Theodora
from Spearcrest, my mother and grandmother look at me, exchange a glance, and then my mother says, “Does your school not serve healthy food?”
I know immediately what she means and lower my head in shame.
“They do, Mummy.”
“Perhaps you are eating a little more than you should,” my mother observes in a light tone.
If my father is the owner of the object that is me—the doll that is Theodora Dorokhova—then my mother is the maker. She is the one who ensures that every time my father sees me, he is satisfied with what she is presenting. She’s the one who ensures that I look small and endearing, that my hair is long and combed to a high shine, that my dresses are clean and pleasing to the eye.
Perhaps it’s because my father blames her for giving him a girl, and now my mother must atone for this betrayal.
Or perhaps it’s because, when she was growing up, her own mother would stop her from cutting her hair, and carefully measure out her portions, and admonish her when her posture was not straight.
“I’ll be more careful,” I tell her. “I promise.”
“We’ll have to come up with a little diet plan for you.” My mother’s tone is cheerful, and she gives my cheek a little squeeze. “Nothing too strict, of course. I don’t want you to have an unhealthy relationship with food.”
It is the magical sentence she always speaks, like a spell to ward off eating disorders. My mother is deathly afraid of me looking anything less than perfect, but she’s also deathly afraid of being accused by some British tabloid of giving me an eating disorder.
So I nod and agree and do what she says. That summer, she takes me shopping, flitting from one designer store to the next so that I should have the perfect bags, the perfect shoes, the perfect clothes. She takes me to her aesthetician to have my eyelashes tinted because they are too light, to have the fine fuzz of pale hair removed from my upper lip, my arms, my legs.
In my mirror, my reflection changes day by day, becoming more smooth and shiny and pretty.
And more doll-like than ever.
discover poetry.
I don’t mean I study it for the first time. I learned about poems in primary school; we even wrote haikus in Year 5. We studied poems in Spearcrest in Year 7 too, a half-term spent looking at war poems from different times and cultures.
But I discover poetry when I’m in Year 8.
Poetry is like an object I’d seen before but never truly looked at. And one day, I just saw its true form, the vast and almost breathtaking beauty of it. I discovered poetry, and it filled my heart with an unspeakable feeling.
Waiting for my English lessons became torturous. I was too impatient. I wanted to read it all the time, to fill my brain with it. I would go into the Spearcrest library, my favourite place on campus. The poetry section there took up almost an entire floor of its own—which seemed fitting.
I discover John Keats near the end of Year 8, and one day, I open the first page of his Endymion. It’s a poem long enough to be a book, and I know it’s going to be special.
The first lines stop me in my tracks.
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness—”
I read those lines over and over again, my heart in my mouth.
Beautiful things do not pass into nothingness. This is a truth that hits me hard because it’s a truth my mother has been trying to inculcate in me for a long time.
A truth the other girls in my year already understand. They know that beauty gives them importance, that it will stop them from being nothing. That’s why they watch tutorials on their tablets and work for hours on end learning how to do their hair, their make-up, learning how to make their skin nice and clean and shiny.
I always believed my beauty should come from within me—from my character and my mind and my soul. But I was wrong. My fellow students knew it. My mother knew it. Even Keats, sensitive and erudite as he was, knew it.
That year, I start paying attention to my reflection in the mirror. Not letting my gaze slide off the doll-like thing standing there, but actually paying attention to it, scrutinising it. Every day, I ask myself: is this thing beautiful, or will it pass into nothingness?
So I stop wearing my hair in braids and start curling the ends, tying it into the satin ribbons my mother bought. I clean my skin and begin to develop a skincare routine, and I wear make-up to enhance my features, which are too plain to be beautiful. I watch my body closely and measure my food portions carefully, declining sweets and desserts.
The next summer, when I arrive home, my mother stops at the foot of the stairs to watch me as I descend towards her.
“Oh, Theodora! You look so beautiful!”
Her eyes, the same blue as mine, are wide, her rose-pink mouth rounded. She’s being completely sincere. I know this because it would never occur to her to lie to me just to be nice. And because she’s never before called me beautiful.
That moment cements two things in my mind.
One, that my work is bearing fruit. Depriving myself of desserts and sweets, carefully watching the mirror every night for any sign of imperfection that must be eradicated, spending hours trying on my new make-up to find the perfect balance of looking beautiful without appearing like I’ve tried to make myself beautiful. Wearing the designer clothes and accessories, shaping my hair into waves with the curling iron.
All that time and effort was not wasted.
Two—and most important—that Keats was right.
I was becoming beautiful, and as a result, I was finally becoming worth something in the eyes of my mother.
Not quite worthy of love, yet. But, for the first time, worth something.
9, everything becomes more difficult.
Being clever and being beautiful aren’t things that just happen. They both require an enormous amount of work.
Eating enough to have energy but not enough to gain weight.
Getting up early enough to wash, do my make-up, do my hair, but also staying up late to keep up with after-school clubs, homework and reading.
Being sociable enough to form friendships and make myself popular, but always being focused enough to impress all my teachers.
My hard work pays off, though. In Year 9, for the first time, I have friends. Not real friends, of course. Real friendships—the types of friendships I read about in books and poems—real friendships are deep, genuine connections. True friendships come with loyalty, companionship, connection.
But those are not Spearcrest friendships.
My Spearcrest friendships are with the prettiest, most popular girls: Seraphina Rosenthal, Camille Alawi, Kayana Kilburn and Giselle Frossard. They are friendships of convenience, much like the friendships I watched my mother curate all my life. We become the girls everyone talks about, girls every other girl in the year wants to sit with.
I’m very aware of the implications of popularity. Just like beauty and intelligence, it’s a double-edged sword. You gain a lot from it, but it’s something that must be maintained.
Now, I have to work hard to be beautiful, work hard to be clever and work hard to be popular.
So I sleep less and work more. There’s always more to be done. New ways of being popular, new books to read, more homework to do, more socialising.
There’s always more to do, and the more I do, the less I seem to become. The more I become this perfect imaginary doll I’m expected to be, the less Theodora there is.
I don’t have hobbies—I have extra-curricular activities and work and tasks.
I don’t have dreams—I just try to stay on top of everything.
I barely have time for the things I love, only the things I must do.
I don’t have anyone I talk to about anything real, even though I’m almost never alone.
I’m clever enough to understand this but not clever enough to know how to fix it.
So I just let it happen and watch with a mixture of surprise and fear as my sense of self flutters away like leaves falling from a tree in the autumn.
It doesn’t upset me. This is something else I find out about myself: I don’t get upset much anymore.
Sometimes, I wonder if I’m broken, if there’s something wrong with me. Everyone around me is bursting with emotions: anger, frustration, joy, sadness, triumph, love, hatred.
I feel none of those things. Mostly, I feel tired and numb. Sometimes, if I’m reading poetry good enough to move me, I sense the emotions of it, but not directly, not fully. I sense them like ghosts. The emotions are real, but I can only feel their shadows.
Maybe that’s because I’ve become a shadow too.
Kiehn, my English teacher, changes his seating plan.
After a brisk announcement, he makes us all stand at the front of his classroom, and he points at each desk and calls out students’ names.
When he’s almost done, he points at the front desk by the window. “Theodora and Zachary.”
My heart sinks. The emotion I feel is real, then—not a shadow. It takes me by surprise. I look across the room. Zachary meets my gaze but doesn’t say anything.
I look away first and slink to the desk with my head down, sitting on the side closest to the window.
Zachary Blackwood’s presence in Spearcrest is like the sun. It’s bright and hard to ignore and can’t be directly looked at. Zachary is everywhere on campus: he’s in most of my classes and in my after-school clubs (we’re both captains of our debate club teams).
Worst of all, his name is always printed next to mine whenever exam results are put up on the corridor walls of the Old Manor.
Ignoring him is hard work because Zachary is well-spoken and sharp and intelligent. He always gets involved in school discussions. In maths class, he always volunteers to go to the front and solve the equations on the teacher’s board. He’s always first to get involved in experiments in science class, and he’s always first to arrive at chess club, and I know his debate team like him more than my team like me.
Every time we start a debate and have to shake hands as team captains, I barely sleep the night before because I’m so nervous.
Zachary’s handshake is like him: solemn and just a little bit too intense.
Now, we sit next to each other. I’ve never sat next to him in class before. He smells good—he smells like an adult, like soap and a rich, sophisticated cologne. Unlike all the other boys in school, he doesn’t carry his things in a backpack but in a satchel of leather that makes him look like a Victorian university student. He opens his notebook: his handwriting is a clean, spidery cursive, and all his lines are drawn with a ruler.
His presence radiates heat. Our shoulders and arms don’t quite touch, but the warmth of his body pushes against mine. I’m cold all the time, and I have the sudden urge to place my arm against his to get more of that tempting warmth.
What would it feel like to place my body right against his and let him wrap his arms around me?
The question startles me like sudden thunder. Guilt, shock and shame fill me as if I’ve just thought of something deep and dark and completely forbidden.
