“Let’s do it again,” I breathed.
We took turns on the bike. Yaya cycled in beautiful lazy circles, her chin held high. Theo kept falling on his ass as he tried to do a wheelie. But I didn’t want to do tricks. I only wanted to go farther and farther.
Soon Yaya and Theo were chasing me as I biked across the yard, over the path, into the west, into the shadowed trees—skipping over roots and stones—to the gate.
I stopped, gasping. I climbed off the bike. It had been a long time since I had been this close to the gate.
I reached a hand out to touch it. The iron was cool.
I squinted past it, into the trees on the other side. We were near Catherine’s main entrance; I could just make out the yellow of the front road, where we had all come in as first-years. It was empty now.
“Hey,” someone said.
I turned. A paunchy man had appeared behind me. He wore a gray suit and sunglasses.
Who was he? Did I recognize him from that first day, when we first checked into the house? I didn’t remember. I didn’t remember anything from that day.
His arms were folded.
“Hi,” he said sweetly. “What are you doing so far from the house?”
“I’m just,” I said, panting, “looking.”
“That’s a nice bike,” he said.
A cloud moved, and light flashed over his sunglasses.
“I think you should go back,” he said. “And leave the bike here.”
“It’s mine,” I said.
“No,” he said, “it’s not.”
I glanced back out through the gate.
A breeze passed through the dark woods. The trees shivered.
Theo touched my shoulder. I hadn’t realized that he and Yaya had caught up to me.
“Hey,” he whispered, closer now, his eyes on the guard. “Let’s go. I think dinner’s soon.”
Yaya took the bike from me, glaring at the guard. She lifted her chin as if daring him to grab it from her. But he only smiled.
We were silent as we made our way across the yard. I didn’t get back on the bike. I didn’t feel like riding anymore.
The Key
Forums were scheduled for August, which should have been enough time to pull together a study plan and presentation. But the classes I was taking in preparation for my Agnes Martin tutorial—Philosophy of Postwar Abstract Expressionism, Semiotic Critical Theory—were lunatic. The text packets were full of oblique essays about haptic forces and hagiography, theoretical movements and progressive impulses. Too often, I would reach the end of an article only to forget which artist we were even discussing. In seminar, the professor would click on an image and ask me to analyze it within the framework of a particular historian’s critical method and I couldn’t even pretend to understand the question.
We had reading response papers due every other day. But how could I respond to those incomprehensible essays? I sat in the library staring at my blank notebook page and felt nothing, not even panic. I took naps and woke up without remembering who I was or what I was doing. I tried to do push-ups. I could do only two.
I wandered through the library looking for someone to distract me. When I found no one, I went to the reference room and paged through the old scrapbooks again. I studied the photo of the boy, the one who had died six years ago, and wished I were dead. Dead people didn’t have to do homework.
I met with the gallery curator, my boss, to ask if she could lower my hours for the rest of the semester. I needed more time to study. But before I could even ask the question, I was staring into her soft eyes and crying.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, wiping my face. “Fuck.”
She placed her hand over mine. “It’s difficult, I know,” she said softly. “Catherine is a difficult school. This, what you’re feeling, this is why we have such a reputation for excellence. It’s not easy to become excellent.”
I blew my nose.
I was also taking a class on late medieval art that semester. June afternoons, Diego and I wandered through the gallery examining triptychs and altarpieces with saints praying in craggy blue mountains, Jesus suffering in the garden. Their misery was flamboyant and gorgeous.
“There was an altarpiece in my church,” Diego said, staring at an egg tempera of saints lamenting the dead Christ. “When I was little. Mary enthroned with little angels around her, flying with silver wings. Every Sunday I sat with the other altar boys and listened to the priest talk, but I couldn’t really hear him. I just stared at her—Mary. She was so beautiful. Surrounded by gold.”
Diego’s voice was soft.
“I think it was the first beautiful thing I ever loved,” he said. “All that gold.”
He cleared his throat. He put his hands in his neatly creased pockets. He started to move on to the next work.
“But where is she?” I said.
He blinked, turning back to me. “What? Where’s who?”
“Mary—enthroned, surrounded by gold. All that gold. What did M. Engels call it? ‘The sublime surface.’ Here.” I gestured toward the saints, their flat faces and flat gilded world. “Where are they? Where is this setting? Where is Mary?”
Diego said, “Heaven.”
That was right, of course. That’s what they thought gold was: the stuff of heaven, matter more magical than life. The birth of the world.
I felt I had asked the wrong question. There was something I didn’t understand, there on the surface of the painting. But I wasn’t sure what it was.
*
The year before, I hadn’t realized how unhappy and crazy the second-years were during the Founders’ Festival. This year Anna and I spent the night before the festival drunk and dizzy, sleeping on the library floor. I wasn’t sure of the time when Theo finally shook us awake. He lured us down to the yard with the promise of funnel cakes.
Going to the festival felt like returning to a dream. There was the bouncy castle, the Ferris wheel, and the high striker. There were the grills and picnic blankets and the brass band, though I didn’t recognize any of the boys in it. There were the blue and yellow ribbons wrapped around the oak trees. Here I was, again.
“Look at them,” Anna mumbled. She was watching a group of noisy first-years waiting in line for the bouncy castle. “Were we ever so young and free?”
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Yaya said. She stood with her arm slipped through Diego’s. They both wore big purple sunglasses. “You’re acing everything. You know your shit.”
“Yeah,” Anna said. “I do know my shit. I just wish I didn’t have to keep proving it over and over again.”
“I have an idea,” I said.
They all turned to me.
“Let’s pretend,” I said, “for today. Let’s pretend that our minds are empty, and we’re kids, and we have nothing else to do.”
So that’s what we did. It was easy, because it was almost true. We ate hot dogs and cotton candy. We danced to the brass band. We placed bets on who could hit the striker highest; then we bounced in the castle until we were dizzy. We drank lemonade and peach brandy moonshine. We collapsed on the dewy grass beneath the trees.
I lay with my head against Theo’s thigh. He ran his fingers through my hair. Sweet summer sunshine warmed my legs and neck. Even though my brain hurt, I felt nice. The whole day felt nice.
Maybe all the work and the stress were a good thing. Maybe my boss was right. The essays, the images, the hours of talking with my professors—maybe this was what it felt like to become good.
Theo’s hand crept down my arm.
A perfumed breeze drifted over the grass. It smelled like the house, rosy and mystic. Early fireflies winked in the pines.
How could I have ever thought Catherine was a bad house?
“Do you want more cotton candy?” Theo said, his voice close to my ear.
I nodded.
He rubbed my arm again, then slid out from under me.
“God,” Yaya said as she watched Theo bound
over to meet Nick in the cotton candy line.
“What?”
“Child, you’re in trouble.”
I shifted to look at her face. There was an almost-angry lift to her chin as she tugged at the string of pearls around her neck.
“What?” I said.
“You’re sinking,” she said. Her eyes were following Theo. “And you don’t even realize it.”
I didn’t ask what she meant.
She plucked a clover. She pulled off its leaves one by one.
I sat up. The bouncy castle had made me so dizzy.
Nick and Theo were walking back now with big puffs of blue and yellow cotton candy. When Theo sat down, I could smell him—his shampoo, his sweat, the nape of his neck—and I felt, down in my stomach, a surge of something huge and indistinct. Something I didn’t recognize.
What was I doing?
“What’s wrong?” Theo said.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m hot.”
I picked up the cotton candy, then put it down again.
A cloud of gnats swarmed over the grass.
“I’m sick,” I said.
*
I lay in bed later that night in the dark, tangled in my bedsheets, drunk and hot. I put a hand to my head. I had been dreaming. No, it was real. The memories of the day doubled and refracted like shadow visions: Yaya and me crawling into the bouncy castle with bottles of wine. Running across the yard and throwing up by a tree. Having sex with someone—yes, a third-year from my Critical Theory seminar—somewhere in the bushes, in the early evening.
I curled up tighter and hugged my stomach. We hadn’t used a condom.
Maybe I was pregnant. I could be pregnant right now. I could feel some toothed little creature taking hold inside me, growing bigger and bigger.
There was no air in my room. I was going to die in here.
I turned on my lamp. I breathed.
Yaya was right; I was in trouble. Something was getting out of control. I had thought that going deeper into the house, filling myself with its dark places, would feel good. But something was wrong. I couldn’t keep track of what was pretend and what was true. When I tried to remember anything real, all I could think of was Theo’s sun-warmed hand against my arm.
Theo. What was I doing?
Theo never felt confused like this. He was so sure of himself, so confident that his work was good and important. I hadn’t been able to coax him into telling me any more about his project, not since that night with the mice, but I could tell he was still working on it. He spent all his time in the plasm lab. He skipped lunches and dinners, even sessions. And I could tell from his shadowed eyes that he wasn’t getting enough sleep. Who cared about sleep? This was why he came to Catherine. To create something vital and important.
But what if Theo didn’t know what he was doing? His research could be wrong. After all, he was wrong about me; he thought I was nice. And M. Neptune thought Theo was a sloppy scholar, that his project was completely misguided. He didn’t even consider Theo advanced enough to have on his team. What if Theo didn’t know what he was doing?
What was he doing? And what was I doing?
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.
I’m in the house, I whispered to myself. I’m in my room. I’m here.
My doorknob turned. It was Yaya, wrapped in a blanket, her braids knotted on top of her head. She waved a lazy hand at me before sliding into my desk chair.
“How are you feeling?” she said. “Any better?”
“No.”
“Me neither,” she said, though her voice was cheerful. “I think I’m dying.” She stuck out a long bare leg and flexed her foot to examine her toenails. They were painted silver. “Hungover at midnight. How divine.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said.
“You, too. Who was that?”
“Who?
“That guy you ran off with.”
“I don’t know. He’s in my Critical Theory class.”
She wrapped the blanket tighter around herself. “Girl, good for you.”
She fiddled with one of the Master Locks lying on my desk. I’d taken to picking the locks with Baby’s kit. I didn’t have a reason. It didn’t really calm me down.
I rubbed my stomach. “I need to eat something.”
“The hall’s closed.”
“We can get cookies from the kitchen.”
“Ooh.” Yaya sat up, then back down again. “Oh, that’s too far.”
“I can get them for us.”
“Would you really?” She crossed her hands over her heart. “My hero.”
I padded through the hallways in my pajama shirt, bare-legged. The festival had spawned smaller parties in the house’s bedrooms and parlors. Laughter echoed through a vent and a door slammed from the end of a hall. My footsteps echoed past the large windows.
As I approached the sitting room by the great hall, I heard a thudding noise that I couldn’t place. I peeked through the door.
It was two of M. Neptune’s new materials concentrators: Burt and Sandy, the short, strange boy with the dark curls and vague eyes. They were playing catch with a blue rubber ball. Burt tossed the ball to Sandy. The ball flew through the air in a perfect, high arc. Sandy dove for it, arms reaching, but missed. He tripped over his feet and stumbled with puppet-like gawkiness. The ball bounced under a chair.
Burt’s sharp eyes followed Sandy as he crawled after the ball and brought it back. Neither of them said anything. Burt let him stand in place; then he threw the ball again, and Sandy missed it again.
I stood there, watching them play, for a long time.
*
In the end, my forum presentation went fine. After all those days I spent writing essays and reports, nights spent sleeping on the library floor, the presentation itself was a blur. I stood onstage with a smear of faces staring back and was hit with the shock that I actually knew what I was talking about. The professors’ questions were savage, but I answered them. Then the presentation was over, my plan approved, and I was done.
Yaya and Diego presented the day after mine. I brought them a breakfast of strawberries and yogurt and helped them get ready in the Molina parlor. Diego had asked me to quiz him with flash cards, then retreated to the bathroom as soon as I appeared. Every once in a while, a moan passed through the bathroom door.
I didn’t feel good, either. I was hungover. My mouth tasted like sand and the parlor’s morning brilliance pierced my brain. It hurt to think.
Yaya was trying to decide if she should wear her white pleather heels or wooden clogs. She sucked on a strawberry as she stepped into one shoe, then the other. Her dress flashed with dripping turquoise beads.
“The white ones,” I said.
She stepped into the heel. “Really? Not too high?”
“Just high enough.”
She bent to strap them on.
Theo was scheduled to present today, too. I would have thought he would be anxious, but some change had come over him in the past week. He was calmer, more awake. He didn’t spend as much time in the plasm lab. He came to breakfast whistling, hung around the parlor after tea, even played charades with us in the evening. And last night, while Yaya and Diego practiced their presentations for me, I looked out the window and saw him crossing the courtyard. He was actually going to bed early.
He wasn’t nervous. He wasn’t worried at all. Which meant his project had come to some kind of conclusion.
And he was going to do it. He was going to show us everything.
The bathroom door clicked open. Diego emerged, wiping his mouth with a tidy handkerchief.
Yaya stood up in her shoes and put her hands on her hips. “Listen, child, are you going to be okay?”
Diego sat on the edge of the settee. “I do not like public speaking,” he murmured.
“We’re not in public,” Yaya said.
Diego picked up a strawberry, then put it down.
Yaya sat beside Diego to rub his back. �
��Precious baby,” she said.
He rested his head in her lap. “Can we run away together?” he whispered.
“Sure,” she said. “After graduation.”
Like last year, forums were held in the Harrington auditorium. It was August now, and even with the windows wide open, the room was hot and dead still. Cicadas droned in the trees. In the back of the room, third-years and first-years lounged together, whispering as they passed around honeydew slices, figs, and glasses of mint tea. The second-years gathered in quiet, anxious knots in the front rows, right behind the professors.
“Are you nervous?” I asked Yaya as we went to sit with the other second-years.
“About what?”
“I don’t know. Failing.”
Yaya frowned, as if she didn’t even understand the question. “I’m not going to fail.”
Diego hugged his stomach. He looked like he might throw up again.
Viktória was sitting at the end of the faculty row, next to M. Neptune. Her hair was twisted up into a strict high ponytail. She wasn’t smiling.
Theo was at the end of the row in front of us. These days, I was always hyperaware of his presence, even if I could barely see him. I could just make out his fuzzy hair and neck. He was wearing his current favorite shirt, a bright teal polo with yellow buttons that Yaya had gotten him from the commissary. The shirt had a small rip in the sleeve. I couldn’t see the rip now, but I knew it was there.
“Fig?” Yaya said. She had gathered a handful of them before sitting down. I took one of the sticky fruits from her palm.
The first presenter was a tiny blondish boy. He was a history concentrator focusing on black visual traditions, specifically zombies. In his dispassionate voice, he explained how the zombie myth traveled from Haiti and through the American imagination, how the superstition shifted as it moved across various cultures and times. I thought the presentation seemed fine, but his advisor kept asking for more and more details on various areas of research. The boy just repeated tonelessly, “Yes … Yes … Yes, I do plan to explore that further.”
The next presenter was a small Indian girl who wanted to analyze the biology of a particular tulip pest. Her hands shook every time she moved to switch the transparency. When she finished, the biology professors spent half an hour barraging her with questions and criticizing her essential premises, suggesting she choose a different track or switch topics entirely. The girl’s voice grew smaller and smaller as she tried to respond. When she finally sat down, her face was wet with tears.
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