Blow Out the Moon

by Libby Koponen

  “It’s the best one we’ve seen so far, but … I don’t like it.” I didn’t like those pale bedspreads and little ripped pieces of paper, but that wasn’t a real reason. “There’s just something about it that isn’t quite right.”

  Then I thought of one good reason, something that would make sense to her.

  “And it’s not in the country, though it’s nice that it’s by the ocean.”

  My mother smiled, but it was a tired smile, I thought.

  “Maybe Daddy will find something!” I said.

  “Maybe he will,” she said, and that smile looked happy.

  I was right. One night he came home and said he’d found the perfect school.

  “I drove down to Kent after lunch, and as soon as I saw Sibton Park, I knew it was the one,” he said, more to my mother than to me; then he laughed a little, almost as though he was embarrassed. “I fell in love with it.” He handed me a small, thin booklet. “ ’Ere ’ave a butcher’s at this!”

  The brochure cover.

  Inside it said:

  Sibton Park is a beautiful Queen Anne house standing in its own grounds of 88 acres…the foundations of the house go back to the reign of Edward III.… Each girl is encouraged to explore her own potential and to take pleasure in the success of others as well as her own. We believe in the old-fashioned value that consideration for other people is at the root of good manners.… Children whose parents are abroad may spend all or part of the holidays at school. It is Mrs. Ridley-Day’s home and the school is never closed.

  The grown-up code — the rhyming slang! Have a butcher’s hook (look) at this.

  The booklet showed a big, rosy-brick building surrounded by fields. SIBTON PARK it said in blue letters. It sounded like a Jane Austen novel.

  Inside were pictures of meadows with horses, and girls riding, and girls in the stable petting a horse (it was in a loose box, with bars at the top, exactly like the ones in the happy part of Black Beauty), and girls in their pajamas on their beds, talking. It looked better than the boarding schools in the books: older, more strange and magical, more like the house in The Secret Garden than a school. There was a little map of the school and grounds, and there were gardens all over: a rose garden, a Tudor garden (what was that?). Meanwhile my father was excitedly telling my mother about the headmistress, and how old the house was (some parts were almost seven hundred years old, he said); I didn’t really listen until his voice changed. By the change, I could tell something was wrong.

  A picture from inside the brochure.

  “Term starts the day after tomorrow,” he said.

  “But she’ll need lots of new clothes, and I’ll have to sew name tapes on everything — couldn’t she go a day or two later?”

  He shook his head. “They won’t take children once the term has started. I have the clothes list right here,” he said quickly, eagerly. She didn’t say anything, and he went on: “Mrs. Ridley-Day said you can get all the uniform things at Peter Jones, and that they can send whatever she won’t need right away straight to the school.”

  He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and my mother and I both looked at it.

  “Jodhpurs, a RIDING jacket!” I said. “Oh, Daddy! Can I take it to show Emmy?”

  “I signed you up for ballet, too,” he called after me; as I ran out I heard him talking excitedly and my mother sort of laughing and saying, “Honestly, Art!”

  My mother and I went shopping right after breakfast. First, she ordered name tapes (a long strip of white material with your name on it over and over in little capital letters: you could choose the color of the letters and I chose blue), and the man PROMISED that they would be ready by the end of the day. These had to be sewn inside all my clothes, even the socks, my mother said. She was worried about getting it done on time.

  “I’m such a slow seamstress.”

  This is the list, with my mother’s notes and check marks. Walking shoes laced up and had thick soles. House shoes were like Mary Janes, only made of brown leather. The shorts were culottes: they were made out of wool. “Fawn” was a sort of warm beige color. “Knickers” were brown and a little bigger and heavier than underpants. You wore them OVER your underpants (why you needed them I never knew). “Vests” were undershirts.

  I had to try on a lot of clothes. The only interesting ones were the string gloves for riding — they really did look and feel like they were made out of string! Maybe they were! They didn’t have the jodhpurs and tweed jacket in my size. The man who measured me seemed surprised that I was going away to school, and when my mother said I was eight he said, “She’s a bit small for her age, isn’t she?”

  It was true. I kept hoping that someday I would get taller; both of my parents are tall, and Emmy was tall for her age, too. In fact, by this time we were about the same height. But, so far I hadn’t grown.

  My mother and Jill started sewing on the name tapes as soon as we got home — my mother’s stitches were tiny and perfectly even. As soon as things were done my mother checked them off on her list and put them in a trunk.

  There was also a small brown suitcase called an “overnight case.” She packed a dressing gown like the ones the girls in the books had and pajamas and a “sponge bag” — that was a pink plastic bag filled with soap, a washcloth, shampoo, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a brush and comb. She said I could put the rest of the things of mine that I wanted to bring in this case myself, and that I could choose what to take.

  I didn’t bring the dolls — in the stories no one had dolls and it wouldn’t be any fun to play with them without Emmy anyway. I chose Pride and Prejudice (the book about the five sisters; my parents had given me my own copy for Christmas), Little Women, Melissa Ann (a book about an orphan), and a fat blue book called Blackie’s Schoolgirl’s Omnibus that had three novels about boarding school in it. I wrote my name and our address in America in each book. I packed the card with Henry’s address on it and all his letters inside the books so they wouldn’t get ripped. I was going to leave the fortune-catcher at home, but then I unfolded it and put it in, too, very carefully. And I put in the diary and pen I had gotten for Christmas — I’d only written in the diary once, but maybe at the school I would want to. I put in an ink bottle, too, but my mother took that out.

  “But then how can I write?” I said.

  “They’ll have ink at the school,” she said quietly, without looking up from the ink bottle in her hand.

  When she did look at me, I thought she looked a little sad, but then she smiled and said, “You’ll have a lot to write about, and you can write letters to all of us to tell us what it’s like: I’m putting in lots of envelopes and stamps. Daddy and I will write to you, of course, and Emmy, too — it will be good practice for her — and Willy and Bubby can draw pictures.”

  When I woke up the next day, the day I was leaving for boarding school, it was very sunny.

  “Emmy! Are you awake?”

  She didn’t answer, so I got out of my bed and went over to hers. She sat up slowly and sleepily.

  “I want to ask you something very important,” I said. “Guard my dolls. Don’t let Willy and Bubby play with them. You can check on them, but we’ll still have the rule about not working each others’. Okay?” She nodded. “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Good.”

  The dolls said good-bye to each other, and then I put all mine in their own beds, under the covers, and put the beds inside the white chest.

  It was a school day for Emmy and Willy, and Jill was taking Bubby with them, too, because by the time she came home, my parents and I would be at the train station. I followed them all to the front door. Willy and Bubby kissed me good-bye, and I kissed them back and gave them each a hug.

  Emmy and I looked at each other, and then she started to cry.

  “Emmy, don’t cry!” I said. “Please don’t cry! It’s not very long until May sixteenth!”

  (That was the first day they would be allowed to visit me, a
nd of course they would come.)

  “That’s right, buck up!” Jill said.

  We both ignored her.

  “But it won’t be the same — it won’t be the same ever again,” Emmy said, still crying.

  I thought that was probably true; but I didn’t say so. I said, “Think of your pet bird!”

  My parents had promised to get her a budgerigar — a small parrot people in England have as a pet — as a sort of consolation present for me going away.

  Then I made our “I hate this” face (the one I always made before I walked upstairs to my London classroom) and Emmy sort of smiled and made hers back at me, and then they left. … I stood in the doorway, and after a few steps, Emmy stopped. She turned around, with her hands still in her pockets, and we looked at each other one last time, and then I waved and ran into the house.

  Emmy, exactly the way she was dressed and standing when she stopped and looked back at me (though this picture was taken a few weeks later).

  I went downstairs: our room was still sunny and very quiet and white. It felt a little funny to be in there without Emmy and Willy and Bubby. … by the time they were home again, I’d be gone. The room was so white, so still!

  When it was time for us to leave, my mother buttoned me into my new gray wool coat (with a name tape neatly stitched into the inside collar with tiny tight stitches, all exactly alike), and a straw hat with a red ribbon round the brim — part of the new uniform. That had a nametape sewn into it, too.

  No one took pictures that day (this was taken several weeks later), but this is the hat I was wearing.

  My father was wearing a tweed jacket and my mother wore her pretty pink suit.

  We took a taxi to Charing Cross, the train station. They weren’t coming to the school — they were just putting me on the “reserved car” (my mother said that meant a whole carriage just for girls going to Sibton Park).

  But when we got to the platform we didn’t see any car marked “Sibton Park,” or any other girls. My father told my mother and me to wait while he went to find out what was happening. When he came back, he looked very embarrassed (I don’t think I’d ever seen him embarrassed before) and told us that he’d called the school: all the other girls had already gone on an earlier train; someone would meet this one.

  “The same mistake was made about her,” he said.

  A very big girl wearing a gray coat and straw hat just like mine was standing a few feet away, scowling awkwardly. Her name was Lindsey Cohen, and my father said we could take the train to Sibton Park together. Lindsey Cohen got on, and then my father said to give him a kiss, it was time to go.

  “So long! See you May sixteenth!” he said, and looked at my mother.

  She bent down and hugged me; I held her neck very tightly for a minute. I could smell her Arpège perfume; then she kissed me and I let go. When she stood up, her lips and chin were trembling. She smiled, with her mouth wobbling a little.

  I got on the train and sat down next to the window, across from Lindsey Cohen; my parents both waved to me and I waved back. The train started with a jerk and noise — a whistle, and then that horrible clacking that keeps getting faster. We all kept waving.

  I kept thinking: I cannot cry, I will not cry, especially in front of Lindsey Cohen.

  On the wall just above her head was a small glass box with a sign below it saying:

  TO STOP THE TRAIN IN CASES OF EMERGENCY, PULL DOWN THE CHAIN.

  PENALTY FOR IMPROPER USE, £5.

  I wondered what would happen if I pulled the chain: How would it stop the train? Of course, I wouldn’t pull it — this wasn’t an emergency. And I wouldn’t cry. After all, I wanted to go to boarding school.

  “Make sure you’re right, then go ahead,” Davy Crockett said, and he did, even at the Alamo. That was much worse than this!

  I would NOT cry. And if it felt like I might, I could go into the little hallway and look out the window there, keeping my back to the compartment.

  Chapter Fourteen:

  Sibton Park

  I didn’t cry, but I did walk into the little hallway. I pressed my face to the window and looked hard. Once we got into the real country, there were fields, deep green and (often) full of sheep. When I went back into the compartment, I fell asleep. I woke up a little in the taxi but I didn’t REALLY wake up until I was sitting at a long wood table late that night, eating cold roast beef. It was rare (just how I like it), and as I ate, I got more awake. Lindsey Cohen was sitting next to me, and we were at Sibton Park.

  The room was big and bare, with three long wooden tables (all empty), squares of gray stone for a floor, and lots of big windows (it was too dark outside to see anything out of them). It was also a little bit cold.

  Sibton Park, as it looks when you come in the front gates and go a little way down the front drive. The house had been added onto over the years, and each side of it (there were more than four) looked quite different. The front was the most formal.

  A grown-up came in and said she’d bring me to my dormitory. She led me through a long passage with coathooks and kids’ raincoats all along the walls, and a brick floor so old that the center dipped down from all those feet over the years.

  We went up steep stairs and through a wider, fancier hallway with wood floors, then up more stairs into a small room with no furniture in it, and down two steps into a long, straight, wide, white hall with lots of closed doors.

  The first door on the right had a white wooden sign with neat black letters saying: WELLINGTON. The next said: WATERLOO. Then, above a little step on the left, the door said: WC.

  She opened the door, and I saw a little white room with just a toilet, no sink or bathtub. I stepped up into it and closed the door.

  When I came out, we walked past more doors and stopped at NELSON. This, she whispered, was my dormitory, and I’d need to get ready for bed quietly so I didn’t wake “the others.” Then she opened the door.

  A dormitory at Sibton Park — not Nelson.

  The room was big, with tall, old-fashioned windows open (a breeze and a silvery gray light came through them, and outside I could see a leafy branch), a fireplace, and five beds: four with girls in them, one empty. There was a little sink in the corner; she pointed to it and watched me wash and get into bed, then whispered good-night.

  As soon as she was gone, all the girls sat up in their beds. One by one, they said hello and whispered their names, very politely: Rosemary Hitchcock, Sarah Riley, Catherine Marshall, and Hazel Fogarty. They seemed nice (only Sarah Riley had kind of a snobbish voice, I thought).

  “My name is Elizabeth Koponen,” I said, “but everyone calls me Libby.”

  “Are you American?” Catherine Marshall said. She was in a bed by itself across from the door. My bed was in the middle of a row of three beds against a wall.

  “Yes,” I said proudly. I am proud of being an American. “Don’t ever give me tea — if you do, I’ll have to pour it out on the floor, in honor of the Boston Tea Party.”

  “What’s that?”

  I told them about the grown-ups in Boston dressing up like Indians in the middle of the night and dumping all the tea from the English ships into the Boston harbor. There was a little pause when I was done, and then Catherine Marshall said, “That’s interesting.”

  There was another little pause, and then Hazel Fogarty asked if I’d ever been “away at school” before, and I said no, and they started telling me all about Sibton Park.

  “Your first term you’ll be teased — new girls always are.”

  I asked how long you were a new girl, and they said for your first term, but that you weren’t an old girl until you’d been there a year. They’d been there for three or four years: they were all older than I was. I asked about the headmistress, Mrs. Ridley-Day. My father had talked about her a lot — he’d said she was beautiful and “a real lady,” and that he’d chosen the school because of what she was like. I didn’t say that; I just asked the girls if they liked Mrs. Ridley-Day.r />
  “Call her Marza. We all do. It’s Greek for ‘mother,’ ” Catherine Marshall said.

  “Does she have a husband?”

  “He’s dead — he died in the war.”

  “That’s when she started the school.”

  “The house is hers,” Sarah said.

  We talked on and on — I didn’t feel sleepy at all and I don’t think anyone else did, either. After a while we stopped whispering and talked out loud. There was a rule against talking after Lights Out, they said, but no one ever obeyed it and people were always getting punished for it.

  Catherine said, “One night the whole school was talking — except for Alice and Tina, they’re prefects and the oldest girls in the school —”

  “— and the next morning at prayers Marza said there would be no sweets that day!” Hazel said.

  I knew that “sweets” meant candy.

  “Do you usually have sweets?”

  “Yes, every day after dinner we line up and can choose two each.”

  “What kind?”

  “Toffees, or acid drop spangles, or peppermints, or boiled sweets. On Sunday we always have Cadbury’s.”

  That wasn’t in any of the books. But they seemed to like school as much as the girls in the books did.

  We talked on and on. I told them that on the train, Lindsey Cohen had hardly talked to me at all, and Catherine said, “She doesn’t like Americans — her father married one and she can’t bear her step-mother. I shouldn’t worry.”

  I asked where the horses were, and if they could ride them whenever they wanted, and everyone started talking at once, and Hazel Fogarty (they called her “Foggy”) was jumping up and down on her bed, imitating someone who couldn’t ride, and we were all laughing when the door opened.

  All the noise stopped and everyone quickly got under the covers. A lady stood tall and straight in the doorway, like a queen. She had gray hair in one long, thick braid that curved over the front collar of her dressing gown. I could see her quite well in the light from the hall and I knew who she was: Mrs. Ridley-Day. She was very beautiful.