Finally, on Saturday morning after I had reluctantly gone to a very stressful yoga class at Nicola’s insistence, I found an email from my mother in my inbox.
Dear Betsey,
I am terribly sorry if you think that my desire to see you for Thanksgiving is based only on the difficulty I’m having with Bijoux’s moving out. Part of it definitely is, but only because I feel like both of my girls have left home at the same time, and I have no choice but to accept that you’re growing up. I’ve spent much of your childhood at the office, and I feel now like I’ve missed out on everything important. The truth is that I miss you. I miss both of you terribly, and I don’t want this year to be the first of many that we’ll spend our holidays apart. I would really love it if you would come to Croatia for Thanksgiving with me and Danko, but I will respect your decision if you prefer to stay at school and focus on your achievements. I know that the last few weeks have been a very positive period of growth for you and I am more proud of you than you can ever know.
Love,
Mom
I deleted the email before I had a chance to read it a second time and become choked up. She had reluctantly given me permission to stay, and that was what I intended to do.
The campus was basically abandoned the afternoon before Thanksgiving. Girls who had remained at Treadwell on Tuesday night caught flights and trains home the next morning. By Wednesday’s lunch service, the last meal to be served before the long weekend, only a few girls sat in the dining hall, picking at sandwiches. One of the RA’s remaining on duty at Colgate over the weekend slid a flyer beneath my door inviting me to a pizza dinner in the TV lounge that night, and not having anything better to do, I went, planning to just swipe a slice of pizza and leave. There were only nine girls in attendance, and not surprisingly, two of them were the Japanese girls who Chloe had pointed out to me on my first night at the dorm. As soon as I entered the TV lounge, one began whispering in the other’s ear until they both stood up to greet me.
“Why are you here?” the taller of the two girls from Japan asked me. “Aren’t you going to your parents’ penthouse apartment in New York?”
I was a little baffled that these girls knew so much about my private life. They knew that my middle name is Jennifer, and that my favorite food is soft pretzels from the kiosk at the airport. All of the information they were eager to verify with me was a little scary; I wondered just how much trivia was available about me online on socialite blogs. The taller girl was named Riko, and the shorter girl, who had dyed her hair a suspicious shade of orange, was named Chihiro. During the pizza dinner, they seemed out of their minds with excitement to be talking to me.
“What about your sister? Is she having Thanksgiving dinner with Tobin Mitchell? When is she going to Harajuku to release the new line of bags? What does Foxy eat for Thanksgiving?”
After dinner, they invited me to the room they shared on the third floor of Colgate and I was absolutely flabbergasted to see that they had not only Bijoux’s old calendar pinned to the wall, but also a poster-sized version of an advertisement we had shot when I was twelve for a clothing line in Japan. They proudly showed me how they had bookmarked Bijoux’s blog and knew more about her new puppy than I did. Chihiro actually owned two handbags from Bijoux’s line; a purple leather hobo bag with rhinestones on the sides and a suede patchwork tote bag. I was flattered that they knew so much about me, but also a little freaked out. For the last two months, I had been riding up and down in the elevator with them, and sleeping just three stories above them… having had no clue that there were certified Google stalkers in the dorm.
I began to really like Riko and Chihiro once they got over their awe of being in my presence. Riko showed me pictures of herself with her sisters (four of them) when they all lived together in Japan, before they split up for their respective studies across the globe. She had sisters in college in Australia, a sister who was married and lived in Tokyo, and one younger sister who still lived at home with her parents in Nagoya. The Mori family was so close-knit that Riko had to wipe away tears from behind her glasses as she described how much she missed them. Chihiro had one brother and one sister back in Tokyo. She was the oldest and her parents expected her to get into an Ivy League school and study medicine. She was in my biology class and had scored the best on our mid-term.
On Thanksgiving, I went to their room in my pajamas quite early in the morning and the three of us watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade together. Several of the teachers came to campus in the afternoon and we had a small feast together, using the kitchen at the Gaffin Center. Ms. Ziegler brought deviled eggs and her two kids, who were in elementary school, and they had made funny tissue paper table decorations that looked like turkeys. It was nice that some of the teachers who lived nearby cared enough about the kids stuck on campus to share their holiday with us. Mr. Ferris brought his dog, a cock-a-poo named Bubba, who took a particular shine to me and begged for a bite of my stuffing.
The next day, after my Aikido practice in the morning, I took the train to Boston with Chihiro and Riko, and we walked lazily around the Museum of Fine Art all afternoon before buying slices of pumpkin pie to eat on the train ride back to campus. As we walked from the T-station to the museum’s entrance, Chihiro’s teeth were chattering. Mom must have had Danko or one of our maids ship some of my winter clothes to me, because a box had arrived in the mailroom that morning containing a new winter coat, sweaters, and wool tights. It was a fortunate thing, even though I was annoyed to find the slip in my mailbox informing me that I had a parcel waiting for me behind the desk, because the temperature had dropped significantly.
“Shotgun!” Erin called on Saturday morning when we raced from the sports complex where we met across the blacktop to Tova’s car.
Tova had prepared a special playlist of motivational songs for us to blast in the car on the drive, including the Rocky theme song and “We Are the Champions,” by Queen. It was cute that she had taken the time to do that. She also encouraged me and Erin to sing along to keep our energy up before the competition. Riko and Chihiro had asked if they could come to the match and watch me get my butt kicked, both of them considering it to be somewhat odd that I, a Caucasian girl, would be learning a Japanese martial art. But I didn’t want any additional witnesses to my slaughter, so I refused their request and agreed to take a cab with them over to the next town that night to see a movie, instead.
When we pulled into the parking lot at the high school where the match was set to take place, my stomach sank. I had been so preoccupied with avoiding the obligatory trip to Croatia that I hadn’t really thought much about the reality of this day’s events. But as Tova carefully parked and I observed how many cars were parked in the lot, I could delude myself no longer. I was going to have to get on a mat and take on a stranger, in front of a captive audience.
“You can do this, Betsey. You can do it,” Tova encouraged me inside, as Erin and I cringed around the edge of the mat, watching the first match. The girls from other high schools all seemed more advanced than us. I was able to figure out who my opponent would be in my first match; she was a sophomore a bit more petite than me with pale blond hair pulled back into a short ponytail. Her high school’s team had real uniforms; the shirts of their gi were bright purple to match their school colors, and the loose-fitting black pants were silky. Erin and I just wore regular white tops and cotton black pants, purchased from the Treadwell campus store, which hardly specialized in authentic Japanese Aikidogi.
“Why do they have such fancy uniforms?” I asked, baffled. I hadn’t even known that there was such a thing as fancy Aikidogi.
“Some schools have much larger teams, that’s all,” Tova informed me. “I find non-standard uniforms to be an unnecessary distraction.”
I was so nervous that I was actually shaking as I watched the first round. Since I was still in the beginners’ group, our matches would not feature the black batons serving as fake knives that the more advanced students were
using in their pairings. The competitors bowed to each other on a blue mat sectioned into a perfect square with duct tape creating a perimeter. A tiny Asian girl squatted and blocked the advance of a much larger girl with curly brown hair, striking her in the gut with a carefully positioned elbow. The larger girl fell to the side and rolled, knocked off-balance. The match wasn’t all that thrilling to watch, because the more junior girls were basically just practicing their kata in what looked like carefully controlled slow motion. The other side of the gym, where the older girls were using throw techniques, flipping each other and knocking each other out of their mat squares, was where the action was at.
Then the man wearing a black polo shirt who was ordering the stop and start of matches with his hand gestures was motioning for me, and I felt Tova’s hands on my back, pushing me forward. It was too soon. I didn’t want to step onto that mat just yet. I turned to tell Tova that I’d made a mistake. I really had just wanted to come with as a spectator.
“You’re ready for this, Betsey,” she was saying, not allowing me to turn around and object. “Clear your mind!”
Clear my mind, yeah right, I thought, inching my way across the mat. The girl with the blond ponytail was staring me down with an icy frown. My thoughts scrambled back to advice Tova had given us in the Treadwell gym about preparing for an opponent.
Don’t look her in the eye. Watch her form, not her features.
I tried to ignore the whites of my opponent’s eyes, and instead focused on her posture, the shape and position of her head. Adrenaline pumped through my veins, and my mouth went completely dry. It felt like sweat was starting to roll in beads down my back. I placed my feet in position, prepared myself, and waited for that whistle.
The match felt like it was over in seconds. The man in the black polo shirt said something to us that I didn’t completely understand, and then extended his right arm toward both of us with his palm facing forward, as if he was pushing a door open, signaling the start of our match. The blond rushed toward me, and I saw her shoulders shift as if she was going to try to duck low and pull me down by the arm. I moved forward to brace her attack, ducking more quickly than her, and knocked my right shoulder into her torso while grabbing her arm, pulling her backwards. When she fell against the mat flat on her back, I recoiled in disbelief. Even after I heard the thud of her body slam against the mat and felt the vibrations from the impact of her weight hitting the floor, it took a few seconds for me to realize that I’d dropped her. Everyone standing around the perimeter of the mat burst into applause and the man in the black polo waved his arm in a manner similar to a karate chop in the air toward me, signaling that I’d won the match.
“That was incredible!” Tova complimented me. “We haven’t even really practiced wrist techniques that way yet. That was a very advanced move.”
I was so happy and proud of myself that I was embarrassed. I tried to suppress my giant smile. It made me a little sad for a second that my mom and Bijoux hadn’t been there to see my awesome maneuver, especially because I wasn’t even sure how I’d done it, and was pretty sure I’d never be able to repeat it.
Erin even nodded in approval at me, although I could tell she was jealous that I had basically lucked out. I knew that instincts and good fortune had played a much greater role in my victory than actual knowledge of Aikido. But the girl with the pale blond ponytail whose chances at the competition were dashed for the day didn’t know that. She gave me the evil eye from across the mat where she sat with her teammates.
Sure enough, almost two hours later, I lost my second match, but held my own for almost two minutes before I lost my balance and fell to my knees. All evidence seemed to suggest that I was better at Aikido than I had realized all semester long. Or, at least even if I wasn’t good, I didn’t flat-out suck. And then I realized, I had already been practicing Aikido for a long time. For three years I had been trying to predict Danko’s moves before he made them. Trying to determine which rooms he’d occupy, how he’d try to corner me alone. There was a possibility I actually had talent.
Erin got as far as the last round in our division and lost, but still got a cool little metal on a purple ribbon. It was a relief that she’d performed better than me; she was in a good mood on the drive back to campus. On that drive, it occurred to me just how far my mom was from me geographically. She was over four thousand miles away from me. Just thinking about how she was almost on the other side of the planet started making me feel very weird and alone. I fell very quiet in the back seat of Tova’s car as I wondered in all seriousness if there would ever be a time in my life when my mom would actually attend one of my events, and cheer for me. Had there ever been such an occasion when she’d been in attendance, watching with tears in her eyes, ready to clap? I couldn’t remember. But it occurred to me for the first time that the window of my life during which it was reasonable to expect my mom to care about my extracurricular activities had quite possibly closed at some point during the last few months. By the time Tova pulled up in front of Colgate to drop me off and enthusiastically congratulated me on a job well done, I smiled to thank her but in my heart I felt like crying.
And then, on Sunday afternoon, my phone rang. It was, quite unexpectedly, Taylor.
“Worst Thanksgiving ever,” she grumped.
“Why?” I asked, immediately assuming that her disposition had everything to do with Todd.
“Oh, my dad is just an idiot and he and my stepmom are probably getting divorced,” she sighed.
“Are you back?” I asked upon answering, immediately hoping she would want to have dinner at Hartford Hall with me. I could hear strange background noises on the call, echoes and microphone-amplified voices that didn’t sound like anything on campus.
“I’m still at the airport waiting for my flight to board,” she said. “Listen. I have great news. Unbelievable news.”
I stepped outside of my room, not really wanting nosy Kate to overhear any transmissions of importance coming from Taylor.
“I got an email from Mr. Ferris this morning. The junior symphony has been invited to perform a Christmas concert in three weeks. Guess where.”
I wasn’t good at guessing things. My guesses would have been Honolulu, St. John’s Preparatory Academy, and the Alamo, in that order. But fortunately Taylor didn’t give me time to guess.
“Madrid!”
CHAPTER 15
In all of my world travels, I had never before been to Spain. Before starting to read The Alchemist, it had never even been on my wish list of travel destinations. But suddenly, in the weeks leading up to Christmas break, Spain was the subject of my every thought.
After Thanksgiving, the inevitability of having to spend over three weeks with Mom and Danko weighed on me like those big stones that were stacked upon the wax figurine of Giles Corey at the witch museum in Salem. Whenever Christmas break even crossed my mind while I was in class, I entered a dizzying panic and completely lost my focus on the lesson being taught. If I could convince Mom to let me go with Taylor to Madrid, I could avoid Danko completely until maybe even summer vacation. The trouble was, was she really going to let me skip out on yet another holiday with the family? I doubted so, highly. Not even claiming I wanted to go to Madrid to visit Kristijan, who would remain in Spain for the duration of my whole school break because Christmas on his Orthodox calendar was the second week of January, was going to be enough to convince her.
But that wasn’t what I’d told Taylor. As soon as she had told me on the phone the Sunday after Thanksgiving that she was going to beg her stepmother to travel abroad for the holiday to tour with the school’s symphony, I had promised her I’d find a way to accompany her. Even if trying to stay away from Danko hadn’t been my main goal in life, I would have been dying to go to Spain with Taylor to back her up in her situation with Todd. As much as my mother pressured me and Bijoux to pursue popularity, I didn’t think she could possibly understand how desperately I wanted Taylor to be my best friend. Taylor wasn’
t constantly trying to impress me with her knowledge of obscure punk bands and the history of controversial art movements like the Dadaists and Fluxus. She was well aware that I was obsessed with All or Nothing and she agreed with me that Nigel was by far the cutest member of the band. I didn’t feel like I was in any kind of competition with her for attention, like I so often did with Nicola after my Halloween heartbreak, or even as I often felt in my relationship with my own sister. Hanging out with her was just easy, and I could just be myself the same way I was with Bijoux, only without having to worry that Taylor would ever call me names or insensitively infer that she was prettier or more desirable than me, because she was a lot more considerate than my sister.
So, Christmas was fast becoming a conundrum. By the second Monday in December, Taylor excitedly showed me her printed, confirmed travel itinerary in study hall. She would be on a direct flight to Madrid’s Baraja airport, departing Boston at eight in the morning on December nineteenth with the rest of the members of the junior symphony. Mr. Ferris would be accompanying the entire group of girls as a chaperone, along with Señorita Rosenkrantz, who was not in actuality an authentic Spanish señorita but was the stout, matronly Spanish teacher from our school who had short gray hair and wore hideously ugly orthopedic shoes. In an unimaginable horror, Madison Iacobazzi’s mother would also be chaperoning. Madison was only a freshman but had already won a bunch of awards for playing oboe, so she was permitted to accompany the upperclassmen on the trip.
“My stepmother wouldn’t book me in first class,” Taylor grumbled, studying her itinerary. “But she did order me a vegan meal option and is giving me an allowance for shopping. She wants me to bring her back a pair of espadrilles from some store she mentioned. So that’s at least something.” One of Taylor’s weird quirks was claiming that she was vegan all the time, but then still eating things like marshmallows and yogurt. I never dared to point out to her that the majority of her dietary intake was not vegan.
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