The Eliot Girls (9 page)

People were beginning to wander away now. Conversation had turned to talk of dinner plans. The heavy door opened and closed, opened and closed, as one person after another left. Michael and Henry were still standing in the circle, alone now, and Michael was speaking in an intense whisper. Henry had leaned in and his head was cocked slightly, his ear bent towards her mouth. When Michael finished, with a troubled nod, Henry put a hand on her upper arm and left it there. Of course, Ruth thought. How tedious of him.

The clock was moving towards five o'clock. Ruth closed her eyes for a moment of repose, and when she came to, everyone had left.

 

 

Cha
p
ter
Si
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WHEN AUDREY ROSE EARLY
the next morning, she noticed her parents' bedroom door ajar. No stirrings were audible in the darkness beyond the door, other than the measured rise and fall of Stevie's snores. Although they didn't speak of the practice, Audrey knew that Ruth sometimes left her door open in case Audrey became scared in the night, and Audrey always felt somewhat irritated when she encountered the sight in the morning, that portal flung wide, the invitation she had outgrown yet her mother persisted in believing she needed. Her parents' realm was one she now preferred they keep private. No longer did she desire the barrier torn down, certain she was safer between them. She tiptoed over and closed the door noiselessly, then headed downstairs, grateful to have even a minor fraction of the morning to herself.

Outside, the wind was blowing hard, with a hollow, haunted sound she found comforting. In the dusky hall, she paused before the mirror, detecting the outline of her reflection, but not the thing itself. She liked herself better this way, scarcely visible. As a girl, she had often pretended that she was the main character in certain of her favourite books: Sara in
A Little Princess
, Pauline Fossil in
Ballet Shoes
, Anne Frank, even. Now, she required something more than imagination to help her effect this transfiguration, and here in the dimness, it was easier to impose on her image a quality that was not otherwise there. The sensation was romantic, a fleeting escape, and she lingered before the mirror, letting her gaze drift in and out. Then she glanced down and remembered herself. Her biology textbook was peeking out of the top of her knapsack. There was a test that afternoon, and she had risen early to do some last-minute studying.

In the kitchen, Audrey turned on only the pendant light over the kitchen table, and under its interrogation-room spotlight, she attempted to focus. Ploddingly, she took notes and made an effort to memorize key definitions. She had done poorly on several recent tests—not just math, but French and geography—and the pressure to perform decently this time, combined with the dullness of the material, made concentration a challenge. Valiantly, she tried to commit the chapters to memory, but how hard it was to do any of the real work related to Eliot.

She began each day with the intent to study harder, better. But at the first sight of a textbook, her purpose wilted. Although Eliot was forever on her mind—she thought about it constantly, with the kind of possessed anger, the fluctuating love and hatred, of a romantic infatuation—she found it impossible to direct those musings along more productive channels. The academic angle of school felt secondary to everything else. Certainly, getting back tests and essays on which she'd received marks in the sixties and seventies was humiliating, not to mention alarming—Ruth told of girls expelled for too many of such shoddy grades—but still she struggled to engage in the lessons themselves. The tumult of Eliot's social realm seized all her attention. She felt unspeakably privileged to be at Eliot, so privileged, in fact, that the question of whether or not she actually liked the school was immaterial. Eliot was her chance to craft a new identity, but what was it that she wanted? To be athletic? Brainy? Popular? Yes, she knew that popularity was what she wanted, as impotently and potently as some people desired fame. It was a shameful ambition, for the embarrassingly low-minded. This was popularity in an abstract, amorphous sense. She thought only of the result, the golden glow of happiness and success. How she might get there was a mystery.

The obstacle, she sensed, was nothing more terrible and specific—nothing less surmountable—than the very core of her. Did she even have what people thought of as a self? She intuited, from time to time, some obscure nucleus, but it was so elusive and mutable as to be totally useless. All her life, her desires had been Ruth's desires for her. Her mother was like a trespasser in her fantasies, and when she imagined herself trying to achieve something, all she could picture was Ruth pushing her from behind, like a certain kind of parent willing her child up onstage at a beauty pageant. For so long, she had believed that she and her mother were on the same side. They had walked up that driveway and shared the sublime surge of admiration, that desire to be part of something remarkable. They had felt it together. Or so she had thought. Now she began to wonder whether the things she felt had ever really been her idea. How could she even know the difference between her mother's wishes and her own? How was she to achieve anything at Eliot when she was confounded by so basic a notion as personal identity?

The kitchen had grown light by now, and Audrey had robotically amassed three pages of notes, but she was more certain than ever that she was completely unprepared for the test. The sound of dog feet prancing across the hardwood, followed by the rushing of water in the bathroom, signalled the true start to the morning. And after a time, Ruth appeared on the stairs, dressed for school, but looking as though she had just staggered out of bed.

“Hello, love child,” she said.

At this allusion to their old joke, Audrey smiled in spite of herself. Upon first hearing the term as a child, Audrey, attracted to the euphony of it, had expressed disappointment that there was no similar magic around planned conceptions such as her own. “Well,” Ruth had replied, “I'll pretend that your beginning was scandalous and accidental if it will make you feel better.”

“Studying?” Ruth asked, pouring water into the coffee maker.

“Biology.”

“Good luck. Do you like Chandra?”

“She's okay. But bio's not really my thing.”

“It's not mine either.”

With a gulp of water, Ruth swallowed a vitamin and made a face, then leaned back against the counter as the dogs came stampeding through the kitchen to the back door. Ruth let them into the yard, then sat at one of the high stools by the island and watched Audrey for a moment. Finally, she said, “So, how do you feel about the idea of getting a math tutor?”

Audrey sighed. She knew this was coming. A tutor should have appealed to her, she knew. Wouldn't it be better not to be so confused as Mr. Marostica's rapid scribbles traversed the blackboard? Wasn't academic success the most important kind? But the thought of trudging to the homely grey-lit studio of Miriam Jarvis after school to review math for yet another hour was discouraging. The hard part was supposed to be getting into Eliot. She was reluctant to accept that she was just at the beginning of a gruelling odyssey. “Do I have to?” she said.

Ruth was silent for a moment. “Well, no, of course you don't
have
to.”

“Because I'm just catching up now. I'm sure I'll do better.”

“There's no shame in it. It's not like anyone will know. Lots of Eliot girls go for tutoring so they can stay ahead.”

“I don't want to talk about it right now,” Audrey said.

“Well, give it some thought.” Ruth clapped her hands on Audrey's shoulders and planted a kiss on the top of her head. “So, who are you hanging out with these days?”

Audrey shrugged away Ruth's hands and stood up. “I'm trying to study,” she said peevishly. “Why do you have to bug me with all this first thing in the morning?”

A blush spread over Ruth's face. “It was an innocent question. I'm just making conversation.”

Audrey roughly crammed her binder and notebook into her knapsack. “Well, I don't have time to give you constant reports on my progress. I have things to do.”

Ruth was too flustered to respond, and Audrey was glad. It was a strange pleasure, starting the day on such an antagonistic note. Just the sight of Ruth, in her immaculately ironed white blouse and tweed skirt, looking so smugly concerned, annoyed Audrey. How good it felt, for a change, to be the one whose mood determined the atmosphere of the house. The feeling rocketed her into the day. “I'm leaving,” she said.

“Now?”

Audrey had no intention of revealing the real reason for her departure—her math homework was incomplete, and she'd forgotten her textbook at school the prior afternoon. She grabbed her knapsack and headed for the front door.

“But don't you want a ride?” Ruth called out. “I'm leaving soon.”

It only added to Audrey's satisfaction that Ruth's last words, as Audrey pulled the front door shut behind her, were, “Aren't you even going to say goodbye?”

 

THE MINUTE AUDREY ENTERED
the classroom, she could feel that it was not empty. No one was initially visible, but after a second, she noticed a trio of heads in the back corner.

Arabella Quincy could change the configuration of a room. She altered the composition of its oxygen. Her loose curls tied carelessly into a messy bun, she was a Pre-Raphaelite muse fallen from grace, the vacant gaze and welcoming suppleness replaced by a wicked glint and a shrewd smirk. The illusory innocence of Arabella's looks was the source of their brutality. The temptation to watch her was inescapable, as was the fatal urge to speak to her unbidden. Once, a lock of her hair had fluttered against Audrey's cheek as they stood next to each other in line, and Audrey had still felt its fragrant brush an hour later. Even when Arabella was out of the room, she seemed not to be entirely absent. The void left by her departure only made her presence more keenly felt. Although gone, she would return, and the anticipation of that return created an intoxicating tension.

Arabella's latest coup had been to liberate the entire class's dislike of Seeta. Every time Seeta entered a room, from the back corner predictably came a series of breathy gasps and shrieks—a reference, Audrey suspected, to Whitney's observation that when Seeta sang “Feelin' Groovy,” she had looked like she was having an orgasm—followed by satirically operatic voices singing “Kumbaya.” The word
groovy
fluttered up, softly and furtively, in the air around her when she made her way through the classroom. Although Seeta herself seemed staunchly oblivious—two days after her first performance came a second, followed by a third, a fourth, a fifth—Audrey was not. As Seeta's deskmate, she felt perilously close to the whole mess.

Just as Audrey had suspected from the first words she spoke, Seeta had proven hard to shake. There she was in music class, singing in Audrey's ear. There she was in pre-calculus, primly opening her binder and setting her supplies at her desk's northern tip. There she was in the French room, copying out conjugations of irregular verbs to kill time before class started. There she was in the gym, limbering up like a runner before a race. There she was at lunchtime, eating pungently spiced foods out of giant Tupperware containers. One day, she had just taken out her meal when Arabella walked past, sniffing the air in dramatic disgust. “God, what died in here?” she wailed. Audrey had been waiting tensely for the trouble to light on her.

Arabella and her best friends, Whitney Oke and Katie Douglas, whom everyone called Dougie, now sat in a tight circle on the floor, strangely silent, as though they were holding their breath to avoid detection. On the closest desk, partially obscuring them, was Arabella's knapsack, unmistakably hers, covered in buttons—one with a likeness of Alan Thicke, others bearing messages such as “Jesus loves you but he loves me a little more” and “Proud grandmother”—their obscure messages a testament to her superior sophistication, to the fact that she had acquired her place in the class through some genetic destiny, a monarchical inevitability that made her unchallengeable. Upon hearing Audrey's footsteps, Arabella peered around the side of the bag, cocking her head slightly like a dog hearing a suspicious noise. Audrey's instinct was to turn and leave immediately, but she knew that to do so would be a declaration of fear, the end of a moment but the start of something much longer.

“I'm just getting a textbook,” she muttered.

Arabella watched her, saying nothing.

The mess of loose papers inside her desk fluttered onto the floor as Audrey rummaged around for the book. “Oh, shoot,” she mumbled as she crouched to gather them. “Oh, shoot,” came a small echo. Audrey looked up and saw Arabella examining her with Buddhic inexpressiveness. Her lips were closed and her expression was unusually flat, a parody of a poker face. Whitney and Dougie glanced from Audrey to Arabella, and then settled on Audrey. Audrey felt her face growing red under their united appraisal. Stuffing the papers back into the desk had become an absurdly complicated endeavour. Like hair that wouldn't lie flat, they refused to be tamed, and continued to peek out every time Audrey tried to close the desktop. She gave a little laugh, which was, in another small feat of ventriloquism, invisibly mimicked. The thought occurred to her as she pressed her hand on the chaos that she had never loathed herself more.

At last she turned to leave. She was almost at the door when Arabella called out, “Hey, new girl. Come back here for a second.”

Right away Audrey knew that this was one of those random moments of adjustment in life. A minor and accidental revolution. It was Arabella's voice. Even as Audrey's heart leapt in alarm, she heard something that strengthened her: the note of curiosity, an opening.

She turned around. “Me?”

“Me?” mimicked Whitney.

“Is there another new girl here?” asked Arabella. “Have a seat.” She gestured to the floor next to Dougie and smiled sweetly.

Audrey tried not to think about the math homework that wouldn't get done as she wedged herself into the one clear spot of floor in the back corner.

“Make yourself comfortable, dahling,” said Dougie.

She wondered for a second if they had invited her over expressly to enjoy the spectacle of her attempt to fit her body into a space that was clearly too small for it. They made no shifts to accommodate her but watched with aloof half smiles as she tried to make room for herself. She had never been so close to them before, and it had seemed only right that this distance remain intact. She saw them now with too much clarity. Normally, Whitney and Dougie commanded little attention of their own. Too much were they simply a facet of Arabella's aura. Now Audrey understood the symbiosis among them. Their near constant presence with Arabella enhanced her power, and they, in turn, received the contagion of her beauty. Audrey supposed that Whitney might have been intimidating in her way, with her striking pale skin and her impenetrable coldness, but Dougie was all freckles and giggling, utterly ordinary without Arabella's neighbouring splendour.