At Briarwood School for Girls

by Michael Knight

  She slept and listened to music on her headphones and watched pay-per-view movies in her room. With tax, the movies ran almost ten dollars each, and because she hadn’t provided a credit card, she had to go down to the front desk to pay in advance each time. She did the math, figured she had enough money left for two movies and one meal per day, usually a grilled chicken salad or soup and bread. She paid cash for her meals as well, which irritated the waiters because they had to return to the restaurant to make change, then haul her change up to her room again. She didn’t have enough money to tip what they deserved. She watched The Fugitive and Groundhog Day and Mrs. Doubtfire. She quit Schindler’s List halfway through. Twice, she watched Jurassic Park. She hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob and dozed between movies. She ached. She bled. One night the bleeding was so heavy it soaked through the pad, and she woke to find her thighs and belly smeared, sheets like a crime scene. She was too ashamed to let housekeeping clean the mess, so she simply made the bed and moved into the spare.

  She remembered to call home so her mother wouldn’t get suspicious.

  “I was just thinking about you,” her mother said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you remember Emma Gray?”

  “Fifth grade? Took forever to lose her baby teeth?”

  “If you say so, sweetie. I’m having lunch with her mom. We’re on the planning committee for the Friends of Literacy ball.”

  “Fun,” Lenore said.

  The next morning, she showered and shaved her legs and gave her teeth a thorough brushing. She dressed in clean blue jeans and a plain black V-necked sweater that she liked. She rode the elevator to the lobby and passed the front desk without acknowledging the clerks and then out through the revolving doors into the bright wave of the day. She couldn’t stop blinking in the light. Was it Thursday or Friday? She wasn’t sure. On Saturday, she would cab out to the airport with her duffel bag and meet Melissa at the baggage claim like she’d just flown into town. She’d spend one night with the Chens before she and Melissa returned to Briarwood on Sunday morning.

  Lenore walked for two blocks before she realized that she was headed in the wrong direction. She repeated the word obelisk in her head as she walked back the other way—obelisk, obelisk.

  Already a crowd on the Mall. Joggers, tourists. White-haired veterans in American Legion caps in front of the Air and Space Museum. They, too, were carrying protest signs, and Lenore wondered what these old soldiers could possibly object to in the Air and Space Museum. The signs all bore a woman’s name: Enola Gay. One of the veterans asked Lenore to sign a petition, but she kept walking up the steps into the gaping hangar of the entry hall. Admission was free, but Lenore had to stand in line to buy a ticket to the planetarium movie—eight more bucks she couldn’t afford to spend. She found a seat and waited until the auditorium faded black. Radiant prisms rippled into being. Shimmering clouds of gas. Planets like gaudy baubles spinning through perfect emptiness. Black holes. Solar flares. Bliss was right. The show was dizzying, worth the expense. It felt almost holy. Darkness everywhere and everywhere beautiful light. The narrator had a British accent. “The deeper into space we look,” he said, “the further back in time we see.”

  Question 5

  On December 21, 1993, home from boarding school, Lenore Littlefield was dragged to a Christmas party by her mother. There were other young people at the party, a number of them boys, and to her surprise Lenore had fun, sneaking swallows from a bottle of Beefeater swiped from the bar. With whom did she slip away?

  A) The son of the hosts, returned from Clemson for the holidays.

  B) A boy she’d had a crush on in middle school but hadn’t seen in years.

  C) The thief who stole the Beefeater in the first place.

  D) None of the above.

  XVIII

  Despite everything, the bell rang on Monday morning at its appointed hour, some poor freshman at the end of the rope, and by the hundred, the girls shuffled off to class, still half-asleep, still half-lost in their dreams, all of them so young, their lives more future than past. They didn’t know anything. They would make so many mistakes. Lenore shouldered her backpack. Art History and Latin and Algebra II and American History and Chemistry and American Lit, in that order.

  At five o’clock she reported to the auditorium, where she dissolved and was reconstituted as someone else. There was no pretense in her portrayal of Jenny March. She was released from herself. She ran her lines. She hit her marks. She saw herself rising from the bed. Her lips were moving. The words came to her unbidden, even after a week without rehearsal. She heard Coach Fink’s whistle as if from a distance, and there passed a stretch when Lenore felt in between things, herself and not herself, aware but not aware of Coach Fink striding toward center stage.

  “Everybody huddle up,” Coach Fink said.

  The girls arranged themselves on the beds or on the floor between them like a slumber party. Coach Fink was brimming. She swung her arms and pressed up and down on her toes while she waited for them to settle. Then she began to speak, and it took a minute for Lenore to register what her coach was saying, partly because she was still hovering in that disembodied place and partly because the words themselves were so unlikely. Coach Fink told the girls how Mr. Bishop had tracked down Eugenia Marsh’s address and how they drove to Rockbridge County and how they found Eugenia Marsh cleaning her gutters. She repeated what she claimed was Eugenia Marsh’s advice about The Phantom of Thornton Hall, something about keeping the mystery behind you. “I’m not gonna bullshit you, ladies,” Coach Fink said. She made it clear that Eugenia Marsh had in no way promised to come for opening night. The very idea, however, that Coach Fink had actually met Eugenia Marsh, had shaken her hand and seen the inside of her house and returned bearing advice from her own lips, the very possibility that Eugenia Marsh might witness their performance of her play in person, sent a ripple through the cast, and when Coach Fink was finished, Juliet Demarinis led them all in a long round of applause.

  And still the bell clanged them on toward the dining hall after rehearsal like nothing had changed. The same placid stars, the same mellow darkness hovering over campus and nestling in the trees. The dining hall blazed with light and chatter, humidity rising from the buffet, the smell like meat boiled in bleach. At last, the bedtime rituals. Girls lined up at the sinks to brush their teeth and scrub their faces. Numerous antiacne agents were brought to bear. The row of their reflections might have belonged to any of the girls who’d ever lived in Thornton Hall. In an old T-shirt and flannel boxers, Lenore shuffled back to her room, where Melissa was putting the finishing touches on a coat of toenail polish.

  She asked some question, and Lenore said something in reply, and they went on like that for what must have been half an hour. Then the lights were out, and Lenore was on her side, facing the wall, with the blanket drawn over her shoulder. Somehow she’d left her Walkman in DC, and without the music she couldn’t make her mind go quiet. Lines from the play flicked through her head all out of order—I have never been a wary girl and I think we dream so we can forget and A shadow is only interrupted light—and she had the curious sense that the wall inches from her nose was just a scrim. She could reach out her fingers and push right through it, not into the next room but to some hazy other side, where Jenny March might take her hand, and she would pass through time and space, from this life into a dream, neither one stranger than the other. Dreaming, then, but not quite dreaming, lines from the play still repeating like faraway voices in her thoughts, vaguely aware of the too warm pillow beneath her ear and of the fact that her feet had escaped her blankets and of the phone ringing down the hall, a reverberation that seemed at first to be coming from inside her, vibrating through her, but that gradually resolved into what it was and returned her to herself.

  She flopped onto her back and waited for someone to answer. Husna most likely. Her room was nearest to the phone closet. But it kept on ringing and ringing until it stopped, Lenore
acutely conscious of the quiet in the absence of the sound. She looked at Melissa, lips parted, hair fanned around her face. Definitely zonked. Lenore alone in her wakefulness. She flipped her pillow to the cool side. She could remember drifting off to sleep when she was a girl, before the divorce, her parents settling in for a drink in the living room, their tired, tipsy voices murmuring her into dreams.

  The phone began to ring again.

  At that hour the sound meant family emergency or desperate boy, so Lenore huffed and tossed aside her blankets and hustled out the door, but the phone stopped ringing the instant she arrived.

  Lenore hit the light switch and eyed the receiver for a few seconds as if daring it to ring again, and then she shut the door behind her and sat on the floor with her arms around her knees. It was almost cozy in there, all those phone numbers and all that graffiti on the walls somehow reassuring, a reminder that lives existed beyond her own—Domino’s Pizza delivery and Save Us Kurt Cobain and J. Crew customer service and My Mother Is a Dick and dorm extensions at the Woodmont School and Dicks Are People Too and a pretty decent ballpoint sketch of a cat smoking a joint and a number that would tell you the time in Mobile, Alabama. Lenore pushed to her feet and lifted the receiver. Dialed information.

  “I need a listing in Charleston, last name Rawlings.”

  Faint ticking on the operator’s end.

  “I’ve got a bunch of Rawlings in Charleston.”

  “Do any of them show a children’s line?”

  “Matter of fact, yes,” the operator said. “Hold for your listing,” and her voice was replaced by a mechanical recitation spooling off the digits one by one as if each bore no relation to the others. There was a nub of pencil on the floor, and Lenore used it to jot the number on the wall, unremarkable among the others. Nate Rawlings. She had no plans to call him. She didn’t know if she wanted to call him. Or what she would say to him if she did. She wasn’t even sure this was his number. That night had been a mistake, true, but nothing terrible, she thought, nothing unforgivable—right?—and maybe she was fooling herself, but there was sweetness in the memory, shame and regret barreling down only after the fact. Nate had thanked her when they finished, real gratitude in his voice and something else as well, something like awe.

  When she hung up, the phone rang in her hand, and Lenore snatched her fingers away like she’d been shocked. It did not ring a second time. She lifted the receiver, listened. Just a dial tone. The bulb in the phone closet flickered out. Lenore tried the switch, but it was dead. She peeked out of the phone closet—abandoned couches, flyers on the bulletin board, television blank as slate. The only light seeped down the stairs from a fixture on the landing, and as Lenore moved out of the phone closet it faltered, blinking off and on before building in intensity like the laziest power surge in the world. The air in her mouth tasted cold. She hugged herself and rubbed her arms. And that light—it kept on getting brighter and slowly brighter, the landing illuminated as if beneath a spotlight on a stage. Any second now, she thought, and a figure would appear, bending around the landing, edging closer. “Who’s there?” she said. The light, the cold. The deserted common room. Then she saw it, the shape of it, barely visible, no more substance than light itself, the vaguest outline of a woman made of nothing, made of air, made of light, the shape of her wavering like flame. “Who’s there?” Lenore said again, and the shape was gone, the light extinguished, nothing but darkness all around.

  Behind her, after a moment, the ringing of the phone.

  Slowly, warily, with her heart pounding and her arms held out before her like a blind man, Lenore followed the sound, feeling for the door frame of the phone closet and running her hand along the wall until she found the phone itself, jumping shrilly in its cradle as it rang. The phone rang again beneath her hand, and this time she brought it to her ear.

  “Hello?”

  Down the line a rushing like the inside of a seashell, and behind that, faintly, Lenore heard a voice say, “Don’t,” a woman’s voice, she thought, though it was impossible to be sure, the voice quavering and broken as if sifted through the spinning blades of a fan.

  “Don’t what?” Lenore said.

  “Don’t call him.”

  The voice clearer now and closer, that seashell rush fading away with Lenore’s fear. “Elizabeth?” she said.

  “You can never tell him what you did.”

  “This is crazy,” Lenore said. “I was in bed and I was almost asleep. I must still be in bed. I dreamed the phone was ringing.”

  The light in the phone closet stuttered back to life, and suddenly Lenore was looking at the knuckles of her free hand, her fingers splayed against the wall beside the phone, the word please creeping out from under her palm. The rushing sound washed in and then diminished, like a wave against the beach. She had the palpable sense that someone was waiting for her to speak.

  “He was so nice,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “He had these eyes.”

  “I know.”

  “I wish none of this had happened.”

  “But it did,” Elizabeth said.

  Lenore let her head tip forward until her brow was resting on her knuckles. This close, the graffiti squiggled and swam.

  “Why?” she said, a question that might have applied to many things, but she figured Elizabeth’s ghost would catch her meaning.

  “You remind me of a girl I used to know.”

  XIX

  Coach Fink marched down the hill after rehearsal, twirling her whistle around her hand, pinching the string in place with her thumb and looping the whistle clockwise through the air, then swiftly counterclockwise, the string tightening in such a way that each rotation brought the whistle to rest with a satisfying smack against her palm. Just enough light left in the sky to sketch the outlines of the trees. As she approached the doors to Ransom Library, it occurred to her that she’d been coaching at Briarwood for thirteen years but hadn’t crossed the threshold in all that time. To tell the truth, she hadn’t spent much time in the library in her student days. It hadn’t changed—the vaulted ceilings, the arched windows, the chandeliers, smart girls hunched over their homework at the study tables. Apprehension fizzed in Coach Fink like she was sixteen again and had a paper due in the morning about some novel she hadn’t read.

  “Can I help you?”

  A librarian in cat’s-eye glasses presided over everything from a stool behind the circulation desk.

  “I’m looking for a PBS production of The Phantom of Thornton Hall.”

  The librarian removed her glasses. For a second her features went still, as if she were posing for a photograph. Then she wrinkled her eyebrows and said, “You don’t remember me, do you? I was a year behind you in school. Constance Booth? Connie? I was the assistant stage manager when you played Maria in West Side Story.”

  Coach Fink studied her face, searching for anything familiar in her eyes, her mouth. She could recall how Wilson Barber’s voice had cracked on the high notes of “Tonight” and how Virginia Cross, as Anita, had mixed up the lyrics in “A Boy Like That,” singing, “Forget that boy and find your mother,” instead of “Forget that boy and find another.” She could remember the bone-deep quality of her stage fright, so pervasive it had a taste—like cold coffee. She could remember the scorched smell of the footlights and the shapes of people in the crowd. But she could not remember Connie Booth.

  Her silence provided ample confirmation.

  “My hair was different then,” said Connie Booth, and she turned on her ballet flats and disappeared through the door behind her desk. Reappeared half a minute later. “That video is checked out.”

  “Does Bishop have it still?”

  “Library policy prohibits me from releasing that information.”

  All these women on their stools with their paltry secrets. Coach Fink resisted the urge to blow her whistle just to make a little noise.

  * * *

  Her best bet, Coach Fink thought, was to go
straight to the source. The problem was she hadn’t spoken to Bishop since Rockbridge County. This was not unusual. Before their road trip, whole weeks would often pass without seeing or thinking of Bishop until she bumped into him on the quad or noticed him stepping down from the bleachers after a basketball game. Her recurring dream had tapered off, which might have been a relief if Bishop hadn’t seeped into her unconscious to take its place. These new dreams weren’t erotic in the least—the two of them paddling a canoe or shooting hoops or, for some reason, building a tree house—but she woke dry-mouthed and aroused. The last thing Coach Fink needed was that sort of distraction, not with opening night so close. She trooped back up the hill beneath the oaks toward Bishop’s duplex, a new and different sort of apprehension bubbling in her. She told herself that all she wanted was to see if Bishop still had the PBS version of The Phantom of Thornton Hall. And there he was, sitting on the stoop outside his duplex like she’d conjured him up with repressed desire.

  Beside him, to Coach Fink’s surprise, was Lenore Littlefield, Bishop’s dog sprawled between them with his head in Littlefield’s lap, all three of them so absorbed that they’d failed to notice her approach. Faculty cars were parked along the curb, and without thinking Coach Fink took two steps to her right and ducked behind a station wagon, owned, she thought, by Lionel Higgins. Before her eyes a bumper sticker: I Brake for Michelangelo.

  “What was she like?” Littlefield was saying.

  “What was who like?”

  “Eugenia Marsh. You met her, right? Everybody’s curious.”