“You can, and you will,” I said matter-of-factly, trying to mimic Nicola’s voice. “My mother’s very grateful to you for helping me with my French. Much of her business takes place in Paris, so it’s important that I learn the language.”
I had been carrying the jewelry box around with me all day in my canvas tote, having decided earlier that morning after my shower that I would rid myself of the burden of the earrings as soon as possible. Deirdre was my favorite tutor, a status solidified when she informed me of her unbridled lust for Mr. Ferris.
“They’re beautiful,” Deirdre commented, her eyes wide.
I was glad to see that Danko’s false generosity was at least benefitting someone who was grateful for it.
Days passed. Taylor finally came around and invited me back to Hartford Hall for dinner.
“You understand why I was mad at you, right?” Taylor asked me after dinner when she and Ruth invited me back to their room for ice cream. The cottage-style dorms were a million times better than Colgate and I promised myself I’d try to move into one if I managed to survive at Treadwell until junior year. “When you first got here, you told me it was important to you to do well here. And then I caught you going out of your way to mess everything up. You’re a nice girl, Betsey, but I think you have absolutely no ability to consider consequences. You’re going to have to work on that.”
She was right, of course. I couldn’t argue that.
Everything on campus felt like it went into slow motion the week of mid-terms. I felt during the week before mid-terms, and the week of the tests, for the very first time in my whole life like I was really a kid. Never before had my life been so completely free from distractions. During those two weeks, I didn’t watch television, didn’t listen to music except when running laps on the track during gym class, and barely saw my friends except in the dining hall. I had stopped replying to Christie’s text messages because I simply didn’t have time to keep up with them anymore, and the life in which I ran wild on Manhattan’s Lower East Side with my friends and remained out way too late in my sister’s shadow, was a distant memory. It may sound weird, but I had never limited myself to just doing school stuff before; there had always been more fun things to do, even going back to as early as first or second grade when Mom would take me out of school to travel with her to Europe. It was definitely an adjustment, just being a student.
Sometimes late at night I’d look up from my study guides on my laptop, see the time, and experience a nagging suspicion that I was missing something important back in the city. I would have to remind myself that all I was missing was a bunch of drunk people taking pictures of themselves to post on Friendbook.
It was a weird experience showing up for my first mid-term on the Monday morning of test week in Biology, knowing that I was actually pretty prepared, for a change. I hadn’t really thought when I’d taken the Treadwell entrance exam that I’d be able to keep up with such intense studying. “You’re ready, and you’re going to do great,” Taniesha, my biology tutor, assured me on Sunday night. She had instructed me to walk back to my dorm and go to bed, and not to stay up studying all night. I had followed her advice and turned off my bedside lamp hours before Kate turned in for the night.
“Good luck,” I whispered to Nicola as the mid-term test packets were passed around the biology classroom. I looked around the classroom at all of my classmates with their sharpened pencils, faces fraught with anxiety. A year ago, under similar circumstances, I would have known with certainty that all of the girls in my class would score better than I would. I felt an odd, unexpected surge of competition rising between my lungs and it felt good. This year, there was a chance I’d score just as well, or maybe even better, than some of them.
Fortunately, the mid-terms were staggered a bit throughout the week, so we weren’t expected to take hideous tests in every single class period of the day on Monday. By Wednesday evening, I had all of my tests except French out of the way, except for my personal essay for Creative Writing Workshop. We had read Joan Didion’s essay, “On Self-Respect,” and were supposed to write a ten-page essay in response, either supporting her premise or disagreeing with her claim that innocence ends when a person realizes that they don’t really like themselves. Ms. Didion claimed that to live without self-respect was to be locked within oneself, incapable of loving or remaining indifferent. The words of the essay had chilled me to the bone, because they described so perfectly my predicament with my secret. I was keeping it, I knew, not out of any strange loyalty to Danko, but instead because I just so desperately didn’t want to disappoint anyone. The further down I buried it, the more impossible it became to embrace and appreciate all of the awesome things I was doing for myself, like studying for my mid-terms and staying out of trouble.
I had put off starting my essay until Wednesday night, and stared at a blank document on my laptop without typing a single word, occasionally switching over to my internet browser to read a funny message from Alex on Friendbook. If I agreed with Joan Didion, would I somehow be revealing my secret to Mrs. Bartholemew, the creative writing instructor? If I disagreed with the essay and tried to claim that it was still possible to have self-respect and maintain a fear of failure and need for the approval of others, I was just going to have to completely lie because I didn’t believe that at all. Making a compelling case constructed of lies was going to be really hard.
It was as I was trying to make the decision about which direction I’d take that my mom called to inform me excitedly that she was going to drive to campus on Saturday to visit me. I cringed. We had Friday off from classes to recover from mid-terms, and I had really wanted to take the bus with Taylor and her friends into Boston on Saturday to go shopping and pig out on ice cream on Newbury Street, as we had been discussing all week. I mean, I didn’t want to hurt my mom’s feelings but I hadn’t even been away from home for a month yet. I was still enjoying being on my own.
“Um, great, Mom,” I told her. “Is Danko coming?”
“No. He’s quite busy working on contracts for a new client. I’m afraid it’ll just be me. We can drive to Cape Ann for lunch, if you’d like. I’ve heard Gloucester is a very charming little town.”
Her suggestions for a fun mommy-daughter date day were making me bristle. I didn’t want any face time with anyone from home; I just wanted to get up on Saturday, put on my favorite jeans and talk about boys on the bus to the city with my new friends. The idea of driving all the way to a coastal town with my mother just to have an overpriced lunch and walk around a rocky beach sounded like a giant bore. More importantly, I felt like any face-to-face exposure with people from my life in New York would restore the wild old Betsey and banish the new studious Betsey from existence. But of course, I couldn’t tell my mom that. I didn’t want her to think for a second that I was ungrateful and reconsider my enrollment at the school.
Around two in the morning, knowing I was compromising my grade on the French exam, I wrote an outline in support of the lie, claiming that if the approval of others is really important to you, then overall it can be the basis of your self-respect when it’s received. I knew that logically, the point I was trying to make was a simple contradiction, and Mrs. Bartholemew was going to call me out on that. But I was tired, and I just wanted mid-terms to be over. After my French I mid-term on Thursday morning, I hid myself away in a corner of the library and completed my essay. I emailed it off to Mrs. Bartholemew without even proofreading it, I was just so happy to finally be done with schoolwork until Monday.
On Friday, when I logged into my personal profile on the Treadwell intranet, I had already received my Algebra 3 grade: a B plus. While some girls at Treadwell would have considered suicide if they’d gotten anything below an A minus, a B plus for me was like winning a billion dollar jackpot. I did a zany little victory dance in my room, not caring if Kate thought I was totally bananas. The grade gave me hope that I’d performed as well on my U.S. History Post World War II, French, and biology tests. Tha
t afternoon as Nicola and I sat with Nala in the square eating a leisurely lunch before Nala caught her train back to New Jersey, I learned the main reason why Nicola had been accepted at Treadwell despite her diagnosis with Asperger’s, besides her dad’s endless wealth.
She wasn’t taking a sophomore math class. She was enrolled in Calculus 2.
And she’d scored a perfect A-plus on her mid-term.
I was happy instead of dismayed that my mom had emailed me to cancel our planned day of fun on short notice. Lucky for me, I was going to get to spend my Saturday goofing around in Boston with Taylor and the juniors. Chloe subtly dropped a hint that she would like an invitation, and I pretended to not have really understood the request and changed topics. On my first day at Treadwell, I would have thought that Chloe was going to be my safer bet as a best friend than Nicola, but her dark opinion of everything was making me rethink that assumption.
Somehow, Chloe had managed to score one of three private rooms in all of Colgate Hall. It was significantly smaller than the room I shared with Kate, but it had its own private bathroom and a window overlooking the square. We sat on her bed, which was piled high with black and gray sequined pillows, watching the enormous flat screen TV hung from the wall. A powerfully potent orchid in a ceramic planter arranged on her dresser filled the room with fragrance. Chloe’s room was an odd mixture of shabby dorm-supplied furniture and luxury opulence. A teal Persian rug with peach detailing covered the hardwood floor. I gathered that despite Chloe’s constant complaining about her mother, she was more than happy to let her mother pay for a more expensive room than everyone else’s, and fancy décor. Even her punk rock concert posters were professionally framed and matted.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Chloe was quick to point out whenever she considered anyone on campus to be a poser. Until I had spent a few hours in her room after mid-terms drinking soda, watching foreign movies downloaded from an internet subscription service and eating copious amounts of chocolate chip and pecan cookies, I hadn’t realized that she was a little bit of a hypocrite.
Mid-terms were behind me, and I had prevented myself from being put on academic probation so far. I’d even managed to score a B-plus on my essay, with a note from Mrs. Bartholemew remarking, interesting concept. But Thanksgiving wasn’t too far off. I was going to have to go home, eventually.
CHAPTER 13
Life on campus changed abruptly after mid-terms. It was almost as if the wall holding back all of the drama that Taylor and Chloe had warned me about suddenly crumbled, and scandal flooded the school property.
Right before mid-terms, a sophomore named Juliette Santangello withdrew from classes when her dad, a prominent investment banker on Wall Street, made headlines for running an elaborate Ponzi scheme and ripping off all of his customers. No one really heard about her disappearance from campus until after mid-terms were over and sweet relief settled in. Oddly enough, then her roommate, the carrot-topped Jesus freak (as Chloe referred to her), Grace Mathison, also disappeared. No one seemed to know what in the world had happened to Grace. First, people claimed she had dropped out of school and had joined Juliette in Long Island in hiding from the media. Her brother had gotten some girl at another boarding school pregnant and had pressured her into having an abortion, which was hugely scandalous considering that Grace’s dad was a world-famous Christian evangelist preacher with his own cable channel and magazine. Eventually the rumors about Grace changed and it was commonly accepted that she had cleared out of the country with her parents and was waiting out the storm of negative press somewhere in Africa.
The celebrity gossip blogs were all announcing that the hottest new model in the fashion world, Gosja Krasnykova, was replacing Emma Jeffries as the face of Hunter Lodge, the big fashion retailer that Emma’s dad owned. The Hunter Lodge holiday catalog hadn’t even hit stores yet, but the blogs were viciously claiming that Emma’s weight gain between her sophomore and junior years had inspired her father’s creative team to yank away her cover model status. Girls on campus, especially juniors, were having a field day with that rumor. Emma was legendary for not being especially nice, and everyone seemed enthusiastic about her comeuppance finally arriving.
Nevermind that Emma looked like she was wasting away in her gym uniform. Her cheekbones were actually sharp, and when her friend Paige would kneel on her toes to help her do sit-ups in gym class, she barely had the energy to do ten before she’d beg Paige to switch places with her. It seemed impossible to believe that the girl had been declared to be too fat by anyone. I had only known her for a few weeks but the difference in her appearance between the first time I’d seen her, and how she looked after mid-terms, was noticeable.
There was bitter gossip in every direction I turned. In the dining halls, I heard scandalous stories about girls with whom I’d never exchanged a word. I learned that Giovanna Pasquasi had a severely retarded younger brother. Her mother was an heiress and ran a vineyard in Long Island. It was alleged that a significant chunk of the Pasquasis’ fortune had been lost in the Ponzi scheme architected by Juliette’s dad, which was obviously kind of awkward since Juliette and Giovanna were good friends. People barely able to form the words, terrified of Stacy Davidson’s wrath, were whispering that she was a lesbian and had hit on Renée. Nicola would have known the truth, I was sure, but she was remaining mum on the whole situation. Renée became curiously absent from dinners, and I started seeing her walking around campus with the auburn-haired junior from the Ukraine who lived in the same split-level dorm as Emma and Paige. Everyone said that girl, Katya, was the daughter of some major Ukrainian mobster who was paying her tuition with money from the massive drug and prostitution ring he ran across Eastern Europe. Even crazier than that, Katya was reportedly from the same town in the Ukraine as Gosja, the model who had stolen the Hunter Lodge cover away from Emma.
And of course, teachers weren’t spared from gossip, either. The girls in my Aikido class told me in hushed voices in the locker room that Tova had fought in the Israeli Defense Force and had come to America after being involved in the accidental bombing of an elementary school in Palestine. There was always discussion about Mr. Ferris since he was one of the few male teachers on campus, and was devastatingly handsome. Everyone had crushes on him like Deirdre’s, even though it was commonly believed that he was gay.
It was a tiny, crazy world and I was thankful every morning that my family members hadn’t done anything to make me the topic of dinnertime conversation so far that year.
“Betsey! Where’s your head?”
I snapped to attention on the Aikido mat at the unexpected sound of Tova’s voice in my ear. I had been daydreaming, as usual, about the Halloween plans Nicola and I were making. We had made tentative plans to meet up with Sam and Alex in Salem, the town where the witch trials had been held, where a whole bunch of cool activities had been planned for the holiday. It was easier to think about designing costumes with Nicola than it was to think about my mother’s increasingly insistent request that I come home for a visit soon.
“Sorry,” I told Tova, my cheeks reddening. After mid-terms, I had started spacing out a lot. I was still studying like a maniac every night, but during classes my thoughts just started to wander.
“I know you can focus. You’re obviously focused on something. If you would just focus on your balance, you would have the makings of a pretty good martial artist,” Tova told me.
There was a competitive meet coming up at the end of November, and Tova wanted me to prepare for it. I was unconvinced that it was a good idea. I knew that if I tried and got my butt whipped in public, my interest in Aikido would be gone in a flash.
I had been sensing for weeks that eventually I’d be forced into making a decision between Chloe and Nicola. That decision seemed to be solidifying around Halloween, which very dangerously fell upon a Saturday. As Nicola and I finalized our plans to meet Alex and Sam at the train station in Salem, I began dreading the moment when I’d have to inform Chloe
that I had committed to plans without her. I knew sometimes she did stuff with Ramona and Danielle, but she always invited me first. Being her preferred friend was becoming burdensome because I knew that along with the preferential treatment came Chloe’s expectation that I provide her with the same.
Alex and Sam had the brilliant idea that the four of us should dress as the Mystery, Inc. gang from Scooby Doo. Nicola had no idea what Scooby Doo was, because the show had only started airing in the UK on the Cartoon Network after she was too old to be interested in cartoons. But when Sam explained the premise to her over email, she really liked the idea and had her heart set on dressing as Velma, complete with a fuzzy turtleneck sweater. That meant I’d have to be Daphne, which was laughable; I’d make a more convincing Scrappy. But Nicola produced a shoulder-length auburn wig from her terrifying closet, and insisted that I find a pair of white go-go boots to complete my costume.
Of course, then I made the fatal error of mentioning the arrival of the white go-go boots to Chloe at dinner.
“I have to stop by the mail room before we go back upstairs,” I said as we were wrapping up dinner and making plans to study in her room together, part of my ongoing efforts to avoid Kate.
Of course, mentioning that I was expecting a package provoked her attention, because Chloe was insatiably curious about everything and immediately wanted to know what had arrived in the mail.
“Part of my Halloween costume,” I casually told her, hoping she’d just dismiss the whole thing. But of course, that wasn’t how Chloe’s mind operated. It was like she had a sixth sense for knowing when I was about to do something she considered to be deserving of ridicule.
“Halloween costumes aren’t really permitted on campus except for the party in the Gaffin Center,” she informed me, stating something I already knew. “And no one goes to the Halloween party. It’s even lamer than the Fall Fling because all the teachers are there, and no boys.”
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