“Could we do something else?” I asked. “I really just want to be with you.”
Annette’s hips wriggled to the beat. “Why? I was having a great time.”
I reached out a hand. “So we can have a little time together.”
“We are together.”
“I mean together by ourselves.”
“Oh.” Annette stopped moving and looked at me for a long moment, as if finally seeing me there in the hall. “Oh, Josie,” she said. “Why do you want to be alone now? It’s our first Saturday night here, and there’s a dance. Can we talk about this later? I just want to be on the dance floor.”
I didn’t say anything—I didn’t have to. Annette sighed. “Why is everything so hard for you, Josie? Why does everything have to be so complicated? It’s just a dance.”
But it wasn’t just a dance. It was feeling uprooted, untethered. It was trying to figure things out when you were surrounded by people you didn’t know. It was feeling lost.
“I don’t want to dance with them,” I said. “I want to dance with you.”
Annette shook her head ever so slightly. “Josie …”
Something about the way she said my name sent my heart into my throat. “What?”
Her eyes were bright, and I could see the flecks of gray in them. “I just don’t think we can—”
“It’s them, isn’t it?” I blurted, stepping back so fast I almost careened into the wall. “The Soleets.”
“The what?”
“Your new friends,” I said, spitting out the last word as if it were snake venom. “They don’t like me, don’t think I’m good enough.”
Annette’s eyes held mine. Did I really just say that? It was unbelievably cliché.
“Are we talking about how they see you, or how you see yourself?” She spoke so softly I could barely hear her.
“What did you say?” I asked, feeling my face get hot.
“Nothing.” She bit her lower lip. “Josie …” Annette stepped closer. Her face was full of sadness, of softness, of empathy.
No, I thought. No, no, no.
She leaned in and kissed me, right there in the main building. We were sort of in a corner, but still.
I wanted to kiss her back, to put my arms around her, to melt into it. But if this was a good-bye kiss, I didn’t want it.
I pulled away. “I can’t,” I told her. “I just …”
“Josie,” Annette said.
Behind her, Marina stood watching us, her mouth open in a ruby-red O.
I don’t know why I didn’t head back to my dorm. Maybe because Marina was standing between me and the door. Maybe because that’s where we’d come from an hour before. Or maybe because I wanted to get as far away as possible and the dorm was right there, a mere stone’s throw. Whatever the reason, I soon found myself at the other end of the main building, propping myself against the auditorium door and sobbing like a deranged lunatic.
Shit! I said, pounding my fists against the carved oak. Shit shit shit. My hands throbbed with every pound, but that felt right since the rest of me was already aching.
How did this happen? I asked myself, opening my fist and laying my palm against the smooth wood. I’d moved halfway across the country from everything I knew to be here with Annette, and now she was dumping me.
Or was she?
I wiped my face and leaned my forehead against the door, willing myself to think logically, to get a grip. Instead, I got footsteps, coming down the hall behind me. Just what I needed—another audience. I yanked open the auditorium door and slid into the quiet darkness. Autopilot led me to row K, to my seat, seventh from the end. I slumped heavily into the chair, staring at nothing.
Without Annette, I thought, my mind shifting the words into without a net. That was precisely how I felt—like a tightrope walker a hundred feet above the ground, teetering dangerously with no net below.
My gaze settled on the podium and the empty stage behind it. I felt empty myself, as if someone had sliced me open and everything that was me just oozed out, leaving nothing but a skin-and-bones shell.
I replayed the scene in the alcove with Annette. What was she trying to say, exactly? That it was over, or that we needed to find a different way to be together? And what was the difference?
I was still sitting there trying to figure out whether I had a girlfriend when the door opened and a shaft of light passed over me, then momentarily cast itself across the aisle to my left. A soft giggle broke the silence, followed by the shuffle of movement and series of intent muffled sounds.
“There’s never anybody in here,” a boy said as the couple stumbled over their making-out selves on their way down the aisle. Thoroughly entwined, they slithered right past my row and sprawled themselves across several seats three feet in front of me.
That can’t be comfortable, I thought as their soft, eager moans filled the auditorium. A faint waft of alcohol drifted past my nose, but I couldn’t tell if it was mine or theirs.
Unbelievable, I thought. And yet somehow the fact that I couldn’t find a place to be by myself wasn’t entirely surprising. Still, I had no intention of staying around to listen to their steamy tryst. Not even bothering to be discreet, I got to my feet and made a beeline for the door.
Back in the hall, I wasn’t sure what to do. Go to my room? Take a walk? Find Annette and attempt to have a reasonable conversation? This last idea was seriously tempting, but something warned me against it. It was too soon. So I descended a few steps down a wide concrete staircase and pushed out the heavy doors marked EXIT.
I found myself at the open end of a large, grassy courtyard that bordered a baseball field. Beyond the outfield was a low rock wall and Route 6, and beyond that, I’d heard, town. A row of giant elm trees lined one side of the field, their branches casting twisted shadows on the grass. I found myself staring up at their wide, barely visible yellow-leafed limbs, suddenly wanting to climb one. Don’t be silly, I told myself. And then, Why not?
I strode forward with purpose, keeping to the edge of the field while I scoped out the trees. I needed a pretty low bottom branch, the right distance between the higher ones, and more than one obvious route to the top. My brothers and I had logged many an hour in massive oaks and elms back home and I was a decent climber, but there was no reason to be stupid. I was, after all, wearing a dress.
A breeze came up, making me shiver. The sweat from the dance mob had dried on my skin and I was now officially chilled. I squinted at the tree in front of me. It wasn’t the tallest in the row, but its branches fanned out like nicely spaced fingers, and both sides of the tree seemed climbable. Plus, it was pretty close to the building and happened to be out of the light, making my ascent potentially incognito. I was already the weird girl who fell asleep during Vespers and ate dessert without utensils—I didn’t need anyone to notice that I spent Saturday nights climbing trees, too.
Glancing behind me to make sure I wasn’t going to trip on anything, I sprinted forward, took a flying leap, and grabbed ahold of the lowest branch. My fingers slipped on the rough bark, but I dug in and walked my feet up the trunk until I could swing a leg over the branch. Grateful that the dress I wore was stretch knit, I hoisted myself upright, heart pounding. I hadn’t climbed a tree in a long time.
I didn’t hesitate. I got to my feet and up I went, reaching for each eye-level branch, finding places for my feet, pulling myself higher and higher. I could hear the blood rushing in my ears, pushing me forward, urging me on. I was breathless but didn’t stop. Soon I was above the first floor of the brick building, then the second and the third, and closing in on some kind of tower at the top. I was almost as high as the chapel steeple, and the houses and fields stretched out below me. A gust of wind rustled the yellow leaves and sent a smattering into the air. I shook my head, inhaling and feeling air move into my belly. A flat crook in a large branch near the top of the tree beckoned. I climbed up to it, settling myself next to the trunk.
The moonlight cast the top of t
he tree’s shadow onto the infield and I could see the shape that was me down there on the ground, small and bloblike. How appropriate, I thought with a sigh. But except for the looming shadow of the main building behind me, the entire campus seemed small and sort of bloblike. I spotted a group of kids hanging out by the athletic center, next to the patch of woods where Roxanne had introduced me to Brookwood’s beverage of choice. Others were clustered by the pond. They were equally tiny and indistinguishable. Maybe that’s what this place does, I thought. Shrinks people.
The door outside the auditorium slammed shut and the make-out couple emerged, holding hands as they walked across the field and lay down beyond second base, the girl resting her head in the crook of the boy’s armpit. I could hear the faint, occasional murmurings of their voices and outbursts of laughter, and I wondered who they were, what they were talking about. Were they a new couple just getting to know each other, or had they been together for a long time?
I felt a pang for Annette and found myself wishing we were still at home, wishing I could press REWIND and go back to life before I stumbled upon the Brookwood website. Before I decided we should apply. Before Annette agreed. Before everything else …
You wanted to leave, I reminded myself. I’d always been clear about the fact that we had to get away from Shannon—especially Annette. Watching Shannon be cruel to Annette was like watching the evil queen in a Disney movie, and it got worse as Annette got older, as if Shannon couldn’t bear to watch her daughter grow up to be a beautiful person. Because Annette was beautiful—the kind of beautiful that made people stop to look. But she also made the people around her feel good.
I looked down at the group of kids by the pond, memories of the night Annette and I had gone to the Full Moon Party at Turtle Beach the September before surfacing in my mind. Our going was a big deal because we went together—as a couple.
Annette and I had been best friends since we were five and a couple since we were twelve, but for two years, nobody knew we’d gone from best friends to girlfriends. And then came the fall of ninth grade.
We came out by accident. Annette and I had gone to poetry camp for a week of mornings that summer, and she’d written me a poem—a haiku. With our names in it.
Imagine and dream
Annette and Josie so sweet
The perfect heartbeat
Unfortunately, the poem ended up in the hands of Eric Stewart, the giant goalie on the hockey team and your basic asshole. In the space of a day, Annette and I went from a couple of freshmen to freshmen freaks. We got heckled, harassed, and bullied. Annette cried herself to sleep for a week.
And then came the Full Moon Party. That summer had been cold and buggy, but the fall was glorious. Bright blue skies and the rich green of a wet spring and summer all around us. And it was hot—in the 80s until well after sunset. The whole town shimmered like a mirage. Perfect weather for the party.
Annette and I had agreed to go to the party together in spite of Eric and his big, mean mouth, but as the date approached, I could tell she was losing her nerve. By the morning of, she was a total wreck.
“Let’s bake something,” I suggested, knowing that sugar and chocolate always made Annette feel better.
We spent the afternoon making fudge, Annette’s specialty, using extra marshmallow creme. Marshmallow creme is the key ingredient to perfect fudge, along with not scraping the bottom of the pot when you stir (so you don’t get grains of burned sugar, Annette told me, just smooth, chocolate-and-marshmallow deliciousness). Shannon was visiting her sister for the day, which meant we didn’t have to worry about getting yelled at for messing up the kitchen, and we made batch after batch, each one smoother and more chocolaty than the last. We stacked the empty jars of marshmallow creme into a giant tower on the counter.
When we arrived at Turtle Lake with our Tupperware of yum, everyone watched us approach without actually looking. When we got within speaking distance, nobody acknowledged us, as if we weren’t there, or didn’t even exist. I was wondering if we should just forget the party when Annette’s eyes narrowed and her mouth twisted into a scowl. “I’m sort of sorry I didn’t spit in it,” she whispered, walking right over to Eric Stewart.
“Fudge?” she asked, smiling her sweetest smile and pulling off the lid to let the chocolate smell drift up to his nose.
Eric blinked into the plastic box, at the dozens of squares of fudge lined up in rows (Annette didn’t let me cut—I was too sloppy with the knife). His nostrils flared and his eyes widened. I think he was practically drooling, which was nothing short of a miracle since he definitely had cotton mouth. Eric was a stoner in the off-season, and right now the smell of weed wafted all around him.
He looked up at Annette, grinned, and reached in.
“You’re welcome,” Annette said as she held out the box to the rest of the group. Within ten minutes, the box was empty and everyone was licking their fingers and laughing. That fudge turned out to be our ticket out of being “those girls”—out of ridicule and harassment. In public, anyway. In private, we knew, it was another matter. Because even though nobody said anything, there were definitely people who just couldn’t deal, who thought we were freaks. Like the religious kids who were sure we needed to be fixed, or the kids who were grossed out by what we did together.
Then there were the people who just seemed curious. We knew who they were by the way they looked at us. Their faces were more open, or something, and they seemed like they wanted to ask us questions. Once in a while I found myself wanting to blurt things out, things I thought they wanted to know. But I never did.
We stayed late at the party, dancing on the beach and gazing at the stars. It was so warm that everyone had cutoff shorts and flip-flops and bare arms that glowed in the moonlight. Afterward, Annette and I walked home together, arm in arm, stopping to kiss under the oak tree next to the school playground, leaning into the trunk together. She tasted like salt and fudge and the full moon, and everything was perfect.
The moon high, we walked together to Annette’s house. We were sneaking through the door and laughing when the voice came at us.
“You’re late,” Shannon hissed, making both of us jump. I let go of Annette’s hand just in time, because a second later, Shannon turned on the floor lamp next to her chair. I squinted in the light, trying to get my eyes to adjust while she rose to her feet and weaved toward us.
“What do you think you’re doing sneaking around in the middle of the night?” Her green eyes were narrow slits. Shannon seemed to hate that her daughter had friends, had a social life. Like she didn’t want Annette to be loved.
“We were at the Full Moon Party,” Annette said. “Dad knew where we …”
“Don’t lie to me!” Shannon raised a hand and Annette ducked, forcing her mother’s arm to swing hard through nothing but air. She lost her balance and careened into the armoire.
“Mama!” Annette said, reaching out a hand to break her fall.
“Don’t touch me!” Shannon hissed. Annette inched away from me and toward her mother, which seemed counterintuitive even though I understood why—Shannon hated any reminder that we were a couple.
It was like being split in two. Half of me wanted to get the heck out of there, especially because my presence was probably making things worse for Annette. But I also couldn’t leave until I knew Annette was safe.
You should go, Annette mouthed.
I gave her an “are you sure?” look, and she nodded.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Annette told her mother. “I could use a good night’s sleep.”
Shannon deflated then, like a little bit of air had been let out of her. “All right,” she said wearily as Annette took her by the arm. I watched the two of them walk up the stairs, Shannon leaning heavily on her daughter, and I marveled at how quickly the situation had taken a turn. As I walked to the door I made a silent wish that it wouldn’t turn again.
The bark of the elm tree felt cool and rough against my face, and I pressed
my cheek into it, taking a breath. I liked it up here. I felt sort of separate from everything below, as though I was watching life at Brookwood instead of participating in it. Maybe I could stay up here. Maybe I could have some sort of satellite existence at boarding school.
The couple on the baseball field got up off the ground and walked away, arm in arm, laughing. It made me ache for Annette, and I wanted to climb down the tree just as suddenly as I’d wanted to climb up. I needed to see her, to talk to her.
I was about to hoist myself to my feet when I heard a creaking sound behind me—a window opening. I held my breath, wanting to turn around but willing myself not to.
“Doing a little extracurricular spying, Subzero?”
No way, I thought. No freaking way. I turned around and found myself just a few feet from Penn, who was half hanging out of the window, his shoulders practically filling the opening.
“Or are you just opposed to stairs?” He leaned forward and grinned, and I could see over his head into the room, which was large and, besides him, occupied by a pair of boys sitting around a table covered in cards and poker chips. I recognized Hank, and a boy named Sam Moon from English class.
“Is that Josie?” Hank said, rubbing his eyes like Toby used to do when he’d just woken up from a nap.
“The one and only,” Penn replied. And then, quieter, “Don’t ask me why, Subzero, but I’m not entirely surprised to find you sitting in a tree outside my window.”
“I wouldn’t let it go to your head,” I told him. “I had no idea this was even your dorm, much less your room. And it’s not my fault the best climbing tree stands right outside your domicile—I certainly didn’t plant it.”
“Domicile,” he echoed, opening the window wide in invitation. “I don’t suppose you know how to play Texas Hold’em? We need a fourth.”
I considered telling him I’d never heard of it, but that would’ve been a bald-faced lie since I’d actually played more than a few hands—my dad had a standing poker night and had taught me the game. “Isn’t gambling against the Brookwood Code of Behavior?” I asked, deflecting the question altogether.
Without Annette Page 8