Pearl

by Deirdre Riordan Hall

  “Sorry if I was weird on Halloween,” I say at last, belatedly breaking the seal on my silence on the subject that had been eating away at me.

  He shakes his head. “No worries. I did you a favor and didn’t tell Sorel. She would have had fun with that one.”

  I give him a questioning look.

  “Sorel’s OK, she’s just the mama hen. I suppose she thinks Pepper and I are her chicks or something. She can be territorial.”

  “If that’s the case, it seems like she wants me to earn my position in the pecking order, at least when we’re around you guys. Other times she’s as sweet as the fudge she gobbles when she can’t break free for a cigarette.”

  He laughs. “What I do think is weird is that it seems like you’ve been avoiding—”

  But Mrs. Dittly shushes us as she explains our assignment. While Grant and I work through a page full of numbers that blur between black and battleship, ash and gunmetal, our hands brush, sending a zing through me. Creases form between his eyebrows, just visible beneath his slouchy knit hat, as he works at a long equation. I would like to sketch or paint him. I try to take a photo in my memory, the way he bites his inner lip when he’s focusing, the way his lips part when he looks up at me, his angles and symmetry.

  After that, I find myself in the woods more often, hoping Grant will join us in the roost. During boisterous mealtimes, we sit at the corner table, some combination of Sorel, Pepper, Grant, and me, passionately discussing the injustices in the world or debating our favorite bands.

  One afternoon, the sky is as moody as most of the students before exams. Sorel rushes off about a call she has to make. Pepper, lost without her, shambles away at her heels, leaving Grant and me alone in the clearing.

  Grant stares at his cigarette like he doesn’t know why he’d put something like that to his lips when there might be something better. He flicks it away and steps closer. The forest lights up with the electricity of us as I meet him halfway. We’re standing shoulder to shoulder, a mere arm’s length away.

  “Thanksgiving,” I try again, ready to inquire about his holiday and desperate not to be so keenly aware of how glossy my lips are and how his part in amusement or with a question.

  He shakes his head. “Tell me two truths and one lie,” he says boldly. “Don’t tell me which is which. I have to guess.”

  I shift and rub my hands together and then stuff them in my pockets.

  “You can tell a lot about a person based off the stories they tell themselves.”

  “Yeah. Uh, OK. I was raised by wolves. My birthday is next month, and my favorite fruit is apples.”

  “True, true, false. You seem more like a cherry kind of girl.”

  If my cheeks weren’t already pink from the cold, dry air, I’d have blushed. “You got it. Your turn.”

  He links his pinkie in mine and leads me over to sit on the rock. “My brother is one of my best friends. I’m shit at card games and”—he turns in my direction, gazing into my gray eyes—“I’m looking at my favorite color.”

  I turn his words over in my mind; the blush replaced with warmth, radiating from my chest, north, south, east, and west. “True, true, true.”

  “You got it. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t lie to you. Not to anyone. Can’t do it. Except, occasionally to the faculty if I’m somewhere I’m not supposed to be.” He looks toward the path leading back to campus.

  “We better head back. Don’t want you to have to break that rule,” I say.

  Despite my occasional violations of school rules, I’m prepared academically when we arrive at the holiday homestretch, the last few weeks leading up to exams, followed by Christmas vacation.

  I’m on my third attempt at the still life in Shale’s class. I told Charmindy what happened after Thanksgiving, but she didn’t seem surprised.

  He paces around the classroom, casually throwing out comments that seize even the strongest egos. “Too thick, there, that line,” he barks at Charmindy, whose line isn’t thick, not really.

  “What is this, a doodle? A child could do better than this. You are no longer children,” he practically shouts at a boy with green paint in his hair. “I didn’t wake up today to be disappointed,” he hollers to all of us.

  I try to keep my hand steady but feel as though he’s breaking me down. I tremble when he passes, afraid he’s going to swipe my canvas from my easel and toss it out the window.

  Thankfully, there aren’t any more still life casualties, but I’m the last student in the classroom during free studio hours. It’s still open season. He sits on a stool in the corner, under a reading light. Every now and then, he says “Hmm” as he peruses a thick book.

  I add a final layer of color to intensify the three-dimensional aspect of the fruit, then put my brush down. I don’t know if I’m done with the painting, but I feel done. Without looking, I close my eyes, back away, and clean my materials.

  When I return from the washroom to get my bag, the shape of Shale’s silhouette takes form in front of my easel. His broad shoulders stiffen at the creaking sound from the floor as I approach. He turns to me.

  “Are you done?” he asks. “Are you handing this in to me?”

  I’m afraid to answer. He’s a live wire. I say the most honest thing. “It feels done.”

  “You do not paint to win my approval, Pearl. There is no gold star awarded in this class. I rarely write comments on your grading sheets. I don’t do recommendations.”

  I want to know what he does do, aside from tearing everyone’s confidence to shreds. I nod, because anything else will come out wrong. Instead, I want to ask him questions, fill canvases with the answers. I want to know about The Starless Night and what came before and after. How he makes the dried pigments mixed with oil explode from the canvas in some places and, elsewhere, downy and soft, like a nap.

  “Then you are the first one done with your still life. Until vacation, you will replicate this. Exactly. Then I never want to see you do a still life again, at least not someone else’s. If you take a sudden fancy to bowls of fruit and vases of flowers, then by all means. This was merely an exercise. Do you understand?”

  I don’t.

  “When you return from holiday, you will do a self-portrait. I want to see who you are.”

  That night, I daze out the window into the windy night; the white twinkle lights festooning campus glitter through my window. I reflect on how, historically, the holiday season often resulted in disaster. If my mom and I spent it with family, the copious consumption of holiday cocktails inevitably led to fighting. If we spent it alone, I’d listen to the lock click on her doorknob as she ducked into her room to get high. Not very merry. Another time I taped paper snowflakes to the windows. I wanted a white Christmas. In a drunken fury, Janet smashed one, shouting how she hated snow.

  I doodle a broken window and then rub my finger over the scar on my hand from when I picked up the glass. Maybe this year I can paint myself into a different scene. Part of me misses my mom. But I can’t identify exactly what about her I miss. I became so accustomed to looking after her and making sure she didn’t go too far off the rails; without her to occupy me, part of me feels idle and mismatched with pieces of confusion. I peer over my shoulder, into the warm glow of my dorm room. I also have high grades, a growing portfolio of paintings and fashion designs, and what I might call a few friends.

  Chapter 9

  One evening, as we walk to the dining hall, Charmindy says, “Break cannot come soon enough, but sometimes I wonder what would happen if I couldn’t finish this insane amount of work assigned these last weeks before vacation.”

  I imagine her world ending and have a peek at mine. Sorel left campus for a family function, and Grant has a soccer banquet. As to Pepper’s whereabouts, I have no clue, probably in bed with a video game, leaving my sole remaining friend, Charmindy.

  “I suppose you could create
a hypothesis and find out,” I suggest.

  “I would never. Where are you going for break?” she asks.

  “Not sure yet. You?” I answer with honest uncertainty.

  She offers excruciating details on the long flight back to India, a wedding, and all the family she’s obligated to visit. My mind rudely wanders away.

  Charmindy and I get along well enough, but other than her quiet interest in art, we actually don’t have much in common. She’s on the edge of the alpha girls, as we called them at my old school. As her roommate, I skirt the periphery, but they don’t accept me, and I sense gossip crackles whenever I leave a room, especially if Terran happens to be in it. Since that first day, the sneer that dissolves into a puckered smile whenever I look in her direction makes me certain she doesn’t like me.

  Most of the girls here, Charmindy included, come from parents with money. They had their names down at Laurel Hill—or at least private school penciled in—when they were born, like my cousins, Erica and Logan. They have new cars waiting for them at home and exotic trips planned abroad. If I didn’t know better, I’d think we live on different planets. And I don’t want them to know about my native terrain.

  Charmindy’s friend Aubrey, plus Terran, Brett, and a few others, joins us at a table in the dining hall. Aubrey promptly spills a delicate forkful of marinara sauce all over her Burberry merino-wool sweater.

  “Some soda water will probably get it out,” I offer, standing up to go fill a cup.

  “Don’t be silly,” she huffs and rolls her eyes. “I’ll just order a new one when I get back to my dorm.”

  I’m definitely from Venus or some other distant world. Even if I couldn’t get the stain out, I would strategically cover it with a pin or repurpose it, removing the sleeves for a vest or something creative.

  “If you’re just going to throw it out—” I start, but she interrupts, saving me from embarrassing myself.

  “Of course I’ll toss it in the holiday clothing-drive box,” she says, meaning the one in the student center. “I’m sure some poor person can get the sauce out. They probably won’t even care,” she adds as if I’m not some poor person.

  As the girls talk about what they’re hoping to get for Christmas, I catch Charmindy eyeing me in apology. And I catch Brett eyeing her with interest.

  “What?” Terran asks, glancing between the three of us.

  Charmindy shakes her head as if to say it was nothing.

  Terran turns to me. “I saw the look you gave her. What was that about?”

  I shrug. “Nothing,” I answer. I’ve been the new girl enough times to know to keep my head low and avoid being noticed, at risk of people finding out about my home life. It’s better kept a secret, especially the not-home life I recently left in flames. I think about how I still haven’t heard from my mom. I tell myself the polite deceit that no news is good news.

  Terran jars me from my thoughts. “No, I don’t think it was nothing. I saw you,” she accuses me. Her eyes flit to Brett more than once.

  “I wasn’t looking. Honest.”

  Her eyes narrow, and her lip lifts in a sneer. “PJ, do you think—” She points between Brett and me and then starts laughing.

  I play with a prickly, artificial holly leaf glued onto the centerpiece of the table, and I recall the numerous times my mom had gone to rehab and how afterward, ranging anywhere from half a year to a month, she’d stay off drugs, illegal drugs anyway. She takes a range of prescriptions for obscure pain, anxiety, and depression. I can hardly keep them straight, which means she certainly doesn’t follow the directions on the bottles. But then again, the more medicated, the easier to avoid looking too closely at the mess she’s made of her life. Comfortably numb. Sometimes I think I understand the desire too well.

  I rise to bring my tray to the dishwasher and to leave this scene that I sense is about to unravel.

  Terran abruptly stands up and stops me when I’m just out of earshot of the table. “If you think there’s the possibility of anything going on between Brett and you, you’re crazy. And if you think I’m going to let you get away with whatever pathetic fantasies you have running through your little mind, you are mistaken. Why don’t you go back to sitting at the loser table, Pearl Jaeger?”

  I prickle at the sight of her devilish smile telling me she knows more than I want her to.

  Mid-December brings bone-biting cold. I wake to a thin dusting of snow on the morning of my birthday. After precal, Grant slips an envelope in my hand as I stuff the thick textbook into my backpack.

  “Sorel told me,” he confesses as I open it.

  I look down at the folded blue paper. On the front, it reads Let’s not talk. Let’s not be friends.

  I open it, and on the inside, it says Let’s just . . .

  Below is a print of two people embracing, their lips tight together so it’s almost impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. Their hair tangles like curling vines.

  On the bottom it says,

  Happy Birthday.

  Yours,

  Grant.

  When I look up, Grant has disappeared, but the words on the card bypass my mind and shoot dangerously toward my heart.

  That night, Charmindy and some of the other girls in the dorm make me a huge tray of brownies, which we all devour in the common room before Terran, the dorm assistant, reminds us it’s nearly lights-out. She looks at me pointedly with pursed lips, as if I’m to blame for having a birthday, for being born.

  Part of me wants to bask in the celebration, but Terran’s expression brings the sharp memory that over the years my birthday has only received sporadic acknowledgment, dimming the moment like blown-out candles. I pad up to my room. In the dark, I screen memories of birthdays past, when Janet didn’t remember until the last minute, stomping out happy sentiment.

  I wipe my eyes and click on my reading light. With colored pencils, I sketch a dress consisting of previous birthday gifts from my mother: candles, an old cassette tape, a box of animal crackers, a calendar with puppies, and a spiral-bound notebook and crayons. It doesn’t translate well onto paper, and I crumple it up. I slip the card from Grant safely between two blank pages and feel it there, warm, an invitation.

  Sorel catches me brushing the bits of brownie from my teeth in the bathroom. My spit is chocolatey.

  “Happy birthday. We’re both seventeen. Woo-hoo,” she says sardonically. “I have a present in mind, but it’ll have to wait until we can escape for a weekend off campus. For now, come down to my room at eleven thirty and don’t get caught.” Before I can protest, she sweeps out of the bathroom.

  I tuck into bed at 11:05, tossing about whether to sneak down to Sorel’s room or stay put. By now, I know that many of the girls turn their lights back on after lights-out, and late-night visits within the dorm aren’t uncommon. It isn’t a huge deal, I tell myself. She probably wants to hang out. Then I worry about her roommate, Lucy. Will she be asleep? What if she tells?

  I bargain with myself that if I fall asleep, I’ll just shrug it off in the morning and apologize to Sorel with the truth. Obviously, I can’t set an alarm.

  The minutes tick by. At 11:15, I’m still wide-awake. Charmindy breathes deeply from across the room.

  I try recalling Grant’s expression when he passed the card to me, but the commotion in the classroom as we packed up and my own surprise obscures it. Let’s not talk. Let’s not be friends. Let’s just . . . Sorel mentioned he’d fooled around with many girls. Maybe he has a stack of those cards, ready and waiting, his way of proposing the idea instead of waiting awkwardly for the right moment. Although we’ve shared plenty of those: in Mr. Meshcheryakov’s math class, the dining hall, the woods . . .

  The glowing numbers of the digital clock flick to 11:25.

  Sorel claims to sneak out to Pepper’s dorm a few times a week, going on her second year. She has
the hickeys to prove it. She’s never been in trouble. Whatever she has planned will be fine.

  At 11:28, I slide back the covers and place my bare feet on the cold wooden floor. I stand motionless, making sure I haven’t disturbed Charmindy, then pad over to the door, turn the knob slowly, and exit.

  I quickly formulate an excuse in case Connie catches me in the hall. I have to use the bathroom. Duh. I drank too much soda at my party and need the toilet. When I pass the bathroom and move to the stairs, I create a second plan; I’ll claim to have forgotten something in the common room.

  Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, I can’t decide, I don’t need any excuses, because in moments I stand in Sorel’s room. Lucy snoozes on the top bunk, and Sorel leans against the wall, with a book light illuminating the pages of a thick novel. Maybe she just wants to hang out and talk Tolstoy. My jitters dissipate.

  “I didn’t think you’d actually come,” she says, not looking up from her book.

  “What about Lucy?”

  “What about Lucy?” she echoes. She slams the book closed and levels me with a glare. “Listen, she’s part of the Korean Connection; don’t think I’d just have some lousy roommate that’s going to rat me out. Lucy and her friends work harder than anyone else at this school. If they want to let loose on the weekends, far be it from me to say a word, but I’ll do a public service and aid and abet them on their occasional exodus from the campus by providing inebriating beverages. And sometimes I score pills so they can pull all-nighters before exams to study and then others so they can sleep afterward. I just look the other way, and so does she. Lucy’s all right. Trust me.”

  I don’t want to know any more. Experience has taught me the less I know about sketchy dealings the better.

  “But”—she looks me up and down—“I won’t have Grant see you wearing your pj’s, PJ. I should have been specific when I said what we were doing; as if you couldn’t have figured it out.” Her eyes roll ghoulishly in the low light. She stalks to her closet and pulls out a sweatshirt and jeans. “Put these on,” she orders.