The Innocence Of Youth

The Innocence Of Youth
In order to fully understand the story in which I am about to tell you, I believe the easiest way to begin would be with the house. It was a large brick building that stood in the outer edges of the city. An extravagant garden surrounded the stone pathway leading to the large wooden doors, a beautiful entrance to the world of faeries. When the doors are opened by the pretty little starlets with their frills and laces, most visitors are taken aback by the excellence. The parlor is illuminated by a sparkling chandelier hanging above the gawking visitor’s head. Women in shoulderless dresses and thin skirts stand gracefully at the bottom of a spiraling red staircase leading up to the second floor. On the walls, there are paintings of an erotically soothing nature. The largest one was of a slim woman sitting in a flowing blue gown with one shining shoulder casually exposed, and she wore a confident smile of satisfaction. To the right and left of the entrance were more and more rooms with shiny wooden floors and marvelous decorations. The rooms smelled like blooming flowers and honey, and in each one you could see women standing around, waiting for someone to escort upstairs.
When I first entered those doors, I was a skinny little eight year old with red ears and a freckled nose. My mother had been holding my hand when we entered, but quickly let go as we both breathed in the atmosphere. From the bottom of the stairs, an elderly woman walked to the both of us, giving us each a quick up-down glance before motioning my mother to follow her. I watched my mother head up the stairs with the old woman, wondering if I should follow. One of the maids offered to take me to my “room,” and a confused little boy followed her hand in hand.
I began working as a sort of housemaid, as I learned that the women in the maid outfits were not indeed maids. I was to sweep the wooden floors in the early morning, polish them with a damp cloth, clean the baths, and collect the sheets from the second floor. There were exactly eleven rooms in the second floor with candles spread around each room, which I was to light after collecting the sheets. I would carry them in full arms down to the washroom, where young girls would scrub the fabrics clean.
Most days I would never see my mother, as she would always be in one of the rooms upstairs with one of her many friends. It was a simple and peaceful life, but I soon found myself completely alone in the house full of people. None of the women would talk to me, my mother never wanted to, and the Headmistress was always busy in the foyer conversing with the guests. It was not until Adaline arrived that I began to truly enjoy my life in the house.
She arrived about a year after my mother and I, standing in the foyer in a light brown blouse looking around with an open mouth. She was completely alone, the maids having walked to the Headmistresses office to notify her of the child’s arrival. I prayed that day, quietly to myself, that I would be able to spend time with her. The Headmistress walked into the foyer and stopped in front of the girl. They talked for a while, the Headmistress nodding her head with her hands crossed in front of her chest until the little girl stopped talking. The Headmistress paused for a while before turning around to look at me, loitering in the dining room to the right. “You will follow him, learn what he does, and stay on your best behavior.”
In the following weeks, she was constantly near me, watching silently from behind. She hardly asked questions, and would never respond to my weak attempts as conversation. Slowly, though, I learned about her from overheard conversations and the gossiping greeters. Her name was Adaline, but everyone called her Ada. She was the same age as me, and our birthdays were two weeks apart. She came to the house looking for a place to stay in exchange for work, and the clothes she wore the day the Headmistress brought her in were the only possessions she owned.
Ada slowly opened up as time passed. When the days morphed into months, the distance between us disappeared, and after six months, I was undoubtedly in love. My infliction became stronger and stronger, until she could do nothing that I wouldn't love. I loved how the second-hand dresses she wore looked on her. I loved how she would close her eyes when she would laugh. I loved how her cheeks would redden when I teased her. I loved how she would sway her hips when she swept the floors. I loved her light pink lips, her dark black hair, her blue eyes, her gentle voice. I loved her with a ferocity only a child could have.
As the years passed and we both neared our thirteenth birthday, I became more outgoing with my feelings. We would often visit each others rooms late into the nights for light conversation and to enjoy the company of one another, and it was one of these nights when I asked her if she would leave with me to get married on our sixteenth birthdays. She responded with a blush, a soft laugh, and a small kiss placed gingerly on my left cheek.
After that night, I began to realize that I could not live without her. When we were together it was all quick glances, blushes, and laughter. When we were separate it was intensely lonely, as even my mother had began to ignore me completely. The last conversation I had with her was near a month ago when I caught her walking in the front courtyard smoking a cigarette and humming to herself. She was wearing a thin silk dress of deep red that drug down to her ankles. When I walked to her, she looked down at me with questioning eyes, as if she didn’t know who I was. “What do you want,” she asked, forming her words around the cigarette. I never was able to respond, as she was called in by the Headmistress to continue working upstairs.
Four days before I was to turn fourteen, I was woken up early in the morning by a sharp scream coming from Adaline’s bedroom. In seconds I was at her door and charging in. She was sitting on the floor of her small room in a loose blue nightgown crying with her pale knees tucked under her chin. There was blood smeared down both of her legs and staining her bedsheets. I crouched down, confused, and placed an arm around her shoulders. She sobbed into my chest quietly until there was a soft knock on the door.
“I’m coming in,” the Headmistress said. She opened the door and immediately began looking around the room, first at the ruined sheets and then to our huddled figures on the floor. Her face was completely devoid of emotion while she took in the scene, as if she was used to these kinds of things happening. “Get cleaned up,” she finally said, “and meet me in my office.”
I was lightly brushed out of the room by the Headmistress as Ada stood up from the floor. She closed the door behind us and crossed her arms in thought. I looked up at her, an irrational rage pouring through me.
“What are you thinking so hard about,” I asked the middle-aged woman. She looked down at me with a look of surprise as if she had just noticed I was there.
She smiled to herself before responding with, “We are about to make a lot of money.”
I wasn’t able to speak to Adaline for three days after the incident, as she was constantly being led by one of the maids around the second floor. It wasn’t until that night that I was pulled out of a melancholic daydream by a soft knock on my door and her head poking through the opening. I smiled when I saw her and beckoned for her to come in. She sat on the edge of my bed and rested her head on my legs. We sat in silence of a number of minutes before she opened her mouth to speak. “Did you know that the big painting in the foyer is of the Headmistress? She told me she used to entertain an artist who liked her enough to paint a picture of her.” I wanted desperately to ask her if she was alright, if she needed to tell me anything, if she wanted anything, but I was silent. Ada looked over at me, and I looked back.
Her eyes were puffy and red, and her cheeks were shining with moisture. It tore my soul apart to see her like that. I lightly pulled her closer to me, as if I was handling a wounded butterfly, until her head was resting on my chest. She hugged my waist tightly and began to quietly cry. Her ragged breathing and her hot tears soaking through my shirt made my eyes burn. We stayed like that for what felt like forever, until her breathing slowed down and she stopped most of the tears. “I’m so afraid,” she said in a quiet voice, “I don’t know what to do.” She fell asleep resting against me that night. When I woke up the next morning, there was a lock of black hair tied in a red ribbon and a letter resting next to me.
I found her that morning lying in her bed and a pool of blood. Both of her wrists had large scores in them and were resting on her stomach. Her white nightgown was soaked with blood, turning it a deep crimson color. She still had tears in her open eyes. There was a small knife with a wooden handle lying on the floor to the side of the bed and a small length of her deep black hair was missing. The last thing I saw of her room before I left it for the last time was the number 16 carved into the wooden headboard of the bed.
And so, my reader, I take you back to the beginning. It was a large brick building that thrives in the edge of the city. A garden stood for the men renting their prostitutes to admire while smoking their pipes and a stone pathway led to the front door, an entrance into a world of red. The girls with all of their frills and laces and perfume would open the two large doors and you would be greeted with excess, a scent of honey used to mask the rotting scents of semen and blood. And there the red stairs were, with women who never smiled waited for another man to carry upstairs. When I last left those doors, I was a ghost of a fourteen year old with a dead child in my arms.