by Emily Layden
Anjali has a hot temper. Bryce bites the inside of her lower lip, pulls her shoulders back.
“The juniors.” Mia ticks them off on her fingers: “Brie? Can’t imagine her caring enough. Kit? She does have that kind of West Coast hippie, social justice warrior thing going on—but, like everybody else, I knew—I assumed—that the person who published the paper was also the person who made the Pedophile Playoffs and the Snap story. I was looking for someone who wasn’t just a hot-tempered campus avenger but somebody who was disciplined. Committed.”
“That’s not Kit.”
Mia laughs. “No, it’s not. So that leaves you and Macy.”
“And obviously it couldn’t have been Macy.”
“I mean, I love that kid, but she can barely tie her shoes in the morning without having a panic attack.”
Poor Macy. Once, Bryce had come across a quote from Virginia Woolf: “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.” It remains for Bryce the most illustrative sentence she has ever read about mental illness. Macy is locked in, a prisoner in her own mind. It must be a terrible way to live.
“And I figured that the clues had to come from somebody who knew,” Mia continues. “Somebody who had the insider information about Karen Mirro’s lawsuit and Mr. Breslin and the school…” She searches for the right word until she lands on one borrowed from the same corporate lexicon that has plagued them all year: “bureaucracy. It had to be someone who was connected. Maybe someone whose grandmother was a Trustee. Someone whose mother is angling for her own position on the Board.”
Bryce bristles at the use of this word to describe her mother, feels instinctively embarrassed at the obviousness of her mother’s wants. “Angling” makes Lillian sound cunning and calculating when Bryce knows her mother to be flailing wildly, desperate. It was this desperation that opened the private doors of the school’s scandals to Bryce, her mother’s obsessive need to talk about her alma mater, to ramble on and on during car rides and over dinners about all the Atwater gossip. It was both a compulsion and a nervous tic, her constant dissecting of the school’s decisions (“As soon as this thing resurfaced over the summer, they should have asked Rich to take a leave”) and worrying over the reputational cost (“They needed to get out in front of this, control the narrative”) and engaging in all kinds of affirmations, manifesting that this was a survivable scandal. Bryce, she’d said one night over winter break, a piece of roast chicken stabbed at the end of her fork, golden skin molting off the slick meat, just remember that everybody is hiding something. She paused, shoved the chicken into her mouth, chewed. Trust me. I’m the one they tell.
“Well, when you put it that way,” Bryce says finally, “I’m surprised that no one else figured it out.”
“Yes! Ha!” Mia lets out a kind of cackle that echoes in the still air.
“Shh!” Bryce hisses, reflexively ducking beneath the rail of the tower, out of view to someone below.
“Sorry!” Mia whispers. “I knew it!”
All year, Bryce had imagined versions of this conversation. She knew that the publishing of the Heron would be the key to her identity—that someone would be able to cull the newspaper masthead for the person closest to the school’s secrets. Sometimes Bryce savored the irony: that the one thing that should make her immune to expulsion—her family’s connectedness, as Mia had phrased it—would also be the root cause of it. She wouldn’t have known all she knew without her mother and grandmother, without the legacies whose paths had made Atwater Bryce’s destiny.
“So what else is there?” Mia asks.
“What do you mean?”
“What’s one thing you didn’t get to do yet this year? I want to help.”
That’s up to you, Mia had said. And something else begins to crystallize for Bryce. “Wait—is the edit test—is that even real?”
Mia shrugs. “Yes and no. The bit about Louisa is true; you can ask her. But it’s not, like, a Vespers-level tradition or anything.”
It wasn’t the Heron hazing Mia wanted in on, Bryce realizes. That was just a ruse; a ploy to get her out of her room. Bryce knows that Mia works so hard to keep an arm’s length from the intensity with which she cares about the things she perceives as injustices, using humor (maxi pads on the Head of School’s door, for example) and a sort of blasé affect (she told Louisa she didn’t even care about the newspaper anyway) to soften her edges. When Mia looks at Bryce, she sees some kind of kindred spirit: someone else who knows what it is to have to temper your outrage, to never fully claim the things that eat at you. What she wants, Bryce realizes, is to feel a little less lonely inside her fury.
But Mia has come to her at the wrong time, Bryce’s wings scorched from flying too close to the sun. She tugs at her ponytail, pushing it higher up on her head. “I think I’m done,” she says finally.
Mia cocks her head to one side. “I don’t believe you,” she says, quickly.
Bryce shakes her head, the smallest one-two. “I crossed a line with the last one.”
She thinks about the way Lauren slapped the marriage announcement down on her desk, smacked beneath a flat palm. I mean, this seems a little below-the-belt, doesn’t it?
Mia lifts her palms up like, Meh. Like, What did you expect? “I don’t think you were wrong. I just think it was too hard. I think we thought we wanted a head to roll and then when it was served to us on a silver platter we were sort of like … man, that’s a fucking head.”
Bryce laughs a little, in spite of herself, in spite of the fact that it’s her miscalculation they’re talking about. “I should have stopped once Breslin left,” she says, although she’s not convinced she means it, or that she could have. She just knows it didn’t feel good when they announced Brodie’s retirement; it felt heavy. She eyes the heron splayed on the ground three stories below them, and thinks about how you don’t always see the lines until you’ve crossed them. That’s a fucking head.
“No,” Mia says. “I mean, he had to leave, obviously. But that’s what’s so hard about this, right? I’m not just mad at him. I’m mad that I ever met him. I’m mad at the whole system that allowed him to seduce and then rape a student and then keep his job for twenty more years, so that one day he would be my teacher and I would look at him every day for three years like, holy shit, you’re the guy who made the butterfly faces, you’re a fucking genius, teach me everything.” She shakes her head, sloughing the disgust from how it settled in her brain like dust. “I think that’s what you were trying to do, with the paintings and the interviews—you were trying to say that it wasn’t just on him.” She pauses again, taking a breath. “It was like this perfect storm, right? We’ve been living inside the section of the Venn diagram where a culture that protects men like him overlaps with one obsessed with prestige and status and reputation. How were you supposed to know how to tackle all of that at once?”
And although this sounds true to Bryce it also seems too straightforward, too intentional and too morally unambiguous. If Mia wanted Bryce to draw a straight line between the school’s cover-up and her behavior this year, she couldn’t do it. Nor could she say—entirely—that she did it because she sensed that she was communicating something on behalf of the student body, and that with each subsequent act the feeling that she had more to say for them only intensified, like she had something to live up to but that that something was like the edge of an exponential curve, never meeting the asymptote. No, if Mia wanted to know how it happened, Bryce would have to say: It just did. The newspaper just presented itself. What she couldn’t have imagined before hitting Send was the gratification, how good it would feel to say Hey, this is bullshit, without anyone saying back—because they couldn’t, because there was no one to say it to—You’ll understand later. This is why she doesn’t think she could have stopped herself after Breslin resigned: she wanted that feeling all the time. The yard signs acted as both her inspiration and her scapegoat: They gave her a blueprint but a
lso muddied the waters; she knew that her actions would be lumped together with the events of Opening Day, and the hunt for a single vigilante rather than many might provide her cover.
How can she say any of this to Mia? How can she tell her that there was something greedy and not at all altruistic about what she was doing? It wasn’t just about safety (get the rapist off campus) or justice (how do you hold a whole culture accountable?)—it was more personal than that.
The wood beneath her feet is worn and fraying and soft, as though it might melt beneath them. She thinks about her mother, smudging at an oily fingerprint on a wineglass, saying, Everybody has skeletons, Bee, using the name only her father used.
“You know what my mother told me when I was picking my classes for this year?”
“Hmm?”
“She said that I had to take photography, not Drawing and Painting.”
Mia laughs, a single puff of the chest, a knock back of the head. “That’s fucked-up.”
“The thing is, she thinks that Atwater is the greatest thing she’s done in her life. It’s like she peaked at eighteen.” It’s a joke, sort of, but her voice is hollow and it doesn’t quite land. “I want to be proud of this place like she is, but I’m also afraid that it’s all I’ll ever be. You know, an Atwater Girl.”
“Sometimes it feels like a trap, doesn’t it?”
Bryce nods. In the fall, the thought of anyone knowing all this—about her mother, about what she’d done; that the girl on campus who seemed to be the epitome of that tag line, a multigenerational legacy from a wealthy corner of New England, pretty like a J.Crew model, was, in fact, a traitor—made her break into a cold damp sweat, moisture condensing even on the tiny blond hairs above her lip. She didn’t think she’d ever be able to explain it, and that even if she could, no one would understand. It will be years before she can look back on this moment and realize that the Venn diagram Mia described had a third circle overlapping the other two: the portion of a culture that takes and takes and takes from girls, all the while refusing to recognize them as whole people. She will remember this conversation and know that they didn’t only want to be seen. They wanted to feel like they mattered.
But for now, it’s enough to have Mia just listen, to sense that what they are feeling is the same thing, for her to nod, Yes, yes, me too.
“Come on,” Mia says finally. “I know what we should do.”
* * *
A river of bubblegum-pink liquid stretches out at Bryce’s feet. The smell—antiseptic, like a hospital—mingles with the stink of going-cold fried food, a nauseating combination. The ease with which Mia assembled a DIY slip-and-slide inside the main room of Atwater’s student center seemed to mean only one thing—that she had done this before—and Bryce found herself wondering, as she watched the senior splash jugs of industrial soap across the floor, liquid smacking and spraying like shrapnel against chairs and couch backs, whether this, too, was a kind of tradition, a piece of random mischief transformed over the years into a rite of passage. She can’t imagine her mother having done this.
“Stop being such a chicken!” Mia shouts through gasping breaths, positioned at the door at the opposite end of the room, holding it wide. “It works, I promise!” Under her arm she clutches a food tray, sticky rivulets of soap streaking down its smooth underside and dripping onto the floor at her feet.
Bryce inhales deeply, a yogic breath. She closes her eyes and thinks about how Mia launched onto her tray like a surfer diving into a wave, her chest smacking against the hard plastic. As a spectator Bryce’s skepticism had vanished in an instant. But at the same time, tennis is not the kind of sport that teaches a body how to absorb a blow, and Bryce’s last thought—rocking back on her right heel the same way she does when she’s preparing to serve—is This is going to hurt.
She uses her arms to catch the tray, breaking her fall slightly before her chest smacks into the plastic. Soap sprays on her face, onto her eyelids, the tips of her flyaways. It’s over before it registers, the lip of the door functioning as a speed bump at the end of the road. She wonders if she kept her eyes closed the entire way. When she stands, soap dampens her shirt and the edges of her thighs. The dry rectangle where the tray pressed against her body blurs like a Rothko.
Mia has her hands braced against her knees, trying to contain her own laughter. “You. Looked. Terrified,” she says between breaths.
Bryce frowns, narrows her eyebrows into one another. She picks up her tray and marches back to the beginning of the stream. She pauses, picks up the last remaining bottle of soap, and tosses more onto the floor, greasing the slide. They go again and again and again, until the soap has slipped to the edges of the floor and out the door, until their clothing is heavy with wet and their ribs and hands ache with latent bruises, until Mia wanders out into the center of the parking lot, her tray tucked under her arm like a canvas. Bryce follows her. Out from under the aura of the building lights and lampposts, they can begin to see the stars that blanket a New England night.
“It wasn’t just that I wanted to help, you know,” Mia says, finally. “With your mischief.”
Bryce looks at Mia. In the darkness she can’t see the earnestness that creases the senior’s brow, the way her eyes flare with a kind of urgency.
“I just think it’s pretty chill, what you did this year,” Mia continues. “And I didn’t want to leave without telling you that.”
She sighs then, a satisfied kind of exhale, and Bryce appreciates all that she is trying to communicate. It would be too much to expect her to say it precisely. Instead Mia looks skyward again. “You know, the truth is, I don’t hate it here.”
“Me neither,” Bryce agrees.
“It’s got work to do,” Mia murmurs, like an afterthought. “But it’s not all bad.”
“I know,” Bryce whispers. And she does. Later that night, tucked into her bed at four in the morning, Lauren sound asleep in the bed across from hers, Bryce will think about this, the sentimental denouement at the end of an adrenaline-fueled night. She’ll put it next to how Mia went quiet in the tunnels, her steely determination every step of the way. She’d never imagined that Mia Tavoletti might love Atwater as much as her mother does, as much as her grandmother. But now she understands. Now she will want to say to her mother: This is what it is to love a place. She’ll want to tell her: You have to want it to be better.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date: June 1, 2016, 5:07 P.M.
Subject: Jamison Jennings Report
To the Atwater Community:
On November 27, 2015, I wrote to inform you that the school had retained the services of the consulting firm Jamison Jennings to perform a cultural assessment and to evaluate our institutional response to allegations of sexual misconduct.
Attached to this email are the firm’s findings. Their report makes clear that Atwater’s efforts to prioritize the safety of its students have not been without failure, even if those failures have been impacted by changing social norms. It pains me to share this, as I’m sure it pained many of our community members to reveal this information in the course of the investigation. That said, I write to you today with no less pride in our school than ever before: your participation in this investigation, your candor with relative strangers, and your trust in the process demonstrated the extent to which we share in a common faith; we believe in our school, and we are invested in its future.
If you are an Atwater graduate, you know that we never stop learning. This report is but one unit in an ever-evolving curriculum. These recommendations will inform our work moving forward, including our search for Atwater’s sixteenth Head of School. I hope that you will continue to participate, and I vow to continue to listen. If you plan to be on campus this weekend for Commencement, I invite you to find me to share your input.
Yours with optimism and gratitude,
Erin Palmiere
BoardReport.docx
> In November 2015, representatives from The Atwater School contacted Jamison Jennings to initiate a conversation about the school’s desire to explore its policies and procedures regarding allegations of sexual misconduct. In a changing landscape, the school sought to receive recommendations for twenty-first-century best practices. Our research affirms our initial hypothesis: although Atwater’s legacy has been defined by innovation, it has failed to stay a step ahead of a challenging coupling between shifting cultural norms and the inherent hazards of the boarding school environment. We are optimistic, however, about the school’s unique capacity to appropriately address such a challenge.
Methodology
The first step in our investigation was a cultural assessment. To best serve the school, we needed to understand its habits and mores. The core of this work depended upon one-on-one conversations with members of the Atwater community. We sought to speak with a wide range of constituents, from current and former faculty and staff to current and former administration to alumnae and alumnae parents. With the help of school administrators, we also compiled a representative selection of current students, and with parent/guardian permission, interviewed eight of those chosen.
In total, Jamison Jennings conducted fifty-three interviews with various Atwater community members. We also reviewed thousands of pages of physical documentation, including: emails, text messages, personnel files, and personal notes. In some cases, physical corroboration of various rumors offered in interviews could not be found. In other instances, School communication was essential in supporting our understanding of community culture and norms.
Findings
We believe in the importance of context in understanding and evaluating our findings, both at Atwater specifically and in the broader historical moment. Nearly every individual we interviewed affirmed the quality of education offered at Atwater, and many spoke specifically to the inherent value of a boarding school community, which they felt results in more individualized, empathetic educational experiences. On the other hand, however, many community members wondered whether the boarding school setting causes a blurring of traditional boundaries in a manner that creates confusion regarding appropriate behavior for students and faculty alike.