“We didn’t make it, Nicola!” I exclaimed furiously. “We’re an hour away from campus and it’s twelve-thirty in the morning and my cell phone battery is almost dead!”
“It’ll be fine,” Nicola assured me, in a tone that kind of suggested that I was overreacting. “I’ll just call a cab.”
She began tapping commands into her cell phone to try to bring up a listing of local businesses, and after a few failed attempts, swore under her breath. “I don’t have any service here. Maybe we need to get closer to the road.”
We slipped our shoes back on and walked across the parking lot, clinging to its wooded edge, prepared to bolt into the trees at a moment’s notice if a car were to return to the parking lot.
There was no sidewalk lining the private road which led back to the highway, so we walked along its edge, which was dark despite the few and far between street lights that punctuated it.
“I swear, Nicola, if we get all the way to the road and you don’t have service, I’m going to be so mad,” I threatened.
Of course, because we’d been aboard a bus and hadn’t been looking out the windows on the way into the St. John’s campus, we had no real way of knowing before we set out toward the highway on foot that the length of the private drive was almost a mile long. We walked and walked. I took my shoes off because a huge tear was forming in my lacy tights at my heel where blister had swelled, and then put them back on because walking barefoot on a road covered in pebbles and twigs was more painful than suffering the blister.
We finally reached the end of the road and I almost lost it and strangled Nicola on the spot. Of course, because we hadn’t been watching when the bus had passed through the iron gates of St. John’s, we would have had no way of knowing that the gates were locked shut until we were standing, perplexed, right in front of them.
“Why are they closed?” Nicola asked, incredulously.
“Because this campus is private property and they probably don’t want intruders driving around here at night, or kids walking off campus,” I snapped back grumpily. “The real question is, why aren’t the gates at Treadwell ever locked?
We shuffled over to the side of the road into the shadows of the pine trees, reorganizing our thoughts once we realized there was a strong probability of security surveillance cameras monitoring the gate area. Nicola’s phone still didn’t indicate that it had service, and mine had shut itself off, which was my own fault for so fervently checking it for Bijoux’s response when we were aboard bus. Attempting to climb over the gate would have been downright foolish. It was probably ten feet high, and there was nothing to even grab onto to make climbing possible.
On both sides of the iron gates, a brick wall surrounded the campus at least as far into the woods as we could see in the dark. The wall seemed a little bit more like a realistic means of escape from this strange imprisonment. It was only about four feet high, and Nicola was pretty sure she was tall enough to hoist herself over. Which meant that if she knelt down to let me use her bent knee as a stepping stool, I would be able to throw myself over the wall, too. She had a height advantage of a few inches on me, and I could never have gotten myself onto the top of the wall without a boost.
I took a deep breath to gather my courage, and tossed my pair of silver Yves St. Laurent pumps over the wall, giving myself no choice but to get over that wall somehow.
“Ow,” Nicola complained when I stepped up on her bent knee with my bare left foot.
“Geez,” I muttered, placing my hands on the smooth cement top of the wall and hiking my right leg upward in an attempt to get both of my knees up there, so that I could orient myself a little before hopping down on the other side. Only I hadn’t taken into consideration the tightness of my beaded dress, because its bottom ripped a little bit, just enough to tear the fine threads holding the silver iridescent beads along the hem. I didn’t realize that I was bleeding silver beads until I was sitting on the wall with my legs swung over to the other side.
“Uh, I think I tore your dress,” I told Nicola, immediately sorry that I had ever agreed to borrow her clothes. The dress couldn’t have possibly been cheap.
“Doesn’t matter,” Nicola assured me. “I’ve had it for a year. I’ll never wear it again.”
I looked down over the wall toward my shoes, and experienced a bit of trepidation about the four foot drop awaiting me. Four feet isn’t that high, but it kind of is in the dark, especially when there are no grown-ups around, and no way to call ambulance if tragedy strikes.
“What are you doing up there? Just jump already,” Nicola commanded me.
But I couldn’t budge.
She walked down the length of the wall a few feet and then threw her shoes over to the other side. She then pulled herself up to the top of it like a professional gymnast. “It’s not so bad, Betsey, really,” she said, hopping down off the wall and landing on the other side with a soft thud and crunch of dry leaves.
“Scrikey,” she muttered. In the dark I couldn’t clearly see how she’d landed and instantly prayed she hadn’t sprained anything. But it turned out that she had just landed in a patch of wet mud, and had slid. The back of her red dress was covered with black muck and when she wiped at it with her hands, they became muddy, too.
“Don’t touch it,” I instructed her. “Your hands are getting all dirty!”
I counted to five and then pushed myself down, landing more elegantly than Nicola, but hardly in a manner that I would refer to as ladylike. We both gathered our shoes and checked Nicola’s cell phone.
Still no service.
“Was there a gas station or anything nearby on our way out here?” I wondered aloud, knowing that Nicola would have no idea because she had been crouching beside me on the bus.
We decided to walk down the highway a little bit, hoping probably in vain that there would be some kind of shopping center or 24-hour gas station with a pay phone within walking distance. Neither of us really even knew which way home was, so we decided to turn left outside the St. John’s gates rather than right. We didn’t dare walk on the pavement of the road, knowing that any passing traffic would seriously wonder about two teenage girls on a rural highway at that hour in dirty evening gowns and suit coats, and instead stuck to the grassy side, occasionally encountering smashed bottles. I was becoming bitterly angry. It was after one in the morning, I was so tired that my eyes burned, my legs were starting to hurt, and I was certain that my roommate, Kate, was exactly the kind of girl who would have taken enormous pleasure in telling Lauren on her nightly bed check rounds that I had never come back to our room after the dance. Kate had been curiously absent from the dance, but then again, she and her churchgoing friends were probably not allowed to dance with boys and had abstained from attending out of obedience.
After what seriously felt like hours of walking, but according to Nicola’s cell phone had only been fifty minutes, we saw an illuminated gas station sign at an intersection governed by a traffic light up ahead in the distance. Our pace quickened when we had that little glimmer of hope to keep us going. By the time we reached the gas station I was pretty much ravenous and exhausted. I had every intention of entering the open mini-mart and buying myself a granola bar, but Nicola protested.
“They’ll think it’s weird that a fourteen-year-old girl would stumble in off the highway at two in the morning,” Nicola reminded me.
She was right.
I then truly almost killed her, because as I was inserting a quarter into a pay phone to dial the operator and ask for the nearest taxi cab company, Nicola had a revelation as she was inspecting her cell phone.
“Uh oh,” she said. “I’ve actually had service this whole time. I just had my phone set to airplane mode because I didn’t want it vibrating when we were at the dance.”
I exhaled loudly enough to inform her that she was seriously, dangerously close to being murdered right there in the AM/PM parking lot. Even if I got thrown out of Treadwell for committing homicide. Even if I had to d
o hard time. I would have been willing, in that moment, to face living out the rest of my days in a jail cell.
“Nicola, you are such an idiot! How could you not realize that? It’s so late at night and we just walked so far!”
“I’m sorry,” she said flatly, not sounding the least bit genuine. “I forgot that I’d turned the service off.”
“Call a taxi,” I commanded her, slamming down the receiver of the pay phone. “Now.”
As we stood there in that dark parking lot, struggling to stay awake, I resolved that I would never do anything with Nicola ever, ever again, even if our absence at Treadwell that night went unnoticed and the long horrible walk across August, Massachusetts served as our only punishment for ditching the dance with Sam and Alex. I would endure Treadwell joyfully as a nerd, outside of the warm glow of Nicola’s popularity. I hadn’t put so much effort into getting into Treadwell just to get kicked out because of someone who was so reckless with school rules. I thought about how disappointed my mother would sound on the other end of the phone if I had to call her and inform her that I’d been kicked out of yet another school. Especially since she had sounded so impressed that I had taken the initiative to find tutors for myself. Especially since I actually had found tutors and had honestly been trying to take school seriously.
“Look, I said I was sorry,” Nicola said, trying to patch things over as we stood there, waiting for the taxi for what seemed like ages. “Are you just going to be mad at me all the way back to Treadwell?”
I waved her away, just shaking my head.
In the back of the cab, the driver seemed totally suspicious of us.
“What are you kids doing out so late at night?” he asked us. He was listening to funky jazz music at a loud volume in the cab, which smelled like cigarette smoke. I guessed he had just put out his cigarette before pulling into the gas station parking lot to retrieve us. This was a totally different kind of cab than the kind in New York; it was white on the outside and there was no clear plastic partition between the back seat and the driver’s seat.
“We’re not kids,” I snapped back. “We’re eighteen.”
The driver asked us for our destination and before Nicola could provide him with the address to the Treadwell campus, I interjected by requesting that he drop us off at the 24-hour diner less than a mile from the entrance to our school. It would be all too painfully obvious that we were jail breakers if he were to realize he was dropping us off at our boarding school at what would be three in the morning by the time we got back to Treadwell.
Fortunately, an hour later when Nicola and I were both struggling to hold our eyes open, the taxi driver accepted Nicola’s credit card for the exorbitant fare. We climbed out of the taxi in the diner parking lot, and the driver must have looked over his shoulder at the back seat because he yelled at us through the window.
“Hey! What, were you two mud wrestling or something? My car is filthy! You can’t just leave it like this!”
Nicola and I exchanged glances. Neither of us had any energy left to try to make a run for it at that point. I took a few steps back toward the cab. “It’s three in the morning. We don’t have any cleaning supplies with us.”
“Yeah, no kidding, smart mouth,” the cab driver snapped at me. “The two of you are going to have to pay for me to have the car cleaned.”
“How much does that cost?” I asked.
“Forty bucks,” the taxi driver said.
I dug into my purse, took two twenty-dollar bills out of my wallet and tossed them through the window of his cab. I was being an impossible brat, I knew, but I was just so annoyed with Nicola. The taxi driver, probably so surprised that I’d paid up without putting up more of a fight, peeled out of the parking lot and sped off down the highway.
Beleaguered, I walked toward the diner, intent on using the bathroom and getting a hot cup of tea before walking the rest of the way back to campus. Nicola lingered in the parking lot, presumably wondering if it was OK to follow me inside. I wasn’t especially concerned about whether she came inside with me, or hoofed it to Treadwell alone.
“What’ll it be, darling?” the curly-haired waitress in a pink uniform that gave her name in hot pink embroidery floss as Jeanie asked me. I had slid into a purple vinyl booth, enjoying the lingering scent of coffee in the air. The laminated menus stood upright in a little metal clip on one end of the table near the window, and I browsed it as if there was a chance I might order anything other what had been on my mind throughout the entire taxi cab ride.
“A piece of blueberry pie and a cup of tea,” I ordered, trying to sound like I had just then made up my mind. Whenever Bijoux and I pulled all-nighters in New York City, we wrapped up our adventures with blueberry pie at the Veselka Ukranian restaurant on Second Avenue, a diner that served food around the clock. Bijoux would always smile at me with purple, berry-stained teeth to make me laugh.
The waitress, who had flawless eye makeup, even at that late hour, jotted down my order on her notepad, smiled efficiently at me and disappeared behind the counter. Surprisingly I wasn’t the only patron in the diner. There was a young couple with dark circles around their eyes splitting a Belgian waffle at another table and two old guys who didn’t appear to know each other sitting up at the counter on stools. Just as I was losing myself in a fantasy about circumstances that had brought the other patrons to the diner at the odd hour, Nicola slid into the booth, across the table from me.
“You can’t be mad at me forever,” she stated, staring me down with her deadpan expression.
“You don’t know me very well,” I corrected her. “I can be mad at you for longer than forever.”
The waitress returned with my slice of pie and tea, and asked Nicola if she wanted anything.
“Do you have hard boiled eggs?” she asked innocently.
The waitress looked at her as if she was bananas. “Yeah, of course we can hard boil eggs.”
“I’d like two of those, please. And a seltzer with a slice of lime.”
Nicola watched me consume my pie, bite by bite, with fascination.
“Could I try a bite of that?” she asked.
“No,” I told her, and added smugly, “it’s not on your list from your doctor.”
Her cell phone buzzed with a text message, and she pulled it out of her handbag to check it. Its contents brought a grin to her face and she held up her phone to show me. I was ready to completely dismiss it, whatever it was, when my heart stopped.
Her brother Tommy had sent her a picture of himself and a guy who looked just exactly like Nigel O’Hallihan.
“Who is that guy?” I whispered, my eyes bulging out of my head.
“That’s Tommy’s roommate, Darren,” Nicola said.
Snippets from magazine articles and Tweets and chunks of video broadcasts flooded my brain. Nigel O’Hallihan, from my very favorite band in the world, All or Nothing, had an older brother named Darren! Could it be possible that my new enemy, Nicola, had some kind of direct connection to the celebrity love of my life?
“How have you known me for a whole week and not bothered to mention that your brother knows Darren O’Hallihan?” I hissed, outraged.
“They go to school together. It’s not a big deal.”
“Not a big deal?” I asked. “Do you even know who Darren’s brother is? He’s in the most famous band in the whole world right now.”
“I know,” Nicola said, putting her phone away. “He went to the same elementary school as Tommy and Darren in London. Does this mean you’ll be my friend again?”
I swallowed the last bite of my pie and took a swig of my tea. Nicola was such a strange girl; I figured she could handle the truth. “I’ll put you on friendship probation, but only because you’re one degree of separation away from the man of my dreams.”
Nicola nodded, not smiling or frowning, as was her solemn-faced habit. “You’re the only person I’ve met at that school who’s fun.”
Her words resonated with me. I was flatte
red, but peeved. I couldn’t afford to be anyone’s fun friend anymore, even if that’s what perhaps what I was best at in life. As the two of us hobbled down the road back toward campus in our painful high heels, I thought back to over the summer when my sister and I had taken Taylor to Virginia Beach and had pressured her to go water skiing with a bunch of college guys we had met. She had ended up getting grounded, and now I kind of understood how she must have felt that whole day.
Nicola suggested we take a right on Featherstone Lane and return to campus through a sidewalk trail that would lead us to the back of the gym so that we could avoid the security guard station near the front entrance. As we rushed down Featherstone Lane, we saw two people approaching and momentarily considered diving into the woods. But as those people approached, I was surprised to realize they were Taylor and Ruth.
“Betsey!” Taylor exclaimed, surprised and dismayed. “What are you doing off school property so late?”
“The same thing you’re doing,” I replied curtly. “Sneaking back onto campus.”
She shook her head at me, disgusted. “I can’t believe you. C’mon, Ruth.”
Ruth, caught in the crossfire, smiled apologetically and followed Taylor as she turned toward campus and stormed across the green toward the dorm she inhabited. Ruth trotted along after her, clasping her handbag to her hip to keep it from bouncing as she chased Taylor.
Great, I thought to myself. Just as on Wednesday I had let myself believe that Taylor and I might actually become friends because I was trying to clean up my act, I had gone and blown it by running into her at my worst... sneaking back onto campus at four in the morning with smeared makeup and a torn dress. I had literally left a trail of silver beads across August, Massachusetts, not unlike Hansel and Gretel’s trail of breadcrumbs.
It occurred to me as we cut across campus that our little adventure had been my first departure from school property since Monday when Mom and Danko had dropped me off. By the time I got back up to my room, I was too tired to even be as overjoyed as I should have been to find a note from Kate on my desk telling me that she had left campus after dinner to catch a 10 P.M. flight home for the weekend. Seemingly, there had been no witnesses other than Taylor to the ridiculous night that Nicola and I had just endured.
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