“Ladies,” Nick says, gesturing with faux chivalry.
Eloise giggles. We descend the steps, which lead to a tunnel—cold, drippy, smelly—and finally come to a door. I’m not scared, exactly, but when Nick pushes open the door at the end of the tunnel, and the damp, overheated, chlorine-infused air rushes in, I feel relief. Now I know where we are. We just took an underground steam tunnel to the indoor pool. Van flips a switch, and the blue water is lit from underneath.
“Awesome,” declares India, immediately shedding her pajamas. The rest of us follow. I’m wearing my old, stretched-out navy-blue eighth-grade swim-team suit. Eloise is in a pink Lilly Pulitzer bikini with a flippy little skirt. India’s suit is all complicated macramé with beads on the straps. And Honor is in a petal pink, expensive-looking silk slip that has no business anywhere near chlorine or even water. She dives in first, not hesitating.
The boys wear baggy swim trunks, probably exactly like the ones their dads wore and still wear. They plunge in after her.
I slide in slowly from the edge of the pool, letting the water climb my legs to the point where it reaches my belly. The cold makes me inhale sharply.
“Eek!” I say to nobody.
Nick swims up. “What are you waiting for, Birdie-Bird?”
“It’s cold.”
“Come on. It feels great once you get in.” He reaches a hand out to me. I can’t resist, of course, so I take it and slide in the rest of the way.
“I’m still freezing,” I say, and then, looking around, add, “This is amazing, though.”
“Isn’t it?”
Nick is not looking around. He’s looking right at me, still holding my hand. My heart gives a double thump, and I struggle to think of something to say.
“I could stay here all night. Couldn’t you?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say stupidly. We tread water like that for a while silently. From across the pool I hear India’s laughter, splashing, Van teasing Eloise about something, Bennett saying, “Guys, watch this!”
The moments tick by. Nick gives me a quizzical look. His eyes go soft, and he swims a little closer. Our mouths are just above the waterline. For a second, I think he will kiss me. Right here, right now, and right in front of everyone.
Van kicks water at Nick, splashing his face, and yells, “Yeah, Evans, show her your Hardwick!”
Nick turns, laughing, and splashes him back, while I feel crimson spread across my face. In my peripheral vision, I catch a dark streak come toward me under the water, but I’m not really aware of what it is until Honor emerges right next to me, her honey hair perfectly sleek across her shoulders, her slip clinging to her peachy skin. For the first time ever, I think, she looks me right in the eye. “You. Bitch,” she says, not loudly, but emphatically.
Then she flips underwater in an expert turns and swims away fast. Nick is behind her in a second, but Honor’s already out of the pool and exiting through the main door as though she doesn’t care who sees her.
“Shit,” says Bennett.
“Yeah,” says Nick.
The party seems to be officially over. One by one, we climb out the pool, all of us realizing at the same time that no one brought towels.
“Dudes,” says Van, “this sucks.”
We dry off as best we can with paper towels from the bathroom and an old, questionable towel Bennett digs out of the lost and found. It’s much colder on the way back, with wet skin and wet hair. The three of us sneak back into Selby without talking.
When we get to our room, Honor is either in her room with the light off, or not back at all.
•••
The following night after dinner, Chazzy agrees to come over to the Selby common room to practice with me. I tell him the story of the night swim caper, mostly because I think it’s a good story and partly because I think it makes me look cool—or at least like I have friends other than him. But when I get to the Nick part where Honor snaps at me, I stumble and skip the details. I’m not sure why.
“I don’t get why she suddenly lost it, though,” Chazzy says.
“I don’t know. It was out of nowhere,” I say, though of course I have a pretty good idea why.
“Freaky chick.”
“Really.”
“We should keep working on our song about her. New York City girl, your pearls are so briny,” he sings cheerfully. He grabs for Hummingbird, and I grab her back. I swing the guitar at him mock-threateningly, pretending I’ll break her over his head. Chazzy laughs and tickles me in self-defense. “Oh, yeah? Bring it, Wren! You’re not rock and roll enough to—”
And then, for some reason I can’t explain, I lean forward and kiss him.
His lips are warm, soft and dry, in a nice way.
Chazzy pulls back, looks into my eyes with a startled smile, and then kisses me back.
What you have to understand about this kiss is up to this point I have kissed exactly three boys:
Gavin Renfrew, the boy I kissed when I was fourteen and starting to get nervous that if I didn’t get this milestone over with soon, I would be labeled a complete loser. It was more slobbery than I expected.
Dave Saperstein, who kissed me at a ninth-grade party. We were officially “together” for a week, until I figured out that I didn’t have to like him back just because he liked me.
Jason (I never got his last name), the UC Santa Barbara freshman I kissed last summer when Kylie and I went to a Vampire Weekend show at the Bowl and pretended we were in college. That was fun, but I decided to get out of there before things got too crazy. Kylie, on the other hand, stuck around and had a somewhat wilder adventure with her new college “friend.”
In no situation (of the grand total of three) have I or would I have considered being the kisser rather than the kissee. I mean, never.
This realization comes rushing in, and I pull away. Chazzy and I look at each other and don’t know what to say. So we don’t say anything for a while. Eventually I decide to go with, “Do you want to work on that duet from last week?” while really thinking, WHAT JUST HAPPENED!?
“Sure,” he says, while really thinking I can’t imagine what.
If Honor was on speaking terms with me, I realize, I actually could report back to her on Chazzy. Oh, well.
My next ridiculous thought is that I feel disloyal to Nick. Disloyal only in my crush, not because he would care at all about what just happened. I know that. Halfway through our song, Mrs. Baird interrupts, looking for me.
It’s about Hannah, and it’s not good news.
Chapter twelve
A Change of Plans
My lips are numb. My tongue is numb. This is what I’m thinking as Mrs. Baird’s voice comes at me from a cloudy distance.
We are in the infirmary. Why are we in the infirmary? I’m not the one who’s sick. But I can see from her perspective: it’s a quiet place, a private place, a place with no personal attachments.
I try to refocus, pressing my tongue against the back of my teeth, trying to feel something concrete. Trying to ground myself to the scratchy orange tweed fabric covering the chair.
“She looks really pale, Mrs. Baird,” says Chazzy. He asked to come with me, and they let him for some reason.
“Shock,” says the nurse, standing by. Where did she come from? I didn’t notice her come in. I try to clear my head.
“Take a deep breath. Now out all the way. Wait, I’m going to get you a paper bag to breathe into.” The nurse walks out, her sensible nurse shoes squeaking against the clean floor.
Hannah is not dead. She’s not dead, but they can’t wake her up. She and part of the research team fell through a snowbridge hiding a crevasse. They were only found because their sled dogs barked all night; the rest of the team tracked the sound and pulled them out.
Hannah hasn’t been avoiding me. She’s been freezing to death
under fifteen feet of snow.
One of the scientists died, and the others are in a hospital in Greenland in hypothermic comas. Their bodies were frozen for so long that they have to be brought back to normal very slowly. They can’t be moved.
I piece this information together in bits, but that’s the gist.
“I need to go there,” is the first thing I blurt out when I finally can speak.
Mrs. Baird and the nurse look at each other. There must be something they are not telling me. Chazzy squeezes my hand.
“Why don’t we wait a few days and see when things stabilize?” asks Mrs. Baird. “We couldn’t send you over there alone, anyway. We would have to arrange for a staff member to accompany you. Do you have a passport?”
I shake my head. I haven’t needed one until now. Everyone should have a passport, I think, just in case. If I ever have kids, I will get them passports right away, even if I have no plans to take them anywhere.
All this time, I was so angry with Hannah, thinking she was too busy or too inconsiderate to call me back. I’m a terrible, terrible daughter.
“It would take at least a week or ten days to get you one, even if we have it expedited,” Mrs. Baird says, ever organized, ever practical.
“Is my mom going to be okay?” My voice sounds tiny.
“The research team leader says the clinic there is very good and practiced at this technique. But it’s a slow procedure. Fairly nuanced. It could take a while before she’s back to feeling herself,” says Mrs. Baird carefully.
Meaning what? Before she can walk? Talk? See? Does hypothermia cause blindness? I have an almost uncontrollable urge to run back to my dorm room and start madly scouring the Internet, looking up symptoms and prognoses. Then I realize I will have five days all by myself to do so. The prospect of staying alone at school for Thanksgiving, especially having just experienced it for a weekend, and now feeling even more—what, orphaned? That’s not right . . .
I can feel my brain tilting into full soap opera territory.
Okay, I tell myself, get a grip.
She’s not dead. They know what to do. I just need to sit tight, be patient and wait to hear that she’s okay. Then I will somehow get a passport and go over there and see her.
Chazzy walks me back to Selby, talking quickly in his reassuring voice. The kiss is a hundred miles behind us, like it never happened. I half-listen as he talks about breaking things down, step-by-step this, day-by-day that. I know he’s saying all the right things, and I’m so glad he’s there, but honestly I don’t think there’s anyone who could make me feel better right now.
Mrs. Baird has managed to get back to the dorm before me, so Chazzy leaves me at the door. She escorts me upstairs. (Why? Where does she think I’m going to go? That I’ll hop a plane with no passport and no money?) When I walk into the room, Eloise, India and Honor are all there. They look expectant, like they know something bad has happened, but they don’t know what. Honor’s cold glance swings to meet me, but then I see something shift in her eyes.
Wow, I must really look like hell to get any sympathy from her.
“Wren? Are you okay?” India stands up and takes a step toward me.
“Do you want to, uh, talk about it?” Eloise asks uncertainly.
“Not really,” I say. “I think I’m going to go to bed.”
“’Kay,” says India, looking a little relieved. “If you need us . . .”
“Thanks,” I say, and head for my room.
Without bothering to change into pajamas or brush my teeth, I climb into bed. I should have insomnia, but instead I feel like I could sleep for days.
Which is what I do, just about.
The next morning, my roommates, Mrs. Baird, everyone leaves me alone. No one seems to expect me to go to class today, so after waking up at noon, I go for a long walk around the lake.
I stop in at the barn. It’s early enough in the day that lessons haven’t begun yet. The horses and I pretty much have the place to ourselves. I stand in Chester’s stall, letting him snuffle my hair and breathe hot horse breath in my face. Another revelation about riding is that when you feel like you want to be alone and feel like you want a bear hug both at the same time, your horse’s stall is the perfect place to go.
I spend the rest of the afternoon alone in our suite on my computer, obsessively researching recovery and/or death from hypothermia. After more than too much time at this, I decide it might be a good idea for me to eat something, even though I’m not hungry. I take a shower, make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the common room kitchen, and wrap it in a paper towel to take back upstairs.
On the way, I stop by Mrs. Baird’s to see if there’s any news. She tells me she’s been on the phone twice with the clinic already today, and things are unchanged. Stable, she emphasizes. They won’t know for a while how much rehabilitation Hannah will need once she’s awake, but she’s responding and they’re optimistic.
I try not to picture Hannah going through all this. I know too much about it after spending the afternoon combing over every freaky, outlandish detail of the thawing process. It sounds impossible, but you can bring a frozen person back to life.
One story I read was about a three-year-old girl who fell into a pond in Austria. She was brain-dead for an hour and a half before the surgeons managed to bypass her heart with a machine that circulated her blood. They opened her chest and lungs and covered them in foil to get oxygen directly into her from the outside. Amazingly, after a few weeks, the girl revived. She was partly paralyzed at first. She couldn’t talk. And two years later she was fine. Like it never happened.
The lungs, though. I can’t think about Hannah in the same situation as that little girl. In my head I see this crazy animated film, Street of Crocodiles, they showed us in an art class earlier this fall. The creatures work in a strange factory, full of buttons, doll heads, scissors and screws. At one point, they are smoothing tissue paper over raw meat. The tissue sticks to the meat, turning transparent. The way they do it seems affectionate, almost loving. I picture Hannah, Hannah’s lungs—meat under tissue paper—and my mind goes blank.
“Wren?” Mrs. Baird smiles at me, but I haven’t heard anything she’s said.
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s going to be a slow road,” she repeats. “We can look into getting a passport for you if you really feel you need to go over there before your mother is recovered enough to travel.”
Mrs. Baird seems like she’s almost as relieved as I am at the news Hannah is stable. I can’t help it, I give her a hug, just because she’s there and she does give me the feeling she’s going to take care of me. I suddenly get the “housemother” concept. It’s not just an old-fashioned, holdover title.
“The more immediate concern with you is Thanksgiving,” she says, stepping back. “Usually we have a few foreign students who plan to stay on campus during the holidays, but this time everybody seems to be accounted for. We can’t keep the dining hall open for one student, as I’m sure you understand. I’ll be in Salisbury with my family, and you are very welcome to join us.”
I try to swallow the lump in my throat away. “Thanks, Mrs. Baird. That’s really, really generous.” I am touched, but at the same time, I’d much rather hide out in my dorm room for five days. How awkward would I feel staying at a teacher’s house? Even a teacher like Gigi, which would be nerve-racking for sure in its own way, but still easier to picture.
I scramble for an alternative plan. Go back to Ventura and stay with Kylie? But that would be awful without Hannah, not to mention expensive.
Thinking about Gigi reminds me of her sister. I wonder what she and her sister do for Thanksgiving. Do they visit their parents? Did Elsbeth tell Gigi before she decided to start the band up again? Maybe she asked Gigi to be in it, and Gigi said no. Maybe Gigi doesn’t even care if Elsbeth is in Glow without her. Do they really never t
alk?
“It’ll be just me, Mother and my sister. Her children are visiting their father in California,” Mrs. Baird adds in the silence. “Quiet, but Linda’s a good cook.”
“Thanks,” I say again, trying to keep the dread out of my voice. I gesture with my paper-towel-wrapped sandwich and look upward. I really am grateful. Really. “Okay, so . . .”
“There’s one more thing. Administrative. It can wait a few days.” She brushes it off. “Ms. Taubin will talk to you about it. And I should hear more from the clinic first thing tomorrow. Stop by on your way to chapel.”
I head upstairs with my sandwich. Everyone else must be at dinner, which is nice. More time alone where I don’t need to answer questions or act like everything is okay. I sit on the window seat and open my biology textbook—because it’s mostly memorization, not a ton of thinking. I let my brain wander, forcing it away from Hannah, from what Ms. Taubin could possibly want. Of course, it drifts straight to Chazzy and the kiss.
I wonder briefly if the whole thing even happened. What was I doing? I could never have imagined myself making a move like that, even with Nick. Especially with Nick. Never.
Do I like Chazzy? I mean, of course, I love him; he’s my best friend—but why did I do that? Was that even me? I try to imagine what he’s doing right now. Maybe he’s at dinner, or back in his room, thinking the same things.
I sit like this for a long time, my thoughts circling. Needless to say, I get no biology studying done.
Chapel, chapel, chapel. I overslept, and now I’m late. I contemplate just wearing the same clothes I pulled off last night and never bothered to put away, then decide I’d better try to keep it together just a little bit. I throw on tights, a jean skirt and one of those sweaters bought in Ventura so long ago—or at least that’s what it feels like, another lifetime. I gather up the books I need and hurry down the stairs, completely forgetting to brush my hair.
We’re not allowed to skip breakfast, so that means I’m going to have maybe three seconds to talk to Mrs. Baird before I head for the dining hall. What I’d really like to do is sit in her room by the phone all day. But I think a day or two of lying around feeling sorry for myself is about all Hardwick is going to let me get away with. That goes against its stoic New England values.
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