The Other New Girl Page 2

  Sometimes girls back home went away to “prep”—always to sister schools associated with some elite boys prep school— but none had ever gone to a Quaker school before so I was a trailblazer and an oddity they looked upon with skepticism and confusion. Not a good combination in eighth grade, so I was not unhappy to leave. In truth, I was not doing well at the girls’ school and my home life was a mess. My parents wanted to get me into what they called “a better situation.” Translation . . . I’d better do well at the Quaker school that was billed as a caring, supportive, and family-like environment, or else. This did not address the messy home life for which I was not responsible but that never seemed to come up in any of the conversations around the dinner table about my so-called lackluster grades or behavioral infractions. When I look back now at my school reports, all of which my mother saved, I am amazed that my grades were actually quite good with one glaring lapse in algebra, which to this day makes no sense to me. And my teachers seemed to like me, according to their comments. But nothing I ever did satisfied my mother. So the impression left was of a slacker who was not living up to her potential. How one pre-measures potential was always puzzling.

  At Foxhall I took the place of a girl named Ursula who’d been expelled at the end of her freshman year for sneaking a local boy into her room late one night and getting drunk with him. Or maybe they were already drunk before she let him climb the tree outside her room and come in through her open window. It had happened in the spring, the four girls who took me under their collective wing told me on my eighth day at Foxhall.

  I’d arrived at Foxhall in a tentative state, my parents having driven me all the way from Connecticut arguing about something trivial that I tried not to listen to by reading in the back seat, which only made me feel queasy. My mother was starting to act weird again and when that happened she would pick on me. My father would defend me and they would go at it, leaving me caught in the middle and left out at the same time. By the time we’d unloaded my stuff and said good-bye so they could get back before dark, I was glad to be on my own, angry that they’d left me to whatever fate was waiting, and terrified I’d be shunned for being new. So when four junior girls took me under their collective wing, I didn’t ask questions or try to figure out why. I was happy to be absorbed into their clan, relieved to belong somewhere, especially if it meant being designated a cool girl.

  We had all stayed up past lights out and gone to the makeup room behind the auditorium stage. The room was only supposed to be used for dress rehearsals or during plays but girls sometimes snuck in there after lights out to study or just to do what teenage girls do late at night—talk about boys, other girls, hopes and wishes. Once there, we would gaze at ourselves in the long mirror above the makeup table that ran the entire length of the back wall and point out our facial flaws.

  Brady’s hair was thick and unmanageable. My eyebrows were too low. Poor Jan’s mouth curved to one side, especially when she smiled. Faith had not enough of a chin and her palms had a skin condition that flared up when she was stressed. It was nonsense, of course, because we were all pretty. But at our age none of us was thrilled with the images we saw gazing back at us, as if that mirror had been borrowed from a fun house and told only a distortion of truth. All except for Daria. She was gorgeous and everyone, including Daria, knew it. No mirror could dispute it, and the rest of us could only sigh and think how easy it was to be Daria, as if beauty was a key that would open any door.

  I was in a kind of confused state during those first days at Foxhall. Plucked out of my familiar pond at home, out of the only bedroom I’d ever known, the house where I’d grown up, the school I’d been driven to since fourth grade, even the uniform I wore, that I’d gotten used to hating but that allowed me to dress five days a week without thinking about what to wear and what everyone else was wearing and what was acceptable and what I would look like and what the others might say about me or think of me. And boys. Now there were boys everywhere I went. At meals. In the halls. In classes. At the library. On the playing fields. They watched us and hooted at us and talked to us and followed us. I didn’t have any idea what to wear, how to act, what to say. Whatever these girls wanted from me, I would be a willing participant. If only they would like me, accept me, make me a member.

  In the makeup room, they told me about the expelled girl, Ursula, whose room I’d been assigned. She’d been on the “outside” as they termed it. I understood right away that simply including me in the retelling brought me “inside” and that was a major coup for me. It was also made clear that since I was the new girl, I had a lot to prove and that night set the wheels in motion. Just to be spirited up to the makeup room after lights out was a sign that I was being tested for membership in their club. I learned later that Daria had set it up, told the others to get me alone and find out what I was made of, if I was worthy of inclusion and how far I’d go to prove it.

  The boy Ursula let through her open window was cute, they said with knowing nods and raised eyebrows. A townie whose father ran the local farm store, a successful enterprise as far as a local business could be looked upon by us preppies as worthy. In those days, farms still surrounded Foxhall. The land hadn’t been plowed under and gouged out by developers. So he wasn’t the kind of poor that would have made him untouchable. Still, he was not one of the boys from Foxhall. Those were the boys we were supposed to date and eventually marry—or boys just like them maybe not from a Quaker school, but from other, more traditional schools.

  But, they told me, she shouldn’t have done it. At least not that way. The girls were not so much offended that she’d taken up with the cute townie, who was nineteen and rumored to be “experienced,” a code word for sexually adept. No, they were more put off by the way she’d done it.

  She should have waited for the weekend and gotten a pass to town and met him on the sly. Maybe under the railroad trestle. Or in that big culvert where the Nonnahanny stream ran quietly enough, if there hadn’t been any rain, to walk inside and sit down on the corrugated metal with the huge old sycamore standing guard at one open end of the tall tube. No one would have seen them in there and they could have gotten drunk and done whatever they wanted. No one would have known. They were still trying to figure out why she’d taken the risk of bringing him into her room.

  “I don’t think she expected to get caught,” said Jan.

  “Of course she didn’t expect it,” Brady made a face at Jan. “Who would? Especially on that day.”

  “Well, it was pretty odd letting him climb the tree and opening the window,” Jan argued. “She was just stupid.”

  Daria ran her fingers through her curls and sighed. “I know, the night before graduation. I mean she was a junior so it wasn’t her graduating. But still . . . she wanted them to find her. I’m sure of it. She almost waved a red cape at them.”

  “At who?” I asked and was sorry the minute the words were out.

  They all turned to look at me and I could tell by their smirks that I should have kept quiet.

  “Who do you think?” asked Jan.

  I shrugged and looked down at the makeup table in front of me but I could feel them all watching me.

  “Them,” said Brady. “The Foxhall behavior squad. The system. The deans. All of them. She hated them. Daria’s right. She wanted to get caught. She wanted to get out of here and go back to public school to finish up. She wanted to get her license, to drive and go where she wanted, and not have to get permission to go to town or sign out or any of the stuff we have to do here. She didn’t want to be a chicken cooped up in a cage anymore.”

  Later, I came to understand it. She wanted freedom. She wanted to get caught so she wouldn’t have to quit the school on her own. This way, she’d be free to move on and the mark against her would only matter to her parents. She’d feel liberation to their shame. It was a bargain she’d made with herself. And the boy could go back to town and talk about the hoity-toity girl he’d screwed right in her own dorm room because in those
days, getting drunk was a euphemism for sex. It was three months shy of 1960, the tail end of the quiet, self-satisfied fifties, on the cusp of the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, The Beatles, pot, Bob Dylan and protest songs, and turning on, tuning in, and dropping out with a little help from your friends. We were supposed to be innocent. We had no idea what was ahead of us. We were supposed to follow the rules. We were supposed to be preparing for college, responsibility, taking our place among the elites of our country. We weren’t supposed to be in the makeup room. We were supposed to be in bed, asleep, alone.

  I was so eager to fit in that I would have done almost anything for these girls. I had no idea yet just how deep the pit of acceptance could be. These girls were at war with the rules, but only in a clandestine way. There was a code to follow and when it was broken, they united to protect both the structure provided by the rules and the ways in which a girl could get around them. They were juniors, one year ahead of me, well versed in the Foxhall culture.

  We were all away from home, isolated out in the country at a school with more rules than our parents had ever laid down. It was a long time ago now. The world has changed. We didn’t have cell phones or iPads. There was no texting or sexting or free Wi-Fi. There was one pay phone down the hall from the school office, and you could only use it for emergencies or on Saturday between nine in the morning and five in the evening. To receive a call on your hall, it came through the switchboard operated by an ancient woman we all called Mrs. W., although what her name really was, I never knew. She sat in her cubicle across from the deans’ office with a panel of wires and plugs that connected her to every phone in the school. She logged all the calls with name of caller, time of call, and who the call was for, all written in a neat script on a giant logbook she kept at her side. The whole thing could have come from the pages of a Dickens novel. It was that nineteenth century.

  “You have to carry on the tradition,” Brady told me in a quiet voice.

  “That’s right,” said Jan. “It’s up to you now. Especially since they gave you her room.”

  She meant Ursula’s room. I didn’t say anything.

  “Daria had an idea,” said Brady. “She said if you agree, then we’ll help you . . .” she seemed to be searching for the right word. “Get settled in here at Foxhall,” she finally said.

  “It can be tough starting out new in the second year, when everyone else already knows the ropes from last year,” Faith broke in. She seemed genuinely interested in helping me through the transition. I would come to understand that Faith may have been one of the cool girls, but she was also deeply concerned about doing the right thing. That was the right thing as she saw it and not as the rulebook dictated. She had her own way of living her Quaker faith. Not like Daria’s way. And I learned quickly that being Quaker didn’t mean there was a mold that fit everyone.

  “Thee can count on us,” she added.

  It was the first time I’d heard anyone speak in that way Quakers had of addressing their families and close friends and was further evidence that I was accepted.

  I must have looked at her with some skepticism because she added, “I don’t agree with what they did to Ursula. Yes, she broke a big rule, but expulsion was way over the top. It was cruel.” Over time I would also come to understand the Quaker idea of passive resistance, of challenging the system from within, of taking a stand for what you think is right, just, moral.

  “So, you see, we have to do something,” Brady said. “It’s an act of civil disobedience. Emersonian in its simplicity.”

  “And Daria has the perfect idea,” said Jan. She grinned at me.

  “What would I have to do?”

  Brady leaned in as if we were conspirators in some war game. “It’s easy. Just sleep through the whole thing. Or say you did. No matter what happens, they can’t prove anything. And all you could possibly get is a demerit. Because without proof or you confessing, there’s not much else that could happen.”

  “But what would I . . .”

  Brady interrupted me. “We’ll do everything. When we come through your room, you just pretend to sleep through it and leave the rest to us. The less you know the better.”

  So there I was, my fate decided. I nodded my agreement and was glad to be accepted into their circle, glad to have this group of girls shepherd me through my start at a new school, to be addressed by Faith in the familiar “thee,” glad to have an easy assignment to seal my entry into the club.

  During the three-day orientation before the actual school year started, new students were handed a thick booklet of rules. You were expected to memorize and follow them exactly. No ambiguities there. Rules were not to be broken and, should anyone break a rule, punishments would be meted out. These were spelled out at the end of the booklet in a section all its own. Reasons for expulsion were extensively covered. When people talk about the past as a more innocent time, less complicated, more personal, easier, simpler, they fail to mention that the human heart never changes and human behavior was as corrupt before as it is today and has been, ever since human history was first recorded. Just read the Bible or look at the ruins of any civilization and you’ll see people behaving pretty much the way they do now, except with cruder tools. They had rules, too. That’s the way it was at Foxhall. Acceptable behavior may have been codified in a booklet handed out at orientation, but that didn’t prevent unacceptable behavior from creeping under the radar. In fact, I would argue it nourished and helped it grow.

  That was the way I looked at it now. Back then, at fifteen, I was an integral part of the system, engulfed by the cool girls at the end of my first week. They were the girls who set the tone, made the unspoken rules, created the alternate codes of daily operation. Not that anything about that was recorded or written in a booklet. But we all knew what was what. I discovered, that night in the makeup room long after lights out, that I was the replacement for the expelled girl who had broken with the code and let a townie into her room where she’d been caught with her bra around her waist and the boy, his pants down around his ankles, on top of her, bed springs creaking and the smell of cheap scotch in the spring air that wafted in through the second floor window.

  After the event, the girls’ dean, Miss Bleaker, directed the grounds crew to cut the branches of the dogwood tree that had allowed this breach of the rulebook. From that day forward, all trees in front of windows around the base of Fox, where most of the girls lived, were denuded of branches above ten feet so that no one could ever again climb into a second floor window.

  Someone—no one admitted to it but there were rumors— carved the boy’s initials, W. T., into the side of the dogwood trunk that faced the building. And, in September, a week into my first term at Foxhall, a ritual of remembrance began. Brady, Faith, Jan, and Daria stole an hour before dinner to collect dandelion flowers before the chill of fall killed them off, wove them into circles and, late at night when everyone else was asleep, snuck into my room and tossed them from the window where they landed on the dogwood’s truncated branches, wilted necklaces clinging like wreaths draped on a gravestone.

  When the time came I did what was expected and feigned sleep through this initiation rite. And that was how I became embroiled with Miss Bleaker twelve days into my first year at Foxhall.

  THREE

  Margaret Bleaker

  “TAKE A SEAT.” MISS BLEAKER MOTIONED ME TO A straight-backed chair opposite her plain, brown desk. Standing to the right of it, she looked down at me. She seemed to be something other than flesh and bone and hair, like a statue that had escaped its base and begun to move zombie-like among the living. Anyway, she was intimidating, and I tried to avoid looking directly at her so instead I studied the room.

  The top of her desk was empty of the sorts of trinkets you’d expect to find in a dean’s office. No pictures of family members or a beloved dog, no potted plants or dishes of jellybeans to offer a treat to visiting girls, nor any other sign— except for her presence—indicated that anyone did an
ything in this office. There was a small bookshelf against one wall containing only The Foxhall Handbook of Rules. I thought it looked lonely, positioned there with no companions, its cover facing the room. One thing was certain. You couldn’t ignore it.

  As if her tall, rather gaunt frame and black hair pulled back into a tight bun weren’t intimidating enough, she didn’t smile and hardly moved except to point with one index finger at the seat I was to “take.” In the scant week I’d been at Foxhall School, I’d heard stories about other girls who’d been ordered to appear before Miss Bleaker. She had the reputation of being completely unforgiving and this alone served her well whenever a girl was summoned to her monastically appointed office. But those other girls hadn’t lived with my mother for fifteen years. Unlike me, they had no idea how to counter an attack or sneak around authority, even lie when necessary to avoid conflict or consequences. The emotionally unstable atmosphere of my family life had turned me into a kind of survivor, like someone who’d experienced the battlefield and returned home, not wanting to talk about it, but on guard, wary of what might happen at any moment, and prepared to hit the deck and then, when the danger had passed, to go back to the business of life as if nothing was amiss. Plenty was wrong. I just refused to show it.

  She cleared her throat and moved ever so slightly back half a step, then looked down at me as if by simply staring she could shake whatever nerve I might have out of me and watch it scuttle crab-like down the hall.

  “Miss,” she looked down at a small slip of paper in her hand, “Greenwood.” Not all the teachers called us by our last names but this was Miss Bleaker, and the girls had told me the name suited her, that she was undoubtedly the bleakest person on campus. She always kept distance between herself and the Foxhall girls. We were to respect her the way we were to respect police officers or judges. We were not to question their authority and we were always to remember that they had the power and we had to fall in line. I hadn’t yet gotten to the point of recognizing the irony of a school professing to question authority in the greater world while standing up for the disenfranchised and downtrodden, yet expecting slavish devotion to the rules imposed from above on its students.