The Eliot Girls

by Krista Bridge

  The cold air had a deadening effect, and the girls were quiet as they made their way, Arabella out in front, collecting dead leaves into a bouquet. Audrey brought up the rear, and in front of her walked Whitney, whose hair, tied into a high ponytail with a red ribbon, swung back and forth perfectly like a pendulum. The silence had a palpable charge that bound them together in a new way. The enduring terror Audrey felt in their presence fed her gratitude at being with them, made every moment imprecisely exciting, elevated with unreality. The power of group complicity was irresistible.

  How she had been drawn into their circle was, as ever, a mystery. Arabella, Whitney, and Dougie had been standing by the lockers after school, imitating Ms. McAllister’s lecture. Nothing resembling a plan was forming in her mind, but she was riveted by their impersonations. Catching her eye, Arabella drew another note out of her binder. A simple look was all it had taken to signal her willingness. And then they had left together. Audrey wasn’t sure there had even been an invitation.

  They had been walking for a time when they came to a widening of the path where a pack of five boys stood huddled around something on the ground, their bikes discarded to the side. The boys took no notice of the girls’ approach. They were about ten years old, young enough to be oblivious to the witnessing eye of the world outside. As Audrey drew closer, she was just able to make out what lay in the middle of their circle. It was a dying baby animal, curled into itself, its tiny paws up by its raw pink snout. Did she just imagine a tremble beneath its inadequate dusting of fur?

  “Should we move it?” one boy said.

  “Nah, don’t bug it.”

  “What if something comes along and eats it after we leave?”

  A boy with red hair shrugged. He was holding a long stick, and though he seemed to have no intention of using it, it gave him an air of authority.

  Dougie squealed in disgust. “Gross!” she mouthed exaggeratedly.

  “You should just put it out of its misery,” Arabella said.

  They looked at her in horror.

  “What do they know?” the red-headed boy said.

  “What kind of psychos stand around watching an animal die?” Whitney said, looking around for agreement.

  Audrey nodded, though she didn’t agree at all. There seemed only to be compassion in their curiosity: an acknowledgment that death, for whomever it came, should be noted. Their bikes, piled carelessly on top of each other, gave Audrey a pang. Their lives seemed so easy, their manners so artless. Arabella strolled haughtily into their circle, as though they had gathered there expressly to observe her procession, and as she passed, affecting regal indifference, she stepped on the animal, producing a crunch, and continued on her way, tossing her leaf bouquet behind her. The boys let out a collective gasp and crowded in on their charge, cautiously assessing what damage had been done.

  “Later, gentlemen,” Whitney said, blowing them a kiss.

  Audrey looked back apologetically, but the boys had already closed themselves against further trespassers. The mood of silence now broken, Dougie chattered about how hilarious the whole thing had been. There ensued a small debate about whether the animal had been dying or dead. Arabella and Dougie maintained that it was clearly already gone, while it seemed important to Whitney that the animal had been merely on the brink before Arabella’s foot came down. Audrey wanted to believe that her father would argue that putting a dying animal out of its misery was in fact the more humane choice, but she was finding it hard to get past the cracking of bones, the pleased expression on Arabella’s face.

  When they came to the crest of a small hill, Arabella led them onto a less travelled path towards a small clearing in the trees. There she threw her knapsack onto the ground and let out a sigh. From her coat pocket, she produced a pack of cigarettes. Scattered amongst the dried pine needles were cigarette stubs from past smoking days. As she handed the pack to Dougie, she looked at Audrey and said, “I guess you don’t want one.” Audrey shook her head, aware that trying to smoke and doing so badly, choking and spluttering, even gagging, would be worse than declining altogether. Whitney and Dougie exchanged sidelong glances. They drew deeply on their cigarettes and exhaled with stagy contentment, as though to emphasize the difficulty of the day’s deprivation.

  “Did you see that creepy stain on Mr. Marostica’s pants today?” Whitney said. “I don’t even want to think about what that was.”

  “Mayo?” said Dougie.

  “Or so he claims.”

  “Ugh,” Dougie shuddered. “What would you do if Mr. Marostica came on to you?”

  “Oh my God,” Arabella shrieked. “You have such a perverted mind.”

  “What would you do if Ms. Crispe came on to you?” said Whitney.

  “Mm,” replied Arabella. “Tempting, but I like my dykes a bit more femme.”

  They drew on their cigarettes in unison, and Whitney exhaled smoke rings. “That’s so grade eight,” Arabella said.

  Through an open space in the trees they saw Samantha Starkey, one of the senior prefects, ambling past with her boyfriend, a Crescent boy. She looked around, then pulled his pants and underwear down and burst out laughing. He clapped a hand over his mouth in faux horror, then began a kind of burlesque stripper dance, shimmying towards her, his penis flapping. She pushed him in the chest so hard that he stumbled back, grabbing her hand so that she fell against him as he backed into a tree.

  “The worst thing about Sam Starkey is that she’s so predictable,” said Arabella, raising one eyebrow and blowing out a thin line of smoke, a gesture surely much practised.

  “Ugh, I feel so scruff,” Arabella said, shaking out her hair.

  Dougie cleared her throat and began talking in her version of a Pakistani accent. “What is this ‘scruff’? Is this what happens when your sari needs dry cleaning?”

  “Might I trouble you for a razor?” Whitney chimed in. “I believe I forgot to shave my moustache this morning.”

  Dougie laughed with her mouth wide open, revealing the silver line of the retainer glued on the back of her bottom teeth. Arabella dropped her cigarette and ground it underfoot with a peculiar daintiness, with just the tip of her shoe. “Goodness me,” she added. “Your body odour is especially fragrant this morning. Do I detect cumin? Or is it garam masala?”

  “Isn’t it groovy?” said Dougie.

  Sudden barking erupted not far away, and they squinted into the distance.

  “Holy fuck, is that Ms. Lee?” whispered Dougie. “She’s walking her fucking boxer.”

  Arabella reached out and pulled Audrey down behind a sparse bush, and Dougie and Whitney snuffed out their cigarettes and crouched behind them. The possibility that this was all a manufactured emergency occurred to Audrey as a nondescript Asian woman, possibly Ms. Lee, the physics teacher, possibly anyone else, walked past, her face half-obscured by a navy-blue baseball cap and a grey scarf wound thickly up to her chin. Dougie quivered on the ground in a fit of staccato giggles. Arabella’s hand pressed down on Audrey’s shoulder. The firm weight of it immobilized her, summoned all of her senses into awareness of it. She was reluctant to move, to breathe, to do anything that might make it depart.

  “My brother says he can get us some goodness this weekend,” whispered Whitney, holding an imaginary joint to her lips. She turned to Audrey. “You want in?”

  “Maybe.”

  Arabella stood up and pulled on her fluffy red mitts. “You know what we’re talking about, right?”

  Audrey was slow to rise. “Of course,” she replied, but this area was littered with verbal mines. Better not to say the word at all than to say it wrong, to use an unpopular nickname, to say “pot” when she should say “weed,” to say “weed” when she should say “a joint.” Julie Michaels had once referred to it as “some doobie,” and they had made fun of her for a week.

  “Let’s walk,” said Dougie. “I can’t fe
el my toes.”

  They set off, quiet again. Audrey could barely feel her fingers as they circled, without any apparent point, around the same loop they had just travelled. The sky was growing dim, and even the dog walkers were deserting. Each time the girls passed someone, they smiled politely, always mindful of the image people expected of the Eliot girls. As they passed the spot where the boys had gathered around the animal, Dougie laughed, though no trace of them remained. At the small bridge they veered to the left until they came to a narrowing of the river. There Arabella stopped and flung her knapsack to the base of a tree. “Someone dare me,” she said. “I bet I can jump across.”

  “You have delusions of grandeur,” said Dougie.

  “I have ambition.”

  “Don’t worry, lovebug,” said Whitney. “If you fall in, I’ll get naked with you and bring you back to life.”

  “The other side is just ice,” Dougie said. “You won’t even be able to land, you crazy bitch.”

  “Ah, but yes I will, because Audrey will be over there to catch my hand.” Arabella met Audrey’s eye and smiled.

  Audrey saw it all, in that smile: the challenge glimmering there, like the tiny diamond studs in Arabella’s ears. Arabella took off her coat, and Audrey’s eyes followed hers across the distance. If there was a moment for refusal, this was it. But Audrey found herself crossing the bridge and finding her footing on the icy slope. Cold water seeped into her shoes as her feet sank into the sludge of wet leaves. “Look alive, Brindle,” Arabella called. She rubbed her hands together and blew on them, then took a few steps back and made an arching leap high across the river. The girls on the other side were cheering, but Audrey barely heard them, absorbed as she was in studying Arabella’s flight. Even in the air, her face was poised and tranquil, betraying no exertion. Her right foot landed on a bundle of twigs, and a second later her left came down on a patch of ice, then slid an inch, and she teetered, trying to catch her balance. Audrey reached out to grab her right hand, but her own grip on the ground was failing her, and Arabella’s weight was pulling her back. As she dug her feet in and yanked, she felt, for a second—although she didn’t review this feeling and what it meant until later—as though Arabella was trying to jerk her off balance, back into the river. Arabella started laughing, and with an involuntary grunt that made Audrey wonder if it wouldn’t have been preferable to fall in the water, she redoubled her exertion, falling back on her bottom as Arabella landed firmly ashore. She was on her hands and knees, but still laughing.

  “That was priceless,” Whitney called. “You looked just like Ms. Crispe, trying to heave her up.”

  Arabella got up, brushing off her knees. Her hair was wild and wind blown, and she had tucked a leaf behind her ear like a flower. “Your turn,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’s. Your. Turn,” she said.

  Audrey stared at her in disbelief.

  “Whit will catch you when you land,” she said. “She’s got the pipes for it.”

  The thought crossed Audrey’s mind that this was all part of an elaborate game they’d planned beforehand, orchestrated to land her in the freezing river.

  “Come on,” Arabella said. “Are you waiting for wings?”

  Audrey resigned herself to whatever was going to happen. There could be satisfaction in plunging into the freezing water, the grand failure of it, a surrender, finally, to the inescapability of humiliation. The fight was too exhausting. Tiny flakes of wet snow began to fall as Audrey threw off her long navy coat, took a running leap, and landed just at the edge of the shore, one foot in the water. Whitney stood on the bank, hands on her hips, in no way ready to catch her. “Oopsie,” she said.

  “Guess you won’t make the cross-country team,” Dougie added.

  As Audrey pulled her foot out of the frigid boggy shoreline and tried to shake the excess water out of her shoe, the girls were already on their way to the bridge, where Arabella stood with Audrey’s coat and bag. “I’d say nice try, but trying is useless,” she said, thrusting Audrey’s things at her. “Either you do it or you don’t.”

  “It’s going to be dark soon,” Dougie said, peering up at the lavender sky.

  As Audrey buttoned her coat, Arabella, Whitney, and Dougie started walking away. From the end of the bridge, Arabella pointed in the direction they’d just travelled. “You’ll want to go back that way to get to the bus,” she said.

  “Aren’t you guys going?” Audrey asked.

  “We’re going to Whit’s house,” Arabella replied. “It’s just up there.”

  “All you have to do is follow the path,” Dougie said, her voice wavering with a hint of apology. “It’ll only take you about ten minutes.”

  “Do you need a chaperone?” Whitney asked.

  Audrey estimated that she had about fifteen minutes before she would be stumbling through the obscurity of evening. “Of course not,” she replied.

  Before long, the girls’ voices had receded entirely. The walk was longer than they had said, and Audrey’s outlook was bleak. The wind ripped through the inadequate wool coat her mother kept promising to replace. The glacial puddle in her shoe swished with her every step, and her wet toes were numb. A glance at her cellphone confirmed her suspicion that the battery was dead; she wasn’t sure which bus would take her to the subway. Reaching a fork in the path, she puzzled over which direction led to the parking lot, and as she continued on, she grew certain that she had chosen the wrong way. The sound of her own footsteps, resonating in the sepulchral air, seemed to announce the arrival of some horrible fate.

  She vowed this would be the final such mistake she would make. Would she never learn to control her hope? She sat on an ice-encrusted log, took off her shoe, and poured out the water. Yes, she had conceived of a future in which she was truly friends with Arabella, Whitney, and Dougie. She had not extinguished that obstinate wish. But she saw now that there would be no turning point. They were not friends now, nor would they ever be. There would be no victory of mischief, no marvellous iniquity, Audrey could pull off that would change this.

  And just like that, a new feeling came over her in a powerful rush. It was a deviant elation, an emotion so unfamiliar that it took her a minute to identify it. Glancing up through the outstretched arms of the winter trees, she felt fearless for the first time in recent memory. What madcap joy, all the more pure for being irrational, and the desolate chill of the valley only fed it. All the sensations that had been so unpleasant just seconds before—the hacking wind, her freezing foot—had morphed into their opposites. It was as though she had sunk deep enough into her sadness to find a rare and mysterious harmony between loneliness and freedom. If only, she thought, she could die in a moment just like this, caring about nothing. The woods around her were dark, but she felt no call to move on, to return to the light-speckled metropolis just visible above her.

  It was then that Audrey’s deep breaths were joined by the sound of approaching footsteps. Turning, she saw the unmistakable figure of Arabella.

  “Why don’t you come to my house?” Arabella said, barely breaking her stride. “You can dry off there.”

  And Audrey was back in the world, just like that.

  HENRY PARTED THE SHABBY orange curtains to peer out at the subsiding snowfall, then drew them again across the dirty window. Someone had made a cursory attempt at cleaning the glass, creating a spotless circle like a porthole in the centre while the periphery remained smudged with the grubby accumulation of motel life: mud splatters kicked up by spinning car tires, dust from the gravel parking lot, a cracking splotch of bird shit. A crumpled Kit Kat wrapper lay on the outside windowsill. Henry stood in front of the window for a moment, holding the side of each curtain in his hands, his head bowed. His posture made Ruth think of a priest outside a confessional: humourless and quietly full of his own secrets.

  When he had suggested finding a motel room after
last period, Ruth had been quick to agree. She was still reeling over the interminable length of the Christmas holidays. She had known that her separation from Henry would feel rotten, but she hadn’t anticipated how toxic her own longing would become. Thinking about him was a torment—she was certain the contemplation was one-sided—and she had been barely able to contain her grumpiness, even on Christmas day. When he had come to her classroom after lunch, she hadn’t even made a show of mulling over her availability.

  “Is it snowing?” she said.

  “It’s just stopping. We should probably leave extra time for getting back, just in case.”

  “Of course.”

  He returned to bed and lay down, his head on her stomach. There was a pain in her gut that his weight was pressing, but she didn’t dare ask him to move. Outside, a green minivan with a struggling muffler pulled into the lot. It was visible through the gap where the curtains refused to meet, and beyond its rusting roof, Ruth could see the cars on Lakeshore whipping past. She thought of Richard driving by (he wouldn’t, of course, not at this end of the city), how it would never occur to him, if he glanced at the sun-bleached grey sign, the unshovelled sidewalks, the blue glow of the small television in the office, that his wife was inside, that she had ever been, or would ever be, in such a place. The idea of her displacement was exhilarating. She wondered if there had ever been a moment in her life when she felt so free—even when she was a teenager, when being free was the perpetual condition of life, automatic and therefore unnoticed. The feeling had to do with being in an anonymous place, an unappealing place. She wouldn’t have felt so exultant in a beautiful room with Henry, with French doors opening onto the wide ocean, a private balcony with a rose bush growing along its wrought-iron railings. Such loveliness would undermine them, render them an ordinary, inauthentic thing, just one more undistinguished facet of a beautiful tableau.