by Emily Layden
Date: Feb 13, 2016, 8:02 P.M.
Subject: Student Voice
Hi Pat,
Hope you’re enjoying your weekend.
As the Heron adviser, you know that I value a certain degree of activism: journalism, after all, is about holding power to account, and is therefore in many ways a cousin to social and political protest. While I know that the student demonstration that has defined this academic year has made a number of things difficult for our community, we have to admit that there’s a degree of irony to this situation: We are a girls’ school, after all—we pride ourselves on our unique ability to empower young women to speak up, and to instill within them the self-confidence necessary for such a task. What they’re doing here might be poorly or misguidedly executed, but we can’t deny that we’ve helped to cultivate a set of values and capabilities that might lead to such behavior.
That said, I thought that Rich’s departure in December might bring a natural end to the protest we experienced this fall. I was, obviously, mistaken. I did a lot of reflecting after the most recent incident, trying to understand what exactly our students are looking for in our response. What is the goal of protest if not to spur action?
The answer, I think, lies in part in that very strength we underscore in our marketing: Atwater is a place where young women learn to use their voices, and the student or students behind the events of this year want to make their voices heard. Moreover, at the end of the day, these are teenagers we’re working with, and they want to express themselves and have that expression taken seriously and generously.
I wonder, then, if we couldn’t present our students with a more intentional space to exercise this skill? In its initial conception, I think that the special issue of the Heron was an attempt to do this; I’m not implying that we are to blame for the leak of the paper, but rather noting the kind of opportunities I think our girls crave. I think that the Jamison Jennings interviews are a good step in this effort, but for many of the girls I think JJ is somewhat removed from actual interaction with the school—and, of course, only a very small sample of students have been invited to participate in those conversations. Perhaps providing an open and legitimate outlet for their concerns would prevent them from trying to create their own.
I considered saving this for our March faculty meeting, but I think it needs addressing sooner rather than later. I’m sure you agree.
Happy to discuss in further detail.
Nancy
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Date: Feb 14, 2016, 11:08 A.M.
Subject: Re: Student Voice
Nancy,
Thank you for giving this such careful consideration. I must admit that I think you’re on to something. I’ll take this up with the Board at the next available opportunity, and we’ll see what we can come up with.
Pat
To: Class of 2016 <
Cc: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date: Feb 21, 2016, 7:36 P.M.
Subject: Student Forum
Students,
For many of you, the past few months at Atwater have been disquieting: you might have wondered about the integrity of this school you call home; you may have felt as though the adults in charge were being less than forthcoming; you might have found yourself engaged in rumor and speculation, frustrated by the sense that the full truth was just out of reach. For those of you who have felt this way, I recognize that this must have been a difficult time. You’ve invested so much in this school, and I understand why the confusion of the previous months might have caused you to doubt whether Atwater was equally invested in you.
Many of you have availed yourself of various campus resources in your quest for understanding. I want to thank our counseling staff and our peer leaders for the ways they have served our community, opening their hearts and offices and dorm spaces to challenging conversations. I recognize, however, that these individuals have had to go above and beyond the call of duty, and that perhaps they have been unable to provide adequate answers to your many questions. To that end, I am inviting the entire student body to a student forum on Thursday, February 25, at 7:00 P.M. in the auditorium. Attendance is optional, and study hall will proceed as usual that evening; if you would like to attend the forum, you are required to sign out with your Dorm Parent. The topic of the forum will be Healthy Relationships and Accountability, and it will be your opportunity to ask relevant questions of the administration on this issue. Ms. Paulsen, Ms. Burdick, Ms. McCredie, and I will be on hand, and the format will be an open Q+A session. If you have questions about the topic or its makeup, I encourage you to speak with your peer leaders, Dorm Parent, and/or adviser for clarification and guidance.
I am often asked what I love most about my job. For me, the answer has always been an easy one: the girls. Wherever I’ve taught, it has been the students who make the job all that it is—fulfilling, rewarding, challenging, and never (ever!) dull. But at no place and at no time in my nearly three decades of working in girls’ education has this been more true than right now at Atwater. Your commitment to and care for our school inspires me daily, and I am so grateful. I look forward to hearing more from you on February 25.
Warmly,
Mrs. Brodie
Field Trip
When Linda Paulsen first suggested that the indefinite revocation of Sloane Beck’s sign-out privileges—she lost them in January, after “missing” the bus back from a dance at Salisbury for an extra half hour with a boy named James who was very good-looking but, as it turned out, not very good at anything else—might also extend to the eleventh-grade humanities trip, Sloane was entirely unfazed. Fine, she thought. She didn’t want to go anyway.
But Mr. Hills felt otherwise, perhaps because to allow his trip—in which he and Ms. Doyle bring their students to New York to visit the Met and the New-York Historical Society and devise an American-culture scavenger hunt in and between both places—to be withheld as punishment was to, conversely, see it as a kind of optional reward: something fun rather than something serious and scholarly. After all, field trips are a rarity at Atwater; the school has every resource it needs, including the money and clout to bring the guest speakers and artists and theater troupes to campus. To permit Sloane to miss the trip in such a manner would be to threaten its very survival. Sloane would accompany her classmates, Mr. Hills argued, because her learning experience would otherwise be greatly diminished; the trip, when you get right down to it, is a cornerstone of the junior curriculum.
* * *
On the bus Sloane and Kyla take a pair of seats in front of Blake and Kit and behind Chloe and Brie. It’s early, and, in late February, barely light out as they pull through Atwater’s gates and rumble along the county road in front of campus, the flattened and snow-dusted roughage of the Darrow farm stretching for acres out the window. Kyla—who can and does sleep anywhere, including on unused mats in the corners of stadiums during indoor track meets—slips in her earbuds and nods off on Sloane’s shoulder, her head bobbing against the apex of her roommate’s clavicle as the bus thumps over potholes cratered wide by a New England winter. For a while they drive along meandering country roads, tracing the same route Sloane and her father travel to and from Westchester, crossing into New York somewhere after Kent and marching south along Route 22 to I-684, on a ragged tangent toward White Plains.
It’s not until Yonkers—another fifteen miles south, where 684 curves into the Taconic—that the notion of the city first seems plausible: where the sleepiness of the Hudson River Valley and its withering suburban sprawl gives rise to waterfront condos billed as luxury living; where the very air seems to change, probably for very real reasons related to smog and pollution and the decreasing elevation of the valle
y toward sea level but also for reasons that always, inevitably, feel more like magic, like karmic energy. When Sloane’s family left Manhattan it was to a place just beyond this radius, so that on a dark summer night Sloane could see the haze of the city over the treetops in their new and impossibly lush backyard but couldn’t feel it. It was as if her senses had been zapped, her taste buds lasered off before a feast of her favorite foods: Nantucket oysters, a really good burger, rosewater macarons. This is why Sloane didn’t really want to come on the trip, because visiting the city had become like some kind of gluttonous feast, all of it opening up again, stuffing her like the last meal of a death-row inmate, so good and so horrible at the exact same time.
* * *
Sloane hadn’t wanted to go to the student forum the previous evening, either; it was sure to be just another opportunity for the administration to spew the corporate jargon they paid their consulting firm astronomical fees to adopt. But Brie and Kit had to go, because Louisa Manning had all but declared their attendance at the forum a Heron staff requirement, and they persuaded Blake to go, and if Sloane followed any rules at all, it was that she didn’t let the whole of her friend group make plans without her.
As the Atwater auditorium filled and Mrs. Brodie and Linda Paulsen waited for the stream of students to slow to a trickle—the way you listen for popcorn in the microwave, waiting for the three-second lag between pops—Sloane checked her Instagram, where she was alerted to a flood of likes and comments on her most recent post.
She’d asked Ms. Allen to take the video—a common request, a way for Sloane to actually understand how the choreography was coming together, to critique her own execution—and only later, rewatching it at night in bed, did she notice how the early-evening winter light filtered into the dance studio, gold and dusty, and how there were twenty perfect seconds near the beginning. She posted and captioned: Siri, play “Stubborn Love” by The Lumineers. (What would a girl like Sloane do without irony? Without the ability to mean two things at the same time?)
The comments were hearts, blue and gold to match the video lighting, variations on prettyyy and ugh how r u so perfect and then, at the end, from carolinaballerina17: tell me about it, with a little winking emoji. It was like touching a thorn, so quick and instinctive was the recoil: Sloane immediately clicked her screen to black and slipped her phone back into her pocket. For the rest of the evening she had the sense of dissociating, as if she was not really connected at all to either drama: it was only her digital self her former dance partner visited, nothing more than a web of coding in the ether; it was only her body inside the auditorium, breathing by rote the air that soured with frustration and unmet expectations.
At first the questions the students lobbed in Mrs. Brodie’s direction were softballs, relatively speaking, although Sloane had to admit that it required a particular brand of self-importance to ask, as Addison did, how to reply when someone who does not go to Atwater inquires about the campus gossip, and that it required even greater self-importance to respond, as Mrs. Brodie did, with a brief vocabulary lesson on schadenfreude. It was Mia Tavoletti—in black jeans and Doc Martens—who changed the tone, when she stood and said, so earnestly it made Sloane physically cringe: “I worshipped Mr. Breslin.”
She went on: “He had a way of explaining creativity to me that just worked. He was … accessible. He knew how to talk about art in this way that was both specific and generous. He wasn’t the kind of art teacher who only spoke in dreamy intangibles. But he wasn’t, you know, prescriptive, either. He didn’t tell you what to make, but he also didn’t let you do whatever you wanted. He always said that what mattered every day was that we had something to show for our time in studio, even if it was shit.” She paused then, and Sloane knew she was debating apologizing for swearing. “I just don’t know … how we’re supposed to trust anyone here now.”
It had seemed to Sloane like a stupid question. She understood the sentiment, the naivete that lends itself to such heartbreak, but Sloane learned a long time ago that you can’t trust anybody anywhere. The question resonated with Sloane’s classmates, though, and Blake raised her hand next and said, with enviable elegance, “I think that part of what Mia is getting at is what the paintings suggested.”
In that moment, Sloane would have sworn that the crowd collectively inhaled, one sharp gasp. The pranks were non grata; like drugs and sex, they were not to be discussed with the adults.
Blake continued, parroting Bella’s analysis from the night they learned about her tattoo, and as she spoke Sloane scanned their section, searching among the juniors for Abby Randall’s frizzy hair the way you might press into a bruise to check if it still hurts. (It wasn’t guilt Sloane felt; no—what she craved was the high of disruption, to know how much chaos a body could handle.)
“The plastering of campus with Mr. Breslin’s work was, clearly, a suggestion that his celebrity was of greater value to the school than the experience of one student. For me, the question isn’t just How do we know who might hurt us?, it’s How do we know if you’ll protect us?”
Mrs. Brodie did not flinch. “Let me state this very clearly, then. The school will never knowingly retain on staff any individual who cannot handle themselves appropriately with our students,” she said, deploying her shield of bureaucratese, her delivery clipped and pointed, the clarity of her statement proof that she’d said all of it many times before: no ums, no extraneous pauses, just crisp execution. “And, as I’ve said, I think that for many years we’ve relied upon an unspoken understanding of what constitutes appropriate. I think for too long we’ve operated within a good-faith assumption that we all share the same dictionary. Moving forward, we plan to set forth in writing clearer guidelines for student-staff interaction.” She then proceeded to explain how, for example, although it is commonplace for students and staff to text, that such behavior is not within “recommended best practices” and that the school was looking into “a number of applications that enable text-like expediency but that capture all correspondence for school records.” As she droned on, the students curled back into themselves, slumping, pushing their feet up against the chair back in front of them. Turns out there was nothing to see here, after all: just more proof that the only place their teachers took them seriously was inside the classroom, discussing Nathaniel Hawthorne or debating reparations.
Walking back to Whitney from the auditorium, shoulder to shoulder with Blake and Kit and Brie, a question nagged at Sloane: “Do you really think they were protecting him? Or do you think they just … didn’t believe her?” she asked her friends.
Blake stopped suddenly, fists balled in her coat pockets. She blinked and shook her head quickly, one-two-three. “Can’t it be both? Doesn’t one allow the other?”
* * *
The bus pulls to a stop in front of the Met steps, blocks wide and set back from the street as if to remind its visitors that it was here first, when there was space for double-wide sidewalks and landmarks that impressed from the ground rather than from the sky. Sloane had seen people on Twitter complaining about the cigarette building on Park Avenue and she remembers, vaguely, when the Gehry building was finished downtown. The buildings grow like runway models, now: tall and skinny and twisting in the wind.
As they’d made their way down the island, her classmates had slowly slumbered into waking, one by one untangling themselves from one another, heads off shoulders and laps, split earbuds disconnected, pillows unfurled from how they’d been bunched against windows. Most of them are too sleepy still to speak, and they primp and stretch and shudder to life with an easy shared silence, a comfortable intimacy. Ahead of her, Chloe fixes her mascara in the mirror of a powder compact while Brie twists her curly and unruly hair into a low bun, loosening it at the nape of her neck and untucking a few pieces of her hair around her ears so that the whole thing doesn’t look too fussy. Behind her, Blake stands and rolls her hips in small circles, stretching a dancer’s stretch.
They’re waiting to d
isembark when it happens: Chloe angles her screen in Brie’s direction; as Brie reaches for her own phone, Sloane hears Blake say, “What is it?”, and all around her the juniors tap-tap into their apps.
Briefly, Sloane feels the muscles that flank her ribs tighten, her breath caught in her lungs, everything expanded. Maybe her friends had seen Caroline’s comment and wondered who she was; maybe they were now currently clicking through to her profile to examine her painstakingly disciplined grid of dance photos: stretching in the mirror, chewed-up pointe shoes, a new black-and-white headshot for the winter season. Maybe they would look so long and hard at her page that they would fall through it like Alice into the looking glass and the whole of Sloane’s life before Atwater would open to them; maybe they would see, if they racked their imaginations, Caroline’s hair balled in Sloane’s fist or her skin under her fingernails.
“Shit,” Kyla whispers, dragging out the vowel in the middle, a long exhale. “Look.” She tilts her phone toward Sloane.
It’s a Snap story by a user Sloane doesn’t recognize, each image a shot of a yearbook photo—she can tell by the whipped blue background, tonally streaked like food coloring in frosting, unchanged in thirty years—cropped at the subject’s neck, so that their face is out of frame. In some, a sweep of longish hair drapes over a shoulder, so that blond ringlets or a loose braid enters the frame, but there is no other way to identify the headless girls in the pictures.
A rectangle of text sits at the bottom of each image, centered and nondescript: sans serif against a white background. In 1988, I slept with my math teacher, the first caption reads.
I left my graduation party at Mangino’s to hook up with my history teacher in a studio in Trask. We’d been flirting all year.
Mangino’s: a very mediocre Italian restaurant in Canaan, the kind of place that uses frozen chicken tenders as the foundation for its chicken Parm. Sloane went there, once, with her advising group freshmen year.