Justin Kramon (8 page)

Finny’s real life began at three o’clock, when the final class let out. She’d go first to her room, to drop off her bag and check for letters from Earl. Finny had asked Earl to start addressing his letters to Judith, and Earl didn’t mind. He always included a very polite note to Judith wrapped around his note to Finny:
Thanks again, Judith, for delivering this letter to Finny. I hope I’ll meet you sometime. You sound like a very nice and considerate person. Sincerely, Earl Henckel.
Judith had gotten in the habit of leaving the letters on Finny’s pillow during lunch, since Judith got back to the room later in the afternoon because of basketball. (She was the center on the JV team.) Sometimes she told Finny how sweet Earl seemed, and how she couldn’t wait to see them together.

“You must be the most adorable couple,” Judith said, and though Finny liked the sentiment, she had the odd sensation her friend was talking about people much younger than herself.

“Cute as a button,” Finny said, and Judith laughed. She could tell now when Finny was being sarcastic, and she seemed to get a lot of pleasure out of Finny’s cranky comments.

Earl’s letters to Finny were as sweet and careful and encouraging as Earl was in person.
Finny!
he always began, and she could picture him that day he yelled to her and waved his arms like he was signaling an aircraft. That excitement, that joy, he didn’t try to contain it. He told her the news about his life, about school and his afternoons and Mr. Henckel, the words seeming to just pour out.
My dad was a little depressed after you left
, Earl confided to Finny in one letter.
He’s been falling asleep a lot lately at the dinner table and during his lessons. One time he actually fell asleep onto a student, which was awkward. I think he got used to our afternoons together. He always asks me if you’re going to come over for coffee sometime. I didn’t really tell him everything that happened, because I didn’t want him to know you got in trouble. I hope that’s okay. I know he just misses seeing you, like I do. Those were fun days, weren’t they?

When she read it, Finny started to cry. “Damn,” she said to herself. She meant to stay happy, skim along the surface of her days at Thorndon. But every once in a while a memory snagged her. The letter was getting speckled with tears, so she put it away.

But most of the time she was happy. Days were bright and cold and fast. Once Judith got back from basketball, panting and sweaty, they’d shower in two stalls next to each other and talk about their days, their voices reverberating off the tiled floors and walls. They’d go to the dining hall together, eat with Brooke and Mariana and Simone. Then they’d do homework together in the study room until check-in.

Now that they were into the semester, Poplan did the check-in instead of Mrs. Barksdale. At night Poplan wore a kimono. She lined the girls up, and after calling each one’s name, she made them wash their hands with soap and warm water. “For your own sake,” Poplan said. She fought colds with a military vigilance, and at the first sign of a sniffle or a sore throat, she would quarantine a girl in the guest room for a week. “There’s no negotiating with a fever,” she would inform the girls. “Your lives are in my hands.”

Finny’s favorite time was the night, once she and Judith were shut up in their little room together, the hallway dim, the black sky pressed against their window. There was a cozy companionship to these moments, a luxury of time, as if life spread out before them, an endless and dazzling sea. She felt such exhilaration in Judith’s presence that Finny had to check herself from becoming too giggly, too overwhelmed with pleasure. So she fell back on her wry delivery, that deadpan way of making jokes. It was the sense of humor Finny would hold on to, even as an adult.

Judith seemed to know everything about everyone in the school. She stood a head taller than most of the girls, and there was a kind of authority in her walk and demeanor. At night Judith told Finny all the gossip, about who’d snuck off with which boys at the last dance. About the girls who stuffed paper in their bras. And other things. More intimate, sexier things than Finny had ever heard talked about before. Judith told her about how Cynthia Bunswaggel had once gotten her period when she was in bed with a guy, and in the morning he’d woken up in a puddle of her blood and thought she was dead. And Halley Klein, who put condoms on carrots and used them to masturbate, only one time the carrot broke off and Halley had to go to the nurse to get it extracted.

Teachers, too. They weren’t safe from Judith’s swath of knowledge. Finny had heard the music teacher singing opera at night in her room, and when Finny told Judith how beautiful it was, Judith said, “It’s because she uses a vibrator. She sings to cover up the sound.” Which Finny found hard to believe. She wasn’t even quite sure how a vibrator worked, but she started listening for the sound of it beneath Mrs. Polczek’s singing. Poplan dated women, Judith said. She never brought them around because she was afraid of losing her job. For some reason Judith didn’t like Poplan, Finny had discovered. But when she asked why, Judith just shrugged and said, “She’s not my type.”

Finny never knew how much of Judith’s stories were invented, or exaggerations of what had happened, tales that had been dressed up by so many tellers that it was impossible to make out their original shapes. But under the canopy of Judith’s voice, a garden of images and incidents bloomed. The world of Thorndon became alive and teeming with secrets.

Then there was the game. When Finny thought back about it, she wasn’t sure exactly how it had started, but it became a pattern that every couple nights one of the two girls would offer the other a dare. They alternated dares. It began simply enough.
Go outside the room after lights out.
And then the next time:
Go outside after lights out and say the word “penis” in the hallway.
Each time a step further, a little more dangerous.
Stay outside for five seconds. Do it with your pants off.

Finny no longer had to wear the purple shirt because Mrs. Barksdale realized that she couldn’t make a rule that none of the other girls could wear purple shirts. So Finny felt a little freer at night. Some nights they both put on Judith’s black clothing, and her lipstick, called each other “draculady” and “phantom” and snuck into other girls’ rooms to show off their looks. Judith’s “dark” wardrobe was extensive, and she told Finny that when they were in the upper forms they’d go to clubs in New York where they could wear these clothes “for real.”

They talked about their lives at home. Finny told Judith about her mom’s social pointers, her dad’s lectures and the way he popped handfuls of Pepto like an addict.

“They sound funny,” Judith said. “I’d love to meet them sometime.”

“Careful what you wish for,” Finny said.

“No, really. I mean it. On some break. I could come visit.”

“You could come during spring break if you wanted.”

“It’s settled, then,” Judith said. “I’m going to Shorty Finn’s house for spring break.” Here Judith got up and pulled Finny off her bed by the arms. They did a little ballroom dancing routine they’d made up just for fun, Finny dipping and spinning Judith. When they came together in a final embrace, Finny felt the curves of Judith’s womanly body pressed against her own childish frame.

“Oh great,” Finny said. It sounded like the flat way she delivered punch lines.

Judith’s explanations of her own family were a little harder to make out. It seemed she didn’t really spend time with them the way Finny did with hers. Her parents didn’t talk to each other anymore, Judith said, except when it had to do with money or plans for Judith. Her mom and dad lived in separate parts of their apartment in New York—“wings,” Judith called them, “separate wings.” They lived on the Upper West Side, in a building called the Beresford, which Judith said was one of the fanciest buildings in New York.

“If you tell anyone in New York that you live in the Beresford, they’ll think you’re a snob.”

She said that most of the other people in the building were famous, or at least old and rich. She saw movie stars in the elevator, and once Peter Jennings had given her a ride in his car. The lobby of the Beresford was like a museum, with chandeliers and antique end tables and Oriental rugs. If you tripped and fell, you might break ten thousand dollars’ worth of furniture in one clumsy swoop. (Finny of course imagined she’d be the one to do that, if she ever visited.)

“But it’s all terribly boring,” Judith said, in a way that made her sound much older. “All the smiling and bowing doormen. It’s so stupid.”

“It sounds very glamorous to me,” Finny said.

“Well it’s not.”

This was the first time Judith had gotten agitated with Finny. Finny heard her friend’s mattress creaking as she adjusted positions. And she wondered: Why would Judith make such a big deal of all the chandeliers and riding in Peter Jennings’s car if she hated it so much?

“My dad has a girlfriend,” Judith said.

“You mean a lady he takes out?” Finny was trying to get a grasp on this strange world.

“No, I mean a woman who looks like my sister. I mean, she’s twenty-five or something. But she actually comes over. While I’m there. He doesn’t tell us, but I’ve heard them together.” Judith had dropped her aristocratic way of speaking. She sounded like a child now.

Finny was about to ask what she heard her dad and his girlfriend doing, but then she realized. “Oh,” she said. “That’s awful. What does your mom do?”

“She gets on boards.”

“What do you mean?” Finny pictured the woman on table-tops, swatting at her husband with a broom.

“I mean, like at Thorndon. Or different museums. Pretty much anything she can throw a lot of money at. I don’t even think she knows all the boards she’s on.”

“Well at least she’s being generous.”

“Tell me about your brother,” Judith said, and Finny understood she was trying to change the subject. “Actually,” Judith went on, “I don’t even recall his name.”

In Judith’s company, Finny felt as if she moved behind a protective shield. Even Mrs. Barksdale mostly left her alone, though Finny heard her yelling at other girls numerous times.
Giving it to them
, Finny and Judith called it.
Old Yeller is giving it to someone.
Mrs. Barksdale would start at a medium volume in her rasping, discordant voice, and as she gave it to some student—who’d shown up late for morning meeting, or swiped some fruit from the dining hall—her voice gradually rose to an almost frenzied pitch, a feverish screech. She couldn’t help herself, and Finny always felt sorry for the girls who were singled out. By the end the student would be holding her ears as Mrs. Barksdale shrieked and squealed. It was such a harrowing, bewildering display that students often began to cry, they were so traumatized by the effect they’d had on this woman.

Students were allowed to eat outside of the dining hall for lunch, and Finny and Judith began sitting in the hall in front of the library. Soon Brooke and Mariana and the others joined them. One time, during lunch, Chayla brought a cupcake out of her lunchbox with a candle in it, and Judith took out her lighter and lit it. She kept her hand cupped around the flame. It was Finny’s birthday, and they sang to her.

“How did you know?” Finny asked when they were done singing. They’d never told each other their birthdays.

“I have my ways,” Judith said. “But blow it out before Old Yeller sees.”

That night a present arrived from Earl: a box of instant coffee.
Not the same
, he wrote,
but maybe it’s enough to hold you over until I see you.

In February, there was a parents’ weekend, when Stanley came to visit. Laura stayed at home with Sylvan; Finny suspected it was because her mother was still angry at her over Earl. Stanley attended a few of Finny’s classes on Friday, ate lunch with her in the dining hall, took Finny and Judith to dinner in Boston. (Judith’s parents hadn’t come.) By the end of the weekend, he seemed satisfied with the school he’d placed Finny in, though he left her with an oddly solemn quote: “‘A useless life is an early death,’” he told her as he was getting into his cab. Then yelled, “Goethe!” just before slamming the door.

At night, after Stanley’s visit, Finny and Judith kept going with the dares.
Run naked all the way from our door to Claycie’s and back. Put a love letter on Amanda’s welcome mat. Shout the word “boner” so I can hear it with the door closed.
And on and on. They spurred each other with their laughter and pleased looks. Later, Finny would recognize that it was a kind of flirting, not necessarily sexual, but a testing of boundaries, of how far each would go for the other, how much they would risk. To go out in the hall, to shout something disgusting, to wait—it was all a way of saying,
See, look what I’ll do.
To keep the game going, to avoid piercing this lovely dream. And what Finny hated to admit—but had to, when she thought back on those nights with Judith—was that there was a desperation in it, in her. She was clinging to what she saw as her new life. Far from being that beautiful lonely birch in her parents’ yard, Finny’s branches were entangled with Judith’s, and she wasn’t sure she would ever be set free.

One night Judith asked her to do something Finny had to think twice about. It wasn’t that the act was particularly dangerous, in the sense that she was likely to get caught. It wasn’t so much more daring than the dozen other stunts they’d pulled in the last couple weeks—sliding condoms that Judith had bought under the door of a sallow-looking girl named Pam, whom they called the Ice Chest; singing a full chorus of “My Girl” after Poplan had gone downstairs. But this time there was a question in Judith’s dare:
Would you go this far for me?
Judith knew that Finny liked Poplan. She knew this would raise issues.

The dare was that Finny had to slip a note that Judith had written under Poplan’s door. Not such a difficult thing. Finny would be the last person Poplan would suspect. They’d become friendly, to the point where Poplan had let Finny sample the cache of Asian food products she kept in her dresser: shrimp chips, salted plums, cans of fruit with names like
longan
and
rambutan.
Poplan didn’t even watch Finny when Finny washed her hands at night; she trusted her that much.