All Girls Page 3
The seniors filter in and out of meals, wandering in long after the initial rush. Unlike the other grades, they do not eat in large groups, twelve girls packed around a table meant to sit comfortably only eight. They eat in pairs or trios or even, sometimes, alone, with a book or a newspaper in hand, and never with trays—only plates. The fact that they are rarely witnessed as a group makes it harder for Lauren to keep track of them. Although they arrive straight from practice, Collier Ludington and Addison Bowlsby look like they have not broken a sweat. Their skin gleams like Gwyneth Paltrow’s. They are the kinds of girls Lauren assumed she would meet at boarding school; they are, it seems to Lauren, older versions of Bryce. Hitomi Sakano joins Louisa Manning, a junior and coeditor of the school paper, at a table near the front of the dining hall. Hitomi is the daughter of two diplomats, and the newspaper’s fiercely incisive Opinion editor. When Olivia Anderson comes to dinner—still in her soccer gear, baggy shorts with a hooded sweatshirt and knee-high socks scrunched down around her ankles—it’s with Emma Towne, who is not not pretty but who, next to Olivia, looks like an average high school senior. She has soft features and brown-almost-blond hair. Bryce explains that Emma is Olivia’s girlfriend, and they’ve been dating since their sophomore year. They are most definitely not Atwater’s first on-campus same-sex couple, but they might very well be the first couple to live that identity completely out in the open, with the full knowledge of faculty and staff. Their relationship has created some challenges for Atwater, Bryce says, and when Lauren asks for elaboration Bryce explains that, well, for example, if Bryce were dating someone, she could not have him sleep over in her dorm room, because boys are not allowed to sleep over. (They are not even allowed in the dorms.) But girls are allowed to have sleepovers, and so far no exception has been made for Olivia and Emma.
* * *
Atwater has a rotating schedule, and at Hall Meeting on the third evening it’s explained to her. There is no possible way to memorize it save a photographic memory. Every Monday is the same. Tuesdays are different from Mondays, but every Tuesday is the same. Wednesdays are different still, but every Wednesday is the same, and so on. She prints out copies of the schedule and tapes them to her agenda and to the inside of her notebook and takes a screenshot to keep in her phone for easy reference. There will be a special schedule on Opening Day (which is the last day of Opening Week) to accommodate the Opening Assembly. She takes a picture of that one, too.
After meeting, she and Bryce linger in the common room, comparing schedules. They have half of their classes together. Bryce doesn’t know much about the new English teacher, Ms. Ryan, but they’ve seen her around: She’s the Dorm Parent on the second floor of Lathrop, where she lives in the faculty apartment with her husband, Owen. She is young and pretty, petite with big eyes, and graduated from Yale two years ago. Lauren wonders about the presence of Ms. Ryan’s husband in the dorms: Do the girls on Ms. Ryan’s hall still walk back from the bathrooms in their towels, like they do on Lauren’s hall, even though Owen might see them?
For French, Lauren has Inès DuBois, the actually French French teacher. Ms. Daniels is also their history teacher. To fulfill her art requirement, she signed up for Drawing and Painting with Mr. Breslin. Bryce says she should think about switching to Photography with Mr. Zarzynski. It’s easier, she says. Plus, Drawing and Painting is for the, you know, art kids.
Although Ms. Ryan’s husband is objectively handsome, it’s Emmett Morgan, Lauren’s algebra teacher, who is the mutual crush of almost every straight student on campus. At twenty-four, he has the wide-shouldered softness of an overgrown frat boy. He played lacrosse at Dartmouth and spent two years at a failing start-up in San Francisco. Atwater has an unofficial policy against hiring single men, Bryce explains, but they got in a bind last year when the previous algebra teacher quit just weeks before the start of the new school year. Emmett is both the son of a former trustee and the best they could find with no time to actually search.
“But,” she says, “the timing couldn’t be worse.”
“What do you mean?” Lauren asks.
“Well, with this rape accusation, you know?”
Lauren doesn’t know. She wrinkles her nose. Bryce looks around the common room, confirming that they’re alone. Their hallmates are all busy with late-stage unpacking: organizing their books on their shelves, hanging twinkle lights from their windows, tacking pictures to their walls in neat rows.
“Look, I don’t know the entire story, because my grandmother isn’t on the Board anymore—but she still hears things.”
“So you know what happened? With the—the yard signs?”
“I mean, I know the gist. It’s weird that they’re calling the girl an alum, because technically she didn’t graduate.”
“What do you mean?”
Bryce slides a teal Lululemon scrunchie from her wrist and twists it twice around a bun fastened at the nape of her neck. Her hair tendrils around her ear, and she tucks the stray pieces away from her face. “This alum—or almost-alum, I guess—says that she told the school she was raped in the fall of her senior year, right after it happened, and that they kicked her out.”
Lauren feels like she’s missing something. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know. I mean, some things don’t add up, for sure. First of all, she didn’t and has never pressed charges against this guy, which my grandmother says is in part because her case is so shaky that no lawyer worth his salt would take it.”
“She’s suing the school, though?”
“Threatening to, I guess.”
“Why? I mean—what does she want?”
“I don’t know,” Bryce shrugs. “But anyway, that’s why it’s kind of awkward about Mr. Morgan. They stopped hiring single male teachers after exactly this incident in the nineties—again, unofficially—and it’s just not an ideal moment for them to start back up.”
“Because it doesn’t look good?”
“It just doesn’t look like they’re taking any of this all that seriously,” Bryce says.
* * *
Before bed Lauren calls home for the second time. The first time was only briefly, when she could not find where her mother packed the razors (she put all the extra toiletries in the small duffel bag beneath her bed, including the supersize Tampax box). She calls again because she promised on the first call that she would make a second call to let them know how everything was going. They switch briefly to FaceTime so she can show them her room; she points out that they’ve already seen it, to which her mother replies, “But not all moved in!” Already they have begun to speak different languages: Lauren finds herself using words like “Dorm Parent” and “Proctor” and “Hall Meeting” and as she does her parents say things like, “Now what does she do again?” and “Was that the pretty Black girl we met in the parking lot?” and “Is your ‘hall’ the same thing as your dorm?” And Lauren finds herself getting frustrated and so she tells them she has to go brush her teeth and get ready for bed, even though it’s nine forty-five and the truth is she already flossed, too.
“Wait—sweetie?” Lauren recognizes her mother’s tone, the way she speaks when she’s been looking for a window to say something.
“Yeah?”
“Have there been any updates about the … you know … the sign we saw when we dropped you off?”
Across the room, Bryce is embroiled in detangling a set of necklaces that she hangs, one by one, from a golden jewelry stand—a doll-size garment rack. If she heard Lauren’s mother through the speaker, she does not react. Their room is coming together, Lauren thinks: It’s clean and organized but not sterile, like Leah Stern’s room down the hall. There are places where their things mingle side by side as if they’d planned it: Two towels rumpled on the railing across the closet door above two sets of kicked-off shower flip-flops.
“No, Mom,” Lauren says. “Not really.”
As soon as she hangs up she feels vaguely guilty. I
t is the same sensation she has when she squishes a bug that is not a spider, or when she’s caught not washing her hands after peeing, or when Charlie, their golden retriever, comes into Lauren’s room with a toy and she is too busy to play.
* * *
In bed she pulls her comforter up around her shoulders, tucking her elbows in next to her ribs, her face and her hands the only parts of her body outside the covers. She pulls her phone close to her nose and opens Instagram.
Grace has blond hair and blue eyes, high cheekbones and tan skin. She’s pretty on paper, but in reality she looks a little bit young, frozen in sixth grade, soft at the edges. This is painfully obvious in the picture she’s posted, her face framed on either side by two girls who look a lot like Bryce: button-nosed and symmetrical. They’re outside in the deep blue of a late-summer night, glowing in the not-quite dusk. It’s one of those almost-candids, all three girls laughing, Grace’s mouth directly at the camera, her hair falling across her forehead.
we hate it here, the caption reads, punctuated with a yellow heart emoji.
Lauren holds her thumb over the image square for a beat, thinks about coming back to it later. Instead, she moves her finger to the comment box and types:
omg sameee
She watches her comment fall in line; a beat passes, and a red alert pops into the app’s right corner.
gracelostinspace: miss u lady!
Laurennotatriplett: miss you too!
gracelostinspace: tell me everything!
gracelostinspace: do u love it
Lauren types, deletes, retypes. There was a time when Grace would have gotten all the details Lauren’s mother didn’t: about Mr. Morgan, about Ms. Daniels, about Olivia and Tate and Bryce. She would have asked her if she thought the girl who planted the yard signs was telling the truth.
Lauren imagines Grace on the other side of the screen, in her own bed in her new school in Massachusetts, the one that was her destiny, watching the ellipses dance in their DM. There’s only one way to answer now, Lauren knows.
Laurennotatriplett: it’s perfect
To: Atwater Parents Association <
From: brodiep@TheAtwaterSchool.org
Date: Sep 4, 2015, 5:28 P.M.
Subject: Welcome!
Atwater Families,
It was my great pleasure and privilege to welcome our community to campus for Opening Week. The festivities marked the start of my twelfth year at Atwater, and yet the thrill of these first days has not worn off: from the enthusiasm of the new freshmen to the wisdom of the seniors, I love watching and guessing how this cohort will shape the semesters to come.
These celebratory days before classes start play a critical role in establishing the broader tone for the year, which is why I was particularly sorry to have them marred by an act of vandalism. On your drive to campus on Opening Day, you might have noticed a scattering of yard signs targeting Atwater; I want to reassure you that we are treating the placement of these signs with the appropriate seriousness, and that we anticipate no further interruption to our school year and our students’ lives.
Moving forward, I want to state very clearly two things: first, we intend to execute a thorough investigation of the incident to determine with certainty the perpetrator and their motivation; second, Atwater has always been and remains a place that prioritizes above all else the safety of its students. I believe that there is no faculty better equipped to help lead our students in social-emotional growth and discovery, and that we are well prepared on campus to guide our student body in the processing that might naturally accompany something of this sensitivity and complexity.
Our students pride themselves on their capacity to manage their multitudinous responsibilities with diligence and dedication. As the key adults in their lives, it is our job to continually model this behavior. I believe we can empathetically navigate this moment without losing sight of our ultimate, perpetual goal: the providing of a world-class education. I look forward to partnering with you in this effort.
Be well,
Patricia Brodie
Head of School
Initiation
Her entire life, Macy Grant has been what teachers call “a math/science kid,” traditionally excelling inside the clean, black-and-white logic of numbers and facts. This is why it is frustrating to her—sitting at her desk with a small headache forming at the inner edges of her eyebrows and sweat beading where her hair slips from her ponytail at the base of her neck—that her algebra homework is currently not going very well. She wants to blame the late-September heat, a death rattle of summer that marinates the campus in stale humidity and renders any real focus impossible; she also wants to blame their teacher, Mr. Morgan, who despite being very, very cute, is not—in Macy’s opinion—all that great at the teaching. But she has the hollow feeling that this particular homework disaster is neither the weather nor Mr. Morgan’s fault, at least not entirely.
“Is that the algebra homework?” Lauren sits cross-legged at the edge of Macy’s bed, her body wedged into Macy’s window, shoulders pressed against the screen.
Macy slumps into her desk and wipes her forehead, grunting her confirmation. “I’m so fucked.”
“Bryce says we’ll get used to it,” Lauren says, unconcernedly, quoting as she often does her self-assured roommate. Bryce is exactly the kind of person Macy expected to meet at boarding school—a fourth-generation legacy from the expensive part of Connecticut, delicate-featured with a blue-blood name—but she is not the kind of person Macy expected to become friends with, if that’s what they are. On the other hand, Macy developed a quick kinship with Lauren, who hung around the dorm in mesh shorts from her old school and camp-issued T-shirts, her blond hair in a braided ponytail.
“So I was thinking,” she continues, extricating herself from the window frame, “I’m going to run for class council. Not anything too important like VP, but maybe secretary? I just figure that Wellesley is going to want to see a commitment to leadership, and it’s never too early to begin catering your résumé to the experiences your top choice values.…” She trails off, and Macy thinks: This, too, sounds like something Bryce would say.
“Do you actually want to be on class council, though?” Macy asks. “I mean, you’d be great, obviously, but I don’t think you should do it if your heart’s not really in it.”
“My heart is in getting into Wellesley,” Lauren says flatly. “And our cocurriculars will play a very important role in our college prospects. Speaking of, have you given the Heron any more thought? I overheard Louisa talking to Ms. Doyle at lunch and it sounds like they’re putting out their first issue soon. I think they stop accepting new members once they start printing.”
Macy twists her ponytail away from her back. It was a therapist who’d recommended that Macy try writing as a way to “manage obsessive thoughts,” and Macy’s own mother who’d suggested that journalism might be a way to combine this recommendation with Macy’s natural inclination toward facts and puzzles. Although she hadn’t shared all this, Macy had still made the mistake of telling Lauren that she was considering joining Atwater’s student newspaper, the not-daily Daily Heron, and Lauren had refused to let go of the idea.
“Can you explain to me again why you’re worried about college right now? You do know that it’s still the first month of our freshman year, right?”
“Have you really not thought about college?” Lauren asks.
Of course they’d all thought about college, at least as a concept, because college was part of the reason they’d come to Atwater: the name alone a guaranteed résumé-booster, a way to get your application to the top of the pile. Macy shrugs.
“I figure running will be a big factor in my choice,” she says lamely, although it’s the truth.
“Yeah, but there are no guarantees. Addison is a quadruple legacy at Georgetown and apparently she’s freaking out that she might not get in.”
“Can’t her dad just donate a library or somet
hing?”
Macy whips around. Her roommate, Jade, stands in the doorframe, her muscled shoulders peeking out from the armholes of a cutoff hooded sweatshirt, the kind of wildly impractical and impossibly cool piece of clothing only Jade could pull off.
“Hey kids,” she adds, flashing what Macy has come to see as her trademark smirk.
“Hey,” Macy smiles.
“I mean, seriously. Have you seen that girl’s Insta? It’s literal hashtag Rich Kids of Instagram. Look!” Jade pulls her phone from her pocket and thumbs quickly through her apps, clicking into Addison’s profile. She holds it out for Macy and Lauren to see, her arm extended across the room in their direction. The senior’s grid is an endless stream of luxury vacations: Hawaiian beaches, Tahoe sunsets, wildflowers in the Tetons. “You’re telling me this girl can’t just buy her way into college?”
Although they’d known the seniors barely four weeks, a fascination with them had blossomed immediately among the freshmen, Macy included. It was Bryce who provided them with entrée into their world: not only was she on the tennis team with Addison and Karla Flores and Priya Sandhu, but she also seemed to speak their language, a shared vocabulary of the best restaurants in every major city and the best hotels in every resort destination. Macy places an index finger to Jade’s screen, scrolling past matcha lattes and açai bowls.