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Let's not befriends with her anymore.

She's overweight now. Sucks for her.

There's always one girl in your class that you hate.

Alex and Suki

"It's not as if we're the only ones," Suki said, but Mrs. Dembroski passed over this remark and wanted to know instead how Alex and Suki, both of whom lived within walking distance of the school, how they could be late for English, senior English, in this most important semester. An unexcused absence was a zero for the day in Mr. O'Brien's class, wasn't it? Didn't they know that?

"We know. We know, we know, we know. We're sorry. We're stressed. We can't keep up. Mr. O'Brien assigns so much. He expects us to remember everything."

"Okay. For now, it's just detention. Admissions needs help. After school on Friday, you can stuff envelopes."

The sound that whistled out of Alex as she left Mrs. Dembroski's office conveyed all her feelings, but did Dembroski really think stuffing envelopes was going to keep her from cutting O'Brien's first-period Monday class?

"I will never get into Brown," Suki said.

"You make me sick. There are practically buildings named after you there."

Siddons

Anna Mazur said, "Oh, to lose all that beautiful hair!" Anna's own sparse colorless hair sparked when she so much as touched it.

"Hair grows back," Miss Hodd said.

"Not that color," Anna Mazur said.

Miss Hodd said, "I let the nines write after morning meeting today. Nobody wanted to do grammar. Listen to what Camilla Berkey wrote: 'Helplessness scrubs us all clean of any hope we had of doing something, but the doctors are still dirty. They must not be touched with the sponge. No, they must not.'"

Mothers

Mr. Dell, who was not at the coffee, was mentioned by Mrs. Van de Ven as reading to his daughter. They had just started Mansfield Park.

And how did Mrs. Van de Ven know this? Mrs. Morton wondered.

"I asked," Mrs. Van de Ven replied.

The gathered fluttered and some of the mothers looked sad, but Mrs. Morton said, "That's Fanny Price, isn't it? It's a most unfortunate name." Mrs. Morton's deep, druggy, slow voice made several of the mothers laugh. The sound of Mrs. Morton was funny, as was the fact of how rich she was and well-read.

Mrs. Cohen took Mrs. Van de Ven aside and spoke softly, " Think of it this way: When Nanda Morton wakes up each morning, she has made more money than most of us will make in a year." Mrs. Cohen said, "And you know what that means, don't you?"

"I know what that means," Mrs. Van de Ven said. "It means Suki Morton is going to Brown."

"Oh please!" said loudly and in exasperation from another part of the room.

Theta Kovack had heard it all before and had juggled to come in late to work for this acidic coffee and reckless talk.

"Look at them, a class of forty girls," said Mrs. Quirk, the college adviser, "and all of them will find a college. The job is to make the right fit." Mrs. Quirk said it was important to encourage daughters to finish their essays before Christmas break!

Mrs. Saperstein and Mrs. Song wore wise, relieved expressions as their daughters had applied for early admission. These mothers didn't have to worry about essays anymore. "Thank god!" was what they said.

That poor Astra Dell. She was losing all that hair now, wasn't she? How, Theta Kovack wondered, had Astra Dell entered the conversation happening just behind her; but the girl had, thanks to Mrs. Van de Ven, who seemed absorbed by the subjects of Astra Dell and the girls making themselves sick at Norris-Willet.

CHF

Car pushed and smoothed and rearranged the food; she made patterns.

"Look, Carlotta, if you're not going to eat it—" Mrs. Forestal began, but all the air she had to argue with hissed out of her, and she sat quietly, seeming very small and vacant at the other end of the table.

Mothers

What were other people drinking over the Thanksgiving weekend? Miss Wilkes was drinking amber ale, and Lisa Van de Ven took a sip. ("I shouldn't but how else can I get inspired to write my essay?") Alex and Suki were drinking skim-milk lattes. Mrs. Van de Ven ordered pinot grigio for lunch with Mr. Dell. "He looks so thin!" she told her husband at the Post House for dinner. She explained that the doctor was willing to take a risk, "a combination of surgery, internal radiation, external radiation, a couple of chemo…," but Mr. Van de Ven cut her off. They were eating, for heaven's sake, weren't they? "You may be," she said, "but I am drinking."

At the senior parents coffee, Mrs. Van de Ven said she was becoming an alcoholic!

The senior parents coffee had been very well attended. The college adviser, Mrs. Quirk, was at the coffee to answer any last questions about applications and what parents might expect for the next few months. Although the questions and advice seemed much the same as those of two weeks before, the mothers attended to what sounded rewound and repeated. Car Forestal's name did not come up. (It never did!) A number of mothers could have told stories about Carlotta Forestal or about other girls from different schools, but only Mrs. Cohen recounted to the group whatever horror she had heard was happening at St. Catherine's and Norris-Willet, and again several mothers bemoaned their helplessness.

A Daughter

Lisa Van de Ven sat in the kitchen in the best chair. "What the hell is this?"

"I don't know," her mother said. "Leave it if you want. I don't care."

"Oh, Mother."

"'Oh, Mother' what?"

"I know what you're thinking."

"Do you?"

"I do."

"I wonder."

Unattached

Anna Mazur came to the disappointed part of the Tim Weeks story and said, "I'm not pretty, Mother."

Her mother was silent on the phone.

"We're more like brother and sister than anything else." Anna sighed and asked her mother, "What do you think?"

Her mother thought that only baked or handmade gifts should be exchanged between staff and students at Christmas.

Anna said, "That's the rule, but people break it all the time."

" That's right," her mother said. "You got that ugly scarf last year."

"Yes, Mother. That ugly scarf from Hermès."

"It had stirrups all over it."

Anna said, "I don't know what to think about Tim."

"I'll tell you what," her mother said. "Don't think about him."

Siddons

The news on December 15 was bad — Astra still off-limits; and good — early admits to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Trinity, all confirmed. Four girls were in college! School was over for them.

Kitty Johnson, who was waiting to confer with Mrs. Quirk about colleges, said to Car, "If you thought Sarah Saperstein was insufferable before Harvard, imagine what she'll be like now."

"Ny Song, too."

Kitty lowered her voice to confide in Car the decision she had made to avoid her adviser's elective. "I'm not taking O'Brien's course."

"Good idea."

"I'm taking Hodd's Families in Distress," Kitty said.

Miss Hodd, in another classroom, slid her battered Warriner's to the corner of her desk and launched herself into the middle of the classroom in her castered chair, one leg up on the seat, chin on her knee, all the better to listen to how the seniors in her English class felt about the news that Astra Dell was sicker.

"A whole group of crying juniors passed me in the hall. They didn't even look like the kind of people who would be her friends."