On the fourth floor, I examined the numbers on doors as I made my way down the hall toward the elevators. When I passed the room that had Chloe’s name on its door, I walked a little faster, even though the door was closed. I wondered if it was possible that she had managed to secure a single; I thought those were only available to RA’s. 4B was next door to the RA’s room, directly across the elevators. Its door was propped open and I knocked lightly.
“Come in,” a voice beckoned from behind the door, and I entered.
Nicola and Nala had decorated their room to the extent that it looked like a page out of the Pottery Barn catalog. Nala even had brought her own bed frame, a white tufted headboard that looked like it belonged in a princess’s private quarters. A mirrored ledge hung over her headboard on the wall, on which porcelain music boxes of ballet dancers were positioned. On Nicola’s side of the room, Thames United banners hung across the wall from a number of championship games, along with framed pictures of Nicola posing with the team. On her bed was a colorful, satin patchwork quilt that looked like it had come from an exotic bazaar in Asia. Immediately I wished I had done a better job of picking out cool stuff when I had been shopping with Bijoux. Incense that smelled like angel food cake was burning on the window ledge.
“Finally,” Nicola said in her posh accent with her back to me, not even turning to see who had entered the room. Nala looked up from where she sat upright, stretched out on her bed, reading her U.S. History textbook in a pair of plaid pajamas. “I didn’t think you were ever coming. It’s almost curfew and they are very serious about that here.”
“I don’t think we’ve met yet,” I said to Nala, wanting to befriend her rather than intrude upon her study time. “I’m Betsey. I’m new here.”
“I’m Nala Gordon,” she said, waving one hand from where she sat on her bed without getting up. “I like your dad’s band.”
So, word was already out about me.
I took a few steps closer to where Nicola sat at her desk, seeing that she hadn’t gotten up to greet me because she was on video chat with a gorgeous guy.
“Tommy, this is Betsey,” Nicola said, introducing me to the guy on screen. She shifted over in her chair and motioned for me to sit on the half of the seat that she had just freed for my behind. “She’s a new arrival at the women’s penitentiary.”
“Welcome to jail,” the extremely handsome Tommy said in a posh accent that matched Nicola’s. He had auburn hair and the same warm light brown eyes as Nicola. Wherever he was in the world, the sun was up, streaming in through the windows behind him in what appeared to also be a boarding school bedroom. “My sister tells me they have decent cookies in the women’s penitentiary.”
“Betsey, this is my brother Tommy. He goes to school in Melbourne,” Nicola explained. “Tommy, guess who Betsey’s sister is.”
Tommy looked stumped and took a wild guess. “Pamela Anderson.”
“You’re so daft,” Nicola complained. “It’s Bijoux Norfleet. Your favorite.”
Tommy’s subsequent expression made me realize that maybe Nicola hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said her brother was in love with my sister. He blushed, and it was strange to see a guy who was probably seventeen or eighteen blush over video chat on the other side of the planet. “Get out! Really? You’re pulling my leg.”
“She’s not kidding,” I assured him. “My dad is in Pound and my sister just got her own apartment in the East Village. She’s going to Japan soon to promote her handbag line.”
“That’s killer,” Tommy said. “Your sister’s really well fit. I had her calendar last year. Is she going to do another one?”
Bijoux had done a bikini calendar the year before, which she’d sold from her website, and my mother had thought it was the tackiest thing ever until my sister turned a profit of almost a million dollars. “I don’t know about that.”
We said our goodbyes to Tommy because he had to get to class, and he and Nicola agreed to talk again when Nicola woke up in the morning. I had observed during their brief chat that Nicola never, ever smiled. It was unnerving. She was kind of like a robot. It was fortunate that she was very pretty, or it would be easy to dislike her.
“The Fall Fling is on Friday night,” she informed me, changing topics as soon as the laptop on her screen went blank. “They’re bringing boys here from some school nearby. I want to see what’s in your closet so that I can borrow something if you have any good dresses.”
I was starting to wonder if she was a little nutty, the way she was always so severe and abrupt. Nala looked up from her book and tilted her head at me in sympathy. Nicola had already been at school since the middle of the previous week and it seemed as if Nala was wondering the same thing I was wondering: what was wrong with this girl?
“Uh, OK,” I agreed. “But I want to see what’s in your closet, too.”
Nicola immediately got off her chair and opened her closet door. It was stuffed, seriously, stuffed, with hangers, shoes, and handbags. Even as the door opened, a hot pink Kate Spade bag toppled off the top shelf and hit Nicola in the head.
“Scrikey,” Nicola muttered, bending to pick up the fallen bag off the floor.
Nicola had so many dresses to pick from, my head was spinning. She pulled out at least ten off the rack and held them up to me, and decided for me that it was between a turquoise sleeveless number and a silver beaded sheath. Neither dress was really my style, which was what made the prospect of borrowing them even more exciting. She insisted on letting me borrow an enormous pair of diamond stud earrings, urging me to insert them into my earlobes right there, before I left the room.
I wrote down my class schedule for her to review, and it turned out that we only had first period Biology together at 8:15. Meanwhile, I had French and Algebra 3 with Chloe.
“French?” she questioned, looking at my hand-written schedule. “Why in bloody hell did you sign up for that torture? It’s so much harder than Spanish.”
“Great,” I muttered.
I could tell that Nala was mostly trying to ignore us but she did take a little interest in my class schedule and mentioned that we would be in classes at the end of the day together: Honors Creative Writing and U.S. History. She then announced, “It’s getting late. They’re going to do hall check soon.”
Nicola and I didn’t even share a lunch period so we agreed to see each other the following morning for breakfast before I went to pick up my ID.
When I got back to my room, I realized I had left my cell phone on the night stand next to my bed. I had missed a call from my dad. Rather than calling him back from the room where Kate was still making a grand effort to ignore me, I stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind me.
“Hi, Dad,” I said. He had picked up on the first ring, something he never did.
“Hey, honey girl,” Dad said. “How are they treating you up there at the Precious Knee Socks School for Girls?”
My dad always thought he was hilarious. I knew, since he’d grown up going to public school in New Jersey, that he considered my mom’s entire insistence on private education to be an unnecessarily frivolity.
“Fine,” I said. “I mean, as fine as any school full of mean rich girls can be.”
“Chase said he’d tell Taylor to keep an eye out for you,” Dad told me. “I’m worried about you. I don’t know why your mom feels so strongly about surrounding you with brats everywhere you go. There’s nothing wrong with having some normal friends who live in normal houses—î
“Dad,” I interrupted him. Boarding school had been my idea. I didn’t want to risk losing what I’d worked so hard to achieve unless my option was moving to California with him and Phoebe. But there was basically no possibility of that. Dad’s wife, Phoebe, really didn’t like having me and Bijoux around. I wasn’t even allowed to pick my half-brother Drew up, not even for a second.
“All right, all right. Your mom is a smart lady and I’m sure she knows what she’s doing. You give me a call if you need
anything, OK?”
Just then, I saw Lauren swing around the corner with her clipboard. It was already ten fifteen. I was breaking curfew and I didn’t even realize it. She saw me on the phone and tapped at her wrist as if she was wearing a watch to remind me of the time. I momentarily completely freaked out; it was only my first day on campus and already I was breaking rules.
“Dad, I’ve gotta go,” I said urgently. “It’s curfew. I have to go back inside my room.”
“OK, Bets. Talk to you soon,” he said.
Lying in my bed that night, I felt completely disoriented. I could hear Kate lightly snoring after a while, and even though I was desperate to fall asleep, everything around me was just too distractingly strange. Prior to arriving at school I hadn’t given much thought to what it might be like to sleep ten feet away from a total stranger every night. I thought about what Stacy had said about Kate and began to wonder if I’d ever really get to know her that year. The possibility of running into Taylor the next day was freaking me out even though I had it on pretty good authority that her dad had instructed her to be nice to me. I wondered what Christie was up to back at home, and if she and Seth Zable were still planning on taking over the art world. I felt a strange sense of accomplishment drifting off to sleep at last in my boarding school bedroom at having managed to arrive there, but it didn’t feel as great as I’d hoped. Taylor had never mentioned that her school in Massachusetts was basically a snake pit.
That night I had terrible dreams of being lost in Croatia, running through crowded streets at night without my clothes on, begging people to help me. I would run up to groups of people laughing and drinking at outdoor cafes and they would wave me away. No one understood my pleas for help, people just shrugged and smiled apologetically in the way that older generations in Croatia who didn’t know English often would. I woke up at least once around three in the morning, gasping for breath and perspiring.
It didn’t seem fair. I’d managed to escape Danko, hadn’t I? Why was he still terrorizing me in my dreams?
CHAPTER 9
Miraculously, I got out of bed at six-thirty, feeling like someone owed me a gold medal for Waking Up Early. I crept through the room as quietly as I could, really not wanting to wake Kate and have to negotiate our bathroom-sharing schedule on a morning when I was kind of in a hurry to meet Nicola for breakfast. Dressing privately in the bathroom, I shrugged disappointedly at myself in the mirror after trying on my uniform. I did not look as cool wearing it as I had hoped. Everyone else on campus looked like an extra from a music video. I just looked short and stout wearing a frumpy plaid pleated skirt. I took a picture of myself frowning with my mobile phone and texted it to Bijoux, who would no doubt enjoy a laugh at my expense whenever she woke up for the day.
“You’re late,” Nicole greeted me expressionlessly.
“For Pete’s sake,” I muttered, looking at my mobile phone. “It’s seven-oh-two.”
“Two minutes late,” Nicole repeated. She had taken a seat in the sparsely populated dining area and had been waiting for my arrival before getting food. She wore perfectly smudged eyeliner and matte rose lipstick, and had a Hermès scarf loosely knotted around her neck that matched the navy blue of her uniform.
We ditched our backpacks at the table and moved through the cafeteria area together. I lingered over the arrangement of donuts, tempted, but opted for cereal when I saw that Nicola’s breakfast consisted of black coffee, two dry pieces of multi-grain toast, scrambled eggs and an entire avocado. I was mystified to find that the locks on the breakfast cereal containers had been removed and I filled a ceramic bowl with puffed rice cereal.
“What’s the deal with the locks on the cereal?” I asked Nicola.
“People hoard dry cereal. They come in here with Tupperware that they just fill and stuff into their backpacks, so it’s only available during the breakfast hours,” she informed me.
It took me a while to figure out how girls were able to steal so much cereal when the ladies who operated the cash registers were right there, watching everything. But when I paid at the check-out with Nicola, it became much more apparent how the stealing occurred. Girls with regular meal plans could put as much food on their tray as they wanted; the ID card was only swiped once for the meal. Food items were only itemized with individual prices for diners paying cash, like I was. So theoretically, a girl could fill five bowls of cereal to take back to her table without having to pay extra for them, and deposit them into a Tupperware container to take back up to her room for later.
“Do you always eat so… healthy?” I asked her as I watched her begin her meal. She didn’t even add sugar to her coffee. Bijoux loved coffee but I really hadn’t acquired a taste for it yet. I could only force it down if it was a fancy caramel or mocha latte.
“Food isn’t interesting to me,” she said. “I have a meal plan from my doctor and I just eat what’s on it. I don’t really care what it tastes like.”
She was definitely a robot, I was becoming convinced. I could not imagine a life in which I was impervious to the taste of donuts.
Nicola insisted on accompanying me to Samuel Hall to have my photo ID taken, since we would be walking to Biology together anyway. Along the paved path to the security office where the ID would be created, Nicola grilled me about my older sister. It seemed like she had already simply decided that her brother was going to marry my sister, and the details of exactly how that was going to become a reality were her puzzle to assemble.
“So, when will your sister becoming to visit you here?” she asked me. “The week before Easter would be ideal because Tommy will be coming to the States then to see me.”
“Listen,” I said, figuring I had to break the news to her sooner rather than later. “My sister will probably never come to visit me here because she’s a huge flake and hates schools, even ones she doesn’t attend. Also, she already has a boyfriend, and he’s a famous TV star, so she’s kind of off the market.”
“Has he asked her to marry him yet, this boyfriend?” Nicola asked. She really just would not give it a rest.
“No, but I mean, come on, my sister is eighteen. She’s not marrying anyone yet,” I said.
The security guards in the ID office didn’t look like they could secure much of anything. The uniformed guard who told me to stand in front of a blue backdrop for my photograph appeared to be in his seventies, and the guard who assembled my card on his computer screen and then laminated the final product was at least one hundred pounds overweight. Nicola sat patiently in the hallway until my card was ready.
“That’s a horrible picture of you,” she said bluntly when I showed her my new ID.
Actually, it was. My eyes were basically closed and the humidity was making my hair extra frizzy. But I couldn’t believe Nicola had actually said that. “You’re awfully rude, you know that?” I told her.
“I’m honest,” she said.
Christie would have never been so hurtful about any of my pictures. She was a true friend and would have done me the service of lying about the picture looking decent. I slid the ID into my wallet, grumpy. It was too late to ask the security guard to reshoot my photo; we were going to be late for Biology.
Then Nicola added, “You’re prettier than you look in that picture, that’s all. You could always tell them you lost your ID and need a new one. That’s the only way to get a new picture, but a new ID costs twenty dollars.”
I forgave her since it was becoming clear that she was just very insensitive, not necessarily rude. Of course, Nicola’s own ID card, which she wore around her neck on a leather lanyard, featured a picture in which she looked like she’d been frowning for the cover of Jolie!
After my first three classes at Treadwell, I was reconsidering my entire approach to escaping Danko. Somehow it had escaped my attention during registration that mid-terms were just three weeks away. I had been perfectly lost throughout Biology since I had begun my sophomore year in an introductory chemistry lab and had never taken a b
iology class before. Every student in the biology lab had their own microscope to use during class activities, and I had fumbled throughout the exercise of putting a couple of grains of yeast into a drop of sugar water on the slide, cracking the slide as I snapped it into place beneath the microscope. Feeling like a complete idiot, I didn’t say a word that I’d basically broken school equipment and managed to cut my fingertip. I hoped that cracked slides were a common enough occurrence that no one would care what I’d done.
Physical Education basically just sucked. It was a mixed class, which meant that girls from all four grade levels were thrown in together. Unlike at Pershing where Phys Ed was usually a couple of slow-paced laps around the gym followed by a game of volleyball held together by the four or five athletic girls in the gym class who actually gave a crap about volleyball, gym class at Treadwell was like, real work. We were each given heart monitors to wear around our wrists and as we ran laps we were told to achieve a heart beat rate of 140 beats per minute, and then to try to sustain it. If our beats per minute escalated to over 160, we were supposed to walk a lap to bring the rate back down. This went on not for two or three laps, but for ten laps. After two laps, I was red-faced and winded while everyone jetted past me, and my wrist monitor indicated that my heart was beating at 165 beats per minute.
“Has it been a while?” a pinched-face petite senior with a shiny black pontytail hissed at me as she raced past me.
“I have asthma,” I lied, wishing I could spring into motion, catch up to her and punch her.
Mortified, I walked a lap, sweating like a maniac and hating everyone, and fell further behind. When just about everyone was finishing their tenth lap, I was still on my seventh and the gym teacher, who fortunately was not keeping count, motioned for me to come and join the class in the weight training room to begin doing squats.
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