by Chessy Prout
“It’s going to be so fun, Lulu,” I said, using one of my various nicknames for Lucy.
“I know we’ll probably still get in fights, but you can’t be rude at school. You really can’t talk back to seniors.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And I just want you to know that what you do in the first couple of weeks is how you’ll be known. Everybody remembers everything,” Lucy explained. “So don’t dress too slutty or revealing at Nash Bash. Don’t kiss any boys during the first month. You don’t want to be known in that way. Boys will try to talk to you all the time. You can ignore them.”
Lucy had good intentions and I trusted my older sister. But I was offended that she felt the need to even tell me these things. I knew how to protect myself. This was my life.
“I’m going to figure it out on my own,” I said.
“You don’t understand: the school is a whole different world than down here.”
“I have to make my own mistakes,” I told Lucy. “You made your mistakes. I’m going to make mine.”
“Fine,” Lucy sighed. “You’ll figure it out.”
I had fun visiting Lucy’s dorm at St. Paul’s (first image, above) and playing in a scrimmage with her volleyball team (second image, above). Lucy took this photo of me after my interview with admissions in fall 2012 (above). I was so excited to join her at boarding school.
My family celebrated after I got accepted to St. Paul’s. During Revisit Weekend in April 2013, I reunited with Lucy and took photos of my favorite view of Library Pond.
FOUR
St. Paul’s, September 2013
I’d finally made it. Mom and I were waiting in the Rectory, a stately gray house in the middle of campus, so that we could meet the head of school and sign my name in a big leather-bound book.
I recognized Rector Michael Hirschfeld from visiting Lucy over the last couple of years. I’d already met his son, Dylan, the year before, when he and his older sister had dinner at our home. Mr. Hirschfeld had a frozen grin on his face and robotically stuck out his hand when Mom and I made it to the front of the line.
“Hi, Chessy. We’re so glad to have you here,” he said. “Dylan is really looking forward to seeing you.”
I eagerly picked up the pen and signed my full name, Francesca Prout, in black ink. It was my first official act of independence—I enrolled myself in the school. The next four years of my life started now.
Mom and I linked arms and walked along the path the way she and Dad had years ago at his reunion. My dorm, Conover Twenty, or Con20, was a redbrick building with a pitched green roof. It faced the chapel and was conveniently located next to the Schoolhouse, where most classes were held.
I knew my room was not going to be as posh as Lucy’s at the Kehaya castle. Still, I was stunned at how tiny the space was: it had originally been used as a single, and there was just a body’s length between the twin beds. I could deal. I was used to cramped spaces in Tokyo.
I noticed a pale girl with jet-black hair sitting on a bed and a bunch of DJ equipment stuffed in the corner. She had a rocker look, with lips stained red and black combat boots. I went in for a hug.
“Hi, I’m Chessy. It looks like we’re going to be living together. Yay!” I said, immediately regretting how dorky I sounded.
“Hey, I’m Tabitha,” she said coolly, barely looking up. “Some people call me Tabby for short. But I don’t really care what you do.”
I quickly learned three things about Tabitha: she was from the West Coast, she was obsessed with all good music, and she gave zero shits what other people thought of her. I liked her bluntness; it reminded me of Arielle. But I worried that Tabitha assumed I was some lame Florida chick who only listened to pop music.
Mom was busy chatting with my head of house, Colin Callahan, and of course they made connections. Mr. Callahan’s dad had taught Mom in college at Holy Cross. I lived next door to another dorm adviser, Dr. Theresa Gerardo-Gettens, who everyone called Dr. G.
I left the adults so I could grab more boxes from the car when I ran into Ivy—the younger sister of Lucy’s roommate. We hugged each other as if we were best friends, even though we’d never actually met in person. Ivy was tall with long blond hair, perfectly straight white teeth, and a beauty mark under her right nostril. She lived on the Upper East Side in New York City and could have stepped off the set of Gossip Girl.
“Chessy! I can’t believe they didn’t match us as roommates, but it’s soooo good that you’re just down the hall,” Ivy squealed. “We’re going to have so much fun.”
Her peppiness was contagious.
“Definitely,” I said, my voice sliding an octave higher. “I can’t wait!”
We swapped cell phone numbers and made plans to walk to dinner. I was relieved to find a friend right away, especially someone who seemed so confident and upbeat. I pictured us becoming best friends and doing sister outings together.
Later that evening there was an opening-night dinner for third formers—what they called freshmen at St. Paul’s. It took place at the Upper, the main dining hall, which was tucked inside a hulking Gothic building. Ivy and I stuck close together as we entered a narrow hallway lined with dark wood panels engraved with the names of St. Paul’s graduates.
The dining hall itself was straight out of Hogwarts, with tall arched ceilings and long rows of wooden tables. During dinner, a stuffed snowy owl that looked like Harry Potter’s pet, Hedwig, flew across the cavernous room on a wire. I couldn’t decide whether this was magical or creepy. Maybe magically creepy.
After the meal, we traipsed across campus to the smaller old chapel for First Night Service. After a short ceremony, where Mr. Hirschfeld welcomed us, we spilled out into the dark night. Seniors, dorm leaders, and faculty surrounded the chapel and cheered the new kids, known as newbs. I saw Lucy on the lawn and ran to hug her.
“We’re finally here. Together,” I said, my eyes glistening.
“Yes, we are, Chess,” Lucy said, and squeezed my hand.
I spotted Mr. Hirschfeld’s son, Dylan, out of the corner of my eye and waved at him to come over.
“I need something good to wear for Nash Bash,” Dylan announced, referring to the dance the following night, when everyone dressed up in neon colors and crazy outfits.
“Totally. Lucy has a box of costumes we can search,” I said.
Dylan texted me so that we had each other’s numbers, and we agreed to meet the next day to raid Lucy’s stuff and find him some spandex biker shorts. I was eager to be as helpful as possible. The pressure to find friends and make this community my own weighed on me. People seemed to orbit around those with knowledge, and I was not afraid to use mine.
As I straightened up my room before bed, I got a text from Ivy.
Ivy: Hey so 7:45 walk to breakfast?
I grinned as I texted back.
Me: Yess!The first of our long walks to the upper . . .
Ivy: Ahhhh! Let the adventure begin
I tried to pay attention during the rest of orientation, but I felt like this stuff was beneath me. I’d lived overseas and knew how to take care of myself. Still, I made a few mental notes: if I wanted to discuss a serious issue with an adult, I should talk in hypotheticals to avoid mandatory reporting to outside authorities.
And if I got drunk, or knew a friend who was wasted, we should “sanctuary” ourselves. We wouldn’t get in trouble if we turned ourselves in to the health center and said we were concerned about our safety. Of course, the school didn’t phrase it precisely this way—but that was the message.
At a dorm meeting about Nash Bash, the adults were more blunt with their advice: “People will be inappropriate. Boys will try to touch you. Try to ignore it and don’t participate.”
That advice felt wrong somehow. The senior girls (sixth formers) then suggested that we come up with hand signals to get out of any sticky situation. Ivy and I were skeptical but ultimately devised a plan: thumbs-up if a boy was cute. Thumbs-down if things looked sketchy
.
Ivy and I raced to the Athletic Fitness Center blasting music on her iPhone—a “Summertime Sadness” remix by Lana Del Rey and “No Interruption” by Hoodie Allen. We sauntered into the dance, as if we owned the place. I was wearing a yellow crop top, black Converse sneakers, and high-waisted purple-and-black shorts with a galaxy-like print that I borrowed from Ivy’s roommate, Faith. Ivy had on a tight white T-shirt showing off her tennis abs, blue-and-pink shorts, and a pink headband with a bow on top. She looked like a cotton-candy swirl.
We made our way to the dance floor and created circles with groups of girls. I didn’t notice when a freshman hockey player snuck up behind me and slipped his hand under my shorts. I was so flustered that I grabbed Ivy’s hand and pleaded, “Say we have to go to the bathroom!”
I didn’t want to cause a scene and show my disgust at the first social event of the year. In the bathroom, other girls told me that same boy had groped them, too.
“Can you believe this?” I said to Ivy after the escape.
“It’s gross. But just forget about it,” she said, leading me back to the dance floor. “I’ll protect you.”
I would quickly learn that boys at this school felt entitled to stake a claim to things that were not their own, including girls’ bodies. I struggled to make sense of it all at the time, because the behavior was so normalized, woven into the fabric of St. Paul’s. Whenever I wanted to get a meal at the dining hall, I first needed to walk through a common area that Lucy had warned me about: the senior couches. Here, seniors—and only seniors—were allowed to sit on the maroon leather couches and walk on the senior rugs.
The couches usually faced outward so the boys could stare and call at girls who passed by on their way to the dining hall. All I could think was, Oh my God, somebody is looking at my butt right now. We were all on display.
As a fourteen-year-old, I reveled in my newfound freedom at boarding school. No one told me when to go to bed, do my homework, or clean my room. St. Paul’s, or Millville as the nickname went, was every teenager’s dream. I picked the electives I wanted and took naps during my free blocks in the afternoon.
I loved that classes, sports, and clubs were all right there for me—the way it was at Sacred Heart. Making varsity volleyball as a third former was kind of a big deal. Even better, I scored jersey number thirteen—my lucky number, same as Taylor Swift.
Rusher the Crusher still intimidated me, but I appreciated having friends outside the newbs. The older girls were encouraging and invited me to dinners and lunches at the Upper. Sometimes we went to Coach Doc’s house for ice cream and waffles or deep-dish pizza. It felt like a family.
Ivy also made varsity volleyball, and the two of us seemed unstoppable. We had sister brunches in the Upper with Lucy and Georgina and often retreated to their oasis in Kehaya. Lucy and Georgina and their third roommate, Zoe, had pushed their beds together to create an amazing megabed. Ivy and I loved flopping on the bed and sharing memories.
Georgina, shorter and more petite than Ivy, had dark hair and a mean streak. And she was always talking about how much she hated their mom.
“She didn’t raise us. We were raised by our nanny,” Georgina complained. “And I had to help raise Ivy. She, like, owes me everything.”
“I wuv yoouuu,” Ivy said.
“Oh my God, remember that time when I thought you looked cuter than me with your blond hair so I tried to dye it black?” Georgina recounted.
“I knooooow, that was so funny,” Ivy said, dissolving into a fit of giggles.
I sensed that Georgina was envious, but this sounded diabolical. I pretended to laugh and looked sideways at Lucy. She met my eyes with a knowing look.
Later Georgina asked Lucy whether she ever got jealous that Ivy and I were adjusting so well to St. Paul’s.
“Oh my God, I never want to be a newb again,” Lucy said. “I want her to have a better go at this than me.”
I soon realized that Ivy could be just as competitive as Georgina. When I told her I had an audition for an a cappella group, she decided to try out and somehow ended up singing one of the songs I had practiced. When I confided that I thought Jackson’s younger brother—the boy I had met during Revisit weekend—was cute, Ivy said she had a crush on him too. I wasn’t going to let boys get in the middle of my most promising friendship, so I immediately backed off and rooted for her. That’s what you were supposed to do, right?
In just a few weeks, Dylan and I had collected a big group of friends from our dorms and classes. Ivy knew several kids from the New York City private-school world, including Catie, who lived in our dorm, and Harry, a scrawny guy who loved his blazers.
We moved across campus in the safety of herds, from the Upper to classes to Tuck Shop, the student center, where kids hung out at night to see and be seen. It reminded me of the picnic tables at CSN—girls gossiped about boy crushes, complained about classes, and admired/judged each other’s outfits. I liked Tuck for the snacks and usually devoured mozzarella sticks or raw cookie dough, or both.
The newbs were still getting to know each other and finding common ground: Did you summer in the Hamptons or Martha’s Vineyard? Ski in Vail or the French Alps? They name-dropped rich and famous people they’d met and shared selfies of themselves in front of black diamond runs. Some of the lingo my classmates used was nuts, like substituting the word “gucci” for good. As in, “Sounds gucci!”
I knew I lived a comfortable life, but my parents never talked about money, and as a kid, I didn’t really think about wealth or class or where my family fit in. I didn’t understand what a rarefied world I was entering when I got to St. Paul’s. Girls wore couture to formal seated meals. The level of affluence and one-upmanship was astounding.
And I wasn’t immune. When people asked where I was from, I always made sure to mention that I grew up in Japan and was part Japanese. It was all true, obviously, but I knew it made me sound more interesting and worldly. I was kind of ashamed of saying I lived in Florida, and I wanted them to know that I wasn’t just some blond ditz.
It took me a while to get used to the selfie situation at St. Paul’s. The girls constantly took pictures of themselves, always posing to accentuate their “good side”—something I thought only happened in cheesy movies about mean girls. Ivy taught me how to create a “thigh gap” by placing my feet together and bowing my legs out. I tried it once, but I felt like I dislocated my knees.
Photos were uploaded to Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook, and everyone kept track of how many likes or comments they received. The pictures were carefully curated as if they were displayed in an art gallery. Some social events were simply an excuse to show off our phenomenal prep-school lives—Fall Ball, Nash Bash, Dorm Day, and sports games included. Older guys were just as photo obsessed, especially when it came to taking pictures with the newbs.
At Ecofest, a pseudo Earth Day gathering in the fall, kids dressed in plaid flannels and drew names on each other’s foreheads, something that resembled a branding ritual. I had to borrow a shirt from Lucy because I’d lent out all five of my flannels to girls in the dorm.
“Chessy, you have to stop giving away your clothes,” Lucy scolded me. “People are not going to give them back.”
“I just want other people to like me,” I said. “I feel bad saying no.”
We headed over to an orchard behind Lucy’s dorm and took photos in front of trees bursting with magenta and canary yellow.
Lucy’s friends chatted with me about life as a newb. Then Owen Labrie sidled up to me. Lucy had broken up with Owen sophomore year because he moved too fast. Now he was captain of the soccer team and had on a red shirt and multicolored headband that held back his long brown hair. He was attractive and assertive.
“Oh, can I take a photo with you?” he asked as he squeezed his arm around my shoulder.
“Okay,” I said, already under his grasp.
Then he walked away without saying anything more. Kind of a rude weirdo. I didn’t understand
why someone would want to take a picture with me and not actually have a conversation. But the photo of the two of us went up on Facebook, making it look like we were the best of friends.
I started to find the scene at Tuck tiresome, especially as the nights got colder. I preferred hanging with Tabitha, listening to cool music she had discovered, or chilling with a bunch of girls in Ivy’s room.
Ivy and her roommate, Faith, had one of the larger spaces in the dorm, which could easily fit fifteen people sprawled out on their blue and pink rugs, beanbag chairs, and raised beds.
We’d do homework together in there, which really meant Ivy studying and me goofing off with Faith and Catie, who lived down the hall.
We liked to procrastinate by shopping online or giving each other makeovers. One night the three of us sat on the floor, one in front of the other, curling each other’s hair. I was in the front and had my laptop open while Faith wound my locks tightly around the hot iron.
“How does it look?” I asked Catie in the back.
“Oh my God, you’re like Shirley Temple!” Catie burst out laughing.
“It’s so cute, Chessy!” Faith said, defending her work.
“Everyone needs to be quiet!” Ivy huffed from her bed, not looking up from the MacBook resting on her legs.
We giggled and would stay quiet for five minutes, max. I liked Faith a lot. She was sweet, with thick auburn hair and a throaty laugh. But it was clear she was out of her league when it came to Ivy. Faith lacked Ivy’s sophistication and confidence and sometimes followed Ivy around like a lost puppy.
Early on, Ivy had spread rumors that Catie was crazy, but I thought she was hilarious and down-to-earth. I saw Catie every morning when we waited at the Clark House health center, where nurses dispensed meds in two lines: one for students with names A–L and the other for M–Z. Catie wasn’t embarrassed to be seen picking up her morning Rxs. Nothing actually seemed to bother her.
