The Eliot Girls Read online

  “Hello, love child,” she said.

  At this allusion to their old joke, Audrey smiled in spite of herself. Upon first hearing the term as a child, Audrey, attracted to the euphony of it, had expressed disappointment that there was no similar magic around planned conceptions such as her own. “Well,” Ruth had replied, “I’ll pretend that your beginning was scandalous and accidental if it will make you feel better.”

  “Studying?” Ruth asked, pouring water into the coffee maker.

  “Biology.”

  “Good luck. Do you like Chandra?”

  “She’s okay. But bio’s not really my thing.”

  “It’s not mine either.”

  With a gulp of water, Ruth swallowed a vitamin and made a face, then leaned back against the counter as the dogs came stampeding through the kitchen to the back door. Ruth let them into the yard, then sat at one of the high stools by the island and watched Audrey for a moment. Finally, she said, “So, how do you feel about the idea of getting a math tutor?”

  Audrey sighed. She knew this was coming. A tutor should have appealed to her, she knew. Wouldn’t it be better not to be so confused as Mr. Marostica’s rapid scribbles traversed the blackboard? Wasn’t academic success the most important kind? But the thought of trudging to the homely grey-lit studio of Miriam Jarvis after school to review math for yet another hour was discouraging. The hard part was supposed to be getting into Eliot. She was reluctant to accept that she was just at the beginning of a gruelling odyssey. “Do I have to?” she said.

  Ruth was silent for a moment. “Well, no, of course you don’t have to.”

  “Because I’m just catching up now. I’m sure I’ll do better.”

  “There’s no shame in it. It’s not like anyone will know. Lots of Eliot girls go for tutoring so they can stay ahead.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it right now,” Audrey said.

  “Well, give it some thought.” Ruth clapped her hands on Audrey’s shoulders and planted a kiss on the top of her head. “So, who are you hanging out with these days?”

  Audrey shrugged away Ruth’s hands and stood up. “I’m trying to study,” she said peevishly. “Why do you have to bug me with all this first thing in the morning?”

  A blush spread over Ruth’s face. “It was an innocent question. I’m just making conversation.”

  Audrey roughly crammed her binder and notebook into her knapsack. “Well, I don’t have time to give you constant reports on my progress. I have things to do.”

  Ruth was too flustered to respond, and Audrey was glad. It was a strange pleasure, starting the day on such an antagonistic note. Just the sight of Ruth, in her immaculately ironed white blouse and tweed skirt, looking so smugly concerned, annoyed Audrey. How good it felt, for a change, to be the one whose mood determined the atmosphere of the house. The feeling rocketed her into the day. “I’m leaving,” she said.

  “Now?”

  Audrey had no intention of revealing the real reason for her departure—her math homework was incomplete, and she’d forgotten her textbook at school the prior afternoon. She grabbed her knapsack and headed for the front door.

  “But don’t you want a ride?” Ruth called out. “I’m leaving soon.”

  It only added to Audrey’s satisfaction that Ruth’s last words, as Audrey pulled the front door shut behind her, were, “Aren’t you even going to say goodbye?”

  THE MINUTE AUDREY ENTERED the classroom, she could feel that it was not empty. No one was initially visible, but after a second, she noticed a trio of heads in the back corner.

  Arabella Quincy could change the configuration of a room. She altered the composition of its oxygen. Her loose curls tied carelessly into a messy bun, she was a Pre-Raphaelite muse fallen from grace, the vacant gaze and welcoming suppleness replaced by a wicked glint and a shrewd smirk. The illusory innocence of Arabella’s looks was the source of their brutality. The temptation to watch her was inescapable, as was the fatal urge to speak to her unbidden. Once, a lock of her hair had fluttered against Audrey’s cheek as they stood next to each other in line, and Audrey had still felt its fragrant brush an hour later. Even when Arabella was out of the room, she seemed not to be entirely absent. The void left by her departure only made her presence more keenly felt. Although gone, she would return, and the anticipation of that return created an intoxicating tension.

  Arabella’s latest coup had been to liberate the entire class’s dislike of Seeta. Every time Seeta entered a room, from the back corner predictably came a series of breathy gasps and shrieks—a reference, Audrey suspected, to Whitney’s observation that when Seeta sang “Feelin’ Groovy,” she had looked like she was having an orgasm—followed by satirically operatic voices singing “Kumbaya.” The word groovy fluttered up, softly and furtively, in the air around her when she made her way through the classroom. Although Seeta herself seemed staunchly oblivious—two days after her first performance came a second, followed by a third, a fourth, a fifth—Audrey was not. As Seeta’s deskmate, she felt perilously close to the whole mess.

  Just as Audrey had suspected from the first words she spoke, Seeta had proven hard to shake. There she was in music class, singing in Audrey’s ear. There she was in pre-calculus, primly opening her binder and setting her supplies at her desk’s northern tip. There she was in the French room, copying out conjugations of irregular verbs to kill time before class started. There she was in the gym, limbering up like a runner before a race. There she was at lunchtime, eating pungently spiced foods out of giant Tupperware containers. One day, she had just taken out her meal when Arabella walked past, sniffing the air in dramatic disgust. “God, what died in here?” she wailed. Audrey had been waiting tensely for the trouble to light on her.

  Arabella and her best friends, Whitney Oke and Katie Douglas, whom everyone called Dougie, now sat in a tight circle on the floor, strangely silent, as though they were holding their breath to avoid detection. On the closest desk, partially obscuring them, was Arabella’s knapsack, unmistakably hers, covered in buttons—one with a likeness of Alan Thicke, others bearing messages such as “Jesus loves you but he loves me a little more” and “Proud grandmother”—their obscure messages a testament to her superior sophistication, to the fact that she had acquired her place in the class through some genetic destiny, a monarchical inevitability that made her unchallengeable. Upon hearing Audrey’s footsteps, Arabella peered around the side of the bag, cocking her head slightly like a dog hearing a suspicious noise. Audrey’s instinct was to turn and leave immediately, but she knew that to do so would be a declaration of fear, the end of a moment but the start of something much longer.

  “I’m just getting a textbook,” she muttered.

  Arabella watched her, saying nothing.

  The mess of loose papers inside her desk fluttered onto the floor as Audrey rummaged around for the book. “Oh, shoot,” she mumbled as she crouched to gather them. “Oh, shoot,” came a small echo. Audrey looked up and saw Arabella examining her with Buddhic inexpressiveness. Her lips were closed and her expression was unusually flat, a parody of a poker face. Whitney and Dougie glanced from Audrey to Arabella, and then settled on Audrey. Audrey felt her face growing red under their united appraisal. Stuffing the papers back into the desk had become an absurdly complicated endeavour. Like hair that wouldn’t lie flat, they refused to be tamed, and continued to peek out every time Audrey tried to close the desktop. She gave a little laugh, which was, in another small feat of ventriloquism, invisibly mimicked. The thought occurred to her as she pressed her hand on the chaos that she had never loathed herself more.

  At last she turned to leave. She was almost at the door when Arabella called out, “Hey, new girl. Come back here for a second.”

  Right away Audrey knew that this was one of those random moments of adjustment in life. A minor and accidental revolution. It was Arabella’s voice. Even as Aud
rey’s heart leapt in alarm, she heard something that strengthened her: the note of curiosity, an opening.

  She turned around. “Me?”

  “Me?” mimicked Whitney.

  “Is there another new girl here?” asked Arabella. “Have a seat.” She gestured to the floor next to Dougie and smiled sweetly.

  Audrey tried not to think about the math homework that wouldn’t get done as she wedged herself into the one clear spot of floor in the back corner.

  “Make yourself comfortable, dahling,” said Dougie.

  She wondered for a second if they had invited her over expressly to enjoy the spectacle of her attempt to fit her body into a space that was clearly too small for it. They made no shifts to accommodate her but watched with aloof half smiles as she tried to make room for herself. She had never been so close to them before, and it had seemed only right that this distance remain intact. She saw them now with too much clarity. Normally, Whitney and Dougie commanded little attention of their own. Too much were they simply a facet of Arabella’s aura. Now Audrey understood the symbiosis among them. Their near constant presence with Arabella enhanced her power, and they, in turn, received the contagion of her beauty. Audrey supposed that Whitney might have been intimidating in her way, with her striking pale skin and her impenetrable coldness, but Dougie was all freckles and giggling, utterly ordinary without Arabella’s neighbouring splendour.

  “So,” Arabella said. “We were just talking about that gross handout Ms. Crispe gave out the other day in gym.”

  The previous day, Ms. Crispe, the gym teacher, had given the class a detailed lecture about personal hygiene on gym days. Accompanying this talk was a handout upon which she had listed the five cardinal rules of gym attendance, and although the majority of girls had appreciated her insistence upon the use of antiperspirant, less welcome was her legislation on menstruation. The first rule was introduced by the title, “To Pad or To ’Pon? That is the Question.” Only tampons, Ms. Crispe instructed, were to be used on gym days, since girls wearing sanitary pads were unable to give the games their all. In the locker room before the bell rang, the girls had fumed about the handout while forming countless theories about what they deemed a homoerotic interest in their vaginal proclivities. During lunch, Whitney had suggested that they all wear pads to the next gym class as a matter of principle.

  “We’ve all agreed that we have to do something,” Arabella said. “It’s not enough just to complain about it. Or wear pads, since she might not even notice that anyway.”

  “She’s totally violating our privacy!” exclaimed Dougie.

  “And our civil liberties,” added Whitney.

  “And, like, why is she so obsessed with our menstrual blood?” Arabella said. “Don’t you find that really disturbing?”

  Audrey nodded.

  “So, listen. Whit came up with the most hilarious plan.” Arabella fizzed with excitement, her hands fluttering in her lap as her hair fell across the aristocratic slope of her long neck. On her chin was a pimple, small but clearly still at the beginning of its life. Audrey glanced away, hoping Arabella hadn’t seen her notice it.

  The idea was to leave a pad, smeared with ketchup, in the middle of the locker room floor. When Ms. Crispe came in, clipboard in hand, whistle around neck, to badger the class to hurry up, she would spot it. From there on, the plan grew more formless, its goal somewhat unclear. It wasn’t even about the rules anymore, Whitney insisted. But there was a point, and it seemed to them an important one. It was a matter of honour, almost, to humiliate Ms. Crispe for talking about their periods so openly, for forming her beliefs into a list of regulations and then detailing them on a handout. A lesson had to be taught. The girls looked at each other and aimed squalls of hyena-like laughter at the ceiling.

  “Isn’t it an awesome idea?” giggled Dougie.

  Audrey had to agree that the plan was, in its sheer pettiness, rather formidable. The amount of energy and passion they poured into these trivial injustices astounded her. There was no precedent for it in her life. At her old school, all any of the girls had cared about was boys. And the size of the school had prevented any single event from having such resonance. She wondered what Ruth would say if she knew that such things went on.

  Arabella looked slyly at Audrey. “Do you want to do it?” she asked, as though offering an opportunity she might not grant.

  “I want to do it,” Dougie whined.

  Arabella ignored Dougie and fixed Audrey with her magnetic stare.

  “Now?” Audrey said.

  “Well, we have gym first period.”

  Audrey glanced at her math book and then at the clock. It was almost 8:30. If there had been morning soccer or basketball practice, the locker room would soon be full of girls changing into their school uniforms. But refusal was not an option. She nodded her consent. They clapped their hands in glee as Arabella stuffed a wrapped sanitary pad and a restaurant packet of ketchup into Audrey’s knapsack.

  The locker room was in the basement, and when Audrey swung open the door, she discovered it empty. Her instructions were simple enough. She unwrapped and unfolded the pad, smoothing out the creases and twisting it up roughly in her hands in an attempt to make it look used. Then she opened the ketchup and smeared it down the middle, rubbing the surface with her fingers to make it look more natural, like blood that had been collecting for hours. It wouldn’t absorb, though, and lay glistening and congealed on the top, quite obviously ketchup. It smelled obviously of ketchup, too. It was at this point that Audrey realized she had nothing with which to clean her fingers, so she picked up the pad’s crinkly paper wrapper and wiped her fingers as best she could, then buried it under a mound of used Kleenexes, a dirty, torn gym sock, and an empty carton of skim milk in the big rubber garbage can.

  She set the pad conspicuously in the centre of the floor and stepped back to get a view of her handiwork. The plan suddenly seemed less a subversive and witty comment on a teacher’s overstepping than a prank by twelve-year-olds. Outside the door, a herd of footsteps might have been headed towards her or away, so she grabbed her knapsack and headed for the bathroom, where she washed her hands, then sat in a cubicle until the bell rang, breathing deeply to calm her galloping pulse.

  When she returned to the locker room after chapel, much of the class was already there. She took a spot in the corner, pushed her bag into the cubbyhole overhead, and started undressing. The pad was already garnering much attention. Upon entering the locker room, most girls sidestepped it deferentially, giggling. Rebecca Knowles called out, “Is that real blood?” To which Dougie answered, “Yeah, that’s my big bloody pad. Sorry, I’m just human.” Audrey’s face was burning. A part of her thought that she should have been proud of her part in it, flattered and exhilarated to have been taken into one of Arabella’s plots, but the prevailing part of her was still afraid of getting into trouble. Ms. Crispe was due to arrive at any moment, and Arabella kept glancing knowingly in Audrey’s direction.

  A hush fell over the room as the door swung open and Ms. Crispe, wearing khaki walking shorts and a white-collared polo shirt, a pencil behind her ear, walked in and planted herself stockily by the garbage can, hands on her hips. Like everyone else who’d come in, her eyes immediately went to the crimson pad, but unlike everyone else, she offered the pad no deference. She said nothing, her very body the antithesis of a girlish squeal. Then she took one step over to the pad, squatted, and picked it up by its corner, holding it aloft under the fluorescent lighting.

  “What is the meaning of this?” she asked calmly.

  Half-dressed, the girls stared at her, unanswering.

  “To whom does this belong?”

  The girls remained silent for some seconds. Then Arabella raised her hand.

  “Maybe it belongs to someone who has her period?” she said in a querying, helpful tone.

  “Thank you, Arabella,” said Ms. Crisp
e. “What is this doing on the floor?”

  “I’m not sure what it’s doing on the floor, Ms. Crispe,” Whitney said innocently, “but remember you said we’re not allowed to wear pads in gym class? I guess maybe someone just remembered that and was trying to respect your rules, but didn’t have time to go to the bathroom before the bell?”

  Ms. Crispe turned around and flung the pad face down into the garbage, where it landed with a squelching wetness.

  “You have one minute to finish getting dressed,” she said.

  When the door swung shut behind her, muffled laughter issued from all corners of the room, but the joy was gone, not so much because the incident was over as because of Ms. Crispe’s deflating reaction, her refusal to get particularly angry or to acknowledge the ketchup, to seem at all ruffled, or the least bit aware that her rules had been shown up by the grade tens. Arabella and Whitney, lacing up their shoes in the opposite corner, were conferring.

  “Just ask for a tampon next time, Seeta,” called out Dougie.

  Seeta was pulling on her gym shorts, and she looked up, startled to hear her name.

  “What? I didn’t—”

  Arabella burst into laughter, relieving Seeta of the need to finish her sentence.

  Seeta sat on the long wooden bench and concentrated on tying up her running shoes. Whitney whispered to Arabella something Audrey couldn’t hear. Seeta seemed to be moving very slowly—whether in an effort to calm herself or to resist intimidation, Audrey couldn’t tell. She looked up from her shoes and gave Audrey a small smile, then finally stood to leave. When the door swung shut behind her, Arabella exclaimed, “That was classic!”