All Girls Page 4
“Seems like it to me,” Macy says, the little hole in her gut hollowing further as she thinks about her own family’s inability to finance a more compelling college application. “I know her grades aren’t the best, but I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
“Well, Bryce was saying that Priya and Addie were talking about the whole”—here Lauren lowers her voice—“rapist thing, and that they’re, like, a little worried that it’s going to hurt their admissions prospects.”
Jade whistles. “Hoo boy, I don’t even know where to start with that. Number one, college makes people insane. Number two, ‘rapist thing’?”
Lauren shrugs, a little sheepish. “What are we supposed to call it?”
She has a point, Macy thinks. All the available phrasing seems too clinical—“accusation,” “allegation”—or simply too adult: A “scandal” is a thing that happens to politicians and professional athletes. Plus, they hadn’t heard anything at all about the signs or the reason for their placement since Opening Week, when they’d all received a vague email from Mrs. Brodie outlining the situation: We are working with our alumnae and our Board to develop a clearer picture of the circumstances that led to the vandalism, and look forward to reporting our findings to the community. Despite the Head of School’s claims, though, they knew almost nothing more than what Ms. Daniels had told them on the first night.
Jade shakes her head. “Number three: If I’m understanding you correctly, the seniors are worried that this woman’s rape might prevent them from getting into their dream school?”
“Okay, well, when you put it that way—”
“What other way is there to put it?”
“It’s not all the seniors, for starters,” Lauren says, a bit of an edge to her voice. “I think that some of the tennis girls were just talking about college and saying that, like, the whole thing has sort of hurt Atwater’s reputation. So when an admissions officer sees their applications, the first thing they’ll think is, ‘Oh, that’s the school where the girl was raped,’ not, you know, ‘Oh, that’s one of the best schools in the country.’”
“Do you think that’s really true?” Macy asks.
“I don’t know if it would actually, consciously impact an admissions decision, but I can totally see there being a subconscious gut reaction. Like word association, almost. And maybe it’s not even ‘That’s the school with the rapist.’ It could be ‘That’s the school with the crazy alum,’ if they don’t believe her, or just ‘That’s the school with all the drama.’”
“So people outside Atwater are talking about this?” As far as Macy knew, there hadn’t been so much as an erroneous comment on Atwater’s Facebook page about the incident; it certainly hadn’t been in the local papers, which the school had delivered each morning courtesy of the donation of an alumna who believed quite staunchly in the power of print journalism.
“I think the boarding school community is very small,” Lauren says. After a beat, she adds: “What I want to know is, why would this alum have planted those signs? I mean, it is kind of crazy. It seems totally predictable to me that it would have only alienated her further.”
Macy has noticed a tendency among some of her classmates to try on the linguistic costume of an adult woman, yoking together big concepts and tight construction in a distinctive pitch and clip. In the end they always oversell it: It’s the inflated self-importance that gives it away. “It’s hard to say without knowing exactly what she wants,” Macy says.
Jade nods. “Although, if you’re trying to be, like, a trustworthy and sympathetic witness, you probably don’t commit regional vandalism. You, like, wear your hair in a middle part and button your Ann Taylor blouse all the way up.” Jade mimes the buttoning, pinching her fingertips together at the neck.
“I told you, you’ve been watching too much SVU,” Macy quips, then adds: “Maybe it wasn’t her.”
“But who else could it have been?” Lauren asks.
Jade shrugs. “Maybe Addison wants something besides her grades to blame when she doesn’t get into Georgetown.”
Lauren is appalled. “It was absolutely not Addison Bowlsby!”
Jade laughs and puts her hands up in surrender. “Easy! Of course it wasn’t Addison. Speaking of: What’s the deal with Friday?”
As if on cue, Macy’s heart quickens. She feels a thudding inside her chest, a pounding she never notices in even the toughest workout, not when her heart rate reaches two hundred beats a minute during repeat two hundreds.
“Bryce doesn’t know any more than we do,” Lauren says. Although Initiation itself is among Atwater’s worst-kept secrets, what actually happened between the freshmen and the seniors on the first full moon of the fall trimester was under lock and key. The secrecy seemed to be part of the whole thing, creating suspense and fear.
“Maybe it’ll be some super-fucked-up sorority-girl shit.” Jade raises her eyebrows. Macy thinks she’s joking, but she can’t be sure.
“Like what?”
“I once read about a sorority that did something called a ‘Sharpie party,’” Lauren chimes in. “They made the pledges get completely naked, then circled all the parts on their bodies that needed ‘improving.’”
Jade snorts.
“Do you really think it’s going to be that terrible?” Macy asks.
“I really doubt it,” Jade says.
“Plus,” Lauren adds, “the school is under a lot of scrutiny right now. I don’t think they’d allow anything too risky.”
Macy opens her mouth and then closes it again. This is not good enough for her. She craves the exact logistics, not only the big questions like What’s the difference between Ringing and Initiation? but also where will they be going and when do they have to leave and what do they tell their Dorm Parent, Ms. Daniels, and how long will it take and will she still be able to get eight hours of sleep on Friday because they have a race on Saturday? And also: Does everyone do it? Like, literally everyone?
Lauren jumps off Macy’s bed, tugging slightly on the hem of her mesh shorts as she stands. “I’ve gotta do the English reading,” she says. “See you guys at breakfast?”
Jade nods.
Macy manages a smile. “Yeah.”
* * *
That night, Macy can’t sleep. Her mind spirals. She plays out scenario after scenario, like an attorney prepping for questioning, a flowchart of possible pathways blossoming inside her head. She sees herself inside a house of undefined ownership—the country home Addison’s family bought in Litchfield for when they visit from California, maybe, although of course Macy has only heard about the house, never seen it—stripped naked, lined up between Lauren and Jade; in the next image, Macy sits in Ms. Paulsen’s office, her parents on either side of her, the stiff wood of one of Atwater’s spindle-back chairs pressing into her shoulders. Ms. Paulsen tells her that she is in violation of a half-dozen Atwater rules, chief among them signing out of campus under false pretenses. She is forced to leave campus immediately, without so much as returning to her room for her clothes or her sneakers or to say goodbye to Jade.
When her alarm chimes at six thirty the next morning, Macy cannot say whether she slept, and if the stream of consciousness she traveled eventually meandered into dreams.
* * *
Despite Macy’s IEP and her accommodation plan and Scullen Middle School’s fairly stellar reputation as far as suburban public schools go, her teachers regularly cold-called on Macy or otherwise asked her to do things that functioned as triggers. And even though her parents did blame the teachers and the administration, Macy did not, because by the end of eighth grade almost everything was a trigger: she could not recite French from memory and she could not deliver a presentation to the class and she could not be asked to read out loud and she could not do projects that did not come with a very, very clear set of expectations, like how many points each component was worth and how each component would be graded and whether the rough draft would be graded or if it was just a checkpoint and if it wa
s just a checkpoint, then how many points completion of the rough draft was worth. It never helped that her parents were constantly having meetings with her teachers or with her principal, because that only increased Macy’s sense that she was a mounting burden to her teachers, a drain on their time and resources and mental energy. She did not want to schedule a dozen extra help sessions per week because her parents believed that one-on-one time would help Macy to feel more comfortable with her teachers. She did not want her teachers to develop alternative assignments or independent studies.
She wanted to be normal. And if she could not be normal, then she wanted to be ignored. But her grades were inconsistent and she was so obviously unhappy and her parents were frustrated with the school and did not think that a high school four times Scullen’s size was likely to improve the situation. They spent spring break that year touring Lake Forest and the Lab Schools and St. Ignatius but none of Chicago’s best day schools seemed like a fit for their family, who’d have to drive Macy an hour each way, adding two hours to an already exhausting day. They talked about selling the house in Naperville and moving to Chicago proper, but Macy didn’t want to move somewhere where her runs would be relegated to streetlight intervals or wind-battling tempos along the Lakefront Trail.
When they visited Atwater, Macy could picture herself running along the country roads that carved up rural Connecticut; she liked the small network of trails that snaked through the forest behind campus. As her parents asked questions about individualized education and Atwater’s Academic Resource Center, Macy pieced together routes in her head: Four miles in the rough square of roads around the school, then three by taking the forest trails at their widest; out-and-back tempos on the rolling hills of the county road that stretched in front of campus. Nestled behind the gym and out of sight on a regular Admissions tour, Atwater’s track was its only disappointment: the centers of the lanes worn thin, the blue coating chipped away, cracked at the outer edges—it had to have been thirty years old. Standing in the middle of lane three on the backstretch, the polyurethane hard like cement beneath her feet, Macy hung her head.
“We’re just waiting for a name donor,” the coach explained, reading Macy’s mind. Ms. Brown was a math teacher with short blond hair and the weathered look of someone who’s spent decades outside, skin stretched thin over cheekbones carved by sun and wind over thousands of miles. Macy liked the way her blue eyes wrinkled at the corners and the way she talked with her hands. Her parents liked her because she talked about looking out for girls’ well-being and how she didn’t believe in putting high mileage on developing bodies.
When she got home Macy punched Atwater’s zip code into Google Map Pedometer and traced routes around the Litchfield Hills, counting the miles, using street view when she could to check the grade or to be sure a particular county road hadn’t widened to a kind of highway.
* * *
Mr. Morgan lectures with his textbook in his hand, the teacher’s edition, his tie loosened and his hair a little bit ruffled. It is very clear that he is flying by the seat of his pants, the lesson developing in the moment. Macy has not spent a lot of time around high school or college guys, but something about the way Mr. Morgan carries himself reminds her of an adolescent boy—or, at least, he does not carry himself the way the adult men in her life (her dad, her grandfather, her teachers at Scullen Middle School) generally do. He’s explaining point-slope equations, telling them how to find the equation of a line when they’re given the slope (m) and an unknown point on the line (x1y1). There’s a formula to follow. In theory it should be uncomplicated. It is uncomplicated. It’s still September; this is just foundational stuff for the rest of the year, Mr. Morgan reminds them most days, apologizing for how simple and straightforward this all is.
But Mr. Morgan also likes to cold-call. While his back is turned to the class, the textbook in one hand, scribbling away on the chalkboard, he’ll say, “Macy, can this be simplified?” Which is exactly what he does now.
Macy has the familiar sensation of a rock settling into her stomach suddenly, the same weight she feels in the minutes before a race. The longer she takes to answer, the more eyes turn to her, Jade’s and Bryce’s and Lauren’s and Leah Stern’s, even—Leah, the only other freshman on the cross-country team, whose eyes rarely land anywhere besides her feet and the floor and the paper in front of her and sometimes the board. Macy is jealous of Leah, of her obvious weirdness, the childish way she dresses, her ponytail with the middle part, her refusal to speak to anyone. Mr. Morgan never calls on Leah.
Mr. Morgan turns from the board, over his right shoulder. “Macy?” he asks again.
“I don’t know,” she says, which is sort of the truth, because she was paying attention but not paying attention, watching the world around her, watching Mr. Morgan move across the board, the steps of the formula laid one after another, but none of it was actually settling into her consciousness, making a home inside the grooves of her distracted brain. It was all white noise.
“Come on,” Mr. Morgan says, smiling. He has the teeth of a white-collar serial killer, the villain in a suburban psychological thriller: fluorescent white and pin straight. “You’ve got this,” he adds.
But Macy does not have this. She tries to look over the formula again, to backtrack to the start of the problem at the top left corner of the board. But her face is hot and she feels her armpits dampening and the class around her starts to fidget: She hears a pencil drop on the floor and a desk creak as someone shifts her weight and the scratch of an eraser across rough paper and the click of a calculator out of its sleeve.
Mr. Morgan smiles at her. “I get it. Wednesday morning, first class of the day, hard to focus. But hang in there, guys! Five more minutes and then I’ll give you time to get started on your homework. Who can help Macy out?”
Bryce pipes up from the back row with the correct answer. Macy sinks into her chair. She tugs at the front of her shirt, caving her chest inward, pulling the fabric away from the sweat that pools under her arms.
* * *
At lunch, Macy feels too sick to eat. Her stomach cramps and unfurls, cramps and unfurls. She hardly remembers it now, but her parents say that she was a picky eater even as a small child. For weeks at a time she’d refuse to eat anything for dinner other than buttered pasta, oil-slick shapes slipping around in a bowl like fish out of water. Around the same time, she decided on toast for breakfast: buttered, like the pasta, with nothing else—no jam, no peanut butter (never peanut butter); no cinnamon and sugar. Lunch was a struggle, because what she liked could not be packed in a lunchbox and consumed three or four hours later: mac and cheese, grilled cheese, cheese quesadillas. Her dad convinced her that cheese sandwiches were just dry, cold grilled cheeses, and so for months in second grade she ate two slices of neon-orange American cheese on white bread.
From the get-go it was too much for Macy’s mother, who shopped at Whole Foods and drank tea instead of coffee and who slathered DEET-free bug spray and mineral-based sunscreen on her daughter in the summer months. She lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling, imagining refined sugars and preservatives marching through her daughter’s little body like invaders, chewing away at the synapses in her developing brain, setting fire to her neurotransmitters, planting like grenades the seeds of insulin resistance and dementia. She tried sneaking greens into the foods Macy would eat: puréed zucchini folded into banana bread; butternut squash roasted and puréed and stirred into stovetop macaroni and cheese; cauliflower steamed and mashed and used to replace half the potatoes. She saw a therapist, where she talked mainly about her own eating issues and her own mother’s—Macy’s grandmother’s—exacting standards, and the therapist, misunderstanding the severity of the situation through no fault of her own, tried to help Katie Grant feel as though she was projecting some deeply rooted anxieties onto her own daughter.
Jade smacks her tray on the table next to Macy. “Nice lunch,” she says, eyeing the two pieces of wheat toast cooling on Mac
y’s plate.
“I’m not feeling so hot.”
“You should go to the Health Center,” Bryce chimes in.
“Then she’d have to miss practice,” Jade says, rolling her eyes. “God forbid.”
Macy spots Leah Stern, sitting across the dining hall with seven or eight other girls, her head bent over her tray, physically inside the circle but not at all a part of it. The dining hall’s round tables meant that no one ate alone, that sometimes different friend groups had to share a table.
Macy looks up at Bryce and musters a smile, chewing a piece of bread until it reaches the consistency of baby food.
* * *
The afternoon passes in a fog. In history, Ms. Daniels lectures about belief systems, and Natalie Howard—thinking it would be funny, which it is to most of Macy’s classmates—asks about the flat-earth theory, and even persuades Ms. Daniels to show a clip from some YouTuber about exactly this. In Drawing and Painting, where Macy is the only freshman, Mr. Breslin has asked them to each contribute one item to a still life of objects that represent power. Macy presents her old Garmin, the rubber-plastic strap torn and rusted where it connects to the watch face.
“Ahh, time,” Mr. Breslin says. “As relentless as the ocean!”
Macy had actually intended the watch as a kind of symbol of her training, which makes her feel strong and therefore powerful, but she doesn’t correct him.