Miss Jane by Brad Watson Page A

gets home and partake heartily at supper. Make sure she drinks plenty of water in the afternoons. I would not give her iced nor hot tea.
    I’m sure she has told you that I went over all this with her myself. She seemed to understand. Such a wise little girl you have there, as you well know.
    She is a healthy child, all things considered, and this regimen should not cause her any more than some initial, mild discomfort, to which I believe she soon will become accustomed.
    Yours truly,
    Ed Thompson, M.D.
    AND SO SHE willingly took up the routine. At home they had a double privy with a wall in between, so she would go there first thing in the morning and stay, stomach growling, until she felt she was entirely empty. She hardly even noticed the coming and going of others on the other side. No one spoke to her, interrupted her concentration on becoming an empty vessel, her body an empty, hollow chamber of flesh, dry and clean as the inside of a cleaned-out fish. And then she would step back out into the yard, feel the dust on her feet and between her toes, as if she had stepped out onto the surface of the moon, which was sometimes still there pale and wan just above the tops of the trees.
    Her dresses were sewn to be loose and hang from her shoulders in a way that would not cinch her waist and accentuate her preventive undergarment. There were no secrets, really, in such asmall world as their little school, but there was a kind of natural discretion. Her mother gave her a vial of inexpensive perfume to dab onto her wrists and her undergarments to disguise—at least for a moment, for a getaway—any smells in case of an unavoidable accident. Even young Jane sensed the sad futility of this gesture, although she would wear a bit of perfume most days for the rest of her life.
    Despite the constant faint but cloying scent of this perfume, the smells peculiar to a school classroom fascinated her almost to the point of being mesmerized. Pencil lead, waxy crayons, ­writing-tablet paper and the paper in the schoolbooks, all of them used and handed down from children years and years before, the chalk used on the blackboard, the rising and then fading smells of lunch the students ate from their paper sacks, lunch boxes, or (for some of the poorest) pails covered with a kitchen towel, the boys’ hair oil and the girls’ bath powder, the dung from the horses and mules that some of the older children would ride to get there and then tether outside the building to a hitching post. All of it combined into a medley of smells that would always mean “school” in her memory.
    It was a small school that took the community children all the way from first grade to high school graduation, and there were not many enrolled, so the environment was relatively intimate, like some great, overgrown family, in a way. The children seemed to know and understand one another like siblings, whether lovingly, or with hostility, or with the purposeful ignoring of this one or that.
    She established herself in the little world there, and was accepted well enough, easygoing as she was, and thick-skinned by virtue of her family’s ways in general and her mother’s often harshtongue. She could tell that Grace was keeping a distant eye on her but she stayed just that: distant. Early on, she caught some teasing from the other children during recess, saying, She wears diapers . The principal and high school teacher, Miss Deen, who had taken it on herself to supervise the younger children’s little playground, reprimanded them.
    â€œYou should not make fun of anyone for being who she is,” Miss Deen said to them in her calm and level but somber voice. She was a tall and sophisticated woman with a long face and square jaw and glinting sharp green eyes who had grown up in the capital in Jackson, then married a local farmer she’d met at the state agriculture and teachers college.
    â€œYou there, Steven,” she said, at