Mr. James announced that preps and lowers would be at the back with him and that Pierce and a senior named Grayson would lead the uppers and seniors toward the front.
“Under no circumstance do we split up more than a couple hundred meters,” Mr James said, mostly to Grayson and Pierce.
His luscious brown locks waved in the wind, “It’s our first ride and we are all just getting back into the flow. Let’s just enjoy it. The weather won’t be this nice for much longer.”
Emily was disappointed not to be in a group with Pierce. She had hoped to get to know him a bit better. When she had heard about the fall dance, she thought she might even get in his sights for an invitation. It was possible. He had called her “little one,” after all. That was flirting, right?
But, if she couldn’t be with Pierce, then her best hope was to keep up with the dashing Mr. James, and maybe prove that in a week or two she should join the faster group. She felt confident. She couldn’t wait to tell Josh that her school had a cycling club and about the mega bike she was riding. He would be jealous but happy for her, too.
The group set off and Emily found herself at the front of the pack the whole time. If she could hang on to lead position the whole time, and show she wasn’t out of puff at all by the end, she could ask for an upgrade.
The ride was relatively easy, not too hilly, similar to the rides she had done with Josh, although it was a lot more beautiful than going through the suburbs of Minneapolis. She didn’t know if it was the upgraded bike or her desire to impress a boy, but she hardly noticed the miles passing.
After flowing along in the lanes that surrounding the miles and miles of countryside surrounding Harlow campus, the group landed back at the starting point. Emily smiled to herself secretly, knowing that it wouldn’t be hard to convince Mr. James to upgrade her if she did that just once more.
As they all stood around taking their helmets off, she planted a seed with the coach.
“That was great, Mr. James. Do we ever go any further than that? I could have stayed out all day.”
“Great. Glad you liked it. We did a bit over 20k which I think was enough for the junior group. More than enough, actually…”
One of the boys had had to stop and walk his bike up a small hill.
“But tell you what,” said Mr. James, “If it’s too easy I’ll put you in the faster group. Next week I’ll let them spilt off when if there’s another adult supervisor. They don’t go any further but going faster, well, you’ll feel it in your lungs and legs. Pierce and Grayson will look out for you and if you can’t handle it, one of them will fall back and you can give the junior group more time.”
Just then Pierce, walked his bike over.
“Looks like we have a talent on our hands. You did a superb job recruiting this one,” he said to Pierce, “Emily wants to be pushed a bit more, so I told her to give it a go with you guys next week. Can you look after her,” asked Mr. James.
“Of course I can,” said Pierce, “It’d be my pleasure.”
He winked.
Emily could not believe her luck.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
EMILY LOVED BEING at Harlow that first month. It was hard, though. Really hard. The unfamiliar learning environment, where teachers just facilitated discussion, pushed Emily to stretch herself, needing to come up with her own discussion points to keep her grades up.
Suddenly, when she read a book for English, she knew that she needed to point out the alliteration or have unearthed some deep hidden meaning from within the manuscript.
Everyone around her seemed to be a genius at something. And kids had the most amazing experiences. In her biology class, one student talked about their trip to the Galapagos and learning about Darwin from experts there. In her French class, about half of the kids had been to France, or at least Quebec. In history, one kid was in Paul Revere’s bloodline. It was almost crazy to think all this privilege converged in one place.
There were days when her confidence would take a real nosedive. It appeared everyone was so intelligent and talented. Diverse backgrounds, stories… unique talents like playing the ukulele or Indian dance. Emily had never realized how just how ordinary she was until now.
It was all so hard to keep up, but math would have been next to impossible without Randy. He played teacher to Emily as he discovered new algorithms and formulas and theories by working progressively through the problem sets. He was a real Einstein and Emily wondered if all the other kids in the class were like him and she was the only dunce for whom this stuff didn’t come naturally.
Emily thanked her lucky stars this somewhat unusual guy was her partner. With his help, she might be lucky enough to get a “B” in Mr. Kim’s class. Though it would be the first “B” of her life… she would probably have to learn to accept lower grades at Harlow.
With her study buddy and the constant subliminal messaging, hearing the name Andy with an R, her dreams about Andy became more frequent again. She studied late into the evenings, often falling asleep with a book on her chest and waking just after midnight to change into pajamas. It was then that she would think how Andy would have loved Harlow. How much he belonged there and should have paved the way for them both.
Emily and Randy sat in her dorm common room one day, working on their homework together. He had just asked her a stream of questions:
“How is the furniture arranged in your dorm room, Emily?”
“Do you eat the thing you like most on your plate first, or last?”
“Do you keep your pens and pencils on your desk or in a drawer?”
“If you don’t use an app on your cell anymore, do you delete it or just leave it?”
“Are you the oldest, youngest, middle child or single?”
Emily had answered politely until that point. She did not want to answer that last question. She didn’t know how to answer that question. She still could not feel comfortable saying she was the oldest. She didn’t want to leave Andy out of her life, but she didn’t want to talk about him either. She just wanted to leave it all behind.
“Randy, I don’t mean to be rude but why do you ask so many weird questions? I mean, it’s like I’m being interrogated.”
“I’m autistic,” he replied, curtly and unemotionally.
Taken aback, Emily felt instantly unsure of what to say. Should she say ‘sorry’?
“I should have told you sooner,” he continued, “Mom told me I should tell people upfront. When I meet them. She says that being black and autistic in America can cause problems. She says it can appear that I am aggressive.”
Emily wasn’t sure what to say. It made her uneasy to talk about disability and race in this way. So… matter of fact. It didn’t feel matter of fact to her. She felt awkward and wondered if he felt upset by it all. She didn’t want him, or his Mom, to have to worry about him coming across aggressive. He was different for sure, but definitely not aggressive. Quite the opposite.
“Oh…” she said finally, “Well, I don’t think you’re aggressive. But the word I used, interrogated, it’s definitely like that.”
“I can try to stop asking so many questions Emily. But if I know the answers to these things, it’s how I can be comfortable with you. I am very wary of people I don’t know and the details put me at ease.”
“Ok. Well, now that I know I suppose it actually makes it all a bit easier to deal with. Thanks for telling me,” said Emily, “And, if you need to know if I prefer mashed potatoes smooth or lumpy, feel free to ask.”
She smiled at him.
“It appears my Mom was right,” Randy said, “I should have told you upfront.”
He smiled at Emily in return and thought to himself that she could be trusted. He decided he would call her a friend.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THERE WAS NOBODY Emily liked more as a friend at Harlow than Xander. They had become inseparable since that very first day at Gateway. They didn’t even talk about where and when and how to meet up anymore.
It was a given.
The Conundrum blog they were working on together pulled them together, it was a good thing they did like each other because having an ear to the ground all the time would have been exhausting, but they had each other. They could talk for hours about the various rumors they had heard and whether they should investigate.
It was difficult to get a hold of rumors as preps. They didn’t even know who was who yet, especially of the older students. But Xander and Emily were both super sociable, and it was turning out to be a great for meeting people. They had no choice but to break the ice from time to time.
What Xander especially enjoyed was eavesdropping. The best places on campus to do that were:
late night in the dorm bathroom
the library
the dining hall (at times, you needed supersonic hearing to cut through the background noise)
the cardio and weight rooms at the gym (Xander really had to stretch his confidence to hang out in the weights area with upperclassmen)
dorm common rooms
the bookstore
the cafe in town and at
any assembly where the content was boring.
Xander and Emily kept a meticulous schedule that documented where they were and the time at which they heard something of value. Or even they would not that people were present and chatty in that area. They committed to, together, spending time in each of these places, at different times of day and different times of the week.
It was Xander’s idea to structure their snooping in this incredibly organized way. Once per week, they put their findings into a big planner he had bought. He said it would help them eventually understand not only the best places but also the best times for “stakeouts.” He hoped that it would reduce their workload in the future.
Emily appreciated Xander’s enthusiasm and instruction and needed the structure. She could be chatty and it helped her focus on listening more.
Their first story had been Xander’s discovery, and Emily was so happy for him. She remembered his lit up face when he told her.
“Oh my God, Em… this is SO awesome! I’ve got the best first story!”
He had overheard it in the weights area at the gym. He would always pretend to be listening to music and wore his Beats headphones as a coverup.
“Well… spit it out…” Emily said, he was so wound up he stalled.
“There are three guys that are going to cheat a multi-choice exam. Guess how they are going to do it? It’s flippin’ genius actually…”
Emily widened her eyes and begged the information to come to her with her hands.
“Morse code,” he said, and his jaw dropped.
“Whoa…”
Emily contemplated just how unbelievably clever the cheat scam was. The guys had snuck a snap of the answer sheet in the teacher’s desk drawer and each memorized a third of the answers. They planned on tapping their feet and fingers to reveal answers to each other.
It was ingenious to be sure but Emily was surprised that all the guys knew Morse Code. She thought it would have been easier to just learn the material on the test.
“Yeah,” answered Xander to her question, “I thought the same when I heard them. But they mentioned a SpiderWeb video that taught them in 15 minutes. Honestly, Em, they probably thought to put in the time now and plan to use the scam again.”
“So what happens once we publish the blog? I mean, will they still do the cheat? Is this like self-discipline or something?”
“I dunno,” said Xander, “I’m going to ask Leila if I can catch her. Or you can.”
“I’m a bit scared of her to be honest. I haven’t officially met her yet, and she always seemed to grunt instead of say ‘hi’ when I see her in the halls.”
Xander agreed.
“Yeah, she definitely has something about her… but she’s always been nice to me. I’ll text her.”
When they revealed their first blog, people really talked about it. It went viral on campus in no time. Many probably wished they had thought of it first.
It turned out the boys didn’t do the cheat after being revealed. Self-policing was a thing for certain crimes on campus, cheating being one of them. It was one crime that students reported to teachers.
Harlow was cool, but also full of people all intending to compete for those precious Ivy League college spots. They weren’t about to let a cheat steal their spot. It was bad enough that some of them could buy their acceptance letter.
Xander and Emily were elated when the blog hit campus. They celebrated with huge “frappes,” another strange east coast word, for milkshakes, at a local ice cream shop.
Whenever she was with Xander, the awful memories, the grief, everything seemed to disappear. Yes, he knew how to make her smile with his stupid jokes but it was something else altogether that Emily loved but couldn’t put her finger on it. He just made her feel like she could be herself.
But even though she had felt that way, she still lacked confidence and leaking out little white lies. She had told him that her uncle worked at NASA. She gave him little details that would make him assume that her parents had profitable, white-collar jobs and that they lived in a nice, big house in a cute suburb. It was small stuff. Or at least she had thought it was, but the worst thing about the lies wasn’t even that one day Xander might find out the truth, but that perhaps he only liked her for the person she was pretending to be.
It ached Emily that she just couldn’t be her full self even though Xander really seemed to be cool with anything and everything she said and was. Maybe that was the mystery that needed to be solving- why since Andy died, she felt less confident than ever.
It just made little sense. The first day of school she met a friend for life, the second day a boy she crushed on seemed to like her a bit, too… but none of this made her feel valuable. It just made her want to try harder to make up ways these people should love her more. Or would allow her to keep them. She was always so afraid of losing.
Despite this underlying feeling, she enjoyed her time at Harlow more than she ever could have imagined. The freedom was amazing. She was completely responsible for herself. She needed to get herself to class, make sure she ate, did her homework… there was literally no one watching over her. After years of Pepper’s micromanagement, Emily found it complete bliss.
She did have to comply with certain rules and quickly learned the lingo: if she missed a class period she got a dickie. There were three allowed per term. If she was late for evening check in or was disruptive in the dorm, with loud music or something, she got sevens (which was only a big deal on the weekend as all preps had to check in at seven anyway, apart from on weekends when they could check in at nine).
Emily’s dorm was full to the brim with friendly girls. Some felt untouchable, way too popular, but she had quickly gotten to know all the preps and they would meet up sometimes in each other’s rooms to study, would watch TV together, order pizza and subs together. It was all very cozy and friendly. The students at Harlow all seemed to have great social skills and colossal amounts of confidence and Emily didn’t have very many chances to feel lonely.
Her dorm had two faculty members living in, like the “parents” of the house, and four senior girls who were proctors. These were the people that Emily was to turn to if she had a problem and to whom she had to report when she had to check in.
Mrs. Fernandez was a tiny Spanish woman, who was also head of the modern languages department, and she was in charge. She lived in her dorm apartment with her husband and they were both in their late fifties. It was nice having a figure that felt motherly like living in the dorms.
The other in house faculty was a youngish woman named Miss Smith who lived on her own but was apparently engaged. She taught Portuguese and as another modern language teacher, living with her “boss,” she seconded everything that Mrs. Fernandez said.
The Graves proctors were very grown up looking girls who seemed to take their power seriously. They were all four yea
r seniors. At Harlow, one could apply for entry any year and there was a small intake for every year after preps, so new students were added through every year up to postgraduates (students that already finished high school but who all seemed to use their sporting prowess to get into a better university on the Harlow name).
Four year seniors had an aura about them. They knew more about Harlow than anyone; they were prouder, fiercer and snobby about the position. They hazed preps the hardest and got respect from preps just by nature of their tenure.
The proctors in Graves Hall were Claudia, Francine, Moira and… Leila. After that night’s monthly meeting, when everyone was leaving, Leila grabbed Emily.
“Hey, you’re Emily, right,” Leila asked.
“Yeah… hi…,” Emily replied, nervous.
She was wary of Leila, but really of all the seniors, as Xander had told her some horrendous hazing stories. Apparently, in his dorm, he had heard about everything from preps having to wear adult diapers over their pants around the dorm for the first month to much worse, having preps strip down and line up in the order of the size of their penis. The latter terrified Emily. It sounded humiliating.
“You’re Xander’s friend, right,” Leila said.
“Yeah,” Emily replied.
“He’s cool. I mean, I wouldn’t have thought to give a prep the Conundrum blog, but he could sell religion to the Pope. Clever guy, super funny. He said he wanted to do it with you. I had my doubts because it’s meant to be completely secret. You do know that, right,” she asked threateningly.
“Oh yes, course I do. Xander told me. Anyway, it’s pretty obvious that if any teachers heard about it, that would suck,” Emily said, wondering if Leila was interrogating her.
“Listen, I started that blog a few years ago, when I was a prep, and have hung on to it like gold dust. I mean, it was my pride and graft and I wanted to let it go in my last year because let’s face it, until I wasn’t writing it any more I couldn’t tell anyone I was the one doing it. I’ve come out to some seniors now so I can get a bit of the glory. It’s only fair.”
The End Defines the Beginning : A Boarding School Coming of Age (Harlow Academy Series Book 1) Page 10
