Now, sure.
I suppose what happened is objectively funny. People falling is funny. People losing a wig as they fall on their ass is probably hilarious.
Except that it’s Madison. Madison, with her hard-won, newborn pride. Who picks and plucks and squeezes and scratches at every surface of herself, making manifest the torture of anxiety-ridden thoughts, who is convinced that she’s ugly and picks at herself as a way to cope with this conviction, then feels even uglier because she’s picked at herself, like one distorted mirror across from another distorted mirror, reflecting self back on to ruined self, on and on into infinity. Madison, who for one hopeful moment believed Freja, that possessing the thing you want the most is a simple matter of confidence. And for people like Freja, who are born into a world and a body that reassures them at every turn that they deserve every good thing they’ve ever gotten, maybe it is. But Madison is different. Which is why you can tease her, you can prod her, you can mock her with a mix of exasperation and affection—we all do it, all the time—but you can never, ever laugh at Madison.
Doesn’t everyone know that?
Does Freja really not know that?
Her regal laughter bubbles out into the flinty, clear, cold air, shatters against Madison like a body blow. Vera skates off to retrieve the wig while I go over to help Madison up. She knocks my arm away, rolls over onto her hands and knees and stands up slowly, holding on to her hip. Coach Leslie is skating out to us, in long, clean strides that remind us she once played elite hockey.
And Freja is still laughing.
She’s doubled over with it, not seeming to notice that nobody else is joining in. Madison looks around wildly. The grit is gone from her face and she is once again herself, skating with shaky, ungainly strides toward the edge of the lake where we’ve piled our boots and coats. She is kicking off her skates, shoving her socked feet back into her snow boots. As she limps back toward campus, we can hear her sobs echo across the ice.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Vera skates menacingly toward Freja, holding the wig under her arm like a dead animal.
“I am so sorry,” Freja says, wiping her eyes. “I am just shocked! I did not know that was not her real hair!”
I skate right up to her, close enough that I can see the fine blond hairs furring her upper lip. Close enough that my breath, dry and sour from all this exercise, makes her lean away from me. “I have to go check on my friend,” I whisper, cupping her face with the pads of my fingers, “but trust: I’ll be back for you.”
35
THERE’S THIS STAIRWELL AT RED OAK, in the academic building, that nobody ever uses. We all walk around the long way to get from our academic classes to the computer lab in order to avoid it. One day, when I first got here, I asked why.
“It’s haunted,” Swizzie explained with a shrug.
“Two suicides,” added Vera. “A month apart. Long before any of us were here.”
“It’s only two stories, but they jumped headfirst.”
“Swan dive.”
“Splat!”
I had laughed. That’s what you do sometimes when you hear about something awful happening to someone who could have been you.
I am not laughing now.
Madison is missing, and I’ve already checked our room, the admin office, the nurse’s office, and the kitchen. She’s not in any of those places, and there is nowhere else on campus I have known her to go.
There’s only one more place to check.
I cross the snowy quad, my toes numb through my boots. The academic building is quiet, abandoned. I walk toward the fire door that leads to the stairwell. The door opens with a low creak. The floor is concrete. Head-splitting hard. I look up. The banisters winding up to the second floor have all been replaced with high metal bars, like the slats of a baby’s crib. They reach all the way up to where they are bolted to the ceiling. You couldn’t jump if you tried. And for once, I am grateful to those who took the time to babyproof the whole of planet Red Oak, to save us from ourselves.
Dinner rolls around, and she doesn’t show up. Neither does Freja. Maybe, at least, Freja is being punished, or maybe Mary Pat has hidden her away somewhere solitary for her own protection, like they do in prisons. Smart. I don’t say much as I absently fork potato pancakes, made from the last dregs of the Thanksgiving leftovers, into my mouth. I’m thinking. As soon as I’m done eating and washing my dishes, I sneak away from constructive relaxation to my room, which is where I finally find her, curled under the covers, facing the wall. Mary Pat must have gotten her wig back to her, because it’s here, uncombed, sitting askew on its Styrofoam head. It’s dark except for my desk lamp, even though lights-out is still an hour away.
“Hey,” I say from a safe distance. No response. She’s crying, quietly. Her shoulders are shaking.
“Madison.”
“Please don’t turn on the light.”
“Okay. I’m not. I’m just standing here. Are you all right?”
She sits up, clicks on her reading light, and turns to face me.
I stumble backward. She’s still holding the tweezers in her hand. I don’t know where she got them; tweezers are banned personal grooming items, and now I know why.
Her eyes are red and bald as an opossum’s, and in a sad, small pile on her wrist sits a collection of tiny hairs.
She runs a finger along the pale arched line of skin where one of her eyebrows used to be.
“I only wanted to do a little,” she says. “And then I just couldn’t stop.”
“It’s okay.” I’m trying not to stare at her gigantic forehead. So that’s the point of eyebrows, I realize suddenly. It’s to make you forget that your eyes, nose, and mouth only take up 50 percent of the acreage of your face. “I get it. You were upset.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s okay.”
“Did you know,” she says softly, “that I’m the only girl here besides Freja who came to Red Oak without transport? Nobody had to pin me down or force me out of bed in the middle of the night. After the car-bomb thing, my parents just suggested the idea, coming to a place like this, and I jumped at the chance. I thought if I could disappear, their lives would be better.”
She reaches up absently to pull at her eyebrows before she realizes they’re no longer there.
“Well,” I say, “you thought wrong. I’m sure your parents love you.”
“No, it’s true. My mom is a professor of economics. I’m not what you’d call a ‘value add’ kind of person. I don’t add anything good to anybody’s life.”
“Listen,” I say. “Stop, okay? I’ve had those same thoughts. Especially after—” I stop.
“After what?”
“Here’s how little I think of myself.” I climb the bunk ladder and sit cross-legged next to her on her bed. “I didn’t even know this guy raped me until Vivian pointed it out to me. I just thought it was bad sex. I just thought that’s how senior guys treated freshman girls.”
Madison blinks at me with round, lashless eyes from behind her outdated pink glasses. She doesn’t say anything. All her fingernails are ridged in dried brown blood.
“But now I know, okay? Now I know. I’ve learned something at this place after all, as it turns out. And, Madison, you count. I mean it. Who gives a shit about this ‘value add’ stuff? Don’t you know that negative numbers have value, too? Algebra stretches in both directions. So does life. Okay?”
“Okay,” she sniffs, staring down at her tortured hands.
“Where’d you even get a pair of tweezers, anyway?”
“I wasn’t ambushed by transport men, remember? I had time to prepare.”
She directs me to a slit she’d fashioned into the bottom of her suitcase, where a small manicure kit, containing a pink nail file, nail clippers coated in silver glitter, and a stainless steel pair of cuticle scissors, is hidden.
“Most people our age use hiding places to stash condoms and weed. Not you, though.”
She manages a sm
ile. “Not me.”
“Okay.” I stick my hand out, palm up. “Fork over the contraband. Your pubic region will thank me in the morning.”
Madison sighs but obeys. I slide the tweezers back into the little box and, with a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure she’s not watching, carefully remove the scissors and push them up the sleeve of my sweatshirt before nestling the kit back into its hiding place.
36
I WALK CLOSELY BESIDE MADISON to breakfast, feeling more like a bodyguard than a roommate. All the way across the snowy quad, she hangs her head to conceal her new look. Her tweeze job won’t escape Mary Pat’s notice at group chat, of course, but at least maybe she can get through breakfast before having to face the consequences.
As we line up for oatmeal and eggs, I notice that Freja has wisely decided to start eating her meals with the girls in her own house.
“Damn!” Trinity shrieks as soon as we set down our trays. “What the hell happened to your face?”
“Shut up, Trin,” Madison mumbles, swirling her spoon muckily around her oatmeal.
“But what did you do?”
“What does it look like I did?” She spoons her breakfast into her mouth with one hand, while covering the top part of her face with the other, as if it’s unbearably bright in this predawn room.
“You have no eyebrows.”
“You know, Trinity, maybe if the porn thing doesn’t work out, you could be a detective.”
“Is this because of Freja? Because all you need to do is say the word and we will whoop her ass.”
“No!” Madison looks up, suddenly, her face frozen in perpetual surprise. “Please. Please don’t whoop her ass, Trinity. Okay? I mean it. I’m not even mad at her. It probably was funny, me falling and losing my wig and everything. When things are funny, people laugh. They can’t help it.”
“I didn’t laugh.” Trin looks around the table. “Did you laugh, Mia?”
“Nope.”
“How ’bout you, Vera?”
“No. No I did not.”
“See? None of us laughed. And you know why? Because it wasn’t funny.”
“You know what would be funny, though?” Vera says through a mouthful of apple.
“What?”
“If we whooped Freja’s ass.”
“Guys—”
“No, Madison’s right, everybody.” I shoot Madison a reassuring smile. “There’s no point in getting ourselves in trouble and starting, like, a civil war with Conifer House over this.”
“I don’t know.” Vera snaps off the stem of her apple and discards it in her uneaten bowl of Cheerios. “Winter around here is pretty boring. An interhouse civil war might be just the distraction we need. Since we probably aren’t going to be ice-skating anymore.”
“I hear you, but I think we should respect Madison’s wishes on this one.”
Trinity starts to object, but when Madison leans down to scoop another spoonful of oatmeal into her mouth, I give her a look. Then she gets it. You don’t live in isolation with people for months at a time without being able to interpret each other’s most subtle looks. The three of us—Trin, Vera, and me—share a secret smile over our breakfast trays. They understand my unspoken words: I’ve got a plan.
Because of Madison’s tweezers, I know that we’re in for a room search, the kind Dee relishes, pounding on our bedroom door with one fist as she’s turning the knob with the other. So after kitchen cleanup, on our way to group chat, I slip the nail scissors to Vera.
“Hang on to these until tomorrow,” I whisper. “Bring them with you to PE.”
37
THE LOCKER ROOM SHOWERS in the Red Oak gym are semi-communal; enclosed just enough to pass muster with skeptical prospective parents who come to tour the place but public enough to deny us even a moment of true privacy. There are ten doorless stalls, five on one wall, five on the other, so that even if you can’t see the naked girl on either side of you, you can clearly see the girl directly across from you, and the ones on either side of her as well. We are not allowed to use our own personal hygiene products in gym class; a large tower with dispensers of cheap shampoo, conditioner, and soap stands between the two shower aisles, forcing you to step out into public view every time you need to get some product.
The locker room also has five private stalls, equipped with their own private soap dispensers, and we all have the option of using them anytime we want. But nobody ever does. That’s because if even one girl requests a private stall, then Coach Leslie has to stand outside the shower door to monitor her—and, by default, to monitor all of us. And since we resent any intrusion on our very limited moments of unchaperoned freedom, Red Oak groupthink has decreed that showering in private is a deviant act. If you request a private shower, you’re a princess, a diva, a special fucking snowflake. Or you must have gotten your hands on a self-harming tool—the spring of a mechanical pencil, maybe, or the sharp foil edge of an applesauce cup—and now you’re trying to hide the damage you’ve done. Or you’re such a horny little freak that your masturbatory habits can’t wait until after lights out when you’re sure your roommate is sleeping, like a normal person. Regardless of the imagined reason, nobody ever showers in private.
As a result of this situation, I’ve grown quite familiar with the bodies of my classmates. I know whether nipples are large or small, pink or brown. I know who has stretch marks and birthmarks and body acne and scars, self-inflicted or otherwise. I know the color and quantity of pubic hair and where each girl is secretly carrying extra weight. I know each roll and muscle, each kiss of thigh and curve of shoulder.
I know Freja’s body.
I know the narrow plane of her waist, the round, high ass, the long, smooth back with the single mole directly in the middle, as if, when you pressed it, she might come to life. The breast implants that I didn’t know were breast implants until Trinity asked her straight-out and she admitted it. The long, thick hair, so shiny when wet it looks like a cascade of black vinyl.
Today, I’ve got my eye out for it especially.
“Let she who mocks the bald join the ranks of the hairless,” Vera had pronounced after I whispered my plan to her and Trinity as we crossed the quad after yesterday’s morning classes. “I like it.”
Coach Leslie is always stationed just outside the locker room entrance when we shower, or at least she’s supposed to be, but we know that she’s addicted to her fantasy league, and tonight the Vikings are playing the Bears on Thursday night football. Trin takes the shower closest to the entrance, the one that normally goes unused because anyone walking past in the gym can see straight in at you.
She nods at me when Coach Leslie, after hanging around at the doorway for a few requisite minutes, hoofs it back to her office computer to make some trades.
I turn on my shower. I take my time peeling off my sweats and sports bra, where I’ve been stowing the cuticle scissors that Vera handed off to me at the beginning of class, and which were periodically stabbing me all throughout our badminton tournament.
Vera has taken the shower across from me. She is distractedly rubbing her own mane of scraggly black hair, waiting for a signal. As soon as Freja steps outside her cube for some shampoo, her silicone chest leading the way, I give the nod.
We’re on her in an instant, taking her down to the tile.
I feel a flash of pain in my knee as it cracks into the soap tower. It takes me a moment to understand that Freja is thrashing beneath me like a caught fish. Vera, wild-eyed, skids across to her, holding her hands back while Trinity covers her mouth and I lift up the great, sopping wad of her precious hair. I gather as much of it as I can between the blades of the cuticle scissors and squeeze them shut. Muffled by Trin’s hand, Freja fights and screams so violently you’d think we were cutting off her actual fingers instead of her hair.
“Shut up,” I whisper in her ear. “Maybe next time you decide to rip out someone’s heart with your stupid laugh, you’ll think twice.”
“Stop
! What are you guys doing?”
Madison has stumbled out of the shower, hair dripping, boobs swinging. The problem we are encountering is that we were supposed to act fast, before the other girls could stop us, but these scissors are made for cutting tiny curls of cuticles, and Freja’s hair is very long and thick and copious.
“Get back in the shower,” Vera shouts while I snip frantically. “Get back!”
“Stop!” Madison shrieks. “What are you guys— Stop!”
Naked girls are now creeping out of their various stalls to gawk, to chide, to shout encouragement or vitriol—after all, regardless of how they feel about Freja, this is some good and much-needed entertainment—but all I’m aware of is the fact that this hair is so thick and these scissors are so dull.
And here is Coach Leslie, looking like a sweat-suit-clad demon, the steam swirling around her and settling in misty droplets at the top of her white puff of hair, and as I’m being dragged away by her hands and Dee’s, who seems to have materialized from nowhere, I feel myself almost instantly drained of the rage I’d been cultivating toward Freja ever since what she did to Madison. Seeing her there, reduced to a sobbing heap on the wet tiles, a small section of hair near her face shorn to ear length, I feel a sick bloom of guilt and shame for what I’ve done. It’s disappointing, really: I thought I was tougher than all that.
38
“GOOD EVENING, MR. AND MRS. DEMPSEY. The purpose of this hearing today is to discuss the physical assault that occurred in the locker room earlier this afternoon.”
“Physical assault is a little extreme, don’t you think?” I interrupt. “We cut some of her hair with cuticle scissors.”
“As Mia well knows,” Mary Pat continues without looking at me, “and as you know, too, Mr. and Mrs. Dempsey, here at Red Oak we have a zero-tolerance policy against physical violence of any kind.”
“Yes, we know, Mary Pat,” Dad says quickly. “We are just so embarrassed about Mia’s behavior.”
“Embarrassed but not surprised,” Alanna says, her fingers brushing her nose as a not-so-subtle reminder of what I’m capable of.
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