All Girls

by Emily Layden

  * * *

  Practice that afternoon does not go well. It’s an easy steady-state run, four miles on the roads Macy ran that morning, plus drills and core. The muscles along the sides of her spine threaten to spasm, flexing in tiny little pulses like tremors before a major earthquake. Leah Stern’s half step is particularly annoying, a bad habit that pushes the pace and ruins the workout for everybody else. Macy can’t resist trying to close the gap Leah creates, and the result is that the team finishes the run strung out over a hundred yards rather than together as a pack. Macy’s breathing catches in her throat.

  The cycle of her insides eating themselves continues. By the time she gets back to Lathrop after practice she feels as though she might have explosive diarrhea, which happens sometimes when she is extraordinarily dehydrated. She can’t bear the thought of dinner, but she scrounges in the storage bins under her bed for the packets of powdered electrolyte mix her parents packed for her. She watches it dissolve in a tiny water tornado, slumped against the side of her bed.

  The rest of the school is in the dining hall—lingering over teas and decaf coffees, knees tucked into chests, treating the minutes between dinner and study hall like stolen time, the rare half hour during which they are accountable to no one—and so Macy has the bathroom to herself. She leans over the trough sink, so far that her hip bones knock into the hard porcelain, causing her to wince. She positions herself so that her face is mere inches from the mirror, turning her chin slowly left then right, surveying the landscape. The pores on her nose seem to widen the longer she looks. She counts a smattering of blackheads at her chin. She begins by flicking a nail across a small whitehead near her eyebrow, listening to the tiny pop as it bursts. She examines the damage—minimal, none really, just a little red mark where there used to be a microscopic mountaintop of pus. Leaning closer to the mirror, she places her forefingers on either side of the tip of her nose and then drags them in opposite directions, stretching the skin, before moving her fingers toward one another again. She watches as strings of discharge sprout from her pores, long and thin and solid enough to stand on end, like tiny bacterial beanstalks. She works until her nose is red and swollen and sore before training her fingertips on her chin.

  This only ends one way, Macy knows, and despite her experience and the fact that she can hear her therapists’ gentle preaching rattling inside her brain—picking is a “body-focused repetitive behavior” and a “physical manifestation of your anxiety”—she makes the same fatal error: she goes for a pore on her cheek that is not quite ready, and her fingers slip and her skin, weakened under the duress of the last twenty minutes, peels away beneath her nails, leaving a raw red crescent shape in its wake. Fuck, Macy thinks, and she steps away from the mirror abruptly, repulsed by her own insatiable compulsion. Fuck fuck fuck. Now she will have a scab. Now the situation is so much worse than when she walked in here, a pinprick carved into a crater.

  She’s staring at her face when the bathroom door swings open. Leah Stern is wearing pink plastic shower shoes and a teal bathrobe patterned with pink and white ice cream cones. In her left hand she holds her shower caddy—also a bright green-blue—and with her right hand she clutches her bathrobe closed at her chest. She looks like what Lauren calls “sheltered”: like she hasn’t seen much of the world; like she is nearer to twelve than thirty.

  “Hey,” Leah says.

  Macy wonders how bruised and battered her face looks. Does Leah know she’s been picking? “Hey.”

  Leah stands still for a minute, and Macy feels as though she is supposed to say something else, anything else, to compensate for the alarming spectacle of her skin.

  “Ready for Saturday?” Macy asks, a heat diffusing from her ears.

  “I guess. Sounds like it’s a tough course.” Leah doesn’t lift her response like a question, but she doesn’t move for the shower stalls, either.

  “I think so. I almost want to skip the walk-through. I’d rather not get all worked up about that hill at mile two.” Of course Macy would never skip the walk-through.

  Leah nods but does not agree.

  Maybe it is their surprising normalcy that makes her do it—the remarkable fact that the air does not combust with awkwardness—or maybe it’s because of the adrenaline that slicks through her veins, her body’s response to shame. But she has barely thought it through before the words are out of her mouth: “I hope that whatever they have planned for us tomorrow night doesn’t keep us up late.”

  Something in Leah shifts. “Initiation?”

  “Yeah.” Macy groans and rolls her eyes.

  Is it disappointment? Embarrassment? Leah turns to the showers as she answers, pulling back the curtain on the second corral. “I don’t think I’ll be participating in that.”

  “Oh.” Macy pauses. She notices that Leah has a large whitehead at her temple, red-rimmed and pulsing, and is briefly overtaken by the desire to squeeze it. “Too bad. It’ll be fun. You should think about coming.”

  Leah raises a single eyebrow, slightly. “Thanks. I don’t think it’s really my thing, though.” She places her shower caddy with a thud on the shelf inside the stall. There’s a metallic scrape as she slides the curtain shut behind her, leaving Macy alone under the white lights of the bathroom.

  * * *

  When Macy wakes the next morning it is as if from a nightmare, with the vague malaise of something not quite right. It takes her a minute to remember, and then there it is: Leah and her casual “it’s not really my thing.” She moves swiftly through the stages of anxiety, replaying the conversation again and again. She can sense her brain doing what it always does, shifting the lens, applying a filter, cutting and splicing. The more she replays the reel the more Leah’s dismissal sours, drips with scorn. What she really meant, Macy knows, was that it shouldn’t be anybody’s thing. Macy wonders what it would cost to be like Leah Stern: to feel that unburdened by her classmates’ expectations. To half-step her teammates on group runs. To exist mostly in a world of her own making. She could start tonight, she thinks. Whatever Initiation is—they still don’t know, they still haven’t been told where to be and when and what to wear and what they’ll have to do and for how long—she could just say no, just skip it, just sit this one out. They would leave her alone, like everyone leaves Leah alone.

  She pretends to sleep while Jade pads around the room, listening to her roommate’s morning routine: drawers open and shut; the closet grinds on its rails; a zipper crunches. She can hear Jade slide on her backpack, the weight shifting against one shoulder and then the other. She is careful to shut the door quietly behind her, easing the latch into the strike so gently that the click of closure is barely audible. It is a tender enough gesture that Macy knows her roommate has forgiven her, and she tucks herself deep into her comforter, hiding inside the shame that flushes hot across her chest.

  * * *

  All day long, Initiation looms. Every time Macy spots a cluster of seniors together—Addison and Collier walking across the Bowl during morning break; Priya Sandhu and Karla Flores sprinkling sunflower seeds over their salads at lunch; Olivia Anderson’s head in Emma Towne’s lap, Olivia’s legs dangling off the end of a bench outside Whitney in the early afternoon—she assumes that they are fine-tuning their plans for tonight, plotting and scheming down to the last detail. She hates them. She indulges in long fantasies of interior monologues, losing herself during biology and algebra in the exact phrasing that would make Addison and Collier see the error of their hierarchical ways.

  Meanwhile, Macy’s friends have started to doubt the whole thing. At lunch—where Macy makes herself a plate of salad but does not eat so much as a safe-colored chickpea—Lauren muses that the whole thing is just psychological torture, a bit of a mindfuck to keep the freshmen from feeling too comfortable.

  “Maybe the torture itself is the initiation,” she says.

  “Unh-uh.” Bryce shakes her head and demurs through a mouthful of turkey sandwich. “My mom said it’s real.”
>
  “Did she tell you what it is?”

  Bryce shakes her head again. “Just said to have fun and watch my feet.”

  “Watch your feet?” Jade perks up. Jade loves clues.

  Bryce shrugs. “Whatever that means.”

  In between English and history, Macy runs back to Lathrop. She scrounges underneath her bed, pulling the storage bins and baskets one by one from where her parents puzzled them into place until she finds what she’s looking for: a case of Ensure, purchased just for emergencies. She downs half a bottle right there, leaning against her bed frame, the liquid chalky in texture and muted in flavor. Before she throws the bottle in the hall recycling she peels off the label and shoves it deep inside her backpack.

  At practice, Macy does her best to avoid Leah altogether. She hammers harder than she should on their shakeout to prevent Leah from half-stepping. In the end-of-practice huddle, Ms. Brown smiles and says, “Nobody roll an ankle tonight, okay?” and Kit laughs and Tasha Lyons says, “No spoilers, Coach!” and Macy feels suddenly violently nauseous, like she might vomit in the middle of the circle. The bus leaves at eight tomorrow, Ms. Brown adds, but the race isn’t until eleven, so maybe bring something light to snack on: a banana, a granola bar, et cetera. As they disperse, Carol Brown puts a hand on Macy’s shoulder, holding her back.

  “You ready for tomorrow, Mace?”

  Macy shrugs. “A little nervous about the hill at mile two.”

  Ms. Brown smiles, her eyes big and crinkly. “You’ll be fine. You won’t set a PR but I think you can still finish in the top three. Just hold your move until after the hill.” She pauses, and Macy can tell she wants to say something more. She has a wild fantasy that Ms. Brown is going to tell her about Initiation, to confess exactly what’s coming, because she doesn’t want her star runner to blow it tonight—but when Ms. Brown speaks again all she says is, “You’ve seemed a little off this week,” and Macy feels her heart drop with a thud into the bottom of her stomach.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. Is everything all right?”

  Macy feels like she might cry. Her throat swells. The muscles around her eyebrows seem to spasm, clenching and unclenching. But she is so sick of being a source of trouble, a constant burden, always, and the whole reason she came here, to this northwestern corner of Connecticut, a thousand miles from home, was so that she wouldn’t be a burden, so that she could have a fresh start, no more teachers eyeing her warily, nervous about her triggers and the parent phone calls and the meetings and the IEP and the e-mails from psychologists and psychiatrists.

  “I’m fine,” she manages. “Just a busy week, I guess.”

  It’s obvious that Ms. Brown doesn’t believe her. She tilts her head to one side, takes a minute before she speaks. “It can have a cumulative effect,” she offers. “The first couple of weeks are like a vacation, you know? It doesn’t hit you right away that this place is your new reality. But you’ll be okay, Macy. This is the right place for you.”

  It is enough to make Macy’s insides puddle at her navel, her body a shell.

  * * *

  Dinner comes and goes. When Jade is in the bathroom, Macy sneaks another Ensure from under her bed. She makes a mental note to find a garbage in the gym or over in Trask to dispose of the wrappers. The last of late summer hangs deep orange over the hills when Macy climbs into her bed, hoping that she can fall asleep and morning will come and the whole thing will have been as Lauren guessed: a ruse, an experiment; psychic torture. In the distance, a peeper chirps, maybe the season’s last survivor.

  * * *

  She wakes to a thundering. It takes her a moment to process where she is, to orient herself in the slash of gold light that cuts underneath their door. Jade’s bed is neatly made, her roommate nowhere in sight. She is able to separate the cacophony that rumbles outside her door into its discrete parts: Shouts, laughter; the stampede of feet; fists banging against doors. She has the feeling of being six or seven and playing hide-and-seek, her body stiff with giddy and irrational terror.

  Macy is thinking about curling deeper into her comforter, imagining telling her friends tomorrow that she just slept through it, when her door creaks open and Tasha Lyons’s head peers around the corner. “Hey, speed demon. You in or what?”

  “I didn’t think I had a choice.”

  Tasha’s voice is not altogether impatient. “Believe it or not, it’s not that much fun to haze someone who doesn’t want to be hazed.”

  Macy doesn’t know how to respond to this.

  “You should at least come watch,” Tasha says.

  “Will it take a while?”

  Tasha lets out a kind of exasperated laugh. “You’ll be just fine for tomorrow morning.” After a beat, she adds: “Come on.”

  Macy climbs out of bed. “Do I need shoes?”

  Tasha shrugs. “You heard Coach.”

  The thundering is beneath them now, echoing and reverberating in the stairwell and sifting in from the cracked windows in the lounge. Macy follows Tasha down the hall and stairs, closing in on her classmates. They smack against the fire exit, and—

  The first thing Macy notices is the moon, low and swollen and so bright it blots out the stars. In groups of two and five and seven Macy’s classmates stampede across the silver grass. They undress as they run, unhooking bras and stumbling to peel off socks. Fully clothed seniors swarm among them, some with their phones out, flashes bursting like fireflies.

  “Where are they going?” Macy asks.

  “Only one way to find out.” Tasha smiles. It’s not an order.

  Back home in Naperville, Macy would find herself night running in the winter months, when the sun sets early and rises late, daylight a matter of just eight or ten hours. She was never allowed to stray from their neighborhood, where her parents could be sure that despite the darkness she’d be safe. She’d run lollipop-shaped loops around the network of cul-de-sacs, again and again and again, until her watch read forty or fifty or sixty minutes.

  She glances at Tasha, who nods encouragingly.

  Her classmates have a two-hundred-yard head start on Macy, but she closes the gap quickly. In seconds she’s somewhere in the front-middle of the pack, following the leaders she can’t see over the hill at the gym and down into the forest. As they crash through the brush, she catches a glimpse of Linda Paulsen, their hard-nosed Dean of Students, keeping watch at the mouth of the path.

  Fifty yards into the woods, they cut from the trail. Macy tears at thinned branches, her arms shielding her body. Twigs snap beneath her feet. The group slows, working through obstacles.

  “I’m gonna get poison ivy!”

  “There’s no poison ivy here!”

  “What about ticks!”

  “Fuck!”

  “Sorry!”

  “WATCH THE STUMP!”

  Their feet hit dirt, then rock. Macy hears the smack of water on skin before she realizes where they are. The creek empties into the Housatonic a half mile down the road. Her team brought her here on the third day of practice, to cool off after mile repeats in the August humidity.

  She realizes that she is the only one still dressed. It’s worse than being naked. She peels off her T-shirt and shorts, the latter tangling on her sneakers. She steps out of them, stacking them neatly on a rock set back from the shore.

  The water hits her like knives, splashing at her waist.

  “Doesn’t count unless you dunk!”

  The stream sears across her forehead, pinching her temples in a vise. She brings her hands to her face, sweeping water from her eyes and nose.

  The seniors hoot and shout. Someone sprays champagne from the shore. To her left, Daphne and Lauren wrestle one another into the water. Someone yells at them to watch the rocks. Bryce crouches in the tide, her breasts marbled beneath the clear waves. Jade thrashes toward Macy. With her right forearm she cups the river and tosses it in her direction.

  “You made it!”

  Macy laughs, squeezing
water from her hair. The moon has risen fully now, and out of its halo the stars squint above the trees. She dances above the jagged rocks, shifting her weight from one sharp edge to another. She nods at her roommate, electric with their mischief, relief barely outweighing all the rest, terrified and thrilled and triumphant all at once.

  * * *

  In the morning, Macy is slower than usual to wake. She stays in her bed for an extra minute, warm beneath the comforter she brought from her bed at home. As she bounds down the stairs to the dining hall, she realizes she feels rested for the first time in weeks. Her prerace jitters are thoroughly under control: not a trace of faint nausea, no frantic trips to the bathroom. The stairwell smells like eggs and maple syrup, and she plans her meal: Oatmeal, she thinks, and a banana, and small cup of black tea. She makes a mental note to grab an extra piece of fruit in case she gets shaky from the caffeine, which happens to her sometimes.

  Between the late night and the fact that it is only 7:30 A.M. on a Saturday, Macy is not surprised that the dining hall is sparsely populated: a handful of upperclasswomen, sitting alone at random tables, crouched over their newspapers. She underestimated how much she would like the school’s ban on cell phones in the dining hall; there’s something charming about this view of her classmates bathed in morning light, hunched over steaming coffee and the morning news.

  Jade and Lauren sit at a table in the corner. She realizes immediately that something is wrong from the way they share a paper, their heads almost touching. Suddenly the image in the dining hall is an ominous one, each unfolded newspaper a land mine waiting to explode as soon as Macy is close enough to read a headline. She imagines what they say before she can actually see them, her subconscious splicing together language from her frenzied research: HAZING SUSPECTED IN STUDENT DEATH; STUDENT DROWNED—HAZING TO BLAME?

  She would have known, wouldn’t she? If someone had fallen? If someone hadn’t made it home last night? It was dark, and the shore of the creek was rocky; Macy herself felt her ankle flop on a larger-than-usual stone. It would have been easy, she imagines, for someone to have tripped and fallen face-first into the water. She’s heard about deaths like this, she’s sure of it: accidental drownings in mere inches of lake or pond or stream.