The Little Woods (2 page)

I paused outside the dining hall, then steeled myself and opened the door. Inside, they swarmed like terrible aphids, laughing too loudly, prancing and strutting like all high school kids do, but there was an intensity to them I found unsettling. The boys were especially daunting, trying to sit casually at their tables, passing condiments when you could tell they wanted to go apeshit.

I opted for the soup, which, after surveying the situation, I realized was a poor decision. Soup required sitting. There’d be no ducking out with a sandwich now. I slunk through the rows of tables, looking for an opening. There were seats, of course, but no openings. The din grew louder, and I tried to swallow over the burgeoning lump in my throat. I sat between a pale red-haired boy and a heavy boy wearing a stern expression and a Cthulhu shirt. They ignored me and each other.

I ate my soup, all the while watching a man across the room. He was blond and handsome in a B-list-celebrity way, and he had a dog at his feet—a golden retriever that seemed to be named Tinker. As more and more boys passed, flicked their chins out, and called, “Reilly, what’s up?” it became clear that he was faculty or a coach of some kind.

One of the boys who stopped to say hello was intensely easy on the eyes. He was black with vaguely Asian features, bright
eyes, and the most incredible body I’d ever seen—broad shoulders and smooth, muscled arms. Nothing extravagant, just everything exactly as it should be. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and without warning he turned and stared directly at me. I looked away and tried to seem preoccupied with my soup, but I must have been completely obvious, because he laughed—a deep, wonderful sort of laugh—and then headed to his table.

I finished quickly and realized I’d no idea what to do with my tray. I stood awkwardly and tried to look around for a place to bus it without looking like I was looking. The last thing I wanted was to appear confused. I walked toward a little room, an annex of sorts that emitted a glow like kitchen lighting. I was just walking in when a pair of long, slender hands slid the tray away from me and set it on a conveyor belt. I followed the hands up to find a teacher with the face of an elven princess. She had arresting blue eyes and ice-blond hair that fell in wispy waves to just below her shoulders.

“You must be Calista Wood,” she said, grasping my hand to shake it.

I knew who she was. I had seen her a million times in my dreams, and in the newspaper photograph I kept hidden in a shoe box in my closet at home. She was older now. Ten years older. In my photograph, she was crying, crumpling into a spasm of grief, but in real life, she was fresh and bewitching, and her eyes held no pain. When I wished on stars and birthday candles, this was what I wished for—to be that fresh and empty.

“Yeah,” I said, trying my best not to have a weak wrist, looking for recognition in her eyes.

“Welcome,” she said. She smiled unevenly. “I’m Ms. Snow,
but please call me Asta. I’m your advisor.” I knew that already. Dr. Harrison had told me as much. Presumably he’d placed us together because of some ill-conceived notion that she could help me heal, as if such a thing were possible. “You look scared,” she said.

“I do?” I asked, my carapace slipping. There was a sparkle to her eye and a warmth to her smile that intimated that astoundingly wonderful things might happen in her presence.

“It’s okay,” she said, gently guiding me toward the dessert table. “They all look like you when they get here. You’re going to be fine.”

“I am?”

“You’re going to be better than fine. You’re going to have fun.” Her eyes lit up and suddenly it seemed like it could possibly be true. “I’m going to make sure of it.”

“People don’t normally come midyear, do they?” I asked as I watched her wrap some cookies in a napkin.

“Not usually, no.” She laughed and handed me the little package of cookies. “You should be really proud of your acceptance. I’ve seen your PSAT scores. Very impressive. Now, take these back to your room and try to get some sleep. Tomorrow’s a big day.”

“Thanks,” I said, stroking the rough red paper napkin. “I’ll see you around, then.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow. I have you in biology.” She smiled. “And in assembly. We sit together in advisee groups.”

“Okay,” I said, my voice disappearing somewhere inside my throat.

She laughed—a great, open-throated joyous laugh—and
every muscle in my body seemed to relax. “Look at you. So shy. Don’t worry, okay? You’ll like it here. I promise.”

I smiled and nodded, then made a quick exit. Holding the cookies at my side, I headed back to the dorm, determined to go directly to sleep even though it was only seven-thirty. In my absence, the dorm had changed considerably. Girls. Lots of girls with high-pitched, chattering voices. I tried to push through, but the hallway was thick with them, carrying duffel bags or nibbling dinner leftovers. It seemed every few steps I took, two girls erupted into screams and threw themselves at each other, three weeks apparently more time apart than they’d been able to manage. I weaved through them and made it to my room, ready to slip into my pajamas and turn out the light.

Inside I found a gangly redhead going through my underwear drawer while a gamine with huge eyes and a bleach-blond pixie cut spat a viscous black substance into my green mug. Their eyes widened when they saw me, and the blonde covered her mouth. The redhead casually shut my drawer.

“Jesus, this is awkward,” the redhead said, looking something like a praying mantis.

“I’m, um, just gonna get my backpack. Sorry.”

“Oh my God, no!” squeaked the blonde. “This is
your
room.” There was an incongruous globule stuffed in her cheek, slurring her otherwise clarion voice.

The redhead approached and extended her hand. She slumped a bit at the shoulders, possibly an attempt to hide her prodigious altitude, and she smiled sharply, as if reminding
herself to hold something back. She wore a formfitting blue sweater and a gray flannel skirt. Her metallic-orange hair was pulled back on one side by a barrette. It hung to her shoulders, thick and intractable. I pulled my oversized Bikini Kill T-shirt farther down over my skater shorts and did my best to brush the hair from my eyes.

“Fredericka Bingham, but everyone calls me Freddy,” she said, shaking my hand. “And I just want you to know that under ordinary circumstances, I don’t hang around in other girls’ rooms looking through their underwear.”

“Don’t believe a word,” Blondie said, and then spat into my cup. “That’s practically all she does.”

“Wait, Bingham?” I said, recalling a name from a welcome letter I’d received. “Aren’t you the student body president?”

“Yeah. I’m going to be a politician, so obviously I’m going to have to have you both killed. You can understand how this might look.”

“Of course,” I said very seriously, and Freddy smiled for real with big joyously gapped front teeth.

“Don’t worry, Noel will be first to go. This is Noel, by the way.”

“Nole?”

“Yeah. Noel. Written like the Christmas song, but pronounced like the grassy Kennedy-assassination one,” she said, nodding and tugging on her sleeve. She had dressed herself in a sort of punk rock menagerie, fishnet peeking out here, waffled long underwear tucked under there, and she had ringed her eyes in thick black liner. I was impressed.

“Her parents named her after Noël Coward, isn’t that bourgeois?”

I nodded, completely lost.

“He was a playwright,” Noel said, rolling her eyes. “My parents are total assholes. They named my sister Albee, but she changed it to Helen when we were, like, five.”

“Wait, your sister … is she …?”

“Your roommate. But don’t worry, we’re nothing alike,” Noel said, smiling, then spat again.

“My—my roommate?” I stammered. “I thought she wasn’t back yet.”

“She’s not.” Freddy laughed. “Not until tomorrow.”

“She’s doing Outward Bound, and they got stuck somewhere, can you believe it?”

“And so we came to use Helen’s room so Noel could dip. It’s disgusting but she does it to wean herself off the cigarettes she smokes over breaks. Anyway, we saw all your stuff,” Freddy said, shrugging. “I know. I know. Normal people would have left, but we started snooping. I hope you’re not mad. We heard about you, and we were curious.”

I took a seat on my absent roommate’s bed.

“They never let people transfer midyear,” Noel said, her eyes wide. “My God, your test scores must be off the charts.”

I shrugged. “They said they had a slot to fill.”

“They always have a slot to fill.” Noel shook her head and spat into my cup again. “Someone always chunks it and gets sent home for some reason or another. You’re more likely to be eaten by wolves than make it all the way through St. Bede’s.”

“We’re lacking hard data on that, but it’s basically true,”
Freddy said, taking my green cup away from Noel, who leaned back and set her snowy head against my pillow. They looked at me, and I knew I was supposed to speak, but I had no idea what to say.

“So then you’re my welcoming committee because I got high test scores?” I asked.

“How high are they?” Noel asked, her voice breathy, nearly reverent.

“High,” I said. “I’ve got kind of an eidetic memory, you know, like photographic. It’s not a classic one, but if I look at a list of information, I can usually recall it for a while. It fades eventually, but it’s useful for tests.”

“You don’t retain any of it over the long haul?”

“Some of it, yeah. I remember definitions. My cousin and I went through a phase where we’d get really high and memorize the dictionary—well, Danny mostly got high, and I mostly memorized, but lots of that stuck. Whatever, standardized test scores are meaningless.”

Freddy gasped.

“Helen’s going to love you,” Noel snorted.

I adjusted a sock that was creeping uncomfortably down my ankle.

Their eyes lingered on me, and I felt gawky and strange.

“You know about the whole no-cell-phones-no-Internet policy, right?” Noel chirped.

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “I hate cell phones anyway.”

Freddy nodded and smiled like I’d just passed a test. “We do too. And anyway, service is spotty at best here, so it’s actually not such a big deal.”

“Wait,” I said. “Did you just say no Internet?”

“Yeah.”

“I knew about the cell phones, but no Internet? What the hell?”

Freddy pursed her lips. “It’s not banned like cell phones are, but it’s strictly limited. Basically there’s one computer with Internet access in the library. You can use it if you need to, but the signal’s always going in and out, so it’s actually a waste of time.”

“So there isn’t, like, a computer lab or anything?”

“Oh, there is.” Freddy nodded. “State of the art, but it’s only for writing papers and making spreadsheets and stuff. There’s no Internet in there whatsoever.”

“God,” I said. “Are they trying to make us feel isolated or what?”

“It’s actually a good policy,” Freddy said, thrusting out her jaw. “It means we do research the old-fashioned way. St. Bede’s has a phenomenal library. And we don’t have to worry about the Internet plagiarism problem some of the other top boarding schools have had. So really it’s good.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sounds great. So are you guys juniors too?”

“Mmm, no. Helen and I are,” Noel said, taking my cup back and massaging the handle. “But Miss Bingham here’s a senior, and Pigeon’s a sophomore.”

“Pigeon?”

“Yeah, you’ll meet her later. She’s, well …” Noel rolled her eyes at Freddy. “She’s just Pigeon. You can’t really describe her.”

“Don’t any of you have normal names?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Noel laughed.

“I don’t know,” I said, laughing too now. “No one here’s named, like, Heather, or Kristen, or anything.”

“Sure they are. Take Kristen Mitchell or Heather Whatserface. But they don’t really
do
anything, so no one really talks about them.”

“Do you guys live in McKinley too?”

“No. We live in a nice dorm. No offense,” Noel said, and stretched out farther on my bed.

“This is primarily a sophomore dorm. We have singles in Prexy, which is where most of the juniors and seniors live, except for the ones who want doubles, or ones like Helen who are too lazy to fill out their room request forms. They live here.”

“It’s good for you,” Noel said. “It’s nice to have a roommate when you’re new so you don’t get lonely. That’s why it’s required for freshmen and sophomores.”

“So the other girl left, then?” I asked. “The girl who used to live here? Did she get kicked out or something?”

Freddy and Noel exchanged looks, and something heavy settled onto the room.

“Iris,” Freddy said. Noel looked at her feet. “She ran away.”

“In the fall,” Noel said, her voice cracking. I noticed that she’d gone pale. “She was …”

“Enough about Iris,” Freddy said, getting up and smoothing her skirt. “She was a pain when she was here, and she’s a killjoy now that she’s gone. It’s getting late, and Noel and I have to go.”

Noel looked up at Freddy with questioning eyes and then nodded. “If you want, come sit with us at lunch tomorrow. Do you have first or second?”

“What?”

“Lunch.” Noel laughed, the color slowly bleeding back into her cheeks.

“I don’t know. How do you know?”

Freddy smiled sideways at Noel, who spat one final time into my cup, then set it on her sister’s desk.

“If you see us, just come sit with us, ’kay?”

They left me in my room, dusky light trickling in through the curtain as it wavered in their wake. I changed into my moose pajamas and crawled under my big plaid comforter.

I wondered what Clare would think about my coming to St. Bede’s. I wondered if she knew I was here. I wanted to tell myself that I could feel her presence—that I was somehow closer to her—but I’d never believed in ghosts.

WHEN THE ALARM CLOCK WENT
off at seven-forty-five, my eyes felt like sandpaper and my tongue tasted sweetrotten, like decayed fruit. I brushed my teeth, pulled on a black T-shirt and my shorts even though I knew it was too cold for them. Somehow I’d already managed to lose my brush, so I ran my fingers through my hair and hurried off to breakfast. I kept my eyes down, and alone at a table in the corner, I ate my bowl of cereal in record time.