New Girl

by Paige Harbison

  As I walked down the path, I remembered when I was thirteen and looking at pictures of Manderley. I’d imagined myself prancing down this very path full of optimism, maybe already with a brand-new friend acquired on the ride in, ready to have an adventure.

  I felt a little silly thinking about it, but something in me still had a flicker of that same excitement.

  Once in the hall, I saw that there was a woman directing each wave of students to a line for the cell phone drop. Yes. Oh-ho yes.

  The cell phone drop. In an effort to be more “traditional,” the school mandated that we could use cell phones only between seven and nine at night or on weekends, and we had to check them out, leaving our room keys behind as collateral. Leah and I’d read all about it in the letters. We’d sat on her back porch in the gray-blue of a mosquitoey twilight waiting for her dad to finish grilling the burgers and hot dogs, and read all about the new restrictions I’d be living with.

  I’d be living in a dorm with a girl I’d never yet spoken to, sleeping in a twin-size bed. There would be no interdorm visitation between guys and girls, no social-networking sites except on a special computer in the library. We’d be wearing uniforms, and, perhaps most disappointingly as a new student with no friends here, the no cell phones thing.

  It was like prison. Without visitors.

  After reluctantly dropping off my beloved, brand-new iPhone and getting my key, I realized I didn’t know where to go.

  I got up the nerve and approached two girls standing by the stairs. “Hi, um, I’m sorry, but do any of you know which way I go to get to room fifteen?”

  The girls exchanged a meaningful look I didn’t understand. I resisted the urge to shrink away.

  The brunette with big pearl earrings and a very thin nose tossed her hair and looked at me. “So you’re the new girl?”

  “Yes, I’m—”

  “Great. My name is Julia, and this is Madison. We live right across from you.”

  “Oh, good.” I smiled.

  She did not.

  “You can follow us, we’re going up.”

  “Okay.”

  Follow seemed like a weird word to choose. Walk with. Or, come with. Instead, I got trail pitifully behind like a stray cat.

  They started off, and I tried to keep up.

  “So did you two know whoever used to live in my room?”

  Another exchanged look.

  The one called Julia looked straight ahead and responded, “Yep.”

  “Ah.” I nodded. Trying to fill the silence I said, “That cell phone drop blows, doesn’t it? How do you guys survive?”

  Madison looked back at me. “You get used to it.”

  It was clear that I shouldn’t ask any more. I stayed silent for the next two flights.

  The hallway was all open doors and girls gabbing and shrieking. The noise quieted as we walked up. Everyone was looking at us. Or at me. I didn’t know whether to wave or what, so I just walked on.

  “There it is,” Julia said, and pointed at the only shut door on the hall.

  Everyone was silent now, and no one tried to conceal their stares.

  I went for the knob, hesitated, and then knocked. No answer. Pushing the door open, I was surprised to find that the lights were on and my roommate was there, reading a book.

  “Hi, are you Dana?” I asked, and then realized that both sides of the room were fully decorated. “Am I in the wrong room?”

  Was that why everyone had stared? They were just trying to embarrass me for some reason?

  “No.”

  “No you’re not…Dana, or—”

  “You’re in the right place,” she said impatiently, not looking up at me. A curtain of shiny black hair hid her face.

  I stood there, feeling like an idiot. She wasn’t being helpful at all, but still I felt like I was harping on the subject. “Sorry, but…then why is there someone else’s stuff over there?”

  “Those are Becca’s things.”

  Another few seconds of silence passed as she slowly, deliberately, turned a page in her book.

  “Um. Okay.” I cleared my throat again and shifted my weight to my left foot, still aware of the quiet outside as everyone listened to this conversation. It seemed that Dana would be perfectly content with me standing here for the rest of my life trying to figure out if, in fact, I should take another step in or not.

  Finally she revealed to me her face. She looked like a skeleton. The skin that stretched over her high, sharp-looking cheekbones was as white as Julia’s pearls. Her lashes were black and long, and trimmed narrow eyes. Thick black liner encircled them, and she looked distinctly exotic. I didn’t think I’d ever seen someone who looked quite like her.

  I immediately felt the twinge of intimidation.

  “Is…she coming to get her stuff?” I asked, when she said nothing.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What am I supposed to do with it, then?”

  I blushed as my confidence promptly ebbed.

  Her cat eyes moved to look at the other side of the room. “I already put some of it away for her.”

  I followed her gaze and spotted a Louis Vuitton suitcase underneath the bed.

  “I see,” I said.

  A thoughtful moment passed before she said, “You shouldn’t sleep in the sheets.”

  “No.”

  I took a few steps toward the bed. The floorboards groaned.

  “Stop.” She said it quietly, but exhaustedly. As if she’d told me a hundred times to stay away from that comforter.

  I backed away, watching as she very slowly and carefully removed each layer. When she got to the pillow, she stopped for a minute and gave it a very slight squeeze before removing its case. Odd. But I said nothing.

  When she finished, Dana walked silently back to her side of the room, and removed her own sheets, replacing them with Becca’s. I got a chill, and then realized the noise had resumed outside.

  Once she’d finished, she lay down in the sheets and closed her eyes. I averted mine quickly, feeling as though I was spying on someone unaware of my presence.

  My suitcases hadn’t arrived yet, so I just sat down on the nylon-encased mattress that was begrudgingly left for me. With a furtive glance in my roommate’s direction, I leaned forward and looked at the Polaroid pictures on the wall across from me.

  Most of them starred a pretty girl with long, platinum-blond hair. She was pretty in that sort of affected way that you can tell she practiced. Maybe I was wrong, maybe that’s how she always looked, but to me she seemed a little pinched. I noticed in one picture that she was one of those girls who looked good in a hat. I always look stupid in them.

  I scanned the snapshots of her with different friends, almost always posed and never candid, and usually including someone who was probably her boyfriend. There was more than one picture of them kissing. He was really good-looking. Not just hot or sexy, but handsome in that kind of old-fashioned way. His hair was dark and his eyes were light. He wasn’t smiling in any of the pictures, and something about him made it hard to look away.

  All the girls stood with their stomachs sucked in and their hands on their hips, either squinting “sexily” at the camera or making some other very-on-purpose facial expression. Madison and Julia, the girls I’d just met, were in several of them. I could already tell that they weren’t the kind of people that I was used to being around.

  Suddenly my bright pink toenail polish looked tacky, and my clothes ratty.

  I was startled a moment later by a knock at the door. I glanced at Dana, who didn’t move.

  “Come in?” I said, standing. It was Madison and Julia, who, clearly, never left each other’s sides.

  “So, are you down to come to the party later?” Julia asked.

  “Is it like a school thing?”

  Madison furrowed her brows, still smiling. “No?”

  I hesitated, weighing the options between risking getting in trouble but being social and taking the safe route of staying
in my room. What was the worst that could happen, I’d have to transfer back home?

  “Yeah, sure.”

  They both smiled, said, “Cool,” and then they walked off, leaving Dana and me alone again, as if the brief exchange had never happened.

  “Are you going?”

  Her eyes opened, and she stared at the ceiling. “Maybe. Probably not.”

  “Okay.” I sat back down.

  She grabbed her book and went back to “reading.”

  After a few more minutes, my things finally arrived, and I told the guy to just go ahead and set them on the floor. I stood above the pile, considering it for a long moment.

  “Dana?” I said quietly. She looked up, and I withered. “Sorry. Um. Do you think… Should I take down these pictures and the frames and everything?”

  She said nothing. This was unnecessarily uncomfortable.

  “I mean…I could pack them up....” I trailed off lamely, not looking forward to the prospect.

  She still said nothing. All I wanted to do was text Leah and share with her how completely, totally weird this all was. I wanted to tell her how I couldn’t wait until next year; we’d both been accepted to Florida State University and fully intended to be roommates.

  Instead, my phone sat in some lockbox downstairs, and I tried to arrange my things neatly and accessibly in my boxes and suitcases. After that quick task, I lay down in my new bed and tried to ignore the bright blue eyes staring down at me from almost every picture. I picked up the first Harry Potter book in an effort to get excited about boarding school again, and waited quietly in my bed for Madison and Julia to fetch me for the party that would begin it all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  One year ago

  “I MEAN, CAN YOU BELIEVE THEY SENT ME HERE?” Becca sat, legs and arms crossed, in the backseat, complaining to the taxi driver she wasn’t even sure spoke English. He nodded every now and again, but that was about it. She didn’t even care, she was venting. “And you know why?”

  The driver made eye contact with her in the rearview mirror.

  Becca leaned forward. “Because I can’t ‘keep my grades up.’ They think that’ll be easier here? All of these kids probably study nonstop. They’re probably all supersmart.” She sat back again, with a disgruntled noise. “I mean that’s not the only reason they made me come. I just…I hate both of my parents. My mom used to be okay, but now she just does whatever my dad says.”

  Nod from the driver.

  “Yeah, it sucks. They don’t know how to handle me so therefore they—what—ship me off? That is fantastic parenting.” She was silent for a moment before another thought struck her. “This is their fault anyway. Isn’t it all about the parenting? Isn’t the ‘troubled teenager’ thing just the lashing out of an ignored or neglected child?”

  Nod.

  “Exactly. See, even you understand it.” She sighed as they pulled up to Manderley. “But I don’t know. Maybe this will be better.”

  The taxi stopped by all the others along the very long entryway road, and the driver got out to remove her suitcases and boxes.

  “Lot of stuff,” he remarked with a smile when Becca clicked over in her high-heeled boots to join him at the back of the van.

  “Yes, because this is my last two freaking years of high school, and they don’t even want me at home. So I just brought all of it with me.”

  Nod. “Pay.” He held out a hand.

  “Ah.” She dug into her purse. “You do accept cards, right? Cards?” She held one up when he clearly didn’t know what she was saying.

  Nod.

  She looked down at her things, and then at the sidewalk, which was another six or seven feet. Becca smiled and looked at the driver. “Could you be a sweetheart and move them up there for me? Please?”

  He cleared his throat and then did as she asked. When he came back, she handed him her credit card and waited. He brought back a receipt. She signed it, putting twenty dollars on the tip line. The next minute, he was back in the car and driving off.

  For the briefest of moments, she felt weird watching him go. She was alone. This was her first year at a brand-new school, and she knew no one. Even that driver, whatever his unpronounceable, all consonant name was, had felt like company on the ride from the airport.

  “Miss?”

  Some guy with a cart startled her. “Jesus, what?”

  “I can take your things and deliver them to your room.”

  “Okay, it’s all right there.” She pointed.

  “Student ID number and room number?”

  She screwed up her face. “I have no clue.”

  “It should have come in the mail with your roommate’s name and your rule book.”

  She shrugged.

  He looked down at his pad of paper. “Okay, just give me your name, then.”

  “Rebecca Normandy.”

  “You don’t know any of your information?”

  “No.”

  He clicked the side of his walkie-talkie, and it bleeped. “Hey, Bill?”

  A few seconds passed before “Bill” answered. “Yeah.”

  “Can you look up a student’s information for me?”

  Another couple of seconds. “Go ahead.”

  “Rebecca…Normandy.” He spelled her last name, and then wrote down what Bill’s muffled voice reported.

  She was getting impatient, and then had a terrible moment where she realized she wasn’t eager to get anywhere.

  “And how many items?”

  Becca looked at him for a moment. He was looking right at them, did she really need to tell him? She glanced meaningfully down at them and then back to him.

  He took a deep breath and counted, then handed her a ticket he’d recorded it on. “Okay, hang on to this. On the back I wrote down your room number and student ID number. You’ll need those to get your key up there at the cell phone drop.”

  She froze. “So sorry, the what?”

  He gave her a look. “Didn’t read any of the info, huh?”

  “Uh-uh. Did you say cell phone drop?”

  “They’ll tell you the hours you can check it back out.”

  Becca sighed and followed the rest of the students up to the line that ended at a window. It was way too long to wait in. She went up to the next person in line. Luckily, it was a guy.

  “Hi, I’m new here, and I’m so sorry to ask this, but do you mind if I just drop off my cell real fast? I wouldn’t ask, but I’m just feeling so sick from the ride up here.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Thank you so much,” she cooed. She looked apologetically at everyone else in the line. “Sorry!”