St. Ophelia's School for Drowned Girls

Lily C. Buday

From Water

It was common knowledge that Ms. Delphine Temple loved the suicide girls—the drowned ones especially. Her office, which was otherwise more or less bare of decoration, boasted a large-framed print of John Everett Millais’s Ophelia in a place of honor directly behind her desk. It was thus an uncomfortable tableau that faced any girl unlucky enough to find herself in Ms. Temple’s office, opposite the piercing stare of that formidable lady and the vacant countenance of her literary idol. 

Having studied under her since they were fourteen or fifteen, most of the third-year girls accepted their syllabi full of macabre eighteenth-century sensationalism without question. Ms. Temple’s reading lists never changed: the Greeks for the first-year literature class, Shakespeare for the second, the Victorian era for the third, and anything that was left over for the seniors. From Antigone to Sylvia Plath, the girls of St. Matilda’s Preparatory Academy were brought up through the years on a steady diet of female self-destruction. 

Elyse thought the whole thing was insane. 

“There are things to read about besides death,” she said over lunch on the first day of term, waving her copy of The Awakening with more force than intended and nearly throwing it into a plate of traditional welcome-back grilled cheese sandwiches. Welcome back, Elyse thought dourly, as if any of us ever left this place. And indeed, of all the third-year girls, only Amelia had gone away for summer break—ironic, seeing as Amelia bought into the peculiarity of St. Matilda’s more than any of them. Olive said that it was because Amelia’s parents were soft, and Elyse was inclined to agree. It was easy to trust adults when you had parents who loved you that much, enough to send for you in the summer when they could have just left you at the expensive boarding school designed so parents could forget they had daughters. Elyse’s own parents took full advantage of St. Matilda’s optional summer term. 

“I think it’s lovely,” Amelia said now, the seriousness of her voice undercut by the pearl of melted cheese clinging to the corner of her mouth. “Death is an inevitability. We might as well shape it into something poetic, don’t you think?” 

“I think,” Elyse replied after a fortifying draught of iced tea and a brief consideration of whether or not a half-fond, half-exasperated Amelia-headache could reasonably be considered as serious as a migraine, “that summer vacation was wasted on you. You haven’t rebelled at all. Tell me, did you do anything over break that Ms. Temple—or the other teachers—wouldn’t approve of?” 

Amelia blushed a little, but not enough to make Elyse feel guilty. They were best friends, nearly inseparable since their days as homesick first-years. Elyse was hardly mean-spirited, but she also wasn’t very patient, and Amelia knew that. Elyse figured that if her brusque behavior really bothered her friend, she would have mentioned it sometime during the past two years. 

When a lithe form slid onto the bench next to her, Elyse’s attention was wrenched pleasantly away from Amelia. Olive. 

“What are we talking about?” Olive swung her dark hair over her shoulder dramatically, the way pretty girls did in the movies. She addressed both other girls, but Elyse knew that the sly smile curling up the left corner of her mouth was for her alone. The thought sent a thrill through her. Olive was gorgeous, model-actress gorgeous at only seventeen, a fact that probably should have made Elyse wild with jealousy but didn’t. Olive was a third-year like Elyse and Amelia, but she was also a rare creature at St. Matilda’s—a transfer student. For Elyse, this was yet another thing to admire about her—a perspective that hadn’t been moldering in this school since the age of fourteen. 

“Elyse is on her annual rant about Ms. Temple’s suicide girls,” Amelia answered. “She does this every year once the book lists have come out. You have to just let it run its course.” 

“Thanks a lot,” Elyse grumbled, but with no real venom behind the words. It couldn’t be helped that her resistance to the curriculum clashed with Amelia’s devotion to it. 

“Oh, really?” Olive raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow, her smirk deepening enough to show off a dimple in her left cheek. “I’m shocked, Elyse, what have our dear Ms. Temple’s legions of the dead ever done to you?” 

And that was the question, Elyse supposed—not merely what the stories had done to her, the parade of deceased women in her mind, but what they had done to the entire captive audience of St. Matilda’s, what it meant to live under that shadow. She didn’t say this, though—not to Olive, who had only been here for half a term and one summer, who was ridiculously beautiful and almost certainly didn’t dream of the empty eyes of the Millais Ophelia. 

“Well, it seems that they’re about to make me late for literature class,” she said instead, scooting backward and swinging her legs one by one over the bench. “As I have no wish to be eviscerated by Ms. Temple on the first day. I’ll bid you both adieu.” 

Amelia rolled her eyes at that, and Elyse was proud of her. Olive’s expression didn’t change, but when Elyse bent down to retrieve her messenger bag, she felt nimble fingers brush lightly against her lower back, raising gooseflesh beneath the thin cotton of her oxford school shirt. She shivered. 

Elyse hurried out of the dining hall before she could do something stupid like smile. 

She slid into a vacant seat in the fourth row of the literature classroom with two minutes to spare. The room was nearly full—there wasn’t a girl in St. Matilda’s who would risk being late for this particular class. Not to mention that the literature classroom was tiny, with desks for only fifteen students. Ms. Temple was the only teacher who taught classes that small, the only teacher to divide years down the middle. First and second year, Elyse had been assigned the same literature period as Amelia, but this time she hadn’t been quite so lucky. Or maybe, some bitter, guilty part of her thought, it’s a blessing in disguise. Elyse couldn’t deny that she and Amelia had been slowly but surely drifting apart for a couple terms now, ever since the summer after first year, when she realized that Amelia was loved and she was not. Regardless, she couldn’t help wishing that she had someone in this class to whom she could address wry looks. Olive. That’s who Elyse wished was here to weather Ms. Temple’s nonsense with her, not Amelia. 

The woman of the hour swept through the door at exactly one o’clock. Elyse had long since lost patience with her teacher’s showman-like displays of hyper-punctuality, but even she had to fight down a sharp intake of breath as Ms. Temple strode to the front of the room for the first time since early June. 

If asked, most who knew her would be hard-pressed to explain exactly what it was about Delphine Temple that drew the eye and quickened the heartbeat. At five foot five, she stood no taller than most women her age, which could be roughly estimated as “forty-something.” She moved in a way that suggested agility without athleticism; she was wiry, not muscular. Her brunette curls were plaited into a single unremarkable braid that rested between her shoulder blades. 

To the girls of St. Matilda’s, she was the eighth wonder of the world. 

When she reached the blackboard, Ms. Temple turned to face her class and acknowledged them with a short nod, her sharp jaw seeming to slice into the crescent of space beneath her chin. “Ladies,” she said by way of greeting. 

No one replied. Attention was the only response Ms. Temple wanted. Elyse winced internally as she remembered her first year, when she and Amelia had babbled out greetings along with the rest of the class, only to be met with a chilling, disparaging eyebrow raise. 

“The Victorian era,” Ms. Temple began without further preamble, “represented an unprecedented rise in many different forms of literary sensationalism.” 

Elyse wanted to pound her head into the desk. Oh, really? What kinds of sensationalism, Ms. Temple? Do tell. She had finished The Awakening several days earlier, in the grip of afternoon boredom. It was one of those mass-market paperbacks with tiny, wiggling-ant print and paper as thin as cellophane. Whenever she had managed to actually finish a page, trying to turn it was nearly impossible—the paper stuck together so that Elyse found herself skipping from page thirty to page thirty-four. She wouldn’t have bothered at all, but Amelia hadn’t returned from vacation yet, and Olive had been in the recreation yard showing off her prowess at field hockey—a display that could only keep Elyse’s attention for so long, never mind how toned and lovely the other girl’s legs were. The slim novel had everything Elyse had come to expect from Ms. Temple’s assigned texts: infidelity, personal turmoil, and a tragic heroine who took herself off to a watery grave. So, she tuned out Ms. Temple’s words, reasonably confident that she could still field any questions flung her way. She had more important things to think about than the death of Edna Pontellier and all that led to it—things like Olive and her feather-light touches, Olive and her half-smiles, Olive and the infuriating, sensual games she liked to play.... 

That evening, sprawled in a pile of pillows on the floor of the room she shared with Amelia, Elyse half-wished that she had paid attention in class, if only so she could compare notes with her friends. 

“Ours was the best lecture she’s ever given,” Amelia said, with a fervor in her eyes that she reserved exclusively for scholarly pursuits. “She got this ... look in her eyes when she talked about the ending, about Edna’s suicide being the only way she got a choice ...” 

“I actually kind of cared about the book by the time she’d finished,” Olive agreed, dangling her feet off of Elyse’s bed and kicking a pillow. 

Elyse scoffed. “You can’t take that stuff as proof of genius, Ames. The only thing those looks prove is that she gets off on talking about death.” 

Olive burst out laughing, giving up her perch on the edge of the bed in favor of lolling backward, her plaid skirt hitching up around her thighs. 

Amelia’s button nose crinkled in on itself. “Elyse, ew!” 

“I’m not kidding.” Elyse sat up, pushing the pillows behind her and wrapping her arms around her knees. “It’s bordering on sexual with her. It’s disturbing. You should be disturbed.” 

“Okay.” Olive rolled off the bed, hopping to her feet only to settle on the floor next to Elyse, slinging a casual arm around her shoulders. Elyse gripped her knees tighter. “So she’s got some morbid fetishes. It’s not worth losing sleep over.” 

The sublime placement of Olive’s arm notwithstanding, Elyse was annoyed. Amelia lost perspective when she went home for the summer, and Olive simply hadn’t been stuck here long enough to understand how the school and its denizens could get inside your head. Elyse, on the other hand, was beginning to feel as if she had lived her entire life within these walls. Olive’s fingers began to wind into the ends of her hair as if they had a mind of their own. At least one thing at St. Matilda’s had changed for the better. 

By the time all homework was completed and first-day gossip exchanged, Olive had returned to her own room, Amelia had curled around her advanced biology textbook and fallen asleep, and the last of the lights in the St. Matilda’s dormitories had blinked out, it was past midnight. Elyse pulled a cardigan from her dresser drawer and shrugged it over her shoulders, then slipped into her shoes and padded from the room. The dormitory corridors were windowless and pitch-dark, but after three years, Elyse could navigate the school with her eyes closed. She made her way away from the dormitories, past the teachers’ wing, and into the tunnel that connected the school’s main building to the chapel. 

The chapel was by far the oldest part of St. Matilda’s, built in the eighteenth century when the campus had been home to a small convent. The buildings that had housed the nuns had been shoddily constructed and had fallen down long before the school had opened its doors, necessitating the construction of new dormitories and classrooms, but the lovely old stone church had remained. Elyse had never cared for the chapel in daylight, when it played host to groups of studying, quarreling girls and the occasional vaguely Catholic Sunday service. But at nighttime, she loved to wander the upper mezzanine. Moonlight poured through the high, arching windows, reflecting off the pale stone of the walls and floor and making them look as white as snow. 

Olive was waiting next to a window, as cool and silver as the moon itself. She wore a white nightgown, barely more substantial than a slip. She turned at the sound of Elyse’s footsteps, habitual smirk tugging at her lips. 

“Took you long enough.” 

Elyse rolled her eyes. “I have a roommate again, Olive, and she studies more than she sleeps.” 

Olive laughed. “Who would have thought we’d be unhappy to see her come back?” 

Elyse made a noncommittal noise. “I could have predicted that she’d be in the way.” And then she closed the distance between them. 

When Olive had kissed her for the first time in early July, just a couple of weeks after the start of summer break, Elyse had thought, this is it. This is what I’ve been missing out on, hidden away in here. It was as if an absent puzzle piece had clicked into place. Things would be better now. Her life would be whole. Of course, she hadn’t thought past the heedless summer term teachers and Amelia’s empty bed. She hadn’t thought about the concept of impermanence. 

Olive was a breath of life within the stagnation of St. Matilda’s. By definition, she was not something that could last. Maybe that was why Elyse had insisted upon keeping their relationship secret, even from Amelia—who probably would have been slightly uncomfortable but supportive nonetheless. There was something about this tenuous, fluttering thing with Olive, something that made Elyse want to play her cards close to her chest. She couldn’t truly bring herself to believe that Olive would ever want anything serious from her, anything emotional, and she’d be damned if anyone realized that she had fallen much harder than the other girl. So, Elyse pressed their bodies together, took what she could get, and begged her heart not to get involved. She suspected that it wasn’t listening. 

They might have stayed there for hours, sliding to the flagstone floor with barely a concern for the possibility of patrolling teachers, if it hadn’t been for what happened next. One minute the two girls were leaning against the windowpane, and the next, their ray of moonlight was obstructed by a dark shape hurtling toward the ground on the other side of the glass. Elyse and Olive sprang apart. 

“Jesus! Was that a person?” Olive grabbed Elyse by the hand, pulling her toward the stairs that led down to the main floor. Before Elyse could truly process what was happening, she had been dragged out of the chapel through the main door into the chill night air, shivering in her pajama shorts. Olive led her toward where the shadowy mass had fallen, but stopped short of actually approaching it. 

The moon truly was quite bright, only a night or two from being wholly full, and the crisp September sky was free from even a wisp of cloud. Therefore, there was nothing to keep the girls from seeing exactly who lay crumpled before them in a puddle of milky light. 

“Shit,” Olive said. “Is that...” 

“Ms. Temple.” Elyse took a step back, then seized Olive’s arm and all but hauled her back inside the chapel. 

Elyse took a deep breath, but Olive cut her off before she could speak. “Elyse, don’t panic.” 

Elyse stared at her. “Don’t panic?” she repeated. “Our literature teacher, the patron saint of suicidal ideation, just jumped off a building, and you’re telling me not to panic?” 

“Weirder things have happened,” Olive said slowly, with a great deal of skepticism, as if she was trying the statement on for size and finding it lacking. 

“Name one, Olive!” Elyse glared at her. Olive, of course, had no response. Elyse sighed, and then tugged gently at her arm. “Come on,” she said. “We can’t be here when the other teachers find her.” Olive looked for a moment as if she would like to protest, but ultimately acquiesced, to Elyse’s relief. Ms. Temple was wholly still, without the mist of breath on her lips, without the rise and fall of the chest that would yield that breath. There was no way she could have survived the fall. There was nothing they could do. 

If Amelia was surprised to discover Olive and Elyse clinging tightly to each other in bed the next morning, she didn’t let it show. But then again, Amelia had never been one to rock the boat; her defense of the St. Matilda’s literature curriculum was proof enough of that. Elyse was too exhausted to lend the thought either fondness or annoyance. Olive disappeared briefly to wash and dress, and then the three girls trooped down to the dining hall, Elyse and Olive lagging slightly behind a distracted Amelia. They walked in silence, both afraid to invoke the events of the previous night. 

But when they entered the dining hall, they were not greeted by a scandalized student body, by morose teachers at the head table. Instead, Elyse and Olive stopped short at the sight of Ms. Delphine Temple in her usual seat, hair neatly braided and looking no worse for the wear as she buttered a piece of toast with quick, deliberate strokes and chatted with the chemistry teacher. 

“That’s not possible,” Olive said, her voice shaking like an opera singer’s vibrato. 

Elyse couldn’t answer, as she was too busy recalling Olive’s remark from the night before. Weirder things have happened. 

“Guys!” Amelia waved at them from ahead, indicating that they should hurry. 

Elyse took a hesitant step forward, then turned back to look at Olive. “Midnight in the chapel. We can’t talk here.” Olive nodded, and the two girls took their seats alongside Amelia, steadfastly refusing to so much as glance toward the head table. 

Elyse had never before been so relieved not to have literature class on her daily schedule. But with this blessed respite came a double period of history for all three girls, during which Elyse and Olive couldn’t help exchanging furtive glances over Amelia’s head. After about fifteen minutes Mrs. Leutzchild stopped her lecture in the middle of a sentence. 

“Miss Holliday.” Elyse snapped her gaze away from Olive. “I assure you that Miss Cole will still be there after class. Please pay attention to the material, not your classmates.” Mrs. Leutzchild was no Ms. Temple, but she could be plenty intimidating when the mood took her. Elyse nodded, cheeks burning. 

It was a particularly unpleasant class. The memory of Ms. Temple broken and empty on the ground was plenty of nightmare material to be getting on with—Elyse didn’t need additional mental pictures of the historical abuses Mrs. Leutzchild liked to dwell upon. She thought Olive likely felt the same way, because when she dared a glance, the other girl, usually so cool and collected, looked rather ill. 

It was closer to twelve thirty than midnight that night when Amelia had nodded off and Elyse could don her shoes and sweater and slip out into the darkness. Olive had beaten her to the chapel again, but had this time elected to wait in what must have been the darkest corner of the mezzanine, sitting cross-legged in a pool of shadow. Elyse strode to the window instead, leaning her elbows on the sill. Silent as a cat, Olive joined her. Despite their earlier intention, they didn’t talk. Neither girl said a word. As if in silent agreement, they faced the window and stared out into the night, waiting. 

At twelve fifty, the lean form of their literature teacher flashed before their eyes once more. 

Only five minutes passed before Ms. Temple stirred, and only two more before she picked herself up off the grass. Elyse was uncertain whether she was witnessing a miracle or a horror, but either way her heart caught in her throat. 

The pattern continued night after night. At half past midnight, Elyse and Olive would assume their posts on the chapel mezzanine. At some point between twelve forty-five and one o’clock, Ms. Temple would fling herself from above, her body arching, contorting. She would arrive violently upon the ground, crumpled like a doll, and then, invariably, be up and on her way, dusting at the grass stains on her clothes, before one fifteen. 

Olive spent every night in Elyse’s bed. Elyse skipped every literature class. In hindsight, it was not a system built to last. 

Amelia exploded at lunch, a week after the whole thing had started. “Okay,” she said, loudly and forcefully enough that Elyse dropped her spoon into her bowl of chowder. “What the hell, you two?” Olive set her own spoon down slowly, meeting Elyse’s eyes. 

“What, Amelia?” Elyse fought to keep her voice neutral. 

Amelia let out an angry snort like a bull about to charge. “It’s not that you two are hooking up, or whatever it is that you’re doing. I’ve seen that coming for months.” Elyse and Olive exchanged startled glances, and Amelia rolled her eyes. “Please. You’re not subtle. But that’s not the point, although I wish you would’ve told me. No, there’s clearly something else going on. You’re all clingy,” she said with a pointed look at Olive, “and you—” here a dagger glance at Elyse, “you’re jumpy and skipping classes. You used to tell me everything, Elyse. We were best friends.” The accusation in Amelia’s voice was tinged with sadness. “What happened?” 

Elyse opened and closed her mouth a few times, feeling like someone had removed her vocal cords as she grasped for the words to deny what Amelia was saying—to deny that anything had changed between them, to deny that she and Olive were keeping a momentous secret. But as she floundered, staring into Amelia’s open, guileless eyes, she felt a hand clamp down on her shoulder. She chanced a quick look at Olive, whose panicked expression told her everything she needed to know, and then turned to face the piercing gaze of Ms. Temple. 

“Miss Holliday. My office, please.” Elyse could only nod numbly, rise, and follow. 

Elyse thought that eternal damnation probably felt like Ms. Temple’s office, like the fraught space between the living woman at the desk and the dead woman in the Ophelia painting. 

Ms. Temple spoke without preamble. “You’ve been absent from my class for nearly a week. Why?” 

Elyse felt a curious agitation bubble up in her stomach, something like hysteria and terror and shame all at once. She parted her lips without knowing what, exactly, she was planning to say—without even knowing what was weighing on her most. Of course Ms. Temple’s suicide attempts and subsequently revealed immortality were at the forefront of her mind, but that was hardly everything. It seemed as if Elyse’s throat closed on the sheer volume of it all: her parents, Amelia, her ever-growing fear that Olive would tire of her, the shattering claustrophobia of St. Matilda’s. 

She burst forth into great shuddering sobs. 

Elyse was aware, some minutes later, of a cool hand on her shoulder, fingers grazing the skin near her collarbone. She looked up at Ms. Temple. The older woman’s expression was as unreadable as ever, but Elyse thought that there was a hint of something in those green eyes that she hadn’t seen before, a question or maybe an understanding. Whatever it was, it had Elyse asking, before she could think about it and stop herself, “Do you ever feel trapped, Ms. Temple?” 

Her teacher’s eyes seemed to glaze over slightly, her hand clamping down tighter on Elyse’s shoulder. “How so?” There was a peculiar note in her voice, as if she knew she’d been caught out. 

“By this place. By life. I don’t know.” 

Ms. Temple pulled her hand away, withdrawing from Elyse and seating herself behind her desk once more. She gestured to the Millais Ophelia. 

“Do you know why I keep a print of this particular painting, Elyse?” 

Elyse started at the sound of her given name and the relatively equal footing that Ms. Temple was extending to her through the use of it. She shook her head. 

“Because every day is a push through still water,” Ms. Temple said. “We all feel like we’re drowning, Elyse. Some more than most,” she acknowledged with a dip of her chin. “But you won’t be like her.” She indicated the painting. “You’ll make it to the surface.” 

You, Ms. Temple had said. Not we. 

When Elyse returned to the dining hall, it was almost empty. Lunch was over; girls had spilled out of the drafty room and swept off to classes and dormitories and recreation—another afternoon at St. Matilda’s slipping by slowly. 

Olive and Amelia still sat where Elyse had left them. She resumed her seat without a word. 

“It’s no wonder,” Amelia said softly, after a moment, and Elyse knew that Olive had told. The knowledge didn’t bother her. “The look in her eyes, I mean. When she talks about death.” 

Elyse offered no answer except to meet Amelia’s eyes, and to grip Olive’s hand tightly under the table, feeling for the beat of their pulses, each against the other: brief, fleeting, impermanent, alive. 

Image © Europeana

---

Lily C. Buday is originally from northern Michigan, where she learned to write semi-obsessively about lakes and water. Her work has been published in Chautauqua, GASHER, Joyland Magazine, and Salt Hill Journal, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of a 2022 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council and a 2022 Artists 360 Fellowship from the Mid-America Arts Alliance. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arkansas, where she was awarded the James E. & Ellen Wadley Roper Fellowship in Creative Writing and the Harrison/Whitehead Founders' Fellowship. 

Website: lilycbuday.com