’ve read it twice, Jack.”
The rustle of paper. The particular creak of the chair her father sat in when he was being right about something.
“Woodlands.” He said the word the way he said the names of regattas he intended to win. “Lake Forest, Illinois. Best convent school in the country, bar none. Best faculty, best families, best record. Half the country’s Catholics send their daughters there. You do not sit on a talent like that because Philadelphia happens to be convenient.”
“She’s twelve.”
“She’ll be thirteen in November.”
“She’ll be seven hundred miles away, is what she’ll be.” Her mother’s voice was doing the thing it did, level and reasonable and completely immovable, water working at stone. “And what about Grace?”
The silence that followed lasted long enough that Mia, standing barefoot in the dark hallway in her nightgown with her wet hair dripping down her back, forgot to breathe.
“They’re not one girl, Margaret,” her father said at last. “They’re two. It’s about time this house started acting like it.”
And that was the thing about her father, Mia thought, standing very still on the cold floor. He wasn’t cruel, he was something more difficult than cruel. Certain. John B. Kelly Sr. had rowed his way out of a bricklayer’s boyhood to Olympic gold on the strength of his own two shoulders and one unshakeable article of faith, and the faith was this: there existed, for every situation, a thing called the best, and a Kelly’s whole duty on this earth was to identify it, obtain it, and be it. The best crew. The best school. The best version of yourself, produced on schedule and without complaint. Declining the best, when the best was offered, was unthinkable. Practically a mortal sin, really.
“It’s the best thing for her,” her father said, in the tone of a man closing a ledger. “She’ll thank us when she’s twenty.”
Mia went back upstairs without her book.
--
Grace was awake. Of course Grace was awake.
The lamp was off and the window was open to the spring night, someone’s radio murmuring down the block, and there were two beds in the room with a nightstand wedged between them, crowded with hair ribbons and a chipped rosary and a stack of library books neither of them had returned.
“You heard,” Grace said. It wasn’t a question. It was never a question with Gracie.
Mia climbed into her own bed and lay facing her sister across the gap, and for a long time neither of them said anything at all, which was its own kind of conversation.
“Illinois,” Mia said, finally, to the dark.
“I know.”
“How’d you know?”
“Daddy’s been leaving brochures where Mama will find them for a month.” A pause. “It’s a good school, Mimi.”
“Don’t,” Mia made a face.
“It is!” Grace protested.
“You sound like Daddy.”
“I sound like someone who doesn’t want you to cry. Because if you cry, I’ll cry, and then Peggy will hear us, and then it’ll become a Family Discussion.” In the Kelly house, feelings were allowed the same way swimming was: at designated times, under constant supervision, and never alone after dark.
Grace’s hand came across the gap between the beds. She squeezed. Mia squeezed back. They’d been holding hands across that gap since before either of them could remember.
People often asked twins foolish questions. Whether they read each other’s minds. Whether they felt each other’s pain. Mia never knew how to explain that it was both simpler and stranger than that. Grace was not her other half the way a broken plate has halves. Grace was more.
“Seven hundred miles,” Mia said.
“Then we have the whole summer,” said Gracie. “Go to sleep, Mimi.”
She didn’t. Neither did Grace.
--
They went out to see the school in June, Mia and her mother, on a train full of soldiers. Her father stayed behind with the brickyard.
Woodlands Academy sat on green lawns above a ravine at the edge of Lake Forest, all gray stone and arched windows and ivy, with Lake Michigan showing silver between the oaks when the wind moved them. It looked like something out of a Gothic novel, which Mia would’ve found promising in a book and found considerably less promising in real life. She decided, privately and immediately, that she hated it.
The Reverend Mother gave them the tour herself, which Mia immediately understood to be a compliment paid to her father’s checkbook. Classrooms. Dormitories. The refectory, smelling of wax and Wednesday’s fish. Girls in identical uniforms who curtseyed as they passed, the whole calm machinery of the place turning over like a well-kept clock. Mia walked half a step behind her mother and only spoke when spoken to, and when a girl in the corridor said “hello” to her directly, Mia went scarlet and managed only a nod before her mother laughed and said, “She’ll warm up. She always does. Eventually.”
And then they came to the chapel.
“Mia sings,” her mother said.
Mia’s stomach dropped through the stone floor and she blushed.
“Does she?” The Reverend Mother turned. Her eyes were pale and shrewd and not unkind. “Would you sing something for us, child?”
And there was, of course, no polite way for a twelve-year-old to refuse a Reverend Mother. So she stood where she was put, at the head of the aisle, and she sang the Panis Angelicus, because it was what she sang at Ravenhill on Sundays and it was what her mouth produced when her mind refused to help.
The chapel took the first note and gave it back to her doubled.
When she finished there was a silence with a texture to it. The Reverend Mother looked at the nun beside her, and the nun looked back, and something passed between them over Mia’s head, freighted and swift.
“Well,” said the Reverend Mother.
Mia would learn, much later, that the rumor of her arrived at Woodlands a full three months before she did. That the look exchanged over her head that June afternoon traveled from the chapel to the refectory to the letters the sisters wrote all summer, so that by September there was scarcely a girl enrolled who had not heard that someone was coming this year who could sing.
On the train home her mother said, “That was lovely, wasn’t it,” which was the thing her parents said instead of I’m sorry.
Mia watched Indiana go by the window and didn’t answer.
She didn’t say she’d very nearly forgiven them at the chapel. Very nearly.
--
They summered in Ocean City, New Jersey, in a big, shingled house a block from the beach. It was the place Mia loved most in the world.
That summer, though, the shore was at war whether it wanted to be or not.
The boardwalk lights wore black hoods now, and the streetlamps on the ocean side stayed dark, and cars ran the shore road on headlights taped down to slits, because a lit coastline made silhouettes of the ships offshore, and the submarines were waiting for silhouettes. Coast Guardsmen walked the beach at night with dogs. Tar came in on the tide, black gobbets of it from torpedoed tankers, and stuck to the soles of your feet, and every house on the block kept a rag and a bottle of kerosene by the back steps as though this was normal, and by August it was. There was a gold star in the front window two streets over, too, where last summer there’d been a boy who taught half the neighborhood children to crab.
But it was also, stubbornly, insistently, summer. Kell, fifteen and growing, rowed on the bay at dawn while their father stood on the dock with a stopwatch and a face that gave away nothing and expected everything. Peggy was seventeen and glamorous and permanently exasperated. Lizanne was nine and a menace to society. But there was ice cream, and there were sunburns, and there was the smell of the house at six in the evening, salt and Noxzema and supper, that Mia would spend the rest of her life trying to find again in other rooms.
And there was Grace.
Every morning that the flags allowed it, the two of them swam out past the breakers to where the water went quiet and green, and floated on their backs with their ears underwater and their hands linked, the way they had floated every summer since they were little. From above, Mia supposed, they looked like one creature. It felt like being one creature. It always had.
They split the world down the middle that summer by ancient treaty. Grace took the top halves of ice cream cones; Mia took the bottoms. Grace read the last pages of books first; Mia guarded her own endings like state secrets. Grace kept movie magazines under her mattress, smuggled past their father, who had a Pulitzer-winning playwright for a brother and a vaudevillian for another and considered the theatrical Kellys a cautionary tale instead of anything else. Mia kept nothing under her mattress. Mia kept everything in the place where twins keep things, which is to say, in Grace.
“When we’re grown up,” Gracie said one evening in August. They were lying on the sand in the last of the light, before the beach curfew, before the dogs. “You’ll sing and I’ll act. We’ll be famous in completely different ways, so nobody can compare us. And we’ll live next door to each other, and our children will grow up thinking they’re siblings.”
“Daddy will have a fit.”
“Daddy will have two fits. One each. It’s only fair.”
Mia laughed into the dusk. Out over the water the first stars were coming up over an ocean with submarines in it, and the boardwalk behind them glowed its strange dim wartime glow, and her sister’s shoulder was warm against hers.
“Swear it,” Grace said, and held up her little finger.
Mia hooked it with her own. “Sworn.”
One night near the end of August there was a red glow far out at sea, low on the horizon. The whole family watched it from the dark porch and nobody said the word tanker, and her father’s jaw worked, and her mother sent Lizanne to bed, and Grace’s hand found Mia’s in the dark without either of them looking and held on until the glow went out.
They didn’t talk about September. This was a decision they made without discussing it.
--
The station was full of soldiers.
That was the first thing Mia would remember, always, about the morning she left. Khaki and Navy blue as far as she could see, duffel bags and kit bags, girls crying against uniformed shoulders, mothers holding on to sleeves, and above all of it the enormous echoing hum of a country in motion. Her own goodbye was one small drop in it.
Kell thumped her on the back like she was leaving for boot camp instead of school. Peggy sniffled once, dramatically, and said Mia could have her good sweater if she wrote first. Lizanne asked if she could keep Mia’s doll collection while she was gone, and nobody bothered answering her.
Her mother kissed her on the forehead and said, “You’re going to love it, darling. The nuns are wonderful.”
Her father then shook her hand and said, “Make us proud, Mia.”
And then there was Grace.
Grace cried. That was the worst part. Grace never cried. Grace, who was already so still and so self-contained at twelve that their mother sometimes checked to make sure she was breathing, stood on the platform in her good coat with tears running silently down her face and didn’t make a single sound, and didn’t wipe them away either. Even her grief had composure. It was the most terrible thing Mia had ever seen.
“Write me everything,” Grace said.
“Every week,” Mia agreed.
“Every day,” Grace countered.
Mia’s smile was small. “Gracie.”
“Fine. Every week,” she conceded. “But your letters better be long.”
They hugged.
Then Grace let go.
It felt like losing something Mia didn’t have a name for yet. She would spend years not finding the name. She would look for it in Illinois and in New York and in rooms full of famous strangers, and she would learn eventually that some things get named only once, at the beginning, in a language spoken by exactly two people.
And then she was traveling in the care of a Mrs. Dougherty, a friend of her mother’s bound for Chicago, who slept from Paoli to Pittsburgh with her hat on. The train was thick with servicemen; a sailor who looked scarcely older than Kell gave up his window seat to her somewhere in the mountains and called her “miss.” Pennsylvania went by in the dark.
Mia stared at the dark shapes sliding past and let herself think about how unfair it all was. She hadn’t asked for Woodlands. She hadn’t asked to be the one worth writing letters about. She wished, fiercely and uselessly, that she could trade every bit of it back. And underneath it all she knew there was also a small hard knot of nerves about all the things waiting for her at the end of the line: new girls, new nuns, a new home. She pressed her palm flat against the cold window glass and told herself it wouldn’t always feel like this. She almost believed it.
She cried once, in the washroom outside Altoona, quietly, with the tap running so no one would hear over the noise of the train, and washed her face, checked her reflection twice to be sure it didn’t show, and came back to her seat with her chin up.
Kellys didn’t cry in public.
Somewhere past Fort Wayne Mia finally took out the journal Grace had given her for their last birthday, leather-bound, still smelling faintly of the shop, and opened it to the first page, and wrote Dear Gracie. She’d meant to write Dear Diary. She looked at it for a while and decided that it was perfect, and that it always would be, and went on from there.
--
The trunk was bigger than she was.
Mia stood on the front steps of the Academy and stared up at the gray stone and the arched windows and the ivy, all of it exactly as Gothic as it had been in June and considerably more permanent, and thought, very clearly and very calmly: I would like to go home now.
A nun materialized beside her. They did that here, materialized, like ghosts in habits, appearing silently at your elbow with expressions suggesting they already knew every sin you’d ever committed and several you hadn’t gotten around to yet.
“Miss Kelly?” The nun’s voice was brisk. “I’m Sister Agnes. Welcome to Woodlands. Your room is on the second floor, west corridor. Your roommate hasn’t arrived yet. I trust you can find your way?”
Mia could not find her way. The building had approximately nine thousand hallways, all identical, and she was twelve. But she nodded, because that was what you did when a nun asked you a question. You nodded and said “Yes, Sister” and figured out the rest on your own.
“Yes, Sister.”
“Lovely. Dinner is at six. Chapel is at seven. Lights out at nine. Any questions?”
Mia had roughly four hundred questions, but she shook her head, and Sister Agnes gave her a look suggesting she did not believe this for a moment, and dematerialized back into whatever shadow dimension these nuns occupied between interactions with students.
The room was small. A window, two twin beds, two desks, two wardrobes, and a crucifix on the wall between the beds that seemed to watch her with a faintly accusatory expression. White bedspreads. White walls. A dark wood floor that creaked. It smelled of furniture polish and loneliness and something faintly floral that she would later learn was the lavender sachets the nuns put in every wardrobe.
She sat down on the bed nearest the window. She had always slept nearest the window at home, and if she could not have Grace, she could at least have the sky. She folded her hands in her lap and breathed.
You are fine, she told herself. You are Amelia Violet Kelly. You are fine. This is your Lowood. Jane survived Lowood.
She was not fine.
She unpacked methodically, because unpacking was a task, and tasks were manageable, and feelings were not. Clothes in the wardrobe. Books on the desk; she had brought seven, which her mother called excessive and Mia considered a bare minimum for survival. The journal went into the nightstand drawer. The small framed photograph of her family went on the desk, propped against Jane Eyre.
She was arranging her pencils in order of length when she heard footsteps in the hallway. Quick footsteps. Confident. The kind of footsteps that belonged to someone who had never once in her life stood in a doorway wondering whether she was allowed in.
The door swung open and a girl walked through it.
She was dark-haired and bright-eyed, carrying a suitcase in one hand and a tennis racket in the other, and she was talking. Already talking, mid-sentence, as though the conversation had begun somewhere out in the hallway and Mia was simply expected to catch up.
“…and I told Mother that if Teddy touched my racket one more time I’d hit him with it, and she said that wasn’t very Christian of me, and I said neither was Teddy breaking the strings on my last one, and… oh. Hello. You must be Mia.”
Mia’s first instinct, as it was with most strangers, was to disappear, to make herself small and quiet and easy to overlook until the moment passed. It was a skill she’d perfected around louder siblings. It did not appear to work on Jean Kennedy.
She dropped the suitcase on the empty bed and stuck out her hand. She had a wide, easy smile and the absolute confidence of a girl who had grown up in a house full of brothers and learned, by necessity, to take up space.
“I’m Jean. Jean Kennedy. We’re going to be roommates. Sister Agnes says you’re from Philadelphia and you’re very smart and very quiet.” She tilted her head, studying Mia with frank curiosity. “You don’t look that quiet.”
Mia, who had not yet said a single word, blinked.
“I…”
“Are you the one who can sing? Everyone says there’s a girl coming this year who can sing. The nuns have been talking about it since July. Was that you? Sing something.”
And Mia understood, with a sinking feeling, exactly where the rumor had started, and that the chapel had betrayed her after all.
“I… what?”
“Sing something! I want to hear.”
“I’m not going to just… I don’t sing on command!”
“Why not? I do everything on command. Bobby says it’s my worst quality. Bobby’s my brother. I have a lot of brothers. Do you have brothers?”
“One,” Mia managed. “Kell.”
“Just one? That must be peaceful. I have four. Well, eight siblings total, but four brothers, and they’re all terrible in completely different ways, which I think is actually worse than if they were terrible in the same way, because at least then you’d know what to expect. Do you play tennis?”
“No.”
“I’ll teach you. Do you ride horses?”
“No.”
“I’ll teach you that too. Do you like ice cream?”
“…Yes.”
“Perfect. We’re going to be best friends.”
She said it with such absolute certainty that Mia felt something loosen in her chest. Not the homesickness. That would take weeks to fade and months to disappear entirely and, if she was honest, it never really went away. But the panic. The breathless, drowning panic eased, just slightly, in the face of Jean Kennedy’s relentless, overwhelming certainty.
“I’m Mia,” she said, though Jean already knew this.
“I know. You’re very pretty, did you know that? Not in a weird way. Just as a fact. You’re very pretty and you’re also very quiet, and I happen to think you look like someone’s going to eat you alive if you don’t have backup. I used to be shy, too.” Jean sat on her bed and bounced once, testing the mattress, and looked at Mia with an expression that was somehow both appraising and already affectionate. “I’m going to be your backup. Okay?”
Mia should have said something polite. Something reserved. Something befitting a Kelly. But Jean was looking at her with those bright, certain eyes, and Mia was twelve years old and terrified and miles away from Grace, so all she said was:
“Okay.”
