The Other New Girl Read online

  I couldn’t say I didn’t like Meeting. I sort of did. It was a relief not to have anyone telling me what to think or what to think about. I sometimes wondered if the spirit would ever move me to speak. I wondered what that would feel like, if it would be a powerful urge or some small voice. I did know that all the other religious ceremonies I had been to, where someone stood above us and told us what God wanted or didn’t want or admonished us not to do or to do something, were not speaking to me. I liked the concept that God was inside me—in fact, inside each of us—in a personal way. And that if God wanted to speak to me it would come from within rather than from somewhere outside of me. So, I was not averse to attending Meeting twice a week. It was a time when I felt no pressure. That was a relief especially during those first few months at Foxhall.

  NINE

  Secrets

  FOX WAS AN OLD BRICK BUILDING IN THE GEORGIAN STYLE with dormer windows on the top floor and a bell tower at one end of the roof. In addition to the wake up, chore, class, and study hall bells, that tower bell counted the hours twenty-four seven, gonging us all through the days and nights until we hardly noticed the interruptions. Fox Building had been constructed in the late eighteen hundreds to house the entire school, classes, dorm rooms, eating hall, everything, including a Meeting For Worship space which, over the years was expanded to house the assembly room and stage behind which was a back staircase that led up to the makeup room.

  The mattress room was located at the east end of a sprawling basement, with staircases that led to it from both the west and east wings of the building. At the west end was the school laundry, known to students as the button crusher. They had some kind of massive ironing machine down there that they fed with clothes and sheets all day long. Everything that went in one end came out the other board-flat, buttons and all.

  The basement housed all sorts of creepy rooms and alcoves off of its main hallway, a low-ceilinged affair of rough concrete painted white. I remember a buzzing sound at certain points, probably emanating from a gigantic electric room where all the switches and fuses were located. Besides the mattress room, there were various storage rooms filled with old desks, chairs, lamps, bed frames, and assorted other extra furniture.

  Up above, on the first floor, you could enter Fox Building from one of three sides. On the east side a wide porch, which happened to be almost directly beneath my window next to the offending dogwood trees, led to an old fashioned double wood doorway with glass panes. Inside there was a generous foyer type area with a decorative and rather large round wooden table with those curved legs and a bowl of some-thing—fruit or flowers—in the middle, especially when alumni or benefactors were in town. Off to the sides were ample rooms with comfortable couches and armchairs and more tables and lamps.

  These were the “for show” rooms of the school, the places where important people were greeted, passed cups of tea, and generally fawned over in a quiet, Quakerly way. It was also where—sometimes—prospective students and their parents met with an admissions officer for a “conversation” which was really an interview. It was rare that an actual student ever saw the insides of these rooms except to glance at them in passing on the way to the door. But even that was rare as few students used the east door, it being the farthest from anywhere we normally would be heading, like the gym or a classroom. And anyway, all the action was on the south porch, which was the main entrance to Fox Building with an even wider porch and a semi-circular set of six steps that spanned the entire width of the high-ceilinged porch.

  This was the entrance that led to the telephone operator, Mrs. W., and across from her cubicle, Bleaker’s office and next to that, the assistant deans’ office and farther down the hall, the mail room where we each had been assigned one of hundreds of little, metal mail doors with small windows that allowed you to see if you had received mail. In those days now long gone, before iPhones, email and texts, the mail-room was a boarder’s link to the outside world.

  Beyond the mailroom, the hallway opened up to a large space surrounded by built in benches along the walls where students sat to read newspapers or just hang out before and after meals. They were called the social benches. Flirting happened here. Also gossip and general teasing. At certain times of the day, this rather wide hallway was as quiet and empty as a museum after closing hours, but at others it was like a train station at rush hour. These times were all predictable. Meals three times a day and Assembly each morning prior to the start of classes.

  In one corner where the benches met, the phone booth stood with its little seat inside and its door that pulled closed from a hinge that ran up and down the middle between two glass panels. If you wanted privacy, you banged the door shut. If you didn’t and you wanted air, you left it open. This was before calling cards, so you had to come armed with coins and time your call to the minute or bring a boatload of coins if you didn’t know how long you’d be on the phone.

  In her sophomore year, Jan, in concert with a boy called Stocky for reasons that were never clear since he was tall and rather gangly, came up with an ingenious contraption that billed the phone company out of hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in calling charges over the years that we attended Foxhall. They managed to divine the exact shape of the inside mechanism that dropped the coins into the coin box when you placed them in their individual slots at the top. They then constructed, from a coat hanger, a wire line that replicated the precise path the coins took until they hit a latch that opened up like a trap door. But they went one step further by including in this wire mechanism an extra bend that corresponded to the coin return pull. And that was the genius of it. With the coat hanger carefully shoved up into the phone from the bottom following the inside path precisely, you’d plunk your money in one end, and when you heard it descend, you’d flip the wire sideways diverting the money from the coin box and pull the coin return open and like some Vegas slot machine, your coins, and anyone else’s stored inside, would tumble out into your lap from the other end. They called it, simply, the wire.

  Stocky had a crush on me, I was told, so one evening after dinner on a Tuesday night when we had a whole extra half hour before study hall just to hang around, a bunch of us were sitting on the benches just yakking. Stocky motioned me aside and kind of cornered me by the phone booth.

  “Want to call someone?” he asked.

  “Right now?”

  “No. Later, after study hall. I could meet you here and let you use the wire.”

  Of course, by then I was an officially designated cool girl so I’d heard about the wire but had never actually used it. Still I must have looked guarded so he said, “Just meet me here at eight forty-five and I’ll bring enough coins to call whoever you want. I’ll show you how it works.”

  By then I was going to study hall while everyone else could stay in their rooms for the two hours we were required to study weeknights. Study hall for anyone on demerit was held in one of the larger classrooms in the quad where all the academic buildings were located in the middle of campus between the boys and girls dorms.

  Not everyone knew about this coin contraption, but those who did used it widely. Of course they had to use it at odd times since it wouldn’t have done anyone any good to be discovered robbing the phone company. But, at least consciously, nobody thought of it that way. We all just thought of it as exerting a measure of frugality. Someone always stood guard when one of us used it. The wire was transported in a brown paper bag so no one could see what it was. Better to keep it quiet, we all agreed. Such was our moral compass that while we knew it was wrong to rip the coins from the pay phone, we also thought of the telephone booth as just a thing at our school, completely disconnected from the real world. Just something inside our make believe school bubble that was there more for our amusement than for any other use. It was the clandestine nature of this tripwire contraption—not unlike the mattress room or the pigpen or even the makeup room—that attracted us because all the kids who used it could readily have reversed the
charges when calling home or certainly afforded the few dollars it would take in quarters to call our friends back home. And, after a year or two at Foxhall, most kids didn’t have many friends they kept in touch with outside school anyway.

  “I can’t make it back from study hall at exactly eight forty-five,” I told him.

  “I’ll wait for you by Mrs. W.’s then.”

  “What if we get caught?” I was already in so much trouble, my parents had even called to reprimand me and tell me to watch my “behavior.”

  “If anyone’s around we’ll just wait.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better on the weekend when fewer people are outside the dining hall?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think there’ll be anyone around tonight. Just meet me at Mrs. W.’s and I’ll take care of everything.”

  I didn’t know it then but Stocky had put money into a mattress room bidding war on me and this was his first move to gain my trust. Boys were only allowed in the public areas of Fox Building until nine thirty on weeknights so that didn’t give us much time and, if anyone happened to walk by the telephone booth while we were extracting coins, I could really be in big trouble. But part of fitting in meant taking ever-bigger risks so I told him okay and, after two hours reading Tess of The D’Urbervilles for English class, I met Stocky outside Mrs. W.’s. He held the brown bag and my mind was filled with the awful things that happened to poor Tess at the hands of men.

  “Here.” Stocky gave me a handful of coins while I hit “0” for the operator and gave her the number. I’d decided to call my friend, Melena, back home. No sense alarming my parents any more than I’d already done.

  When the operator said: “That’ll be one dollar and sixty-five cents for three minutes,” I plunked the coins in one at a time while Stocky adjusted the wire. After a few seconds the phone rang and my friend’s mother answered. When Melena got on, we started to chat as if I’d never left home, and I forgot all about Stocky and the wire and the demerit and everything. We giggled and whispered until the operator came on and said it would be fifty cents for another minute, so I plunked in two of Stocky’s quarters and we kept on talking. Well, by this time, Stocky had positioned himself directly against the phone booth door, which was half open, in a way that anyone walking by couldn’t see inside. And as Melena and I chatted like birds in a tree, he pushed himself closer and closer so that finally his thighs were right up against me and he was practically straddling me seated in the booth with my knees facing out. And then the operator came on and demanded more coins so I reached for the slot and Stocky placed some in my hand. Now he was rubbing against me, and all I could think was how could I get out of this situation?

  “Hey, Melena,” I breathed, “I should probably go. Write me okay? And I’ll write you.”

  “One more thing,” she said, “remember Bill Poole? Well he asked me out for this Saturday. To a dance at the high school. Should I go? You remember what a reputation he has?”

  “Of course you should go. Just make sure he doesn’t drive you home alone on any back roads. Hey, I really have to go. Love ya.”

  I could feel something going on with Stocky that did not seem to be his leg muscle and I also thought I saw someone coming down the hall toward the phone. I looked up and he had this far-away look on his face and all I could think was, Good God, what have you gotten yourself into, Tess? So I kind of smacked Stocky on the arm and he snapped out of it. I hung up and he yanked the wire and all his coins came back out at us in a rush like a dam had burst. I giggled and kind of pushed him back so I could collect the ones that fell on the floor.

  When I looked up to hand them back, he was grinning and said, “Oh, keep them for next time.”

  He slid the wire back into its paper bag and stepped back away from me.

  “Maybe Saturday, after the dance, we could meet up—you know—downstairs?” He pointed down toward the basement. “I think I could get us some wine or maybe something stronger.”

  Oh, God, I thought, how do I get out of this now? At that moment another girl, a junior from one of the east side halls, walked over and told us she needed to make a call so we stepped away, which gave me a few seconds to think of an answer. I didn’t want to turn him down and it get around that I was a bitch or something. But what to say?

  “I don’t know, Stocky. I mean you’re really sweet and I like you and everything. It’s going kind of fast, you know, and I really don’t want to tie myself up with one person yet. I mean so many girls are after you, it would be unfair to you at this point.” I hoped it sounded convincing.

  He didn’t look wounded or anything and I thought he was really out to lunch, and then he said something that really stung, for some reason.

  “Oh, I get it. You’re a virgin. An ice queen.” He started to walk away and then turned back. “Well, you had your chance. Maybe someone else will have more patience but not me. Take care.” And he sauntered away down the hall as if he’d made some big score.

  TEN

  The Nipple Pool

  DARIA AND TIM PAYTON WERE EXCLUSIVE AND THE WHOLE school knew it. At the Saturday dances they clung to each other. All the girls were jealous of her and all the boys were jealous of him. They were the perfect high school couple and talk was they would end up married with the perfect life, perfect family, loads of money and possibly even fame because of Tim’s Hollywood connections.

  Tim was one of five students who’d made the trek east to Foxhall from the west coast. One even came from Hawaii, a boy named Rennie, who took me to my first Foxhall dance. He was so blond, he almost glowed. Tim’s father was some big muckety-muck movie studio exec. Tim was tall, broad shouldered but with a mop of curly, black hair that made him look like a boy in a man’s frame, with cow eyes and long, thick lashes that all the girls coveted like crazy. He had a shy and deferential manner and he adored Daria. He’d wait for her outside class, walk her to the dorm, and sit with her to study in the library. The most attractive thing about him was the way he moved. It was kind of a slow amble but his shoulders seemed to shrug a little with each step so he almost appeared to be slow dancing. Anyway, it was pretty sexy to watch him.

  This was their second year dating and you could tell he felt lucky to have her. The way he clung to their relationship made all the other girls even more envious of Daria. At the school dances, he’d hold her as close as he possibly could without some teacher or Bleaker coming over to separate them. The only time he’d let go of her was when they’d play a fast dance. He couldn’t fast dance and the other boys would take the opportunity to ask Daria for a dance and, when they did, she’d dance rings around them and the other kids would snicker at the boys who couldn’t keep up with her. Tim didn’t seem to mind because she’d always come back to him.

  Most relationships at Foxhall followed one of two patterns: fast and furious with a quick breakup or tethered for the duration. That was actual coupledom. Then there were all the kids who just couldn’t seem to manage to date anyone in particular at all and hung around at the edges. Moll, for instance, never even came to the dances, probably because she was so shy and had no social skills. Or the social skills you needed to make it at Foxhall, which was not the real world, after all.

  But there were all kinds of couples. I once passed what was known as the Social Room, situated across the wide-open hall from the Assembly Room on the second floor of Fox Building. This room was located above one of the fancy rooms where donors were entertained. It had a bunch of old couches and chairs, a couple of desks, even a rocking chair. It was right next to my room so I often passed through that hall. On this particular day, as I passed, I heard soft talking so I glanced in because I thought maybe some friends were in there and I glimpsed one of the steady couples, seniors both of them, and hall proctors, too. They were seated next to each other on one of the couches, very close together. His arms were wrapped around her like a python and she was taking out her retainer and putting it in his mouth while he did the same to her. I thought I was going to ga
g and maybe hurl lunch so I got out of there as fast as I could, but not before I heard her giggle and say, “Ooooh, tastes like your tongue.”

  When I told Daria about it she said, “Those two are to-tally disgusting. If they got married they’d probably produce a bunch of brats with no teeth at all.”

  We were at the indoor pool waiting to practice our dives for a meet the next day. My stomach had already started to flip-flop just thinking about that meet.

  “You know they’re all going to be here,” Daria said as we watched another girl execute a half gainer. “Oh, that was ugly. We’ll never win tomorrow, belly flopping off the board like that. Come on, Greenwood. It’s up to us to pull it out.”

  I stood slowly and made my way down the bleachers to the board. It was easy at practice, with only the team there. I could concentrate on my approach, the three long steps to the end, the bounce—once, twice—and up as high as I could go and as close to the end of the board as possible to get the maximum arc. Then, tuck, twist, come out, enter the water clean, and down like a bird going after a fish. That was the best part. Down there in the water, everything blue and quiet with only the beating of your heart to break the stillness of that perfect moment of freedom. You’d think it would be up there at the crest of your jump, when you flipped or twisted and you were, for a few seconds only, defying gravity, but that wasn’t it. Not for me. It was those seconds in the water, after the dive, before you came up to see your score, when anything was possible and no one but you had any control of what happened to your life.

  And then I was up and my face broke through the water and I gulped in air and looked over to see what Miss Alder-ton had marked on her big card. It was okay. I’d done what I had to do. She waved and smiled and nodded at me to let me know I was good to go.