Gossip of the Starlings

by Nina de Gramont

  “I can’t,” she said, remorse rendering her anguished. “Catherine, please.”

  I turned around and there she stood, closer than I expected. Our noses almost bumped, and I took a step back. She reached out and laid her fingers on my cast.

  “I can’t tell you,” she whispered, “how sorry I am.”

  I could see Mr. November, walking briskly across the lawn, trying hard to look like a concerned teacher rather than a worried boyfriend. I wanted to scream at him to go back to the dining hall and mind his own business.

  Instead I turned on Skye. “Sorry doesn’t change anything,” I said, the very words I had hated my father for saying, after Waverly. Still, I went on.

  “Sorry doesn’t let me ride Pippin,” I said. “Sorry doesn’t give me my championships. Sorry doesn’t get me to the National Horse Show, which I’ve only worked for my entire life.”

  She just stood there, looking down at me. Blameworthy and forgivable as Guinevere. I had started prep school at thirteen. Rich, wild girls—the ones who couldn’t contain their outlaw yearnings—were dazzling and commonplace as New England snow. But Skye was a newborn rebel, with a vengeful and mercurial heart. At any moment she might repent, or head for a cliff, not caring who else got hurt.

  “Sorry,” I said, “doesn’t do one single thing.”

  Not a twitch, not a word.

  “Does it?” I said, wanting an answer of some kind, even a denial.

  She fell to her knees. Ms. Latham had come to her door and stood on her stoop, watching us. Behind Skye, Mr. November stopped in his tracks. Girls had begun to appear on the hill, finished with lunch and heading to dorm rooms or the library before afternoon classes. He frowned and stared at his feet, hands stuffed in his pockets, impotent.

  I stuffed my good hand in my pocket—liking the looks of that stance, its refusal of further involvement.

  “I am covered in shame,” Skye said, like she’d read my mind, and wanted to stick to a medieval script. She reached out to throw her arms around my legs and I took a step backward, letting her pitch forward into the snow. Because the drama wasn’t for me: it was for Skye. Feeding and living off these scenes, the swirl and the crash of them. The sight of her there, curls spread out on the ground, her quivering face when she raised it up toward me. The uncontainable mess of her—thoughts and emotions and needs and neuroses, all spilling out over their corporeal lines. It was as thrilling as Pippin’s gallop and frightening as my fall. I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t want it.

  At the doorway to White Cottage, I looked back. Mr. November was heading back to the dining hall, hands still in his pockets, while Ms. Latham went to help Skye to her feet.

  “Leave me alone,” Skye said, yanking away her elbow and standing. Her voice was a precise imitation of my own—not just the words but the tone and modulation. The slight edge of tears.

  You wouldn’t think it would be so hard—running with just one arm. I clambered awkwardly upstairs and stayed there until the afternoon bells.

  THAT NIGHT, I TOOK the last of my Percodan and crawled into bed. About fifteen minutes later, nearly sunken into the blissfully dreamless sleep only prescription medication can provide, I heard footsteps coming up the worn wooden steps. They sounded too light and fervent to be an Amanda returning from the bathroom. I let my eyes flutter open, blinking at the ceiling.

  She paused outside my door for a long time, impressively still. I could almost see her hair, its motionless disarray, catching the muted light of the hallway’s dim, bare bulb. The floorboards didn’t emit the barest whisper of a creak. I thought about getting out of bed and opening the door, shouting her back down the stairs. But my body felt glued to the sheets, my voice muted by the persistent impulse to protect her.

  Finally, an envelope scraped through the crack beneath my door, and Skye’s footsteps retreated. I could hear her taking the stairs three at a time, a weightless and endearing scuttle. Her letter lay on the floor, a neon swatch of white in dark shadows. I stared at it, barely seconds, before my eyelids pasted themselves together and let me forget her until morning, when I slid the letter—unopened—back into her mailbox outside the dining hall.

  A few hours later, in English, Skye’s seat was empty. Ms. Latham sat at the head of the table. She told us that Mr. November’s father had died suddenly, of a heart attack, and he was taking a brief leave of absence. I found myself wondering if the story were true or if he and Skye had been found out. Perhaps the rejected letter had not been an apology or plea for forgiveness, but a farewell. I felt a lonesome scratch at the base of my throat, at another person gone.

  But Skye hadn’t gone anywhere. I saw her at lunch, sitting next to Eleanor, the unopened white envelope on the table beside her soup bowl. Dear Catherine. Skye’s pretty, schoolgirl script called to me from across the long, noisy room. So that when the next letter came—later this time, after I’d fallen asleep—its floating scrape woke me, and I threw my covers aside. I gave her enough time to leave the dorm, not wanting her to hear me cross my room and pick up the envelope. This time she hadn’t sealed it, an irresistible concession that allowed me to open the letter and pore over it, before putting it back in her mailbox, to pretend I hadn’t read a word.

  Dear Catherine,

  It hardly seems worth it, telling you how sorry I am. I know that sorry isn’t enough, because you think I don’t get it. You think I don’t know how much Nationals meant to you, or else you think I don’t care. But I do know, and I do care, more than I can ever find a way to say. If I could somehow go back, and keep myself from riding down that hill toward you, I would. If I could take a hammer to my arm, if that would heal you and let you compete again, I would.

  But I don’t suppose that helps. Maybe you’d rather hear how much I miss you. When you were gone, I waited and waited for you to come back to school. Even though you wouldn’t take my calls, it never occurred to me that we wouldn’t be friends anymore. Because to me, our friendship is just fact. Ever since last year, the world has been divided into two eras. I think of the time before and the time after. Obviously the time before was better, everything seemed clear and in a way very pure. I remember once when I was twelve or so, driving somewhere late at night with my parents, some town I’d never seen during the day. And I fell in love with this house that had two screened-in porches and a funny breezeway. It was near a lake, and the lights were on inside and it just looked so merry and cheerful. Then the next day we drove by the same house in the daylight, and it was so measly and ill repaired, with this tacky aluminum siding. Did that make the house I’d seen the night before, the one I’d loved, any less real? Does this make any sense? Of course it doesn’t. The only thing that’s made any sense since I left Devon is my friendship with you. I can’t tell you how I hate that I’ve managed to ruin things between us, and especially that I’ve hurt you. Hurt you, literally! My God, Catherine, I broke your arm. You must know that never in my life could I ever have thought myself capable of causing that sort of harm.

  But at the same time, I think there’s a place for you and me, still, and that we’ll find it again. I know you’ve heard about Mr. November, how his father died. He asked me to come to Newton with him, to the funeral. I told him he couldn’t show up at his father’s funeral with a teenage girlfriend. He said we didn’t have to tell anyone I was a teenager, as if I look anything like an adult, as if my face hasn’t been plastered all over the newspapers since the day I was born. Meanwhile the pictures of Mrs. November are multiplying—he must have gone out and bought new frames. There are pictures of her rowing a canoe and pictures of her at the beach in a red bathing suit. She has beautiful legs, they’re very long and strong. I wanted to tell him to call her, to call his wife, to bring her to the funeral. He seems very wrecked and shaky, and I can’t come close to managing his emotions. After I saw him today the only thing I wanted was to come to you and tell you everything.

  So now you’re rolling your eyes, and you’re thinking that I’m impossibly
selfish, and all that I want is an audience. But that’s not true. I don’t want to defend myself, or pretend I’m not a terrible person, because obviously in so many ways I am. But what I’m trying to say, what it really boils down to, is that I miss you. I miss you, Catherine, and I love you, and I still am and will remain your friend whether you want me to or not.

  With all my guilt and love and hope, Skye Butterfield

  There was much in that letter, and the succession of letters that followed, that wooed me back. At the same time, there was much that repelled me, enough that despite my genuine sympathy for her, and a growing return of the love she professed for me, I did not approach Skye. I only returned the letters to her box, newly sealed, my careful reading evident in the creases and folds of the delicate paper. Once, across the table in English class, in response to her intent stare I allowed her the smallest smile, a fraction of a hint at forgiveness. Her return smile seemed so infused with victory that I quickly looked away, not wanting to see her satisfaction or disappointment. Knowing now that it was just a matter of time before I gave in—to both our relief—and allowed our friendship to continue.

  I didn’t hear from John Paul, and I didn’t hear from Susannah. But the letters from Skye persisted, as she traveled across campus almost every night, her own determined mailman.

  IT WASN’T ENOUGH for her, those midnight deliveries. With Mr. November still in Newton, Skye felt lonely and restless in her spotless dorm room. She would watch Eleanor’s head bent over books and try to throw herself into her own studies to forget what had happened—to forget what she had done to me. But that only makes me feel guiltier, she wrote. It’s not fair at all, that I can still do what I’m best at, while you have to sit on the sidelines because of me.

  Skye writhed miserably beneath the weight of this new remorse. Since her expulsion from Devon, nothing had caused her serious regret. The expulsion itself and her civil disobedience at the old-growth forest—both were tinged with an odd sort of heroism. As for the drugs and Mr. November she had yet to be caught. Such late-night transgressions, without the rebuke of authority, took the form of dream occurrences: blameless and unaccountable, like the twelve dancing princesses and their ruined slippers. But the snap of your arm and your body tumbling through the air will stay with me till the day I die. The sound and the sight are with me every day and every night, so that I can’t sit still. I can’t sleep.

  Late on a Friday night, she shook poor Eleanor awake. Without glasses, with her hair loose, Eleanor looked like a startled fairy queen. She blinked through the dark at Skye, alarmed and uncertain. Reading Skye’s letter, I imagined Eleanor had begun to feel it, too: the foreshadowing of Skye’s doom and the fear that at the pivotal moment, fate would decide to leave Skye—in all her shining and dangerous life—and take her instead.

  Still, Eleanor followed Skye’s directions like an indentured servant, putting on her warmest clothes. Skye watched her transform herself from magical creature to dumpy girl. When Eleanor started to wrap her hair into its usual messy knot, Skye braided it for her. “And no glasses,” Skye said. “You don’t need them.”

  Eleanor stuffed them hastily into the pocket of her down coat.

  March, and still the snow. They trudged down the dirt path to Percy Hill Road. No cars that time of night in the sleepy village. By the time they got to the main road—trucks and occasional sedans kicking mud into the breakdown lane—the cuffs of their pants were soaked and their knuckles (Eleanor’s under her mittens, Skye’s bare) chapped and red.

  “Where are we going?” Eleanor asked Skye, when she woke up enough to think.

  “To Waverly. To buy coke from Catherine’s boyfriend.”

  Catherine’s boyfriend. The scholarship student. Skye couldn’t bother with names. I sometimes wonder how she would have reacted if she’d met my father, with his furrowed brow and townie accent. Of course she persisted in believing the coke came from John Paul regardless of what I said. As if coke that pure could have emerged from the banks of Saw River.

  I imagine Skye arriving on campus in the gray predawn. Completely at home, stealing between silver evergreens and redbrick buildings. Like the native she was, she would be able to differentiate between halls and dorms. When she rapped on a random window, the sleepy student who answered would recognize her as one of his own and direct her to John Paul’s window.

  In deference to me, John Paul would have invited Skye and Eleanor to sleep on his floor. I imagine Eleanor’s face, waking in the morning to see John Paul tangled in the covers, the gorgeous, sleeping wonder of him. He would have brought them breakfast from the dining hall and sent them home to me empty-handed.

  But they never got to Waverly. This man picked us up, college age but not college type. He said his name was Van. Van was headed to Ince, Massachusetts, just south of the Vermont border. Not much progress, but enough to get them started. Eleanor climbed into the passenger seat. Skye sat in back.

  “You girls go to college?” he asked.

  Eleanor said no, they went to the Esther Percy School for Girls. Skye kicked the back of her seat, and Van laughed. He looked at Skye in the rearview mirror, his eyes off the road too long. He was young, probably in his early twenties, and might have been handsome but for some unnameable and unsettling air.

  “What’s wrong, Red?” he said. “You worry I’ll show up at high tea?”

  “Not at all,” Skye said. “We have excellent security.”

  “Can’t be too excellent, with the two of you out wandering at this hour.”

  “We have permission,” Skye said, and he laughed again.

  There was a television movie we had all seen, it may have been an after-school special. Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker, starring Charlene Tilton. In it, a serial rapist drove a battered Japanese sports car, black and tinny. That’s exactly what Van’s car looked like, Skye wrote. I should have known not to get inside.

  They drove past the sign WELCOME TO MASSACHUSETTS. MICHAEL DUKAKIS, GOVERNOR. Skye and her parents had eaten dinner with him and his wife in Boston. She rolled down the window and sipped the dark, frigid air, wondering if Van recognized her.

  Van took the first exit. Eleanor sat up straighter in her seat. Skye could see the crown of her head, the glossy brown braid. She wanted to stroke it—comfort her and apologize.

  “You don’t need to get off the highway,” Skye said. “We’ll keep going from here.”

  He didn’t answer but drove through a dimly lit strip of gas, food, lodging. Then continued on down the road—the streetlights blinking yellow and spaced farther and farther apart. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel—an effort to appear cool or an inability to contain jitters.

  “Where are you going?” Skye said.

  I imagine her voice still bright enough to engage him, but he didn’t answer. Just glanced into the rearview mirror, only slightly less nervous than his captives. I watched Eleanor’s head, Skye wrote. I could tell she wanted to turn around and look at me, but she was too scared. And I knew this whole thing was all my fault, and on top of everything else now I’d put Eleanor in danger. Skye put her hand in her coat pocket—my Black Watch plaid—and closed her fist around the handle of my stiletto. She wondered if she should just lean forward and slit Van’s throat before he had a chance to hurt them. I imagine blood spurting onto the steering wheel. Poor, helpless Eleanor, and the car skidding off the road. The senator’s daughter, climbing into her victim’s lap to take the wheel and save them all, and pleading self-defense in the morning newspapers.

  Van turned onto a winding dirt road. Civilization disappeared behind them. The car bumped uncomfortably over pebbles and potholes. Skye felt the end of a dull spring, breaking through the Naugahyde upholstery. She pictured herself and Eleanor, murdered in a ditch, and worried that on top of everything else poor Mr. November would somehow be blamed. In the rearview mirror, she could see the headlights of another car, following them. For a moment she felt a surge of relief, thinking they’d been rescued
. But then she saw Van look in the mirror again and his slight nod of recognition. The blood in her chest turned to ice. I killed Eleanor, she thought, and closed her hand more tightly around my knife.

  The road rambled to a dead end, and Van pulled the car off to the side. The other car stopped behind them. Skye saw two men get out of the car. Doors slammed. Van tapped the steering wheel. Broad footsteps in the snow, walking toward them.

  Eleanor screamed. Skye released the blade of her knife but kept it hidden by her side. Van touched his keys, about to turn off the ignition. And then changed his mind. Pressed his foot to the gas. Turned the car around and headed back up the road. Skye and Eleanor turned around in their seats, watching the faceless men recede. One of them raised his arms in a wide, angry question.

  They rambled back out to Main Street. Skye rolled the window down, so that the three of them shivered—breath escaping in thick, visible gusts—by the time the car slowed down, and Van pulled into Ince’s all-night Texaco. Both girls waited until he’d come to a full stop before fumbling for the door handles.

  “Thank you very much,” Eleanor said, as if he were somebody’s father—driving them home after a sleepover. Then she climbed out of the car.

  Skye waited the barest second, allowing herself to catch his eye. He had nice blue eyes and a Roman nose. Some angry-looking acne across his jaw.

  “What just happened?” she said.

  Van shrugged. He seemed shaken and relieved. Then he jutted his chin toward the rearview mirror, and Skye knew he was indicating her knife.

  “That wouldn’t have helped,” he said, and she scrambled out of the car fast as she could.

  The neon lights from the gas station bathed the parking lot in a dull yellow glow. Skye and Eleanor clung to each other a moment, their bodies trembling. Then Eleanor pushed Skye away.

  “I hate you,” she said. She raised her heavily gloved hand and swatted the side of Skye’s face. Skye lifted up her arms to deflect the next two lame and frazzled blows.