Boarding School Girls

by Helen Eve

Romy

  I phone Mrs Denbigh. I phone Libby. I phone Security. I vainly input call after call as I climb the stairs, my lungs burning as I push myself onwards.

  ‘You promised me you’d stay away from here,’ I say when I reach her. She’s standing on the window ledge, unsteady in one shoe, and she looks at me without really seeing anything.

  ‘Jack said he’d love me until the clock stopped,’ she says. ‘What else can I do?’

  ‘It was a metaphor,’ I say. ‘He didn’t mean it literally. You’re not the same as your mother, Siena. You can still help your sisters.’

  Her face is pale and lovely in the moonlight. ‘You see it now, don’t you?’ she says, and her voice strums with a million tears unshed. ‘You were right. There’s no freedom from this cycle. It’s already all decided.’

  I shake my head vehemently. ‘The cycle is freedom. You showed me that.’

  My phone buzzes. I’m on my way, Jack says. It’s almost twenty to twelve.

  ‘He’s coming. If you think stopping the clock will stop him loving you, you’re wrong.’

  She winds her hand into the sash as she reaches down to remove her remaining shoe, and I look away for a second as my phone buzzes again.

  Tell her I will love her until the clock stops ticking.

  She doesn’t make a sound, and yet sound is what I notice because what happens is the opposite of sound, as the sash pulls taut and the clock stops ticking. The silence is deafening as she falls, a flaming star of golden hair and golden skin and a spirit that I never got close to touching.

  Much later I read the message from Jack that she’ll never see.

  And for one hundred years more.

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Siena

  I grip the concrete ledge with my toes, closing my eyes and surrendering to the breeze. I tighten my grip in the sash, using my other hand to pull out pins and flowers and gold leaves until my hair falls to my waist and I shed everything I’ve become; everything I’ve been made; everything that’s distanced me from those I love.

  When I open my eyes I don’t see the clock beside me. I don’t see the courtyard below. I see only the night sky and its millions of stars, surrounding me until there’s nothing else. I’m nowhere, and I’m everywhere, and I see everyone I need to see even as they fade away.

  I’m with Stella as she hides her own photographs to make room for mine; I’m with Syrena as I paint her toenails ice-cream colours; we’re all together as we lie half drowned on a beach, Syrena twisting my long hair around her baby arm as Stella’s is wrapped around mine.

  Instead of falling, I float like a butterfly towards a garden in which Syrena has wound shoots and stems and sprays around me and Stella until our roots are intermingled and our thorns are blunt and our petals are multi-coloured Neapolitan swirls that encapsulate us all. I see a pastel safety net, pale and slight, yet resolute and as unstoppable as Stella fracturing a frozen ground and Syrena cartwheeling barefoot on a dewy lawn; and I unwind in a golden rope of aerial silk as I am brought to land and moored amongst the sweetly blooming roses that are my sisters.

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Romy

  I trudge up the sweeping driveway, wishing I could camouflage myself in the undergrowth. I run through conversation points, which include the memorial plaque and pink rose garden that will stand at the point she fell. Beloved sister, daughter and friend is the word order I fought for, and won. Siena was a sister first.

  I can tell them that she’d have been a great Head Girl; that the whole school will attend her funeral; and that, instead of the white rhino, a donation will be made in her name to a rabbit protection society. Hard to find, but easier than one protecting unicorns.

  I can tell them that the school exists in a kind of petrifaction as people try to make sense of the past and present and future; that her artwork will be dismantled at the end of the school year so that each student can take a piece of her with them.

  I can’t tell them about the sounds that rose from the courtyard when she was found, contrasting violently with the pillowy silence of her fall; the sirens screaming up the drive; the howls that seemed to come from me as I fell the length of the ladder on my way back to earth. I can’t tell them about Jack, for whom nothing in life will ever matter more than the night he was too late; about the Starlets, who stood outside all night like mice at an abandoned feast, wrung with supranatural sleeplessness; with pervading panic; with directionless despair.

  I’m undecided about whether to tell them what everyone reported, despite the impossibility of it: that when she fell, a shooting star lit the school white, and, for that one moment, eradicated all other colours like a supernova.

  * * *

  I’m hoping to bypass the enormous front door, but it swings open as I approach.

  ‘Quick,’ whispers Syrena, hanging off the door handle. ‘No one should see you.’

  ‘Why not?’ I ask as I climb the steps.

  ‘No one’s been cleaning,’ she says as I take in the cluttered hallway, dusty surfaces and general gloom.

  Syrena puts her finger to her lips as we pass a dining room covered with debris. The table is laid for a party, complete with white tablecloth and cake, but the room has only one inhabitant, motionless at the head of the table in a long white dress.

  ‘My mother never leaves that room,’ Syrena whispers.

  My feet are rooted to the spot as Siena’s mother turns towards me, her eyes dark in her pale face, her expression uncomprehending. Then I jerk away, stumbling after Syrena up the staircase.

  ‘I told you,’ Syrena says matter-of-factly, and I stumble again.

  * * *

  In their bedroom, Stella stands before a full-length mirror, her long hair falling around her like a veil. She’s deep in concentration, reaching for pins to hem her white dress. It’s so big, I realize, because it belonged to Siena.

  ‘Stella, listen to me,’ I say as Syrena looks at me imploringly.

  Stella sits down obediently. Her hands are clasped in her lap, her ankles neatly swung to one side. I prepare to tell her that she doesn’t have to start at Temperley High this year; that she has a choice about where she takes her life. And then I realize from her expression of polite disinterest that I’m not her first visitor.

  ‘Has Libby been here?’ I ask. ‘What did she tell you?’

  Stella speaks as dispassionately and rhythmically as a ticking clock. ‘Siena loved Temperley High. She loved Jack. She loved her friends. Her life was perfect.’

  ‘Stella…’ I’m already floundering.

  ‘She didn’t finish it,’ she interrupts. ‘She wanted to finish it.’

  ‘You can’t finish it for her,’ I say. ‘You have your own path.’

  She turns her head away, and I wonder if she’s hiding tears.

  ‘Will you do something for me?’ I press. When she doesn’t reply, I crouch in front of her. ‘Will you promise that you’ll consider starting a different school this year?’

  She turns back, her eyes clear. ‘Why?’

  I try to tell her what Siena wanted for her: a life that will take her in unexpected and untrodden and messy and wrong directions, with no burdensome legacy of expectation. But a phone rings out before I can speak, and she’s on her feet towards it.

  ‘Stella has a PA now,’ Syrena whispers. ‘She won’t tell me who it is, but…’

  Stella is a miniature silhouette against the window as she pouts and postures and tosses her hair through a conversation about table settings that she can’t possibly understand.

  ‘I already know about difficult decisions,’ she says, looking directly at me as she steps towards the door. ‘When acquiring any venture, redundancies are inevitable.’

  She slams the door behind her, and, by the time I follow, she’s disappeared.

  ‘Stella will get better,’ I tell Syrena as we walk downstairs. ‘She just needs time to learn who she’s going to be.’

  ‘She won’t get better,’ Syrena says
. ‘She already knows who she’s going to be.’

  She reaches for my hand. ‘Promise me you’ll stay at Temperley High and help her. Promise me you’ll find a way to talk to her.’

  ‘How? Do I make an appointment with her PA?’

  She shakes her head, ‘She’ll listen at the funeral. She can’t answer her phone there, or leave the room. At the funeral you can tell the truth.’

  ‘I promise,’ I tell her, and we break apart to the sound of shattering glass from the dining room.

  I look back once at the end of the drive, fully expecting to see three identical faces watching me through the windows of a house spellbound by loss. But, rather than three faces, I see four. They watch me through curtains on balconies and drawing rooms and hallways and bedrooms, and, no matter how long I stare, I have no way of knowing which face is which, or whether they are living or dead.

  * * *

  The same faces sit in a church heavy with the scent of lilies, and I watch them as Stella becomes Siena and Syrena becomes Stella and their mother remains static in a world collapsing around her.

  I watch them as Jack, ashen and faltering, places a single rose – the only pink rose present at this ceremony – atop her white coffin and then stands paralysed before their pew, staring at each of them in turn as if some permutation of them can restore her to him.

  I watch them as the Starlets recount memories of heroism and hedonism and happiness that bear no relation to the girl Siena died to become. I watch them endure this service that holds nothing of Siena, now everything that mattered has been swept away and replaced with the anodyne chasm of propaganda that she seemed for most of her life to be. The room itself is as sterile as the intended Elevation ball, white and gauzy and filled, not with Siena’s collage or even her oil paintings, but with the affected pageantry of an existence in which nothing mattered but window-dressing. Jack, in the midst of it, puts his head into his hands as if the images are closing in on him.

  I break my gaze to focus on Syrena as she turns towards me, her teeth denting her bottom lip as she reminds me of my responsibilities. You promised to tell the truth.

  Mrs Denbigh lays her hand on mine. ‘We can’t let you speak.’

  ‘Why?’ The final hymn begins and my opportunity is lost.

  ‘See how this looks,’ she says. ‘Two girls fall from the tower. One says you pushed her, and the other will never speak again.’

  ‘Libby fell on purpose. And Siena…’

  Her face is set. ‘This isn’t my choice. But perhaps the school’s decision is best for you.’

  ‘What decision?’

  ‘You can’t come back to Temperley High next year,’ she says over the sound of the organ, which dies away before she moderates her volume. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Siena’s mother winds Stella’s hair around her fingers until it’s coiled and neatly sprung, using it as a shackle to pull her closer. Syrena doesn’t take her eyes off me as she clambers onto her seat. Her despairing scream cuts across everything, silencing the congregation even as Stella sways and tumbles onto the flags with a finality that makes me envy her unconsciousness. Her mother lets her fall, her face turning from triumph to something sourer as Stella’s Rapunzel hair unwinds from her hands in a braid of aerial silk that breaks her stone landing.

  Syrena is forgotten in the furore, and I take advantage of the disruption to follow her as she streaks past. Out in the graveyard I find her curled, cat-like, against a crumbling tombstone, her eyes too large in her head and too blue for her pale skin.

  ‘We’re all the same,’ she shivers as I sit beside her.

  Syrena is Siena, whose boundless radiance, unimaginably aborted, will lie beneath us as cold as marble, her eyes shut to the sunlight filtering through these horse chestnut trees above her; the spiky frost and veil of snow pillowing a resting place that needs no air; the hedgerows regenerating endlessly while underground she turns to dust.

  And Siena is Stella, who wears her beauty like something stolen and who sleeps on a stone floor as chaos erupts around her, finding nothing in the tangible world that can bring her home.

  Alive, they stood as slender and fragile as a trio of roses, righting themselves against each other in a dance that gave them air and warmth and nourishment. Cast asunder, the remaining pair may grow beyond Siena, surpassing her interrupted existence with identities of their own, or they may remain with her, absorbing her qualities as they interwreathe into a quiescently peaceful golden halo.

  Epilogue

  Romy

  This morning feels in some ways like any other as I stare around the cafeteria at the inevitable regression that’s taken place since the unity of Elevation. The Starlets, with Libby at their head, are restored as the centrepiece. The Stripes, without Jack, are beside us. The Council are on the broken benches at the back. Yet it’s not like any morning that’s come before it, because it will be my last.

  ‘I wanted to give Stella a choice,’ I tell the Starlets, in case any vestige of sanity remains amongst them. ‘I wanted her to start a different school. As herself.’

  ‘History shows that she’ll be safer following my lead than yours,’ says Libby. ‘Siena died on your watch. Stella will not die on mine.’

  ‘Are you still working for Siena’s mother?’ I ask disbelievingly.

  ‘My contract has been extended,’ she admits. ‘I have a new client now, and we have a responsibility to lay the foundations for a clique-in-waiting. Our job is to inspire and coach the next generation until we’re ready to step aside.’

  ‘Our job?’ Everyone stares at the table instead of meeting my eyes. ‘You, Cassidy? Even you, Mads?’

  ‘Stella’s upbringing is of the upmost importance,’ murmurs Madison as Cassidy nods beside her. ‘We’ll give her the best possible start.’

  ‘Siena dissolved the Starlets before she died,’ I protest. ‘You can’t indoctrinate Stella into believing that Siena wanted this.’

  ‘Siena would have wished me to show Stella the right path,’ Libby says. ‘We’re contractually bound to help her.’

  She’s wearing her new Head Girl badge, awarded for services to the school in leading students through a time of intense grief, and she’s sitting in Siena’s engraved place.

  They accuse me of hating them and of knowing more than I’m letting on; they discuss, endlessly, how Siena must have felt as she died. The conversation degenerates as the new Shells start to arrive.

  ‘I’m leaving today,’ I say. ‘Does it mean nothing to you that I was Siena’s friend?’

  Phoebe stares me out. ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself. We aren’t fooled. We all know exactly how you felt about Siena. How you feel about us all, for that matter.’

  I tip back my head as if it will stop my tears from falling, looking beyond the Starlets and beyond the little girl entering the cafeteria. My chair crashes backwards as I leave it, clawing the curtain and stumbling through the French windows towards a fleeting, disappearing image. It’s an image that no longer exists in this world, but that captivates me long enough for a sea change to occur in the cafeteria behind me.

  Redundancies are inevitable, Stella said with the assurance of a managing director. And her entrance from the wings has introduced a new balance, displacing the Starlets who now huddle, shell-shocked, in the doorway.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask as I rejoin them, frowning at the new group sitting around the hallowed Starlet table.

  ‘Nothing happened,’ says Libby stiffly. ‘We’re … having a team meeting.’

  ‘Were you fired?’ I ask in disbelief.

  ‘I’m not sure what happened…’ Phoebe says dreamily. ‘One minute we were sitting there, and then…’

  She waves towards the table, where six little Shells match six star-pointed initials. They toss their hair and sip coffee as if they’ve been there all their lives, the only clue to their newness in the way that five of them watch and copy the girl in Siena’s place.

  ‘I thought you were going to ins
pire and coach the new generation until they were ready to take over?’ I ask.

  ‘The next generation are ready now,’ says Cassidy.

  Stella is talking closely with a brown-haired girl who looks as if she can’t believe her luck. They are the image of Siena and Libby. Around them, I count a straw-haired fashionista, a red-haired little misfit, a baby-blonde fluff ball and a brunette in a leather jacket identical to mine.

  ‘Even their initials match ours. We each have a little doppelgänger. Mine’s Mary-Ann.’ I sense a note of pride as Madison gestures to the gangly girl with straw-coloured hair.

  ‘Mine’s Penny,’ says Phoebe, looking maternally at the tiny white-blonde girl. ‘There’s a Lila, and a Katrina. I expect someone beginning with C will join them later, Cassidy. I wonder which of them will get kicked out to make way for her.’

  Libby laughs mirthlessly. ‘Ruby, of course. Guess who she matches?’

  ‘You, Romy,’ she adds when I don’t reply. ‘She matches you.’

  ‘Don’t you understand that the Starlets are no more?’ I ask. ‘That you are no more?’

  ‘They’re only playing,’ says Libby. ‘They don’t have the authority, or the expertise, to overthrow us.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ I ask. ‘You shared a lot of information with Stella, and now she’s become the master. You’ve walked into a trap.’

  The little girls pile their hands rapidly on top of each other as everyone turns to watch. The other new girls, awkward in too-big uniforms and unflattering boaters, watch Stella with expressions veering between envy and sheer longing; the boys, notably a serious blond boy who’s already wearing a Stripes kit, don’t take their eyes off her. Edward, unnaturally neat in his blazer and combed hair, is openly mesmerized. The five of us, huddled beneath an exit sign, might as well no longer exist.

  ‘I’m the master,’ protests Libby.

  ‘Stars aligned,’ chorus the little girls, lifting their hands above their heads.

  As their place is cemented in the centre of the school’s consciousness, and their rights to the table acknowledged beyond doubt, Stella looks at Libby, purpose like regicide blazing in her eyes, and then she turns to the open door.