He turned back to Ms. Latham, patted her shoulder in a fatherly way. “I agree with you completely,” he said. His eyes accomplished a fascinating twinkle—an engaging approval and acceptance. Finally, he brought the wine to his lips.
“Annie,” she said quietly, weaving her hair between her fingers as though she were our age. “Please call me Annie.”
She reached for her own glass and took an inexpert draft—more gulp than sip. Skye and I looked at each other—not quite forgiving but taking a moment of alarmed solidarity.
Then we looked away, remembering our slights. We passed the rest of the dinner like a furious but polite married couple, smiling at everyone else, avoiding each other’s eyes, and not addressing a single direct word to each other. I was furious at Skye for exposing me, she was furious at me for my lie of omission—letting her believe all this time that I’d been expelled. The anger rankled silently, to be exploded or forgotten at a later date.
THE NEXT MORNING was Sunday. Before Skye had a chance to appear with accusations or an invitation to breakfast with her parents, I got dressed and went over to Ms. Latham’s.
“My boyfriend has a soccer game at Amherst Academy,” I told her, when she opened the door. “I wonder if you could please give me a ride.”
She stood in her doorway, a red bandanna tied over her long blonde hair, a handmade coffee cup steaming in one hand. The Mondale/ Ferraro button had returned to its perch on her Brandeis sweatshirt. She hesitated a moment, and I could see in that indecision a careful weighing of relinquishing her Sunday against the audience with Senator Butterfield that had come about largely through me—culminating in the fact she had nothing else to do.
“This is nice,” she said, when we arrived on the playing fields in Amherst. The mown grass crunched under our feet with frost, and our breath billowed out in front of us. But the sun shone down amiably, and I shoved my mittens into the pocket of my down vest. We stood on the Amherst Academy side of the field, staring across the game at my old Waverly classmates. A towheaded girl I vaguely recognized sat on a folding chair next to the water cooler, writing down stats. She wore a tailored gray overcoat that went down to her ankles, much more grown up than the average prep school girl. It looked like something Skye would wear.
“Which one’s John Paul?” Ms. Latham asked, having wrested his name from me on the forty-five-minute drive from Esther Percy.
“He’s the goalie.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, the green-jerseyed team converged on John Paul, who dove to the left, keeping them from scoring. At Waverly, I’d seldom attended his soccer games. Usually I had my own competitions to worry about and couldn’t spare time to be a spectator. So it surprised me, how much I enjoyed watching his graceful lunges and intense focus. One sideways leap landed him on the ground, heroically speckling his face with dirt but saving another goal. I hid myself partially, standing halfway behind Ms. Latham’s broad shoulder, not wanting to interrupt his concentration.
At halftime, John Paul still hadn’t spotted me. He trotted across the field, waiting behind his teammates for a cup of water. The tow-headed girl sat gazing at her stats with insouciant obligation.
“Are we going over to say hi?” Ms. Latham asked.
I nodded, but walked toward him slowly. I wanted this incognito observation to last a few minutes longer. Because I could tell, with a lover’s radar, that the girl’s attitude would change when John Paul got to the cooler. And I wanted to see what he would do.
Sure enough: as John Paul filled his Dixie cup, the girl’s pencil came down. Her brilliant hair flipped back over her shoulder—inhuman in its sheen, a faint green cast from the sun’s reflection. She must be on the swim team, I thought, and racked my brain for her name. Probably two years younger than me, at least, to not be instantly recognizable.
We were close enough now to see John Paul nod at something she said. He filled his cup again, then moved away from the cooler. The girl stood, grabbing his jersey at the elbow. She pulled some Kleenex from the pocket of her luxurious coat and reached out to wipe the mud from his face.
John Paul took two steps back. He smiled—a kind and apologetic expression—and wiped his face off on the inside of his sleeve.
“Good boy,” Ms. Latham murmured.
John Paul turned and saw me—his face brightening several shades more brilliant than the interloper’s hair. His face-encompassing smile told me he couldn’t believe his luck. And I didn’t have to turn toward the girl with any kind of triumphant smile. Because Ms. Latham did it for me, a beautifully practiced and schoolgirl gesture, her chin halting just short of looking back over her shoulder, her eyes half closed, her lips perfectly pursed in pleased superiority.
I loved her in that moment, as John Paul’s arms wrapped around me, an embrace oblivious to the envy of every female onlooker.
10
I HAD NO CONTACT with Skye until Monday morning in English, when she slunk into class ten minutes late, wearing sunglasses and my too-small clothes.
Mr. November stopped in the middle of his Hamlet lecture and watched her cross the room, a palpable and uncomfortable happiness at the sight of her. Skye returned his gaze with a combination of sultriness and disdain that seemed lost on him. His eyes softened a little, and he smiled at her.
Skye ignored the empty chair next to me and sat across the table beside Laura Pogue-Smith, whose spine straightened with privilege. Mr. November waited a moment, then resumed his thoughts on the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia. Skye did not remove her sunglasses, and his glance intermittently traveled from the bulletin board toward her shrouded eyes. With each glance, Skye seemed to become more disgusted—as if his attention were rooted in lechery rather than suspicion. She shifted dramatically in her seat and elbowed a delighted Laura.
Mr. November pretended not to notice her theatrics until she made a sarcastic show of sliding off my gauzy white shirt, revealing a peach-colored camisole that I never would have worn on its own, certainly not in this underheated classroom. He turned faintly red, and stopped looking over at her. His Adam’s apple bobbed uncomfortably, and I saw that the stubble across his neck was blotchy and irritated. Even to me, he looked sadly boyish.
After a few minutes, Skye raised her hand. She had to lean forward and shake it for him to see—he’d concentrated his focus so definitely elsewhere.
“Skye,” he said, querulously. Pleading with her not to speak.
“Mr. November,” Skye said. “I wonder if I could be excused. Because we read all these books quite thoroughly at Devon. We read The Catcher in the Rye, and we read The Great Gatsby. We read The Waste Land until we wanted to slit our wrists, and E. E. Cummings until we forgot what a capital letter looks like. And we snored and snoozed our way through Hamlet, in English class and in the lousy student productions. Don’t you people realize that Shakespeare wrote other plays? Histories? Comedies? Do you think we could branch out a little? Because otherwise, I’d really like to be excused.”
She settled back in her chair, satisfied. Nobody laughed, but somebody dropped a pencil. It clattered onto the linoleum and rolled against the door, which Skye had left slightly ajar. Laura looked less certain of her newly elevated position. Mr. November’s face had turned bright pink, but the nervousness had vanished. It was one thing to smile back at her among the maple trees, with only quiet and complicit me as an audience. Another to be tested in front of his class. He knew his reaction to this challenge would be piped from classroom to dining hall to dormitory.
Knitting his brows together with unaccustomed sternness, he put down his Scribner paperback and wove his fingers together.
“Skye,” he said. “Why don’t you take your sunglasses off so I can see your eyes.”
She paused, then obeyed with a sultry air of insolence. The skin above her cheeks looked pure and dainty as lily-of-the-valley. But her irises swam red and burning.
“Since you know the work so well,” Mr. November said, his voice unnaturally deep—perhaps i
mitating a strict schoolmaster from his past, “why don’t you read the ‘To be or not to be’ speech?”
“The whole thing?”
“The whole thing.”
“Kind of a hackneyed choice, don’t you think? So many great soliloquies. Why does everyone always choose that one?”
“To be or not to be,” Mr. November repeated, with an authority we hadn’t known him capable of.
“I don’t have my book.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Mr. November said, “to someone so well acquainted with the text.”
Skye looked down at the table. Perhaps a full minute passed. The breath of twelve other girls warmed the room; the fair skin across Skye’s chest looked mottled and red. When she pulled on her shirt and pushed back her chair, I thought she would march out of class.
But instead, she plucked Laura’s book out of her hands and strode to the blackboard. After leafing through to the page she wanted, she closed her eyes. When she opened them, she looked remarkably clearheaded and serious.
“There is a willow grows aslant a brook,” she said, barely glancing at the text. “That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.”
The other girls in the class looked to Mr. November, who sat staring at her, unmoving. Then they leafed through their texts to find her spot.
I didn’t need to leaf. I had switched schools, too: we’d read Hamlet in English fourth form year at Waverly. I would never be the student Skye was, but I knew the play well enough to recognize this passage. My skin turned hot and clammy beneath my turtleneck.
“Her clothes spread wide,” Skye said. “And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up.”
She caught my eye and interrupted her performance to smile. I glared back at her. Not wanting to think I acquiesced in any way, to assisting a tragic fate.
The sound of pages turning had stopped. Skye’s voice sounded haunting, commanding. No wonder Mr. November didn’t interfere: despite the defiance, her performance was splendid. Every word perfect. Her hair fell loose around her face, the unseasonable shirt flapped loose at her wrists—which she lifted occasionally, floating slim fingers through the air. It doesn’t make sense, in the cold weather, that a window would have been open: but I remember a breeze, dramatically shifting cloth and curls.
“. . . but long it could not be / Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, / Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death.”
She paused a moment, letting her virtuosity resonate in the quiet room. Then she flickered her eyes back to Mr. November—daring him to rebuke her—and adjusted her stance to pedestrian teenage boredom.
“To be or not to be,” she said, in a flat and robotic voice. And recited the entire soliloquy—staring directly at the book, speaking with ironic lack of emotion—before flouncing back to her chair and sliding her sunglasses back into place.
Mr. November sat with his hand marking a page in his unopened text. An actor preparing to play Hamlet might have done well to look at his pale and indecisive face—equal parts awed, angry, and uncertain.
“Okay,” he finally said, his voice—after Skye’s—reedy and ineffectual. “Does anyone remember what I was saying?”
LEAVING CLASS, SKYE fell into step beside me—shaking her head after a minute, as if the companionship had been mere habit and my transgressions had come back to her. English was in the old part of campus, and the buildings surrounding us were the ubiquitous white clapboard, black shutters. After the Georgian brick of Waverly, Esther Percy always seemed so homey and quaint. Peaceful.
When we reached the top of the lawn—the path splitting, headed either left to my dorm or right to the more modern, brown dining hall—Skye finally spoke.
“You going to lunch?” she said.
“Sure,” I said, but neither of us moved.
“I was so angry that night after dinner,” she said, and I thought she meant at me—for letting her believe I’d been expelled from Waverly. Her voice didn’t sound angry at all, but more contemplative, almost sedated. In class, she had fooled even me with her performance. But now I remembered: she was completely stoned.
“I guess I should have told you,” I said. “That I never got kicked out.”
“Oh that,” Skye said. “You mean that’s true?”
“Of course it’s true.”
“I just assumed you were lying. To my father, I mean.”
“No,” I said.
She pushed her sunglasses up on her head and narrowed her eyes. The redness made them look paler, nearly blue. “I always wondered why they kicked you out and not him. Seemed terribly sexist.”
A squirrel scampered out from behind an elm. It took several steps toward us and stood on its haunches—begging for food. We both shrugged at it apologetically, and it ran up to a perch in an overhanging branch.
“Did you see that pervert?” Skye said, and for a moment I didn’t know who she meant—Mr. November or her father. Or somehow the squirrel.
“Staring at me,” Skye said. “I’ll bet that’s why Mrs. November left him. I hope she’s somewhere great now. I hope she’s with someone who really loves her.”
We stood quietly for a moment imagining Mrs. November, laughing over drinks with a handsome and devoted stranger.
“And who knew Ms. Latham was such a slut,” Skye said.
The words, their venom, made me take a step backward. Yesterday Ms. Latham had taken us to lunch in Amherst. Afterward she took a tour of the Dickinson Homestead, giving John Paul and me time to cling to each other in the gardens. I imagined the chaste poet, staring through her window at our embrace in the overgrown hemlocks. All day, for no good reason, Ms. Latham had been so accommodating and nice. I hated the ugly negligence of that word—slut—applied to such a kind and careful person.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“Didn’t you see the way she acted with my dad.”
“Maybe she just admires him,” I said, a lame denial, shamefully lacking loyalty to either party.
“Admires him,” Skye said. “Please. Did you see the way she flirted? With my mother and me right there? It was disgusting.”
The only full sentences Ms. Latham had constructed during dinner had been her defense of Skye. Other than that, she’d spoken in such quiet and deferential tones, I had to lean across the table to hear her. I didn’t want to admit that this had seemed its own subtle brand of flirtation.
“Oh Senator Butterfield,” Skye mimicked, in a high and jeering voice. “You’re my hero.”
“She was really pretty quiet,” I said.
“Quiet!” Skye barked a short, campy laugh. “It’s not about noise, Catherine. You can’t tell, but I’ve seen it my whole life. The way these women come on to him, like he doesn’t have a family. Like we don’t matter! My poor mother. I could have died. I can’t believe I invited her.”
I let a minute pass, and then another. Skye pushed her sunglasses back onto her nose.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m totally starving, but I can’t stand to go to the dining hall. I don’t want to see Ms. Latham, and I don’t want to see Mr. November. Besides which, I know how red my eyes are, and I don’t think any of the usual biddies will be so lenient with me.” On Mondays Mrs. Chilton and the headmistress always ate lunch in the dining hall.
“Go back to my room,” I said. “I’ll bring you some food.”
I stood and watched her walk to White Cottage. My gauzy white shirt peeked out of her jean jacket at the cuffs and waist. In the indirect winter light, her hair looked softer—chestnut—the curls springing despite the plodding pace of her stride.
I thought of all the times Ms. Latham had turned a blind eye to our delinquent behavior. More, I thought of how awestruck she’d been on Saturday. It had seemed more touching than seditious. On our trip to Amherst she’d been calmer—like she’d had some sort of meaningful communion the night before, become an insider. Maybe she’d felt comforted by Senator Butterfield’s strength and comp
osure. Not to mention whatever she’d seen him glimpse in herself. Maybe that was part of the reason she’d given up her day to bring me to John Paul.
And what did it mean, anyway, the way Skye’s father had smiled at Ms. Latham? That he wanted every young person to fulfill her own unique potential? Or did it imply something more lecherous? Should he have been more like John Paul, stepping away from the slightest contact? Or would that have been arrogant, impolitic?
I understood what Skye expected. She wanted me to participate in her bristle, condemning Ms. Latham in a knee-jerk way. And while I couldn’t quite participate in this defamation, neither could I bring myself to refute it. When I returned to my room with over-baked chicken and soft pecan brownies, I said nothing to defend Ms. Latham.
The truth was, I felt too relieved to be back in Skye’s good graces to risk them. I didn’t want to demand an explanation for her behavior at dinner, or sing Ms. Latham’s praises. As much as Skye’s performance in Mr. November’s class startled me, another part of me admired it more than I could say. Such fearlessness. Such disregard for any consequences, resulting in no consequences at all. If I’d been the sort of person to gossip, or tell stories, I would have phoned Susannah and told her what had happened in the most minute detail. Instead I kept it inside, like everything between Skye and me. So that it swelled with importance, sometimes feeling like sanctity, other times feeling like peril.
“So you really didn’t get kicked out,” Skye said, ripping a chicken leg from the thigh with savage purpose.
“No,” I admitted. “But it was still pretty bad.”
She shook her head. “You’re lucky,” she said. “You don’t know what it feels like.”
Despite the preface of solace, the words had the effect she meant. Before, she thought I’d done for love what she’d done for peace and egalitarianism. Now I felt excluded. Apart from and less than her.
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