by Kit Pearson
“Listen, Eliza,” said Helen, with one of her owlish stares. “I’ve been meaning to tell you something. You’re getting far too sucky.”
“Sucky?”
“Yes. You know—sucking up to Charlie and Madeline and the rest of them. Playing hymns, knitting squares, studying all the time. You’re turning into a goody-goody. When we started the Daring Game I thought you had guts, but now you’re acting like Pam.”
Eliza felt a familiar stabbing pain. At her last school she had sometimes been accused of being a teacher’s pet. It seemed unfair. Adults were often pleased with her, but that wasn’t her fault. She liked having their approval, but she didn’t deliberately try for it as Pam did. Her parents had often told her how sensible she was for her age. Once she’d even overheard her Toronto grandmother saying she was “delightfully old-fashioned.” Eliza had cringed at this image of herself. But she couldn’t help it if what she liked was often what older people liked.
Helen was waiting for an answer. Eliza tried not to flinch from her accusing look and held her chin high so the tears wouldn’t fall from her eyes.
“I don’t mean to,” she said at last. “Really I don’t. And I’m not like Pam at all,” she added firmly.
Helen shrugged as if she didn’t believe her and looked even more disdainful. Before she left the room she said, “I think it’s time for another dare. Then we’ll see.”
6
The Second Dare
E liza tried to forget about Helen’s accusation, but she could think of nothing else as she tossed in bed that night.
You can’t help being yourself, said a voice in her head. It was her mother’s, sensible and soothing as always.
But Helen doesn’t like that self, Eliza answered.
Then forget about her. If she can’t accept you as you are, she’s not worth having as a friend. Besides, you have Carrie—you don’t need Helen.
I do! thought Eliza. But she didn’t know why.
Helen was overbearing and not always very nice, not the type of person Eliza usually chose for a friend. There was no reason she had to put up with someone who called her names.
Perhaps, however, the name fit. Perhaps she was a goody-goody. She felt angry at Helen for making her contemplate that. Maybe she should stay away from her. But it was unfair to dismiss Helen completely, when there was so much about her she didn’t know yet. Perhaps that was why Eliza was so drawn to her: she was mysterious. And Eliza couldn’t forget how Helen had stood up for her against Pam. That night, she had seemed like a real friend.
Eliza couldn’t work it out. All the contentment she had felt in the last month was spoiled. It was as if Helen had taken a pin and pricked a balloon inside of her.
After that she began to avoid direct encounters with the other girl. Helen hardly spoke to Eliza either, and when she did, she didn’t call her “Eliza Doolittle.”
The strain between them wasn’t noticed by the others, for the whole school was gripped by the frenzy of mid-term exams. No one in the Yellow Dorm had written real exams before. Pam crept out every morning at six-thirty to cram in the library. Jean carried her English book with her everywhere, whispering the poets they had to memorize. Eliza was especially worried about French and science. She listed conjugations of French verbs on scraps of paper, on her music books and on napkins. Constantly she repeated to herself the sentence Mrs. Lewis, the science teacher, had taught them: “Man Very Early Made Jars Stand Up Nearly Perfect.” The first letter of each word stood for a planet, and the words were in order of the planets’ distances from the sun.
The only two who didn’t study extra hours were Carrie and Helen. The former said to Eliza complacently, “I’ve done my best so far. I’m not going to worry about it.” Helen just lay on her bed, cut off from the rest of them by her radio earplug, and scowled.
“Fidget’s always picking on her,” Carrie told Eliza. “I think it’s mean. Helen fools around a lot, of course, and her work’s always sloppy. But other people are like that too. She says awful things to Helen.”
“Like what?”
“Well, today was the worst. Fidget came in and caught Helen and Linda O. standing on top of the desks-they were just trying to close the windows. She didn’t even tell off Linda, but she yelled at Helen and said no wonder her parents sent her away to school so young-she was such a brat they must have been glad to get rid of her.”
“But that’s terrible! Helen should tell Miss Tavistock.”
“It didn’t seem to bother her. I don’t think anything does. She just laughed really loud, and Fidget took off a house point for rudeness. She was the one who was rude! Some of us thought Helen should tell, but she said to forget about it. And a few kids thought she deserved it. A lot of the day-girls don’t like Helen.”
It must have bothered her, thought Eliza. Perhaps Mrs. Fitch’s bullying was what had made Helen so withdrawn lately. And why had Helen been sent here so young? She had never told them.
“What do you think of Helen?” said Eliza, remembering Carrie asking her the same question on their first day.
Carrie shrugged. “Oh, well … Helen’s just Helen. She’s not so bad.” Eliza wished she could be as untroubled as Carrie was by their complicated dorm-mate.
EXAM WEEK WAS appropriately grey and wet. Every morning they shuffled through sodden heaps of leaves, as they trooped over to the gym for prayers. Many of the trees were bare now, although Eliza’s favourite arbutus and the laurel and holly bushes around the Old Residence were still as green as new paint.
Eliza felt purged when exams were over. Each of the seven times she’d confronted the typed list of questions and the blank book to be filled with answers she had panicked. But then she’d taken a deep breath and scribbled down what she knew as carefully as she could. She thought she had done all right, even in French.
The Friday after exam week the boarders were being taken to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre to see a performance of the National Ballet. Eliza had never seen a ballet before, and that morning she tore open her folded blouse eagerly. Every week their blouses arrived back from the cleaners compressed into a starched rectangle. She popped open the sleeves and pulled the folds straight with a satisfying ripping sound.
Miss Bixley was braiding Carrie’s hair. “What a lucky girl you are,” she said. “I had lovely hair as a child, you know. I could sit on it, it was so long.”
“It sounds like a lot of trouble to me,” said Helen.
The matron was always telling them about her childhood in New York City, where she had gone briefly on the stage. This was hard to believe, but she had scrapbooks of pictures to prove it.
“Tonight we’re going to play the Daring Game,” Helen told them when Miss Bixley had left the room.
“But we’re going out!” said Carrie.
“All the better. We’ll go to bed later than usual and everyone will expect us to nod off quickly like sleepy little children.”
Jean look scared. “Is the dare for all of us again?”
“No, I think we should draw names. Then I’ll decide what the person who’s picked has to do. Unless it’s my name, of course.”
“You can count me out,” said Pam. “I don’t want to have anything to do with it. Why should you decide? And why should you all listen to her?” she asked the others.
Eliza wondered why too, as she hurried over to piano practice. She knew Helen hoped it would be Eliza’s name that was chosen.
BUT THE NAME Helen drew from the four strips of paper she’d dropped into her beret was Carrie’s. Eliza was first relieved for herself, then anxious for her friend, until she saw that Carrie didn’t mind. She twirled around the dorm in her long pink dressing-gown, her braid flying out behind, pretending to be a ballet dancer. “Okay,” she puffed, landing on Helen’s bed, “what do I have to do?”
Helen paced the room. “Let’s see, Turps. I dare you to … uhhh …” Eliza wondered if she was hesitating because she’d had a special dare just for Eliza in mind. “… t
o climb up to the Nursery by the roof.”
“She’ll fall!” said Pam at once. “That’s too dangerous.”
“No, she won’t. It’s dry tonight. I climbed down once, and up must be easier.”
“Why not by the fire escape?” Eliza suggested. It was the first time she had spoken to Helen in over a week.
“It doesn’t take much courage for that,” replied Helen scornfully, looking away. Eliza reddened.
They all peered up at the slanted roof that led to the Junior Dorm above them.
“I can do that,” said Carrie. “Should I come back the same way?”
Helen shook her head. “No, you’d better sneak down the stairs and stop off in the Red and Turquoise Dorms for safety. I know—send us a message on the Slipper Express when you get to the Turquoise Dorm and we’ll let you know when the coast’s clear.”
The Slipper Express had been invented by Helen and Linda O., one of the grade sevens in the Turquoise Dorm. She was always called Linda O. to distinguish her from Linda I., although there wasn’t much need for this. Linda I. was quiet and dull, while Linda O. was almost as boisterous as Helen herself.
The Yellow Dorm associated mainly with the two dorms of grade sevens and eights near them, with occasional forays into the Nursery above. No one on their side of the house had much to do with the three dorms of grade nines beyond Miss Tavistock’s bedroom. They were too loathsome, pimply and fat and full of self-pity because of it.
Visiting between dorms was allowed only before dinner and on Sundays, so the Slipper Express enabled messages to be passed between the Yellow and Turquoise Dorms at other times. The slick hall floor was a perfect surface for a flat-bottomed slipper to coast along.
Now Helen wrote out a warning. “Carrie paying you a late-night call,” she muttered. “Be prepared.” She stuck the note inside one of Eliza’s moccasins, the fastest slippers in the dorm, being both heavy and streamlined. Positioning it in the doorway, she sent the moccasin off with a strong push. It zipped down the hall and landed with a hollow thud at the other end.
Carrie hopped eagerly in her own fluffy slippers. “Shall I start now?”
“Go in bare feet, so you don’t slip,” said Eliza quickly. She shivered; the roof was steep and there was concrete below it.
Carrie sat on the wide windowsill facing them, only her legs inside and her hands gripping the bottom of the half-open window. She tipped her head back: “I just have to get a hold on the gutter,” she called. Pulling herself up so they could see only her bottom half, she lifted one leg at a time onto the roof.
Eliza’s heart beat in her ears as she leaned far out the adjacent window and watched Carrie scramble up until she disappeared. A squeal of alarm made her freeze; then she heard the sound of surprised laughter that meant Carrie had made it.
They went back to bed and waited for her return. Eliza knew she wouldn’t have done it. Climbing trees was one thing, but this was much scarier. She wondered how her friend could be so brave. But Carrie never reflected about things; she just acted.
She was gone a long time, and Eliza started daydreaming about the ballet. It had been a revelation to her, even though they’d sat so high up the dancers had resembled a company of tiny dolls. There was something about their precise movements and the way their bodies and feet told a story that was deeply satisfying.
She tried to think of other things to take her mind off the dare. This morning they’d had Mark Reading. It seemed cruel, making everyone stand up in order as their marks were read out. But at least she had got mostly A’s and B+’s—with one B in French—and she was secretly triumphant that she’d beaten Pam slightly. Later in the morning Miss Clark had praised Eliza’s English exam. But then she’d read aloud with amusement her answer to a question about Tennyson’s poem “The Eagle”: “The main impression in this poem is the sense of great height as the duck stands on a high rock and waits to strike.”
A duck! Wherever had the word come from? She hadn’t been thinking about ducks at all. She blushed violently, but the class’s laughter was appreciative, not mocking. Eliza decided that strange things happen when writing under pressure.
Carrie and Jean had received respectable B’s, but Helen had been among the group who remained sitting, their marks undisclosed but below a C+. It was puzzling, how Helen rarely got her homework finished. The boarders had so much supervised prep that it was hard not to do it. In fact, Eliza had found that if she finished hers quickly she had time to sneak a book on top and read undisturbed.
Helen certainly seemed smart. Pam had been rehearsing for the inter-house spelling bee one night, and Helen had known all the words. “Why don’t you enter it?” Carrie had asked her, but Helen had just replied it was too much trouble.
But Eliza didn’t want to think about Helen.
Jean yawned. “Where is Carrie?” It was very late; Pam’s eyes were closed, and Eliza would have liked to go to sleep herself.
WHAP! The slipper landed against the wall and startled them awake again. It wasn’t Eliza’s slipper, but a scruffy blue one. That was one problem with the Slipper Express: people forgot to send back the same one and you often had to retrieve your own the next day.
“Arrived okay. Safe to return?” read the message Helen pulled out. She stepped into the hall, listened for a second, then sent back an all-clear.
Suddenly they heard voices in the hall and froze. A few minutes later Carrie strolled through the door, calling over her shoulder, “Thank you, Miss Monaghan.”
“What happened?”
“Did you get caught?”
“Shhh!” said Carrie. “Wait till she thinks I’m in bed.” They waited five minutes.
“Now tell us,” whispered Eliza urgently.
“Okay. It was really scary. I slipped once on the roof—did you hear me yell? My bathrobe got caught under my foot.” Eliza winced.
“Then I rolled through the window onto Sandra’s bed. Was she ever surprised! They thought it was wonderful and they wouldn’t let me leave for a long time. I had to look at all their animals. I just love the juniors, especially Holly. They’re so cute.”
“Brats, not cute,” growled Helen. “I know—I was with some of them last year. Go on!”
“I made it to the Red Dorm and talked to them for a while. Then I ran to the Turquoise Dorm and sent the message. But just as I was leaving I bumped into Matilda! She was coming up the stairs.”
“Oooh, Carrie!” cried Jean. “What did you do?”
“I said—I said—” Carrie was laughing so hard she could hardly continue. “I said I had a headache and I was looking for her! And she got all gushy and called me a poor lamb and gave me an aspirin in her room.”
“Did you swallow it?”
“I had to! I don’t think it’ll hurt me.”
“Hurray for Turps!” said Helen, and all at once Eliza felt jealous.
Pam pulled her sheet over her head. “You are all being so dumb. Carrie could have broken her neck. Shut up now—I want to go to sleep.”
“Prim P.J.,” whispered Helen.
Eliza heard her and sighed. She wasn’t tired any more, and she tiptoed into the bathroom with a book. Pam always complained when Eliza pulled the curtains back to get more light. She had tried reading under the covers with a flashlight, but the Pouncer had confiscated it.
She couldn’t concentrate on her book. Adjusting the bathmat under her on the cold floor, she leaned back against the tub and thought about the dare.
Pam was right; it had been dangerous. Was it brave to do something foolhardy? She didn’t think so, but Helen seemed to. Eliza was only glad she hadn’t had a chance to call Eliza a goody-goody again. But not having to perform this dare just meant Helen would think up another one for her.
Eliza decided she didn’t like Helen. At first, the other girl had interested her, but they were too different to be friends. Carrie was much safer. Helen doesn’t like me anyhow, she thought. And I don’t care.
7
T
wo Birthdays
“Would you like to have all your dorm-mates out for your birthday next week?” Aunt Susan asked one Saturday in November.
Eliza considered it. Carrie came out with her almost every week, so she would be included of course. It would be nice to have Jean, if she didn’t mind missing a Saturday at home. But Helen and Pam—did she want them to intrude into her peaceful Saturday life? Nothing ever happened on her weekly visits with Aunt Susan and Uncle Adrian. It was always the same, and a lot like being in her own home. She preferred it that way.
But she knew her aunt and uncle wanted to meet the other three; she and Carrie were always discussing them. Also, it was Helen’s birthday four days after Eliza’s. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t very well leave her out.
“I’ll ask them,” she said finally. “But they might not be able to come.”
Surprisingly, they all could. Jean said she could skip seeing her parents for one week, and she seemed pleased to be included. Pam, who usually went out with her friend Deb, said in a syrupy voice that Helen mocked that she’d love to meet Eliza’s relatives. Eliza was the most puzzled by Helen’s acceptance. She didn’t understand why the other girl would want to come, but Helen said it would be good to have some freedom. She began to act friendlier, even though Eliza remained aloof.
THEY WERE READY at the front door, holding their coats, at ten forty-five on Saturday morning.
“Don’t you all look nice!” said Miss Tavistock, coming out of her study. “Many happy returns of the day, Elizabeth.” She threaded her way through the rest of the crowd of boarders waiting to be picked up.
Carrie giggled. “What does that mean? You guys use such funny expressions.” Carrie often pointed out what she considered to be Canadian oddities: French on the cereal boxes; singing “The Queen” at Friday afternoon assemblies; celebrating Thanksgiving in October; and saying “grade seven” instead of “seventh grade” and “dressing-gown” instead of “bathrobe.” Sometimes Carrie’s comments were irritating; it was as if she were laughing at Canada.