The Eliot Girls

by Krista Bridge

  On the night of the dance, Audrey expected Eliot to be a magical place, an idealized version of itself, sentimentally made over in the image of a high school from a movie. She had envisioned coloured Japanese lanterns strung across the quad, casting their mellow pastel light over the patches of snow and grass, clusters of balloons tied to the basketball hoops in the gym, artificial trees threaded with tiny white lights in the corners and a dusting of silver sparkle blanketing the gym floor. As soon as she and Ruth, who was a chaperone, turned the corner into the long driveway, however, she was confronted by the silliness of her predictions. An ascetic decorating scheme was the one way Ms. McAllister had managed to assert her tastes. Loath to create an impractical climate of love in the corridors of academics—and believing such decorations to be tacky, misleadingly celebratory, and possibly a little dangerous, nurturing as they did puerile notions of romance—Ms. McAllister had made only two concessions to transforming the place: a sign outdoors, with a slightly deflated helium balloon tied to its top, and a long drinks table in the gym wrapped in leftover red plaid Christmas paper. The girls were to remember they were in their school. Their aspirations ought always to be, first and foremost, scholastic.

  But whether Ms. McAllister liked it or not, the atmosphere in the school was utterly changed. Boys were everywhere, and had brought with them a different brand of boisterousness, a physical camaraderie, as if any minute they were about to fall to the ground and start wrestling. Most of them didn’t yet seem even to care about the girls. They were messy and unself-conscious, with worn rugby shirts and shaggy hair, and didn’t seem embarrassed that they were already growing sweaty in the overheated gym. Immediately noticeable as well was a change in the quality of the noise, which was almost entirely male generated. Their shouted conversation rang out in the hallways and all through the quad. The girls, meanwhile, had fallen quiet, whispery and secretive, huddled in corners and against walls in protective groups. They took little notice of each other now. Absent were scathing looks at what others were wearing, the sarcastic compliments. All their attention was focused on the boys. In this, they were together, their joint sense of daring and delight, the novel intimacy of having males in their gym, the same gym where they played volleyball in their navy-blue shorts and endured Ms. Crispe’s graphic lessons on STDs.

  The air in the gym was tropical, filled with the hot breath of hundreds of dancing teenagers. A teacher had opened the emergency exit door, but no breeze could diffuse the cloud of humidity. Audrey’s class had convened loosely in one corner of the gym, so she made her way there and loitered on the edges. She noted with gratitude that, for once, she was not alone in her tense observation of the busy scene. All the grade tens looked as unsettled as she. For all of them, this was a first dance, and though Ms. McAllister’s rules of comportment were clear, their own were not. Where generally the girls ensconced themselves in their usual cliques, tiny, intimate provinces with boundaries as clearly defined as any country’s, they had opened their enclosures, spread themselves out, together yet apart, possibly in an effort to welcome any male approach.

  A song came on that Audrey didn’t recognize, but everyone else seemed to, and while the girls cheered, the boys pumped their fists in the air, jumping. Most of the teachers seemed to have gone out of their way to look just as they did during the school day, though some were dressed even worse, as if heeding Ms. McAllister’s caution against the hormonal male threat. Ms. Glover was wearing a pair of old running shoes, a blousy grey sweatshirt, and high-waisted, pleated brown cords, which had a huge bottle of Tylenol sticking out of one pocket. Only Ms. Howe, the youngest teacher on staff, seemed to be having a good time. In an attempt to age her naturally pixieish face, she usually wore untailored suits and her hair in a bun, but now she swayed slightly to the rhythm, her long hair halfway down her back, precisely lined cherry-painted lips lazily mouthing the words of the music, an act of self-forgetfulness that elicited an appalled double-take from the patrolling Ms. Glover.

  It was hard not to notice Henry Winter at the drinks table. Tall and unmoving, gazing without focus into the middle distance, he seemed in no way engaged in his surroundings as he took little sips from a bottle of Evian water. Most of the teachers were making an effort to look watchful and concerned, to at least appear to have embraced their humourless watchdog roles. Ms. Glover paced the walls with a small spiral notebook in hand, possibly recording unseemly behaviour for later punishment. Even Ruth, whom Audrey spotted at the far end of the gym, wearing what Ms. McAllister would surely consider an inappropriately clingy white T-shirt, was looking distractedly observant, restless and agitated, as though torn between her desire to look hot and her obligation to supervise untrustworthy minors. Rather than loosening up, the teachers had lost their individuality and had formed, according to Ms. McAllister’s decree, a disapproving perimeter around the licentious dance floor. What stood out about Henry was the quality of his boredom, its forbidding force field. He looked at his watch, then at the crowd, and caught Audrey staring at him. Blushing deeply, she turned away and stumbled into Seeta, who was standing directly behind her.

  “Hey there,” Seeta said, smoothing her ruffled pink blouse.

  “Hi.”

  “Are you having fun?” she asked.

  Audrey shrugged.

  “Do you like dancing?”

  Audrey didn’t answer.

  Seeta tried again. “This is a good song. Don’t you think?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It’s one of my favourites,” said Seeta.

  “Actually, I hate it.” It would be preferable to stand alone, Audrey thought, than to align herself with Seeta. She stared despondently out onto the dance floor, where Kate Gibson was making out indelicately with her boyfriend, her prosthetic arm slung protectively around his skinny, pimpled neck. Audrey had seen them together before—he often picked her up from school—but not like this, woozily swaying in each other’s arms in a transport that had attracted the notice of Ms. Glover, who hovered nearby, scribbling furiously in her notebook. The rest of the prefects had paired up and were doing the tango across the middle of the dance floor, weaving their way around the song’s tentative couples.

  “Excusez-moi,” Arabella said as she and Whitney coasted onto the dance floor, where they entwined themselves in an ironic slow sway.

  Dougie walked past wearing her dangling turquoise earrings and a red Eliot baseball cap, hand in hand with a boy.

  “You’ve got lipstick on your teeth,” she said to Seeta, then just before they disappeared into the crowd, turned back and sang out, “Just kidding!”

  Near the end of the song, Arabella and Whitney waltzed past, halting when they caught sight of Audrey and Seeta. Arabella smiled crookedly and raised one eyebrow like a soap opera star. “Having a good time, ladies?” she said.

  Seeta was tapping her foot to the beat of the song. “It’s really good,” she said, nodding. “I was hoping to persuade Audrey to come dance with me.”

  “Aahh,” said Arabella indulgently, like a teacher listening to the long, boring story of a hyper child.

  “Hardly,” Audrey said.

  Arabella pivoted and scanned her grandiosely from head to toe. “So Audrey, you a big fan of the Ramones?”

  Audrey looked at her shirt. Just before the dance, she had found a puzzling new outfit laid out on her bed: a cut-off denim skirt, black leggings, and a vintage Ramones T-shirt. “I guess,” she replied.

  “What’s your favourite song?” asked Whitney, exchanging glances with Arabella.

  “I don’t really have one.”

  “Well, there must be one you like better than the others.”

  Seeta jumped in. “I always liked ‘I Wanna be Sedated.’ Maybe I’ll start rehearsing it for assembly.”

  “You do that,” Whitney replied.

  “You girls make a sweet couple,” Arabella said, smiling. “You shoul
d go hang out with Ms. Crispe and Ms. Sampson. By the way, Audrey, your mom is over there looking crazy hot. I think one of the UCC prefects asked her to dance.”

  “Are you sure you’re not adopted?” Whitney asked, scrutinizing Audrey’s face.

  Before she could give good thought to what she was doing, Audrey found herself struggling against the crowd of people cramming into the gym. She burst through the double doors into the hall. The sudden brightness of the fluorescents made her squint, and she looked down the hall to the bathroom, where a long line of girls trailed out into the hall. To her left was a dark stairwell, and although students were forbidden to enter other parts of the school during the dance, she swung open the door and was swallowed by the cool silence.

  On the second floor, she was disoriented by the changed aspect of the unlit halls, as though she had stepped through time and ended up in a place that ought to have been familiar, but wasn’t. The known world of Eliot was somewhere here, but inaccessible to her. It must be like this, she thought, to be a grown woman returning to your childhood home, to find the rooms intact, the old furniture hidden under dusty sheets.

  Night had altered her homeroom, like everything else, into an alien landscape. The slim light of the crescent moon cast a reflective blue film along the lengths of the spotless windows. All the identifying features of the class were absent, the personal clutter stored away. Ms. McAllister had made the announcement that afternoon that classrooms were to be left in states of superlative tidiness since the school was to be host that night. As they roamed the classroom under the supervision of Henry Winter, tucking books into cupboards, Duo-Tangs into desks, and recycling into the bin, Whitney said, “Okay, Dr. W., this is a legitimate English question ’cause I have a thirst for knowledge. Isn’t it an oxymoron when Ms. McAllister says to get things extra clean? I mean, something is either clean or it isn’t.” Arabella popped up from where she was fishing a drink box out from under a desk and said, “You mean redundant, you dimwit. Oxymorons are opposites.” To which Henry Winter replied with a curt and weary, “Just do as you’re asked. In silence.”

  Audrey sat now at the teacher’s desk and tilted her chair back until it rested against the ledge of the chalkboard. The desk was the only surface that hadn’t been properly cleared. A book, The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence, lay in the middle, its back cover bent, as though it had been carelessly flung and forgotten. The distant strain of music drifted up from the gym. A headache pressed in on her.

  Minutes later, the noise of laughter in the hall, retreating, brought her back to herself. She rose to follow the sound, not wanting to confront it so much as confirm. Her black ballet flats allowed her to travel light-footed, undetected. She had grown used to carrying herself secretively anyway, slipping here and there on the periphery. The voices drew her to them, like a pinprick of light in the pitch black. She edged forward until she was just close enough to make out the words.

  “Didn’t you think Julie Michaels looked like a total whore? Actually, she’s too fat to look like a whore. Before you got here, she leeched on to me. Literally following me everywhere, smelling like her house.”

  “I hear she gives good head,” came a male voice.

  “Ugh. Thank you. I’m literally going to have nightmares with that image in my head.”

  “Hey, man, fat, thin, a mouth is a mouth.”

  “Is a mouth is a mouth.”

  “I’m so going to get one of those hats,” said a voice Audrey knew all too well.

  “Well, I’m a gentleman. I’d be more than happy to help you out.”

  “Never going to happen, sweetheart. Grade elevens only.”

  “Um, ladies. What are we talking about here?” asked a different male voice.

  “It’s this thing the grade elevens are doing. A contest, sort of.”

  “SBGG. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.”

  The voices stopped, as if their owners heard the breath of the intruder, and Audrey hurried off in the opposite direction. She had a dim idea of what they were discussing. Over the past couple of weeks, more and more grade elevens had been wearing red baseball caps with “George Eliot” on the front and “SBGG” on the back. It was against the rules to wear hats during the school day, but on the buses after school, the grade elevens formed a distinctive pack. Although Audrey had grown accustomed to the perpetual anxiety that she was missing out on a joke, that feeling opened out into a sweeping loneliness now that she had a better idea, at least broadly, of the act to which SBGG alluded. It wasn’t simply that she hadn’t conceived of participating in such activities; it hadn’t even occurred to her that others were. She tried to see herself in that pose—kneeling as if in prayer?—but all she could conjure was a room so dark that even her mind’s eye couldn’t penetrate.

  She was in front of the double library doors when she heard a rustling in the side hall, followed by migrating laughter, shushed into a furtive babble. Not desiring a collision with Arabella, she darted into the concealment of the library and strayed into the tall stacks. The darkness here was almost complete. She sank to the floor and breathed deeply, consoled by the mildewed smell of the towering books. The hands of her watch glowed, but she looked away, unwilling to acknowledge the decree of time, its reminder of what awaited below.

  How unlikely it was, she thought, that it should be in the library that she felt most at home while at Eliot. The volumes enclosed her, watchful and beneficent. In spite of her academic struggles, she felt connected to the books; they seemed to represent a superior world to which she should aspire. Lining the rows at eye level were aging Penguin paperbacks, their spines worn and peeling. As her eyes adjusted, she squinted at the titles and author names, barely able to make out the words. McEwan. Morrison. Munro. The final book in the row was Who Do You Think You Are? She pulled it out and tried to make out the cover image. A tanned girl sat in the grass, her arms and legs bare, knees to her chest, lank, straw-coloured hair falling around her shoulders. The pages let out the warm, musty smell of a book long loved; the words were an inky blur. Audrey felt she had to have it.

  Voices surfaced in the stillness. Different voices. So remote did the rest of the Eliot world seem that Audrey wondered whether the murmurs were a figment of her imagination. But there was anger in them—low and restrained, but intelligible nonetheless. She crept to the end of the row and peered out into the open space. There she saw, in a basin of opal moonlight, what she first thought must be a ghost. The figure was pale, clad in white that gleamed in contrast to the pewter shadows, expressing some kind of lament, twisting slightly in an aspect of explanation or pleading. It was a second before Audrey made out a second body; the voice came first, divulging its owner’s identity.

  “And that,” it said, “is a fantastically inappropriate T-shirt.”

  The first figure turned into profile, the face still hidden by a veil of dark hair, but the voice, when it came, sent Audrey stumbling back into the coverage of the bookshelf.

  “Jesus, Henry! Why are you being so hard?”

  The exchange that followed was muffled. Then: “I had no choice. As if I wanted to be there.”

  A mirthless laugh was released.

  There was no time for Audrey to consider what she had witnessed. She knew only that she had to escape without detection, and as quickly as she could manage it. She stole back to the exit and, cringing at the noise, pushed open the creaky door and hurried back to her locker. Only once there did she realize that she had forgotten the book, out of sequence on the edge of the Ws. She sat in front of her locker and rested her head on her arms. Tears of disappointment welled up in her eyes. It was just a library book, she told herself, read by many Eliot girls before her. She could get it on Monday. But the sense of a botched destiny left her nauseated, breathless, so certain she had been that it contained a message just for her. An answer to a question she couldn’t even formulate. All through the weekend to come,
her mind returned to it again and again, there in the library, bearing the invisible imprint of her hand.

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, WHILE Ruth was out grocery shopping and Richard was at the clinic, Audrey went into their bedroom and sat down in the middle of the unmade bed. She stared for a time at the horse picture, listening to the quiet house. The smell of Ruth’s rosewater cream wafted out from the bathroom, the oddly old-fashioned smell of it recalling Ruth’s mother before her. When Audrey was quite young, and her parents had left her with a babysitter for the evening, she had liked to fall asleep in their bed, listening to the raccoons tangle in the pear tree outside. The mattress, long since replaced with a superior model, had sagged in the middle, and she had burrowed in there, hoping they would forget to return her to her own bed. Now she spent very little time in their room. It made her uneasy to think of the private life they carried on away from her. People didn’t realize that being an only child wasn’t just about lacking a sibling with whom to experience childhood. The biggest problem of a small family was that none of its parts existed independently. There was such exposure, and within that exposure such a resonant loneliness.

  She could almost see her reaction to what she’d witnessed in the library—like an object masked by a heavy fog—but she couldn’t quite grasp it, bring it close to her and make out its shape. People often said of deceptions that they had known all along. But over the preceding months, she had sensed nothing. Whatever had happened—was happening—had gotten past her.

  She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the dresser. She looked like one of those deranged children from the movies, scowling, her bob flipped outwards, a bobby pin securing her hair off her face. A spinning, anaesthetized sensation washed over her. More than anything—more than the treachery against her father, more even than the prospect of her family’s dissolution—she was appalled by her own maddening innocence. That stubborn, useless part of her. How could she have failed to sense the change in the air of her house? A titanic untruth had been unfolding right under her nose: Ruth was carrying on a hidden life. All the moments of their shared world, down to each boring word uttered over dinner, had been part of a hollow display, an enactment of something that did not exist.