Without Annette

by Jane B. Mason

  “Does believing you’re being ignored make it true?” Marina asked.

  “Ah, truth versus belief,” Penn said in perfect imitation of Professor Mannering. He twirled his fork in the air absently, dropping bits of scrambled egg onto the table. “They are two separate things … until so many people believe something that it becomes a truth. The earth was flat once, was it not?”

  In anthropology, we’d been talking about how beliefs shape our actions, and this was one of Mannering’s examples.

  “Of course not,” Roxanne huffed.

  “Exactly. Of course not,” Penn said in his regular voice. “But everyone believed it was, since proving otherwise could mean falling off the edge. And until that ship didn’t actually fall off the end of the earth, a flat earth was a truth because everyone believed it. An accepted belief in practice is the same as a truth.”

  “A truth is a fact,” Hank said. “A belief is something a person can consider fact. Not the same thing.”

  “Only it doesn’t always matter,” Marina added.

  “Of course it matters.” Becca cradled her coffee cup in her hands protectively. “When doesn’t it?”

  “When the believing becomes more important than the truth?” I suggested. I could totally hear Professor Mannering saying that, and had learned it firsthand when Annette and I were outed. We were still the same people we’d been the day before—that was a fact. But people perceived us completely differently because of their beliefs … and not in a good way.

  “Or when the truth has yet to be discovered,” Penn added.

  Becca rolled her eyes. “We’ve only had one week of classes and you’re already talking Mannering nonsense,” she said. “Why doesn’t that man retire already? He gets crazier every year.”

  “Professor Mannering is awesome,” Marina said. “I’m trying to get into that class. I hear you learn all about the Amazonian peoples, like those crazy Jivaro, who shrink heads and wear them around their necks!”

  “You mean the Shuar,” Hank corrected. “The term Jivaro lumps several clans together, which none of them really appreciate.”

  Marina picked a soggy cornflake off the edge of her bowl and ate it. “I don’t care what they’re called as long as they’re the ones I’ve heard about. Who doesn’t want to take a class about spiritualism, hallucinogens, and shrunken heads?” She leaned forward. “I’ve heard that the kids who took his class in the sixties used to drop acid to find out what Jivaro ceremonies were like.”

  “Shuar,” Hank repeated.

  Cynthia stared hard at Marina across the table. “Are you still obsessing about Edward Hunter?” she asked. Her words dripped with displeasure.

  “Who’s Edward Hunter?” Annette asked, speaking up for the first time.

  “Some kid who died like half a century ago,” Becca grumbled.

  “Exactly half a century ago, in fact,” Marina said.

  “Here we go again.” Cynthia tossed her napkin onto her plate.

  “What?” Marina said. “It’s true.”

  “Is it true?” Penn asked. “Or just a belief?”

  “It’s true,” Marina said, scrunching up her face. “I think.”

  “Would someone please explain what you’re talking about?” Annette asked. “I’m a little lost.”

  “Of course.” Becca’s smile was wide and self-important as she set down her fork and straightened. All it took was an audience for the girl to get interested. “Fifty years ago, when Brookwood was in its boys-only heyday, there was a terrible accident and a student named Edward Hunter—Hunt—died. He was supposedly some sort of genius—a science whiz—and a major legacy, but also a bit of a …”

  “Dork,” Marina finished.

  Becca took a sip of juice and sat back, fingering her pearls. God, she was annoying. “He supposedly had an authentic shrunken head that his grandfather had traded with the Jivaro Indians in Ecuador.”

  “Shuar,” Hank corrected.

  “Whatever,” Becca said dismissively. “The point is the head itself, not who he got it from. Anyway, Hunt was a dork, but also a scientific genius. A bunch of boys wanted him to make LSD in the chemistry lab so they could have a hallucinogenic Jivaro ceremony, but Hunt refused, saying it was too dangerous.”

  “Which didn’t go over well,” Marina said.

  Becca gave Marina a little kick under the table, and Marina scowled.

  “Right,” Becca said. “The boys were furious. They told everyone his shrunken head was a fake, and then stole it to prove they were right. Hunt went to get it back, but died mysteriously that night—in the tunnels.”

  “What tunnels?” I asked, all innocence.

  “The steam tunnels,” Becca explained with a slightly pitying look.

  I tried to appear befuddled.

  “The administration demanded that the head be returned to the family. Hunt’s grandfather had verified that it was not only authentic but also a family treasure. But the boys who’d stolen it claimed that Hunt got it back before he died.”

  “So where is it?” Annette asked.

  “Nobody knows,” Hank said. “We’re not sure it’s here at all, or even if it ever existed.”

  “Is it a truth or a belief?” Penn asked yet again, this time with exaggerated mysteriousness.

  “I think the kid was misunderstood,” Hank said.

  “How generous of you,” Roxanne sniffed.

  “Well, the poor kid really died,” Marina said. “That much is true.”

  “Right, but like forever ago,” Penn put in, still waving his fork around. But I had the sense that he was bluffing, that prowling around the steam tunnels was directly tied to Edward Hunter and his supposed shrunken head.

  His shrunken head. I had to let that sink in. It was one thing to talk about this stuff in anthropology, where you could keep the weirdness several thousand miles away in the Amazon. It was quite another to find out that there might be an actual shrunken head right here, at Brookwood Academy.

  On the other hand, a lot of things at Brookwood were pretty bizarre. The perfectly groomed campus. The crazy intensity of the academics. The matching shot glasses, apparently owned by all, filled with expensive vodka. And even Sunday brunch. I mean, here I was with Annette—and yet not with Annette—and six other people we’d met only a week ago—people I’d so far gone to class, danced, partied, eaten, played poker, steam tunneled, and almost gotten busted with.

  I repeat: people I’d known for seven days.

  Everything was so much closer together here. As if we weren’t people at all but tiny microbes swimming around in a petri dish. Which was, in a way, more terrifying than a missing shrunken head. Because although I’d been here for only a week, I already understood that getting out of the petri dish was impossible, that now that we were here, there was no escaping Brookwood.

  “Enough banter,” Penn said as he shoved his chair back, the heavy wooden legs scraping across the tile floor. “I’ve got to get to it. My English essay calls, and I haven’t even finished the poems.”

  The English essay—something else I couldn’t get out of.

  I expected Hank to follow suit, but he just sat back and sipped his OJ, obviously lingering. What was he waiting for?

  Roxanne turned her back to him. “I’ve got some French Impressionists to study. Are you finished, Josie?”

  Hank’s eyes flickered with remorse. I glanced over at Annette, who had shaped her uneaten omelet into a smiley face. The mushroom slice made an awesome nose. I waited for her to acknowledge my presence, but she didn’t, and when I looked up, Marina was watching me.

  I stood and picked up my tray. “Yeah, I’m ready,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  It wasn’t until Monday after classes, on the way back to the dorm, that I found Annette alone.

  “Hey, you,” I said, coming up behind her.

  She turned. “Josie, hey.” I tried to read the expression in her eyes, but they were as elusive as morning mist on a lake. “I was going to come find y
ou yesterday, but I had a ton of schoolwork,” she said as we kept walking. (They didn’t call it homework at Brookwood—probably because we never got to go home.)

  “Yeah, me too. They really load it on here.” We reached the turnoff for the dorm but kept going, our footsteps hitting the pavement in perfect rhythm as we moved up the path and found a little bench.

  “Did we break up on Saturday?” I asked as soon as our butts hit the seat, the question refusing to stay inside a moment longer.

  “What?” Annette said, blinking. “No!” Then she was quiet. “Josie, no. That wasn’t what I was trying to say. I just, I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to keep dancing.”

  Relief flooded through me, giddy and light.

  Annette looked out at the field for a long moment, then turned to me. “I love you, Josie, like always. But I still need to be just me in front of people.”

  So much for giddy and light. “Why?”

  Her shoulders fell slightly. “I thought I explained this already.”

  “Apparently I’m a little slow on the upload,” I admitted.

  Annette shoved some crimson- and mustard-colored leaves aside with the sole of her shoe. “Because for the first time ever, I’m in a new place, with a clean slate. And I just want a little time to be myself first, before I’m with you.”

  “Do you want to be with me?”

  “Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

  I shrugged as a crow swooped into a nearby tree. “Okay, how much longer?”

  Annette shook her head slightly. “I’m not sure.”

  “That’s not very reassuring.”

  “Did you just hear me tell you that I love you, and that I want to be with you?” Annette asked, as if I were an impetuous child. “Nothing has changed between us.”

  Nothing has changed between us. I tried to absorb those words, to feel them in my bones. But things didn’t seem to fit the way they used to. We didn’t seem to fit the way we used to.

  Annette read my expression like an open book with large print. “Stop overthinking, Josie. It just makes everything worse.”

  I did overthink, I knew. And I certainly couldn’t say it made things better.

  She smiled at me and stood, reaching for my hand. “Everything is fine, I promise.”

  But a week, and then two and then three, went by. September became October and we were still a secret. Meanwhile, I seemed to be surviving my Brookwood life, if often hanging on by what felt like an unraveling thread. My essays for Professor Drake had intelligent-sounding titles and used as much logic and rhetoric as I could muster. They were, to the best of my ability, authentic. And I didn’t think they totally sucked. Whether Professor Drake thought they totally sucked was unclear, because every essay was covered in red ink when returned to its author, and he didn’t give grades. “You should know how you are doing without my having to tell you,” he liked to tell us over the top of his tortoiseshell glasses.

  Math was another story. I managed to get the schoolwork done and tried to pay attention in class but usually got lost and had to ask Cynthia for help. I was surprised when she always seemed willing. Professor Roth called tests and quizzes “demonstrations.” Only she pronounced them “dem-un-STRAY-shuns,” which was annoying because it felt like she was pointing out just how far I could stray from the material she was trying to teach. I failed the first quiz and so far hadn’t gotten anything higher than a C.

  Anthropology was the best class by far, and not just because Marina had transferred in, though she was definitely a lively addition to the discussions. We were in fact learning about the tribal peoples of the Amazon, all of whom fascinated me. Professor Mannering followed his syllabus to the letter, too, because he asked us over and over what things meant.

  “This is the most important thing we can ask ourselves,” he croaked, pacing back and forth among his artifacts and skulls. “Thinking about what our experiences mean is the best way to figure out who we are, to explore our essential humanity.”

  “As individuals, or as a society?” a girl named Ingrid asked.

  “Class?” Professor Mannering asked.

  “Both,” we replied.

  So I was fascinated by anthropology, distraught about algebra, and had essentially no idea how I was doing in English. I also had no idea what was going on with Annette, though I couldn’t exactly ignore the fact that she was spending more and more time running and less and less time with me. Or that we were still in the closet. And though I regularly crossed paths with and found myself at the table with them, I knew that, with the possible exception of Marina, I hadn’t really been accepted by Annette’s new posse of friends—the Soleets.

  “That’s a good thing,” Roxanne insisted one Saturday afternoon in October. We were sitting in a booth at Mike’s Diner in town, eating glazed doughnuts—heated in the microwave with melted butter.

  “My brother August told me about these,” she said, sliding a fork through the doughy ring and adding, “He and his friends used to get stoned in the woods on the way here.” The butter dripped onto the Formica table as she raised the fork to her mouth, closing her eyes for a moment to savor. “There used to be a lot more drugs at Brookwood, but they had a big crackdown a few years ago. That’s why everyone drinks.”

  Everyone definitely drank, including me and Roxanne. We split the cost of our vodka fifty-fifty and kept it in the back of our closet, carrying it across the field to our bench in the woods once or twice a week. We always kept to Roxanne’s two-shot limit as if it were a mandate, though. Roxanne knew what she was doing and I didn’t question her.

  I took a bite of my own doughnut, which tasted like heaven and sin at the same time. “Are the Soleets really that bad?” Correction. I didn’t usually question her.

  Roxanne eyed me over her bite of doughnut. “Absolutely. And Becca and her posse are even worse.”

  “What kind of worse?”

  She dropped her fork to the table, her dark eyes clouding as if there were a storm brewing behind her forehead. “The bitchy, popular, entitled kind of worse,” she said, taking an exasperated sip of water. “The ‘we are the only people who matter’ kind of worse. The—”

  “All right, all right,” I said. “I get it.” I believed her, and yet somehow didn’t want to. I wanted to believe that there was something good there, something worthwhile to attach to, because otherwise Annette spending so much time with them was seriously depressing.

  Roxanne finished her doughnut and started rifling through her bag. “I’ve got a bunch of errands to do,” she said as she opened her wallet. “You want to come?”

  I looked at her guiltily.

  “Let me rephrase that,” she said. “Is your essay for Monday done?”

  Sometimes Roxanne was worse than my mother.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said. “So I guess you’ll be heading back to our room.”

  “I guess,” I agreed.

  “I’ll pick up the ill-fated carrot dress for you.”

  It took me a second to realize that carrot was the color. “That would be awesome. Thanks.”

  We checked the bill and left our money on the table. “You sure you don’t want me to come?” I asked as we pushed through the door.

  “Positive. I’ll see you on campus.”

  I sighed at her retreating back moving up the sidewalk and wondered how Roxanne got her work done. From what I could tell, she spent most of her time on her art, and yet she pretty much pulled straight As.

  The walk back to Brookwood was short, and fifteen minutes later, I was back in our room. The giant pieces of painted paper were gone, but now the carpet was littered with confetti-like scraps of pink, red, orange, yellow, and blue. Roxanne had spent hours cutting out colored shapes, and these were the leftovers. It looked like someone had barfed up a rainbow on our floor.

  Roxanne was crazy talented—she got it from her mother, who owned a gallery and had occasional shows at small museums around the country—and spent all of her fr
ee time on her art. Which, at the moment, involved a zillion colored shapes cut out of painted paper, à la Henri Matisse’s cutout phase.

  “Matisse became chair- and bed-bound after he got abdominal cancer in his seventies,” she’d told me. “He couldn’t paint or sculpt anymore, so he turned to paper. With the help of his assistants, he started cutting shapes out of painted pieces of paper, putting them together to create collages.”

  She’d flashed a picture of a Matisse cutout at me, called Blue Nude. “The man was a genius,” she’d declared, clicking to another image, one of his dining room in Nice. The walls were lined with cut out figures—swimmers, divers, and sea creatures.

  “You can’t see it here because the picture is black and white, but the figures were a gorgeous, aquamarine blue,” Roxanne told me. “He created his own swimming pool when it was too hot outside to get to a real one.”

  I knew nothing about art, but I believed her.

  Leaving the scattered confetti where it was, I grabbed my twelve-hundred-page Norton Anthology of Short Fiction off my desk. This weekend’s assignment was to read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” choose a theme, and write an essay about the chosen theme’s major components. I climbed up to my bunk, propped myself against the wall with pillows, and hunched over the book, pencil poised for margin note-taking.

  I was three pages into the story, which was getting creepier than life in the warring Amazon, when I heard a knock on the door. Nobody ever knocked on our door, and I looked up, curious. “Come in.”

  The door opened and Annette appeared, wearing her cross-country uniform and a Giovanni’s tee. It sounds totally stupid, but my heart actually skipped a beat. I hadn’t been alone with Annette in what seemed like forever—it was almost as if a beautiful stranger had walked in.

  “Hey,” she said a little breathlessly.

  “Hey.”

  She glanced down at the carpet.

  “Piñata party,” I joked a little nervously.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “No. Roxanne’s working on an art project.”

  “Huh. Looks messy.”

  Silence.