When I arrived back at the dorm, I could hear some kind of horrible noise emanating from my room as soon as I stepped off the elevator.
Oh, god, it’s Margie’s music, I thought.
I pushed the door open but the room was empty.
“Margie?” I tried to shout above the din.
Where was it coming from? I did a quick scan of her side of the room, but couldn’t see a stereo anywhere.
“Hey, Chicka!” Margie came crashing out of the lavatory. “Sorry – is the music too loud?” she screamed at me.
“What music?!” I couldn’t believe that anyone could describe this tuneless thumping cacophony as music.
“Sorry,” she said as she climbed up on her bed to turn off the little mp3 player attached to some very small but very powerful speakers.
“I figured since we’re the only ones here yet that I might as well take advantage. Probably won’t get to do that again! All the bitchy princesses who live in this hallway would complain like mad!”
“How do you know? Does everybody come back to the same room?” I asked.
“Pretty much. I mean, some people won’t be coming back to school at all, for whatever reason, and some people who couldn’t stand their roommate last year will request to be switched up, and then there are new people like you, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same.”
“Oh.”
“See, like you for example, are here in this room because Francine from last year got pregnant and isn’t coming back. Which is too bad, because she was awesome. We had some wicked cool parties in this room. And we were the black sheep on the floor – for obvious reasons!” Margie cracked up laughing at herself.
“So this is your second year here, then?” I wanted to find out more about the school.
“Sadly – yeah! Nah, it’s not that bad. I actually manage to have a really great time. I met my boyfriend in town here last year. He works at the rare record store – I’ll be spending weekends at his place most of the time, so you’ll have this place to yourself. In fact, I’m dipping out tonight to go see him! My mother would shit a brick – you can’t say anything.”
“Oh god, no, never,” I swore.
“He’s nineteen and has his own place. Well he has a basement apartment in a house. It’s wicked.”
“Cool.” I nodded my head in appreciation. “So what are they guys like here? Any cute ones?”
“Ha! Well, not in my opinion! Not my speed AT ALL! But neither are most people here. You have to understand that I consider myself to be a Silver Spoon Socialist, (because I was born rich, but I’m also kinda into the idea of anarchy, right?), so I really don’t get along all that great with the blue-blooded twats that go to this school. And I think we actually have the worst of the worst right here in this hall.”
“Really? Why? What are they like?” I was intrigued.
“Welllllllll, let’s see. We have Andrea Brown, who prefers horses to humans. Actually I kinda don’t blame her for that, but she’s a bore. There’s Stephanie MacDonald whose parents bought her breast implants for her sixteenth birthday. Can you believe that? Fake tits at sixteen?! She’s ridiculous. Then there are my favorites – I call them the Ugly Stepsisters – Cheryl & Lisa – they both call themselves models and they’re tall and thin and never eat anything and will make fun of anyone over a size TWO for being fat – which, hello - yours truly! But if you want my opinion they’re both kinda ugly. But they think they’re prettier than everybody else. And Cheryl’s boyfriend is this guy Chad – like of course his name’s Chad, right? And he’s like the best looking guy in the school, supposedly, and Lisa dates his best friend, Trevor who’s just an ASSHOLE…..”
“Oh, great. You make everyone seem so charming!” I laughed nervously.
“Yeah – I’ll be interested to see how you fit in here. You’re pretty, but you don’t seem too full of yourself. You don’t seem like a Richie Rich girl either – I bet your jeans didn’t cost more than a hundred bucks.”
“Ha! Uh, no. They didn’t! It wouldn’t matter how much money my parents had, my mother would NEVER spend that much on jeans.”
“Where are you from again?” she asked.
“Well, here’s the thing.” I took a deep breath in and steeled myself for her reaction. There was something about having to tell people that my parents had won the lottery that was deeply embarrassing to me. “I’m from Washington and last year my parents actually won the lottery. Not kidding.”
Margie’s eyes widened and she let out a hoot.
“Serious?!” She was downright gleeful about it for some reason.
“That’s hilarious! Oh! So you’re new money! Oh my god I think that’s worse than being on scholarship! Don’t let anybody around here know that! They’re all old-money blue bloods and they have the attitudes to prove it! That’s why they hate me so much – I’m old money – maybe even the oldest of the old – but I act like I’m poor white trash and they can’t stand that!”
I thought Margie was going to keel over from laughing so hard.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Go on with your story,” she encouraged me. “So you’re from Washington and your parents won the lottery and they decided to send you here? Well I guess you should thank your lucky stars they didn’t decide to pack you off to Switzerland or something!” She kept laughing.
“Yep. Pretty much,” I nodded.
My mouth twisted into a wry grin. I realized she was right – but just as my mother was frugal about clothing, I suppose she decided to be frugal about boarding schools. Relatively.
“Well, then it will be super duper extra interesting to see how you fit in around here! Do you do anything? Like sports or school paper or anything?”
“No, I don’t really do sports, and my old school didn’t have a paper. But I like reading and writing though, so that’s actually something I should look into.”
I didn’t tell her of my aspirations to try riding since she had put down one of the girls already for being horsey, although I was dying to find out more about the equestrian program.
“So have you picked your courses yet, did you get a timetable?” she asked.
“No, I haven’t. I didn’t know we had to do that.”
Suddenly I was panicked. How could it not have occurred to me that I would have to pick courses? I glanced over at the brochure and the forms I had gotten from the registrar’s office the first day laying on my desk untouched.
“Oh don’t worry. It’s no big deal. You can do it online if you want. There are certain courses that everyone has to take, of course, like Math and English and stuff, but you can choose if you want to study French instead of Spanish, or Art instead of Music. Stuff like that. They probably already have you in courses just assigned randomly by the computer, but you can switch now if you want. Do you know your student ID?”
And so Margie and I spent the afternoon on her laptop computer as she helped me to select what she deemed the best classes with the nicest teachers. Some sections were already full, but we did manage to get me into the same Social Studies class as she was already in, and I decided that since meeting Stefano, I might try to learn a little bit of Italian.
“Italian?” she screwed up her face at me. “Nobody takes Italian. Take Spanish instead.”
“No, I think I’d like to go to Italy someday,” I insisted, and smiled to myself over my secret.
And that is how Margie and I became friends. She was brash, she was loud, but she was also extremely down to earth and funny and kind to me.
True to her word, she snuck off to stay with her boyfriend that night. She told me she’d come back on Labor Day Monday before curfew and gave me her cell phone number in case I needed anything or in case anybody was looking for her. Which meant that I was alone in my room again and would be until the end of the long weekend when school would start.
Early that evening I went down to the dining hall for dinner. It was virtually empty, and large spaces always seem spooky to me when they’re empty, so I to
ok my food back up to my room.
“Aha! So you see your new friend is very nice!” Stefano was seated on my desk as I came in through the door.”
Surprised and delighted to see him, I must have jumped a mile out of my skin.
“What’s the matter?” he teased, “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!”
“Ha ha,” I admonished him but he really knew I was overjoyed to see him.
“Oh, you’ve brought your supper up. Tell me about what you’re eating.”
“Well, I wish it were worth describing to you, but I’m afraid it’s just a salad and some fries and a formerly-frozen slice of chocolate cream pie for dessert,” I said apologetically.
“Ah. Fried potatoes. They seem very popular; I regret I have never had one.”
I laughed out loud. “Oh no! Don’t regret it at all! The best ones just taste like crunchy salty grease and they’re horribly bad for you! Make your skin break out, bloat you up…horrible!”
“Then why do you eat them?” He seemed genuinely puzzled, and as I tried to think of a way to explain, I realized I couldn’t.
“I don’t know,” I admitted and I heaved the container into the wastebasket.
“I was admiring your collection of books before you came in,” he turned back now to refer to the shelf up on the wall.
“Yes, well, that’s one thing my parents always encouraged me to do – read. Our house was always filled with books.”
“You have sophisticated tastes,” he remarked as he fingered the volumes. “And a liking for the Romantic Poets, yes?”
“Yes.” I blushed a little. I did like the Romantic Poets, but I kept it a secret because at my age to like the Romantic Poets would seem not only precocious but downright pretentious. Not to mention nerdy.
“Why do you blush?” he smirked playfully. “So easily flustered, this young lady! Tell me, who is your favorite?”
“Oh, Byron, of course!” I answered without hesitation.
He groaned and slapped his hand to his head. “Oh no! Not ‘Byron of course!’ You could have said Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, any of them but Byron!”
“Why? What’s wrong with Byron?” I countered.
“Well nothing’s wrong with his poetry – his poetry is quite good, dare I say great – but everything was wrong with the man! He was a very devil and he would have left a pretty young girl like you an absolute wrack.”
“You say that like you knew him!” I exclaimed.
“I did! I did know him. I spent a great deal of time with him in Italy when he traveled through. He nearly got us killed or arrested on many occasions.”
“Seriously!? Really!? Oh that’s amazing!” I squealed girlishly. I was enthralled and couldn’t wait to hear more.
(At home, we had had a beautiful gilt edged volume of Byron’s works. I didn’t necessarily understand everything he wrote at first, but I was able to catch the merriment and the irreverence with which he tore apart some of his subjects. And then there were his love poems; The Giaour for example, that were absolutely heartbreaking in their descriptions of passionate love. I began to read about his life and discovered that he had been like a rock star in his day. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know, they used to say about him. And gorgeous – absolutely gorgeous. I remember going to London once when I was 14 for Christmas. My father forced us all to go to the National Gallery. I wandered off on my own and found the Portrait Gallery. I was meandering along, quite bored with all the stiff paintings of dead people when I rounded a corner and was awestruck by one of the most handsome faces I’d ever seen. It was the famous portrait of Byron with his head turned to the right so that he was completely in profile, resting his chin in his right hand. It took my breath away and I stood and stared at him for the better part of an hour, examining every brush stroke and imagining that perhaps at one time, the man himself stood in relation to the painting exactly where I was now, examining it as I was.)
Now Stefano was telling me he had actually known him! And had had adventures with him and gotten into trouble! This was the most wonderful thing I had ever heard in my life! As if finding out someone you know used to hang out with Mick Jagger back in the glory days of the Rolling Stones!
“We will speak no more of that scoundrel until you wipe that giddy look off of your face. I shall become quite jealous if you continue to look like that at the mention of his name!” he said insouciantly.
“Oh come on! He’s been dead for nearly two hundred years!”
Stefano gave me a stern look.
“Oh. Right. Well – he’s not here and he never will be, so don’t be jealous. I swear on my life that I will always find you smarter and handsomer and like you better than I ever will like that nasty old Lord Byron,” I grinned at him.
“Alright. But only if you swear.”
He was trying very hard to be severe with me but I could see the teasing in his eyes.
“Yes! I swear on my life!”
“Very well then,” he began.
“When the rogue first came to Italy, when was it? Around 1820 perhaps? I can’t remember. Anyway, when the rogue first came to Italy, he had, at that time, been the darling of English society. Which is rather ironic, considering how he abhorred English society! So of course, his reputation preceded him and it was equally as fashionable in Italy to rub elbows with him as it was in England. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance and I was persuaded to join him at a locanda, a tavern one night.”
“A tavern?” I eyed him suspiciously.
“You know, I don’t think it’s entirely suitable for me to be telling you this.”
“Oh go on! You must!” I cried.
“Well, we went to the tavern and being the handsome fellow that he was, he had his pick of the ladies. On this particular night he picked the wrong one. Well, he had a gift for picking the wrong one – which is to say that no wedding ring ever dissuaded him. He slipped outside and had his way with her in a dark lane behind the tavern. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps she had had her way with him. After their…encounter…she went off happily home and informed her brutish, neglectful husband that she had just been had by none other than Lord Byron himself! Well, we were having a merry old time of it, when suddenly the door burst open and the husband had one arm about the woman’s neck and was flailing around a pistol in the other one! It was chaos: he was demanding to know who the English poet was and the woman was screaming and shouting and going wild to get away from him. So then he fired a warning shot into the ceiling. That shut everybody up in a jiffy. The place was stock still and she looked directly at me and pointed and said, ‘It was him.’”
“No!” I gasped.
“Yes! She pointed right at me and said, ‘It was him.’ Whether she did it on purpose to spare her lover, or whether she was short sighted and couldn’t tell the two of us apart in the dim light, I’ll never know. We were similar in stature with the same coloring, so it may have been that she was honestly mistaken. Your Byron didn’t bother to correct her, however, and the next thing I knew, this brute was coming towards me with a pistol aimed at my head! I jumped up and turned the table over in the process and practically dived out through a side door. Now, I don’t know where he could have taken the wench when they had…gotten acquainted…because I found myself trapped by canals on every side with not a gondolier in sight.”
“Oh you were in Venice!” I breathed, imagining the scene.
“Fortunately for me he was a lumbering brute, so I had managed to make some headway, but he was still coming after me. I had nowhere to go, so I leapt into the canal and swam for my life! Under the stinking, fetid water, holding my breath as long as I could, completely unable to see where I was going! I heard the shots from the pistol as I swam. I think he must have spent his ammunition though, for when I surfaced and looked back he was standing on the bank shaking his fist at me. Thank goodness he didn’t have the fortitude to jump into a canal on such a cold night!
“I managed to find a gondolie
r at last, who charged me outrageously for the privilege of climbing into his gondola dripping wet as I was. I made it back to the residence I was staying at, and through the grace of God managed not to succumb to the cold. I lived to see Byron again. And do you know the first thing he said to me the next time we met?”
“What?! What?!” my breath was bated.
“He informed me that I owed him money for the bar tab!”
“No he didn’t!” I exclaimed
“He did! Simple as that, as if nothing at all had happened! No attempts at atonement, didn’t even inquire as to how I had managed to survive! He was a rogue in he truest sense of the word!”
“That’s amazing!” I gushed. “What an adventure! To have lived in those times…..I envy you for that.”
“Adventure! Ha! Well, to have lived in those times as a man, for certain, but it was quite a different story for women,” he pointed out.
“Mmm. I suppose. Still,” I shrugged. I had only a literary and romantic interpretation of that world, not a practical one as he had.
“Which is your favorite poem of the rogue’s?” he teased.
“Well,” I thought carefully, “I don’t know. I don’t think I could pick just one.”
“Then I’ll tell you mine.”
Stefano took a thoughtful breath and began:
“She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes.”
“Oh I do love that one!” I beamed.
“It’s not the first time you’ve put me in mind of it.” He was looking at me strangely.
Now I flushed deeply. Did he mean to infer what I hoped he had meant to infer?
He continued:
“One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o'er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.”
His voice had become strangely low and gentle as if he were afraid of being overheard, yet there was no one. And then he cleared his throat and said in his normal voice, “Except that, strictly speaking, your hair is more like chestnut than raven,” he winked at me.
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