The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison Page B

Being too pregnant is a bit like being too dead; it’s not really a flexible state. He was always a little disgruntled about the pregnancies; Lorraine gave us shots four times a year that were supposed to prevent that sort of inconvenience, but no birth control is completely foolproof.
    Third reason was if a girl was completely incapable of settling into the Garden. If after the first few weeks she couldn’t stop crying, if she tried to starve herself or kill herself past a certain “allowable” number of times. The girls who fought too hard, the girls who broke.
    Avery killed girls for fun, and sometimes by accident. Whenever that happened, his father would ban him from the Garden for a time, but then he’d be back.
    I’d been there almost two months before he came looking for me. Lyonette was with a new girl who hadn’t been named yet, and Bliss was putting up with the Gardener, so I was on the little cliff above the waterfall with Poe, trying to memorize “Fairy-land.” Most of the other girls couldn’t go up on the cliff without wanting to throw themselves off, so I usually had it to myself. It was peaceful up there. Quiet, but then, the Garden was always quiet. Even when some of the better-adjusted girls would play tag or hide-and-seek, they were never loud. Everything was subdued, and none of us knew if that was how the Gardener preferred it or if it was just instinct. As a group, all our behaviors were learned from other Butterflies, who had learned it from other Butterflies, because the Gardener had been taking girls for over thirty fucking years.
    He didn’t kidnap under the age of sixteen, erring on the side of older if he wasn’t sure, so the maximum lifespan of a Butterfly was five years. Not counting the overlaps, that was still more than six generations of Butterflies.
    When I met Avery at the restaurant, he was in a tuxedo like his father. Sitting with my back against a rock, the book across my knees as I basked in the warmth of sunlight through the glass roof, I looked up when his shadow fell over me and found him in jeans and an open button-down dress shirt. There were scratches on his chest and what looked like a bite mark on his neck.
    “My father wants to keep you all to himself,” he said. “He hasn’t talked about you at all, not even your name. He doesn’t want me to remember you.”
    I turned the page and looked back at the book.
    His hand grabbed my hair to pull my face up and his other hand cracked painfully across my face. “There’s no busboy here to save you this time. This time you’ll get what you’re asking for.”
    I kept hold of the book and didn’t say anything.
    He hit me again and blood splashed onto my tongue from a split lip, colored lights dancing in front of my eyes. He yanked the book from my hand and threw it into the stream; I watched it disappear over the edge of the waterfall so I wouldn’t have to look at him.
    “You’re coming with me.”
    He led me by my hair, which Bliss had put up into an elegant French twist that soon came unraveled in his grip. Whenever I didn’t move quickly enough for him, he turned and cracked me again. Other girls looked away as we passed them, and one even started crying, though the girls nearest her quickly shushed her in case Avery decided a weeper would be more entertaining.
    He hurled me into a room I hadn’t been in before, one near the tattoo room at the very front of the Garden. This was a room that was closed and locked unless he was playing. There was a girl in there already, her wrists bound to the wall with heavy rings. Blood thickly coated her thighs and parts of her face, trailed down from a nasty bite on one breast, and her head lolled forward at an awkward angle. She didn’t look up even though I landed on the floor with a loud smack.
    She wasn’t breathing.
    Avery stroked the girl’s flaming hair, curling his fingers into it to pull her head back. Handprints wrapped around her throat and bone protruded