by Emily Layden
Unfazed, Mia taps at Bryce’s laptop, scrolling back through her notes, scanning the eight-page document. “Shit, these are thorough,” she says, arrowing down. Bryce looks for the contours of disbelief in her observation—an echo of the backhanded way people are always saying to her, “Smart too, huh?”—but does not immediately find them. The notes, after all, are not necessarily evidence of intellect: they’re proof of hard work, of grit.
“I’ve heard it’s traditionally a tough exam.”
Nodding, Mia lightly taps shut Bryce’s computer. “Speaking of traditions,” she begins, “I missed out on a very important one this year.”
Bryce first met Mia when she joined the Heron’s writing staff in the fall. It was a decision that had puzzled Bryce’s mother, who’d had her daughter’s Atwater cocurriculars mapped out from infancy: tennis in the fall, lacrosse in the spring; Key Club, for volunteer work; student government (if she played her cards right, Lillian Engel knew, her daughter could be student council president, and then from there a natural choice for an alumnae Board position). The Heron was a ragtag enterprise, one of the few underfunded and overlooked ventures on campus. They did not have a digital platform, not even a website; their room was a basement lair where students chipped paint from the walls like they might pick at their cuticles when bored. The couches sagged and smelled. More than once, they’d found the sand grains of mice poop at the edges of the carpeting. Most important: no one really read the Heron, anyway; it might have not existed at all. For these reasons, the Heron attracted a similarly ragtag group of students, each of them idealists in their own way, looking for a place to direct their fledgling talents.
Bryce liked Mia, and—along with the rest of the staff—saw her dismissal from the Heron in the fall as a great injustice. In the room, her absence was felt immediately: Hard-to-impress and cynical, Mia had a grounding effect on all of them. Plus, she knew her way around the software. In her place Bryce had picked up some of the duties of art director; Anjali knew a bit of Adobe, also, and so between the two of them they could piece together an issue. So far, though, they’d yet to produce one that had the polish of Mia’s design.
“You see,” Mia continues, “due to the manner in which I was summarily dismissed from the Heron—”
Bryce feels her pulse quicken, her cheeks flush. She hates the way she blushes, the way her Irish descendants handed down this one revelatory trait, a smack of rosacea that gives away her secrets.
“It’s fine, I was proud to take one for the team,” Mia says, waving away Bryce’s self-consciousness. “Anyway, because my firing was immediate, I was not granted my God-given right to induct my replacement. You see, typically, an outgoing member of leadership”—she uses the shorthand for the Heron staff members who make decisions: the editors in chief, the art director, the Opinion editor—“mentors their successor through a kind of … editorial test to ensure that she can handle the pressure or assignments of the role.”
“An editorial test?” Bryce repeats skeptically.
“Okay, okay, sure, it’s usually a little bit of light hazing. Last year, when Louisa replaced Madison Hubbard as coeditor, Maddie made her write a feature article on the feminist politics of Taylor Swift’s girl gang. It was weird and hilarious and—because it’s Louisa—thoroughly researched and reported. She agonized over it.”
Bryce slowly nods. “So you want to give me my … edit test?”
“I want to formally pass the baton, outgoing art director to incoming art director.” She smiles and adds: “Well, I guess I’m no longer technically outgoing.”
“But why should a mandate from Linda Paulsen get in the way of your senior bucket list?” Bryce says, half teasing. It was always hard to find her footing with the older girls, hard to keep up with the banter while still showing deference.
“I knew you understood me. Due to the unusual circumstances of my departure, you and I are just gonna have to come at this a little bit differently.”
“How so?”
“Well, funny you should mention our esteemed Dean of Students. She let something very interesting slip when I was on the receiving end of one of her lectures this fall. See,” Mia continues, “among this institution’s numerous fine traditions was this long-since abandoned one: the senior prank.”
“Why was it abandoned?” Her mother never mentioned a senior prank.
“Something about a petting zoo, but I couldn’t get more than that out of her. Anyway: I have a plan to revitalize the senior prank, and I could use an extra set of eyes and hands. And you can have an opportunity to prove to me that you have the creativity, resourcefulness, and ability to focus under pressure required of the Heron art director.”
Bryce thinks about it. The truth is that she doesn’t know Mia very well, that after she was kicked off the Heron they ceased spinning in the same orbit—it wasn’t unusual for a senior and a freshman to have little in common besides their shared cocurriculars; in fact it would have been more notable had Mia and Bryce developed a friendship outside of the Heron room. They kept in regular contact through most of the fall, as Bryce stepped into Mia’s old role on the newspaper staff—she often texted her or dropped by her room during study hall to ask for pointers on certain aspects of layout—but by December she’d run out of legitimate excuses to talk to Mia. Finally, she says: “But it wouldn’t be the senior prank if I helped.”
“That’s the brilliance of it, right? No one will ever suspect you.” Mia stands from her backward-facing seat, swinging her right leg around to meet her left, and in two steps is next to Bryce. Her perfume is heavy and musky, not at all like the floral and fruity sprays most of her classmates wear, and Bryce wonders if that’s a Mia thing or a senior thing, the wisdom to wear a more complicated scent. “I’ll be back after lights-out. That gives you three more hours to study.”
* * *
At 10:42, Bryce finally puts down her history notes. Technically, it’s past lights-out, but their Dorm Parent, Ms. Daniels, goes to bed at precisely 10:32 and so everyone on their hall knows it’s safe to turn the lights back on around 10:34. Her roommate, Lauren, has been asleep for an hour, her body curled toward the window and away from Bryce’s desk lamp. Lauren would never—has never—asked Bryce to turn off a light or to make less noise, which is not to say that Bryce is disruptive but rather that in Lauren’s mind she cannot commit even a minor annoyance. She likes Lauren, really, but the best parts of her—her sarcasm, a certain hardiness and pragmatism Bryce chalks up to hailing from the wilds of upstate New York, which Bryce imagines to be farmland or forest exclusively—she keeps hidden from the rest of the student body. In school she does not speak unless spoken to; at meals she lets one of her friends (Bryce, Tessa) dictate her choice. She has spent the entire year learning how to be at Atwater by following the cues of the freshmen she presumes to be more informed. Bryce has always been the one her friends follow, stealing what they could—braided ponytails for tennis, nails lacquered with Essie’s Ballet Slippers, high-waisted bikinis last summer—in an effort to capture what they could never: Bryce’s delicate wrists, her cheekbones, her straight hips and flat stomach no matter what she ate or how little she exercised. All of this is why she can’t help the creeping sense of pity she feels for her roommate, the disappointing patina of a person who isn’t quite what you’d hoped.
Mia Tavoletti, on the other hand, moves through Atwater with the confidence of someone who understands who she is. She has a crusader streak, but she doesn’t want to be known as one—she seems not to do anything at all for attention or validation. Bryce thinks about this—how a person could end up that way, the curiousness of someone who slices through the world without a hand to guide them—as she changes into something a little more nimble: she swaps her sweatpants for leggings, her dad’s Princeton crewneck for a quarter-zip athletic top; she laces into a pair of sneakers, one of the new ones her mom bought her in January for “winter workouts,” a not-so-subtle reminder to frequent the gym in the off-season. A
s she waits for the minutes to click forward, she flips through her flash cards, slipping ideologies into her subconscious.
“Dressed for the job, too, I see?” Mia announces her arrival, smirking, her small lips thinning as she presses them together.
“You know, I don’t have to do this. It’s not like Louisa has someone else in mind for art director.”
“What? I’m being serious! You look like a ninja.”
Bryce raises an eyebrow. “So, what do I need?”
“Just a sense of adventure.”
* * *
Most of Bryce’s classmates entered Atwater’s tunnels for the first time on the evening of their first Vespers, when they funneled into Trask from the bowels below. Initially conceived as insurance against a student who might use a Connecticut winter as an excuse for missing class, the network of underground channels linking the dorms to one another and the school building was the genius invention of Atwater’s second headmistress, Edith Jordan; now, due to some combination of fluctuating financial resources and a sense that Edith Jordan’s understanding of feminine fragility was somewhat Victorian, the tunnels are kept locked most of the year. The school officially opened them on just two occasions each year: Vespers and Alumnae Weekend, when visiting graduates delighted in recapturing a sense of their high school mischief-making.
This is how Bryce ended up in the tunnels when she was just eight years old. It was the same year her parents got divorced, and Bryce guesses now that Lillian thought the trip would be a fun girls’ weekend, a bonding opportunity for the two of them: a preview of all the excitement her daughter’s future still held, regardless of whether her father was a permanent resident in her house. On that Saturday afternoon, Lillian slipped away from lunch—her eyes red-rimmed and watery, her hair flattened at the roots, her teeth faintly purpled, little fractures Bryce would come to understand as symptoms of too many glasses of wine—and tugged her daughter across the Bowl into Whitney and down to the basement, where a heavy and cracked wooden door opened into a pitch-black hallway, so dark her eyes refused to adjust. Bryce stood at the threshold, her hands in tiny fists, her eyes trained on her mother’s calves thinned by shadow as she stopped to slip her feet out of her stiletto sandals. Her bare feet caved inward, so flat that she couldn’t help pronating.
“Come on,” Lillian shouted, and the empty corridor repeated the command: Come on come on come on. And she stepped out the halo of light into the darkness, her shoeless feet so quiet and soft against the cement that it was as if she had disappeared entirely.
It was Bryce’s father who taught her to swim, who carried her in the pool first with his arms and then with just the tips of his fingers and then with his hands outstretched, always an inch away; it was her father who taught her to ride a bike, his palm flat against her upper back; it was her dad who walked her into school on the first day of kindergarten, hand in hand. Lillian didn’t know that her daughter wasn’t brave.
“Bryce!” Bryce Bryce Bryce. Her father called her Little Bee, short for his little bumble bee. He made buzzing noises at her when he got home from work, chasing her around the kitchen island. Lillian never called her anything but Bryce.
With her eyes shut, choosing her own darkness instead, she ran down the hallway, her sneaker slaps echoing in the corridor. Her mother shrieked, laughing wildly, until Bryce caught up with her, her chest smacking into her mother’s hip.
“Watch it!” Lillian snapped, shoving her daughter off.
Finally they reached an intersection, and light glowed dimly from a spare bulb at the ceiling center. A set of cubbies lined the hall to their left—“That’s the way to the art building,” her mother explained; the hall to their right was more properly lit, and on the walls Bryce could see the sketches of a pattern.
As she followed her mother to the right, the markings clarified, each line made more distinct as her eyes adjusted. It was writing: hundreds of hand-scribbled messages. Names. Numbers. Doodles: hearts and clovers and rainbows. Her mother stopped short suddenly, and extended a pointed finger to the wall, tracing up and down as if searching a crossword.
“Here!” she cried out, finally, and pushed her forefinger into the concrete. “Bryce, look.”
Lilly Lowell, it said, in a tight and jagged handwriting that only slightly resembled the wide loops that signed Bryce’s school permission slips.
“When you come here, your friends will want you to sign your name near theirs, near your class. But you can sign wherever you want.”
* * *
Whether it’s the bravery of age and familiarity or actual minor electrical renovations, the tunnels don’t seem so dark to Bryce, now, following Mia through a lock-picked door in Lathrop’s basement (“Sometimes I just get the hot security guard to open it, but I didn’t want to involve him in this,” Mia said, her nose close to the keyhole). There’s an orange glow that fuzzes every twenty yards or so, from bulbs at intersections or exit signs over doorways, and it’s light enough inside the tunnels to see that behind the scratches of signatures—like hieroglyphics inside an ancient tomb—the walls are painted a sort of milky yellow; the writing itself seems more childish and playful than menacing: GO HERONS! FAB 4 EVER. PENNY WAS HERE.
At the first intersection, Mia takes the tunnel to their right, heading toward the school building.
“Where are we going?”
“It’s safer if you don’t know the plan,” Mia says. “If we get caught, then they won’t be able to wring it out of you.”
Bryce rolls her eyes. “We’re not spies.”
“But Mrs. Brodie is kind of like the CIA, isn’t she?” Mia pauses at the door at the tunnel’s end, thinking. “I still sort of can’t believe that she’s leaving,” she adds.
The email announcing Brodie’s retirement had come from the President of the Board, and included a lengthy recounting of their Head of School’s many accomplishments both at and before she came to Atwater. It made no mention of Karen Mirro or Mr. Breslin or the tumult of the year; it was as if the circumstances were completely normal, entirely coincidental. There was only the vague insinuation, at the very end, that the timing was inopportune—normally a Head announced her retirement a year in advance, and continued to fulfill her duties while the school performed a search for her replacement.
“I mean, it’s not entirely her fault, right?” Mia continues. “It all went down way before she was Head.”
Bryce considers this. “But she still kept him on staff,” she says, carefully.
Mia shrugs. “I’m not defending her, I don’t think. I’m just saying that I think she was at the end of a long line of … buck-passing, you know? I think a lot of people knew Breslin was sleeping with his students, and firing Brodie just feels more symbolic than anything else.”
Bryce is still turning this over when Mia says: “You know there are cameras around school, right? Have you figured out where they all are?” Without waiting for a response, she continues, her voice at a clip: “Anyway, some of them are decoy cameras, just meant as deterrents. If you spend enough time at the security desk watching the monitors you can figure out which are real, but there are a lot and I forget sometimes. I’m, like, ninety percent sure the one on the other side of this door is fake. But keep your head down just in case, okay?”
Bryce’s heart pumps in a kind of way that seems to come from the bottom of her sternum, deep in her gut. She can feel her skin pulsing with the beat, giant echoing thumps that must be loud enough for Mia to hear.
Mia puts her hand on the doorknob, then turns over her shoulder one more time, angling her chin slightly up so that Bryce can see her eyes. “Having fun yet?”
They enter the schoolhouse in the basement wing, a dusty and dark corridor secretly beloved by the teachers whose classes take place in its outdated rooms. It’s where the Heron staff convenes in its crumbling and cavernous room; Bryce also has English down here, in a classroom with lab tables stacked end on end, puzzled into a square that theoretically works and faci
litates discussion like a Harkness table. The basement classrooms are unfussy, unstuffy, not at all the crown-molded and twenty-foot-ceilinged stereotypes of those on the first floor. The carpet peels up at the corners. The chalkboards never fully erase.
Together they hustle along the corridor, shooting for the stairs at the opposite end, where they ascend two flights into the world languages wing. The second floor holds an old dance studio that the school uses for health classes and interdisciplinary workshops and independent studies—Sloane and Blake use it most afternoons for their ballet practice, although never at the same time. Basically, it’s a forgotten room, no good even for weekend hookups or drinking because of its location. But this is where Mia leads Bryce, to a closet at the back of the studio, where she pulls out an overstuffed duffel bag and hooks it over her shoulder. She clicks the closet shut, and motions over her shoulder for Bryce to hurry behind her.
Mia leads Bryce back to the southern entrance of the school building and into the administration wing, where the offices of Mrs. Brodie, Linda Paulsen, and the College Counseling staff sit beyond a set of glass-paneled and gold-lettered double doors. The senior sets down her bag and begins riffling through it; when she stands, she’s clutching two giant boxes of maxi pads. “I’m gonna need your help. There’s two more of these in there—grab ’em?”
“Seriously?”
Mia stares at her. “Put your hood up, too.”
The spring-loaded glass doors move with an eerie silence, cutting through the still air as quietly as the ghosts they are. Bryce follows Mia down the hall; together they walk more slowly than before, peeking in and out of offices, waiting (maybe) for the inevitable blare of an alarm. A daytime visit to the admin wing usually means trouble or, at the very least, discomfort and stress, and so tonight it feels more forbidden even than the tunnels.
Mia stops at Mrs. Brodie’s office, setting the boxes of pads on the floor. She gets right to work, tearing quickly at the box top; the pads are so tightly packed that when she pulls one the surrounding three come with it. She tears open the wrapping, tosses it aside. “Fuck, this is gonna make such a mess,” she says as she peels away the backing. “Pull the garbage bin over, will you?”