Gossip of the Starlings

by Nina de Gramont

  He sat there for what seemed forever, his fingers pressing through the fabric and around her throat. From under the covers, Skye couldn’t tell whether he meant the touch to be threatening, conciliatory, or erotic. Finally she heard him get up and fumble around her room, like he couldn’t find his way out in the dark. After a while the door clicked shut. She pulled the covers off her head and breathed in the clear, unfettered air.

  Pale starlight misted in from above, just enough so that she could register the disturbances in the room—the things on her desk disarranged, her drawers left ajar. She got out of bed and plunged her hand into the top drawer, beneath her socks.

  The coke was gone.

  WE COULDN’T EXACTLY report a theft. “Maybe I should tell them about Mr. November,” Skye said.

  “Tell them what, exactly? That he threatened to kill you? Or that you’ve been dating him.”

  “Some combination of the two.”

  We sat together on bales of hay in Pippin’s stall, skipping Mr. November’s third-period class. I imagined him scanning the room, all jittery nerves, jerking his head up whenever he heard a door rattle anywhere in the building. Pining despite himself for Skye’s appearance.

  “You never should have messed with him,” I said.

  “Easy to say now,” she said, as if the relationship had once looked like a good idea. I tried to imagine what would happen if Mr. November turned us in. Pippin dropped his head and snorted, then nibbled at the pocket of Skye’s jeans. I expected her to jump, startled, but instead she grabbed onto his halter and stroked his muzzle.

  “I used to come up here that week after you got hurt,” she said. “Before you came back to school. I’d bring him carrots and sugar cubes and hang out on the hay. I always waited for him to seem scared—to kick me or something—but he never did.”

  Any other time, this would have interested me. I would have asked Skye questions, about how Pippin seemed in my absence and the way he’d reacted to her. But just then, I needed to keep her on track. There was no room now for the bad judgment that led to Mr. November in the first place. Skye’s hand needed to be held, like a child’s. She needed to be told exactly what to do and how to do it. I wished I could will myself into her body—pulling all the necessary strings and suppressing every unpredictable or dangerous impulse.

  “Listen,” I said. “The most important thing is, if we get caught, we can’t say where we got the coke.”

  “I don’t even know.” Her voice sounded vaguely petulant. She pushed Pippin’s head away and said, in a softer tone, “You should let me ride him sometime.”

  The request was too ridiculous to merit an answer. I grabbed her hand, trying to snap her back to reality.

  “We can’t say anything about Waverly,” I said, not mentioning John Paul or Susannah or Drew—as if possibly Skye could have forgotten their names.

  “Of course,” she said. “But we have to say it came from somewhere.”

  “Remember that guy Van?” I said. “You can say you got it from him. Just make up more details, and tell them about his name and his car. Say he picked you up hitchhiking and sold it to you.”

  “Shit,” Skye said. And then louder: “Shit!”

  In the next stall, Laura’s horse whinnied and kicked the wall. But Pippin just stood, newly Zen. Ears barely twitching.

  “This can’t happen,” Skye said.

  A hot day, she wore my clothes again—a filmy Indian skirt and a tank top. The skirt was too long on me, and hardly covered her calves. Her hair was skinned back into a ponytail and her face looked pointed and pale, her bearing so tremulous that I thought she might shatter into the air around us.

  She threw herself back on the hay bale, arms out by her sides like a snow angel. “My father will die,” she said. “If this happens right before he resigns? Everyone will think that’s the reason. I’ve put him through enough. First he will kill me, and then he will die.”

  Her father, I knew, would take her home and brush her off and send her to another tony school. Whereas my father: I couldn’t even think what my father would do. Given the way he’d reacted to my relatively minor infractions, and the fact that cocaine—of all drugs—belonged to the world of Studio 54 and debutantes and movie executives, all the glamorous and nonworking rich he most despised.

  “Look,” I said. “Maybe it won’t even happen. Maybe we’re getting all wrought up over nothing, and Mr. November was just bluffing. He probably just took it home and snorted it.”

  “Maybe he took it over to Ms. Latham’s,” Skye said. “The two of them sat up and snorted it together, then made passionate love on one of her ratty hook rugs.”

  “No,” I said. “Men can never get it up after snorting coke.”

  “I’ve heard that’s a myth,” she said, and we couldn’t help laughing.

  Not wanting to go to the dining hall, we walked to the orchard for lunch. We ate apples and smoked cheddar cheese and steaming slices of pie. Then we walked up the hill and went to our different classes—AP French for me, AP history for Skye.

  We didn’t hug before parting. I didn’t turn to watch her walk away, curls tamed into that long, long ponytail. Narrow shoulders gleaming with perspiration from trotting uphill to get to class on time.

  EXACTLY FIFTY MINUTES LATER, I bumped into Laura on my way to Human Behavior.

  “Did you hear?” she said. “Mrs. Chilton took Skye out of history.”

  The dean of students had poked her elegant gray head into the classroom. Skye turned four shades of pale, pushed her chair back, and followed her out of class without even collecting her books.

  There was no point in my going to class; I went to White Cottage and sat on my bed. Knowing that soon someone would come to get me and that when I returned it would be to pack my belongings. I thought about giving myself a head start but realized that would be a premature admission of guilt. So there was nothing to do but wait. It seemed the sky outside should grow dark, but the days had finally grown longer. Sunlight beamed stubbornly through my windows.

  The bells tolled class. I sat on top of my cool French linen, sweaty legs crossed. The warped floorboards and simple white walls—spackled with thumbtack holes—had been home to a hundred girls before me. And I recognized the moment as a reprieve. I knew that whatever happened in the next few hours would define my life for a very long time. Somehow in that brief span of moments my belief system shifted in a way that hadn’t occurred when I’d left Waverly, or started Esther Percy, or broken my arm. Not when I’d pledged a new life of purity, sitting on the stone wall with Skye. Only in my room, waiting to be summoned, did I arrive at a clear understanding. This time, these moments, were not my life but its threshold. Whereas I had believed myself to be entirely formed, I was actually very much an embryo—sections of my brain and being, years away from becoming whole. Years from now, I would not be able to fathom the things I had done, participated in. One day, danger and its irresistible wake would no longer be something I keened toward. For some reason this gave me comfort as I looked around at my scarves and my pictures, my tapestries and schoolbooks, my stack of record albums. I tapped my fingers on my knees, patiently waiting to bid good-bye to everything I had known before.

  WHEN SKYE WALKED into her office, Mrs. Chilton sat behind her desk with Ms. Latham standing on one side and Mr. November on the other. Skye didn’t wait for them to speak. She opened her mouth and told them everything. Of all her performances, this must have been the most virtuoso. She executed her betrayal in the most minute and compelling detail. No doubt if Mr. November had not been there she would have included him. Instead, she constructed her disclosure entirely around me. She told them about snorting coke off the toaster oven in my room in White Cottage. She told them about our trip to Cape Cod and her disappearance. She told them about the pot we had smoked in our dorm rooms and the mushrooms we had eaten over Easter vacation. She told them there was more coke on the way and that I had promised to deliver it to her.

  While th
e small group of adults stared at her, entirely floored. They had called her into the office because of the unauthorized charges—totaling more than two thousand dollars—that had appeared on Ms. Latham’s credit-card statement, and which had been traced back to Skye through the customer service staff at L.L. Bean. Ms. Latham was there as apologetic accuser, Mr. November as Skye’s faculty adviser.

  There must have been a long silence at the end of her arresting monologue. I imagine Mr. November staring at the floor—insides hollow from the stolen coke and his own impending doom. Ms. Latham wishing she’d gone directly to Skye instead of to Mrs. Chilton. And Mrs. Chilton herself, wending her hands together, anticipating the brewing storm. Saying in a stern but coaxing tone to Skye that the important thing was for her to tell them the original source of the coke: the name of the dealer, the person who had procured it.

  And Skye told them what she had decided, from the very beginning, to be the truth.

  Here’s what I know about what happened next: Mrs. Chilton asked Mr. November to walk Skye back to her room. She sent Ms. Latham to collect me.

  “MISS MORROW,” Mrs. Chilton said, as I walked into her office. She sat in a wicker caned chair, her posture impossibly precise. Her skin was darkly tanned and deeply lined from years of vigorous walks and sailing trips. But through the crinkles and folds, her eyes shone a youthful cerulean blue.

  I took the chair facing her desk. It was upholstered in chintz and much more comfortable than her own. The dean’s office at Waverly had been shrouded in academic stillness—leather, velvet, and antique. This room didn’t have that quality, exactly, nor the bustling air of industry of my father’s office. Everything here looked used in a worn, unvaluable way. There was a collection of china cats on one shelf. Doilies covered worn patches on armchairs. It seemed cozy and civilized. A gray-haired place, perfect for tea and compliments.

  “You know why you’re here?” Mrs. Chilton said.

  “Skye’s in trouble?”

  “I’m afraid she is,” Mrs. Chilton said. “Very grave trouble. As are you.”

  I didn’t say anything. A landscape portrait hung behind her in a darkly burnished frame. Horses and spaniels, perhaps on a fox hunt. I allowed myself a brief route of escape: Pippin and me, sailing down the cross-country course. I laid my hand on top of my cast, newly pristine after Cape Cod Bay and Maushop Lake had destroyed its predecessor.

  “You’ve had quite a year,” she said. “How’s your arm?”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Getting better.”

  “I’m so glad to hear it.” Palpable sarcasm. Maybe she thought I deserved permanent impairment.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I wonder if she was at all tempted, to see how long I would go without telling her anything. To sit there with me, casting her concentrated combination of kind and stern, until finally my guard broke down and I admitted to knowing the reason for this audience. It would have been a long wait. Forever or more. I never would have said a word.

  “Skye tells us a story about cocaine,” Mrs. Chilton said, after several minutes had ticked silently by.

  I didn’t answer.

  “She tells us that you and she have been using cocaine throughout the school year. That you’ve obtained it more than twice, from your friends at Waverly.”

  I blinked back at her, my fingers resting on the arms of the chair. My shoulders at ease, as if what she said had nothing to do with me. As if English were not my native language.

  “She tells us that a young man by the name of John Paul Saxton has been selling the cocaine to you and to your friends at Waverly. She tells us he has more. That you plan to bring more cocaine here, to this campus.”

  The strongest sort of sting behind my eyes. My teeth found my front lip, evincing the tiniest drop of blood. The back of my throat went dry.

  “Do you have anything to say about this, Catherine?”

  My fingers clenched, quietly clawing the armrest. I realized there were marks, where previous interrogants must have done the same.

  And I thought of John Paul. I thought of the first day he’d sat next to me and offered his hand. I thought of his head bent over books. I thought of him rescuing Pretty Girl and saving goals on the soccer field. I thought of him on Cape Cod, ready to face any necessary consequence to help find Skye.

  When John Paul and I had been caught in bed, the headmaster at Waverly called us into his office to lecture us on the importance of parietal rules and the many reasons for staying chaste. He had talked about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. He reminded us repeatedly of our tender ages. And from the moment we sat down in our chairs, spaced two feet apart, John Paul had held my hand. While the headmaster stared, persisting with his intrusive and embarrassing lecture. John Paul’s arm reaching across the air between us, clasping my clammy fingers with a warm and comforting grip. Nodding as the headmaster spoke but refusing to be cowed. Making his quiet, obstinate, and gentlemanly stand: the right to his own feelings. For me.

  I knew that John Paul would protect Susannah and Drew. He would sit in that same chair, alone this time, facing Waverly’s headmaster. He would firmly and effusively deny selling coke but would not offer an alternative theory. Susannah and Drew would return to school, pockets full of coke, nothing left in John Paul’s room but the scrapes of Scotch tape that had held up posters of Pelé and Bob Marley. They would huddle together and discuss coming forward. Confessing. But they never would. The damage had already been done. John Paul wasn’t coming back no matter what they did. Why take themselves down with him?

  Skye’s story would stand as truth.

  I thought of John Paul’s meager house. His exhausted mother. His father, across the Atlantic, denying the existence of a son who might make him so infinitely proud. Would this fiasco convince Monsieur Filage that he’d done the right thing in denying him?

  John Paul. His hard work and his kind soul and his ruined future.

  My youthful love of justice violently rebelled against everything that would happen next. A surge of hatred welled up, toward Skye and her assumptions. If only I’d told her the truth.

  I was seventeen years old. Love burgeoned huge, frightening, and all consuming. It lunged in every direction—like a multiheaded creature banging horns against itself. I loved John Paul and I loved Skye. I loved Susannah and I loved my parents. And it never occurred to me to love myself, because I had no means of disentangling my identity from the fierce and secret and divergent emotions I felt toward all of these people.

  I wanted to answer Mrs. Chilton, but my body seemed surprised by that intention. It only provided the barest sort of grunt, a crackle from somewhere in the middle of my throat.

  She asked if I wanted water. I shook my head, and managed to emit words. I asked her if she’d contacted Waverly.

  “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

  “Because it’s not true,” I said, “about John Paul.”

  She moved her head the slightest bit to the side, understanding I’d admitted that everything else was true. My mind reached to Van—that mercurial mystery ride—but I knew the time for alibis and scapegoats had come and gone.

  I don’t know what I thought would happen: if John Paul and his scholarships would be rescued, if Skye would be punished for falsely accusing him, if Susannah would be able to forgive this final infraction. Because without so much as taking a breath, I did the thing that came least naturally: I told Mrs. Chilton the source of the coke. And felt unexpectedly sorry for her as her elbow slipped, just slightly, off its slim wooden armrest.

  She asked me more questions and I answered them without emotion. A truthful robot.

  John Paul was already gone. Susannah close behind him. Now Skye, and soon my parents. I stood up as Ms. Latham entered the office. I let her put her arm around my shoulders. My entire body buzzed with my betrayal—but I believed I’d done the only possible thing.

  Walking back to White Cottage with Ms. Latham, I imagined Mrs. Chilton had alre
ady picked up the phone to call the headmaster at Waverly. That Susannah and Drew would return from their trip to face the same kind of audience I had just endured. That like me and Skye they would be expelled—perhaps facing another year of high school, their college acceptances withdrawn.

  It never occurred to me that higher authorities than headmasters would be called on.

  And in the time it took to bring me to Mrs. Chilton’s, to exact my confession and betrayal. In the time Mr. November made his glowering escort of Skye back to her room. In the time it took to phone both sets of parents and deliver the news, and for Ms. Latham to help me pack my things. In the time it took for federal agents to be deployed, meeting Susannah and Drew when they deplaned at Logan—with two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of coke, zipped into their pockets and stuffed into their shoes.

  In that time, Skye made her way to the stables. Where she climbed onto Pippin’s back and vanished.

  20

  THEY SEARCHED THE SAME PLACES, and dozens more. They searched Esther Percy and Devon. DC and Boston. They swept through our barn daily and scoured the old-growth forest. They interviewed all of us, repeatedly—officials hovering close while the battalions of reporters and news trucks and satellite dishes camped on campuses and at the ends of driveways. Except for John Paul, we all lived in houses with long, private drives. Facing the street—with all its intruding eyes—must have been unbearable. If they hadn’t tapped our phone, I might have called him.

  Meanwhile, I was finished with disclosure. I had many audiences with various police officers but never uttered a word about Senator Butterfield’s impending resignation or his nameless paramour. The only thing I cared about was recovering Pippin. If Eleanor hadn’t stayed true to bitter, goody-goody form and turned in Mr. November, his relationship with Skye would have gone undiscovered.

  I did tell them every place Skye and I had been on Cape Cod. One of the Butterfields’ sea kayaks was missing, and I tried—honestly but without success—to remember if we had left Drew’s kayak where it lay or carried it back to the boathouse.