Marlene Kovack was working backstage in costumes for social service hours when she overheard someone — too loud — a middle schooler, say, "You know when people are gay, don't you?" Mr. Weeks was nearby, with props, and she wondered, as she wondered about many of the unattached faculty in school, but why were the middle schoolers always so out of control? Marlene helped only the lower schoolers in the play. The lower schoolers were delicate and shy; they made peeping sounds as Marlene dressed them, the King of Siam's littlest children.
Francesca Fratini swung into the room and cooed over the King of Siam's two littlest children. "Oh, don't you look pretty. I love your headdresses." Then to Marlene, "Remember when we were this size?"
The little girls had hands as small as starfish. "How old are you again?" Marlene asked, and the little girls answered: first grade. Marlene said, "I was never this small in first grade."
Francesca said to Marlene, "You should come to the interschool Macbeth. I'm one of the witches. Our director is crazy. I have to lick Macbeth's face like a dog."
The King of Siam's littlest children turned in their seats to look at Francesca Fratini. "Am I scaring you?" she said. "That's the kind of thing you get to do in high school. I'm a senior." Francesca said, "What do you think of that?"
Little shrugs from the little rouged girls, who stepped away lightly as if their feet were bound.
"You scared them," Marlene said.
"Look, Marlene," and Francesca turned around, and there was a bumper sticker on her butt: Property of the King of Siam. "Prank night," she said. "When we all bow and our hoop skirts flip up, this is what the King and Anna will see!"
Marlene stayed for the cast party and ate cake and went downtown with Francesca Fratini and Gillian Warring, who were doing their imitations of Dr. Bell. They called him the stress doctor and said he came to Siddons twice a week to get the kinks out. Their story was Dr. Bell had an office in the basement at school and that only the nurse had a key. "She takes us downstairs and lets us in," Francesca said.
"He helps you with all the ways you're backward," Gillian said. "I can't believe you don't know this. I know this, and I am in eighth grade!"
Marlene said, "It's an extra, probably, like tutoring."
"No," Francesca said, "you just have to reverse your letters to be in the club."
Dr. Bell had a mustache, and when he spoke, spit caught on the bristles of his mustache and it was gross. It was a mustard color, too — dirty mustard. "It makes me sick," Gillian said. "He has terrible breath, and he sits too close and watches you read for speed, and he keeps his pencil near when you write, and he corrects you as you go along, and you get all confused and of course you seem dumb to him. You're dumb to yourself. The man makes you dumb." Gillian took up Francesca's hands and danced with her the way the King did with Anna. "God! I hate him! Dr. Bell…" After a few turns, Gillian stopped short and confided to Marlene, "Can you tell I've been drinking?" One of the beauties of school was in its bringing like minds together briefly and intensely in these moments outside of school. Now in the Village outside a bar that blinked at fake IDs, Marlene held Gillian's hair while she puked into the street. Francesca went back in the bar to buy the drunk girl a Coke.
A Daughter
"I've just been here too long," Lisa Van de Ven said to Miss Wilkes. "I can't get interested in a single subject. I don't like anyone in my class. Nothing. The other day three of the nine seniors in AP French showed up." Lisa Van de Ven said, "I can't wait to get out of here." Then she said college as if she were making a wish, and she shut her eyes. "That's what I'm passionate about, if you want to know. Leaving. I can't wait."
Youth in its sullen husk, dry, shrunk, ugly as a cornstalk, prematurely autumnal, an awful, rasping wastefulness, Lisa Van de Ven tamped her bloody thumb with a napkin and talked about how alienated she felt from all of her classmates. "Ever since the Dance Concert," Lisa said to her, and said again, "I can't wait to get out of here." She did not look up at Miss Wilkes until the end of recess, and for a moment it seemed to the woman that the girl's face signaled something other than complaint. Was Lisa embarrassed, for Miss Wilkes was certainly embarrassed. However could she have cared so much about this tough girl, but she had; she hoped Lisa Van de Ven would stop chewing her thumb long enough to look up again and see the expression on her teacher's face, an expression that felt easy and dispassionate in its perfect insincerity. "Soon enough you'll be gone," Miss Wilkes said, "but you'll be missed. You must promise to come back and visit us."
Unattached
"Happy in this, she is not yet so old / But she may learn; happier than this, / She is not bred so dull but she can learn." Portia to Bassanio at the English Speaking Union Shakespeare contest, 1995. Anna Mazur had coached her in Miss Hodd's stead. (Poor Miss Hodd had been sick then.) Anna Mazur had coached Astra Dell, and Astra Dell had remembered the speech as well as the sonnet. One of their chief topics of conversation in the hospital had been Shakespeare and what plays Astra Dell knew and liked best. Her favorite was A Midsummer Night's Dream, which wasn't original, Astra knew, but Anna Mazur said, of course, it was a favorite of hers, too.
Favorites. Anna Mazur wanted to be a favorite.
"See what a memory she has!" Anna Mazur said to Tim Weeks.
"I heard," Tim Weeks said, and he saw how small Astra was, shrunk a little, her long sleeves loose over her hands, only fingertips visible. He stood with Miss Mazur and watched as Astra walked down the hall to her next class.
Anna Mazur said, "Her hair, at least it's growing. I almost said 'glowing.'"
Suki and Alex
The prom was in the future, along with a lot of other ceremonies from which someone would walk home with a corsage or a scroll or a secret-society pin. "I'd hoped to be invited," Suki said. Carlotta Forestal, Elizabeth Freer, and Katherine Johnson were the new inductees from the senior class to Cum Laude, the high school equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa; seniors made members in their junior year were Ufia Abiola, Sarah Saperstein, and Ny Song. A cardiologist, Siddons, class of '72, addressed the assembly. The cardiologist, at the beginning of her talk, asked if Siddons seniors still had the tea party with the headmistress in the Conservatory Garden.
Nos from the audience.
Suki said to Alex, "So this person I hardly know asks me if I'm on Wellbutrin. I want to know what about me screams I really require heavy-duty anti-depressants." Something the cardiologist said — death? "All year it's been doctors. Astra's still not out of the woods, you know." Suki said, "Get me on Astra's video after this is over. I have something to say."
Siddons
Tea parties with the headmistress. Headmistress, that was a word from years ago.
"Too bad," Miss Hodd said, "it's prettier than head of school."
"You can't have it both ways," Mr. O'Brien said.
"I'm contradictory. I like the white dresses for graduation, too," Miss Hodd said.
"The girls should be in academic robes," Mr. O'Brien said.
"Oh," Miss F joined in, "white dresses."
"Comme une jeune fille," Madame Sagnier said.
Alex and Suki
Suki smoldered at the camcorder, and Alex turned it off. "I thought you had something to say."
"I thought I did, too, but Astra's being back has taken the punch out of this video." She considered. "I'm glad, of course. Did I sound like my mother just then?" Suki's mother said that most of what was true about human nature was ugly, and Suki cited, as an instance, the fact that Marlene Kovack had visited Astra Dell more than any of Astra's real friends. Marlene, who was not in most of Astra's classes, took it on herself to bring Astra's homework to the hospital.