Liv, Forever

 

Chances of a girl like me ending up at Wickham Hall were next to nothing. I was a farmer’s daughter, and neither of my parents even finished grade school. But I loved to read. I read every single book I could get my hands on. And, fittingly, it was in a novel that I first heard of Wickham Hall.

I can’t recall which book it was. Fitzgerald’s new one, maybe? But it said something like, “Presidents go to Wickham Hall.” And that sounded dandy to me. A girl could do worse in life than become a president’s wife, especially if he was dreamy like Calvin Coolidge.
Oui! Oui!
A president’s wife would just go to parties and entertain, with oodles of free time to read books.

I wrote a letter to the school, asking for admission, dramatically explaining my plight in life, and several weeks later I received a letter back from the headmaster himself inviting me to join the student body. Can you imagine
la joie
?! I never filled out an application. I didn’t even know there were such things until I
heard everyone complaining about how long theirs had taken.
Mon Dieu.
I was lucky, I thought.

It’s hard to tell by looking at me now, but I was a happy girl and not bad looking. The boys just adored my red hair, and I was pretty witty, too. You’d have thought I’d have more sense than to fall for an anonymous note, a request to meet at the weeping willow tree. But no. Silly me. I thought,
“Quelle coincidence!”
I’d always loved those kinds of trees. And there were so many handsome gentlemen at Wickham Hall. It was just too intriguing an invitation to decline.

As I got dolled up—pin curls, of course, and my sole, fine-beaded dress—I started to hum that “Weeping Willow” song. It was very popular at the time. Then I strolled over. I leaned against the trunk underneath those willow branches and looked up. They made a silhouette against the moonlit sky. From below, those weeping arms looked like suspended streaks of rain.

Then something grabbed my forehead from behind, pinning my back to the tree, and I felt the chill of a blade gliding across my neck. It didn’t exactly hurt. It was just cold. And terribly shocking.

I didn’t even know I was dying until I looked down and saw the blood soaking into my dress. To think, the very last thing I wondered—while still a living, breathing girl—was, “How am I going to get this dress cleaned in time for Fall Festival?”

A man in a black suit was waiting for me. He had polished shoes and white gloves and held a sign that read
WICKHAM HALL
. It was written in the same font I’d seen on their website. I’d call it “ye oldy worldy.” But that’s just me. It’s the kind of font you can’t really read. The kind that screams to the world, “We’re so important, we don’t care if you can read our logo.” It’s the kind of font you’d see on a gravestone in London. Not that I’ve been to London. But I’m into fonts. It’s part of what I do.

The man looked at me with—well, pity might be a little strong. But it was certainly on the pity spectrum. Perhaps it was just sympathy. He noticed my fingernails and asked if I needed to go to “the powder room.”

“It’s not dirt. It’s ink,” I told him. “It’s permanently there.” The pity turned to something more like poorly veiled disgust. “No, not like tattoo ink. Like pen ink. I draw things.” He nodded his head like he couldn’t care less.

I’d said, “I draw things,” as if it were no big deal. Just something I do, like take a shower or go to school. But it’s
all
I do. Or at least it’s all I do that matters. I was certain it was the reason I was standing at baggage claim in Boston’s Logan Airport headed to the best prep school in the country for my last two years of high school. My grades certainly didn’t get me into Wickham Hall. I assumed it was my portfolio. I’d worked on it for months. I knew it was my only hope of getting out.

The man was surprised by how little I’d packed. One duffle bag for my clothes. And one very heavy suitcase.

“Shoes?” he asked as he lifted the suitcase with effort from the carousel.

“No, books, vintage magazines. Ink.” For my collages. I brought as much as I could carry. I wasn’t going to take any chances with the Wickham Hall school store.

As he rolled my bags to the car, I got my first taste of humidity. I’d always heard about it, and now it was hitting me in the face, as thick as the paint on a Monet canvas. I’d never been east of the Mississippi. I’d never even been east of the Grand Canyon. Fine, I’d never been east of Las Vegas. I’d hardly been out of Las Vegas. We went to Reno once. That was our biggest family vacation to date. My parents aren’t big on vacations. Not because they don’t like not working—they
love
not working—but vacations cost money. And that they never have.

So you can imagine what I thought when the man approached a limousine. I’m not kidding. A black stretch limousine. With tinted windows. “I was kinda
more expecting a good ol’ American school bus. You know, the yellow ones?”

“Not at Wickham Hall.”

AFTER WE LEFT THE
Boston area, I tried to roll down my window, but it was locked. I could see in the rearview that the man had noticed, but he didn’t offer help. Finally I asked. He obliged. I stretched out across the back seat, lying on my back so I could look straight up toward the sky. The sky and trees became blurry fields of color—blue, white, and green—stacked like a Rothko painting. Except Rothko almost never used green.

When I sat back up, we were already in New Hampshire, where
LIVE FREE OR DIE
is on every license plate. What a state motto. Much better than Nevada’s
ALL FOR OUR COUNTRY
—what does that even mean?
LIVE FREE OR DIE
is something I could get behind, and not just because it contains my name (phonetically). It’s passionate and romantic. I like all things Romantic. And I don’t mean mushy, cheesy romantic. I mean truly Romantic with a capital R. As in Byron, Shelley, Keats, and of course, William Blake.

LIVE FREE OR DIE.
It made me think of how Modigliani’s muse Jeanne Hébuterne jumped to her death while pregnant with their second child the day after he died from tuberculosis. Or how the Dada artist René Crevel gassed himself the day before the French painter Léon Bonvin hanged himself when he realized he would never be able to make a living from his art.

There are countless stories from days past, but it’s hard to imagine someone actually dying for freedom or even
for love these days—in this country at least. Everyone I know is way too apathetic to consider it. My parents rarely bother to vote. Even the guys at school who talked about joining the army only care about job security and free college. No one says he wants to do it for his country or for freedom. But maybe that’s because they think it’d sound lame. It wouldn’t sound lame to me.

Would I die for freedom? For love? I liked to think I had that in me, but how can you die for love if you’ve never felt it? And I don’t just mean I’d never had a boyfriend. I mean I’d possibly never felt love at all. The social worker said it was a protective mechanism. Maybe it was. I’d had four different foster families before I was finally adopted. I was practically bred not to love.

Or maybe it’s just that I got matched with the wrong family. It could happen, couldn’t it? Just ending up with the wrong parents the same way you could end up with the wrong guy on an Internet date.

Headed to the far north finger of the state, we passed through Salem then Concord, and after several more hours, penetrating deeper and deeper into woods that were more dense than I’d seen before, we approached a tall stone wall. I recognized it immediately from the website. It’s something they tout: fully enclosed within a wall built in 1781. I think it originally had something to do with the Revolutionary War. We drove along the perimeter for some time. It was so much bigger than I’d imagined. I wanted to say something to the man, but to be honest, he kind of scared me. So I saved it. Instead, I pulled out my Moleskin notebook and ink.