The Finishing School

by Joanna Goodman

  Kersti should have put it together a long time ago. Hamidou had everything to lose, everything to hide. She was the one who’d wanted those girls expelled, just like Bueche said. He hadn’t lied about that. Even telling the police about Cressida’s car accident was a way for Hamidou to plant the seed of an alcohol-related accident; it gave the police precedence.

  Cressida must have threatened Hamidou the night she got the ledger. Assuming there was incriminating proof of the abuse in it, she probably warned Hamidou she was going to go to Bueche and Harzenmoser with it. Hamidou must have panicked. How could she not? She was a small slip of a woman, but she was athletic and strong. She had remarkable energy. Fueled with fear and rage, who’s to say she couldn’t have pushed a drunken eighteen-year-old off her balcony? And then faked a suicide note?

  All this is going through Kersti’s mind as she makes her way across the lawn to the podium. She hasn’t seen Hamidou yet. She looked for her earlier, heart pounding, palms sweating, and was secretly relieved not to have found her.

  “Bonjour,” she says, her voice a tremor. “Thank you, Monsieur Bueche.”

  She looks out into the crowd and sees Jay, Noa, and Raf, front and center, beaming at her supportively. A few rows back, she spots Hamidou. Their eyes lock. Hamidou smiles and waves. Kersti holds on to the podium and lowers her eyes. She’s sweating. Trickles of water rolling down her back, clinging to the modal fabric of her dress. I know what you are, she thinks.

  The audience is silent, waiting. Kersti forces a smile and draws a breath. Her heartburn is killing her. The boys are fluttering wildly inside her belly, probably feeling her stress, reacting to her nervous energy. “It’s an honor and a privilege to stand up here as one of the One Hundred Women of the Lycée,” she begins. “I would not be here speaking about my literary career had it not been for the foundation I received as a student in the nineties.”

  She looks up from her notes and connects with Jay. He looks worried.

  “My English teacher at the Lycée, Mrs. Fithern, used to tell me I had an unpolished diamond,” Kersti continues. “She always said, ‘You must polish your diamond.’ She encouraged me to read. She’d say, ‘Writers read, luv.’ She suggested I write a short story and I did and it was terrible and all she said was, ‘Keep polishing that diamond, luv.’”

  The audience chuckles.

  “I didn’t have the confidence back then to even think I could be a writer when I grew up,” Kersti says. “I knew I enjoyed writing, but it was here, at the Lycée, that I first discovered I actually had something worth pursuing.”

  She’s struggling to stay focused; her mind keeps going off on tangents. Hamidou. The naked Polaroids. Cressida’s eyes. The dirty note. Who left it for her? And why now?

  “But I didn’t just learn to write here,” Kersti plods on. “I also learned to observe and to absorb. We were exposed to so many extraordinary places and experiences, which helped to shape me and pave the way for a lifetime of wanting to create extraordinary places and experiences. I’ll never forget visiting Shakespeare’s birth house in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and then seeing Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Who gets to do that?”

  A few people applaud. “I was a kid from Toronto,” she says, glancing up and accidentally making eye contact with Hamidou again. Child molester. Murderer. Are you still a murderer if you take away someone’s life without actually ending it? Kersti looks away, but as she’s about to resume her speech, she notices someone standing behind the last row, over by the path to the tennis courts.

  Alison Rumsky.

  Kersti’s mind starts racing. What is she doing here? She wasn’t supposed to come. Said she couldn’t. And then all at once, the puzzle pieces slide into place. When they met for lunch in Toronto, Kersti mentioned the ledger, how she was trying to connect it to what happened to Cressida. Alison never asked what the ledger was, didn’t show the least bit of curiosity. It was like she knew.

  It never occurred to Kersti at the time that there was no reason for Alison to know about the ledger. She wasn’t even friends with them when Amoryn Lashwood sent it to Cressida. And yet she knew about it. Who told her?

  It’s starting to make sense now. Her resentment toward the Lycée. Her wound, her darkness. I can’t go.

  Alison was one of Hamidou’s victims.

  Chapter 32

  LAUSANNE—June 1998

  Volleyball is torture. All Kersti wants to do is get back to Huber House and read the ledger with Cressida, but it’s like each game is unfolding in slow motion. Usually Alison’s deadly hitting makes quick work of the other teams. They’ve been the undefeated Vaud champions three years in a row, but tonight the Aiglon team has stepped it up and is challenging them on every point. Now they’re in a third game tiebreaker.

  Kersti is still second setter. She’s spent most of the time on the bench tonight, which makes waiting all the more excruciating. All she can do is watch and keep checking the time. M. Mahler is pacing the sideline, pumping his fist in the air, shouting at the team in German. Set. Set! Zree hits. Ovah! Du idioten! Set to Alison. Set to Alison, Dummköpfe! Time out! Time out! What are you doing, imbeciles? With his old-fashioned uniform and overused whistle, his cartoonish accent and wiry, white hair sticking out of every possible socket—head, nose, ears—Mahler has become something of a celebrity, renowned throughout the canton for his boisterous Germanic slurs and his impeccable record.

  At around nine thirty, Alison finally spikes the game-winning ball. They all jump to their feet, cheering—Kersti because now she can finally get back to Huber House—and line up to shake hands with their opponents. Mahler is happy. He kisses Alison and swings her around. “Glückwunsch, mein Meister!” he cries. No longer imbeciles, now they’re his champions.

  On the bus ride back to the Lycée, Kersti sits beside Alison. Neither of them says much. Kersti is thinking about the ledger, not wanting Cressida and Lille to look through it without her. Alison is staring out the window with a sad face, even though they’ve just won the championship.

  “You okay?” Kersti asks her.

  “Sure,” Alison says, not turning her head.

  “Are you looking forward to graduating?”

  Alison lets out a strange laugh.

  “You’ve probably got athletic scholarships everywhere,” Kersti says, trying to engage her.

  “I’m going to UBC for volleyball.”

  “Cool.”

  Alison doesn’t ask Kersti where she’s going next year, which is fine because Kersti doesn’t know. Instead she says, “Is Cressida still sleeping with Mr. Fithern?” Completely out of nowhere.

  “They’re traveling together this summer,” Kersti blurts, almost gleefully. “He’s leaving Mrs. Fithern.”

  Alison shakes her head in disgust. Her face turns pink, even her freckles. She slumps down in her seat, turns back to the window, and doesn’t say another word. As though Kersti is somehow at fault.

  By the time Kersti reaches Cressida’s room, it’s well after ten and Lille is the one she finds sitting on the bed. “Where’s Cressida?”

  “I don’t know,” Lille says quietly, her voice faraway. She seems preoccupied. “I just got here.”

  “Are you okay?” Kersti asks her. “You seem spacey.”

  “Komiko said she just saw Cress on the second floor. She was leaving.”

  “Leaving?”

  Kersti rushes over to the balcony and pushes open the doors just as Cressida is crossing the lawn, almost languidly, as if she’s out for a stroll in her own garden. Even in the dark, Kersti is able to make out the shadow of her lithe body gliding on the grass. The wild tangle of hair blowing out behind her like a cape, the gazelle legs that are not quite concealed by her knee-length white cotton skirt.

  She watches Cressida approach the iron gates, which are supposed to keep them safely locked inside the campus, and her chest flames with anger. Cressida was supposed to wait for them to read the ledger. Kersti stays out on the balcony until Cress
ida vanishes in the darkness—off to break Magnus’s heart—and when she comes back inside the room, Lille is gone.

  She decides to look for the ledger herself. She walks over to Cressida’s bed and pulls back the duvet, but the book isn’t there. Cressida must have moved it. Kersti does a swift scan around the room and then starts opening drawers, lifting the mattress, checking under the bed. She sifts through Cressida’s school bag, the papers on her desk, her closet.

  She must have taken it with her, which makes no sense. Why would she have done that? Kersti tidies Cressida’s room, making sure it looks exactly the way she found it, and then shuffles dejectedly back to her room. She changes out of her sweaty volleyball uniform and without even showering or brushing her teeth, falls into bed wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts. She lies there for a long time, waiting. She’ll wait as long as she has to until she hears Cressida’s door, and then she’ll charge in there and demand to see that ledger.

  She stares up at her sloped ceiling, seething and restless. Her window is open and she can hear Mme. Hamidou talking on the second floor with the other on-duty teacher, whose voice Kersti recognizes as Mrs. Fithern’s. Mrs. Fithern has to board here all week, which means Mr. Fithern is home alone. Will Cressida pay him a visit after she leaves Magnus’s place? Will they celebrate her new freedom?

  It always lines up for Cressida. No matter what she does, it invariably works out for her. And as Kersti lies here simmering, she begins to imagine her life without Cressida—an inevitable reality as the school year draws to a close.

  Maybe it won’t be such a bad thing, she considers. It goes without saying she’ll miss her. She’ll miss confiding in her, she’ll miss her pep talks, their laughter, their antics, her unconditional love. What she won’t miss is the perpetual hum of inadequacy she feels whenever she’s in Cressida’s presence. Or that throbbing sense of injustice that never has a voice. Why does everything work out for her? Why don’t the rules apply to her? Why did she get away with it?

  Kersti knows Cressida will always want her in her life, even just to know Kersti is there in some corner of the world, her reliable little beacon of ordinary; a connection to normalcy. She’ll anticipate Kersti’s postcards from Toronto and find them comforting, particularly while she’s jet-setting around the world, handing off lovers like relay batons. “Oh, it’s from my best friend,” she’ll tell her Spanish bullfighter lover. She’ll treasure Kersti’s lame postcards of the CN Tower and the Hockey Hall of Fame as though they’re novelties, just like Kersti’s boring life will also be a novelty. But maybe the long-distance friendship—which is not much of a friendship at all—will prove vastly healthier for Kersti’s self-esteem.

  Chapter 33

  LAUSANNE—June 2016

  Kersti somehow manages to finish her speech. It’s a good thing she prepared notes. As she returns to her seat, she realizes she has absolutely no recollection of what she’s just said. “You were great,” Jay whispers.

  Noa leans over and squeezes her knee. “Good job.”

  Kersti turns around to look at Alison. They acknowledge one another. Kersti mouths, Do you want to talk?

  Alison nods and points toward the tennis courts.

  “I have to pee,” Kersti tells Jay. “I’ll be back.”

  She gets out of her chair again and squeezes through the aisle. As she comes to the end of the row, she realizes the person whose legs she’s climbing over belong to Angela Zumpt. “Hi, Angela,” she says.

  Angela is noticeably heavier and has a few more wrinkles and gray hairs, but otherwise she hasn’t changed much. For today’s ceremony, she’s wearing serviceable chino pants and a yellow button-down. There are beads of sweat on her forehead.

  “Hello, Kersti,” Angela mutters, without really looking at her.

  Kersti escapes and finds Alison at the tennis courts.

  “What are you doing here?” Kersti asks her, wasting no time on small talk.

  “I have to tell you something.”

  “Alison, I think I know what you’re going to say.”

  “I don’t think you do,” she says, shaking her head, her red hair swinging. “I know something that might . . . well, it might help you get some closure.”

  “Alison—”

  “Mrs. Fithern didn’t have anything to do with Cressida’s accident,” she says, her freckled cheeks turning pink and splotchy. “This is hard to say—”

  “Alison,” Kersti interrupts. “Did you come here to tell me about Hamidou?”

  Her pink splotches turn bright red, flaring up all over her neck and chest.

  “I’ve seen the Polaroids,” Kersti says.

  “What are you talking about?” Alison asks. “What Polaroids?”

  “Of Cressida naked in Hamidou’s bed, for one,” Kersti says, lowering her voice. “And a very disturbing note from Cressida to Hamidou.”

  “Who gave that to you?”

  “I have no idea,” Kersti says. “I thought maybe you—”

  “No. I’ve never told anyone. I never let her take my picture.”

  “So it did happen to you?”

  “It started when I was eight,” she says, her tone flat. “In third grade. She came to my room one night and got into my bed. She told me she loved me like a daughter and offered to snuggle with me.”

  “You don’t have to tell me—”

  “I said yes, of course. I loved her, too. And the first few times, that’s all she did. Snuggle me. I felt so cared for, so loved. I was lonely at the Lycée and her coming to me at nighttime and lying down with me, it meant the world to me.”

  Kersti sits down on the bench feeling hot and tired. Alison sits down beside her.

  “She used to scratch my back and hum songs to me,” Alison remembers. “I would fall asleep like that, feeling so content. And then one night, she was scratching my back and her hand slid around to my chest. She fondled me for a while and I honestly didn’t know what to make of it. I was confused. I don’t remember being traumatized at all, not at the time. That came later. At the time, I just remember thinking that maybe that was how European moms snuggled.”

  Alison looks up at the sky, squinting into the sun. “Anyway, it went on for years. She would masturbate me and then I would do it to her. I thought I was the only one.”

  “Did you ever try to tell someone?” Kersti asks, not wanting to offend her. Knowing she’s out of her depth.

  “No,” Alison answers. “I loved her. It was very confusing. I dreaded her visits, but part of me didn’t want it to stop. It was really the only affection I got. At some point I clued into the fact that it was wrong. I was ashamed. I thought it was my fault. I never would have told anyone. In fact, until I got together with you in Toronto, the plan was to basically take it to my grave.”

  “What happened?”

  Alison shrugs, looks away. “I guess you got me thinking about what happened to Cressida,” she says. “You got inside my head.”

  “Did you know it was also happening to her?”

  “I never knew for sure,” she says. “Until the night she fell.”

  “What happened?”

  “She stopped in my room when I was getting ready for volleyball,” Alison remembers. “She was very cryptic. She told me she had proof of what was happening. She never used Hamidou’s name, but she showed me a ledger. I don’t know what was in it, but she told me she was going to bury it somewhere until she could give it to Bueche and Harzenmoser.”

  “Bury it?”

  “Hamidou used to go through our things,” Alison says. “I’d come back to my room and I could tell she’d been in there. She would leave little clues. We had no privacy. I’m sure Cressida was paranoid. Plus, she was always very dramatic.”

  “So she knew it was happening to you, but you didn’t know it was happening to her?” Kersti clarifies.

  “I guess so.”

  “No one else besides Cressida ever said anything to you about Hamidou?”

  “God, no. It was like an uns
poken rule for us, I guess. No one ever asked me and I never asked anyone.”

  “What about Lille?”

  “I always figured if it was happening to anyone else, it was probably Lille. She was so damaged. But I never had the courage to bring it up.”

  “That must be what she was going to tell me in her letter,” Kersti says, thinking about how Lille’s fifth point had been left blank. “She never finished.”

  “I don’t blame her,” Alison says. “Especially Lille. She had so much shame.”

  “I wonder if Cressida went to every girl who she knew was being abused by Hamidou and told all of them about the ledger?” Kersti says, thinking out loud, suddenly remembering the look on Lille’s face when she burst into Cressida’s room after volleyball that night. What if Cressida had already showed Lille the ledger and told her of her plan to go forward with it?

  “Alison, didn’t you think Cressida’s fall might have had something to do with the sexual abuse?” Kersti asks her. “I mean it happened the night she told you she was going to Bueche with proof—”

  Alison looks away guiltily. Her body sags, her eyes cloud over. “The mind does extraordinary things to cope,” she says softly. “You wouldn’t believe the lies I’ve told myself, the denial, the rationalizations, the blind spots. I had to find a way to function and I did.”

  In a way, Kersti understands that. Hasn’t she done exactly the same thing all this time?

  “The guilt finally got me,” Alison says. “That’s why I came here.”

  She looks away for a moment and Kersti can tell she’s struggling to hold back tears. She’s not the type to let anyone see her be vulnerable. “I’m also going to tell the school about Hamidou,” she says, her discomfort palpable. “Which I should have done twenty years ago. I could have prevented—”

  “Don’t go there,” Kersti says gently. “You can stop her now.”

  “I’m going to Bueche first,” she says. “And if it turns out Hamidou did push Cressida, I’ll do whatever I can to help Deirdre.”