by Kit Pearson
“Eliza, you’re not the tidiest person around, but I’ve never seen you look like this! Are you having a bad day? Is something wrong?”
Sarah’s kindness was exasperating. Just take off a house point and get it over with, thought Eliza. Since the prefect expected an answer she mumbled, “I don’t know.”
Sarah continued to gaze at her in wonder. “Hmmm … I don’t know either. You know, Eliza, you should lose a house point for this—even two! But you usually at least try to be neat. I’ll let you off this week, but next Tuesday you must be perfect—not a thing wrong—or I will take one off. Okay?”
Eliza didn’t want to lose a house point next week. It would be too late for the dare then. Sarah sent her off to tidy up before the bell. She was so worn out from her experiment that she gave up trying to be bad for the rest of the day.
“WANT SOME IDEAS? I’d be glad to give you some,” offered Helen that night after Pam had told the others how Eliza had looked.
“No, I’ll do it myself,” said Eliza stubbornly. It amazed her that it was so difficult. Once you had acquired a reputation for good behaviour, people didn’t see you any other way.
Forgetfulness and lateness were still possibilities. On Wednesday morning she forgot her French book, but Mme Courvoisier simply sent her all the way back to the dorm to get it. On Wednesday afternoon she deliberately left her clean gym clothes in her desk, but half the class had also forgotten theirs. Mrs. Lomax was so exasperated she made them do circuit training, which they hated, instead of letting them try out the new trampoline.
It must happen today, thought Eliza on Thursday. Tomorrow was house meeting day; if she didn’t lose a point until then she’d have to wait a whole week until she apologized publicly for it, and she couldn’t bear that. It should be easy enough to be late for something—and that was her last resort.
After the afternoon break, once more an indoor one spent in the stuffy cloakroom that smelled of wet wood, Eliza slipped into the downstairs bathroom and sat on a toilet seat for ten minutes by her watch. Then she walked down the hushed corridors with a beating heart.
Behind each closed door droned a teacher’s voice. She could hear Miss Tavistock reciting a poem to the grade elevens in ringing tones: “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul.” Eliza tried to make her wobbly knees move faster without her shoes resounding any louder on the parquet floor.
Standing outside her classroom door, she listened to them read their parts from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Eliza was Bottom, and she wished desperately that she were already in there, waiting to speak. But it was too late now. She opened the door.
“Elizabeth, where on earth have you been?” The voices stopped and Miss Clark, usually kind, looked up crossly.
Eliza had forgotten to think of a reason. This was all getting much too complicated; she wished she’d never accepted Helen’s dare. “I’m sorry, Miss Clark,” she stammered. “I-I was reading a book in the cloakroom and I forgot the time.”
“You shouldn’t be so absent-minded. You can bring me your house card after class. Sit down now and get ready to read.”
So it was done. Eliza’s face burned as she bent over her Shakespeare. She was relieved that the first part of the dare was accomplished, but facing the consequences would be even worse.
First she had to take up her green house card, already fuller than most in the plus column, to Miss Clark to fill in. “Unpunctuality,” the teacher wrote swiftly. She looked as if she were about to say something, but then she initialled and dated the card and handed it back without a word.
“YOU DID IT! Welcome to the club,” whispered Helen at dinner. They were at the same table that month, and tonight, surrounded by three seniors debating loudly the number of calories in junket, they could talk without being overheard.
Eliza played with the slippery white blobs of her dessert. Usually she enjoyed it, but tonight she wasn’t hungry. “I wish I hadn’t. Tomorrow’s going to be awful—I feel like a phoney.”
“You’re still much too good—but I’ll change you. Can I have your dessert if you’re not going to eat it?”
ON FRIDAY MORNING Eliza crept by the large house point chart outside Miss Tavistock’s office in the school. She glanced quickly at the “1” that had been written beside her name. At least it was the end of the week and it would only be up for a day. It was embarrassing, but also oddly thrilling, to see it there.
House meetings began at one o’clock. The list of persons who had lost house points was read first, right after the Minutes.
Eliza decided to be a knight, confessing a necessary disloyalty to the rest of the Round Table. Standing in front of the room full of curious faces, she pulled back her shoulders and held her head high. What was it she’d heard Miss Tavistock say? “I am the captain of my fate”—something like that. She avoided catching Madeline’s eye. The house captain was standing behind the desk looking solemn, as she always did on house meeting days.
There were five other offenders in line with her. The recitation began. Eliza quickly counted and saw that she would be third.
“I’m sorry I lost a house point—I was eating on the street.”
“I’m sorry I lost a house point—I lost my hymn book.”
Her turn now. “I’m-sorry-I-lost-a-house-point-I-was-late-for-class.”
She watched Madeline conduct the rest of the meeting, but barely heard a word of it. At the end she collected all the house cards—her new responsibility, which today seemed like a farce—and handed them to Madeline with a trembling hand.
“Can you stay a moment?” Madeline smiled encouragingly. Eliza shut the door and sat down on top of one of the front-row desks.
“I’m sorry, Madeline!” she exclaimed, no longer a misunderstood young knight but ashamed and guilty. “It was all a mistake.”
“But don’t worry about it, Eliza! That’s what I wanted especially to tell you. Everyone’s late for classes—everyone loses house points. You care too much. It’s not that important. And it’s not as if you did it on purpose.”
Oh, but I did, I did! thought Eliza. It was so confusing. One house point wasn’t important, and she’d certainly earned enough for Cedar to more than make up for it. But what she’d done seemed important in a way she didn’t want to understand.
At least Madeline was paying attention to her again. And she wasn’t upset. But even that baffled her: her house captain should surely care the most.
It was a relief to have it over, this tense week when she’d felt like another person. She didn’t have to try to misbehave any longer, although she’d better remember to have her uniform in order next Tuesday. Still, even losing another house point wouldn’t be so awful now.
It all suddenly seemed trivial. She could never take it so seriously again, even though she wished she could. Why was everything at Ashdown changing so much?
“You know,” Madeline said, as she tallied the cards, “I sometimes think this whole house point system is petty. Like some English schoolgirls’ story.”
“I’ve read those books!”
“Do you think Ashdown’s like that?”
“I used to—now I’m not sure.” Eliza could feel herself wanting to pour out her disillusionment to Madeline, but she didn’t want her house captain to think she was disloyal. Madeline would likely be a prefect next year. She must believe in the system. She was probably saying these things just to make Eliza feel better.
“Is anything wrong, Eliza?” asked Madeline as they left for classes. “You seem kind of blue these days.”
Eliza shook her head.
Madeline bent over her books, her veil of hair hiding her face. “I’m sorry we haven’t had any time to talk this term. I have a lot of things on my mind right now, but I’m always willing to listen. Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?”
Whatever secret Madeline had made Eliza feel even more isolated. “Oh no,” she said stiffly, forcing a smile. “Nothing’s wrong at all.”
FRIDAY WAS HELEN’S bath night. While she was out of the dorm Pam said to Eliza, “I think Helen’s a bad influence on you. Last term you never would have acted the way you did this week.”
Carrie looked at Eliza reproachfully for a second and added quietly, “I think so too.”
“She’s not!” said Eliza, flushing. “I chose to do it, didn’t I?”
It was none of their business. She didn’t care what Pam thought, but Carrie’s comment stung. It occurred to her that she’d hardly spoken to Carrie all week, she’d been so busy conferring with Helen. Perhaps juggling her two friends was going to be a problem—one more, on top of all the others.
11
Solitary Saturday
E liza began to feel a leaden pride in the way she managed to shove her homesickness deep inside her. Saturdays were the most difficult days. Uncle Adrian looked so much like her father that she felt a pang every time she looked at him. And Aunt Susan was so fussy, it made her long for her easygoing mother all the more.
Every Sunday she had to struggle with herself before writing to her parents. She yearned so badly to pour out her misery to them that she forced herself, instead, to write long cheerful accounts about every detail of school life.
She discovered a trick to keep the awfulness from rising: Each time she felt it she made herself contemplate starting a new school somewhere in Toronto. This was so horrifying an alternative that it pushed the longing for her family away for a while. Gradually she became resigned to carrying the heaviness around inside her, like an unwelcome guest who wasn’t going to leave. And, as the half-way point in the term approached, it didn’t seem so interminably long until she could return to Toronto for Easter.
By contrast, Helen was becoming more high-spirited every day. Giddy with energy, she ran everywhere, knocking things over and earning exasperated scoldings from the matrons, which she shrugged off carelessly. Behind her glasses her eyes glittered with charged excitement. It was difficult to see what she could find so stimulating about these dull days, but her exuberance cheered up Eliza.
The last dare had cemented their friendship. The two of them spent much of their free time, when they could get out of games in the gym, in the cape cupboard by the front door: a perfect hiding place Helen had discovered two years ago. “No one else knows about this,” she confided. “Not even Linoleum—she’d just tell everyone.”
Huddled at the end of the narrow cupboard, they were totally concealed. Even if someone opened the door, it was too dark to notice them, and they’d strung an extra cape from one wall to the other to make sure. The space behind it was as snug as the inside of a tent. They sat on the dusty floor and pursued the endless topic of everyone else at school.
Helen did most of the talking, and Eliza was glad to be distracted from her depression by the other girl’s stories. “We really fooled Fidget,” she said with satisfaction one day. “She always sits on the edge of her desk with her feet dangling in the wastepaper basket. Nancy put an alarm clock in it and Fidget’s foot set it off! She was furious! But she didn’t know who’d done it, so she just yelled at us for a while and gave us extra homework.”
Eliza shuddered. Mrs. Fitch’s tirades were famous and she felt lucky to have Miss Clark as a homeroom teacher. “Does she still pick on you?” she asked Helen.
“Not as much. Although she really blew up at me when we had to write something about Churchill.”
“Why?”
“Oh, just because I asked why we always made so much fuss about people from other countries who’ve died. It was the same when Kennedy was shot—everyone got so dramatic about it. He wasn’t our leader. Neither was Churchill.”
Eliza was shocked. Her poem about Churchill’s death had been selected for the school magazine. “But Churchill and Kennedy were great men!” she exclaimed.
Helen shrugged. “Maybe … Anyhow, Fitch said I was rude and selfish. But the whole class hates her now. They’re all out to bug her, not just me.”
In the cupboard, Helen told Eliza every outrageous thing she’d done since she’d come to boarding school. It was an impressive list; Eliza marvelled that she’d got away with so much.
Sometimes she tried to ask Helen more about her parents. The brief information she’d heard last term had become magnified in her mind. She pictured Helen’s mother as cold and heartless, and her step-father as cruel. “Is your step-father mean to you?” she asked.
“Not mean—he doesn’t have enough energy for that. He’s just boring. We have nothing at all in common. I don’t know how my mother could have married such a totally uninteresting person after my father.” Her voice became tight. “But I don’t want to talk about him.”
Eliza stopped quizzing her. Helen acted as if she had no family, as if Ashdown was the only world she had ever inhabited.
Although she spent a lot of time with Helen, Eliza tried not to neglect Carrie. She didn’t see why the three of them couldn’t all be friends. Helen didn’t ski, but Carrie did; she and Eliza always stayed together on the slopes. On non-skiing Saturdays Eliza began to ask Helen, as well as Carrie, to her aunt and uncle’s. But these Saturdays were always a strain. Carrie and Helen were polite to each other in public, but each voiced doubts to Eliza in private.
“I don’t see why she had to come out with us,” said Carrie. “She makes me nervous. I’m always afraid she’s going to say something awful in front of your relatives.”
“You said last term that Helen didn’t bother you anymore,” Eliza reminded her.
“Yes, but I never thought we’d have to be together so much. She’s too crazy.”
“Turps slows us down,” complained Helen. “We could have stayed on the beach a lot longer if she hadn’t made us bring that boring baby with us.”
Eliza began to feel she was in the middle of a tug of war between her two friends. “Can’t just the two of us go?” objected Carrie when Eliza suggested that Carrie, Helen and herself watch the senior house basketball game together. “I just want you,” insisted Helen when Eliza began to call Carrie to join them in the group a prefect was taking over to Crabby Crump’s.
One week Helen even asked if she could be Eliza’s partner for church. “But I’m Carrie’s!” said Eliza, before she could think of a less hurtful reply. It was an Ashdown tradition that you always had the same partner for church: either your best friend or someone like a sister or cousin or friend from home, whom you might not see much of the rest of the week but always claimed for Sundays.
There was an odd number of boarders, however, and Helen was the one left over. She usually had to walk into church with the matron, unless someone was sick. Eliza now realized how awful this must be, but she couldn’t think of a solution. After her reply Helen just walked away. She never mentioned it again. Then Eliza felt angry at both of them: at Carrie for making her reject Helen, and at Helen for putting Eliza in the position of having to reject her.
AUNT SUSAN and Uncle Adrian went to Hawaii for ten days. Skiing had ended, and there were two Saturdays in a row when Eliza had to find someone to go out with. On the first one she was invited home by Thea Crawford.
Thea’s family lived near Little Mountain, in a grey stucco house that seemed to overflow with small scruffy children and yappy dogs, although there were only two of each. Thea was undemanding and cheerful; it was a rest to be with her instead of Helen and Carrie.
They pedalled to the top of the park, then paused to get their breaths. It was an unusually dry day, and the mountains and city were spread out clearly below them. Eliza had borrowed Thea’s sister’s bike. It was too small for her, but riding a bike again was an intense pleasure. She longed for her own, lying neglected in the Chapmans’ garage in Edmonton.
“Do you ride your bike to school?” Eliza asked Thea.
“I take the bus. There’s no prefects on our route, so we have a great time. We try to land our berets on each other’s heads. The bus driver gets pretty mad.”
“I wish I was a day-girl,” said Eliza en
viously.
“Oh, but I wish I was a boarder! From what you say it sounds like so much fun.”
“It isn’t this term.”
“You make lifelong friends in boarding school, though,” said Thea earnestly. “That’s what my mother says. Is Carrie your best friend?”
“Carrie and Helen.”
“Helen? Really? She’s so …” Thea paused.
Eliza looked at her defiantly. “She’s nice. I really like her.”
“Oh, I’m sure she is, if you say so,” said Thea hastily. “Come on, let’s go and see what’s for dinner. Coasting back’s the best part.”
THE NEXT WEEK Carrie invited Eliza out with her and her parents, who were coming up from Seattle for the weekend. Eliza knew that Linda O.’s parents were also in town, and had asked Helen to join them for the day.
“I think I’ll stay in,” said Eliza. “I have some prep to do.” She didn’t, but the prospect of having a day alone tempted her. And she had never remained at the school on a Saturday before; she was curious to see what it was like.
On Friday Helen was gleeful because she’d received a twenty-dollar bill in the mail from her grandmother in Montreal. She snapped it between her fingers. “Boy oh boy, do I need this!” she crowed, as she and Eliza struggled out of the crowd surrounding the mail slots.
“Why did she send it?” asked Eliza. “And isn’t it risky not to send a cheque?”
“It’s a late Christmas present,” said Helen quickly. “She always sends me twenty dollars, but this year she forgot, so I wrote and reminded her. She’s getting pretty doddery—that’s probably why she sent cash.”
“Are you going to buy something with it tomorrow?”
“Oh, I think I’ll save it. You never know when it might come in handy. I’ll take it down to the office later.” She pocketed the money and walked away, whistling merrily.
Helen had changed. Last term she would have spent the money immediately on food. There was something odd about her behaviour, something Eliza couldn’t pin down.