The Unseemly Education of Anne Merchant

by Joanna Wiebe

  “Of course he didn’t,” she says under her breath.

  Gigi’s cottage may be old and small and the kitchen may be lined with plates commemorating the Reagan administration, but it has one redeeming quality: it’s just feet from the edge of the east side of the island, giving a spectacular view of the endless Atlantic (when the fog breaks, at least). The lush land drops off sharply, suggesting a cliff. My gaze follows the island’s dark green border as it runs mere steps from where I’m standing, behind the Zin mansion next door, and gets lost in the dense woods, only to appear again high in the distance, where the black slate rooftops of Cania Christy rise like the pointy teeth of a saw. There are no gentle slopes into the water, at least none that I can see from my vantage; there are just towering rocky cliffs, abused at their bases by hungry waves. It’s rugged and harsh and absolutely perfect looking.

  “You’ve only been here since last night,” Gigi continues, “and already you don’t like it.”

  “I like it. I’m just surprised. Does everyone live off-campus? I mean, there are dorms, aren’t there?”

  “You and the Zin boy are the only students living off-campus.” Gigi shuffles her crossword around. “There are dorms, yes.”

  Her watery, drooping gaze rolls my way then trails out to the whitecaps of the ocean. A spot of toast with strawberry jam is stuck to her lip.

  “But the dorms are full,” she explains, chewing out each of her words in a slow, deliberate manner. “Headmaster Villicus approved your application a mere two days ago. You should be glad I opened my home to you.”

  “I am, Gigi.”

  “Because not many would do what I’ve done,” she finishes sharply.

  Our gazes meet and stick. To look in her eyes, you’d think she could be a hundred years old or five; she is at once a wise old woman and a lost child. The combination is, I have to admit, frustrating—the condescension of her wisdom fused with the weakness of her vulnerability. As if I should revere her and protect her at once. Either she’s going to be a pain in the butt to live with, or I’m in a bad mood thanks to my intense jet lag. Or both.

  She is the first to drop her gaze.

  “Well, maybe something will open up at the dorm soon,” I say. “In the meantime, Gigi, thank you for taking me in. It’s—” I start looking around but stop quickly, which is the only way to keep a hint of believability in my tone “—nice here.”

  She doesn’t look up. “You’ve got orientation today, right?” She scribbles over her crossword. I’m not even sure she’s putting letters in the boxes. “Big day for you, between getting your Guardian and choosing your PT. Big day.”

  “Sorry?” This is the first I’ve heard of a Guardian or a PT. “What are those?”

  Still staring down, her eyes dart left, right, up, and down. “Oh, pish posh,” she sings, getting chirpy suddenly. “It’s not my job to walk you through your whole orientation day in advance, is it? No. I’ve got strict orders from Headmaster Villicus. Let you bunk here. Stay out of it. And get paid.”

  “Is there something in particular you’re staying out of?”

  “Oh, what do I know? Your life! Your school! All of the above.” Her expression can only be described as panicked when she looks up at me. “You’re the first student I’ve had stay with me. Don’t pay any attention to me.”

  With an odd smile, she shakes her stringy hair. Then she’s on her feet, shoving me toward the front door, where Skippy has resumed bouncing and barking madly at me; this dog hates me. And I’m getting the sense that Gigi feels the same way, but she opts to growl and wave away topics rather than bark and bounce. After rummaging through the front closet, Gigi pivots on her heels and pushes a thick fisherman’s coat at me. It smells like old fish carcasses. I take it and stop to look her in the eyes again, forcing her to look at me.

  “Are we cool?” I ask.

  “This is just a business arrangement,” she says. Then her voice softens ever so slightly. “I can’t say if it’s a good thing you’re here. But here you are. And I can’t change that.”

  As I stumble out of Gigi’s, a frigid breeze blows over my back, but I toss the fishy coat behind shrubs—I don’t need to replace my Death Chick moniker with Stinky Salmon or something worse—and wrap a scarf around my neck. It’s far too cold for September, but I have to remind myself I’m not in California anymore; beyond the fuzzy-looking trees and wide fern fronds is the cold Atlantic, not the warm Pacific. Breaking into a trot to keep from freezing, I dash up Gigi’s gravelly walkway to the main road and tell myself not to run too hard or I’ll show up at school sweating like the devil in a church.

  The Zin mansion looms to my right. My hometown is filled with houses designed to make neighbors and tourists sick with envy, and it appears Dr. Zin’s mansion was designed with the same thing in mind. But I’m not envious. Really, I’m not. After all, it looks like Dr. Zin’s place, cloaked in fog, with sharply pitched roofs stabbing up through the mist, is about one lightning storm away from haunted house status. I turn onto the long, narrow, and empty road and start toward the school. In the distance, over the treetops and through the fog, I can just make out the peaks and steeples of the campus. Even from here, it looks nothing like the big-box school I used to go to.

  “What did Dad get me into?” I ask myself and watch my breath freeze.

  Until this morning, I’d heard nothing of getting a Guardian or choosing a PT, which, if I had my way, would be txt shorthand for getting Pretty Teeth or Perfect Tests. Having never been to a private school—never mind the most elite one on the planet—I guess it makes sense that I don’t know. Maybe Guardians ‘n’ things are standard at these places.

  “It’ll be fine,” I assure myself. “You’ll figure it out.”

  That’s when I notice it: a red line painted across the road right before the Zin property begins. The paint is bright. I near it. I spy layers of faded red below it, as if it’s been painted and repainted weekly. For decades.

  With a little hop, I cross it. I tell myself to disregard it.

  As I start jogging, hoping not to be late, a loud Ducati whizzes by me, sending small rocks and twigs swirling into the air; I have to slow to pick a particularly wiry twig from the wilds of my hair. As I do, I hear the crackle of leaves underfoot and glance over my shoulder. A uniformed girl with a short brown bob and little bangs is walking far behind me. When I look again later, she’s gone. I jog the rest of the way to school, alone on the road.

  Cania Christy is one towering stone building backed by smaller converted houses and outbuildings, which I can barely distinguish beneath the slowly lifting perma-cloud that drapes campus. Just two things catch my immediate attention: the main building, over the front doors of which the name Goethe Hall is etched, and the silence. The campus is so noiseless that a part of me wonders if I’m a day early. I hear only the squealing protest of door hinges opening and closing and the caw of gulls muffled in the foggy seascape and absorbed by greenery that is so lush it’s suffocating. In the rare moments a breeze blows a hole through the fog, I glimpse the odd student meandering silently into or out of Goethe Hall; I’m at once comforted to know I didn’t arrive on the wrong day and curious to find that, without fail, every student is walking alone. It’s a strange but welcome relief to think that this student body may be comprised of people similar to me, people who haven’t always been in the in-crowd, people who are more focused on their goals and ambitions than on trying to be popular.

  Perhaps there are no cliques here. Perhaps they’re progressive enough at Cania Christy to ban bullying and the exclusionary cliques that help create it.

  “Now what’ve we got here?” a girl with a drawl says.

  I turn to find four girls in uniform watching me with their arms crossed. They’re impossibly well groomed and flawless. Obviously besties. Proof that I was dead wrong about my anticlique idea.

  Their cool gazes roll up and down my body, assessing me in a way with which I’ve grown unfortunately familiar. Every girl
knows this drill. These are the cool girls, ostensibly, and they have come to weigh and measure me. Their bodies, hair, makeup—even the way they rock their uniforms—are undeniable signs of their power on campus and their expectations of a perfectly charmed life, which their daddies will guarantee them. Like four slightly oversexed dolls, they stand at arm’s length from me, thrusting out their cleavage, tossing their straightened silky hair over their shoulders, and pursing their pouty, glossy lips. Their skin is so unblemished it glows. Their eyes are so clear they might see right through me.

  With my curls, crooked tooth, and stunningly empty bank account, I am their antithesis. Or, as I prefer to see it, they are mine.

  I’ve never gotten along well with the popular girls. And something in their collective scowl tells me I’m not about to become the fifth member of this particular clique.

  “You must be the new girl. The junior?” the ginger begins frostily, her tone warm like a Savannah summer but her eyes dead cold. Her followers—a Thai girl, an Indian girl, and a stark blonde—glare at me. “The California chick who thinks she’s some sort of artist?”

  “Unless there are two of us,” I reply. My years of dealing with rich, bitchy, and beautiful girls have given me a bit of a bite. “Why? Are you the president of my fan club?”

  “As if Harper would ever be your fan!” the Thai girl exclaims and looks at the ginger—evidently named Harper—for approval.

  I narrow my eyes. “I just meant how do you know so much about me?”

  With her friends mirroring her every move, Harper curls her lip and glares up at me. She’s barely five-two but is filled head to toe with piss and vinegar. “Everyone knows about you.”

  “And not in a good way,” the stark blonde adds, her words thick with a Russian accent.

  “It’s like when a circus freak walks into a room,” Harper drawls. “It’s hard for everyone else not to notice.”

  “Gee,” I begin, “I’d love to hear more about how your parents met, but I’ve got to get to school.”

  I try to cut through the foursome, but Harper shoves her hand against my chest, stopping me. Not cool.

  “Truth is, Merchant, we know who you are because it’s not every day Headmaster Villicus lets in some poor chick with a crazy mom who killed herself.” Harper smirks. “Word gets around.”

  “Well, you know nothing about my mother. But I’m sure you know all about getting around.”

  Removing her hand and pushing through their stunned crowd, I take the stairs into Goethe Hall two at a time and ignore the girls’ voices as they tell each other that I’m not worth the hassle, that I’m ugly, that I totally need braces, and that I’m never going to get the “Big V,” which sounds like something sexual but hell if I know. Inside the ornate Goethe Hall, I somehow find my way into the long queue where I try to shake off my encounter, try to stop seeing red, and wait impatiently to collect my orientation package from an old, wrinkled secretary who spits when she speaks.

  “Did you say your name’s Martha Cennen?” the secretary asks me as she shuffles through disorganized stacks of orientation packets. She smells like the bottom of an ashtray. She is wearing an enormous emerald brooch. Behind her, a dozen secretaries, also wearing massive pendants, type on typewriters, one finger at a time.

  “No, it’s Anne Merchant.”

  “Maybe you remind me of someone I used to know.”

  I sigh. “I’m a junior in the Fine Arts stream.”

  “A junior. Fine Arts. Tanner Chanem.”

  “Anne Merchant,” I correct.

  “It’s not Nate N. Nemrach?” Her gaze meets mine.

  There’s an odd, out-of-place playfulness in her expression. And then I realize where she’s getting all those other names from.

  “Are you just turning my name into anagrams?” I ask.

  Like a caught child, she quickly shakes her head no and dives, with a giggle, back into searching the stacks. Or at least putting on a show of searching.

  The ticking of single typewriter keys quickly becomes grating. Behind me, a Mandarin guy and an Italian girl—who are, like everyone else in the queue, coldly ignoring their peers—have started grumbling in their respective languages. I assume the wait and the maddeningly slow secretary are getting to them like they’re getting to me. At last, the secretary pokes her head out of the pile of packets, lifts one victoriously, and yanks a sticky note off the front of it.

  She reads the note, and a slow smile spreads across her face. “Message for you, Anne.”

  “From my dad?”

  She shakes her head, but, before she can explain, a PA announcement interrupts her: “All new students, meet at Valedictorian Hall by nine o’clock for your campus tours. All new students.” A glance at the clock shows it’s nearly nine already, and I don’t even know where Valedictorian Hall is. I look expectantly at her.

  “You wanna go on the campus tour, don’t you?” she asks me. I don’t have much patience at the best of times, but she’s killing me. She knows I have to go. It’s like she’s taking pleasure in dragging this out and watching everyone in line squirm as we wait helplessly for her.

  “I’d like to go, yes.”

  She glances at the sticky note. “Is your dad named Mr. Merchant?”

  “Yes.”

  She glances at it again. “Well then your dad didn’t leave a message for you.”

  “Who did?”

  Her grin spreads. It’s yellow enough to be pure gold. “Headmaster Villicus. He’d like to see you. Which I guess means you won’t be going on the campus tour.”

  Handing me my packet, she points me down a long, dark hall, which brings me to a set of empty wooden benches outside the headmaster’s closed door. I take an uncomfortable seat, wait to be called in, and briefly admire a selection of Beksinski’s beautiful nightmares condemning me from their frames on the walls. I start absently reviewing my class schedule and syllabuses—all while trying not to stew over my encounter with the girls outside and failing miserably. It sucks to have already made enemies of what are surely the most popular girls here, but it’s not exactly new territory for me. I thought it’d be different at Cania—I thought I’d have a clean slate and the protection of this school uniform—but tales of my California life seem to have preceded me.

  I can feel the slightly optimistic outlook I brought to the island receding like an ocean wave, exposing the oppressive heft of my unshakable life story.

  There are no rewrites in store for me here. No blank canvases. What was will continue to be. That Harper and her pack of perfectly coifed skanks knew where I come from—that they knew about my mother’s sickness and subsequent suicide—reinforces what a part of me already guessed: if I want a better life, I’m going to have to fight for it. As Anne Merchant. Not as some watered-down, poser, more acceptable version of myself.

  A commotion at the end of the hall interrupts my thoughts, and I glance up to see three silhouettes hurriedly heading my way. Two are tall and lean, and the other is shorter and marginally buff. It’s clear that one of the tall guys is hauling the other two toward Villicus’s office, in spite of their reluctance. Their bickering reaches me before they do.

  “It’s called the First Amendment,” the shorter guy cries. His voice seems to be holding back a laugh, and, as they come into the light, I can see him grinning. “Freedom of speech. Freedom to assemble.”

  “That’s enough, Mr. Stone.” One of the tall guys is, in fact, a tall man, who is dressed impeccably in an expensive-looking suit with a cashmere scarf and overcoat. His dark hair is brushed elegantly away from his face, and his frosty blue glare glows against his olive skin. Obviously, he’s a member of the faculty. I hope he’s not my teacher, though, because it would be tragic for my GPA if I spent my class time gawking at the teacher and stammering through my comments.

  “I should be allowed to protest the Big V race,” the Stone boy insists, “without your kid getting on my butt for it and without Villicus tearing me a new one!”


  “Pilot, your picket sign read ‘The Only V I Want Is Between Her Legs,’” the tall boy says and, frustrated, sits on the bench across from me. He drops his face into his hands and sighs. “That’s not protesting. That’s peacocking. Aggressively.”

  Pilot Stone smirks. His dark gaze dashes my way, and he smiles mischievously. I raise my papers in front of my face so it’s not quite so obvious that I’m eavesdropping.

  “Dr. Z, come on,” Pilot says as he squeezes into the bench next to me, forcing me to shove down when there’s hardly space to do so. He smells clean, and his leg and arm against mine are nice and warm. “I won’t tell Villie about Ben here destroying my property—”

  “Your property! It was offensive garbage on craft paper!” the tall boy cries out.

  “—if you just let this whole thing go.”

  The negotiating stops quickly with a long, heavy pause. I wish now that I wasn’t holding my syllabus up as high as I am so I could see their faces. Relying on my peripheral vision, I strain to make out Pilot’s expression, but all I can see is that he is looking in the direction of Dr. Z, who is standing in front of Headmaster Villicus’s office.

  “Wait to be called in,” Dr. Z orders before rapping on the door and abruptly disappearing inside.

  I lower my syllabus to see Pilot mockingly salute the spot where Dr. Z was just standing and the tall guy with the swimmer’s build—Ben, I believe his name is—run his hands through his thick sandy hair.

  At once, both Pilot and Ben turn their gazes on me.

  I have to tell myself not to blush. Because if these guys are even remotely representative of the male population in this student body, well, I can feel my optimism returning already.

  two

  THE BIG V

  ADMITTEDLY, I’VE NEVER BEEN ASKED TO GO TO THE movies or for coffee. I’ve never held hands with a guy. And—unless you count a very strange moment when, at the age of eleven, after sketching a beautiful dead boy in his open casket, I kissed his cheek—I seem to have made it to and past my sweet sixteen without being properly kissed.