All Girls

by Emily Layden

  I’ve thought a lot about that dining hall conversation in the years since. I was twenty-one the first time a man got “a little weird” with me, and then twenty-three. Both times I characterized the incident to friends in exactly that way, either because Karen had given me the language or because it was the natural way to describe the confused feeling I had that maybe I’d played some role in my own hurt. I’m not saying that what happened to Karen happened to me, or vice versa: What I’m saying is that we were both very young, and it was 1995, and for both of these reasons we did not have the vocabulary we have now to describe such experiences.

  Karen was the wiser, more experienced one within our friendship. I’m sure she knew I thought there was something glamorous about her affair, and to say what she has said now would have ruined the facade. Although I am ashamed by my own teenage narcissism, I want to be kind to both of our younger selves, and understanding of all that we didn’t know. Karen and I have lost touch, and the opportunity has long passed for me to tell her all this. But I’d still like to try to be a better friend, and it seems speaking up for her right to share her story—equipped as she is with the hindsight of adulthood and the knowledge afforded by a changing landscape—is the least I could do.

  Please let me know if this is still possible, and, if so, to whom I would address my thoughts.

  Meg Rogers

  Class of 1996

  Fall Fest

  There was no chance of doing any AP Biology that day. Any time Mr. Gregory said “ATP,” Kit Eldridge, dressed in a teetering wig and a brass-buttoned coat as Alexander Hamilton, shot up from her seat and began reciting the preamble to the Constitution: “We the People, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” When he asked them to write, from memory, the steps to cellular respiration, Brie Feldman, dressed as one half of the Mario Brothers, shouted, in a squeaky voice with a bad Italian accent, “Let’s go!” and then began playing, from her phone, music from the Mario Kart video game. In the back, dressed as Belle from Beauty and the Beast, Sloane perched at the edge of her lab stool, her heels cocked against the ground. She began class with a fully choreographed rendition of “Belle (Reprise).”

  Mr. Gregory is the perfect Atwater teacher for Ringing. Through each interruption he is patient but undeterred. He claps politely and then returns to his slides. The young and new teachers are always too young and too new to know how to handle it. They try to play along or they ask overeager questions, wanting to be in on the joke. The veteran teachers like Mr. Gregory have a kind of mild disinterest, an okay-let’s-get-this-over-with kind of attitude. It endears them to their students, who find indifference—especially among their male teachers—motivating. They love him for it.

  In the back of the class, Chloe Eaton is wearing a unicorn onesie, the horn-adorned hood drooped on her back. She ordered it online for $60 plus overnight shipping, and while she might normally be grateful for the opportunity to wear a onesie to class, right now she just feels awkward. The costume Priya picked for Chloe—but which Chloe paid for, because Ringing expenses are the responsibility of the junior class—is the least imaginative and the least original, chosen at random at the last minute. It’s not even embarrassing: it’s just boring. She’s supposed to leave small piles of glitter in her seat in every classroom (“Unicorn poop!”), but Linda Paulsen vetoed that particular prank after first period, complete with a brief tirade about how Ring Dares that unreasonably burdened the janitorial staff were unfair and “privileged,” and that, as an Atwater alumna herself, she expected more from them.

  Chloe had never really looked forward to Ringing, the custom through which Atwater juniors earn (via successful completion of a series of dares, most of which involve a costume and an element of performance) and are bestowed their class rings. Of all the Atwater traditions, it gave her the most anxiety: What if no one wanted to be her Ring Sister? Or, what if someone would be her Ring Sister but, you know, it was someone who chose her out of default? What if she was the only junior left without a Ring Sister, and so Paulsen had to pair her with the only senior who hadn’t yet been proposed to?

  In the end she proposed to Priya because they were both part of the same tangled knot: Priya was friends-but-not-best-friends with Addison and Collier just like Chloe was friends-but-not-best-friends with Blake and Sloane. Blake asked Collier; Sloane asked Addison. (Honestly, she thought Sloane would ask Karla Flores, who greeted Atwater with the same kind of regular indifference as she did, but there are varying strategies to this sort of thing.) She wasn’t like Louisa Manning, who had an actual best friend in the senior class (Anjali Reddi), or like the theater kids, who all hung together regardless of grade. She could have asked a senior on the field hockey team, like Isabelle Baldwin or Ashley Witt, but they were the kind of not-very-close that results from actually knowing one another. Which is to say: they had made a conscious decision not to be friends. The whole ordeal—choosing and proposing to a Ring Sister—was the closest thing to actual dating that Chloe had ever experienced: Blake and Sloane ran interference with Collier and Addison, sniffing out who remained of the seniors, then presented the list back to Chloe; then, like matchmaking couriers, circled back to Collier and Addison to confirm mutual interest or agreement. Finally, they landed upon Priya.

  In a school that largely lacked promposals, Ring Sister proposals took on all the related fanfare. Classes ground to a halt, unable to withstand the deluge of interruptions and speculation. Louisa Manning wrote an editorial for the newspaper, five hundred words on her friendship with Anjali Reddi beneath the headline, ANJALI, WILL YOU BE MY RING SISTER? Blake persuaded the kitchen to decorate a cake with the same question for Collier; Sloane went for maximum audience, using the student-announcement portion of Morning Meeting to propose to Addison. Even Kit Eldridge, with her West Coast hippieness that tends to buck tradition, proposed to Karla Flores via the hand delivery of a massive cornucopia of fall flowers, dahlias and black-eyed Susans and garden vines cascading out of an antique silver vase. Kyla Moore stood behind the opposing team’s goal during a home soccer game, holding a giant sign directed at Olivia Anderson. Brie persuaded someone on the maintenance staff to code a message to Emma Towne in the pool scoreboard. For ten days the proposals interrupted field hockey games and extra help sessions and Atwater’s weekly formal dinner—and then it all stopped for a month, until mid-November, when Ringing occupied the already-distracted week before Thanksgiving break.

  All of this is to say that, sitting in the back of biology in her unicorn onesie, Chloe has not been looking forward to this week. Her phone faceup on the desk, shielded by her classmates and the depth of field from Mr. Gregory’s largely indifferent eyes, she swipes through Snapchat, where every other post has RINGING scribbled across it in neon pink or fluorescent yellow. She taps over to her own post from this morning and watches her pinched fingers sprinkle glitter, raining from in between her neatly manicured nails before the video rewinds and plays in reverse, the iridescent flecks sucked back up into her hand. It’s mesmerizing. It’s the best thing to come out of today. (This is affirmed by her messages, which are flooded with video replies in the form of hearts and thumbs-up and 100 emojis.)

  Next to her, Sloane repositions her notebook closer to Chloe. She’s scrawled something in the top corner in handwriting that is like Sloane herself: tight, elegant, unfussy. What’s tomorrow? it reads.

  Chloe gives her head the tiniest of shakes. She doesn’t know. She reaches for her own pencil and scribbles a response: You?

  Jasmine (from ‘Aladdin’), Sloane writes.

  Chloe looks up from the paper and Sloane rolls her eyes.

  Disney princesses all week, I guess.

  Chloe shrugs, but as she turns her attention back to Mr. Gregory—diagramming the citric aci
d cycle now—she notices her lungs filling properly for the first time today.

  * * *

  When she gets back to her room that night, there’s a bag positioned on her bed with a card propped in front of it, waiting expectantly. She takes the time to unpack her own backpack first, plugging in her laptop and setting it on her desk, stacking her books on the hutch above, scanning her planner to assess the night’s homework: a chapter in The Awakening; twenty pages on secession for APUSH. She can skim both in under an hour. Finally, she picks up the card, flips it over, running her hands along the milky smooth envelope. The card inside is blank save for three attentive letters at center—PKS—in a kind of stern and serifed font. Inside, Priya’s looped handwriting is hasty and crooked: “For tomorrow!!” it reads. “—P.”

  The instructions seem unnecessary, the lack of personal touch almost insulting. No shit, Chloe thinks, before imagining that Priya wanted the chance to use the monogrammed stationery that gathered dust most of the year. Still, would it have killed her to write another sentence? Can’t wait for Saturday, maybe? Or, Super pumped to be your Ring Sister! Maybe she could have signed it that way, XO, Your Ring Sister, instead of that trying-too-hard —P. (It’s a rare initial that holds up to the single-letter nickname. B, for Blair or Bea or Bianca, works; so does S, for names like Serena or Sienna or Simone. P for Priya is not one of them. Neither is C for Chloe.) She slips the card back inside the envelope, putting both aside, and turns her attention to the bag itself. Whatever it is barely fits in the bag; that it is Chester-the-Cheetah orange and soft is immediately apparent, and the realization comes before Chloe has it a third of the way out of the bag.

  “Another onesie?”

  The voice is behind her, and Chloe whips her head over her shoulder to see her roommate standing in the doorway, clutching a steaming paper cup close to her chest.

  “Apparently.”

  “That’s sort of boring,” Brie says. “But I guess at least it’s comfortable?”

  Chloe holds the body-shaped blanket up against herself, matching its shoulders to her own. “I guess so. The booties are a little annoying. I have to, like, shove them into Uggs…” She trails off.

  Brie places her tea neatly on her desk before striding over to where Chloe stands. She pinches the fabric between her thumb and forefingers, the polyester gliding between her fingertips, and makes a low whistling sound. “Man, no chance I’d stay awake through APUSH if I was wearing that. What else is in there?”

  Chloe plunges her hands again into the depths of the bag, fishing around beneath the onesie. When her hand emerges, it’s clutching a single-serving-size cup of Frosted Flakes.

  “‘They’re grrrreat!’”

  “I guess I’m Tony the Tiger.…” Chloe peers into the bag again. “There must be a dozen of these in here, all Frosted Flakes.”

  “What are the instructions?”

  “Add milk.”

  Brie snorts. “No, idiot, like—what does Priya want you to do with the cereal? What’s the dare?”

  Chloe turns the cup over in her hands, rattling the flakes inside against their plastic container like a small percussion instrument. “I don’t know.…”

  “After the glitter was vetoed, I doubt chucking cereal into the air will be allowed.”

  “Yeah, definitely not.”

  “Oh—look. It says something on the bottom.”

  Chloe looks at Brie, then flips the cup over in her hand. EAT. “Eat? When?”

  “See if the same thing is written on the others.”

  Chloe turns the bag upside down, and single-serving packs of Frosted Flakes rain down on her bed, clattering against one another. As they tumble onto her comforter, rolling away from each other like bumper cars, they catch black lettering across the bottom of each, and the words piece together like an impressionist painting—EAT across every single one.

  “Damn,” Brie says. “That’s a lot of Frosted Flakes.”

  * * *

  The next day, any time Chloe might have normally eaten in public—sipping coffee at breakfast with Brie; at snack; during lunch—she eats Frosted Flakes instead, hunched over the little plastic-paper cups, the blue paper top peeled partway so that it half covers her face. By the afternoon she is starving—a matter not necessarily of lacking calories but of lacking nutrition, of substance, of fiber—but isn’t willing to risk Priya or one of Collier’s lackeys catching her at the snack bar or ordering in. She skips dinner entirely, unable to bear even the thought of tonight’s acorn squash and green beans and roasted turkey. She sits in their room instead, and sneaks a protein bar from Brie’s stockpile, eating only half of it because it, too, like the Frosted Flakes, tastes like chemicals and sugar and the headache that set in two hours ago and which now rages between her eyebrows. She starts fantasizing about breakfast, about Atwater’s designer egg McMuffins (served on little ciabatta rolls instead) and maple sausage, neither of which she’d eaten since her freshman year, because only freshmen and a certain kind of upperclasswoman eat from the hot-food bar at breakfast.

  * * *

  On Wednesday, she wears a onesie printed to look like wizard robes, carries a wand, and casts a spell every time a teacher says “homework.” Some of her classmates have read the books a dozen times over and try to engage with Chloe using obscure references and a language that sounds like inside baseball. Chloe would have to admit she hadn’t read the series, eliciting at worst horror and at best an offer to binge-watch the movie adaptations this weekend. Most of the time, though, a classmate would just whisper longingly—“I’m so jealous”—and Chloe would think, Don’t be, someone wears this every year.

  She doesn’t have to wear a onesie on Thursday—the costumes in general were fading in presence and originality by the fourth day—but she does have to carry around a small speaker and project music as she walks from class to class. (“Your personal soundtrack!” Priya’s note read, with a link to a playlist of pop icons Chloe listened to only as a passenger in other people’s cars.) This is mostly fine, except the teachers hate it and three times yell at her to turn it down.

  * * *

  Friday offers, per tradition, a break. The following day is Fall Fest, an all-school carnival of sorts, during which Chloe and her classmates will perform their last Ring Dare. Having survived Fall Fest, Ringing would conclude on Sunday evening at Ring Dinner, where Priya would finally present Chloe with her school ring.

  As a freshman and sophomore, Chloe loved Fall Fest. The school brings in food trucks—the high-end artisan ones that served things like banh mi tacos and grilled cheese with smoked Gouda and caramelized onions—and a bouncy-house slide. There are quintessential New England autumnal things like pumpkin carving and bobbing for apples and paper cups of steaming hot cider and, across the street through the Atwater gate, a corn maze. Chloe has never been entirely clear on what combination of money and neighborly sensibility led to the Darrow family carving up and lending out to a bunch of teenagers a wide swath of their cornfield every November. She isn’t even sure if the Darrows made the maze themselves, or if Atwater hired the men and machines that arrived in late October and mowed and trimmed and left sweet-smelling piles of mashed leaves and stalks in their wake. Some of the more competitive Atwater girls—the best athletes, like Kyla, a sprinter and jumper bound for Division I—would try to persuade a teacher or janitor to let them up into the clock tower, where a high, clear vantage point would help them solve the maze before racing through it on Saturday.

  Mostly, though, the maze is a place to hook up. The other best part of Fall Fest—besides the grilled cheese and the tacos and the cider doughnuts—is the fact that Atwater buses in students from other boarding schools in New England and upstate New York. (For years, they’d only invited students from a boys’ school in New Hampshire, but due to a student outcry that the practice was “heteronormative matchmaking,” Atwater now welcomed students from an all-girls school, too.) Each of the classes handled this differently. The seniors, Chloe had
noticed, reacted coolly, many of them in relationships or, after three years at Atwater, having established friend groups with these students who visited regularly. The freshmen were nervous and excitable, most of them traveling in unfriendly and impenetrable packs and living vicariously through the handful who managed to spend five minutes alone with a boy in the corn maze or the pool hallway. (Chloe’s freshman year, both Sloane and Blake hooked up with boys from Salisbury.) The sophomores had a little more savvy, knew how to flirt in the safety of a large group. Last year, Chloe had traded numbers with a boy from Westminster, and they’d texted for a few weeks before naturally falling out of touch. Juniors, of course, had Ringing.

  The whole point of finishing Ring Dares on Fall Fest was precisely because of Atwater’s guests. It was timed for maximal humiliation. On the day of the year when you wanted to wear your cutest, most New England–y fall outfit—when every other Atwater girl would be dressed in camel sweaters and Barbour jackets and jeans tucked into Hunter boots—you’d have to run around in, say, snow pants. When every other Atwater girl would have her long hair in soft curls or a perfectly untidy bun, you’d be wearing a clown wig. It was a nightmare.

  * * *

  “Think about it this way,” Brie was saying to Chloe, chatting reasonably from across the room while she dug through her closet, tossing clothes in a pile over her shoulder. “If a guy still talks to you while you’re doing dramatic readings of nursery rhymes while dressed like a mime—”

  “Is that what you have to do?” Chloe asks, horrified.

  “What? No. I’m just saying. Hypothetically. If he’s game for our shenanigans”—here she stands up triumphantly, having finally found what she was looking for—“then you know (a) he’s into you, and (b) he’s a keeper.”