by Emily Layden
Priya’s parents—despite the fact that they live in London—had made the trip to Atwater every Parents’ Weekend, dutifully meeting with each of Priya’s teachers as concerned and involved parents do. They always bring gifts: teas, chocolates. When they visit, Priya finds herself acting as their chaperone, translating her mother’s accent, countering her father’s reservedness with bubbling conversation. “They’re so sweet,” her teachers would say, without ever learning to pronounce her mother’s name—they were always Mr. and Mrs. Sandhu, while Collier’s mother was Meredith! And Addison’s mom was Eleanor!—and her friends were no better, never extending an arm for a handshake like they did with Hitomi’s parents (Maybe he’s not allowed to touch a girl, Priya could see them wondering; Maybe her scarf will slip off her shoulder—it looks so delicately placed). In an American school in a liberal state, Priya knew what her classmates saw when they looked at her parents, the debates they’d have out of earshot about servility and subservience and patriarchal conceptions of modesty.
The only option is to overcompensate, to try to temper the way her parents landed. This afternoon she will help them socialize over the trendiest foods—poké, bibimbap, California cheeses—never letting her guard down, making sure that both of her parents’ hands are at all times occupied so that the question of a handshake is never raised, making sure to steer the conversation toward topics in which her mother can participate (reality television, the new Indian restaurant in Hartford, weirdly—inexplicably—American football), making sure that they spend at least twenty minutes talking to Hitomi’s parents, who—because they are a diplomat and the wife of a diplomat—are perfectly adept at carrying on a conversation with two Indian expats. She knows that no one will mention Karen Mirro or Mr. Breslin or Jamison Jennings because people will make assumptions about her parents’ conservativeness; to talk to them in particular about a sex scandal would be to violate some unwritten code of polite conversation.
After she’s put her parents in an Uber, after she’s made excuses for why they can’t attend the parent cocktail party that night (“Early flight tomorrow!”), after she clicks through the afternoon’s conversations, unfolding and refolding them like little paper sculptures in her mind, searching every crease for a misstep, after the adrenaline buzz of preventing her own embarrassment winds down like a sugar crash, the worst part will come. Washing her face, pinching her eyelashes to rub off her mascara, she’ll feel a hollowing deep in her gut, so acute it causes her to brace herself against the sink, and she’ll wonder: Was I mean to them? Do they know they embarrass me?
* * *
For much of the afternoon, the flat-bottomed clouds with the slate-gray undersides hung over the hills in the distance, tethered for reasons related to pressure and altitude to the valley beyond. As the day wore on, the winds lifted them from their position and pushed them toward Atwater until they melded together into one great darkening storm cloud over campus. A breeze lifted the underbellies of the leaves around the Bowl so they seemed to shimmer. And Olivia Anderson and the class of 2016 gathered on the schoolhouse steps for one last tradition before the rain broke.
Senior Smoke is, in Olivia’s California-born and doctor-raised opinion, the most ridiculous of the Atwater mores, dumber even than the stupid white dresses, because at least the weirdness of the white dresses is right out there, unmistakable, undeniable. The tradition that calls on the graduates to share a cigar on the afternoon of their graduation day is something else, something that seems to Olivia equally antiquated but in a more confused way. Every year, the girls post pictures from the steps, hips jutted to one side, cigars perched between two fingers at O-shaped mouths. Trying so hard to say, We’re not the ladies you think we are. Staged irony. Faux self-awareness. It would be better if it was weed, honestly, because the worst part about the whole thing was the subconscious riff on cigars as symbols of masculinity. They weren’t breaking any barriers by smoking cigars in white dresses. They were just getting Instagram likes.
There are more girls there than Olivia was expecting—twenty or twenty-five of them, the usual suspects like Collier and Addison and Karla but also some of the model citizens like Ashley Witt and Hitomi Sakano. Mia Tavoletti dangles her legs from the stone ledge that runs at a diagonal up the steps with her lips—as it happens—wrapped around the end of a vape pen. She watches as Mia holds for a second, her chest beneath her white slip dress projected slightly outward, then exhales, releasing a cloud of milky vapor that briefly wreaths her head before evaporating into the air. The smell lingers, and Olivia smiles to herself.
This is just like Mia, she thinks: a joint would be too ordinary for someone who’s always so determinedly ahead of the curve.
Olivia stands at the edge of the ledge near Mia. “Hey,” she nods.
“What’s up?”
“Smoke before your smoke?”
Mia laughs. “Hey, this isn’t smoking.” She waggles the pen in front of Olivia. “Happy to share,” she adds.
Olivia puts up a hand. “I try to break no more than two school rules simultaneously,” she says, counting in her head: the dress (sort of); the cigars (technically).
“Fair enough.” Mia pauses for a second to take another hit. “Cool outfit, by the way,” she says when she looks at Olivia again.
Olivia’s dress is, actually, if she says so herself, pretty cool, and partly because it’s not really a dress: It’s a mullet dress. Pants in the front, skirt train in the back, with a bustier top, Olivia’s “gown” pushes the limits of Paulsen’s dress code. But she informed the Dean of Students that she had every intent of wearing it regardless of whether she granted her permission, and—to Olivia’s astonishment—Paulsen backed down. It wouldn’t have surprised Olivia if Linda Paulsen did not exactly keep up on trends in designer dresses; she imagined her seeing the choice not as protest but rather as just buying what was available.
“To be honest”—Olivia flicks her chin up, gesturing toward Mia’s dress—“I’m a little surprised that the president of ***Flawless is actually going along with this patriarchal bullshit.” She says the name of the club exactly like the song title, asterisk-asterisk-asterisk-Flawless.
Mia sighs and lifts her chin skyward, appraising the blackening above. “I know. I let us down on this one.”
At that moment Olivia spots her ex-girlfriend in the sea of girls circling around Collier and Addison, who distribute individual cigars from heavy wooden boxes. Emma catches her eye.
“Someone once told me that it’s important to pick your battles.”
“Yeah,” Mia says. “Sometimes I think that’s just what we tell ourselves when we’re exhausted.”
Olivia lets out a low laugh. “Well, it’s been an exhausting year, hasn’t it?”
“You’re tellin’ me.”
“Cigar?” Collier has materialized in front of them, the box extended in front of her like a host on one of those 7:00 P.M. game shows. Mia slides the pen into her bra so that the slim white metal protrudes only slightly and at an angle at her dress neckline, and lifts the tiny log of tobacco from the box. Olivia follows suit. “Wait to light them until after the pics! The smoke is too hard to photograph.”
Olivia has never held a cigar before. It’s both heavier and lighter than she was expecting, and smells like rotting fruit: honey-sweet but also earthy.
Someone yells over the group: “Hurry! Let’s get the pics before the rain!” Olivia’s classmates stack themselves on the schoolhouse steps with the expertise of girls who’ve posed ten thousand times before. They jostle for the inside positions (the middle photographs skinniest); the lower rows sorority-squat; the girls at the ends cock their arms at their hips. Mia stays on her perch; Olivia leans against the railing, moving herself just inside the frame. The photographers are some obliging juniors: Blake and Brie and Kit, each juggling four or five or six phones.
They are still and silent long enough to hear thunder rumble in the distance.
“Hurry!” Ashley Witt shouts,
and the group disperses, and Olivia realizes that several of her classmates have come prepared with lighters. They cluster in random groups, leaning inward, small sizzles issuing forth as the cigars catch.
Next to her, Mia holds out a lighter. “Light?”
It tastes like ash. She holds it inside the back of her throat and feels her eyes begin to water. She realizes she is making the same rookie mistake she made the first time she smoked weed, and not actually inhaling. Next to her, Mia pushes tiny smoke rings into the space in front of them.
“I can’t decide if I’ll miss it,” she says.
Olivia tilts her head and blows outward. Together they watch the exhalation diffuse, blossoming like a three-dimensional Rorschach. A single raindrop cuts through the cloud, then another. One lands on her temple, tiny and ghostlike, and as she reaches a single fingertip to her forehead to wipe away the phantom wet Olivia realizes that neither of them will miss Atwater, not exactly. Instead what they’ll feel is a very particular kind of ache, one that will spasm at random intervals—in the shower, on a bad date, in the middle of a college seminar—and when it does they’ll know: this is the longing you feel for a place that’s become a part of you. This is the yearning you carry when you never really leave.
Acknowledgments
I spent most of my twenties teaching at boarding and independent day schools, the majority of them all-girls. We live in a culture whose regard for young women is both conditional and changeable, and yet every day I watched my students insist upon the validity of their experiences. Teenage girls are wise, bighearted, and relentlessly optimistic, and it is very likely I learned more from them than they did from me.
To my agent, Lisa Grubka, a handler with all the calm and compassion of Frank Langella’s Gabriel, the toughness of Margo Martindale’s Claudia, and the wisdom to know when to use which (and the good humor to tolerate these random and logically shaky tangents): Thank you for … *gestures vaguely at new life*.
My editor, Sarah Cantin, is extremely fucking good at her job. Were I writing this story, I could not have conjured a kinder, savvier, and more professional ally. Thanks as well to Katie Bassel, Erica Ferguson, Erica Martirano, Sallie Lotz, and Hannah Nesbat, who gave this book its title. And at John Murray in the UK, my gratitude to Becky Walsh, Charlotte Hutchinson, and Emma Petfield.
Hilary Zaitz Michael at WME championed not only this manuscript but also my desire to write for television (when there was yet very little tangible evidence I could do such a thing); what a person wants most when navigating a new landscape is to be taken seriously but also with generosity, and she and Scott Goldman at FKKS have this talent in spades.
Lisa, Sarah, Hilary, and Scott each brought with them to Atwater a veritable army. Thank you to everyone at Fletcher & Co., WME, FKKS, and St. Martin’s Press who believed in these girls and fought for their space in the world. And to Jessica Rhoades and the team at Pacesetter: Thank you for understanding this story, for wanting to give it a broader audience, and for helping to tell it in rich, new ways.
The transition into this new career would not have been possible without the support of my therapist. Good therapy with the right fit is transformative, and yet the fact that I am able to pursue treatment is a privilege. Mental health care should be accessible to any individual who needs it, and I hope that one day such a system will prevail.
I am eternally grateful to the many professional (and paraprofessional) communities and work families that have sustained me over the better part of the last decade. Lizzy DiNuzzo, Jon Hickey, Allison McCann, and Julian Stern read and provided essential feedback on as many pages as I could send, and in so doing made the wilderness a little less lonely. Steady employment paid my bills but my colleagues fed my soul, including Steve Brown, Tim Fitzmaurice, Claire Mancini, Cristi Marchetti, and Tesha Poe.
Donna Inglehart gave me my first teaching job but always called me a writer. From Meg McClellan and Kathleen McNamara I’ve received a master class in mentoring (and personhood). Judy Richardson’s office in Margaret Jacks ranks among my favorite places in the entire world; all I can say about her is that I had wandered very far from writing and myself by the time we met, and now here we are.
Thanks, for that matter, to everyone in the Stanford American Studies and Creative Writing programs, including Richard Gillam, Adam Johnson, and Angela Pneuman. It is impossible to think that I was ever worthy of their attention, tutelage, encouragement, and empathy.
I have always felt similarly undeserving of the loyalty of my closest friends. Maria DeMatteo, Erin Hatton, Maria Malone, and Julie McPhillips: Whether we met at twelve or twenty-five, it has been a gift to grow with you.
My cousin, Kristen Layden, fits into every category in this section—friend, teacher, teammate, collaborator, family; it would be simpler and truer to merely say that she is the glue.
Gabby and Nina Armstrong are also more than my cousins: they are my inspiration, and the best people I know. So much of the first draft of this book was written or nurtured in their home in Lake Placid, and so much is owed to the entire Armstrong family—to Nina and Gabby but also to Karen, Shayn, Neil, and Peeves: for the naan pizza and funfetti cake; for loving and caring for Canfield like their own; for the training outpost; for a teary walk around the lake when I was certain this would never happen.
In fact, I have been exceptionally fortunate to live my life inside a big, generous family. My maternal grandparents, Henry and Jeannette Boehning, taught me to be compassionate, unselfish, and devoted—in teaching and in life. My dad’s parents, Ed and Kay Layden, raised a family of storytellers. Thanks as well to Chris, Julian, and Julie Boehning; Janet, Kevin, and Tim Layden; Peg, Sam, and Todd Palmiere.
My parents, Joe and Sue Layden, opened every door for me. All of this begins with them. My brother, Max, has always been my number-one fan: I believe in you, too, Bud.
Finally, to my husband, Brian: The book was the dream; meeting you was better.
About the Author
EMILY LAYDEN is a graduate of Stanford University and has taught at several girls’ schools nationwide. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, The Billfold, and Runner’s World. All Girls is her first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Here
Orientation
Initiation
Vol. CCII, Issue No. I
Fall Fest
Vespers
Retrospectives
Field Trip
Prom
Senior Prank
Commencement
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
ALL GIRLS. Copyright © 2021 by Emily Layden. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Kerri Resnick
Cover images: tartan fabric © Hajna Nemeth / Arcangel; rips © Aline Sprauel / Arcangel; frayed cloth © nnattalli / Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Layden, Emily, 1989- author.
Title: All girls / Emily Layden.
Descript
ion: First edition. | New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020037485 | ISBN 9781250270894 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250270900 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3612.A9584 A45 2021 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037485
eISBN 9781250270900
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First Edition: 2021