All Girls

by Emily Layden

  As Bryce reaches for the waste basket, Mia presses the first pad against Mrs. Brodie’s door, applying pressure for a few seconds. It reminds Bryce of when they were taught how to use a pad in middle school, and the health teacher stuck them to her arms and forehead in an attempt to lighten an awkward lesson. It’s absurd; hilarious. Mia leans back to admire her handiwork, keeping her hand a length away from the door, waiting to see if the stick takes. It does, and Mia exhales. “Fuck yes. I wasn’t sure this was gonna work. Are doors like underwear?”

  “Metaphorically,” Bryce says, “a little bit.”

  Mia snorts a laugh. “Come on, we gotta cover this thing. Make it neat—rows of them, side by side. That way we’ll get the most coverage. I want this motherfucker leak-proof.”

  And for a few minutes they work in a diligent silence, pasting the pads in tidy rows, their rhythms syncing, tearing and peeling and sticking at the same time, and Bryce’s adrenaline is calmed by the manageable task at hand. She read something once about a depressed polar bear in the Central Park Zoo, and how the key to the polar bear’s depression was that he lacked “manageable tasks”—he was bored, basically—and that the path to contentment for humans and zoo animals alike is via a series of manageable tasks.

  Bryce positions a final pad in the bottom corner of the door, and then lets her crouching body fall back into something half-seated. Mia had turned over the trash bin to use as a footstool; Bryce watches her finish the top row, then jump off her stool and walk backward for a better view.

  “Sorta can’t tell what they are, can you?”

  “It looks like those cushioned walls you see in psych wards on TV.” This is probably the truest thing about the door: it looks like it was designed for you to run into it.

  “Well, that works just as well.”

  “So … why pads?”

  “For three years, Flawless has been lobbying Atwater to put pads and tampons in the bathrooms. At first we wanted free ones, and when the administration said that would”—here she puts on a sort of vaguely British affect—“‘amount to a not-insignificant expenditure,’ we campaigned for dispensers instead—you know, those things you see in public bathrooms.”

  “Yeah, I’m never clear on whether or not those work.”

  “Yeah, me neither. Anyway, so we said fine, we’ll pay for them, but you should have them all around campus. And we did this research, polled the student body, made the argument for reliable access to feminine care and our role, as a girls’ school, in setting the standard for that right … and they just said no. ‘The Health Center always has tampons in case of an emergency,’ they said, which, yeah, we know, but the Health Center can be out of the way, and by definition that sort of misunderstands what a period emergency looks like.”

  There are so few people who know this about Mia, Bryce thinks—how noble she is, how morally righteous. With her black-on-black clothes and her good-but-not-outstanding grades and her lack of really close friends, Mia always seems sort of above it all: just passing through. In so many ways the pads on the door is classic Mia: weird juxtaposed with virtuous; hilarious with high-minded; deadly serious but also superficial.

  “This school—they say they’re all about empowering us, but the truth is they have a very narrow view of what that looks like. And if our empowerment comes at any kind of cost, then we can forget about it.” She inhales deeply. “And I don’t just mean financial cost, like, dollars spent or whatever. If it costs their image, then that’s an issue, too.”

  “Well, if their image is tarnished, then so is their bank account,” Bryce adds.

  Mia nods, reaching a hand out to flatten a pad that curls at the side.

  “Why not have somebody from Flawless do this with you?”

  Mia turns over her shoulder, and Bryce senses she’s disappointed in the question. “I didn’t want them to be able to sanction the club,” she says, as though it’s the obvious thing. “A mysterious rogue defector is best.”

  After packing up their things—they leave the wrappers in the admin trash can, but otherwise try to make the area look undisturbed, so everything looks normal at first—they head back across the main floor up the stairs again.

  * * *

  Bryce does not remember the first time she came to Atwater; she was too young for the memory to stick, and by the time she was old enough for a visit to settle into permanence she had traveled to the campus enough times that it felt like visiting a relative. She didn’t always understand why, of all things, she had to go with her mother to Alumnae Weekends and fund-raisers—she had a nanny, after all, a rotating cast of them, soft-featured and brown-haired graduate students from Yale, working on their Ph.D.s in public health or sociology, on-call help who picked Bryce up from school or practice and helped with homework and dinner and dishes and bedtime when her mother (who did, in fact, have a graduate degree in psychology and who was, in fact, in private practice in Greenwich, where she worked mainly with the mothers of girls with whom Bryce played tennis) was too busy or too tired or, maybe, Bryce came to understand when her mother kept hiring nannies even when Bryce was twelve and thirteen and old enough to do a lot of the nanny’s tasks on her own, when she just wanted another adult in the house.

  Lillian brought Bryce to Atwater because it was the greatest thing she had ever done in her life, Bryce now knew. Looking at the pictures of her mother in the old yearbooks and in the graduation and society photos on the walls, tall and thin and soft-focused, her hair long and honey blond, a kind of classic American beauty that could and would withstand the shifting whims of decades and generations, the Lilly Lowell who went to Atwater in the eighties—a decade before Karen Mirro—was a girl with unlimited promise and potential: student council president, captain of the tennis team; a boyfriend at Westminster; accepted to Barnard and Wellesley and Bryn Mawr. Loved by all her teachers, the envy of all her classmates. Perfect.

  But then life had become a disappointment for Lillian, as it is for so many girls whose high school careers are extraordinary. She got her degree in psychology, and after a couple stints as an in-house therapist at various rehab centers, she found the demands of corporatism too stringent, too inflexible; it was because her ex-husband was a hedge fund manager that they had the capital for Lillian to start her own practice, just a few clients at first, recommendations from friends, a list she could keep as small as she wanted provided she could cover the lease on her office space and that she could keep her office itself decorated in whatever style was de rigueur. (Whether her wardrobe—tailored staples from Theory and Vince, sensible but chic flats from Chanel and Prada, hair by Kérastase, always—counted as a work expense was up for debate, and so the budget varied from month to month.) The arrangement allowed her to say that at least she still worked, something many of her friends and Bryce’s friends’ mothers could not say, at least she had purpose, but it was a small existence, a modest career, one that hovered at the edges of a hobby, smelling like sacrifice and resentment and an angry yearning for what might have been.

  She did not have an M.D. or a Ph.D. She did not lead a team of psychologists in a hospital or a rehab facility. She did not perform her own research. She did not speak at conferences. She was not, by any measure, wildly successful. She made low-six figures every year. And then her marriage fell apart, and she became a middle-aged Connecticut divorcée with a middling therapy practice and a stubborn wrinkle between her eyebrows. It wasn’t a failure, exactly, it just wasn’t what anyone saw in the future of the senior who once charmed the President of the Board of Trustees into personally funding and hosting the first senior retreat on her Hamptons estate.

  Of course Lillian never said any of this to Bryce, and in fact it would be years—Bryce would be in her thirties—before her daughter would really see how the hints of unhappiness that vignetted their existence had coalesced together into one shroud, before she would see her mother at seventy and understand the mountain of dissatisfaction that shadowed their life. For now, all Bryce
knew were the average and prickling constraints of a mother who saw her daughter as a piece of her own résumé, a reflection of herself, one last chance to get it right.

  * * *

  The clock tower announces Atwater from a half mile out. It crests above pine and oak and birch trees, the tallest building at the school’s highest elevation. Officially, the only people with access to the purely ornamental tower—there’s no bell that tolls each hour, nothing to maintain up there beyond keeping the bats out—are members of the maintenance team, but some students, over the years, have successfully badgered a beleaguered and good-natured facilities worker until he says he’s headed up there anyway, so sure, why not. The occasional clock tower view pops up on social media, and the jealous! comments flood in.

  Bryce has never been, but she knows how to get there, and she recognizes where Mia’s leading her before they reach the door that hides in plain sight. It’s at the end of the hall on the third floor, between a few offices and some storage closets and a last-resort bathroom. “Have you been up here before?” Mia whispers, sort of absentmindedly, jiggling the door handle.

  Bryce shakes her head.

  Mia lets out a low whistle. “You’re in for a treat.”

  Immediately Bryce feels the night air tumbling down the shaftway. The staircase up the clock tower is impossibly narrow. Mia wears the duffel bag like a backpack, the handles looped over her shoulders, and still it rubs against the drywall on both sides. The tiny flights switchback on one another, and Bryce’s suspicion that they are not only narrowing but also steepening is confirmed when they reach the final flight, little more than a ladder.

  Mia goes first, and Bryce waits for her to clear the landing at the top before beginning her ascent. She’s never had a thing about heights, but ladders provoke in her some other primal fear, and she imagines a sort of nonviolent tumble, her foot missing a rung and plunging through, knocking her off-balance. She steps gingerly, foot-foot-hand-hand, until her head pokes into the night sky.

  She expects Mia to be busy implementing the plan, but as Bryce ungracefully slides her body chest-first onto the (weakly supported, clearly deteriorating) floor, she sees the senior standing at the ledge, her hands gripping the barrier at her waist, surveying the little world below them. Bryce joins her, and for a minute they don’t say anything. Beneath them is their bubble, the Bowl at the school building’s base the bottom of the convex curve. Lathrop is to their right, where they spot a number of lit windows violating lights-out; the same is true to their left, in Whitney. Lampposts ring the Bowl and the roads that arch away from it into parking lots and Professorville, radiating orange haze. Beyond their artificial border to the west, where the long, low, purely ornamental rock wall briefly swells to an always-open iron gate, the world switches suddenly black, acres of sprawling farmland that is tended to with the course of the sun.

  “‘Look, Simba,’” Mia growls, “‘everything the light touches is our kingdom.’”

  Bryce laughs, a low, whispered ha, because she is aware that she is supposed to. But the truth is that she is mesmerized by the view, by the way the campus below them looks like an island in a sea of darkness, like flying over the middle of the country at night and seeing, suddenly, the lights of a city clustered like burning stars. It is as though Atwater is the only civilization for miles; as though the universe does not exist beyond the Bowl. But this feeling Bryce has is too delicate—too embarrassing, too humiliatingly sentimental—to put into words, and so she says instead: “What’s the plan, Mufasa?”

  “Mufasa ends up dead.” Mia squats at her duffel bag and slowly unzips. She twists and pulls; with a final tug she’s thrown back two steps and Bryce can see what she had crammed like vacuum packaging into the bag: a life-sized stuffed heron, at least three feet long, with stiff, yellow legs attached to a blue-gray body. Its wings are stitched flat against its trunk, a bird that cannot even pretend to fly. “So,” she says, standing and turning to face Bryce, shaking the heron by its disproportionate neck. “How should we kill her?”

  Bryce stifles a laugh; Mia’s delivery is perfectly deadpan, a restrained mix of melodrama and sarcasm. But she knows, too, that despite her inflection Mia is completely serious: This is a long-standing Atwater annoyance, that the mascot for their historically progressive all-girls school is a Lady Heron. In her four years, Mia, a star soccer player, had led or cosigned petition after petition to remove the “Lady” from their title, calling it—alternatively and simultaneously—“unnecessarily gender normative,” “midcentury misogynist,” and accusing the heron of extolling “outdated definitions and expectations of femininity.” This is also—it occurs to Bryce—why Mia had been only moderately careful about the cameras and the entire notion of getting caught. Any symbolic destruction of the school mascot would point directly to its most vocal opponent. In other words, Mia was prepared to pay the price.

  Bryce extends a hand toward the bird, fingering its coat gently. It’s a high-end toy; it reminds her of the stuffed animals she admired at FAO Schwarz as a child, horses as big as ponies (and sturdy enough to ride, too), giraffes tall enough to graze the ceiling, each so realistically rendered that the store might as well have been a zoo. The heron Mia holds is cloaked in feathers, hundreds of soft synthetic approximations of the real thing. She pinches one between her thumb and index finger and tugs lightly at first, then harder. It comes loose. Her breath catches: “Oh, shit—sorry,” she whispers.

  Mia’s eyes widen. Her lips peel into a smile. “Genius.” Still clutching the bird’s neck in one fist, she reaches a hand to its belly and tugs, as Bryce did, pulling another feather loose. And then—with surprising calm, like a child picking petals from a daisy—Mia extends her arm out of the tower, into the open air above the roof, and releases the feather from her hand. They watch it drift on the imperceptible breeze, shrinking smaller and smaller in the distance and darkness.

  Together they set in on the bird, plucking and yanking, pinching at her faux feathers and releasing them—individually at first, then by the fistful—over the ledge, onto the roof and the sidewalk below. The destruction threatens the toy’s integrity, and as she begins to bald, small bits of stuffing poke through the holes created by their tugging, so that what they toss out of the clock tower becomes a mix of fluff and feather. The heron withers before them, naked and sagging.

  Mia peers over the railing, and Bryce follows suit. The debris litters the ground at the steps of the school building, a tiny blast radius of animal destruction. Mia eyes the bird, its ultrathin (“Ultrafeminine,” she’d griped) neck tight in her fist. And then she lifts its shriveled remnants out into the open air and lets go, releasing the toy to its scattered plumage. It lands noiselessly, splayed at the center of its own wreckage. Surveying their handiwork, Bryce thinks suddenly of a story she read about a young woman who jumped from a parking garage roof, and how surprised she was to learn that the woman’s body wasn’t obliterated on impact: the damage remained inside, broken bones and ruptured organs contained by thick skin. At the time, Bryce had double- and triple-checked the facts, obsessively searching for just how much force a body could withstand. If they’d thrown a real heron from the roof, it occurs to Bryce, there might not have been any splatter at all.

  Of course, if they’d thrown a real bird from the tower, it might have just flown away: they’d have freed it, instead. She wonders why neither of them thought of this, a version of protesting the Lady Heron that involved deliverance rather than death.

  “Now what?” Mia asks.

  “Hmm?” Bryce says, jolted from her trance.

  “What’s next?” the senior says.

  Bryce feels the space around them tighten. She begins to shiver, and bites the inside of her mouth against the shudder. “Huh?”

  Mia squares her shoulders against Bryce’s, and Bryce—who is not short, who is an average five-foot-five—is suddenly aware of how tall Mia Tavoletti is. It makes sense, in a way, that she is as certain of herself as she is: ther
e would be no way for her to pass through this world unnoticed, no way to shrink against upward-gazing eyes. “I know it’s you.”

  When she was a child and in trouble, Bryce would do this thing where she would just refuse to talk to her mother—a version of the silent treatment, applied in reverse. Her mother would scold and shout and wave her arms wildly, pointing, hollering in increasing decibels, and Bryce would just stand, stone-faced, waiting for the torrent to end, for her mother to run out of gas. What she knew then—although she could not have explained it, had only the vaguest sense—was that what her mother wanted most of all was someone to shout with, an equal in argument. Her daughter’s muteness triggered a reminder that she was alone in this business of parenting, in living.

  She considers ignoring Mia. She could just move past her, down the staircase, through the tunnels, and back into bed. But before Bryce can move, Mia continues: “It started with the newspaper, when I—unwittingly, turns out—took the heat for Louisa. I knew that the person who published the special issue had to have been on the Heron staff. I considered for a little while that it was Louisa—that she was lying to me—but it just didn’t fit. She’s too…”

  “Goody Two-shoes?”

  “I might’ve gone with ‘Nervous Nelly,’ but yeah. She’s too afraid of getting in trouble. So then I went through the list, starting with the seniors. Hitomi? No way.”

  This is correct. Hitomi is the daughter of diplomats, quiet, focused, ferociously smart. Bryce nods.

  “Right. Anjali?” Mia cocks a head to one side, nods. “Maybe. She was pissed off enough that I could’ve imagined her doing something stupid.”