The Eliot Girls Read online

  Audrey forced herself to keep moving, to seem to have a purpose. On the second floor, she headed for the bathroom and found it empty. Facing her reflection in the long wall of mirrors, she closed her eyes and opened them again. She had imagined herself disappearing into the crowd, but it was becoming obvious that even the coveted uniform couldn’t stimulate such a swift and sly metamorphosis. The clinical brightness of the bathroom did no kindness to her face. Her eyes were shadowed and bloodshot from nights of fitful sleep, her wavy hair was frizzy, her cheeks were still flushed from the walk. Anxiety had fixed her in a state of permanent, wide-eyed vacancy, as though she spent her life on the brink of unwanted revelations, perpetual astonishment her only mode.

  Audrey blinked at the strange girl staring back at her. In the past month, she had grown somewhat used to looking in the mirror and failing to recognize herself. In August, vexed by every facet of her appearance, she had cut her hair. Although Audrey was forever being told she resembled her father, her long, unruly hair had been one attribute she shared with her mother, and chopping it off had been just one in a series of attempts to differentiate herself from Ruth. The change had been meant to help her grasp some new, defining image, but all it had accomplished was to make her feel more alien in her skin. She thought that feeling less like herself would help set the tone for this new chapter in her life; it would catapult her into the role she was preparing to play. But she missed being able to hide behind the plenty of her old hair. Too much was her face now laid bare. Her features, she was sure, took up an excess of space against too pale a backdrop: her olive eyes overly large, her lips inelegantly full.

  She was still frowning at her reflection when the door swung open and two girls burst into the room, shattering its hermetic serenity. One girl doubled over, laughing noiselessly with her mouth wide open, while the other was alternately seized by laughter and hyperventilation. They opened the door again and the taller girl threw what looked like a mashed orange wedge down the hall.

  “Oh, you are in some deep, deep merde! I almost pity you. I really do!” she yelled, still barely able to hold herself up under the force of her paroxysmal laughter. The orange was whipped back at her; she grabbed it and reared back like a professional pitcher and returned it down the hall.

  Again the orange was hurled back by a distantly cackling phantom, and again it fell with a damp thud at the yeller’s feet. This time, she stepped gingerly over it and let the bathroom door swing shut behind her.

  The two girls turned at once to Audrey in the spirit of dissection. They leaned slightly into each other, their elbows touching as though they were exchanging messages with a series of nearly invisible nudges. Indistinguishable from the neck down—both uniforms were arranged in a state of conscientious chaos, the kilts a hair shorter than allowable, the Oxford shoes scuffed at the tips, the white blouses crumpled and half-tucked—the girls were otherwise a study in contrasts. The thrower of the orange gathered her brown hair into a messy bun, exposing ears dotted with tiny silver-adorned piercings, and cleared her throat. Her review of Audrey was undisguised and penetrating, and though her lips revealed no smile, her eyes twinkled, either in the aftermath of the orange throwing or in the discovery of something amusing in Audrey’s bearing. The other girl, neck stiff and arms folded, a single blonde braid hanging tidily over her shoulder, took in Audrey more coldly, as though she had long since conducted her appraisal and discarded the subject.

  “What grade are you in?” asked the dark-haired girl.

  “Ten,” replied Audrey. “You?”

  “We’re in grade six!” she answered in a shrieky falsetto meant to sound childlike.

  She skipped towards a cubicle and paused before going in.

  “God, it’s the first day, and already this bathroom reeks of shit.”

  Audrey’s nose had picked up nothing other than the overpowering antibacterial smell of industrial cleaner, but she knew that she must be the prime suspect in the creation of any fecal odour and that the smell, even if fictitious, was as real as they chose to believe.

  The girls stepped into cubicles simultaneously, then locked the doors and dropped the seats of the just-cleaned toilets, their earlier titters resurfacing.

  “Listen, Whit, listen,” came the voice from the dark-haired girl’s cubicle. “Your pee is soprano and mine’s alto.

  They listened without laughing for a second.

  Then came the voice again. “Whit, you have, like, the opera singer of pees.”

  “Then yours is, like, R&B,” returned the blonde. “Your pee has soul.”

  They flushed at the same time and emerged from their cubicles, delighted by their synchronicity. As they washed their hands, they smirked at each other’s reflections in the mirror, then left without giving Audrey another glance. The second the door swung shut, they burst into laughter out in the hall.

  Audrey planted her hands on either side of the sink and stared down her reflection again, enjoying the briefly empowering flicker of anger that illuminated her features. A gush of nostalgia for her old school came over her. How she missed the very featurelessness her mother had taught her to deplore. The homely serviceability of the building itself, the banana-yellow lockers and speckled linoleum floors, the smell of pot lingering in the back hallways, the worn and scratched surfaces. The harmless indifference of the crowd, its exchange of apathetic chit-chat. All the things that had inspired her scorn now kindled a spasm of sadness. It had been a forgivable offence, being a forgettable girl there.

  But a good school was the key to everything. Before she even knew how to read, she was taught this essential fact of life. There was no getting around it. Here she would have to stay.

  IN THE CLASSROOM, THE mood was the frantic joy of a drunk just before he spills over into belligerence. It was a madhouse of noise. Nothing so discernible as conversation was taking place. Girls were perched on desktops or standing in clusters, flooding each other with incoherent delight. As Audrey was gathering her nerve to enter, a series of hoots preceded a happy gasp, and a girl with her hair in pigtails toppled ecstatically off a desk to a swell of applause.

  There came a shout from the other end of the hall and Audrey turned to see Moira Loughlin, the art teacher and a former friend of her mother’s (the allegation, never voiced directly to Moira herself, was that she had become intolerably conceited since finally selling a painting and introducing the term “fan base” to her everyday vocabulary), bouncing towards her, nearly tripping over her long purple peasant skirt, tousling the asymmetrical bob she considered her trademark.

  “Audrey!” she cried, clapping. “Check you out!” She came to a skipping halt in front of Audrey and placed her hands on her hips, nodding with exaggerated approval. “Looks like I didn’t get the bulletin! So…you excited?”

  Audrey smiled uncomfortably. “I guess.”

  “Well, you’re about to become part of one heck of a group,” she said, beaming into the classroom and then back at Audrey. “I can’t tell you how good it is to see you here, finally.”

  Audrey glanced away, willing Moira to stop talking. All the effort she’d put into getting accepted at Eliot only made her feel less deserving of her spot. This was the secret, the shame she imagined written all over her. It was the blemish no uniform could hide. A girl seated just inside the doorway cast an aloof gaze out at them. Audrey tried to judge how much of the exchange she might have heard.

  “I kept reassuring your mom that you’d show that Ms. McAllister what you were made of when you were good and ready. She may have been worried, but I never was, not for a second.” She thumped her hand insistently against her chest, drawing attention to the creased, sunburned cleavage visible through the unbuttoned front of her oversized denim shirt. Suddenly, a thunderbolt seemed to rip through her body, and she exclaimed, “Suze!” Her eyes leapt to the girl just inside the door. “Did you have a good summer?”

  “A
wesome,” said Suze lifelessly.

  “You been taking your sketch pad with you everywhere, like we talked about?”

  “Absolutely!” Suze replied, her voice now dripping with sarcastic enthusiasm that seemed to escape Moira, who continued to smile with uncontainable pleasure.

  “Will you do me a favour, kiddo?” asked Moira, now gripping Audrey’s shoulders and shoving her in the direction of Suze. “You take care of my friend here. It’s her first day, and we all know how those can be.”

  Offering an apologetic half smile, Audrey allowed herself to be foisted on the reluctantly rising Suze, and they stood there staring at each other helplessly until Moira, happy with her matchmaking, finally retreated. Upon Audrey’s entry, the room went instantly quiet. A funeral procession of two, Audrey and Suze made their way slowly across the front of the room under the now-whispering scrutiny of the surrounding girls.

  “You can sit there, I guess,” offered Suze, biting her thumbnail while listlessly gesturing with her head at a pair of unoccupied seats. “Most of the seats are taken. The thing is, like, pretty much everybody has planned already who to sit with.”

  “This is okay,” said Audrey, setting down her knapsack.

  Suze nodded and, considering her duty discharged, her unfairly extracted pledge to Moira honoured, retreated sluggishly to her own desk. There, still chewing on her nails, she became embroiled in an intense, low-voiced conversation with her deskmate.

  As Audrey sat and began to unpack her bag, there came from the hall a stampeding sound, and the two girls from the bathroom burst in, dancing around the front of the room in a frenzied tango. They twirled each other like drugged ballerinas, then finished with the blonde lowering the brunette into a low and wobbly dip.

  “My unmentionables!” she shrieked. “Everyone will see my unmentionables!”

  “Your unmentionables get mentioned pretty often,” replied the blonde. “Especially at St. George’s.”

  Bunches of girls scattered around the front of the room made an appreciatively hysterical audience.

  “Oh, oh! The bitterness! And not even nine o’clock!” said the brunette, pulling herself up. “Don’t worry, Whit, there’s someone for everyone. Some guys like girls with dicks.”

  As Audrey watched them, the hazy alarm of the preceding weeks came into focus. She had never been good at this brand of teasing. Nor was she the adult teen, precociously challenging her teachers on the finer points of various philosophical or political ideologies. At her former school, she had once sat in glazed awe as a fellow student engaged the history teacher in a half-hour debate about whether the roots of communism and fascism were ultimately the same. But the kind of safe vacancy she had relied on before wouldn’t go over at Eliot. There was more to life, surely, than the fear of being embarrassed. Ruth was forever telling her that now was her chance, and though the precise character of this chance was never articulated, Audrey sensed that her mother was talking about a lot more than education. It was a matter of reinvention. No one knew her at Eliot. A new life, a new identity, seemed almost to be within her reach. Now was her opportunity to be something other than herself. She could choose to be more than the girl who sat quietly in the middle of the room. The difficulty was that the means of creating the delicate details of that persona were as murky as ever.

  With five minutes remaining before the bell, the dancing girls began to lead a crew of others in the creation of a list of cryptic reasons grade ten was to be the most awesome year yet. After deciding amicably upon number ten, “Après-school aerobics with you know who,” the group was now fighting over number nine. Audrey was pretending to have some important matter at hand in the bottom of her knapsack when a voice from above offered an enthusiastic, “Hey!”

  Audrey looked up with wary hope. Leaning towards her with an intimacy that suggested long acquaintance was a petite girl smiling so assertively that her presence commanded the space between them and bestowed the illusion of considerable height. She asked if Audrey minded if she took the seat beside her, and entrapped by her own politeness, Audrey nodded weakly. The girl set a shiny black briefcase on the desktop and snapped it open as she settled herself. From its organized interior she drew a Ziploc bag of dried apricots, which she offered to share. “I’m Seeta!” she said, digging apricot out of a molar with her tongue. She extended a hand, which Audrey stared at in momentary confusion, never having had someone her own age suggest shaking hands. “Are you new here too?” Seeta asked.

  Audrey nodded, glancing away. She tried to project a certain distractedness, not wanting to engage too fully with this new seatmate. (Was it really settled then? Was this to be her lot for the rest of the year?) She supposed there should be some comfort in the neighbouring desk not remaining empty, but emptiness at least meant possibility, whereas this felt shatteringly like the end of possibility. Futures were decided in a split second. Alliances, even if unwillingly formed, were hard to shake.

  The one-sided conversation that followed confirmed Audrey’s gloomiest suspicions. With the volume, both of voice and gesture, of someone wanting very much to be noticed, Seeta offered a detailed comparison between George Eliot Academy and her old high school in Scarborough. There was very little about this old school that didn’t inspire her derision, from the perpetual smell of egg salad in the classroom to the buffoonish males who insisted on taking over every class with their stupidity: “I mean, how could any person over the age of twelve not know what existentialism is?” Taking in her surroundings with rapturous glances, she marvelled in her escape from that hell of mediocrity. “At least everyone knew I was a serious scholar,” she said. “No one bothered me.”

  She might have been pretty, had there not been so many elements of her appearance that defied prettiness. Her black hair was thick and shiny, but greasy at the roots, and so long it reminded Audrey of a horse’s tail. In the corner of her eyes was a dusting of sleep. Her full lips were slightly chapped. As her monologue continued, her tone grew somewhat shrill in proportion to her escalating enthusiasm, and she began to draw the attention of girls seated nearby. The general consensus seemed to be that ignoring her would be safest, but she proved difficult to ignore. Her roving eyes sought the other girls out, and she aimed a forceful smile of good cheer at anyone whose gaze drifted towards her. Glances were exchanged behind her head, but she noticed nothing.

  Finally, she stopped talking and let out a long sigh, as though her outrageous admiration of everything in sight had exhausted even her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I completely forgot to ask your name.”

  Audrey unwillingly released the information.

  “It’s fate, then! Breakfast at Tiffany’s happens to be one of my favourite films.”

  Audrey’s stomach made a screeching sound like a car racing around a bend.

  “What was that?” cried Seeta, looking around excitedly.

  The second bell rang then, and the stragglers in the hallway rushed in and took their seats, followed by the homeroom teacher, who would shepherd the class to assembly. The day was just beginning, but Audrey had a bad feeling that something had already been decided.

  Chapter Three

  THE ENDURING MONOTONY OF the morning staff meeting was one of Ruth’s most reliable pleasures. In that half hour were housed the only mindless minutes of her day. As announcements got underway and handouts were distributed, Ruth sank into a quasi-attentive trance, grateful to be cradled in others’ more competent palms. Nothing was required of her but to listen, or to appear to listen. She could be the audience rather than the guide, the student rather than the teacher. In her many years at the school, she had never ceased to be uplifted and amazed by the elegant proficiency of the machine of Eliot running around her.

  But on this morning, as she headed to the staff room, her body resisted the usual decompression. Anxiety about Audrey had been plaguing her from the moment they left the house. In the car, they had list
ened to the news and exchanged few words. Ruth had fought the urge to reach out and grab her daughter—whether to embrace her or shake her she wasn’t sure. Ruth hated silence, and during that drive, even more than usual, she felt crushed by it. No words of encouragement, it seemed, could disarm Audrey’s malaise.

  When they had reached Eliot, Ruth let Audrey out at the base of the driveway. Her impulse was to hover, shadowing Audrey to the classroom, making introductions, but she knew that that would be the worst thing she could do. It was a kind of agony: her hopes for her daughter were immeasurably outsized by her helplessness. After they parted, Ruth parked in the lot behind the school, then doubled back to the front and took up a partially hidden post by an old oak tree so that she could observe Audrey’s approach. It was a moment before Audrey came into view, dawdling up the long driveway, then weaving her way through the constellations of girls spread across the circular drop-off area. She walked without purpose, as though uncertain she was even in the right place.

  Outwardly, there ought to have been little to distinguish Audrey from the other girls, but Ruth noticed, even more than she usually did, how the old-fashioned school uniform made Audrey seem as though she had stepped out of another generation. In August, she had cut her wavy brown hair into a twenties-style bob, which accentuated the elegant length of her neck. (Audrey received compliments so poorly that Ruth was reluctant to tell her this.) In the past year she had grown noticeably taller—though her posture was terrible, perhaps to compensate for her unease at this new height. Yet Ruth’s heart broke at the sight of her, looking not straight ahead, but wonderingly up into the sky, as though marvelling at the clouds.

  Now fifteen, Audrey was losing the unawareness that, in childhood, had given her a kind of unaffected charm. In its place had grown an almost insistent awkwardness. Ill at ease in her body, she was perpetually slouching and fidgeting, glancing away from eye contact. Ruth was sad to witness the change, though she knew that she shouldn’t be surprised by it. A part of her was even grateful for it. She had always thought there was something a little vulgar about supremely confident teenagers. She could not help thinking that there was something beautiful in such awkwardness.