All Girls

by Emily Layden

  Ms. Trujillo knew that this big room had been such a treat for Abby, her email said. But Atwater was welcoming a student back to campus in January, a junior who had previously attended the school but withdrawn for personal reasons, and they needed to put this young woman in Whitney with the other juniors. “You should feel free to reach out to Bella Nitido yourself,” the email concluded, and that was when the news went from bad to worse.

  Bella left Atwater in the middle of their sophomore year. Before it all fell apart, she was a bona fide member of the group of girls everybody wants to be: her best friend was Sloane Beck, and the two ran around Atwater with their supreme knowledge of drugs and thinness and slept-in eyeliner until spring break, when Bella posted a series of overexposed pictures and videos of herself and Sloane and Blake and Kit and Brie in Bella’s room (they could tell by the shibori wall hanging and the MetroCards taped to her desk), their heads always cocked at just the right angle, Sloane’s hair lazily half covering her face. In one of them, a small pile of Tic Tac–size pills was visible on a shelf behind their shoulders; in another, a disembodied hand passed a joint into the camera’s field of vision. Someone shared the pictures with Linda Paulsen, and while the other girls were put on probation, this was Bella’s third time breaking a Fundamental Standard. She had to go.

  It was kind of a big deal because Atwater doesn’t kick people out for ordinary reasons related to drugs and drinking: It takes a higher-order offense, like an academic integrity violation, or something that threatens the community trust, like theft. Maybe this is why they’d agreed to let Bella back in, Abby thought—maybe they’d realized it was a too-harsh punishment. Or maybe it had something to do with Karen Mirro—everything this year seemed to have to do with Karen Mirro—and how the terms of her expulsion had called into question the seemingly arbitrary execution of Atwater’s disciplinary system.

  Reading the email, Abby tried to think if she’d ever spoken to Bella outside of structured situations: chem class last year, English the year before that; dorm bonding activities in Lathrop. Otherwise, nothing beyond a hallway head nod or a bathroom-sink smile. It wasn’t that Bella was mean to Abby, but rather that neither existed in the other’s world.

  In the end, the move-in had been more survivable than Abby had anticipated; neither she nor Bella died from awkwardness. With Ms. Trujillo’s permission she returned to campus a day early to move her things back to her side of the double, and tried not to imagine what her half of the room would look like to Bella Nitido: the used books, the wrinkled comforter, the quilt that suddenly seemed childish rather than homey. When Bella arrived the next day, wearing ripped jeans and a cropped sweater and combat boots, she greeted Abby as if they’d been casual friends for ages. She unpacked without any pomp, piling her textbooks on the floor, stacking jewelry boxes and makeup palettes on her dresser top, leaving her desk bare save for her laptop charger and two slim volumes of poetry: Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese and The Essential Rumi. The lack of fuss seemed glamorous to Abby, so self-assured.

  For four days they chatted easily about safe subjects: home, school, family. Bella liked hearing about Abby’s house in Vermont; she asked about snow and fireplaces and the size of her backyard. Abby learned that Bella was born and raised in New York, in an apartment on the Upper West Side, and that she spent her summers in the Hamptons. Her brother went to Salisbury, just ten miles northwest from Atwater. When Bella talked about the city it was like she was in love: with jam from Sarabeth’s and runs in Central Park, clockwise around the Reservoir, east across the northernmost shore and then south again, past the curves of the Guggenheim. Before she’d come to Atwater the first time, she’d wanted to go to Chapin or Brearley or even Horace Mann—but her parents had both gone to boarding school and so that was the way.

  Every conversation with Bella left Abby charged with a kind of hunger, as if every detail Bella shared was a bread crumb; it required all of Abby’s restraint to not ask for the entire loaf—to just be cool, to act normal, because after all, wasn’t this just how all the pretty-smart-rich-athletic girls talked, safe inside the knowledge that people always wanted to hear what they had to say? Maybe it had nothing to do with Abby; maybe Abby could have been anyone at all.

  * * *

  “Like, if you had to be buried in bugs,” Bella says on the day the portraits appear, her right hip cocked against the doorframe, her attention trained on a piece of paper in her left hand, “I guess butterflies would be the least terrible, right?”

  Abby looks up from her copy of Gatsby, hopeful that Bella hadn’t noticed how she’d been trying to jut her chin in the air like Jordan Baker, just to imagine what Fitzgerald was describing. “Is that one of the paintings?” she asks, lamely.

  “Mhmm,” Bella murmurs. “I mean, you’ve got to admit—they’re beautiful.”

  “Do I?”

  Bella looks aghast. Her eyes widen, her jaw drops, and she shoves the portrait out in front of her, so the face crawls in front of Abby. “Look at it! It’s, like, fucking Damien Hirst before Damien Hirst. If Breslin hadn’t ended up teaching, he might have been Damien Hirst.”

  Abby does not know who Damien Hirst is and makes a mental note to google him later. “How’s the sub, by the way?” Bella takes AP Studio Art, one of the classes Mr. Breslin taught before his sudden departure, which they’d been informed of via an email from the Dean of Faculty on the last day of break. During his leave of absence, Breslin’s classes would be taught by Jessica Abernathy, an alum from the class of 2011 and a recent college graduate, a painter who—according to Ms. Burdick’s email—used gloved fingertips to smear enamel paint in barely there layers to create the effect of translucency, of faces seen through fogged windows or wet glass. It only just now occurs to Abby that there’s a relationship between Ms. Abernathy’s work and Mr. Breslin’s: masked faces everywhere.

  Bella shrugs. “She’s fine.”

  Abby nods, mostly as a way to fill the space, worried that Jessica Abernathy is not what Bella wants to talk about. She tries again: “Did she say anything about the paintings?”

  “No, which is fucking weird, right? I mean, this guy’s art is just all over, it’s this literal elephant in the room, and we’re just … not going to talk about it? Not even from an educational perspective? I mean, we could have done a one-off lesson or some kind of inspired-by exercise, like have us each draw self-portraits in … fucking bumblebees, I don’t know.”

  Abby has done activities like this in English class: Ms. Edwards made them write a poem from the perspective of an inanimate object, like “Monologue for an Onion”; this year, Ms. Doyle asked them to write a story in the second person, like Lorrie Moore and Jamaica Kincaid.

  “It’s actually an interesting question, right?” Bella continues. “What to do with the great artwork of shitty people? Like, we study Van Gogh, who was no fucking hero, and Picasso obviously—”

  Abby knows Van Gogh gifted one of his ears to a former lover, but she’d always thought this was an unfortunate result of the artist’s depression, not necessarily anything more sinister—although perhaps it would be somewhat traumatizing to receive a bloody ear in the mail. As for Picasso, she didn’t know.

  “I’m just saying,” Bella continues, “for a school that fucking loves a ‘conversation,’ the lack of one about Mr. Breslin is … notable.”

  “Maybe that’s why this person is doing these things,” Abby ventures, the thought occurring to her only then, in the moment. “These … pranks, I mean. I thought that they would end after Breslin left—it seemed, I dunno, reasonable to guess that the goal was to get him off campus? But now he’s gone and clearly she’s not done.…”

  Bella nods, slowly. “Did you see that some of his reviews were posted, too?”

  Abby shakes her head.

  “Yeah, from a couple of his early gallery shows, like when he was a senior at Parsons. And a write-up of some award he won at graduation. Called him Warholian. Both ‘jarring and whimsical.’”

&
nbsp; Abby had initially thought there was a statement in the paintings themselves, one that—lacking any skill in art analysis—she assumed had gone over her head. But now she’s not so sure. “Maybe the person who hung these all over wants us to think about Breslin’s talent?” She hates the way her voice rises at the end, the way her statement becomes a question.

  “And how much it must have meant to the school to have this … prodigy on staff,” Bella adds. “Anyways, I’m hungry. Wanna go get dinner?”

  In a day the paintings are gone, but this rhythm sticks for the new roommates: they start to check in with one another, making their comings and goings mutual, walking downstairs together in the mornings for burnt coffee and past-its-prime winter fruit. Every day Abby is a little slow to get ready, just to see if it’s real: to catch the image of Bella lingering, one toe poking out the door, an elbow on the handle—impatient but waiting, nonetheless, for her.

  * * *

  January of junior year is also the official start of the college process at Atwater, although much of the grade begins it long before, with some families—certainly not Abby’s—hiring private college consultants as early as freshman year. The juniors are summoned for a weekend-long retreat with Atwater’s college advisers, a series of lectures and talks from alumnae and slideshows with crippling statistics (5.4 percent acceptance rates; composite scores in the ninetieth percentile) that Mr. Burke, the head of College Counseling, tries to offer up optimistically. The process involves an individual meeting with Mr. Burke, who asks Abby to rank her college preferences.

  “When do you want them by?” Abby asks, leaning over the form, peering up at Mr. Burke.

  Mr. Burke, whose soft features and perpetually red cheeks give him the aura of a person always a little put-upon, adjusts his glasses. “Oh, no, I’d like you to do it right now, please.” He taps the sheet in front of her, already printed with numbers, one through fifteen.

  Fifteen!

  “Do I have to fill all of these?”

  “Just do the best you can,” Mr. Burke smiles, “and we’ll go from there. You went on some college tours this summer, right?”

  Abby and her mother had, indeed, gone on a slew of New England road trips that summer, just the two of them piled into her mother’s old Subaru Outback. They spent a weekend in Boston, visiting Harvard and MIT and even quickly spinning through BU, just in case; before that, they went down to Philadelphia and spent a night at her mom’s cousin’s in New Jersey between touring Princeton and Penn. They saved Dartmouth for last because it wasn’t easily combined with anything else, one lonely trip across Vermont toward the White Mountains.

  She nods at Mr. Burke.

  “Just you and your mother?”

  She nods again, less patiently this time.

  “A girls’ trip! Like Thelma and Louise,” he jokes, as if Abby has ever seen Thelma and Louise.

  The whole time, their twelve-year-old Subaru sputtering across I-90 or down the Taconic, Abby’s mother had been a deluge of enthusiasm. From the passenger seat she rambled about her early twenties, the time on the West Coast, Portland (“Nothing like it is now, I hear”) and San Francisco (“Even less like it used to be!”) and then Los Angeles, how she hadn’t had any interest in college (“No regrets, I had you instead!”), but how she was so excited to be doing this with Abby now. When she wasn’t talking she sang along to Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris, folk-country mixes Abby’s father made years ago that reminded her of early-summer nights, long and deep blue, swatting mosquitoes on the porch while her parents slowly two-stepped around the kitchen.

  She doesn’t like Mr. Burke watching her, can’t help but feel as though—despite his congeniality, despite the way his shirt collar always seems a little too tight—he will judge her order. His job depends upon his successful stewardship of applications and admissions to the highest achieving colleges, Williams and Middlebury and the Holy Trinity of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale; no doubt he has an opinion about how she should prioritize. Abby skips numbers one and two, and scribbles “Penn” on the third line.

  * * *

  It’s the first week in February when Sloane pokes her head into their room, her long, thin brown hair swinging in front of her, Blake visible over her shoulder. Abby and Bella are each sitting on their beds, tapping away at their laptops.

  “Hey.” Sloane’s voice, even in one syllable, is deep and throaty. Before meeting Sloane—in algebra freshman year—it had not occurred to Abby that a voice like that could belong to a teenager.

  Bella waves a hand, inviting her friends inside. “Hey, Abby—do you mind if we work together for a bit?”

  Abby speaks too quickly and too enthusiastically—“No, of course not!”—and immediately sinks into a humiliated and spiraling despair. She hates her stupid eager self. She hates Sloane, whose presence she reads as proof that Abby is not entertainment enough for Bella. Most of all, she hates how she knows she’d do anything for her roommate’s affection.

  “Hey,” Sloane nods, in Abby’s direction this time. Blake follows behind her, taking a seat at Bella’s desk while Sloane hops on Bella’s bed, nestling in at the foot, her back against the wall. Blake is holding Give Me Liberty!, their AP US History textbook. Abby’s own copy is facedown on her bed, abandoned for a browse through Facebook.

  “Did you do the APUSH reading?”

  It does not immediately occur to Abby that Blake is talking to her, and so her response comes out choked, her cheeks flushed. “Just started.”

  “Takes forever, doesn’t it? I need a break every three pages.”

  “Totally.”

  Sloane lets out a snort. “Get out of here, Blake. Abby’s probably doing next week’s reading.”

  Abby is not sure if it’s intended as an insult—and if it is, whether it’s directed at her or at Blake. Even at a place like Atwater—where it is cool to be smart, where the Sloanes and Blakes are also the top of the class—there is still the constant threat of being perceived as trying too hard.

  Blake frowns, so briefly that you’d have to have known the frown was coming to see it, before adjusting her face into something coolly judgmental. She looks at Abby, expectant.

  “I wish I was that far ahead. Then I could do that mountain of AP Bio we have.” It is the perfect response, defiant and unexpected, and Abby has no idea where it came from.

  “Don’t remind me,” Blake groans. She kicks off her shoes and props her feet on the corner of Bella’s desk, tilting on the back two legs of her chair. For a few minutes the four of them sit like this, reading—or, in Abby’s case, pretending to read while replaying the moment over and over again, luxuriating in the hollow surreality of having passed the test.

  Of course, the thing about Bella and her friends—these friends, this circle that seems not to include Abby, because maybe Abby and Bella are inching toward friendship but it would certainly not be the same circle of friendship that includes Sloane and Blake—is that the tests come at rapid-fire speed, so that acceptance is a matter of constant appraisal, of keeping up. It doesn’t immediately register with Abby, for example, that the water bottle now making its way among the three friends is not, in fact, filled with water. One minute, Blake is sitting lazily at Bella’s desk, her pen skating beneath the textbook’s too-small print; the next, she’s pulling a Nalgene from her backpack, unscrewing the lid, taking a long drag, and passing it on to Sloane. By the time the smell—bleach-like and musky—diffuses to Abby’s side of the room, Bella’s fingertips hug the bottle, and as she brings it to her lips she peers over the top and gives Abby the tiniest shrug. Not knowing what else to do, Abby smiles.

  They go on like this for a while, the turning of recycled pages and the gentle sloshing of the bottle’s interior the only noise in the room. Abby wonders what she’ll say if they offer her a sip, running over sentences from a chapter about Progressivism while rehearsing options in her head: “No, thanks,” is too cold and judgmental; “I’m okay, thanks!” is overeager and shrill; “I’m
allergic to gluten” wasn’t true, and anyway some alcohols are made without grain, like vodka (right?) and she is not sure which they’re drinking. Even if “yes” is the nonconfrontational, nonjudgmental option, there is still the matter of which kind of yes. “Sure”: Cool, done-this-before; runs the risk of sounding like an alcoholic. “Yeah!”: Overeager, sounds like she’s never done this before, which is embarrassing and awkward, like owning up to being a virgin. If she leaves the room, Bella might think that she’s mad or annoyed. If she goes to sleep, she’ll put them in the awkward position of having to be quiet, plus she doesn’t like sleeping around a group of awake people, like on buses or trains. She’s trapped, a prisoner in her own room, victim to one of those psychological torture techniques where they don’t physically harm you but instead make you watch something terrible. Like Sophie’s Choice, which she hasn’t seen, but her mom mentions a lot.

  “Bleargggghh.” Blake lets out an exaggerated groan and slams her book, spine open, on the desk. “I’m so bored by this book.”

  “I’m so bored, period,” Sloane echoes. “This is a waste of good alcohol.”

  “I don’t think anything that makes homework more bearable is a waste, personally.” Bella hiccups as she speaks, a response so on-the-nose Abby wonders if it was real.

  Blake giggles, and Bella and Sloane follow suit. Finally, Sloane comes up for air: “What should we do?”

  “Bowling alley?” One of Atwater’s worst-kept secrets is an old bowling alley, hidden in the basement of the school building. A relic of some off-brand discretionary spending in the 1950s, it proved too costly to maintain, and its two lanes sat beneath their geometry and world history classes, the pins that hadn’t yet been stolen gathering dust, the wax losing its shine. The door to the bowling alley is usually unlocked; the only breaking involves rule-breaking, as the bowling alley is technically—like the clock tower or the forest after dark or the basement of Trask on weekends and during coed events—off-limits. You can up the ante by sneaking in on a night like tonight, which would also involve (a) being out of bed after lights-out, (b) being off your hall after lights-out, and (c) being in the school building after lights-out.