by Emily Layden
“What jokes?”
“The witty banter she’ll use to fill the space between performances.”
“Nice try,” Emma says. She takes on a kind of lawyerly affect: “But you know that I can neither confirm nor deny any rumors about Olivia’s participation in the forthcoming Vespers performance.”
Each year, the specifics of the holiday variety show—roles in which are the honor and privilege of the senior class only—are a surprise, revealed in real time on opening night. In the two weeks leading up to the performance, the entire school becomes obsessed with sleuthing out the key players and their acts. But it seems obvious to Celeste that Emma’s girlfriend is going to be the emcee—Olivia Anderson is funny and charming and universally adored, the exact perfect person for the job—and maybe this is why she never really partakes in the guessing game: her classmates treat the show’s particulars like secrets to be discovered, but in Celeste’s mind it’s just a puzzle, a matter of piecing together personalities with likely performances.
“It’s definitely Olivia,” Josie says to Brie, who nods knowingly. Josie has always been better than Celeste at capitalizing on the social opportunities of swim practice; it was too hard, initially, for Celeste to find the exact right moment to chime in—the natural opening in the conversation—and now that she has become the quiet one on the team it would be too strange for her to speak up. She hangs at the periphery, witness but never party to the locker room banter.
“Obviously,” Brie says, nodding. “Hey, Celeste—” Brie curves around Josie, arching backward to where Celeste stands in front of her locker. “Did you finish the Bioethics reading yet?”
She says it so quickly that Celeste takes an extra beat to process the question.
“Celeste.”
“Yeah. I mean, no. Not yet.”
“Ugh, I wanted to copy your annotations.”
The purpose of Atwater’s electives—the only scenario in which Celeste, a sophomore with average grades, and Brie, a high-achieving junior, might find themselves in the same class—is to provide students with opportunities to study subjects that interest them. In reality, though, electives are by and large treated as freebies: low-input GPA boosters taught by the most preternaturally laid-back faculty (like Mr. Gregory, their Bioethics teacher). Even so, Celeste thinks it doesn’t seem like copying annotations would save that much time, particularly since annotations are easy to fake anyway.
Nevertheless: “I’ll probably do that first,” she says, “if you want to come by halfway through study hall…”
“Whatever, I’ll just do it,” Brie groans. “Ugh,” she says, pinching a section of hair in front of her face, her irises nearly crossing the closer she moves the ends toward her nose. “The chlorine is destroying my hair. I don’t understand how yours stays so smooth.”
This didn’t happen as much at Atlantic Middle School in North Quincy, where Celeste’s classes were filled with Chinese American students like her. Once in seventh grade Julia Lawrence—long-faced with dimples and curly, dark hair; not pretty, but maybe she’d grown into it since—reached forward from where she sat behind Celeste in math and tangled Celeste’s ponytail in her fingers, churning it over between her knuckles.
“Your hair is so pretty,” she said, longingly.
Across the aisle, Kelli McCord—who, because of some strange combination of the timing of her September birthday and the fact that she’d waited an extra year to start kindergarten, was fourteen in seventh grade—whipped around in Julia’s direction and snapped: “That’s some colonizer bullshit.”
Chided, Julia released Celeste’s ponytail. Twisting her arm over her shoulder to smooth her hair into place, Celeste hoped Kelli couldn’t see how Julia’s hands in her hair had made her skull tingle, her shoulders melt.
Next to Celeste now, stepping into her sweatpants, her face turned toward the lockers and away from Brie, Josie shoots Celeste the same look Kelli gave her that day in middle school, conspiratorial and commiserative all at once.
* * *
Josie Chen is Celeste’s only real friend at Atwater. Celeste gravitated toward her naturally, sensing in Josie another relative outsider. While the majority of Atwater’s international students are from wealthy families on mainland China, Celeste understood—from the way Josie commented on the Gucci sneakers, the Vuitton backpacks, the Balenciaga sweatshirts—that Josie’s family was middle class in Hong Kong, and that they’d cobbled together all they had to finance her education. At lunch, the girls from Beijing and Shanghai sometimes lapsed into their native languages, but Josie had attended English-speaking schools her entire life and American schools since fourth grade (it was from Josie that Celeste learned that there even was such a thing as a “junior boarding school”). Celeste—the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants—is on an academic merit scholarship at Atwater; she speaks only minimal Mandarin because her parents refused to use it around her when she was growing up, partly because they wanted Celeste to speak English and partly because they themselves were trying to learn and assimilate quickly. Celeste feels she spends most days at Atwater in a kind of slippery purgatory, and in Josie, she thought she’d found someone who finally understood what it was like: to feel too Chinese and poor to fit in with the American kids, but not Chinese enough—or wealthy enough—to fit in with the students from China.
She hides all this from her mother, who when she calls asks about Celeste’s friends, plural. Maybe this is why Celeste still tries: that night she thinks about emailing Brie to let her know she finished the reading, but she doesn’t want to appear desperate; she writes a draft, deletes it, asks Josie for Brie’s number, drafts a text, deletes it. She decides to take a walk across the Bowl to Whitney to see Madame DuBois for help on the French homework, because she’s on study hall duty on Brie’s floor. When she gets there Brie’s door is closed, and this somehow makes Celeste more embarrassed. In the lounge, Madame is presiding bemusedly over Vespers gossip (“Is Mr. Morgan really playing guitar in the teacher performance?” “I heard that they’re doing that Band Aid song, you know, ‘Do they know it’s Christmastime at aaaalll…’”), a cluster of juniors at her feet and nestled into the couches around her. When she spots Celeste, she holds up a hand and asks in her nasally accent: “Celeste, do you need anything?”
She makes up a question about the journal-entry requirements and hurries back to her dorm.
* * *
Like most nights, Celeste has trouble falling asleep. Her window overlooks the small parking lot behind Lathrop. She stacks one pillow on top of another and rolls onto her side, scanning Atwater’s still grounds. The ninth- and tenth-grade dorm is shaped like a right-angled U, or an open square, with Celeste’s room on the third floor on the longest side. She cranes her neck a bit and shifts on her shoulder. The blinds are drawn on most windows; in some, pink or teal curtains are caught in the sliver of space between the blind edge and the window’s side. Some girls line their windowsills: stuffed animals; pictures; small, cheap fans; candles they’re not allowed to light. Celeste’s own window frame is empty and, even on this early December night, open a few inches. Sometime in late October, the school turns on the central heat and leaves it blasting straight through to mid-April. The rooms bake, swell, radiate off and into one another. On thirty-degree nights the girls throw open their windows and doors, wasting the heat to the early-winter cold.
The new English teacher, Ms. Ryan, lives below her, in the faculty apartment on the second floor at the edge of the U. The kids like her, so far—she’s young and pretty, went to Choate and then Yale, and got married over the summer. The girls on her hall like looking at her wedding pictures, and sometimes she brings her dog to class. She teaches freshmen and a senior elective (something about contemporary women writers, which sounds only vaguely interesting to Celeste, whose favorite class is, in fact, Mr. Gregory’s), and first impressions of her are that she’s chill.
Ms. Ryan and her new husband Owen have left the blinds open in their
living room, and the white-blue glow of the television cuts through the room’s overhead lighting. Celeste watches as Owen pulls Ms. Ryan to her feet, and as she brings her face toward his she slips one hand inside the waistband of his drawstring sweatpants. They’re both in T-shirts—the unisex cotton kind you get for free at races or volunteer efforts—and Celeste thinks none of it seems very sexy or romantic, but she doesn’t really have any point of reference. When they pull apart, Ms. Ryan rests one hand flat on her husband’s chest; she slides the other into his palm, knitting their fingers together. She leads him, arm outstretched behind her, and disappears in the space between windows. The blinds in the next room are drawn, and so Celeste turns over in her bed, into the hot dark quiet of her room.
She feels a kind of swelling somewhere below her navel. She replays the image of Ms. Ryan rising to her feet, the ease with which she kept one hand looped through her husband’s while moving the other across and then inside his pants, like it was all second nature. She is surprised by the kind of tucking sensation inside her own pajamas, and—without thinking, impulsively, a thing she has never exactly done before and yet an echo of the way she used to nestle her stuffed animals between her legs when she was eight or nine because something about pressing into them felt good, helped her to fall asleep—she folds her hand into her underwear, searching for a way to relieve the kind of tightening there. For a moment or two or three she doesn’t think about anything, just the curious way her body feels smooth but also not, and then there’s an expanding across her chest and shoulders and she stops, suddenly, pulling her hand outside her pants and squeezing it tight between her thighs, clenching them together, terrified of the edge to which she’d brought herself.
* * *
By morning Celeste is carrying last night like a dream of her own—maybe she did dream about it, after—and when she sees Ms. Ryan in the hall before class she smiles at her knowingly, like old confidantes, and is quickly embarrassed. She debates telling Josie what she saw (but not about what she did after); she thought she might do it at lunch, but they ended up sitting with some of the team, and she didn’t want to tell everyone. Josie would understand that she was watching, not spying; with Josie she could wonder about why Ms. Ryan put her hands inside her husband’s pants even though once on the swim bus Celeste had heard Brie say something about why even bother with that, they can do it better themselves.
After practice—in the afternoon that day; they’re always juggling pool time with the local clubs and masters swim groups who pay Atwater to use its facilities—she catches up with Josie on the way to dinner.
“Hey.”
“What’s up?” Celeste remembers explaining the greeting to their German exchange students, who couldn’t quite get the hang of salutations like, “What’s up?” and “How’s it going?” Something about their particular unassuming delivery—the idea that they were not really questions—caused Carla and Melanie to kind of choke on their words. Celeste always thought it was interesting that they understood the way the inflection didn’t quite match the phrasing.
“Do you think Mr. Morgan is really going to play guitar in the teacher performance? I mean, can you imagine? What an absolute dream. I might spontaneously orgasm in my seat.”
Celeste’s cheeks flush hot and bright, and she’s grateful for the early darkness of a December 6:00 P.M. The word sounds absurd on Josie’s tongue—too clinical—and Celeste thinks maybe this is another thing they’re getting wrong. She wants to say to her, Are you sure that’s the word we’re supposed to use? What about “come”? But she also wants to ask her, Has that ever happened to you, have you ever had one, how? She wants to ask, Do you think Ms. Ryan had one last night?
“Speaking of,” Josie says, turning to face Celeste so suddenly that her oversize backpack swings away from her side, moving beyond her shoulder and knocking her 105-pound frame slightly off-balance—briefly Celeste is gripped with panic, a wild terror that Josie is going to ask her about last night, as if she can smell it on her—“who did you vote for?”
“What?”
“The Pedophile Playoffs.”
Celeste has no idea what Josie is talking about; she stares at her friend, blank-faced.
“Wait, have you not seen it yet? Oh my God—okay, I’ll send it to you.” She pulls out her phone and tap-taps away, her face glowing in the dark. “Look at your phone.”
The link Josie texted to Celeste brings her to an NCAA-style bracket, sixteen entries narrowing in a flowchart to a single name, not yet filled in. In the blank spaces at the outermost edges of the bracket are names, and Celeste absorbs them all at once, her eyes swallowing the sum: Paulsen, Breslin, Gregory, Zarzynski—the names of Atwater faculty and staff. The instructions at the top of the page are simple: Who at Atwater is most likely to fuck a student? Vote your response! Rounds will be updated every eight hours.
“Whoa,” Celeste says, her mind clanging like a pinball machine.
“I know, right? Kinda fucked-up—but also sort of hilarious. I can’t believe you hadn’t seen it yet.”
“Who sent it to you?”
“Brie,” Josie says. “I think it’s just getting sent around this way—like, person to person,” she adds, as if she senses the insecurity at the core of Celeste’s question. Josie means it like, Don’t worry, you weren’t left out, but what Celeste hears is confirmation that Josie is her only passage into this kind of gossip.
“Every eight hours,” Celeste says finally, counting in her head. “That means the winner will be announced right after Vespers?”
“Mm-hmm,” Josie nods, wide-eyed. “Timed for maximum impact. You should vote,” she adds, sliding her phone back into her pocket. “My money’s on Mr. Gregory.”
“What?” Celeste loves Mr. Gregory. He’s patient, accommodating, no-nonsense.
Josie makes a kind of groan-growl. “He’s such a silver fox.”
Here Celeste notices the slight Britishness to Josie’s English, a trait her speech shares with some of the other Chinese students who attended English-speaking schools: the curved vowels, the lifted inflection. It’s more elegant than the English Celeste’s parents speak, dropped prepositions, present-tense only.
“But aren’t we supposed to be voting for who’s most likely to sleep with a student, not who we most want to … you know … fuck?” Like “orgasm,” “have sex with” sounds clunky and clinical to Celeste, but “fuck” feels off, too—simultaneously indifferent and familiar.
Josie shrugs. “Choose your own adventure, I guess.”
* * *
Study hall on Thursday night is a total wash, since Friday is a half day, and all the teachers know that their focus will be on that night’s Vespers performance. In her room, Celeste opens the bracket on her laptop, waiting for the update. She looks out her window and tries again to count the rows to Ms. Ryan’s apartment, but the lights are off. She waits a while like this, her computer in her lap, the names of her teachers spread before her like a kind of map. She wonders, briefly, if they know about the bracket—they can’t, she decides; the school Wi-Fi would have most certainly blocked the site.
To vote on the names, Celeste thinks, would be to levy a kind of judgment; she feels as though she holds the fates of her teachers in her hands, that for once—for the first time—it is not the other way around. She looks over the pairings, and finds that she makes her decision differently each time: she votes for Amy McCredie over Linda Paulsen, for example, because it seems both cruel and cliché to vote for the Dean of Students who lives her life at Atwater as if they all do not know that she’s gay; she chooses Mr. Morgan over Ms. Edwards for all the reasons that everyone else will surely choose Mr. Morgan: he’s young and single and objectively hot—a triple threat, a unicorn on their campus. In Celeste’s mind Ms. Hammacher edges out Mr. Hills because her brain cannot place Mr. Hills’s endless patience in a sexual situation; when she has to choose between Mr. Gregory and Mr. Clark, Josie’s opinion rattles in her memory, and she selects Mr.
Gregory against her better instincts. The bottom half of the bracket is a series of teachers she knows less well: Mr. Fink, who teaches Latin, against Ms. Trujillo, a new Spanish teacher and a Dorm Parent in Whitney; the male art teachers—Mr. Zarzynski and Mr. Breslin—face off against one another; Mr. Banks is paired with the bracket’s sole write-in spot.
Next to her computer, a new message from Josie bubbles onto her phone.
Did u vote??
Thinking about it.
Do ittttt
What’d you put for Zarzynski/Breslin
Breslin duh
Why
idk he just seems like a cradle robber lol
Anyway my $$ is still on Gregory going all the way
Did you actually make a bet with someone
lol no I’m just rly into predictions lately
Vespers will do that to you
Speaking of!
Final predictions comin in hot
Hah ok
Soph and Ariyana are doing a duet
Kat Foard is doing her own choreography
I think Ayesha is doing the opening
Mmm bold choice
True, but I stand by it
Kk
And Olivia MC obviously
I think it’s “emcee”
Nerd
lol
Also I feel like that’s not a prediction
Everybody knows
Well u heard it here first
I didn’t …
Also we’re getting ready together right
The dress code for Vespers is, officially, semiformal, but each year inches closer and closer to the Academy Awards. Celeste and Josie bought their dresses at a consignment store in Hartford; Celeste’s is red with a square neckline and a slit up the thigh, and hovers precariously between cheap-looking and ’90s supermodel. It cost $17.