The Other New Girl Read online

  She stared at me and I wondered if I was supposed to say something and if so, what? But she only paused a few seconds before resuming.

  “I’ve been watching you,” she almost whispered it.

  I thought if she’d been watching me how was it she needed my name written down to remember it? But I kept still.

  “You’ve been here a week and you’ve gone through orientation so I can assume you know the rules.” Here she pointed a thin finger at the bookcase for emphasis. “Now, because this happened just after the first week of school, I might be persuaded to overlook a demerit and punish you with only a week of kitchen duty cleaning plates. But now,” she backed up and moved to her chair on the other side of the desk where she slowly lowered herself and folded her hands so that she almost looked as if she were about to pray. I thought she would have made a good nun. At least what I thought would have made a good nun, never having been in close proximity to one myself. I had only seen her wear the most austere black dresses which each looked pretty much like the others. Her shoes were the sensible sort. She was unadorned by jewelry or hair combs or makeup, save a slash of red lipstick that seemed to be applied more to identify her as female than to enhance any particular feature.

  “Now, however,” she went on, “I find I can’t be lenient as that would send the wrong message. So I shall have to mete out the maximum for such an offense.”

  Still no word on the offense itself.

  “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  I blinked at her. I hadn’t expected this question so I blurted out, “What offense are you talking about?”

  Quick as a spider, she pounced. “Are there other offenses that perhaps you have committed? It would help your case to clear the air right now. Otherwise . . . ”

  She left the word hanging in the air like a balloon. My hands had turned clammy and for all my bravado in the beginning, by then I was beginning to weaken. I knew my tough crust had a thin shell and that underneath I’d been damaged by the emotional trauma that had been perpetrated on and around me since childhood. I might put up a brave front but inside I questioned myself more deeply than anyone could imagine. When I didn’t say anything else, she sighed deeply, as if I’d hurt her to the core.

  “You girls don’t understand how important it is to follow the rules. Without rules, we’d all be just wandering in a desert of chaos. You girls will learn that later in life. But now, it’s up to me and your teachers to instill in you the value of following the rules at all times. What happened in the past was a tragedy for one girl and her life will never be the same. Her example is a lesson for all of you. We must overcome the past and the impulses that led to such behavior. That is our mission at Foxhall. And we cannot allow you girls to make a mockery of that.”

  “But Miss Bleaker, I had nothing to do with that. And anyway it happened last year and I wasn’t even here yet.” I tried to sound sincere and full of empathy for Bleaker’s oh-so-difficult situation.

  “I’m well aware of that, Miss Greenwood. I’m asking about what happened just last night.” She unfolded her hands and reached in front of her. I heard a drawer slide open and she carefully lifted out a wilted circle of dandelions linked together by their stems and held it dangling limply from her fingers.

  Oh, the dandelion rings on the tree outside my window. A long minute ticked away while I stared at that dandelion ring and she stared at me.

  “Well?” she finally broke the silence.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” I told her. “What is it?” I tried to maintain a “who me?” attitude.

  “Miss Greenwood, this is not a joking matter. These . . . ” she seemed to search for the exact word to show her disdain, “symbols are neither funny nor acceptable. And since they appeared in the tree beneath your window, I must assume you are responsible and that means the punishment will be yours to bear alone.” She sighed again as if the burden of our collective subversion was too heavy for her to shoulder. And then she continued. “I have told you girls again and again, told you and warned you, that holding hands leads to babies. That is why I patrol these halls, these dances, this school. To protect you girls from the fate that would befall you should you forget that simple dictum.” Again she sighed, this time with less depth. And then finally finished her diatribe. “Of course, if you tell me who else is behind this affront to decency, your punishment will be minor.”

  “Miss Bleaker, I swear I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m a very sound sleeper and maybe someone snuck into my room while I was asleep.”

  I didn’t know it then but news that someone was being interrogated had spread like a rampant flu through Fox Dorm and word was out that this someone was in Bleaker’s lair, ratting out the offending girls and soon others were to follow. The longer Bleaker’s door stayed shut, the more outrageous the stories got everywhere in Fox and even across campus to the boys’ dorms, where whispers of conspiracy, tattling, repercussions and expulsions to follow rang up and down the halls. Finally the gossip culminated in a tale that whoever had ratted out the girls, Daria was the one who would be expelled and that the rat would come to Daria’s room in Fox to tell the extended tale and fess up her perfidy to the awaiting tribunal of upper class girls.

  Such was a small community that quasi-news traveled faster than solid fact and this fable had taken on its own life and grown wings. It could be hard to tell where gossip ended and information began. The intertwining could be like muscle and ligament, inextricably attached each to the other. I could look back on it now and still not see clearly how the chain of events linked together in more than a general way. As it turned out, that autumn of my sophomore year at Foxhall School would turn deadly, but on that day in Bleaker’s office, no one had any idea how events would spin out of control like a tornado, sucking all of us, innocent or not, into its vortex.

  FOUR

  Study Hall

  THAT WAS HOW I ENDED UP RELEGATED TO STUDY HALL FOR the entire first semester—September until Christmas break— of my first year at Foxhall. Study Hall. The jail of prep school, the very last place you wanted to be stuck, even for one week. I’d read about it in the book of rules. While everyone else spent the two hours between social time after supper and the forty-five minutes before lights out in their rooms or their friends’ rooms or at the library, anyone assigned to study hall was required to spend that time locked away in one designated classroom with other malcontents or academically below-par performers. Since it was the beginning of the year, there would be only a few of us. It also meant I would be confined to study hall on Sunday afternoons after lunch from one to four—three long hours of staring at Caesar’s account of consolidating power, in Latin, or figuring out quadratic equations, a loathsome task under normal circumstances. It looked like the start of what would be a singularly lonely semester.

  Innocent of the turmoil brewing while I faced the Bleaker treatment, when finally freed from her grip, I wandered the halls for a while just feeling waves of relief. That elapsed time further fueled the rumor mill until I finally found my way up to the third floor and walked toward Daria’s room, because of all the people who I could have faced right then, it was strangely Daria who I thought would be the most supportive of the way I’d held my ground and refused to give up the others to save my own neck. Also I wanted to show her I was worthy of inclusion.

  When I opened the door, there they were, seated on Daria’s bed like a row of starlings on a telephone line. I was surprised because I’d just come to see Daria alone, and wondered why they were all in her room. The expressions on their faces ran from suspicious to guarded to shocked and, within seconds of opening the door, they shifted to disbelief and then a kind of collective sneer as Daria’s voice greeted me.

  “Greenwood.” She said it like a reprimand. “Is it you?”

  Is what me? What is she talking about?

  “Is what me?” It must have sounded insincere but I was too perplexed to realize it at the time.
/>   “Is it you?” she repeated. “Are you the rat? Should I expect Bleaker to call me in now?”

  “What are you talking about?” I shook my head and looked from one to the other down the line.

  “It’s all over the school.” Jan spoke for them. “Bleaker made someone talk and now Daria’s going to be expelled.”

  “Really?” I sat down on Daria’s battered desk chair. We were all given one at the beginning of the year. Along with a desk, bed, and one lamp. Any other amenities you had to supply from home so our rooms were a collection of odds and ends donated by our parents or bought for the school year and then discarded. The castoffs of every year showed up in other people’s rooms the next year, adding to the general thrift-shop look of the less wealthy kids’ rooms, signaling to everyone just who was on scholarship and, in many cases, who was from a Quaker family. Quaker kids were given admission preference, even if they couldn’t afford to pay the tuition. The school didn’t tell us this. But it became part of the general knowledge that circulated like pollen settling on the student body. Like where you’d gone to school before you got to Foxhall and if you were one of the five or so percent of Jewish kids. Besides entering as a sophomore, I straddled the religion line and didn’t quite fit in any category. My father had been raised Jewish and my mother was an Episcopalian. When anyone asked me what I was, that was my answer because I really didn’t know what I was or where I should place my allegiance. I think that was why my parents sent me to a Quaker school. They thought in that environment I would be accepted for myself and not stuffed into a category that didn’t fit me. Part of that was true. Even as I was rebelling against the school system, I realized I was absorbing something meaningful from Quaker teachings and practice. But then there was the pettiness, the arbitrary rules, the puritanical attitude.

  “Well it wasn’t me,” I said emphatically. A general sigh filled the room and the atmosphere cleared as if a storm had blown itself out. “Anyway why would Daria be expelled and not anyone else?”

  “Bleaker’s been gunning for her since last year,” Brady whispered, but the others could hear her I was sure.

  “But why?”

  “Because of Tim Payton,” Brady put a finger to her lips.

  “You can tell her,” Daria interrupted. She sounded impatient. “For God’s sake Brady, everyone else knows, or if they don’t then they’re just so out of the loop they don’t matter.”

  “Well,” Brady leaned into her story. “Last year, at the Junior-Senior Dance, Daria went to the dance with Tim . . .”

  I’d seen him around already and heard about him, too. Now a senior, one year ahead of Daria.

  “. . . and they disappeared for about a half hour and Bleaker went berserk looking for them. When she couldn’t find them, she went to Coach Sharply and told him to look for them in the boys’ dorm because she suspected they were— she called it ‘flaunting the rules’—and anyway, once you’re at a dance, it’s against the rules to leave until it’s over. Well Coach told her to let it go, that school was almost over and, with graduation the next week, there was no sense making a big deal of it. That made her so mad she shut down the dance and sent everyone back to their dorms.”

  I looked over at Daria. She was grinning.

  “What happened?”

  “We weren’t in the boys’ dorm. We were in the mattress room. Tim had a key. I don’t know who got it originally but it was passed around all year.”

  “What’s the mattress room?” I must have sounded like a total idiot to them but I couldn’t help myself. How else could I learn all the ins and outs of this new system?

  “Brady, you tell her. You’ve spent the most time there of any of us.” From her position on the bed, Daria leaned her back against the wall and pulled her knees up to her chest.

  “Oh, so now I’m the group slut?”

  Daria let out a little laugh. “Well it’s true. You were the first one to tell me about the room.”

  Brady turned to me. “It’s this room in the basement of Fox where they store all the extra mattresses. There must be about thirty of them down there. So if you want some privacy—you know like with a boy—that’s the most comfortable place to do it.”

  “You guys are kidding, right?”

  “Oh, man, like you are really out of it aren’t you?” Daria sat up straight again. “Why would we be kidding? And anyway where were you the past two hours then?”

  “Yeah,” Jan spoke up for the first time since I’d entered the room. “We looked everywhere for you.”

  “I was in Bleaker’s office.”

  “Then it was you,” Daria’s eyes narrowed and she moved to the edge of the bed as if she was ready to run.

  “What did she say?” Faith asked in a clear voice. She was fair-minded, and supportive, always ready to forgive an offense. The younger girls adored her and often turned to her for advice.

  “Oh, you know, she threatened me and then tried to make a deal with me.”

  “But you didn’t squeal?” Jan asked. “I mean you kept us out of it, right?”

  Looking back now, at everything that happened after that, I wonder what I was thinking at the time. I thought I was being noble, sacrificing myself to the greater good. At the same time, I think I knew what was really going on. I wanted them to accept me, to like me, to make me a permanent part of their circle, because high school girls’ friendships can be as ephemeral as moonlight subject to a passing cloud. I was a new kid. I was lucky they’d taken me in and taught me the ropes. I didn’t want to lose what I’d gained. And by taking the hit, I would have something over them and they could never reject me. At least not for that year. And by then I’d be in the upper class, and it would be up to me who to accept and who to reject. My time at Foxhall would be secure. They would owe me. It wasn’t a bad thing to want to fit in. And there was no reason why I shouldn’t.

  “I didn’t squeal,” I told them. A collective sigh rose from the bed and they giggled nervously. Daria leaned back again and stroked her hair.

  “Well, thank God for that,” Brady said. “Sorry, Faith.”

  Faith never swore or used any words that might offend another Quaker. She was an odd combination of saint and sinner, hard to figure out so the other girls paid her a certain deference. And how she practiced the Quaker way of speaking to family and close friends, by using the pronouns thee and thy and thou rather than you and yours, was funny for me at first. Quaker faith could be quiet and yet visible in small ways. Faith was kind, pretty, gracious, and smart, a natural test-taker who always got perfect scores on every standardized test. Next to her, I felt every bit of my B average grades. Yet she always treated me with respect.

  “What did you get?” Brady asked. “Study hall for a month?”

  “The whole first semester,” I said.

  “Wow. She really was pissed, old Bleaker,” Jan snickered. “God I wish I had a cigarette.”

  “One of the senior boys gave me half a pack yesterday,” Daria whispered, as if she thought there might be a spy outside the door, ear pressed against the old wood, just waiting to get the goods on all of us together.

  I reached behind me and turned the bent key in the old lock, thinking it would be easy to pick any of these locks, as old as this building was. It clicked and the girls seemed to relax some.

  “Where is it?” Jan wanted to know. “Hand some over. We all need a smoke.”

  “Not in here, for God’s sake,” I told them. “That’s all I need is detention for the entire school year.”

  “Yes,” Brady muttered. “We don’t need to get caught for smoking on top of everything else. But I know a place that’s safe. We can go there one at a time and meet up. Out in the woods. There’s a path where no one would see us sneaking out. It’s an old shed out there. One of the boys showed it to me last year. He said they call it the pigpen.”

  “Which one?” Daria asked. She stroked her hair with elegant, tapered fingers. I noticed her nails were perfectly manicured and she had po
lished them a lovely pale pink. “Was it Boyd? He told me about that shed at a dance. He wanted to sneak out to it but I wouldn’t go. He’s got a reputation, you know.”

  “It wasn’t him,” Brady said. “I don’t even remember who it was. But definitely not Boyd.”

  “What do you mean you don’t remember?” Daria gave her a fishy stare. “You went out there with him didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but we were pretty drunk and I don’t remember much about it.” Brady giggled nervously.

  “Are you sure it was one of the Foxhall boys? I mean could it have been . . .” Daria’s voice trailed off.

  “No,” Brady pronounced it with force. “It couldn’t have been.”

  I looked from Brady to Daria as it dawned on me what was going on. Apparently the expelled girl wasn’t the only one who had a thing for the cute townie with the initials WT.

  “Why do they call it the pigpen?” I asked.

  They all turned to look at me and Jan sneered, “Don’t be stupid. Why do you think they call it that?”

  I had no idea but I nodded as if it had just occurred to me and then Daria, her angelically gorgeous face masking any emotion, told me, “Because we can all behave like pigs out there and no one will ever find us.”

  My stomach felt like I’d been sucker-punched but I kept quiet and hoped my own face was as much of a mask as hers. That was, I was learning, the essence of cool here at Foxhall. Not to feel. And if you did feel, not to show it.

  “Anyway I have the cigarettes for anyone who’s not too chicken to come out,” Daria offered.