“You didn’t think I took from you, did you?” Little said.
I glanced away.
“I’d never take from you. Damn, girl.” Her voice was cheerful; maybe if I hadn’t been able to see her, I’d have bought the act. But her eyes were full of unspeakable longing and sadness. As we stood at the threshold watching each other, I felt a sense of recognition so profound that I almost believed I would keep her secret.
2. All School Rules Are in Effect
FRESHMAN WINTER
A fter Madame Broussard checked us in at curfew, the common room cleared out except for Dede, me, and Amy Dennaker, who was inside the phone booth; she kept laughing and saying, “Shut up!”
I looked down at my notebook. “Okay,” I said to Dede. “What’s the reproductive pattern for the protist Euglena?”
“Binary fission,” Dede said.
“Right.” In my head, I repeated, binary fission, binary fission, binary fission. It astonished me that Dede, who seemed to expend most of her energy grooming herself and trying to be ingratiating with people more popular than she was, retained such information effortlessly while I was averaging a C in biology. It was not clear to me how I’d arrived at this juncture gradewise, because before entering Ault, I’d never received lower than a B plus in any class. Either Ault was a lot harder than my junior high had been, or I was getting dumber-I suspected both. If I wasn’t literally getting dumber, I knew at least that I’d lost the glow that surrounds you when the teachers think you’re one of the smart, responsible ones, that glow that shines brighter every time you raise your hand in class to say the perfect thing, or you run out of room in a blue book during an exam and have to ask for a second one. At Ault, I doubted I would ever need a second blue book because even my handwriting had changed-once my letters had been bubbly and messy, and now they were thin and small.
“What about for bacteria?” I said. “What’s the reproductive pattern called?”
“For bacteria, it’s binary fission and conjugation. It can be-”
“What are you guys doing?” Amy Dennaker had emerged from the phone booth and was regarding us with more interest than usual. The month before, in February, Amy had scored a hat trick in the ice hockey game against St. Francis and then, in the third period, broken her nose. This made her, to me, even scarier. “If you’re studying for tomorrow, don’t bother,” Amy said.
Dede and I looked at each other. “We have a biology test,” I said.
“No, you don’t.” Amy grinned. “You didn’t hear it from me, but tomorrow is surprise holiday.”
“What’s that?” I said, and at the same time, Dede said, “That’s awesome. Are you sure?”
I turned to Dede. “What’s surprise holiday?” I said.
“How do you know?” Dede asked Amy.
“I can’t reveal my sources. And you can never be totally positive. Sometimes, if Mr. Byden thinks too many students know, he’ll cancel it. But look at it this way: It can’t be on a Wednesday because of sports, it’s not usually on a Monday or a Friday because it would be lame if it was just attached to the weekend, and it’s almost always before spring break. So that leaves Tuesday and Thursday, and the boys’ basketball game against Overfield was rescheduled for next Tuesday. Next Thursday, some presidential speechwriter dude is coming to speak fourth period. And the week after that is the week before spring break. You never know for sure until you see the green jacket, but basically, process of elimination says it’s tomorrow.”
Dede was nodding. Apparently, she had heard about the green jacket.
“Here’s another thing,” Amy said. “Alex Ellison has a history paper due tomorrow, but he told people at dinner that he hadn’t even started it.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Alex rooms with Henry Thorpe, and since Henry is one of the senior prefects, he would know for sure. The prefects are the only students who find out ahead of time. And Henry would definitely tell Alex.”
“Would Henry be allowed to tell?” I asked. Both Dede and Amy looked at me as if they had forgotten my presence.
“No,” Amy said. “But so what?” She seemed to suddenly remember who I was: a dorky freshman she didn’t know very well, sitting with my only slightly cooler roommate. Clearly, she had not meant to be this generous with her time or her information. “Do what you want,” she said. “You guys can study all night long if it floats your boat.”
I waited until she had disappeared up the staircase, then turned to Dede. “So are you going to explain this to me or not?” I still didn’t particularly like Dede, but there was no one I felt closer to at Ault. Back in December, Little Washington had been asked to leave less than twenty-four hours after I talked to Madame Broussard, and when we gathered in the common room for curfew you could feel the difference, the new emptiness. Little herself was gone-her parents had come to get her and, just like that, her room was cleared out-and so was the suspense of who was stealing, or when it would happen next. Around two in the morning, I was having such bad stomach pains that I went into the bathroom, sat on the floor by the toilet, and stuck my finger down my throat. Nothing emerged, but I gagged a few times, then leaned over the bowl, considering the toilet from this angle-the calm water, the curving porcelain. I had been there for about twenty minutes when Dede pushed open the unlocked stall door. “Could you leave me alone?” I said, and she said, “You did the right thing. You didn’t have a choice.”
In the common room, Dede said, “Surprise holiday is an Ault tradition. Once a year, classes get called off to give us a break.”
I thought of my C in biology and wasn’t sure I deserved a break.
“When you see the green jacket at roll call, that’s when you know,” Dede continued. “Mr. Byden might be making an announcement and he’ll take off his jacket, and the green jacket will be on underneath, or someone will jump out from under the prefects’ desk wearing it. Something like that.”
“So we don’t have our test?”
“I guess not. At least until Friday.”
“Then we don’t need to study.”
“Well.” Dede bit her lip. “We probably should just to be safe.”
“I’m tired,” I said.
“If we study now, we won’t have to tomorrow.”
I looked at her-she was so responsible. It was as if I were seeing a version of myself from a year before, the version who had convinced my parents to let me go to Ault, against their better judgment, by saying it would be a first-rate educational experience. Now I was a different person, someone unlike Dede. She could study because she approached her life straightforwardly. But I was living my life sideways. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else. Grades felt peripheral, but the real problem was, everything felt peripheral.
“I’m going to bed,” I said. I left Dede in the common room, peering at her biology notes.
At breakfast, Hunter Jergenson recapped a dream she’d had involving space aliens, which prompted Tab Kinkead to ask if maybe it hadn’t been a dream after all but an abduction, and then Andrea Sheldy-Smith, who was Hunter’s roommate, told a long story about how she had accidentally used Hunter’s toothbrush, and Tab said to her, “So basically you guys have made out?” I was constantly amazed at the ridiculous topics raised by other people, especially by other girls, and I was equally amazed by the enthusiastic responses their ridiculousness elicited. Of course, maybe being ridiculous was the point-the way they didn’t give off the painful feeling that something was at stake.
No one at the table brought up surprise holiday, and I felt a growing suspicion that either Amy had been wrong or-this possibility had occurred to me in the middle of the night-she had duped us. At chapel, Mr. Byden spoke about the importance of humility, and I scrutinized his expression for a sign that there would be no classes. He did not give one. Generally, I liked chapeclass="underline" the rickety straw seats, the dim light, the impossibly high arched ceilings, the sound of the organ when we sang hymns, and the wall in back where the names of Ault boys who had died in wars were carved into the stone. But today I was restless.