Blow Out the Moon (10 page)

Emmy, exactly the way she was dressed and standing when she stopped and looked back at me (though this picture was taken a few weeks later).

I went downstairs: our room was still sunny and very quiet and white. It felt a little funny to be in there without Emmy and Willy and Bubby. … by the time they were home again, I’d be gone. The room was so white, so still!

When it was time for us to leave, my mother buttoned me into my new gray wool coat (with a name tape neatly stitched into the inside collar with tiny tight stitches, all exactly alike), and a straw hat with a red ribbon round the brim — part of the new uniform. That had a nametape sewn into it, too.

No one took pictures that day (this was taken several weeks later), but this is the hat I was wearing.

My father was wearing a tweed jacket and my mother wore her pretty pink suit.

We took a taxi to Charing Cross, the train station. They weren’t coming to the school — they were just putting me on the “reserved car” (my mother said that meant a whole carriage just for girls going to Sibton Park).

But when we got to the platform we didn’t see any car marked “Sibton Park,” or any other girls. My father told my mother and me to wait while he went to find out what was happening. When he came back, he looked very embarrassed (I don’t think I’d ever seen him embarrassed before) and told us that he’d called the school: all the other girls had already gone on an earlier train; someone would meet this one.

“The same mistake was made about her,” he said.

A very big girl wearing a gray coat and straw hat just like mine was standing a few feet away, scowling awkwardly. Her name was Lindsey Cohen, and my father said we could take the train to Sibton Park together. Lindsey Cohen got on, and then my father said to give him a kiss, it was time to go.

“So long! See you May sixteenth!” he said, and looked at my mother.

She bent down and hugged me; I held her neck very tightly for a minute. I could smell her Arpège perfume; then she kissed me and I let go. When she stood up, her lips and chin were trembling. She smiled, with her mouth wobbling a little.

I got on the train and sat down next to the window, across from Lindsey Cohen; my parents both waved to me and I waved back. The train started with a jerk and noise — a whistle, and then that horrible clacking that keeps getting faster. We all kept waving.

I kept thinking: I cannot cry, I
will not cry,
especially in front of Lindsey Cohen.

On the wall just above her head was a small glass box with a sign below it saying:

TO STOP THE TRAIN IN CASES OF EMERGENCY, PULL DOWN THE CHAIN.

PENALTY FOR IMPROPER USE, £5.

I wondered what would happen if I pulled the chain: How would it stop the train? Of course, I wouldn’t pull it — this wasn’t an emergency. And I wouldn’t cry. After all, I
wanted
to go to boarding school.

“Make sure you’re right, then go ahead,” Davy Crockett said, and he did, even at the Alamo. That was much worse than this!

I would NOT cry. And if it felt like I might, I could go into the little hallway and look out the window there, keeping my back to the compartment.

Chapter Fourteen:

Sibton Park

I didn’t cry, but I did walk into the little hallway. I pressed my face to the window and looked hard. Once we got into the real country, there were fields, deep green and (often) full of sheep. When I went back into the compartment, I fell asleep. I woke up a little in the taxi but I didn’t REALLY wake up until I was sitting at a long wood table late that night, eating cold roast beef. It was rare (just how I like it), and as I ate, I got more awake. Lindsey Cohen was sitting next to me, and we were at Sibton Park.

The room was big and bare, with three long wooden tables (all empty), squares of gray stone for a floor, and lots of big windows (it was too dark outside to see anything out of them). It was also a little bit cold.

Sibton Park, as it looks when you come in the front gates and go a little way down the front drive. The house had been added onto over the years, and each side of it (there were more than four) looked quite different. The front was the most formal.

A grown-up came in and said she’d bring me to my dormitory. She led me through a long passage with coathooks and kids’ raincoats all along the walls, and a brick floor so old that the center dipped down from all those feet over the years.

We went up steep stairs and through a wider, fancier hallway with wood floors, then up more stairs into a small room with no furniture in it, and down two steps into a long, straight, wide, white hall with lots of closed doors.

The first door on the right had a white wooden sign with neat black letters saying: WELLINGTON. The next said:
WATERLOO
. Then, above a little step on the left, the door said:
WC
.

She opened the door, and I saw a little white room with just a toilet, no sink or bathtub. I stepped up into it and closed the door.

When I came out, we walked past more doors and stopped at
NELSON
. This, she whispered, was my dormitory, and I’d need to get ready for bed quietly so I didn’t wake “the others.” Then she opened the door.

A dormitory at Sibton Park — not Nelson.

The room was big, with tall, old-fashioned windows open (a breeze and a silvery gray light came through them, and outside I could see a leafy branch), a fireplace, and five beds: four with girls in them, one empty. There was a little sink in the corner; she pointed to it and watched me wash and get into bed, then whispered good-night.

As soon as she was gone, all the girls sat up in their beds. One by one, they said hello and whispered their names, very politely: Rosemary Hitchcock, Sarah Riley, Catherine Marshall, and Hazel Fogarty. They seemed nice (only Sarah Riley had kind of a snobbish voice, I thought).

“My name is Elizabeth Koponen,” I said, “but everyone calls me Libby.”

“Are you American?” Catherine Marshall said. She was in a bed by itself across from the door. My bed was in the middle of a row of three beds against a wall.

“Yes,” I said proudly. I
am
proud of being an American. “Don’t ever give me tea — if you do, I’ll have to pour it out on the floor, in honor of the Boston Tea Party.”

“What’s that?”

I told them about the grown-ups in Boston dressing up like Indians in the middle of the night and dumping all the tea from the English ships into the Boston harbor. There was a little pause when I was done, and then Catherine Marshall said, “That’s interesting.”

There was another little pause, and then Hazel Fogarty asked if I’d ever been “away at school” before, and I said no, and they started telling me all about Sibton Park.

“Your first term you’ll be teased — new girls always are.”

I asked how long you were a new girl, and they said for your first term, but that you weren’t an old girl until you’d been there a year. They’d been there for three or four years: they were all older than I was. I asked about the headmistress, Mrs. Ridley-Day. My father had talked about her a lot — he’d said she was beautiful and “a real lady,” and that he’d chosen the school because of what she was like. I didn’t say that; I just asked the girls if they liked Mrs. Ridley-Day.

“Call her Marza. We all do. It’s Greek for ‘mother,’ ” Catherine Marshall said.

“Does she have a husband?”

“He’s dead — he died in the war.”

“That’s when she started the school.”

“The house is hers,” Sarah said.

We talked on and on — I didn’t feel sleepy at all and I don’t think anyone else did, either. After a while we stopped whispering and talked out loud. There was a rule against talking after Lights Out, they said, but no one ever obeyed it and people were always getting punished for it.

Catherine said, “One night the whole school was talking — except for Alice and Tina, they’re prefects and the oldest girls in the school —”

“— and the next morning at prayers Marza said there would be no sweets that day!” Hazel said.

I knew that “sweets” meant candy.

“Do you usually have sweets?”

“Yes, every day after dinner we line up and can choose two each.”

“What kind?”

“Toffees, or acid drop spangles, or peppermints, or boiled sweets. On Sunday we always have Cadbury’s.”

That wasn’t in any of the books. But they seemed to like school as much as the girls in the books did.

We talked on and on. I told them that on the train, Lindsey Cohen had hardly talked to me at all, and Catherine said, “She doesn’t like Americans — her father married one and she can’t bear her step-mother. I shouldn’t worry.”

I asked where the horses were, and if they could ride them whenever they wanted, and everyone started talking at once, and Hazel Fogarty (they called her “Foggy”) was jumping up and down on her bed, imitating someone who couldn’t ride, and we were all laughing when the door opened.

All the noise stopped and everyone quickly got under the covers. A lady stood tall and straight in the doorway, like a queen. She had gray hair in one long, thick braid that curved over the front collar of her dressing gown. I could see her quite well in the light from the hall and I knew who she was: Mrs. Ridley-Day. She
was
very beautiful.

She didn’t say anything, just looked. Everyone was lying down, breathing quietly and slowly. Then …

“Catherine Marshall, were you talking?”

No answer.

“Hazel Fogarty, were you talking?”

No answer.

“Sarah Riley, were you talking?”

No answer.

“Elizabeth Koponen, were you talking?”

“Yes, Marza,” I said proudly — (in books, the girls always owned up).

There was a little pause and then she said, in a different voice, “You’re far too young for this wing of the house.”

She didn’t say anything else, but even after she left, there was no more talking — except that Catherine Marshall whispered, “When she asks, you don’t have to answer.”

I think they all went to sleep after that. I didn’t — I lay on my back with my eyes open, thinking and listening. The girls were nice … they liked me … Sibton Park wouldn’t be like St. Vincent’s. …

The night was very quiet — so quiet that I could hear leaves rustling outside the window.

After a while I heard a sound I hadn’t heard in a long time, a sound that felt safe and familiar even before I knew what it was: a car far away coming closer and closer, getting louder and louder, until its lights swept the room fast. Then the room got dark again, and slowly, the sound faded away.

I heard that every night in my room in America.

I lay on my back, listening for the next one. Finally I heard it. First the engine from far away getting closer and louder — it felt lonely and adventurous from far away, but safe, too; and then exciting when the sound was really loud and the lights swept the room. Then the sound went farther and farther away until I couldn’t hear it anymore, and the night was still and peaceful and quiet; until the next safe sound — a car from far away coming closer.

Chapter Fifteen:

Talking to a Real Horse

The next day, there weren’t any classes: The first day of term was always a day just for everyone to get settled in.