by Lily Bailey
If that doesn’t work, we will make it nine, and if that still doesn’t work, we’ll just keep saying them in multiples of three.
Right now, this sounds a little confusing, but we have the whole summer before we go to Hambledon.
We will spend it perfecting our technique.
We are thirteen. We’re wearing a stripy green-and-pink Ralph Lauren polo shirt, skinny faded gray jeans, and gold pumps. Our hair is tied back in a messy bun.
Mum has helped us lug our trunk into our boardinghouse, Wimborne. Scarlett is here too, but she’s in Aylingforde. That’s fine—we didn’t want to be in the same house anyway. We both agreed that if we were together all the time, we probably wouldn’t talk to anyone else. We haven’t seen her yet.
Mum, who has been feeling tearful since we saw the turrets of the red-brick castle on the hill, finally loses her cool. She’s helping me put T-shirts in the drawer under my new bed when the waterworks start. Now she’s wailing to everyone that she can’t bear to lose her baby.
We are in a four dorm called Harper. Of our three new roommates, Ellie looks as if she’s going to start laughing; Soo-jin blinks three times in quick succession. Alice, who has been at Hambledon since she was eleven, is impossible to read.
We hiss: “Mum, it’s time to go.”
Our justification system—our way of not saying sorry all the time—starts to get out of control. Initially, the idea was to justify things we would normally apologize for, to make them go away without having to say sorry. But as we got better at it, we realized we could use the system to deal with pretty much anything.
Unless you can remember what went wrong, though, you cannot put it right. So we take the first letter of each worry and put it in a list. We continuously repeat the list in our head until we have a quiet moment to go through it all.
If we find a way of justifying the action, it becomes a green word. When we can’t justify it, it is marked as a red word. We must remember and learn from it so we don’t do it again.
Green words stick around for a day, being reevaluated to check that they definitely weren’t that bad, and then get left behind at some point between when we fall asleep and when we wake up the next morning.
Red ones can continue to be carried forward for several days until we find a way to excuse them.
If we’ve done something really bad, we have to accept that there is no way of excusing it. Then it becomes a very red word, and we see its letters spelled out bolder in our head, flashing an angrier crimson color. It then goes into the Master Archive, which is the area in our head where we store all the really bad things we’ve done. We visit those words about once a week, to see if anything about them has changed.
Our list from today is EHHCSBR:
ENTER: When we came through Wimborne’s main doors, Mum and we were holding our trunk, and we brushed past another girl. Will that girl think we were being a pervert, trying to touch her?
HANDS: Was my hand sweaty when we shook my new housemistress’s hand in the entrance hall? If so, will she think I’m disgusting?
HELLO: When we met Alice, we said “hello” and she replied with “hey.” Is hello the wrong way to introduce yourself? Will she think we are weird?
CRYING: Does everyone think we’re a ridiculous baby because Mum cried?
SHIRT: Mum dried her eye on her shirt. Will they think we’re disgusting and have been brought up to clean facial leakages using items of clothing?
BUM: After Mum left, we were talking to Alice about her favorite bands and she turned round to get something out of the drawer under her bed, but she did it so quickly we couldn’t look away, and our eyes skimmed her bum for a second. If she saw, will she think we’re a pervert?
RUMBLE: Our stomach rumbled when we were all sitting in the room talking. Did anyone hear, and if so, do they think we are vile because our body made a disgusting noise?
EHHCSBR.
EHHCSBR.
EHHCSBR.
We sit on our bed and try to quickly sort our head. We anticipate this could take a few minutes. Luckily, Alice, Ellie, and Soo-jin are also sitting on their beds, having a conversation about Ellie’s old school.
With the right amount of nodding and smiling in (hopefully) the right places, we’ll be able to look like we are involved in the conversation while sorting through EHHCSBR.
Before we repeat the words, we must do the movements. Years ago, when we promised Dad we would stop fidgeting in exchange for a pet, we learned to be subtle with them. Now, we keep them as imperceptible as possible by only making tiny moves. We are grateful to him for this; we wouldn’t want to be marked out by some noticeable physical quirk.
We tap our feet on the floor nine times, invert our feet to the left and right, pull our sleeves down on each side, and tuck our hair behind our ears.
We repeat:
Tap, invert, sleeves, hair.
Tap, invert, sleeves, hair.
Tap, invert, sleeves, hair.
Sleeves is a reminder for us to pull our top down as far as possible to cover our hands; they are always rosy as clown cheeks from washing them too much. “It looks like you’re wearing red gloves,” Ella said previously, “or like you dipped them in a cauldron of boiling water.”
It is best to keep them hidden.
Invert. A couple of years ago, we sprained our ankle and it never got completely better, so sometimes it gives out. When that happens, our foot falls in on itself and we look like a freak who can’t even walk. Invert had been a red item for so long, we gave it special status. Why do we make ourselves repeat an embarrassing action? No idea.
Where do tap and hair come from? No idea either.
After the moving actions, we repeat all the words on the list three times. It must be done quickly and rhythmically, as if reading aloud from a shopping list. If the rhythm between the words feels wrong, or if there is a word that can’t be recalled instantly, the whole thing must be done again.
ENTER, HANDS, HELLO, CRYING, SHIRT, BUM, RUMBLE.
ENTER, HANDS, HELLO, CRYING, SHIRT, BUM, RUMBLE.
ENTER, HANDS, HELLO, CRYING, SHIRT, BUM, RUMBLE.
Then we assess the words individually:
ENTER: Brushing past that girl was clearly an accident. She probably didn’t even notice. And anyway, it could have been her who brushed past us.
HANDS: We have felt our hand against our face nine times since to check and can confirm that it is dry and there is no need to worry about the handshake.
HELLO: Clearly saying hello is wrong and uncool. This must be remembered.
CRYING: Mum cried, and it was ridiculous. There is no getting around the fact that everyone probably thinks we’re a mummy’s girl.
SHIRT: They probably didn’t notice Mum wiping her face on her shirt. Since we don’t ever do this ourselves, we can prove over time that we are not disgusting.
BUM: Alice was facing away from me, so she could not have noticed the bum glance. The others were talking, so probably didn’t notice either.
RUMBLE: Everyone’s stomach rumbles sometimes, and it is very unlikely they heard it, as everyone was talking loudly.
In our head, we color the actions according to what is now okay and what is still bad. HELLO and CRYING are still red, so must be carried over to a new day.
Before the routine can be closed, we must repeat our three mottoes:
In the end it is all done.
Anger only hurts the one who feels it.
If you want nice friends, you must be nice to them.
These mottoes get us through the day. The first reassures us that at some point we will have learned enough from our routines to not do them again. Two and three are equally important, because without them we’d express unacceptable feelings like annoyance and anger. We fear that we could become nasty and violent. Finally we do:
Tap, invert, sleeves, hair.
Tap, invert, sleeves, hair.
Tap, invert, sleeves, hair.
Then we land in Blank Slate
, which is the time where we have come as close as possible to our head being clean—before we do another bad action. Blank Slate can last anything from ten seconds to a few minutes. Unfortunately not much of the day is spent in Blank Slate, but when we are there, it’s a euphoric place to be: a gift, an unrivaled vantage point, from which everything seems crisper and better defined. Arriving in Blank Slate feels like resurfacing after being under the sea—that first breath you take when your lungs are greedy for oxygen and the joy of sun and sky hits you all at once. She is always kind to me when we get there.
All is well now, She soothes. You are liked.
We float on our back in sparkling turquoise waters, a silky ocean current threading over our body, between our fingers. Relief pulses through our veins as we kick back to shore and rejoin the conversation, carefully, softly, so they never notice we left.
· 8 ·
Hambledon
On the weekends all the girls in the same year in our boardinghouse loaf around in the common room, watching endless DVDs, documentaries, and reruns of Hollyoaks.
We make “the boat,” where we push the two sofas together to form a square, and then dump all the comfy cushions in the middle. There’s a door to the kitchen, and everyone takes it in turns to do the “toast run” so that we have TV snacks. We try to avoid our turn, for we see the invisible dirt on our fingertips seeping angrily into the spongy white slices of loaf: E. coli, salmonella, listeria. At the beginning of term we made toast for everyone, and Ellie got sick the day after. Enough said.
A collective popcorn is made about once a day. We try to get out of the kitchen when the microwave is on, because Mum once said you shouldn’t stand near one in case the rays escape and fry your organs. Most girls in our year have already got their period, and we can’t help wondering if the reason we haven’t had ours is because we fried our ovaries in the past. Mum wouldn’t have a microwave, just to be on the safe side, but Grandma had one, so it’s possible the radiation occurred when we were younger. Either way, there’s no point compounding the damage.
There’s normally a power struggle about what we watch. Alice likes gruesome horror stories and films about planes going down with people clutching their babies and shrieking, but she’ll settle for a documentary about serial killers. Ellie would rather watch Disney classics. The rest of us slot somewhere in between. Personally, we like the serial killer shows, because it’s a relief to know there are people out there worse than us.
Recording our mistakes has become our full-time occupation. Most words are generated when interacting with other people, like at mealtimes or when everyone is hanging out in the dorm. At these busy times, remembering everything that has been done wrong is such an effort that there’s no time to actually work through the list. In quieter moments, like being in assembly, doing homework, or pretending to read a book, we get a chance to stop and review the day’s data so far. It’s called a Pause. By rights then, watching TV should be bliss. Not much talking gets done, and there’s ample time to go over everything. Yet nothing about these routines is pleasant. It’s like making yourself answer the same math question over and over and coming up with a different answer every time, even though you don’t actually like math, so there’s no conceivable reason why you would want to occupy all your free time with it.
She tells me that over time doing these lists will make us perfect, but it’s little consolation. Every day feels like an unrelenting slog of words generated, letters compiled, actions reviewed—with nothing to show for it but exhaustion and despair.
At 7:00 a.m. every weekday, the Wimborne alarm screeches throughout the house. We roll over, not wanting to open our eyes, because within five minutes letters will be dancing and cartwheeling across our brain.
We swing our legs out so they dangle over our bed, reaching down to our top drawer to pull out some pants before grabbing our school uniform from the chair. Actions start to be recorded:
STARE: As we got up to sit on the side of the bed, our eyes made contact with Soo-jin. She was sitting on the end of her bed in a bra. Will she be disgusted and tell everyone Lily is a pervert?
UNDER THE DUVET: The others get ready quite openly, but we prefer to take our pajamas off and dress under the duvet so no one sees our body. As we pulled our pants up, we made a funny grabbing motion with our hands by accident. What if someone thinks we were masturbating?
REACH UP TO GET BOOK: We got off the bed and reached up to get our math textbook from the top shelf. It felt like our skirt might have lifted up a bit at the back. What if everyone thought we were flashing them because we derive pleasure from exposing ourselves?
MATH HOMEWORK: Soo-jin asked if we’d done the homework. We were a bit sleepy and said “Which homework?” This was idiotic because math is the only lesson we have together.
School uniform on, we brush our teeth with Alice.
BREATH: Alice said “Come and brush your teeth with me,” so we both walked along the corridor to the cubicles. She asked us a question and we turned to her to reply. What if our breath stank because we hadn’t brushed our teeth yet?
DREAM: Alice told us she dreamed last night about a train going round her head and knocking people dead. She looked at us expectantly. We don’t think we expressed as much concern and sympathy as she expected.
MIRROR: Alice came and shared our cubicle. We accidentally looked in the mirror, which we must avoid doing in front of other people. Will she think we are vain?
The alarm sounds again at 7:15 a.m. and the whole of Wimborne files downstairs to the common room for roll call. A range of offenses are committed.
SQUEAL: Mrs. Grove called our name. We meant to say “Yes” normally, but it came out squeaky, and everyone is going to think we have a horrible stupid voice.
EYE CONTACT: We caught the eye of a Wimborne first-year by accident. Will she think we were trying to groom her?
The others can be summarized as follows:
WHISPER
MUDDY
ELBOW
SMILE
JUICE DISPENSER
CROISSANT SPILL
ATE SLOWLY
THANK YOU
THREE
BRUSHED LEGS
SAT WITH NAOMI
Once we’re in assembly, it takes about ten minutes for the hall to be full. The chaplain marches onto the stage to tell us that Jesus has come to save us, generating the first Pause of the day. It’s time to address the list so far.
We go through it three times:
SURMBDMSEWMESJCATTBS.
SURMBDMSEWMESJCATTBS.
SURMBDMSEWMESJCATTBS.
A few more letters pop up while the chaplain talks, and we slot them in at the end.
Between three and ten letters are normally generated on the way to class. While you don’t communicate in class as much as in everyday life, interaction is still required. When the teacher is talking, you can pretend to listen while actually reviewing words, but you might not finish if you’re interrupted by something inconvenient like a worksheet. So classes are Half Pauses.
Full Pauses include going to the toilet, having a shower, and, most importantly, the time before we go to sleep. Full Pauses are used to review all words created that day, though the depth of the review can be tailored to the time available. A toilet review must be quick (otherwise someone might think we’ve gone for a huge shit, and that would generate so many letters it doesn’t bear thinking about). We get longer in the shower, say twenty minutes, but we can only focus on reviewing once we have washed our full body three times, or nine if we still don’t feel clean. We go over the list until someone bangs on the door and shouts to hurry up. Bedtime has an indefinite time allocation.
At the end of the day, there tend to be between 100 and 350 letters.
The day’s list must be analyzed before we sleep, along with the red letters carried forward from previous days. We lie on our bed re-sorting the letters into red and green afresh, deciding what is definitely green and can be discarded, and
what is so serious it must be taken with us into tomorrow. This takes up to four hours.
A Christmas tree materializes in the Wimborne entrance hall, and our housemistress is sitting next to it, tapping away on her BlackBerry. When she looks up, she sees Georgia and ourselves bashing the snow off our shoes on the doormat outside.
“Hey, you’re first back,” she calls. “You guys get to decorate. I’ve got to go do some jobs.” She kicks a cardboard box of baubles and tinsel in our direction and disappears down the corridor.
We couldn’t be happier to oblige. We untangle the lights and wind them round a few times, before starting on the plastic red and gold baubles. It takes about twenty minutes. Finally, Georgia lifts us on her shoulders and we plonk the star on top.
Alice arrives back from math, pulls the rest of the tinsel out of the box, and takes it upstairs to Harper. We follow.
At her heels like a dog, She sneers. It’s pathetic.
We add CLINGY to the list.
Up in Harper, Ellie and Soo-jin have hung fairy lights from the curtains. The four of us sit on the floor in the middle of our twinkly grotto, cutting scrap paper into snowflakes. “I Kissed a Girl” blasts from the speakers on repeat.
They are bitching about teachers. It takes me a moment to realize they’re looking at me. “Well?” probes Ellie. “Don’t you have a teacher you don’t like?”
We’ve been cutting quietly while revising a list, but verbal interaction is now required. This means we’ll have to start all over again on this list after we’ve spoken, which is annoying and panic-making. Frustration prickles across our skin like static. But at the same time, it’s nice to know there are people nearby who stop you fading away altogether.
Because here’s my friend’s worst thing about being in a dorm: our lists get interrupted. And my best: our lists get interrupted.
