“Okay,” Vera says. “Your mom’s famous. So what?”
Freja shrugs, her Saint Laurent fur boots squelching through muddy slush. “So nothing.”
“Look.” Trinity steps in front of her on the trail. “Everybody’s in here for a reason, okay? I put naked pictures of myself all over the internet and cost my mom her seat in Congress. Vera here is a self-harmer.”
“Don’t forget formerly suicidal!” Vera adds brightly.
“Madison tried to kill her ex-girlfriend, Soleil’s a junkie, Mia beat up her stepmom, Swizzie’s a compulsive liar, Charlotte has anger management issues, et cetera. And don’t even get me started on our backstories. My point is, we’re all on the same level, okay? And we just want to know why you’re here.”
“And we’ll find out one way or another,” Vera says, stepping with casual aggression into Freja’s personal space, “so you might as well just tell us.”
Freja smiles pleasantly from one girl to the next as she climbs over a fallen tree. “But you see, girls, there is no reason I am here.”
“Don’t think you’re better than us, sweetheart.” Vera’s voice has oiled itself into a growl. “It’s like Trinity said: everyone’s here for a reason.”
“Very well.” Freja stops to turn and face them. “Here is the reason: my mother, she wanted to send me to boarding school in the US. I have family in Minneapolis, so she has chosen to send me here. This is why I am here.”
“Wait.” Vera holds up a mittened hand. “Are you trying to say that your mom sent you to Red Oak thinking it was just a normal American boarding school with, like, normal preppy American kids?”
“This is correct.”
Trinity and Vera bug their eyes at each other and burst out laughing so hysterically that a startled spruce grouse shoots out of some nearby bushes and takes off squawking into the trees.
“That’s right, gals!” shouts Coach Leslie, waving her walking stick from the front of the line. “Laughing feels good, but let’s try to respect the peace and quiet of nature while we release those yummy endorphins, okay?”
Vera, laughing even harder now, calls out an apology, first to Coach Leslie, then to the spruce grouse, which has already disappeared back into the forest and presumably can’t hear her anyway.
“Oh, now I have heard it all,” Trinity says, wiping her eyes with her gloves. “Now I have heard it all.”
“She thought she was going to get up here and take some AP classes, maybe try out for the field hockey team or some shit?” Vera shakes her head as she kicks through a patch of melting ice. “You poor thing, Freja. Well, once you hop on that family therapy session at the end of week two, hopefully you can convince ‘Nic’ to get you the hell out of here.”
“No.” Freja smiles calmly. “You do not understand me. I knew what this place was. My mother did not—her English is not very good. But mine is.”
“Wait.” Vera stops so short I nearly crash into her. “You’re telling me you didn’t have to be here—that you’re here by choice?”
“Yes.”
“Lies,” sings Trinity. “Lies, lies, lies.”
“You may choose to believe me, or you may choose not to believe me,” Freja says, picking over a muddy puddle in her sumptuous fur boots. “In Copenhagen, I had bodyguards. I could not leave my house without being swarmed. I had photographers in my face, all the time. I could not have boyfriends; I could not even have friends. I could not be normal. Here, there are no phones, no tabloid stories filled with gossip. And you have all been so awful to me—so cruel! And this makes me so happy!”
Happy? We all look at each other, confused.
“No one has ever been cruel to me in my life! They are all too busy—what is the English phrase? Sucking my ass?”
That does it. Vera and Trinity collapse into the shallow snow, screeching with laughter. Three more terrified spruce grouses go clapping up into the sky, and Coach Leslie, who has finally realized they are laughing at something other than her dumb jokes, orders the two of them back to campus to wash dishes.
29
IT’S BEEN A WEEK since Freja’s arrival, and for most of us, the new girl has settled into nothing more than a curiosity—beautiful, yeah, and famous, supposedly, but not particularly funny, cool, smart, or interesting. We’re all just glad she lives in Conifer so we don’t have to hang around her that much.
All of us, that is, except Madison.
When she’s on kitchen duty, she makes a giant Rice Krispies treat in the shape of a heart and presents it to Freja after dinner.
During group chat, she openly stares at Freja with such naked ardor that Mary Pat has to remind her that sometimes you can violate someone’s personal space without ever actually touching them.
“So now I’m not even allowed to look at people?” we heard her whining when Mary Pat kept her after the session for a one-on-one and we all stood around the door, eavesdropping. “Even the way I look at people is problematic now?”
A hushed response from Mary Pat.
And then an impassioned cry from Madison: “What are you gonna do, put one of those cones around my neck that they put on dogs to stop them from licking their wieners?” which sent us all running down the hall, dying with laughter.
During homework hours, she quietly hums songs from Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die album and stares off into space with tragic longing.
In foreign language independent study, she puts aside her usual French and signs up for a Duolingo program in Danish.
One night, at dinner, Freja makes the innocent mistake of complimenting Madison’s glasses. Madison immediately yanks them off her face and holds them out to Freja. “You want them, they’re yours,” she says. “They’re real Kate Spade.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” laughs Freja. “I was only saying that they are nice, Madison.”
“Here.” Madison shakes them in Freja’s face. “They’re yours. Please. Take them. I want you to have them. They’ll look so much better on you than they do on me, anyway.”
We all expect Freja to wave her away again—this is a girl who owns a twenty-thousand dollar Balmain dress, after all, so what does she need with other people’s hand-me-downs?—but instead she arches a sculpted eyebrow.
“Are you sure these are Kate Spade?”
“Positive. I swear. I picked them out myself at Pearle Vision!”
“Very well, then.” Freja accepts the glasses, examines them, then slips them on. “These are very strong, no?” She squints around the table. “You are sure you do not need them?”
Madison blinks, her blue, weepy, mostly lashless eyes filling with tears at the glory of seeing something of hers adorning Freja’s face. “I’m positive,” she says. “I have a backup pair.”
“Those old pink ones?” asks Vera. “Aren’t those from like sixth grade?”
“You can barely see out of those!” exclaims Trinity.
“They’re fine,” insists Madison. “Really. Freja—those look amazing on you. I’d be honored if you kept them.”
And Freja, to our amazement—and annoyance—agrees. She thanks Madison, slips them into the front pocket of her backpack, then gets up to return her tray to the serving line.
“What is wrong with you?” Trinity’s voice is filled with disgust, but Madison just smiles dreamily, watching Freja scrape her leftover potpie into the garbage.
Later that night, after lights-out, Madison, in her outdated pink glasses, crashes into a wall on her way to the bathroom, chipping a tooth, and even though she cries about it, nobody feels sorry for her dumb ass.
30
IT’S NOT EVEN THANKSGIVING YET, but the stream outside Vivian’s office has frozen solid. Snowdrifts are blown halfway up her window, obscuring most of the view and making her tiny space feel even more claustrophobic than usual.
“So,” she says, crossing her legs and peering at me over her reading glasses.
“So,” I say.
“How are you?”
“Fine. I think I
have seasonal affective disorder.”
She looks at me. “Have you been feeling down lately? Sad? Dark thoughts? That kind of thing?”
“I was joking. I’m just sick of winter, that’s all.”
“Well, you’re going to need to get used to it, because technically it’s still autumn.”
“I hate east-central Minnesota.”
“Yes, so you’ve mentioned. Let me try asking you again: how are you?”
I reach back to tighten my ponytail, adjust myself in my chair. “You want to know, honestly?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I’m frustrated.”
“With anyone or anything in particular?”
“Why, since you asked: you.”
“Me? Why’s that?”
“Because why am I even here right now?”
“Mia. Come on.” Vivian wiggles her pen between her fingers, which is what she always does when she’s annoyed with me. “You’ve got to start focusing on your current reality, on the goals we’ve set for you, and get over this fixation that you don’t belong at Red Oak.”
“No, I don’t even mean that. I mean, why am I specifically here? Sitting in this chair, in this office, with you?”
She just looks at me with her tell-me-more face.
“I’ve been coming to see you twice a week for over a month now and you still haven’t really asked me about anything important.”
“Really? Like what?”
“Um, I don’t know, like my mom? And the fact that she got murdered?”
“Do you want me to ask you about your mom?”
“It’s not that I want you to. It’s just that I’ve been going to one therapist or another since she died, which is pretty much as long as my working memory goes back, and every single one of them is always dying to talk about her.”
“I was made to understand that you don’t remember your mother.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, then, when your other therapists have asked about her, what did you say?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. They do most of the talking.”
“And they say . . . ?”
“The usual.”
“What’s the usual?”
“Well, the most recent ones have told me that I have a mother-shaped void in my life, which I’m trying to numb with drugs or fill with boys.”
“Huh.”
“And that it won’t work because the drugs are temporary and the boys are the wrong shape.”
“Ah.”
“But here’s my question: if the void in my life is mother-shaped, and I only had one mother, then aren’t I doomed to have that void unfilled forever?”
“I suppose you are.”
“So I might as well just do whatever the hell I want because I’ll never feel whole anyway.”
“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it—though I would add, with respect, that not every kid who loses a parent ends up making some of the choices you’ve made. I don’t say this as a rebuke. I say it to remind you that—and we’ve talked about this—even though you experienced a catastrophic loss at a young age, it shouldn’t dictate the remainder of your life. You don’t want your mother’s death to become a crutch.”
“A crutch?”
“A catch-all excuse for why you make the choices you make.”
“I don’t do that at all. My dad and Alanna and my teachers are the ones who blame every bad thing I do on my dead mom.”
“Well, why do you think you behave the way you do?”
“I don’t know, maybe because I’m just kind of an asshole? Does there have to be a reason?”
“Well, yes, there usually does. Especially because you’re not, at least in my estimation, an asshole.”
“Aw. Thanks, Viv.”
“There are behaviors, and then there are issues. If you can get to the issue, you can start to change the behavior.”
“Please,” I say flatly. “Tell me more.”
“Well, since you brought it up,” she says, referring back to her notes and ignoring my sarcasm, “let’s talk about some of your behaviors. Those void-filling boys, I mean. Starting with Xander. That’s the boy you were seeing when you—”
“We weren’t seeing each other.”
“Okay. Let’s forget about labels. Was this a boy you cared about?”
“No.”
“And yet you were intimate with him.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“And the other boys—did you care for any of them?”
“Some more than others.” I look out the window at the whitewashed landscape. “But at the end of the day . . . no, not really. And they didn’t care about me, either.”
“So if you didn’t care about them, and you don’t feel they cared about you—why do you think you kept doing it?”
“I don’t know. Because it was fun?”
“You know, Mia, some cognitive psychiatrists believe that humans are often unconsciously drawn to the repetition of painful experiences.”
“What are you even talking about? I just told you it was fun. Who said anything about pain?”
“Forgive me. Maybe I’m misunderstanding you. Are you saying the sex with these boys, Xander and the others, was satisfying?”
“What do you mean satisfying?”
“Physically. Emotionally. Did the sex make you feel good?”
“Yeah.” I clear my throat. “Definitely. Otherwise why would I bother?”
“Wow. That’s great. Especially because it’s very unusual for women—especially very young women, like yourself—to experience orgasm with a partner when there’s no real intimacy there. And it’s nearly impossible to experience orgasm when you’re under the influence of drugs or alcohol, which you often were, when you engaged in these sex acts. Correct?”
“Correct, but that other part you said—that’s bullshit.”
“What other part?”
“The idea that a girl can’t enjoy sex unless she’s in love. Unless there are candles and negligees and silk sheets and sensual jazz music playing and shit like that.”
“Have you ever given any thought to what you like, Mia? What you want in a romantic encounter? Because what you just described —the negligees, the candles—that sounds to me like a cross between a Hallmark movie and a porn film.”
Her words summon a memory into my mind. Dillon Keating. LaBagh Woods at the height of summer, mosquitoes buzzing our bodies and my back pressing into the warm soft moss. Far away, the sound of laughter. He’d yanked my underwear down my thighs so fast that it tore in half. I saw a guy do that in a porn once, he said. I didn’t think it would actually work. We both had laughed then, me the loudest, so he knew I was cool with it, that I wasn’t scared at all. Black cherry vodka and flat Sprite in plastic cups spilled near our heads and fizzed into the mud. I’d only meant to kiss him.
“You know what?” I say. “I’d rather talk about my dead mother than talk about this.”
31
THANKSGIVING IS A HOLIDAY that’s all about family and food, so spending it away from your family is always going to suck, no matter how good the food is.
And I’ll admit: the food is good. Madison, Freja, and some of the other Conifer girls have spent all week in the kitchen with Chef Lainie, blind-baking pie crusts, tearing up stale bread for stuffing, mixing and plastic-wrapping cranberry sauce, and brining three massive turkeys freshly slaughtered and shipped from a poultry farm up in Pequot Lakes. The rest of us non–Martha Stewart types have been kept busy with chores like cleaning windows, dusting drapes, washing baseboards, and vacuuming the dorm hallways.
On Thanksgiving afternoon, we all help push the tables together in the middle of the cafeteria to make one long banquet-hall-type setup, with an elaborate cornucopia centerpiece Madison fashioned out of leaves and sticks she’d gathered along the walking trails. Outside the big picture windows, the snow falls, fine as cake flour. There is a hot chocolate station23 next to the salad bar;
homemade pumpkin, Dutch apple, and chocolate mousse pies; stuffing made with sofrito and torn sourdough and decadent dollops of butter; bowls of cranberry relish, cranberry chutney, and cranberry salad; trimmed green beans; brussels sprouts with candied bacon; the three huge local turkeys, golden and crispy-skinned; and, of course, because this is Minnesota, a large assortment of Hot Dishes. When we walk into the cafeteria to sit down for dinner, it doesn’t smell like a school cafeteria anymore. It smells like a home. Which is maybe why, halfway through our meal, Madison puts her fork down crossways on her plate, just like her well-born mother taught her, and begins to cry. This unleashes a domino effect across the table, with the exception of me and Vera, who simply roll our eyes at each other and split an extra helping of popovers. Still, it’s hard to have fun when everybody around you is sobbing, homemade popovers notwithstanding.
“Don’t despair, everyone,” Mary Pat says with her signature brand of willful positivity as she helps herself to a second serving of mashed potatoes and all around her, girls press their napkins to their eyes. “After we clean up here and put dishes away, I have a surprise for all of you!”
Mary Pat isn’t big on surprises. She’s big on structure, routine, and boundaries. So we all begin chattering excitedly among ourselves, trying to guess what the surprise might be. Trinity thinks it’s going to be like what they do on reality TV, when they have contestants’ family members squirreled away somewhere, and that any minute now, our parents and brothers and sisters are going to come strolling through the front door of the cafeteria. Swizzie thinks it’s going to be some sort of field trip, maybe to Mille Lacs to see the holiday lights. Soleil wonders if it’s going to be a cheat day, where Mary Pat allows us one hour to do whatever drug we want.
“A girl can dream, anyway,” she says.
Of course it turns out to be none of these things. After we’ve stuffed ourselves, cleared the table, packed the leftovers into giant Tupperware containers, and washed the dishes, Mary Pat and Coach Leslie march us through the snow, across the quad, and over to the rec center. Mary Pat unlocks the gym and throws open the double doors with a flourish.
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