Orpheus Girl

by Brynne Rebele-Henry

Genres: Young Adult; YA Family; YA Social Themes; YA Romance

Synopsis

In her debut novel, award-winning poet Brynne Rebele-Henry re-imagines the Orpheus myth as a love story between two teenage girls who are sent to conversion therapy after being caught together in an intimate moment.

Abandoned by a single mother she never knew, 16-year-old Raya—obsessed with ancient myths—lives with her grandmother in a small conservative Texas town. For years Raya has fought to hide her feelings for her best friend and true love, Sarah. When the two are outed, they are sent to Friendly Saviors: a re-education camp meant to “fix” them and make them heterosexual. Upon arrival, Raya vows to assume the role of Orpheus, to return to the world of the living with her love—and after she, Sarah, and the other teen residents are subjected to abusive and brutal “treatments” by the staff, Raya only becomes more determined to escape.
 
In a haunting voice reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and the contemporary lyricism of David Levithan, Brynne Rebele-Henry weaves a powerful inversion of the Orpheus myth informed by the disturbing real-world truths of conversion therapy. Orpheus Girl is a story of dysfunctional families, trauma, first love, heartbreak, and ultimately, the fierce adolescent resilience that has the power to triumph over darkness and ignorance.

CW: There are scenes in this book that depict self-harm, homophobia, transphobia, and violence against LGBTQ characters.

Release date: October 8, 2019

Publisher: Soho Teen

Print pages: 176

Sample

Every night Grammy and I watch Mom on the TV. I always thought Mom was a silver screen kind of beauty because of that picture of her in high school: blonde, dimples, all clean-looking. But in this show she’s dark-sexy, her hair colored a deep brunette, silky bedsheets held up around her neck with gold ribbons. Mom left Pieria when I was a kid. Grammy would say it was because she needed to go be Aphrodite on the TV. I know that it’s because she was tired of it all, of the town and the people. So she disappeared one night. She only told Grammy as she was walking out the door. I was two.
 
 
In the car on the way to church this morning, I write Sarah’s name in the condensation on the passenger’s window, then wipe it off before Grammy can see.
     The car is a worn-down blue Volvo from the seventies. It’s a miracle it’s still running. Every time Grammy slides the key in the ignition and it actually starts, she thanks God under her breath. The seat belts are frayed so much that they could snap if you pulled too hard, so we stopped using them. I have to hold onto the car door to keep from falling out of my seat every time Grammy brakes. She drives like a maniac. Runs over mailboxes on a regular basis, hits curbs, mows down shrubs. Once she ran over an abandoned lemonade stand. She never stops to deal with what she’s run over, just keeps going, like she’s late on her way to somewhere really important.
 
 
I get through the service like I always do: running myths through my head. Ever since I found my mom playing Aphrodite on that soap opera, I’ve been memorizing them. I know it’s stupid, but I’ve always thought that one day I’ll open the door and she’ll be there, and I’ll need something to talk about. And since my mom’s Aphrodite, I might as well be able to talk about myths. During the service I think about Persephone, how the girl was pulled away from everything she’d ever known and taken to a strange world. Or Atalanta. In these myths, girls are always being changed or taken by men, their voices, their protests ignored. And the queer girls, like Atalanta, are forced to become something else.
     Grammy’s always talking about how one day I’ll have a normal life, with a husband and two kids (a boy and a girl) and a brick house with a white picket fence and a big yellow dog who’ll run around the yard. She says my husband should work so I don’t have to, and I’ll stay home all day and make cookies the way she taught me and go to PTA meetings and church. Whenever she talks about it, she gets a misty look in her eyes and twists the gold chain of her cross necklace between her fingers, and I know it’s not my life she’s imagining, that secretly she’s wondering what would have happened if her own husband hadn’t died in a car accident at twenty-seven and left her with a two-year-old girl, if her girl hadn’t gotten pregnant senior year of high school only to run off three years later.
     Instead, she still has a job arranging and delivering flowers for weddings and funerals and baptisms, continual reminders of her own wedding and her husband’s service, and she makes me go to cotillions and dance with boys, refuses to let me wear pants to school, and makes me go to church three times a week and Bible camp in the summer and try out for cheerleading every August.
 
 
Every fall since fourth grade, she’s bought me a new pair of shiny green pom-poms. She takes the day off work to come to the tryouts with me. I walk into the gym with a lump in my throat, but I never can kick high enough or land lightly enough, and every year we drive home together in disappointed silence. When we get home, Grammy always says she has a “headache worse than Satan,” and she goes upstairs to lie down and change out of the “Go Team!” sweatshirt she wears just for tryouts. We both know that her head’s not hurting, that she just doesn’t want to have to pretend not to be let down yet again, but I always nod and don’t say anything.
     This year, before she went upstairs, she said, “You were supposed to be my second chance.” But she said it so quietly I think I wasn’t supposed to hear her.
     Since then we’ve never talked about tryouts again. I think maybe she finally just gave up.
 
 
Once the service ends, I heap pastries and the little watercress-and-pickle and peanut-butter tea sandwiches that the church ladies make onto my plate, then sit down on the coffee-stained couch outside Preacher Sam’s office and eat until I feel sick. Every time I go to Sarah’s dad’s church I get this sinking feeling, like something’s wrong with me and if they find out, when they find out, it’s all over.
 
 
Most nights I dream that Sarah and the choir boys and Preacher Sam are peering down at me. I’m wearing another girl’s clothes but I don’t know why. When Preacher Sam hands me a crucifix, my skin starts burning and wings burst out of my back, and I’m trying to get the wings to stop sprouting from my back but they won’t, and soon I’m screaming and burning and they’re whispering “freak” and then they’re yelling it.
 
 
The dreams started when I was eight, shortly after I realized I was different from the girls I went to school with, but I didn’t yet know how, just that there was some strange and invisible barrier separating me from them. Often, at after-school church camp, I’d watch the girls running around, skipping rope or drawing on the pavement outside the church, and my back would ache for reasons I could never discern. On those days, I tried to pinpoint the difference, the thing separating me, causing me to feel like every movement I made was an act, a dream that I would wake up from, like a fortune-teller sifting her tea leaves, trying to gather together some foreign objects and principles into a crystalline answer. But for years the bowl would come back empty, nothing more than water and stray oolong straining to reach the surface.
    
 
When I was born, I had two small, misplaced vertebrae sticking out of my back. They looked like wings. The doctors took pictures, then set the vertebrae back in place. Now I just have two bumps and a line of scars on my back. Sometimes at night, I run my fingers over the bumps, try to imagine what the wings would have looked like. The doctors made the first incision in my vertebrae, so the worst of the scars are low on my back, though the scar tissue maps all the way up to my shoulders in a messy sprawl. The doctors said I healed better than expected. They’d thought I’d be disfigured. But I just don’t wear bikinis like the other girls, always make sure my tops don’t slip down past my shoulder blades. I don’t need anyone else thinking about my being different even more than they already do. I don’t want to cause any suspicion—at least not any more suspicion than being motherless in a little town already creates.
 
 
The only time that Grammy ever acknowledged my scars was once when I was ten. I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror staring at the faded-to-pale lines, watching the ruined skin ripple when I moved. I remember trying not to cry when I saw how ugly it was, how the marks of what was once a wound, a defect, covered me. I’d never paid much notice to the scars before, had always just considered them a part of me, normal, but the day before, Sarah and I had gone swimming, and when she’d crouched at the edge of the pool before diving in, I saw the smooth stretch of her back, her unscarred shoulders, the skin taut and gold from the sun, and a hard lump of something akin to shame worked its way into my throat and made it hard to swallow.
     Later that night, alone in the house, I prepared to try to find a way to make myself beautiful too, to try to rid myself of the ruined thing inside of me—the constant gnawing feeling that I was hiding something, that some part of my girlhood, and my body itself, was defective, wrong. But there was no way to get rid of the scars, no way to remove the proof that I was different than the other, unmarred girls I grew up with.
     I remember clawing at the scars, as if I could scrape the ugliness away, as if I could cleanse it out of myself from the outside in. When that didn’t work, I scrubbed at my back with a washcloth I’d covered with dish soap. I was getting hysterical by then, my face screwed up with panic. My skin was flushed with shame and I was crying so hard that I didn’t hear her come in, but when I looked up she was in the
doorway, watching.
      Grammy knelt down on the bathroom floor so that we were at eye level, and she grabbed both of my hands in hers. My fingers were bloody from scratching the skin around the scars, and the blood smeared into a faint red on her palms. She stared at me for a minute, like she was trying to remember something she hadn’t recalled for years, and then she cleared her throat. “Raya, this is God’s doing. He makes everything in his image, you know. And so he gave you these wings, like an angel. You know, when you were born, the parts of your back they had to take out looked just like a baby bird’s. He made you in his image; he made you like him. And you need to accept that.”
     Though I never put much weight in God, from then on, whenever I saw the scars, that feeling of disgust that had always risen up in my mouth like bile whenever I saw my body was replaced with a kind of grudging acceptance: Grammy said they were beautiful, that I was marked for some reason, that maybe my being here wasn’t as much of an accident as I’d always felt like it was, and I thought that maybe that could be enough.