Without Annette

by Jane B. Mason

  Erica was an olive-skinned girl with dark eyes and a round face. Her pearls were double stranded. “I’m Erica Goodspeed, and I’m an upper mid from Manhattan. This is my second year at Brookwood. I’m a triplet.”

  As luck would have it, I was sitting right next to Erica. “My name is Josie Little, and I’m from Virginia Falls, Minnesota. This is my first day at Brookwood, and …” The first thought that came to me was I feel like a mutant, which was clearly not a good choice. Next up in my brain was I came here with my girlfriend, which was also unacceptable, since blurting out your sexual orientation on your first day at a new school in a new state was never a good idea. (And would get me in hot water with Annette, since we’d agreed not to be out at first.) So I blurted out the third thing that came to mind, “I was born in a Red Lobster.”

  Somebody’s fork clattered, and Hank Jeffrey laughed out loud. The girl sitting across from me choked on her roll. Clearly, my third idea was as bad as my first two. I felt my face grow warm as the boy next to me started to talk.

  “I’m Jake Flemming, from Darien, Connecticut. I’m a senior, and this is my fourth year here. I skipped second and fifth grades.” He said it as if it was his shoe size or something—like it wasn’t really something to talk about.

  I took a bite of chicken and tried to chew through the introductions, thinking I might get lucky and chew my tongue off.

  Amanda Collins was a senior from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the granddaughter of some famous writer. Hank Jeffrey was an upper mid from Philadelphia and had been a Gerber baby. Cynthia Wu, a mid, was from Westchester and spoke five languages. Fluently. And Patrick Mahoney, whom I recognized from my row at Vespers, was a mid from Manhattan who was training for his pilot’s license. Maybe when he got one, he could fly me the heck out of here.

  I looked down at the food on my plate, trying to ignore the lingering ache in my chest and wondering if anyone would notice if the girl born in a mediocre seafood chain restaurant slid under the table and stayed there, indefinitely.

  “Thornfeld hates it when you scrape at the table, but everyone does it anyway.” Hank skillfully heaped everyone’s uneaten food onto a single plate. He’d tucked his tie, dark blue with narrow stripes, between the buttons of his shirt to prevent splatterage. “If we didn’t, we’d never make it to before-study-hall Scene in the T.”

  I nodded as though I knew exactly what he was talking about and picked up a couple of serving platters. Spotting Annette waiting by the door, I made a little detour on the way to the dish drop.

  “I have to clear,” I explained quickly. “I’ll come find you as soon as I’m done.”

  She nodded and I scurried over to Hank, who was dumping the food into a giant bin of slop and sliding the plates onto the stainless counter. On the other side of the window, a college-age boy was hosing down the dishes and loading them onto a giant plastic rack. He looked a lot like my brother Ben (except for the hairnet)—tall, dark hair, straight nose. I pushed the platters toward him, painfully aware that Ben, like the rest of my family, was seriously far away. “Hey,” I said, then added, “Thanks.”

  He didn’t reply, and I wondered if he’d heard me. Then I wondered if I’d offended him. Then I wondered how saying hello or thank you could be offensive. Ugh. Why did everything seem so hard to figure out?

  Turning, I saw that Hank was already on round two of table clearing. Ugh again.

  “Steve lives in town,” he said as I approached.

  I looked at him blankly.

  He pointed to the boy doing dishes. “He’s a townie.”

  Meaning …

  “I think he graduated from the public high school a couple of years ago, but I’m not sure. We don’t really talk.”

  “Oh,” I said lamely. Why did that matter, exactly?

  He picked up the scraper again and grinned conspiratorially. “Whatever you do, don’t let Lola No see you scraping at the table. Or breaking any other rules. That woman has a serious pole up her butt and lives to bust anyone for anything.”

  “Lola No?” I repeated.

  “Penelope Lassen. Associate professor of chemistry. Total hard-ass. I have the unfortunate privilege of spending the year in her lab.” He leaned in closer, his blue eyes narrowing slightly. “Rumor has it she uses a spreadsheet to keep track of the busts she makes, with dates and levels of offense and every other detail she can come up with. I think her goal is to get us all kicked out so she can retire early.” He shook his blond head and handed me a tray of glasses before picking up the last few items on the table and carrying them to the drop. I followed after him like a golden retriever puppy.

  “Well, Josie Born-in-a-Red-Lobster,” he told me. “I believe our table is fully cleared, and therefore we may adjourn to the T in the main hall for a little Scene before they whisk you away for your ritual first-year orientation. Said orientation is somewhat painful—especially for an unlucky few—but not as painful as Professor Roth’s final exam.” He headed for the door and I paused, wanting to get to the main hall as soon as possible but unclear on whether we’d walk there together.

  “Are you coming or what?” Hank called over his shoulder.

  He led the way back through a pair of stone archways into the main hall, which was crowded with students. But unlike the en masse parade to the dining hall after Vespers, this gathering felt sort of … electric. Students grouped together in clusters, obviously aware of who surrounded them. Eyes darted—searching, scoping, doing a kind of evaluation dance to see how everyone was measuring up. One minute Hank was next to me, and the next he had ambled into the crowd. I stood on the edge of the Scene as if I was not only late to the party but crashing, too.

  Wishing I wasn’t thoroughly opposed to heels, I rose up on tiptoe and tried to spot Annette. I saw myriad heads, but none stood out as hers, which befuddled me. I’d thought that I was infinitely familiar with every angle, every posture. How could I not identify her in a crowd of strangers?

  Standing on the edge of the swirling mass of students, I longed for something safe and familiar. Two days ago, being in Virginia Falls seemed drab and uninteresting, but it was starting to dawn on me that it was my drab and uninteresting, that everything about it was part of me. At the moment, being squished on the faded living room couch, fighting a losing battle for the remote, sounded like heaven.

  “Josie!” I turned to see Annette a little farther down the hall in a cluster of girls. She stepped away and came toward me.

  I rushed forward, as if she’d just tossed me a rescue buoy and was towing me in.

  “Finally! Come on—I want you to meet some people.” She turned and I reached out, barely touching the back of her sweater as she led the way to the other girls. I’d done this a thousand times, but instead of relaxing into my touch, Annette hurried forward, leaving my hand hanging awkwardly in midair for the second time since I’d arrived.

  “This is my friend Josie,” Annette said to Rebecca and another girl I didn’t know. “She’s from Virginia Falls, too. Josie, this is my roommate, Rebecca Ryder.”

  “Becca,” Rebecca corrected, holding out a hand. Rebecca was tall and extremely fit—her biceps were more sculpted than Ben’s—and her eyes were the color of a lifeless lake, an incredible turquoise blue. Her eyes swept over me in approximately three seconds, making me feel inside out. “Welcome to Brookwood,” she said.

  Oh my God, I thought. She’s gorgeous. My girlfriend’s roommate is freaking gorgeous. I did my best to muster a friendly, nice-to-meet-you expression.

  “Isn’t this place amazing?” Annette said excitedly.

  Amazing? I thought dazedly. More like Overwhelming. Confusing. Foreign.

  “I’m Marina Carlisle,” the other girl said. “I’m in the room next door.”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “To these two,” she finished. Marina was tiny—barely five feet—and chesty. Impressive rack, I heard my brother Ben say in my head, immediately followed by the sound of my mother whacking him on the
arm with a rolled-up magazine.

  I laughed aloud and the conversation halted, eyebrows clashing together. Annette’s lips curved into a small frown.

  While I tried to let the awkward silence roll off my back, I spotted Penn and Hank down the hall, yakking it up with a bunch of boys. I watched them guffaw and wrestle and act like buffoons, and momentarily wondered how long it would take to undergo sex-change therapy, a thought so ridiculous that I laughed again.

  It happened while I was still chuckling. A shift. I didn’t see it, but when I refocused on the girls, it was obvious that something had changed. Becca and Marina had turned ever so slightly, just enough to move me out of their conversational circle, leaving Annette in an in-between position.

  Annette’s eyes dimmed as if the sun had slipped behind the clouds, her expression clearly saying “what is going on with you?”

  “Can we go for a walk?” I asked under my breath. I wanted to take her hand—that’s what I would have done at home. I didn’t, but Annette pulled away as if I had, and regained her position in the group of girls. The one I’d so rudely interrupted. And was, clearly, no longer a part of.

  I felt my jaw slacken in bewilderment. Annette had just chosen these girls, whom she’d met a few hours ago, over me. I stared at the tiny moth hole in the back of her grandma Ruby’s sweater and wondered what to do while my eyes started to well.

  Don’t just stand here, I told myself. I needed an exit, or better yet, a portal. Turning, I saw stairs at the end of the hall and somehow moved myself forward. Half tripping over my own feet, I rushed down them and pushed blindly through a pair of massive double doors.

  Gulping in air, I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand. You’re such an idiot! my brain shouted. I was angry. Angry with Annette for choosing those girls over me, and even angrier with myself. How could I not have known how different Brookwood would be? How overwhelmed and awkward I would feel? How much I would miss my family?

  I was walking fast, trying to pull it together. I couldn’t stop crying, though. And I had no idea where I was or where I should go. I walked up a paved path and out across the athletic fields, which seemed to stretch on and on. Every so often, I’d go up a little rise, only to find another field at the top. And from what I could gather, every field was perfectly rectangular, perfectly level, and perfectly mowed. Freakin’ everything at Brookwood was perfect.

  I want to go home! I thought. I kicked my shoes off my feet, hard, sending them flying into the air. Two seconds later, I heard them plunk onto the soft grass somewhere in the darkness.

  The grass was cool and squishy under my feet, and I wriggled my toes into it. I took a breath, felt a tiny bit better. I was getting a momentary grip. But now I had to find my shoes in the dark.

  Padding forward, I aimed for the spot where I thought maybe the left shoe had landed. But thanks to a mostly overcast sky, there was no moonlight, and I couldn’t see a thing. I zigzagged in an attempt to be logical. Could it have come this far? I wondered as I scanned a section of grass near the goal. Probably not …

  Turning around, I headed in the other direction and came almost immediately upon my right shoe. Well, that was something. I slipped it onto my foot.

  In the distance, I heard voices and laughter. The new students were on their way to Orientation in the auditorium. I knew I should be going, too, but also knew I couldn’t show up wearing one shoe.

  I retraced my steps and kept searching, but it was as if my shoe had disappeared, as if the field had swallowed it up. I could feel my heartbeat accelerating, my palms getting sweaty. I was going to miss Orientation and had no idea whether or not it mattered. At VF High, they never bothered to take attendance at assemblies—it took too long. But I was far, far away from my Midwestern high school.

  My search became urgent. I raced up and down the field, not really paying attention to where I was looking. How hard could it be to find a shoe? As my feet moved quickly over the grass near the painted center line, I heard a familiar gurgling sound that I couldn’t place. My phone beeped, a text. Where are you? Annette wanted to know. It’s starting! And then, just as I realized what the gurgling sound was, the sprinklers came on.

  The water was surprisingly icy, and I was drenched in seconds. I didn’t even bother to run. I was smack-dab in the middle of the field; there was no easy way out. So I just stood there in the freezing sprinkler shower getting soaked, holding a cell phone and wearing one shoe. I shuddered as water dripped into my ears and down my back. And then, all of a sudden, I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “I hate it here!” I screamed.

  I heard my voice echo off the buildings in the distance, the garbled words rushing back at me in the darkness. And then my mother was there, in my head, telling me not to be so rash. Not to judge. To give it a chance. Just like she’d been telling me since preschool, when I spent the first two weeks screaming my head off.

  “I hate it here!” I shouted, louder this time.

  The sprinklers turned off as quickly as they’d turned on, and the fields were silent except for the settling water that gurgled in the irrigation tubes. I took a step forward and heard the water squish between my toes, felt my foot sink into the wet earth. Two steps later, I found my shoe.

  I bent over to retrieve it as a breeze came up, and shivered. Like the rest of me, the leather flat was soaking wet. I tipped it and a thin stream of water ran to the ground, flooding my memory with the first time I met Annette.

  It had been raining for almost two days, and everyone in the house was cranky as anything when the doorbell rang. I opened the door and there she was, on our porch, smiling.

  “Can you play?” she asked without telling me her name. Her family had just moved into the neighborhood.

  I nodded while my gaze dropped to her boots, which were brand-new, polka dot, and shiny as all get out. They had every color of the rainbow.

  Her eyes followed. “You want to wear them?” She didn’t wait for an answer—just slipped her feet out and handed them over.

  I put them on and tromped to the closet to find my brother’s army green hand-me-downs, watching her face when I brought them out of the closet. She didn’t balk, even when she had to squeeze her feet into them because they were two sizes too small.

  “Let’s go!” she said, tugging on my hand. We splashed in mud puddles all afternoon, tromping across the greener-than-green-from-rain grass dotted with yellow dandelions that we stomped on with all our might. Back and forth we marched, the water sucking and slurping against our boots while the rain poured down and my brothers threatened us with dripping earthworms. We ignored them in unison, totally absorbed in our own waterlogged world. Annette’s long, wet eyelashes clumped together, making a single dark fringe above her green eyes.

  I fell in love with those boots right away. Falling in love with Annette took a little more time. I can’t tell you exactly when I realized that the way I felt about Annette was different from the way I felt about, say, Maureen. Or Henry. I think my first clue might have been that she was my favorite thing to photograph during my middle school photography phase. I took pictures of other stuff, too, but somehow Annette always found her way into the frame.

  Our parents didn’t notice at first, probably because we had been best friends for years. Weekly sleepovers were part of the regularly scheduled programming. Years later, we were still having sleepovers, though what we did after lights-out was not so regularly scheduled, at least not in our small Minnesota town. Where we came from, girls like boys and boys like girls, or at least that’s what they wanted us to believe. Not that we were constantly going at it or anything. Mostly we spooned each other—her back against my front—fitting together perfectly and talking in the dark.

  “You might want to keep that opinion to yourself,” someone said bluntly.

  My head snapped up and I squinted across the wet field toward the sound of the voice. It was female and, I was pretty sure, not an adult’s. But I couldn’t see anyone.

 
I could, however, hear someone walking toward me.

  “Not that I disagree with you. Sometimes it freaking sucks here. But being miserable is not the kind of thing you want to advertise at Brookwood.”

  Roxanne. It was my roommate Roxanne walking toward me. I felt a moment of relief, and then wondered why I would be relieved to see her.

  I didn’t say anything as she closed in on my dripping, shivering self. “You look like you could use a drink,” she said. “Come on.”

  I dumped the rest of the water out of my shoe, slipped my phone into my pocket, and followed her across the grass into a patch of woods that was bizarrely situated in the middle of the fields. The thickly clustered trees made everything even darker, but I could make out the shape of a bench near a small open area. Roxanne sat down on it and pulled a two-liter bottle out of her giant book bag. Unscrewing the top, she tilted it and took a drink. “Brookwood Balm,” she told me, handing the bottle over.

  I hesitated. I wasn’t a prude or anything, but I didn’t drink a whole lot, and when I did, my usual beverage of choice was beer. I definitely wasn’t accustomed to swigging hard liquor out of a bottle the size of a milk jug.

  She shook the bottle. “This thing weighs close to eight pounds,” she said. “Are you going to take it or not?”

  I took the bottle, lifted it to my lips, and let the vodka, I now knew, fill my mouth. I held it there for longer than I should have, wondering if I’d be able to get it down, and when I finally swallowed, a wash of dinner and vodka belched into my mouth, making me gag.

  Roxanne chuckled. “You have to get it down fast—otherwise it burns too much.” She took another drink and handed it back.

  Shivering, I took the bottle again. This time I swallowed almost immediately, and down it went, leaving a trail of heat in my throat that spread into my belly.