Enthusiasm (8 page)

Ladies’ rooms, it turns out, don’t flourish in boys’ schools. Each likely-looking door seemed to taunt me. I discovered a coat closet, a broom closet, a conservatory dripping with greenery, and wood-paneled, book-lined chambers of various shapes and sizes—but no restroom. At last I found a chaperone to ask. She directed me to a boys’ bathroom, temporarily reassigned to meet the needs of female guests. “Boys: STOP! Girls: GO!” read a laser-printed sign taped to the door—not, I thought, the most tactful way to put it.

The uneasy sense of trespass that I’d felt all evening intensified when I went in. What most unnerved me were the urinals. With their exposed position, unprotected by so much as a door-less stall; with their long, jutting necks and their intense smell—of ammonia, strong detergent, and something else—is it any wonder I slunk past with a shudder?

I chose a stall at the end of the long room. As I sat resting my feet and watching the rows and columns of blue tiles dance a quadrille before my eyes, I heard the door swing open. I froze—boys?! No, thank God—girls. Just girls. Prep-school girls, judging by their accents. Perhaps girls from Miss Wharton’s?

I decided to wait them out.

There seemed to be four or five of them. Some made for the toilet stalls while their friends stood by the sinks. A couple of them compared and exchanged lipsticks; another requested a comb. (“Promise you don’t have nits?”—“Will you get over that? Fourth grade was six years ago!”)

They praised each other’s shoes and disparaged various boys, mostly unknown to me, although I did hear the name of Chris Stevens. “Unthinkable creep, keep him away from me!” commented one girl with a melodious voice that seemed to curl musically around my ears.

“Oh, I don’t know, he has a sort of viscous charm,” disagreed another.

“I
guess
, if you like a guy to
ooze
at you,” answered her friend.

Their conversation went on for so long that the toilet seat began to dig uncomfortably into the upper half of my lower limbs. I was considering making a break for it when I heard another familiar name.

“Anyone at all? My choice, the whole school? Okay, give me Parr,” said the curly-voiced anti-oozer.

“Grandison Parr? The junior—the fencer?”

“That’s the one. Mmmm! Rich, firm goodness.”

“Really? You’ve experienced this firsthand?”

“Oh, don’t I wish! I’m not
that
lucky.”

“Parr? Isn’t he taken?” objected one of the urinators from her stall. “He seems to have a date, anyway. That tall—”

An ill-timed flush, echoing in the tiled, high-ceilinged room, cut off the rest of the sentence. Considering all the ill-timed flushing I’d been doing myself that evening, I reflected—flushing of the skin, not of the toilet—(the water gurgled to a stop before I could finish the thought; I turned my attention back to the deeply interesting conversation—)

“—and the little one in red? Where did they
come
from? Where did they
get
those
dresses
?”

“I think the tall one’s his sister. She kind of looks like him. She was dancing more with that dorky guy, the one in the three-piece suit.”

“No, but would you let your sister dance with the dorky guy in the three-piece suit?”

“Would you let your girlfriend?”

“Well, they were all in the same set, anyway, early on. Did you see the little red one bouncing away? No way she learned
that
from the quadrille sergeant!”

“The guy in the funny suit is Parr’s roommate. I still think the girlfriend is the tall one. She—”

As if to mock me, the last urinator finished her business and drowned out the end of another interesting sentence. By the time her toilet ceased its gurgling, the girls had clattered out of bathroom, leaving me alone to stare dizzily at the blue tiles.

When I rejoined my party, Ned and Ashleigh were dancing vigorously to the last few bars of “Take It Back”—the Wet Blankets version, not Ned’s waltz—while Parr looked on with an amused smile.

“There you are,” he said. “I was afraid I’d lost you again.”

“It took me a while to find the ladies’ room. They hid it behind a sort of greenhouse thing and a room full of silver cups in glass cases.”

“Oh, you found the trophy room? Good place to take a nap when you’re supposed to be in study hall. There’s a big, puffy sofa behind the cabinets, and nobody ever goes in there.”

The song ended, and the trumpeter blew a fanfare. I saw that the band had reassembled in the musicians’ gallery. The room fell silent. Parr leaned close so he could whisper in my ear, “I’m sorry to say this is it—the last dance.” His breath tickled my neck. The sensation made me my heart pound so loudly, I was afraid he’d hear it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please take your places for the Virginia reel!” announced the trumpeter to moans and cries of “Already?!” In Jane Austen’s time—or her novels, at any rate—this dance, known to Miss Austen and her characters as the Sir Roger de Coverly, signals the end of a ball.

“I guess it’s over,” I said to Ashleigh. “Better call Zach.”

“Zach?” asked Ned.

“Our ride home,” I explained.

Ashleigh retrieved her purse from behind the knight, fished out her cell phone, and handed it to me. “Here, you do it—just hit redial,” she said, grabbing Parr’s arm. Ned offered me his again.

The Sir Roger de Coverly is a complicated and vigorous dance: no easy thing to get through while talking on a cell phone. Still, I managed somehow, and by the time the dance brought my friend and me back within talking distance, I was able to report that Zach was on his way.

Chapter 7

An unglass slipper
~
A Farewell to Forefield
~
I eat the Pancakes of Anguish.

T
he boys insisted on walking us to the gate, where we had told Zach to meet us. Clumsy in my silver pumps, I stumbled going down the steps. My right shoe flew off. Parr caught me by the elbow. “Careful, Cinderella,” he said, retrieving the shoe. I stretched out my hand for it, but he held it back for a moment. “Should I keep this, in case I need to find you again?” he said.

“If you do, you’ll have to carry me to my pumpkin.”

“Don’t tempt me,” he said. Kneeling, he held the shoe in front of my foot. I couldn’t decide which he was more like: a knight in a fairy tale, or an old-fashioned shoe salesman—the kind your grandmother might have taken you to when you were little, who measured your feet with a cold metal sliding device.

The knight, I decided. The salesmen, I remembered, always had a bald patch clearly visible from above; Parr’s hair shone thick and pale in the moonlight.

Parr eased my shoe over my heel with a little wiggle. He rose and took my arm again, holding me steady as I picked my way downhill along the grassy edge of the road. We caught up with Ash and Ned, who were chattering about which Wet Blankets songs would make the best waltzes.

The rest of the walk went by in an instant. “Gentlemen, we cannot thank you enough for your gallantry,” said Ashleigh when we reached the stone lions.

“Hey, it was our pleasure. Next time, though, don’t give Wattles the satisfaction of gobbling at you—call first or drop an e-, and I’ll make sure you get official invites,” said Parr. “Here—got a pen, Noodles?”

Ned selected a small felt-tip pen from the items in his pocket.

“Paper?” asked Parr, fishing around in his own pockets.

“Here,” said Ashleigh, thrusting her hand into his. “Write on my palm. I always do.”

Zach drove up as Parr bent over Ashleigh’s hand. “Oho! Grandison Parr!” he said, leaning over to pop open the passenger-side door. “So that’s how it is, is it? Are you treating my little friends right?”

“Little friends, indeed!” said Ashleigh, waving her hand to dry the ink and flouncing into the car. “Mr. Parr is treating us with a great deal more respect than
you
do, Mr. Liu. He and Mr. Downing rescued us from a particularly nasty adder and stood up with us for a quadrille, a waltz, and the Roger de Coverly. He is entirely a gentleman.”

“Yeah? Glad to hear it, because that’s one ass I’d rather not have to kick. I’m not saying I
couldn’t
, but it would be a challenge. Black belt yet, Parr?”

“No, don’t worry, you’re still king of the hill,” said Parr. “I’m glad to see the Hunkajunk is still in one piece,” he added. “But if you’re so worried about the girls’ safety, why are you driving them around in that thing?”

I was astonished to hear him speak that way about Zach’s pride and joy. Last year Haichang Liu had passed on to his son the family’s old—or, as Zach prefers to call it,
vintage
—Saab, as an early graduation present when Zach got into Cornell. Zach spent so much time tweaking, tuning, and polishing it that I was surprised he had managed to graduate afterward.

But Zach just laughed. “Jealous? Learn discipline, young lion, and someday you too may be worthy of such a car. Come on, Julie, get in.”

“Hai, Sensei,” said Parr, giving a little martial-arts bow, palms together. He opened the car door, helped me in, and handed me the end of my wrap, which was trailing out.

“Thanks so much for everything,” I told him. “You too, Ned.”

“No, thank
you
,” said Ned, poking his head in Ashleigh’s window. “I never dreamed I’d actually enjoy the Founder’s Quadrille. I’m glad you two decided to crash.”

“Me too,” said Parr. “But once is enough for one evening. Don’t let Zach wrap you around a tree—use that e-mail address to let us know you’re okay, would you? [email protected].”

“Yeah, yeah, get going before I wrap
you
around a tree,” said Zach.

Parr shut the door and gave the car’s rear end a little pat, like a cowboy with his horse, to send us on our way.

“So you know Grandison Parr?” asked Ashleigh.

Zach nodded. “He’s a smartass, but a pretty fair swordsman. Decent guy on the whole. More than decent, actually—he helped me push the Saab all the way uphill to the garage when she broke down near the dojo last summer. Of course, he thinks that gives him the right to call her the Hunkajunk. Smartass. But he seems to like
you
.” He gave Ashleigh a penetrating look.

“How long have the two of you been acquainted?” she asked.

“Oh, three or four years, I guess.”

“How did you meet?”

“He practices kendo at the dojo.”

“How could he? I was under the impression that the Forefield authorities kept their students locked up on the hill,” said Ashleigh.

“No, they let them out for things like that. Haven’t you ever seen them rowing on the river or riding around on horses in those ridiculous outfits? Besides, his family has a weekend house not all that far north, so he’s around for part of the summer.”

So that was why I’d seen him in town before school was in session.

“Are there any girls at the dojo?” asked Ashleigh.

“A few. Not as many as the guys, but a couple of the teachers are women, and there’s a women’s self-defense class that’s pretty popular. Some of the karate classes have a fair number of girls in them. Why?”

“I was thinking kendo might be fun.”

I was surprised to hear it. Didn’t she realize that the martial arts uniform consisted of a short, bathrobelike tunic over loose trousers? How did she expect to kick an assailant without displaying her lower limbs? Was it too much to hope that we might be in for a craze change already?

“I think aikido would be more your thing,” said Zach. “It’s all about turning your enemy’s strength against him, so your size doesn’t matter so much, and face it, you’re pretty little—in most ways, anyway. The main thing is balance and discipline.”

Balance and discipline, I reflected, were not chief among Ashleigh’s virtues. However, the conversation having left the riveting topic of Grandison Parr, it soon ceased to hold my attention; for the rest of the brief ride home I stared out the window at the dark trees, reliving the hours just past and musing on the uncertain future.