Jazza’s doelike eyes narrowed a bit, and she stabbed at her lentil roast.
“I’m still making up my mind,” she said.
“You don’t say much, do you?” Jerome asked me.
No one in my entire life had ever said this about me.
“You don’t know me yet,” I said.
“Rory was telling me she lives in a swamp,” Charlotte said.
“That’s right,” I said, turning up my accent a little. “These are the first shoes I’ve ever owned. They sure do pinch my feet.”
Jerome gave a little snort. Charlotte smiled sourly and turned the conversation back to Cambridge, a subject she seemed pathologically fixated on. People went right back to comparing notes about A levels, and I continued eating and observing.
The headmaster, Dr. Everest (it was immediately made clear to me that he was known to all as Mount Everest, which made sense, since he was about six foot seven), got up and gave us a little pep talk. Mostly it boiled down to the fact that it was autumn, and everyone was back, and while that was a great thing, people better not get cocky or misbehave or he’d personally kill us all. He didn’t actually say those words, but that was the subtext.
“Is he threatening us?” I whispered to Jerome.
Jerome didn’t turn his head, but he moved his eyes in my direction. Then he slipped a pen from his pocket and wrote the following on the back of his hand without even glancing down: Recently divorced. Also hates teenagers.
I nodded in understanding.
“As you are probably aware,” Everest droned on, “there’s been a murder nearby, which some people have taken to referring to as a new Ripper. Of course, there is no need to be concerned, but the police have asked us to remind all students to take extra care when leaving school grounds. I have now reminded you, and I trust no more need be said about that.”
“I feel warm and reassured,” I whispered. “He’s like Santa.”
Everest turned in our general direction for a moment, and we both stiffened and stared straight ahead. He chastised us a bit more, giving us some warnings about not staying out past our curfew, not smoking in uniform or in the buildings, and excessive drinking. Some drinking seemed to be expected. Laws were different here. You could drink at eighteen in general, but there was some weird side law about being able to order wine or beer with a meal, with an adult, at sixteen. I was still mulling this over when I noticed that the speech had ended and people were getting up and putting their trays on the racks.
I spent the night watching and occasionally assisting Jazza as she began the process of decorating her half of the room. There were curtains to be hung and posters and photos to be attached to the walls with Blu-Tack. She had an art print of Ophelia drowning in the pond, a poster from a band I’d never heard of, and a massive corkboard. The photos of her family and dogs were all in ornate frames. I made a mental note to get more wall stuff so my side didn’t look so naked.
What she didn’t display, I noticed, was a boxful of swimming medals.
“Holy crap,” I said, when she set them on the desk, “you’re like a fish.”
“Oh. Um. Well, I swim, you see.”
I saw.
“I won them last year. I wasn’t going to bring them, but . . . I brought them.”
She put the medals in her desk drawer.
“Do you play sports?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” I said. Which was really just my way of saying “hell, no.” We Deveauxs preferred to talk you to death, rather than face you in physical combat.
As she continued to unpack and I continued to stare at her, it occurred to me that Jazza and I were going to do this—this sitting-in-the-same-room thing—every night. For something like eight months. I had known my days of total privacy were over, but I hadn’t quite realized what that meant. All my habits were going to be on display. And Jazza seemed so straightforward and well-adjusted . . . What if I was a freak and had never realized it? What if I did weird things in my sleep?
I quickly dismissed these things from my mind.
5
LIFE AT WEXFORD BEGAN PROMPTLY AT SIX ON Monday morning, when Jazza’s alarm went off seconds before mine. This was followed by a pounding on the door. The pounding went down the hall, as every door was knocked.
“Quick,” Jazza said, springing out of bed with a speed that was both alarming and unacceptable at this hour.
“I can’t run in the morning,” I said, rubbing my eyes.
Jazza was already putting on her robe and picking up her towel and bath basket.
“Quick!” she said again. “Rory! Quick!”
“Quick what?”
“Just get up!”
Jazza rocked from foot to foot anxiously as I pulled myself out of bed, stretched, fumbled around filling my bath basket.
“So cold in the morning,” I said, reaching for my robe. And it really was. Our room must have dropped about ten degrees in temperature from the night before.
“Rory . . .”
“Coming,” I said. “Sorry.”
I require a lot of things in the morning. I have very thick, long hair that can be tamed only by the use of a small portable laboratory’s worth of products. In fact—and I am ashamed of this—one of my big fears about coming to England was having to find new hair products. That’s shameful, I know, but it took me years to come up with the system I’ve got. If I use my system, my hair looks like hair. Without my system, it goes horizontal, rising inch by inch as the humidity increases. It’s not even curly—it’s like it’s possessed. Obviously, I needed shower gel and a razor (shaving in the group shower—I hadn’t even thought about that yet) and facial cleanser. Then I needed my flip-flops so I didn’t get shower foot.
I could feel Jazza’s increasing sense of despair traveling up my spine, but I was hurrying. I wasn’t used to having to figure all these things out and carry all my stuff at six in the morning. Finally, I had everything necessary and we trundled down the hall. At first, I wondered what the fuss was about. All the doors along the hall were closed, and there was little noise. Then we got to the bathroom and opened the door.
“Oh, no,” she said.
And then I understood. The bathroom was completely packed. Everyone from the hall was already in there. Each shower stall was already taken, and three or four people were lined up by each one.
“You have to hurry,” Jazza said. “Or this happens.”
It turns out there is nothing more annoying than waiting around for other people to shower. You resent every second they spend in there. You analyze how long they are taking and speculate on what they are doing. The people in my hall showered, on average, ten minutes each, which meant that it was over a half hour before I got in. I was so full of indignation about how slow they were that I had already preplanned my every shower move. It still took me ten minutes, and I was one of the last ones out of the bathroom.
Jazza was already in our room and dressed when I stumbled back in, my hair still soaked.
“How soon can you be ready?” she asked as she pulled on her school shoes. These were by far the worst part of the uniform. They were rubbery and black, with thick, nonskid soles. My grandmother wouldn’t have worn them. But then, my grandmother was Miss Bénouville 1963 and 1964, a title largely awarded to the fanciest person who entered. In Bénouville in 1963 and 1964, the definition of fancy was highly questionable. I’m just saying, my grandmother wears heeled slippers and silk pajamas. In fact, she’d bought me some silk pajamas to bring to school. They were vaguely transparent. I’d left them at home.
I was going to tell Jazza all of this, but I could see she was not in the mood for a story. So I looked at the clock. Breakfast was in twenty minutes.