“It’s kind of a taboo topic. Everyone’s really touchy about it. So, do me a favor?”
“Yeah.” She’s got me wondering.
I plan to spend the day on my bed, forgetting that families love to tour the dorms to get a taste of their child’s home away from home, not bothering if they’re interrupting someone else’s real life. For me, this is home.
But I get curious enough to wander into Brontë while Esther is stashing her jumbo jar of Nutella. Esther’s mother pokes around in the bathroom.
“Who’s the poor girl who wears this nasty retainer?” she calls out.
“Don’t touch anything! That’s Oona’s.”
“I haven’t met Oona yet, have I? Is she a friend?”
“She’s not really friend material.”
“Sweetie! That’s a sad thing to say. What do you mean?”
“She’s quite homely,” Esther admits. “But she’s boy crazy.”
Esther glances at me and I gaze back without twitching.
“And what about you? Is there a boy you’ve got your eye on?”
“Mum!”
“It’s a harmless question, Esther.”
Does Esther’s mother have the faintest clue how weird her daughter is? How she wears that floor-length cape from morning until night, apparently fending off the Dark Powers of Middle-earth? For which we’re all grateful, naturally, but it hardly leads to romance.
I need a fag. I head for the Swamp. Two cigarettes later, who should turn up but Jenny’s sexy brother. Brilliant. He grins when he sees me, offers a slim, hand-rolled enticement, and off we go a little deeper into the woods.
We get to the spot where a fallen tree gives us something to lean against. Tom lights the spliff and we pass it back and forth until it’s gone and then we’re facing each other.
“Is your mother as perfect as she seems?”
“Every bit and more,” he says. “Except for a relentless attachment to optimism.”
I hook my fingers through the belt loops of his jeans, tugging, playful, looking him in the eye.
“Good weed, eh?” he says.
“Yeah.”
He’s got a fleck of lint caught in the stubble on his chin, his lips are half smiling. “Um, what’s going on here? Aren’t you in the little-sister category?”
“Not if I can help it.” I pull on the belt loops again.
“Wait a sec,” he says. But it’s not like he’s resisting. He’s a boy. Why would he say no?
In two seconds my hips are against his and same with our mouths. Am I really high or is he a great kisser? Maybe both. We’re sort of swaying and kissing at the same time. There’s some flowery word for this craving in my knickers, but I call it twat-ache. Tom, unlike any other boy I ever met, slides his hand into my pants and rubs exactly there, so I nearly faint and fall down. He’s doing me, how’s that for novelty? But after the full-body rush, I recover and find his zip. His turn.
We’re back at the Swamp, me having another fag, when I ask him, “What’s the deal with Jenny’s boyfriend?”
“Who?”
“Is he really in Vietnam?”
“Uh …”
“Matt.” I chuck my cigarette into the dirt. “Right?”
“Man, that was strong stuff,” he says. “My dealer at Sheffield is actually Moroccan. Yes, Matt’s in Vietnam.” He rubs his eyeballs with the heels of his palms.
That’s when Jenny comes huffing down the path like she’s running for a bus. She skids to a halt, seeing us so chummy on the stone rim of the fountain.
“What the hell?” she says. I hope I appear to be purring.
“Hey,” says Tom.
“You missed dinner,” she says.
“Not really,” I say.
“You look cozy.” Making cozy sound poisonous.
“Uh.” Typical male response from Tom.
I lift the hair off my neck and feel the breeze catch the curls, adding to what I hope Jenny recognizes as dishevelment. I didn’t set out to piss her off. I like Jenny. But what makes her think she can manage the world?
“Penelope was just saying how much you miss your boyfriend,” Tom says. Jenny looks at him and he looks at her.
“Matt,” says Tom.
“I know his name.” Jenny glares at me.
“I miss him too,” says Tom. “Your boyfriend.”
There is a slippery undercurrent here that isn’t clear to me. Does it have to do with Matt being black? Or from not as posh a family? Or what?
“You are such … Penelope, you …” Jenny starts and stops. I can feel her steam whistle about to blow.
“There is waaay too much teen-girl nuance going on here,” says Tom. “Are you two in a fight or something?”
“We weren’t,” says Jenny. “But we are now.”
She turns and stomps away, trying to make her escape before I see how red her face is and how her eyes are wet.
Tom just shrugs goodbye at me and follows her. I guess I’m not surprised. I watch him catch up several yards along the path, but she wrenches herself out from under his brotherly arm. He tries again, she stops walking, he says something, she shakes her head and waves her hands about, they keep going. Neither of them bothers to look back in my direction. The chill from the stone under my bum spreads all the way through me. I’m really high. But I’m really bloody low. So much for tea at the hotel. How the hell am I going to salvage this one?
It must be break between dinner and the afternoon program, because the courtyard is swarming. I skirt around the edges, avoiding the general cheer of chatting families, though when I look closely it’s the parents chatting and the kids looking vague or haunted or embarrassed or all of the above. Nico’s mother, the famous author, is wearing sunglasses. Percy’s mum, wow, she’s gorgeous, her dark skin glowing amongst all the pasty whites. Esther’s dad has one of those beards that probably hosts a nest of wrens and a plate of macaroni.
I can’t face the dorm. I slide into the kitchen. The weed and the loneliness have made me ravenous. Damn, I’d forgotten that they don’t serve Vera’s food to the parental masses, but a real dinner catered by a place in Harrogate. Scraps worth foraging for.
Two women in white jackets are rinsing glasses and stacking dirty plates into big bins. A man rattles the bins out to a van. I note the platters of leftovers covered in foil sitting on the counter. The strangers are like robots, no smiles, focused on getting the hell out, which they do pretty quickly.
Vera seems a bit dazed in the sudden quiet, wiping her hands down the front of her apron. The din of families in the courtyard comes through an open window.
“I’ve come to help tidy up,” I say. She fetches me the ancient broom, no comment. I often appear in the kitchen at odd moments. She gathers up stray knives and spoons, wipes the counter with a damp grey rag. Very sanitary. My broom is not efficient, but I do my best. Near the food, I lift a corner of the tucked foil.
“You have no family today?” she asks. “No mother?”
No, I agree. No mother.
“Me also, I tell you already, yes? I have no mother. You hungry?”
She hands me a plate and lets me fill it myself. Little browned potatoes, slices of rare roast beef, slivers of carrots and parsnips tossed together in something sweet and gingery. It’s the best food I’ve ever eaten off a school plate or maybe anywhere.
Vera watches me. “Good, yah?”
“No offence, Vera, but it’s … incredible!”
She doesn’t exactly smile but close.
“You think I don’t know what they say?” She unwraps foil from another plate, revealing a Battenberg cake with glistening frosting. “You think I don’t know what name they call me?”
Ouch. That cannot be a good feeling.
She shrugs. “How could be worse than Nazis?” Anytime I talk to Vera, she reminds me about the Nazis. “I get on a train,” she says. “I leave mother and brother on platform. My father already is killed, betrayed by neighbour not liking Jews. I depart Prague and escape. I am
fourteen years old. Why complain about stupid names?”
She trades my dirty plate for one holding a slab of pink and yellow cake.
“And then what happened?” I say. “What happened to your mother and your brother?”
“I never hear.” She finds me a clean fork. “She was wearing blue sweater with pearl buttons when we say goodbye. Brother was holding box with stamp collection.”
I’ve been eating the cake so fast I’m practically drinking sugar, but now it lands in my stomach like a stone.
“It’s a tradition,” I say. “To complain about school food. That’s what kids do. Don’t take it personally.”
“Good women feed us oranges and cocoa in Holland where we take boat to England. Good Quakers give me job in school. Cook before me is already gone. I must start right away to make food. How am I to learn cooking with no mother?”
She gives me the rest of the cake, which I carry like a precious baby up to Austen dormitory. Where Kirsten and Jenny are in a huddle on Kirsten’s bed. It’s one of those conversation-killing entrances and they don’t have the grace to look guilty. I go to my locker and tuck the cake away.
“Something you want to say?” I ask. “Or just waiting for me to leave so you can stab me in in the back?”
“Look who’s talking!” says Jenny. “Let’s start with how I specifically asked you not to mention a particular something and you turned right around and opened your … Well, anyway. I guess you won’t be joining us for tea.”
“What’ll you tell your mum?”
“I already told her”—Jenny slips into a perfect imitation of me when I explained my mother’s absence—“ ‘She is … not well.’ ”
It’s horrible.
“And then,” says Jenny, “we could discuss how brothers are seriously off-limits!”
“Is that an American rule?”
“It’s a worldwide rule for keeping your friends!”
“Penelope has a bit of a thing for other people’s brothers,” says Kirsten.
“I never touched your brother, Kurse, and I think you know why!”
She turns on me with a face I’ve never seen, eyes like a fiery dragon’s. I’ve lost enough today. My hands fly up in apology. “Sorry!”
I want to say that certain brothers seem to have a thing for me too. I want to say what’s wrong with taking it where you can find it? But Jenny is trying on Kirsten’s clothes, her black pencil skirt and the turquoise Biba top, dressing for the Buckingham Hotel, leaving her snipped-up rags in a heap beside the bed.
I press my forehead against the window that looks over the drive. A parade of cars is nosing toward town, each car holding a family. There is only me to blame for where I am. There is only me.
jenny
When the letter finally came from Matt, I had this great idea. What if I kept getting letters? All it took was a tick beside my name for people to think I had post. The sheet was pinned on a board in the Great Hall during morning lessons. A quick, small pencil mark and my reputation was intact. Brilliant. I just let the stamped corner of the first envelope peek out from my notebook, and Oona or Penelope would notice, not that I was speaking to Penelope.
“Come on, tell us what he said!” Oona’s thirst for romance was almost embarrassing.
I brushed off obvious nosiness with a distant gaze. Real letters came too, from my mom or from Kelly, red and blue markings shouting Airmail. Bundled together, who would know?
Penelope was still Queen of the Swamp—Percy’s nickname—despite pissing off every single person at some point or another.
It was hard to admit that Tom had succumbed, but I did complain to Percy: “She says and does anything she wants to! Like no one ever taught her any manners.”
“As if she’s a toddler.” Percy was good at listening. “It’s very naughty to knock the jam pot onto the carpet or to poke hairpins into the butter, but she’s still part of the family, so you clean up the mess and try not to leave jam pots or hairpins lying about.”
“But then she finds a packet of matches. And burns down the house.”
“Why aren’t you pissed off at your brother?” said Percy. “He’s the one who … did whatever he did with her. She’s just a pathological slag.”
I was pissed off at Tom, but he was away on Planet Sheffield. Penelope was in my own dormitory. I never looked in her direction. I slept with my back to her bed under the window. And I’d been avoiding the Swamp for days. But where else was there to go? Especially tonight when we had a weirdly warm evening. I’d be missing that twilit half hour, listening to night birds, seeing the branches shift to monstrous silhouettes.
I spotted Penelope’s white denim jacket from the top of the path, a perfect beacon. I took a second trail that circled away from the Swamp, bumpier, more scattered twigs and heaps of leaves. I hadn’t approached the woods from this direction before, had no idea where or if the paths met up. What was I doing in the dim, creepy woods anyway? I just couldn’t bear to go down to the Cellar by myself—what if people were making out? Or sit in the dorm looking like a lonely bunny when they all showed up at Bed Bell. I walked nearly on tiptoe, hearing small crackles in the hush, an occasional bird whistle. Yellow leaves fluttered and turned over like girls showing off the backs of their dresses. Maybe I’d find the shrine that the third form had reportedly built under a bush, a place for the fairies to come.
A boy laughed. I saw a flash of blue ahead, amongst the grays and greens. He wasn’t a killer rapist because why would he be laughing? I crept off the path and peered around a tree, palms against the crinkled bark. There were two jackets, one blue, one darker. Two boys. I couldn’t see who, but they were laughing again, and then … tussling. I inched from my tree to a thicker one, better for hiding behind.
Now they were snogging and bucking their hips, white hands gripping dark-clothed bodies. I could have walked right past without them noticing, they were going at it that hard. One wore a hoodie; neither face was visible.
The kiss went on and on. I pushed away from the tree trunk, palms welted in stripes, stumbled through the bracken, hearing myself pant. I somehow arrived on the path below the Swamp and pulled up short. No way could I go back past the boys, so there was only forward. I took a deep breath before breaking cover from the shadows, then stepped into the clearing, intending to pass the Swamp with an air of autumnal enchantment, hands in pockets, eyes toward the purple twilight.
“Look what the woods coughed up,” said Penelope.
“Nymph wearing anorak,” said Adrian.
“Jenny!” said Kirsten. “What are you doing?”
“Exploring.” I tried to laugh.
“Hang out for a bit.” Kirsten patted the stone ledge next to her. Nico and Penelope sat close by, twin demons staring at me. Oona was throwing dead leaves on Adrian, dodging his swatting hands.
“Nnn. Catch you later.” I kept moving.
Who’d been kissing? I waited farther up, beside a hedge that framed the bedraggled rose garden. I’d see whoever appeared on either path. Night was blowing in quickly, swilling the violet sky, forcing the kids at the Swamp to think about curfew. It was Nico who ambled along first, with Adrian as sidekick and Oona right on their heels.
“The damsel doth await us.” Adrian thought he was so funny.
“Ha ha.” I kept an eye on the woods behind them.
Nico turned his head to follow my gaze just as Luke emerged from the trees. Blue jacket. Nico and Adrian looked at each other, big exaggerated Aha!, and turned to consider me.
“Luke?” murmured Nico.
“No.” My mind leapt to a denim bum gripped by pale hands. “No, really!” I knew my face was flaming.
“What?” said Oona.
Luke paused at the Swamp, pretending to tip his sister backward into the mucky fountain, sidestepping Penelope’s attempt to retaliate. As if it were any ordinary day. And maybe it was, for Luke. Only for me a new notion had been startled out from under a rock. An invisible thing, suddenly catching the
light. Luke and another boy.
They straggled up the path toward us.
“Hey, Luke,” said Adrian. “There’s a leaf in your hair. Just like the one in Jenny’s.”
My hand went to my head before I could stop it. No leaf. Adrian hooted. Oona bugged out her eyes. Penelope’s went slitty, watching.
“Jenny?” said Luke.
“Jenny?” mocked Adrian, with a little shimmy to his hips.
“Jenny?” Nico was asking me, not believing.
I pushed through the bramble of bodies and hurried across the flagstones, praying with every step, Don’t trip, don’t trip.
I skipped Cocoa and sneaked into the bathroom to run a scalding bath before anyone could remind me that I was nowhere near the top of the list for First Bath. I went under, held my breath, whooshed up, went under again. It made me think of a news clip we’d seen on television before the Sunday mystery, of camouflaged soldiers in a swamp, with leaves and briars attached to their helmets, faces smeared with mud, only their heads above the murky water. Did Matt have to hide from the enemy like that? Was the enemy hiding from him the very same way?
Were we all hiding all the time, camouflaged by what other people expected to see? There was Luke, plain as day, letting assumptions keep him out of sight. Or in my case, a whole constructed person. But what was I hiding from? The nobody I felt like inside, or some other enemy? Was my disguise helping Luke’s? Could his hurt mine?
I finally climbed out, not wanting to waste the bathwater, leaving it, still warm, for the girls now clattering up the million stairs, the chill driving them toward hot-water bottles like sheep. And even hotter in the Austen dormitory was the gossip tidbit of the night.
“Is it true?” gasped Caroline. “Oona said … you and Luke!”
I bent over, toweling my hair. “She’s wrong.”
“Nice try.” Oona had sidled in from Brontë. “I was there!”
“Where exactly is there, Oona? You’re just wrong.”
Penelope came in, grabbed her toothbrush, headed for the bathroom.
“Pen?” called Caroline. “Did you hear about Jenny and Luke?”
“Penelope is ticked,” said Oona. “She’s been trying to get off with Luke for three terms.”
What We Hide Page 15
