All Girls

by Emily Layden

  “So … what’s Emma got you doing?”

  Brie snorts. “A bunch of us have to do a flash mob.”

  Immediately Chloe feels her stomach sink, the kind of weighty and sudden disappointment she felt when she didn’t make the varsity field hockey team as a freshman even though she knew, deep in her heart, that she wasn’t actually good enough. Still, she had hoped. Brie and whomever else would be shielded from embarrassment by the comfort of a mob. It was so easy. Fun, even. She groaned with jealousy: “Who else?”

  “Hmm … Sloane, Blake, Kit, Kyla … I don’t know who else. Honestly I’m surprised you’re not doing it too, since Priya is friends with Collier and Addison.”

  It is weird, Chloe thinks, especially since Priya hadn’t been all that original with her dares all week. Chloe had interpreted it as lazy half-heartedness, but (she thinks) if Priya was really being lazy and half-hearted about all this, wouldn’t she have wanted to tag along in a group dare? It would have saved her the effort of thinking up something on her own.…

  “So what’s the song?”

  Brie walks over to her phone, scrolls and taps for a minute, and then, as a percussion-laden backbeat announces itself in their tiny dorm room, steps into the center of their floor and begins to perform a sloppy, stilted, weakly memorized choreograph to Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls).”

  “Stop, please—” Chloe shields her eyes, laughing, feigning horror. The more she protests, the more Brie digs into it, swinging her hips wider, kicking her legs higher, finally sashaying over to Chloe and grabbing her by the wrists, pulling her off her bed and into the beat with her until they collapse onto the ground.

  Her back against the carpet, Chloe speaks to the ceiling. “You really need to practice a little more.”

  Brie reaches across and smacks her roommate lightly on the shoulder. “Anyway, my plan is to stand in the back and let Sloane and Blake have the spotlight.”

  “Smart.”

  “So, what’s your dare?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Brie rolls over onto her side, propping herself up on her elbow. “Hmm. Well, maybe you should practice the dance just in case.”

  “You just want someone to make you look good.”

  “Excuse me? Did you see those moves? I look so good I’m gonna make everybody else look bad.” Still lying on her side, she shimmies her shoulders a little.

  Chloe loves this about Brie, the way she doesn’t get all worked up about Atwater traditions and pomp and circumstance. Whenever she calls home, Chloe’s parents ask about Brie, and her dad always says that “that Brie has a good head on her shoulders.” It is true that Brie has a way of impressing parents, with a kind of old-soul maturity that radiates an even keel. She is probably right. Priya probably forgot to tell her about the dance, and tomorrow morning Chloe will wake up to a not-so-apologetic text that demands she learn the flash mob routine by the afternoon.

  “All right,” she says, rolling over and standing up suddenly. “Am I gonna have to do that foot-stomp thing? Because I’ve seen the music video, and I don’t think I’m coordinated enough for that.”

  * * *

  Chloe’s first thought the next morning is that it is a perfect fall day. She and Brie like to sleep with their windows open as long as possible, and buried under the comforter she feels the fresh cool of the season filtering across the room. A New England fall, she learned her freshman year, has a kind of morning chill you can smell. On the twin bed across from her, Brie is still sleeping—although the rest of Whitney is, it seems, wide awake. She listens as her classmates run from room to room, and knows that—for many of them—the best part of the day has begun: getting ready. In hindsight, she’d wish she’d stayed like that forever: The gold autumn light sifting through Atwater’s flimsy shades; the cool, wet, fresh-smelling air diffusing into the warmth of a room shared by two bodies; the vague mechanical sounds of industrial equipment and facilities staff in the distance, hard at work setting up the day’s festivities.

  Instead of doing this—instead of enjoying one extra, optimistic, quiet-but-not-lonely moment—Chloe rolls over and reaches for her phone, resting facedown on top of her desk next to her bed. With the tilt of the screen, her display lights up, rectangular bubbles covering the picture of her dog, Stanley: messages from Kit and Sloane and Brie (she must have gone to bed after Chloe) and, there at the bottom, a single message from Priya Sandhu.

  She has the sensation of having read the thing before she actually has, as though she has subconsciously absorbed the content of the message by merely displaying the words in front of her. It is not unlike the times she’s tried Sloane’s Adderall, when her senses become so supercharged that she needs to read a thing several times to absorb the words in order, from left to right, top to bottom. She feels suddenly hot and sweaty, too, also like when she takes Adderall.

  Hey, sorry I forgot to tell you about tomorrow. I know some of the girls are doing a flash mob but I figure it’s too late for you to learn the dance. Plus, this’ll be more fun! I dare you to make out with a Westminster guy in the corn maze.

  She’d sealed the message with two kissy-face emojis, little hearts bursting from their puckered lips.

  Chloe hasn’t kissed a boy since the only boy she’d kissed. It happened two summers ago, after she spent most of her first year at Atwater embarrassed and trying to hide the fact that she hadn’t yet kissed anyone, never mind all the other things the girls would ask during a game of ten fingers. She and Tyler Mandell had been friends since elementary school, it happened in Andrea Flynn’s parents’ finished basement after they’d both had a couple of beers, there was a lot of teeth knocking and, after, Chloe was mostly just grateful it was over, in both the literal sense (i.e., kissing Tyler) and the bigger, metaphorical sense: she was no longer years behind everyone else; during a game of ten fingers, no one ever asked, “Never have I ever kissed five boys.” The question was just “Never have I ever kissed a boy,” and now Chloe had.

  Lately, though, she’d sensed she was falling behind again—not behind girls like Sloane, who lost her virginity during their sophomore year to a senior at Collegiate and who had since had sex with a guy from Horace Mann and another guy from Collegiate, but behind girls like Brie, who gave head for the first time last summer and who could talk about what she liked a guy to do when he fingered her, because it had happened enough times for her to have developed an opinion about it. Maybe it was because of the rogue newspaper release and the flyers Mrs. Brodie had the Heron staff hang around school (“How to Talk to Survivors” and “Getting Help at Atwater”) and the lesson their Peer Educator had given on affirmative consent, but it seemed like everybody was having versions of sex now, or at least talking about it.

  In the bed across from her, Brie stirs beneath her comforter, finally rolling over and catching Chloe’s eye. She smiles contentedly, beneath shut eyes, and snuggles into the cocoon of her duvet dramatically.

  “Morning,” Brie says, her voice raspy with sleep. “Guess what day it is.”

  Chloe sits up and places her phone facedown on her desk, as it was when she woke up. “How many cider doughnuts is too many cider doughnuts, do you think?”

  * * *

  The visiting schools would start arriving around noon, and although normally Chloe likes to arrive places at a time her mother calls “fashionably late”—even though it had nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with being able to assess the social scene, to survey the room or party for the already-formed cluster of people she knew—Mrs. Brodie had given her usual very stern speech that Atwater should be “a good host” and be at Fall Fest to “welcome their guests.” Plus, she’d added, anyone who was late would earn an infraction.

  So when they had finally finished getting ready—after Blake finished straightening the back of Brie’s hair; after Blake had, after trying on three different sweaters from her own closet, finally borrowed something from Kit; after Kyla had refused to be talked out of wearing s
neakers—they headed out of Whitney and toward the Bowl.

  Chloe remembers once when her dad had asked her, only half kidding, if she and her friends coordinated their outfits when they went out together.

  “It’s like there’s an official Chloe’s Gang uniform,” he’d said, laughing at his own joke, imagining the exaggerated capitalization.

  She’d been short with him, looking up from her phone to offer a terse “What are you talking about?”

  Her mother quickly slid into Chloe’s corner, chiding her husband with an eye roll and a “Rick, stop that.” But descending into the Bowl now, Chloe can’t help but see her dad’s side of things: Atwater looks like an army of preppy, slender, perfectly groomed lumberjacks—plaids beneath field jackets or quilted vests or fisherman knit sweaters above denim tucked into boots. It isn’t normally like this at Atwater, she thinks defensively—when she first visited, Chloe was struck by how the school not only didn’t have uniforms but also that, for all she could tell, it seemed to neither have a dress code: there were girls in skirts and sweaters and riding boots but also in jeans and sweatshirts and team uniforms and faded or ripped or torn black-on-black-on-black ensembles—but Fall Fest was almost a themed party, like the spring luau or the winter rave. Plus, the rare presence of visitors—specifically male visitors—tilts the balance.

  Or maybe it’s just Chloe who thinks that way. Walking out to the Bowl, she sees that the anticipated arrival of their guests hasn’t caused her classmates to shrink to the edges of the circle, to cluster in gangs of three and four, arms on hips, waiting to ensure that when the moment came they looked cool and casual and even a little expectant. Instead, Chloe hears shrieks in the distance, puncturing the air that gently hums with the machinery that powers Fall Fest: the bouncy slide, the food trucks, the kettle corn. She imagines that some of the freshmen are already on their second go through the corn maze, trying to improve upon their time. The rest of the ninth graders—at least, she spotted Lauren Triplett and Bryce Engel, and a trio of girls who looked small and eager the way freshmen still do in the fall—are clustered around a large metal basin, hands gripping the edges, listening as Mr. Banks gesticulates his way through the directions for bobbing for apples. (Which is, again, an activity no one besides the freshmen would participate in.)

  Although some teachers—like Mr. Banks—are tasked with manning activities, many simply mix and mingle with the students, enjoying Fall Fest as if it is a regular street fair and this is the real world. Ms. Daniels and Ms. Trujillo stand in line at Whey Station, a bright yellowy-orange truck that sells mac and cheese and grilled cheese. Mr. Morgan, who is twenty-four and built like Adonis and who isn’t a great math teacher but who has, nonetheless, a kind of endlessly dreamy bumbling charm, stands at the front of a booth playing a game that involves tossing little plastic rings over heavy metal bottles. He’s positioned in a kind of mid-squat, grinning and floppy-haired, side-arming each ring like a small Frisbee and tossing his head back when it inevitably misses its mark. Ms. Ryan and her husband move among the crowd, clutching steaming paper cups, their heads cocked slightly toward one another.

  There is a little cluster of picnic tables near the ring of food trucks, and each year the seniors claim them as their territory. In general, seating is discouraged at Fall Fest—until later in the afternoon, when, tired or bored or paired off, they’ll find their way to the edges of the Bowl, where park benches pepper the sidewalk looping inner campus, or else simply fall to the grass a few feet from the games and trucks. For now, though, Fall Fest’s makeshift cafeteria belongs to the seniors—at least a certain cohort of them—who make room for their group by sitting not only on the table benches but on the tabletops as well. They tuck into one another, crossing and angling their dangled legs to squeeze tighter together, wrapping one arm around another before placing a single elbow on a single kneecap or crossing their arms in front of their sweatered torsos.

  Priya sits near the end of the actual bench, a few bouncy-haired heads down from Collier and Addison. She wears dark denim tucked into boots and a turtleneck sweater. At least there’s this, Chloe tells herself: At least she knows better than to wear a turtleneck on a heavily photographed day. For a second, Chloe thinks they make eye contact—she drops her eyes quickly, then feels the immediate embarrassment of being so obvious about her avoidance.

  She hadn’t responded to Priya’s text, nor had she told Brie (or Sloane or Blake or Kit or anyone) about her new dare. Telling them would mean she’d have to explain why she was nervous about it, which would mean explaining that, actually, she hasn’t hooked up with anyone in over a year, and in fact she’s only ever hooked up with one boy, once, which would be to offer clarification on something she was just kind of leaving to assumption. As they did their hair and makeup, Sloane and Blake practiced the dance in the Whitney hallway, and Brie offered once again to teach Chloe the steps, and so she tried for a few minutes before Sloane lost interest and Blake announced an outfit dilemma. She could just tell Priya she never got the text—but it was such an obvious, familiar lie. She could slide herself into a big group and physically go through the corn maze with a boy from Westminster and then, later, tell Priya that they’d hooked up—but Chloe knew that whatever she did or said she’d done tonight would filter through the school in a matter of hours, and then across New England via text or Snapchat or Twitter and ultimately back to whichever bewildered boy she named as her partner. The only other option was to bail on a Ring Dare entirely, which was obviously not an option at all.

  * * *

  She met Aidan Beiers during last year’s Fall Fest, when Sloane and Blake—both of whom had boyfriends somewhere else, who were doing it for sheer sport—engineered a coed race through the corn maze near the end of the day. He was skinny like a runner, with a sort of concave chest and shoulders that slumped slightly, and the natural tan of someone who spends a lot of time outside; he had light brown hair that—like all the boys Chloe knew—was slightly longer at the top, for styling into that kind of pushed-back, swept-over look celebrities usually wore to awards shows. He was good-looking, basically, if a little bit young. Chloe—who would not call herself skinny, and not in the body-dysmorphic way, either (she isn’t fat, but she has the kind of thighs and butt that make her well suited to field hockey)—had a hard time initially with Aidan’s thinness: She couldn’t imagine the way their bodies would fit together; she imagined those moments in movie sex scenes when the guy would pick up the girl and gently back her into a wall, and think, Aidan would never be able to do that to me. But she needed his thinness, and his middle school face, too, because it was what separated him from flawless and placed him within Chloe’s reach.

  Nothing happened between them. The group Sloane and Blake put together naturally coupled off—Chloe almost felt sorry for the boys who ended up with Sloane and Blake, whose casual flirtatiousness did not betray the simple fact that they each had a boyfriend and would not, therefore, be hooking up with any of Atwater’s male guests that day—and Chloe and Aidan, the stragglers in the group, ended up together. He was new to Westminster, and Chloe asked him how he liked it and how the cross-country team was doing and where he was from and, thankfully, the walk through the maze really only lasted long enough to cover the most informational kind of small talk. He asked her for her number after they crossed the street back onto Atwater’s campus. Texting him had made her the center of their friend group’s attention for a brief while, as they helped her compose each message, agonizing over the connotation of each piece of punctuation.

  All week, Chloe had been secretly hoping he’d text her. She’d leave her phone unattended for extended periods of time, imagining that the longer she went without looking at it, the surer she’d be to return to a message from Aidan. At Brie’s urging, she’d drafted (and then deleted) dozens of messages to him, alternatively flirty and casual and sometimes both flirty and casual. (“If you want something, what are you doing to make it happen?” Brie had asked, sagely and pati
ently; then, later, less patiently: “Do you even want to see him?”) The fact that he hadn’t texted actually made Chloe more anxious about seeing him: she wasn’t sure how to act around him when they were inevitably reunited. It had even occurred to her that she should pretend she didn’t remember him, or maybe—and, until yesterday, this had seemed the most likely—she would just do her best to avoid him entirely.

  But now she needs Aidan, or at least Aidan is her best bet, and as they wander through Fall Fest she feels the vague nausea of nervous anticipation. She is only half listening to Brie (“Am I in the mood for sweet or savory?” she had said a minute ago, and Chloe assumes she is still trying to decide which snack to eat first) when the first bus rolls around the loop, swinging into the Lathrop parking lot.

  “Look,” she says, interrupting Brie.

  “Hmm? Oh—looks like Salisbury?”

  In Chloe’s imagination, the arrival of a guest school at Atwater always played out like high school dance scenes from movies set in the 1950s: the girls and boys cluster on separate sides of the gym, whispering to one another and waiting for someone to bridge the divide. In reality, it—both high school dances and the arrival of guests at Atwater—is nothing at all like this.

  Instead, the bus pulls up, groans to a stop, opens its doors, and fifty or so Salisbury kids empty out onto the loop pavement and descend upon the Bowl, and a small pack of Atwater girls stride casually across the grass, waving, a couple of them tapping into their phones, like friends who used to go to summer camp together. Then they turn and rejoin the carnival, one cell pinching wide to swallow another, the process repeating each time a bus rolls in.

  * * *

  He finds her while she is sitting with Brie, splitting a cider doughnut (sweet, Brie had decided). Chloe feels a hand on her slouched shoulder and immediately a weight settles into her gut, filling the space between her sternum and her pelvis.