All Girls

by Emily Layden

  It was Harper who talked her through the coming-out. They started messaging eight months or so into Emma’s Tumblr life, after trading likes and reblogs. “It wasn’t anything at first,” she explains. “We just talked, for a long time—for years. She’s a little bit older than us—”

  Here Olivia, who has been listening wordlessly, interrupts: “Does she go to Michigan?”

  The question surprises Emma. “No—Liv,” she stutters, “that wasn’t about us at all. You know that.”

  Once or twice in the application process, Olivia had remarked that she didn’t understand why Emma wanted to head back into the Midwest—to her the states that buffeted the Great Lakes were all the same, the college towns they housed irrelevant, mere islands in a conservative wasteland—but Emma sensed that it wasn’t just coastal elitism: it was all part of her ability to prioritize their relationship, her keen sense of how to work at it; Olivia didn’t need Emma with her at Barnard or even in New York, but didn’t a train ride away seem more manageable? Now Emma had exposed the nerve again, awakened her girlfriend to the suspicion that her college decision wasn’t about returning to her roots but was, instead, about running away. (In reality, it feels more complicated than either of these desires, a confusing need for a reclamation of sorts.)

  “I don’t even know where Harper goes to school,” she adds.

  If Olivia senses that this is a lie, she doesn’t let on. Her expression is unchanged: lips pressed together, eyes expectant, jet-black in the glow of the patio lights.

  Emma forges ahead: “I just meant, she had some things figured out. She helped me talk to my parents. She helped me decide to come to Atwater. She was my advice columnist, my therapist, my mentor. Sophomore year she helped me figure things out with you. I hadn’t ever had a girlfriend—you know that. I didn’t know how to flirt or…”

  “How to have sex?”

  “Yes, that, too. We talked about everything. At the time, I just … wanted to be a good girlfriend. I still do.”

  “When did it become something more?”

  The truth is that there’s a part of Emma that still, even now, despite a message history filled with flashes of skin that are not Olivia’s, bristles at categorizing her relationship with Harper as something more. It was never real because that was the point, their founding principle. “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” Emma says, a line borrowed from Hollywood, but she’s serious nonetheless.

  “I believe you,” Olivia says, and the sadness Emma feels is unlike anything she has experienced before. They are quiet for a minute, and Emma has the sensation of being within the eye of the storm: The calm is momentary; magical, impossible if not for the laws of physics.

  “She doesn’t look anything like me,” Olivia says, finally. “Is that—is that what you like?”

  And Emma feels her entire body slouch into itself, a sudden emptiness that reminds her of all the times she thought about telling her parents she was gay—just imagining the conversation caused her to feel like an urn of disappointment, a vessel for her parents’ sadness. In so many ways, Harper is Olivia’s physical opposite: her thick black hair is half-shaved, so she’s constantly sweeping the longer side back from where it curtains in front of her right eye; her skin is milky pale, almost vampire-like; she does not wear dresses or makeup and often wears a binder.

  Emma is attracted to Olivia—of course she is. And she loves the way Olivia feels like home, safe and warm. But with Olivia she feels like she’s only acting the part of one half of a model couple—a sensation that’s heightened by the fact that they practically live together, every day playing house. Their classmates think it’s cute and romantic, but Emma knows what they don’t: that this kind of intimacy has its own challenges, a relentlessness that doesn’t allow a person to hide. Olivia has come to feel like a half measure; Harper, on the other hand, is thrilling, her entire persona a dangerous suggestion: that it’s possible to live fully, to not give a fuck.

  But of course there’s no way to say any of this, so instead she tells Olivia: “You’re beautiful.”

  “I know,” Olivia snaps. “People tell me all the time. Everybody tells me all the time.”

  Emma starts to speak, but Olivia puts up a hand. “So was I—was I just your cover? Are you just with me because I make it okay? Because I complete some picture you have in your head of this perfect gay couple? If you were with me, then nobody would give you a hard time about being gay?”

  Emma thinks again of her mother: She’s very pretty. It had felt like a kind of victory. But her mother is in Ohio, in a suburb of Cincinnati where people still say things like That’s so gay.

  “I don’t know. I thought everything would be different here. But it still … it was still hard for me.”

  Olivia tilts her head slightly back. She brings a knuckle underneath each eyelid, blotting her mascara and eyeliner where it threatens to melt. When she levels her chin again, she looks directly at Emma. “Do you think it isn’t hard for me?”

  She thinks about Olivia’s parents, her exceptionally petite Korean mother and her towering and broad-shouldered Black father, both of them Northern California transplants; the pictures Olivia sends her from holidays at home, dinner tables laden with orange-red tofu stew or grilled peel-and-eat shrimp but also tikka masala or stir fry or oysters fresh from Tomales Bay, as if even the food Olivia ate every night could represent the way she grew up in a house that understood the breadth and depth of the human experience. She wants to say this, she wants to say that Olivia is lucky, but what she says instead is: “Everyone loves you. They never stop telling you how perfect you are.”

  Olivia shakes her head. “Do you know what else people say? That I’m so exotic. That the way I look is so interesting. Freshman year—do you know how many times someone said to me, ‘You’re so pretty—where are you from?’ Like, I’m from fucking California, asshole.”

  It will be years before Emma understands. She’ll be in her late twenties, living in Seattle, a science teacher and swim coach at a prestigious prep school that will have more in common with Atwater than she presumed, before she realizes that for all the ways that she herself was pretending—to be a little less edgy, a little less butch—Olivia was also pretending: the whole persona she’d built at Atwater—of model citizen, Head Proctor, liaison to the administration—was a matter of painstaking restraint. It was that tight-lipped half smile she offered whenever someone told her how beautiful she was.

  For now, Emma just feels as though Olivia has said something about race that she—a white girl from the suburbs of Ohio—can’t entirely access. It’s supposed to be empathy but it feels like a trump card. “I don’t know how to respond to that,” she says, in the end.

  Olivia sighs. From the speakers Emma can hear the twang of autotune, the unmistakable drawl of Miley Cyrus’s voice against an overproduced backdrop. Emma likes Miley Cyrus, actually—so does Olivia. They bonded early in their friendship over the Miley backlash, which they both felt (and still feel) was entirely unwarranted.

  “I’m just saying,” Olivia says, “that you’re not the only person who’s pretending to be a little bit less.”

  * * *

  That night Emma takes the first bus back to Atwater. Olivia offers to make an excuse for her—she blames the weed that Izzy Baldwin brought, the joint they passed in the semidarkness behind the stables. It’s believable; Emma has never been able to metabolize the drug, and their friends know this about her. Together she and Olivia make a little bit of a show of it, Olivia asking if Emma’s sure she doesn’t want Olivia to go back to the dorms with her, Emma insisting that Olivia go have fun! Collier and Addison tug on Olivia’s elbow, making pleading pouty faces, desperate for the all-star of the senior class to make an appearance at their after-prom party. It occurs to Emma—fleetingly, bitterly, a fraction of the idea dislodged from some corner of her brain and drifting to the forefront like a melting iceberg—that Olivia is, in a way, their mascot. She tries to grab on to the thought—
to wrestle with how they could be casually, subconsciously racist or homophobic like Olivia says but also outwardly adoring—but something—the fog of the weed and the alcohol, the emotional trauma of the evening—prevents her from doing so.

  Whitney is quiet. The halls are scattered with the aftermath: Straighteners left to cool, cords snaking across the carpet; eye shadow palettes and brushes poking out from half-zipped vinyl makeup cases; abandoned stiletto heels, one in the pair fallen on its side dramatically. It still smells like perfume and hair spray, but mixed now with the mustiness of a two-hundred-year-old building; it reminds Emma of the Macy’s on Kenwood, where her mother would drag her for Christmas shopping—a Ralph Lauren sweater for her grandfather, a scarf and some Clinique for her grandmother, the same things every year. The store itself was old, and on the right day if you entered through the men’s department you smelled instead of perfume and candles the faint stink of a deteriorating carpet, dust, bathroom cleaner.

  Her laptop sits on her unmade bed, half-covered by abandoned clothes from earlier today: a sports bra, a sweatpants leg. She picks it up and leans against the edge of her mattress, holding her computer open as she half stands, the front edge of the keyboard pressing into her abdomen.

  Make sure u send me a pic, Harper wrote. She sent it after they’d boarded the bus, after Olivia had looked at her account when she’d gone to the bathroom.

  Emma positions her laptop on her desk, tilting the screen so that the camera is slightly downward-facing. She takes a few steps back and squats slightly, angling her torso forward, allowing the fabric to gap away from her chest. With her left hand she pulls gently at the bottom of the dress’s deep V, and then again shifts her thumb slightly to the left, so that the fabric barely grazes her nipple, which is hard, hard, hard. With her free hand she clicks the shutter on the screen; before sending it, she looks carefully: there it is, the tiniest glimpse of the outer edge of her areola.

  Look closely, she types, as if there was any chance Harper would miss it.

  While she waits for a reply, Emma begins brushing out her hair, tugging at the bun Olivia swirled and pinned at the nape of her neck. It’s half-undone when Harper responds, a tangled mess of bobby pins jammed into the bottom of her skull.

  I wish I could see that for real.

  Emma squints. She knows instinctively what Harper means. They’ve been hinting at it for months, edging closer and closer to the suggestion, nervously composing messages that asked for more without letting on that either one of them thought this wasn’t “real.”

  Harper goes to college in Vermont, four hours due north from Litchfield. There’s a bus from Hartford that takes double the time, an all-day trip. It’s always seemed insane, improbable, unrealistic.

  You could, Emma types. I could be there by tomorrow night.

  To: erin.palmiere@reginaventures.com

  From: erin.palmiere@reginaventures.com

  Date: May 13, 2016, 9:18 A.M.

  Subject: A Message from the Board

  To the Atwater Community:

  It is with mixed emotions that I write to inform you that Patricia Brodie will be retiring at the end of this school year. She informed the Board of this decision at our last meeting.

  Mrs. Brodie—as so many of you know her—joined the Atwater community as Head of School in 2004. In her twelve years in this position, our school has grown and thrived in unprecedented and unparalleled ways. Under her leadership, we’ve retained the highest enrollment since our founding; our bicentennial campaign was our most successful fund-raising effort in our history. Through her vision, we: designed and implemented a more individualized curriculum, including expanded elective course offerings and the senior independent study program; expanded our varsity sports program, adding to our roster crew, squash, water polo, and ice hockey; critically refurbished and enhanced our infrastructure, including updates to the Inez and Marshall Emmons Field House and the addition of the Burgess Center for Science, Technology, and Engineering; added at least one full-time faculty member to each major department, tightening our overall faculty-student ratio by 30 percent. Each of these developments has helped to bring Atwater into the new millennium, into an era of education that prioritizes individualization and hands-on, problem-based learning, and that prepares our young women for leadership in an entrepreneurial economy.

  In fact, Mrs. Brodie has built a career and a lifetime out of innovating and self-starting. She earned her MEd. from Teachers College when Title IX was in its infancy, unregulated by the Department of Education and under frequent litigation that sought to chip away at the meager protections the earliest form of the law afforded. She began her teaching career at Brearley, and in the subsequent years would traverse the nation, working for some of the country’s finest educational institutions.

  She did much of this with her husband of almost forty years, Elliott Rhodes. An accomplished scholar and professor emeritus at Columbia, Elliott has also become a fixture on Atwater’s campus, an honorary member of the maintenance department (we’ve seen him snowplowing the track), theater department (where he’s helped with set design), and history department (more than once in his decade on campus, Mr. Rhodes taught a senior elective). Both Elliott and Patricia are looking forward to spending more time together in retirement. We are so grateful for all that they have brought to the community, and we wish them the best in their next adventure.

  A leadership search is a ten-month endeavor, necessitating the formation of a search committee, the retention of an executive search firm, and feedback from a wide variety of constituents. Given the timing of this announcement and our reluctance to abbreviate the search process in any way, the Board has made the decision to appoint an interim Head of School for the coming academic year, with plans to name Atwater’s sixteenth Head of School in the early spring of 2017. We look forward to your input in this undertaking, and are excited for this next chapter in Atwater history.

  Gratefully yours,

  Erin Palmiere

  Senior Prank

  Dusk is settling long and pink across Atwater’s grounds, and Bryce Engel sits cross-legged on her twin bed. Her window is thrown open, and below her she hears the cacophony of her classmates soaking up this warm spring night. For the seniors, it’s one of their last on campus, and she imagines without looking that the majority of the revelers are from the class of 2016. She thinks she can hear Karla Flores’s big, generous laugh.

  They leave for the senior retreat tomorrow, three days on a lake somewhere in Vermont, while the rest of the school stays behind for exams. Honestly, Bryce thinks this is one thing Atwater gets really right: all spring, the seniors are a distraction; they’ve been accepted into their dream schools—Harvard and Princeton and Williams and Middlebury—and so all they have to do each day is not fuck up hugely. They can let their grades slide a little. They can break all kinds of minor rules a little more flagrantly: they can “forget” to sign out when they leave campus for lunch; they can be a few minutes late to class.

  Anyway, this means that for the month of May there’s a little bit of controlled chaos on campus, and for Bryce—who began organizing her exam notes in April—this is an annoyance. She’ll be happy to have them gone tomorrow, leaving her a whole day to study for her world history exam in peace.

  She puts her computer down for a second and shimmies off her mattress, sliding her toes as she does through the hard plastic of the flip-flops she keeps near her bed at all times—the floors are dirty, and as much as she’d like to rid herself of this particularly obsessive quirk, she cannot stand the thought of placing her bare feet directly against the floor; she can imagine the way the dust and dirt would nibble at her soles, microscopic grains of sand itching at her skin—and shuffles across the room to the window, thinking she’ll slam it shut. On move-in day she gave the bed under the window to Lauren, because her mother said that although it sounded romantic to have the bed under the window the reality was that that meant your bed was the one that dust an
d rain and bugs filtered onto first, and it was more of a nuisance than it was worth. She pauses to listen, her hands on the sill, the music drifting up to her in an indistinct medley: summertime outdoor stuff, Edward Sharpe or Dave Matthews or maybe Belle and Sebastian.

  “Bryce!”

  For a confusing second or two she thinks it’s coming from outside, and her face flushes hot and red, as if she’s been caught spying. But no—it’s just someone outside her door.

  “Bryce!” The voice hisses again. “You there?”

  The girl at Bryce’s door is six feet tall and lanky like a model, her arms and legs long, graceful extensions of herself. She’s wearing ripped black jeans and an undersize black T-shirt.

  “Hey, Mia,” Bryce says, one hand still on her doorknob. “What’s up?”

  “How’s it going?” Mia Tavoletti says as she takes a step forward, pushing easily into Bryce’s room. She does a tiny circle in the space between the beds, then chooses Bryce’s desk chair. She drags it a few feet away from her desk, but doesn’t turn it around to face the center of the room before sitting. Instead, she sits down backward, resting her chin on the top of the chair’s back. She whips her head around for a second and eyes Bryce’s still-open computer.

  “Ahhh—studying?”

  Bryce nods. “Trying to,” she says, and then immediately regrets the dismissiveness in her tone, the way she failed to mask the slight annoyance at Mia’s interruption. She is annoyed—but she’s also curious about Mia’s presence in her room, flattered at having captured the attention of an upperclasswoman, especially one as indifferent and self-involved as Mia.