Star shook her head. “I figured I’d let you look first. She says that in addition to what’s there, there was a cafeteria worker who had a heart attack in Shelton Hall in the ’90s, and there was a day student who died in a car accident around 2004. Which wouldn’t count as an on-campus death. And because those were recent things, it’s not the kind of thing they’d have much about in the archives. She just mentioned those.”
I flipped to the next page in the folder.
“Stella Roper, Influenza,” I read. “I feel like from her handwriting Ms. Noceno was enjoying this way too much.”
Star’s eyes went wide. I worried for a moment that I’d offended her, talking that way about Ms. Noceno.
“Let me see,” she demanded, grabbing the folder. A couple of other sheets fell out. “Damn,” she said, reading the top page.
“What?” I said.
“I just…I’ve heard of Stella Roper before. I’ve come across her name in my Caroline Bromley research. I was…curious about her.”
I watched Star sigh and then start to riffle through the papers in her desk drawer—most of them photocopies of old letters and other archival materials.
“A kindred spirit?” I said softly.
I’d forgotten that Star’s real name was Stella. She hated it, she told me last semester. When her parents told her in first grade that it actually meant “star,” she begged them to just call her that instead. And they eventually relented.
“I thought maybe, yes.” Star shrugged, pulling out a sheet of paper. “I hadn’t had time to research her yet, since I’m really focused primarily on Caroline.”
The paper Star had pulled out looked like a photocopy of an archive document—a list of names and dates. Caroline Bromley was the first name on it, with the date 1890 next to it. The next name on the list was Minnie Gardner, with 1891 beside it. The next name had 1892 next to it, and so on. I squinted at the words scrawled across the top.
“You can read it better on the original in the archives,” Star said. “It says, ‘Our silence is not eternal.’ I found this list in one of the Caroline Bromley files.”
“Our silence is not eternal,” I repeated. “Is that…religious?”
“I don’t think so. What’s really exciting about it is that it kind of resembles something Caroline Bromley said and wrote later in life, when she was a leader in the women’s suffrage movement. Our silence, forever broken. There’s even a picture of her and another woman holding up a sign that says that.”
I’d heard that phrasing before. Most Windham students probably had. The portrait of Caroline Bromley that hung in the administrative building—also called Bromley Hall—said that beneath it.
“Wow,” I said. “Did Caroline herself write that at the top, you think?”
“I like to think so. The handwriting doesn’t quite match the few documents of hers we have from later in life, though. It might have been someone else. And you can see that the handwriting changes over the years as different girls participated. There was apparently kind of an underground women’s suffrage group here at the school, and this is the list of the student leader of the group for each year.”
“Was that the year she graduated, or what? I don’t remember.”
“No,” Star said. “It was the second year she was a student here.”
I scanned the list of names. It went all the way up to 1921.
“They dissolved the group a little while after women got the right to vote?” I said.
“I assume, yes.” Caroline shrugged. “It seems like maybe they could’ve kept it going and fought for other women’s rights, but maybe they didn’t think of it that way.”
The handwriting changed over the course of the list—clearly it wasn’t all written by one person, but many people over the years. Some names had a little symbol next to them—a flowery-looking star. Caroline Bromley’s name had one next to hers.
“Do you know what that little star means?”
“No idea. I feel like someone might have gone in later and put a star next to the names of the women who were actually active in the suffrage movement later in life. I’m not sure. Ms. Noceno says this has been in the archives for only about six years. It was Ms. Holland-Stone who actually figured out what it was, when it came in with a box of other junk. Because the third name on the list, Helen Driscoll, is also someone who became a suffragette—someone less famous than Caroline, but who was active with her in the movement when they were adults. Her name has a star, too. And she’d apparently made reference to the student group in a letter that’s in a different archive somewhere. Seneca Falls, probably.”
Ms. Holland-Stone, my Western Civ teacher, was also Star’s senior project advisor—and the chair of the history department.
“Anyway, someone brought this list in,” Star continued. “Along with a Windham diploma and a few old schoolbooks and papers and other stuff that someone found in an attic after their grandma died. A great-great-aunt had gone to Dearborn, or something.”
“Oh. Is the great-great-aunt’s name on the list?” I asked.
“Yeah. Paulina Nielson. The last one on the list. But the family didn’t know much about Paulina as a person or her history at Windham. They weren’t a legacy family or anything.”
“Stella’s listed here for 1916,” I pointed out.
“And she died two years after that. She didn’t live to see the women’s suffrage amendment happen. That’s so sad.”
“At least all the other girls on this list did, probably,” I said. “Including Caroline.”
Star frowned at the list when I handed it back to her.
“This list is a big part of my project, in a way,” she said. “I’ve been researching some of the names on it when I have time. I’m not able to find information about everyone, but I’m finding that a few of the girls, including Caroline, most importantly, were scholarship girls.”
“Why is that most important?” I asked.
“Well…it’s interesting. Sometimes people downplay the role of working-class women in the suffrage movement. It’s interesting that here on campus the girls most interested in that didn’t necessarily fit the mold.”
“But…why would that be?” I asked.
“I’ve actually given this some thought. And I think maybe that not having so much money and power earlier in life would naturally lend itself to envisioning having more power, more of a voice, in your adult life as a woman.”
“Is that your thesis?” I asked, trying not to sound skeptical.
Star shrugged and blushed a little.
“How much suffragist activity could the girls really have participated in while they were stuck here in Heathsburg?”
“At the time, I guess it was the thought that counted. And Caroline certainly put the thoughts into action later.”
My gaze crept down to the name Stella Roper.
“Was Stella Roper a scholarship girl?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t gotten to researching her yet—otherwise I’d have already known she died.”
“Mmm,” I said, and tidied up the papers in Ms. Noceno’s Death Folder. “So Stella died in 1918, and the first mention of the ghost that anyone knows about is from 1920.”
Star shoved the student leader list back in her drawer and wove her head back and forth.
“Stella…Sarah…Stella…Sarah…kinda similar. Is that what you’re getting at?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I dunno.”
“I don’t think the overly academic girls of the early 20th-century Windham would mix those up. Stella is Latin for “star.” Sarah is Biblical, Hebrew. They’re totally different.”
“Just a thought,” I said.
Star glanced at her phone.
“Maybe I should try to get some homework done,” she said.
I agreed. But when
I opened my laptop, I saw I had a new email—from Kathleen Darkins.
Dear Haley,
I don’t have any appointments scheduled on Saturday. Did you have a particular time in mind? Would this be a crystal consultation or a general wellness profile?
I didn’t know how to answer that question. I was tempted to write Kathleen back and ask her point-blank if she was at Windham in 1986. But I felt I already knew the answer, and over email it was too easy for her to avoid the question. Best to leave it alone until I arrived in her shop tomorrow and asked her face to face.
22
Once we were friends, Taylor never quit asking me why I was here. Here at Windham. She was curious like that. She could sense where there was a story. And she was relentless about getting to hear it.
It wasn’t until the very end of my first year that she got me drunk enough at a party to tell it. We were in the basement of Charlie Bronner’s house, lying on a soft, colorfully flecked carpet that seemed expensive even though it reminded me of the time my brother puked up half of his Halloween candy—all Twizzlers and Nerds and Skittles, which he favored. Jackson Pollock rainbow puke.
She asked me if I missed my brother, and I said yes, sort of. And that led to it. Why I was here.
I told her that it all started—probably, as far as I could tell—with sixth grade. My parents got divorced when I was in sixth grade. Which didn’t have to be all that remarkable. But they’d fought about custody. Fought viciously, if we were going to be honest. There was some judge my mom wanted me to tell about how crazy my dad acted when he was drinking. But the worst of it had been when I was like eight or nine, which had felt like forever ago, and couldn’t she tell about that herself? And was she going to mention that at the time she had often gotten pretty wild and angry, too? And she wasn’t making my little brother say much of anything—so why was it all on me?
There were different grown-ups—lawyers, judges, some kind of weird therapist who kept wanting to play Jenga—who wanted me to say different things. There was my mom running out of money to be able to pay her lawyer, and not being able to buy a Christmas tree. There was the night my dad came and pounded on the locked door—THUNK THUNK THUNK—screaming for us to let him in, until the cops came. And then there was the not knowing if we were supposed to pretend that never happened when my brother and I visited my dad a week later. Mostly, there was fear of what would happen next. The next day, the next hour, the next minute.
It was that stuff that started it, I think. This feeling I had when I was twelve—this feeling like I was sinking. Not drowning. Just sinking. Like into sand. Deeper and deeper down. The feeling accompanied me into seventh grade, even after my parents seemed to have settled on a cold, angry truce.
Life felt generally terrifying then. I couldn’t possibly do gymnastics at the Y anymore. I’d been on the tumbling team with my friends Fiona and Nelly. But I could no longer get my brain around a layout or a roundoff, much less my body. I felt too heavy for any of that. Up to my thighs in sand.
When I announced to my mother that I wouldn’t be going back to the gym, she didn’t argue with me. I understood that with all of the divorce legal fees and the other financial burdens of now being a single parent, my quitting was likely a relief to her.
Some of the sleep stuff came back. The sleep stuff from when I was younger. My mom caught me sleepwalking one time and on two horrifying mornings I woke up to wet sheets. (This part I’d managed not to tell Taylor. Even when I was drunk, my brain guarded that, refusing to transmit it to my tongue.)
Sometime at the beginning of seventh grade, a girl came up to me in the hall before gym—a girl unknown to me in the sea of middle schoolers, who hadn’t gone to my elementary school.
“Do you ever brush your hair?” she asked, looking back at the two girls who had followed her over. One of the girls I recognized as a new friend of Nelly’s.
They must have been applying lip gloss together right before approaching me. All three sets of lips looked so slippery that I couldn’t stop staring. The girl had to repeat her question.
“Yes,” I said absently.
“Oh. Okay. I was just wondering.”
But it occurred to me later that my hair had indeed become rather unmanageable lately. There was a large knot in the back that I’d been pulling up into a sort of half ponytail. But doing that didn’t entirely hide how large it was getting. I did brush my hair, but now that I thought about it, it felt like maybe I only brushed the front and had forgotten about the back for a while. When you’re distracted by the general act of keeping yourself from sinking, other stuff tends to get only half done. So now the knot was bigger than I remembered it. Puffy. It had drawn those wet-lipped girls like flies to a corpse.
I tried for a couple of days to work the knot out. Eventually I cut it off, leaving a sort of thin spot. I thought it wasn’t noticeable, but I was apparently wrong. Some girl—a different girl, but friends with the original girl—pointed it out, asked if someone had put Nair in my shampoo. After that I wore my hair up in a ponytail for a year. But at least that gross knot was gone.
Somehow in all of this I stopped seeing Nelly and Fiona much. I went to Fiona’s birthday party, but I could tell I was just there because her mother made her invite me. Nobody talked to me, so I ate caramel corn the whole time.
With few friends, I had a lot of time for homework and I did okay in school. Sometimes the sinking feeling would overwhelm me and I’d drop the ball with this class or that. But I always aced math. Math came naturally to me.
And I would run after school, up and down the hilly streets of my neighborhood. Put on sneakers and run and run and run, because you can’t sink while you’re moving fast.
On Valentine’s Day my mother dragged me to take a PSAT test. She didn’t say why. She just said, “Let’s see how you do.” So I took it without any stress. I did okay on the verbal, but freakishly well on the math. I should have known something was up when her eyes popped as she opened the test scores. But I had no idea that my mother was sending the results, along with my school records and a writing sample, to her friend Michelle, who’d never left Heathsburg and worked in the main administrative office at Windham. Michelle helped get my application to the top of the pile of financial aid hopefuls.
My mother didn’t breathe a word of it to me until the acceptance letter and scholarship notification arrived. She didn’t want to get my hopes up. But she presented me with both on a rainy April evening, over a humble dinner of salad and English muffin pizzas.
“I’m not trying to get rid of you,” she said. “I will miss you with all of my heart if you go. But I wanted you to know that you can have something else—if you want it.”
I could tell she’d probably planned and practiced these words, and I burst into tears at hearing them. I didn’t know if I was happy or sad. But I remember understanding, gratefully, that it didn’t matter how I felt. I was going to Windham either way.
My mother had, in her own good time, noticed I was sinking. And this was the best way she could think of to save me. Because it was how she herself had always wanted to be saved. By going to that beautiful old pie-in-the-sky school just down the road from her parents’ little Heathsburg bungalow.
When I’d finished telling all of this to Taylor, she didn’t ask about my mother. She didn’t ask about gymnastics. She just said, “Fiona and Nelly. Sound like shitty friends. And how did they get such stupid names?”
“I love the name Fiona,” I’d said defensively.
Taylor shook her head and was quiet for a minute or two.
“One time my brother locked me outside all night,” she said after a while. “My parents thought he was old enough to babysit.”
I didn’t know how this was connected—except in the spirit of mutual drunken confessional. Or maybe because we both had brothers we hardly ever saw.
“Which
brother?” I asked, because I knew she had two. One three years older than her, one five.
She didn’t answer. Her eyes were closed. She’d passed out.
23
Eight Nights Left
Of course she hoped this place would change her—improve her. But it didn’t change her enough. We can’t really blame that all on a place, though, can we? Places don’t break people—not usually. But rather the people who occupy those places.
It was those golden girls who broke her with their cruelty. That’s how the story goes. Those beautiful, lithe, smart, rich ones. Girls like that are timeless, aren’t they?
24
Saturday, February 2
Maylin and I started out early, with coffee and muffins from the dining hall. Still, we decided to stop at the Heathsburg gas fill-up for chips and sour candy straws. One hour didn’t make for much of a road trip, but we could pretend.
As we made our way down the main drag of Heathsburg, I remembered something my mom told me about growing up in this town. You’d often see Windham and Farnswood students walking up or back from the Rite Aid or the doughnut shop on weekends—you could tell them by their preppy clothes. When my mom was a senior at the public high school, she had a boyfriend who liked to pretend they were in a video game in which they’d knock down the “Windyfarts.” He’d jolt his steering wheel just slightly in the direction of the sidewalk when he’d see one, and say softly, Plink! And my mom would giggle in spite of herself.
So be careful if you ever walk on that main drag, she concluded. As if her old mouth-breather boyfriend was still gunning it up and down that street thirty years later.
“I tried to get Alex to change her mind and come with us,” Maylin said, putting her blinker on for the highway ramp.
“She’s got a lot on her plate,” I said. “As usual.”
“Yeah, well. She keeps saying she’s falling behind on things.”
“Could that really be true?”
When All the Girls Are Sleeping Page 13