Honor Code

by Kiersi Burkhart

  “How can that be?” Mom asks. “You’re the most intelligent, sweet girl I know.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “But it’s not about how intelligent or sweet I am. I’m a First Year. I’m flabby and I’m not rich.”

  Her face goes dark. Oops. That was the wrong thing to say.

  “So what?” Mom says, squeezing the arms of the chair with her nails. “I knew that school was a mistake. I told your dad, ‘All this praying in school business, and those snob kids, Sam won’t fit in.’ And I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “They’re not snobs.” And there’s not any praying, but it’s pointless to repeat that.

  “Yes, they are.” Here she goes. “You’re not rich enough for these kids? You worked hard to get into that school.”

  Plenty of other kids worked hard to get into Edwards. But nothing I can say can convince her she’s wrong.

  “They’re jerks, Sam,” she says definitively. “Forget about them. You’ve got one great friend, and she’s your roommate to boot. That’s what I call good luck.”

  But they’re not jerks. Bex proved that Edwards kids are perfectly nice and friendly—once you get in with them.

  It’s just that “getting it” part that still needs more work.

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  We go to a movie. People of all shapes and sizes move around, living their lives, driving cars and eating fast food. This is the real world—and yet it still feels like a dream. I can’t wait to get back to the Edwards world of huge old trees and fantastical brick buildings.

  I miss Gracie. I miss my dorm room.

  I miss Scully.

  Seeing him around campus. Looking for him as Gracie and I eat dinner in Hamilton Hall.

  The weekend finally ends. When I get back to campus, everything is glittering and magical. In the two days I was gone, all the leaves have turned a handsome orange-gold, just a preview of the autumn transformation to come—as if the wide arms of Edwards are welcoming me back.

  When I walk into our room carrying my duffel bag, Gracie’s already there.

  “Sam!” She jumps to her feet and hugs me. No one’s ever been so excited to see me.

  We spend the rest of the night catching up on our weekends, as if it was a whole summer. I only part ways with her to go brush my teeth.

  While I’m spitting into the sink, somebody says over my shoulder, “I found a date for your friend.”

  I jump. Hayden’s standing over me in the mirror. I’d almost forgotten about leaving her that note, asking if she could help Gracie get a date.

  “Calm down,” she says, leaning against the dispenser that hands out free tampons, pantyliners, and even little baggies for throwing away used ones. This school has been the least troublesome place to get a period in my life. “You know Britt Walhausen?”

  “Uh, no.” I don’t know anybody, really.

  Hayden lets out a sigh. “He’s a good match. I heard he didn’t have a date to the Mixer, so I offered him Gracie. He was thrilled.”

  Did she just say that she offered up my friend like a . . . prostitute?

  I close my eyes for a brief second.

  “Thank you,” I say, but it comes out flat.

  Hayden tilts her head, like she expected a bit more pomp and fanfare.

  “Just doing my job as your prefect,” she says coldly, stepping back. “It’s not like just anyone would take Gracie.”

  I clench my jaw. That was a rough way to talk about Gracie, but I can’t let the Head Girl leave thinking I’m ungrateful. I want to keep getting invited to events like the Mixer by Scully Chapman.

  “Thank you, Hayden,” I say. “Really, this means a lot to me, and Gracie will be so happy.” Wow. That sounds better than I expected. “Gracie’s my best friend, and I didn’t want to go alone. I know I’ll be with Scully, but I’m nervous, you know? It’ll be great to have her there. And she won’t feel like a third wheel since she has an awesome date now, too.”

  Hayden’s expression morphs into a blinding white smile. Look, I made the two quiet girls open up to me! In her mind, she has just made World’s Best Prefect.

  Give her a prize.

  “Oh, of course,” Hayden says, beaming. “It’s my job. You know the honor code: We have no parents here, so we must parent each other.” She pats me on the shoulder. “Just keep going to tennis and working on that waistline, and I promise—good things will happen to you.”

  Then Hayden floats out of the bathroom. Just when I’d finally forgotten about that night in the second-floor lounge, it comes back to find me again.

  Needs Improvement. I’m still just a work in progress.

  I look down at my hands and feel like they need a nice, long wash.

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  When I slip back into the room and tell Gracie about her match-up with Britt, she is not in raptures.

  “Britt Walhausen?” She squeezes her eyes shut and rubs them with the palms of her hands. “That wasn’t exactly who I’d had on my list. But he’ll do, I guess?”

  I’ve disappointed her, but what could I have done differently?

  “Sorry,” is all I can say.

  “No, no.” Gracie sighs. “It’s fine. We’ll have a good time together, no matter who our dates are.”

  Her upbeat attitude gives me hope. She’ll bear it for me. It’ll be fun.

  The next morning, Gracie stops in front of Cath and points. “There he is. That’s Britt.” I follow the path of her finger toward the river of sleepy students heading to Morning Prayer.

  Oh, no.

  He’s already balding, that much is clear. No hats are allowed during school hours, so the poor guy can’t even cover his head with a baseball cap. But he tries anyway, gelling his thin, white-blond hair down all in one direction. He’s not terrible-looking aside from that, a little dorky in a trim yellow polo shirt. I could have done better for Gracie—all those long legs and dark hair and luminous eyes of hers.

  Out of my hands.

  That’s when Britt notices us looking at him. He gives Gracie a shy little wave, then hurries away like an elementary school kid.

  Gracie tries not to let it show on her face, but it’s obvious that she’s not excited about her date.

  I wouldn’t be, either.

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  I suggest to Gracie that we go buy new dresses for the Mixer, and even though she resists the idea of getting something special, she can’t deny the reality that neither of us owns anything close to appropriate.

  It’s a whole thing to get off campus to do something in the city like shopping, so we make a Sunday of it. We sign out at the main office, then head to the shuttle stop outside Hamilton.

  I’m giddy about getting off campus, unchaperoned, for the first time. It feels like we’re skipping school.

  We don’t chat on the shuttle ride. Gracie and I don’t need to talk all the time to feel comfortable. I sketch cars and trees in my notebook and she gazes out the window. The silence is easy.

  I wonder what Scully will wear. I want to get something the right color to match.

  Gracie’s obsessed with finding a dress at Nordstrom’s that meets her ultra-specific criteria. “No colors, no frills, and especially no ruffles. Gray or black only.”

  “It’s a dance,” I say. “You can’t wear gray.”

  She grins. “Black it is.”

  We spend most of our allotment of off-campus time looking for Gracie’s perfect unfrittered black dress, and only ten minutes before we have to catch the shuttle do I find a dress for myself. It’s a salmon-colored monstrosity.

  “It looks amazing on you, though,” Gracie says, tapping her chin. She spins me around in the mirror. “Perfectly complements all this.” She makes a cupping gesture around her chest.

  I pinch the dress. “But all these weird bows and fluffy bits—”

  “It works with your hair. On anyone else it would look ridiculous, but on you I think it’s perfect.”

  I guess with that kind
of review I have to buy it.

  On the way out of the store, we pass through the men’s section to reach the exit. Three guys are trying on suits. I recognize one of them.

  How does Scully Chapman keep appearing like magic? And he’s trying on a salmon-colored tie.

  “Nice pink,” says one of his friends—a younger guy with slicked-back, dark hair. He plucks the tie off Scully’s chest and smirks.

  “What’s wrong with pink, Cal?” Scully says.

  “Uhh,” the dark-haired guy grapples for something to say.

  “You guys have something against men wearing pink?” Scully presses.

  The two friends exchange a look.

  “No,” says the second one. “Guess not.”

  My affection for Scully increases a hundredfold. His masculinity is anything but fragile. I clutch the paper shopping bag closer that contains my beautiful salmon dress. Thank you, Gracie.

  Scully adjusts his tie in the mirror. “I think pink is my color.” He notices my reflection in the mirror and spins around.

  “Scully’s coming over,” Gracie says under her breath, clasping my arm.

  “I can see that.”

  Scully approaches us—me, really. He approaches me. He greets Gracie briefly, then says, “I know this is premature. Like seeing the bride before the wedding.”

  Oh my god, I think. Like seeing the bride before the wedding.

  “But what good luck!” He flaps the tie. “I wanted to get a tie that would match your dress, but I had no idea what dress you’d be wearing, and how awkward it would be to call you up for that. Then, poof, you appeared!”

  Magic, indeed.

  “Y-y-yeah,” I say, nodding. “Amazing coincidence. But you already read my mind with that tie.” I lift the salmon-colored dress out of the bag.

  A grin explodes across his face. “What’s the chance?” he asks.

  Gracie says, “I was the one who picked it out.”

  “Chances are low,” I say, smiling back. I don’t know how I’m managing to string words together. He’s so hot that I need sunglasses. I hold it together long enough to say, “Must have been fate.”

  Gracie bumps my arm and points to the door. “We’re gonna miss the shuttle.”

  Scully gives a little bow. “I’ll be seeing you soon,” he says, flicking the pink tie at us. “Don’t miss your ride home.”

  He returns to his buddies, who stare at us with unreadable expressions. Disgust? Shock? Admiration?

  Probably not that last one.

  Gracie and I rush out just in time to catch the last shuttle. If those guys are missing it . . . Must be great to be friends with a Fourth Year like Scully, who passed his finals and gets to have his own car on campus.

  “It’s really happening,” says Gracie, once we’re on the bus. “We’ve got dresses and everything.” She sighs. “I can’t believe we’re going to be at the dance with that guy.”

  The way she says it, her voice dreamy, kills the glittery feeling in my chest—and replaces it with dread. How is this going to go, with both of us drooling over Scully and only me being his date?

  I study the graffiti on the back of the seat the whole drive back. I can’t feel too down about the Gracie stuff while imagining Scully and me in our matching salmon, slow-dancing under the spiraling sparkles of an old, glittering disco ball.

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  http://privateschoolnewb.tumblr.com

  Oct. 18, 2017

  Boarding school looks like:

  A sleepover every single night.

  When we close our door at lights-out, it feels like a secret club that only me and my roommate are allowed into.

  We turn off our big overhead light so it looks like we’re asleep, then flick on the little ones beside our beds. We’re both in Drawing Club now, which is great. We draw in our sketchbooks in the low light most nights, giggling at our renditions of Him. He models a lot for the Drawing Club, so we have tons of material to draw from (so to speak). Usually we sketch Him so His huge pecs stretch out His too-tight shirts.

  We stay up late, talking about Him. He’s like a magical beast that we see from time to time and admire from a distance—never acknowledging aloud that only one of us could have Him.

  Afterwards, we put on Disney movies and split the earbuds between us, the laptop perched in front of us while we prop ourselves up on a bed with pillows and backpacks. The hours get so big that suddenly they start over small again, and we’re so sleepy that we start to feel drunk, pushing each other off the bed and then trying to stifle our laughter so we don’t wake anybody up.

  Boarding school looks like:

  Being alone, but maybe not so much.

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  Finally, it’s Friday. The big day. Three hours before the Mixer’s supposed to start, Gracie insists we take long, cleansing, luxurious showers. The bathroom is clogged with girls giggling and trying on their outfits.

  In our room she blow-dries my hair and has me put on my dress.

  “I dug out my kit,” she says, sliding into my chair. I sit across from her on the bed in bundles of pink fabric as she unfolds a Costco-sized makeup bag. Normally she doesn’t wear much makeup—some winged eyeliner, occasionally that maroon lipstick that looks best on an olive complexion like hers. So why have such a huge collection?

  Everything in Gracie’s kit is Sephora and MAC—higher-end stuff, even I can tell that. She has every color of eye shadow, ten tubes of lipstick, a sampling of foundation shades, and a half-dozen eyebrow colors with little wedge brushes to paint them on.

  She plugs in the straightener and curling iron, then picks out all my colors and sets them on the desk. Once the straightener’s hot, she gets to work. It takes almost twenty minutes to straighten my big, frizzy mess into something resembling . . . normal. When I spot myself in the mirror, I don’t even recognize me. I look like a TV actress.

  Next, Gracie picks up the curling iron. Why straighten my hair just to curl it again? But after she’s covered my head in cute little ringlets that bounce around my shoulders, I can see her vision. A few spritzes of hairspray and it’s locked in.

  Gracie lets my hair settle while she does her own. She gives her black locks a ’70s-style flat-iron job that makes the razor-straight ends of her hair hang low on her back. She finishes with her usual severe part down the middle, her long bangs ending just at the arch of her eyebrows.

  I think I get the look she’s going for now—like a goth Katy Perry. It works.

  Gracie switches gears to doing my makeup.

  She paints four different colors of foundation onto my face in big swabs, making me look like a science project. But once they’re all smoothed out and blended together, I could swear I’ve been Photoshopped.

  “Holy shit,” I say into the mirror. Not a single freckle or blemish anywhere. It makes me look like I have higher cheekbones, a more delicate nose.

  “You’re good at this,” I say.

  “Just takes practice.” Gracie stands in front of the mirror and performs the same makeup magic on herself, but in half the time. She has the ritual down.

  Even if she doesn’t act it most of the time, Gracie’s still born and bred to be here.

  Next, she plucks the edges of my eyebrows until my eyes prick with tears. She selects a small angle brush and dips it in brown clay, gradating my eyebrows from light and smoky near my nose, to dark and dramatic at the arch. She sucks in her bottom lip as she works, focusing hard on me. I’ve never been so fiercely the subject of someone’s attention.

  I feel like a spoiled princess.

  Then she blends my eye shadow from gold at the tear duct, out to green, then blue across my eyelids, painting with such care and detail that I feel like one of Gentileschi’s paintings. I eye the coral lip stain she chose, which looks atrocious in the tube—what if all this makeup turns me into a clown?

  But when she paints the lip stain on me, I can see the image that Gracie had in her head.

 
She does smoky eyelids on herself and severe eyebrows that strangely suit her.

  I had my doubts, but when we stand in front of the mirror in our dresses, we both look . . . exceptional. Even the salmon is majestic and almost royal with this epic makeup job. I grin at Gracie in the mirror in her tiny, slinky black dress. Night and day.

  “We look sexy,” she says.

  I nod furiously. “Super sexy.”

  “Ready to go meet those guys?” she asks me, threading her arm through mine. I love this side of Gracie. Ready to go on an adventure.

  “Let’s get ’em.”

  Chapter Six

  As I walk into the anteroom of Hamilton Hall looking like this, I feel for the first time like a real Edwardian.

  It’s free seating for dinner. The giant whiteboard menu says meatloaf. Perfect. Meatloaf’s hard to mess up, and the Hamilton kitchen is great at messing things up.

  The whole school assembles in the cafeteria’s anteroom in their finest evening wear, hair twirled and curled and stacked, gelled and spiked and combed.

  Britt’s the first to spot us in the crowd. He’s wearing a soft, baby-blue tux. Gracie looks about to barf, but I think the ’70s throwback powder blue suits his comb-over. It’s a perfect contrast to Gracie’s goth look. They’re both so retro.

  “Hello, ladies,” Britt says, giving a little bow before taking Gracie’s hand. He plants a polite kiss on the back of it, and she looks even bleaker. “How are you this evening?”

  “Ready for that meatloaf!” I say brightly, and Gracie rolls her eyes.

  Britt tries to strike up small talk with her while I search the crowd for my date. My date. A shiver runs down my arms. I know it’s not supposed to “mean anything.” I know it’s not “a date.” But I get to spend a whole evening getting to know this ridiculously handsome, cool guy who—for some inexplicable reason—has chosen me.

  I am Boarding School Cinderella.

  As if I’ve summoned him, he appears on the other side of the cafeteria. Scully’s big, wide mouth gets even bigger when he smiles—like now, when he notices me.

  We walk toward each other and meet somewhere in the middle of the chaos.

  “Hey,” he says.