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“Welcome to hockey!” Claudia boomed. “Most of you have played hockey before—we’re just going to run through some basics and drills to get back into things.”
It became pretty obvious pretty quickly that “most of you have played hockey before” actually meant “every single one of you except for Rory has played hockey before.” No one but me needed the primer on how to hold the stick, which side of the stick to hit the ball with (the flat one, not the roundy one). No one needed to be shown how to run with the stick or how to hit the ball. The total amount of time given to these topics was five minutes. Claudia gave us all a once-over to make sure we were properly dressed and had everything we needed. She stopped at me.
“Mouth guard, Aurora?”
Mouth guard. Some lump of plastic she had left by my door during the morning. I’d forgotten it.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “For now, you’ll just watch.”
So I sat on the grass on the side of the field while everyone else put their plastic lumps in their mouths, turning the space previously full of teeth into alarming leers of bright pink and neon blue. They ran up and down the field, passing the ball back and forth to each other. Claudia paced alongside the entire time, barking commands I didn’t understand. The process of hitting the ball looked straightforward enough from where I was, but these things never are.
“Tomorrow,” she said to me when the period was over and everyone left the field. “Mouth guard. And I think we’ll start you in goal.”
Goal sounded like a special job. I didn’t want a special job, unless that special job involved sitting on the side under a pile of blankets.
Then we all ran back to Hawthorne—and I mean ran, literally—where everyone was once again competing for the showers. I found Jazza back in our room, dry and dressed. Apparently, there were showers at the pool.
Dinner featured some baked potatoes, some soup, and something called a “hot pot,” which looked like beef and potatoes, so I took that. Our groupings were becoming more predictable, and I was starting to understand the dynamic. Jerome, Andrew, Charlotte, and Jazza had all been friends last year. Three of them had become prefects; Jazza had not. Jazza and Charlotte didn’t get along. I attempted to join in the conversations, but found I didn’t have much to share until the topic came around to the Ripper, when I dove in with a little family history.
“People love murderers,” I said. “My cousin Diane used to date a guy on death row in Texas. Well, I don’t know if they were dating, but she used to write him letters all the time, and she said they were in love and going to get married. But it turns out he had, like, six girlfriends, so they broke up and she opened her Healing Angel Ministry …”
I had them now. They had all slowed their eating and were looking over.
“See,” I said, “Cousin Diane runs the Healing Angel Ministry out of her living room. Well, and also her backyard. She has a hundred sixty-one statues of angels in her backyard. Plus she has eight hundred seventy-five angel figurines, dolls, and pictures in the house. And people go to her for angel counseling.”
“Angel counseling?” Jazza repeated.
“Yep. She plays New Age music and has you close your eyes, and then she channels some angels. She tells you their names and what colors their auras are and what they’re trying to tell you.”
“Is your cousin … insane?” Jerome asked.
“I don’t think she’s insane,” I said, digging into my hot pot. “This one time, I was over at her house. When I get bored there, I channel angels, so she feels like she’s doing a good job. I go like this …”
I took a big, deep breath to prepare for my angel voice. Unfortunately, I did so while taking a bite of the hot pot. A chunk of beef slipped down my throat. I felt it stop somewhere just under my chin. I tried to clear my throat, but nothing happened. I tried to cough. Nothing. I tried to speak. Nothing.
Everyone was watching me. Maybe they thought this was part of the imitation. I pushed away from the table a bit and tried to cough harder, then harder still, but my efforts made no difference. My throat was stopped. My eyes watered so much that everything went all runny. I felt a rush of adrenaline … then everything went white for a second, completely, totally, brilliantly white. The entire refectory vanished and was replaced by this endless, paperlike vista. I could still feel and hear, but I seemed to be somewhere else, somewhere without air, somewhere where everything was made of light. Even when I closed my eyes, it was there. Someone was yelling that I was choking, but the words sounded like they were far away.
And then arms were around my middle. There was a fist jabbing into the soft tissue under my rib cage. I was jerked up, over and over, until I felt a movement. The refectory dropped back into place as the beef launched itself out of me and flew off in the direction of the setting sun and a rush of air came into my lungs.
“Are you all right?” someone said. “Can you speak? Try to speak.”
“I…”
I could speak, and that was all I felt like saying at the moment. I fell against the bench and put my head on the table. There was a pounding of blood in my ears. I looked deep into the markings of the wood and examined the silverware up close. My face was wet with tears I didn’t remember crying. The refectory had gone totally silent. At least, I think it was silent. My heart was drumming in my ears so loudly that it drowned out anything else. Someone was telling people to move back and give me air. Someone else was helping me up. Then some teacher (I think it was a teacher) was in front of me, and Charlotte was there as well, poking her big red head into the frame.
“I’m fine,” I said hoarsely. I wasn’t fine. I just wanted to leave, to go somewhere and cry. I heard the teacher person say, “Charlotte, take her to the san.” Charlotte attached herself to my right arm. Jazza attached herself to my left.
“I’ve got her,” Charlotte said crisply. “You can continue eating.”
“I’m coming,” Jazza shot back.
“I can walk,” I croaked.
Neither one of them loosened their grip, which was probably for the best, because it turned out my ankles and knees had gone all rubbery. They escorted me down the center aisle, between the long benches, as people turned and watched me go. Considering that the refectory was an old church, our exit probably looked like the end of a very unusual wedding ceremony—me being dragged down the aisle by my two brides.
6
SAN WAS THE SANATORIUM—BASICALLY, THE nurse’s office. But since Wexford was a boarding school, there was a little more to it than just an office. There were a few rooms, including one full of beds where the really sick people could stay. The nurse on duty, Miss Jenkins, gave me a once-over. She took my pulse and listened to my chest with a stethoscope and generally made assurances that I had not choked to death. She told Charlotte to take me back to my house and make sure I relaxed with a nice cup of tea. Once at home, Jazza made it clear that she was taking over. Charlotte turned on her heel in a practiced way. Her head bobbed when she walked. You could see her updo bounce up and down.
I kicked off my shoes and curled up in bed. Though the offending beef was long gone, I rubbed at my throat where it had been. The feeling was still with me, that feeling of having no air, of not being able to speak.
“I’ll make you some tea,” Jazza said.
She went off and made me the tea, and I sat in my bed and gripped my throat. Though my heart had slowed to normal, there was still a tremor running through me. I picked up my phone to call my parents, but then tears started trickling from my eyes, so I shoved the phone under my blanket. I bunched myself up and took a few deep breaths. I needed to get this under control. I was fine. Nothing had happened to me. I couldn’t be the pathetic, weepy, useless roommate. I had wiped my face clean and was smiling, kind of, when Jazza returned. She handed me the tea, went to her desk and got something, then sat on the floor by my bed.
“When I have a bad night,” she said, “I look at my dogs.”
She held out a picture of two beautiful dogs—one smallish golden retriever and one very large black Lab. In the picture, Jazza was squeezing the dogs. In the background, there were green rolling hills and some kind of large white farmhouse. It looked too idyllic for anyone to actually live there.
“The golden one is Belle, and the big, soppy one is Wiggy. Wiggy sleeps in my bed at night. And that’s our house in the back.”
“Where do you live?”
“In a village in Cornwall outside of St. Austell. You should come sometime. It’s really beautiful.”
I slowly sipped my tea. It hurt my throat at first, but then the heat felt good. I reached over and got my computer and pulled up some pictures of my own. First, I showed her Cousin Diane, because I had just been talking about the angels. I had a very good picture of her standing in her living room, surrounded by figurines.
“You weren’t lying,” Jazza said, leaning on the bed and looking closely. “There must be hundreds of them!”
“I don’t lie,” I said. I flicked next to a picture of Uncle Bick.
“I can see the resemblance,” Jazza said.
She was right. Of all the members of my family, I looked most like him—dark hair, dark eyes, a very round face. Except I’m a girl, and I have fairly ample boobs and hips, and he’s a man in his thirties with a beard. But if I wore a fake black beard and a baseball cap that said BIRDBRAIN, I think people would immediately know we were related.
“He looks very young.”
“Oh, this is an old picture,” I said. “I think this was taken around the time I was born. It’s his favorite picture, so it’s the one I brought.”
“This is his favorite? It looks like it was taken in a supermarket.”
“See that woman kind of hiding behind the pile of cans of cranberry sauce?” I asked. “That’s Miss Gina. She runs the local Kroger—that’s a grocery store. Uncle Bick’s been courting her for nineteen years. This is the only picture of the two of them, which is why he likes it.”
“What do you mean, ‘courting her for nineteen years’?” Jazza asked.
“See, my uncle Bick—he’s really nice, by the way—he runs an exotic bird store called A Bird in the Hand. His life is pretty much all birds. He’s been in love with Miss Gina since high school, but he doesn’t really know how to talk to girls, so he’s just been … staying around her since then. He just tends to go where she goes.”
“Isn’t that stalking?” Jazza said.
“Legally, no,” I replied. “I asked my parents this when I was little. What he does is creepy and socially awkward, but it’s not actually stalking. I think the worst it ever got was the time he left a collage of bird feathers on the windshield of her car …”
“But doesn’t he scare her?”
“Miss Gina?” I laughed. “No. She has a whole bunch of guns.”
I made that last part up just to entertain Jazza. I don’t think Miss Gina has any guns. I mean, she might. Lots of people in our town do. But it’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t know him that Uncle Bick is actually harmless. You only have to see him with a miniature parrot to know this man couldn’t harm anything or anyone. Also, my mom would have him locked up in a flash if she thought he was actually up to something.
“I feel quite boring next to you,” Jazza said.
“Boring?” I repeated. “You’re English.”
“Yes. That’s not very interesting.”
“You … have a cello! And dogs! And you live in a farmhouse … kind of thing. In a village.”
“Again, that’s not very exciting. I love our village, but we’re all quite … normal.”
“In our town,” I said solemnly, “that would make you a kind of god.”
She laughed a little.
“I’m not kidding,” I said. “My family—I mean, my mom and dad and me—are the normal people in town. For example, there’s my uncle Will. He owns eight freezers.”
“That doesn’t sound so odd.”
“Seven of them are on the second floor, in a spare bedroom. He also doesn’t believe in banks, so he keeps his money in peanut butter jars in the closet. When I was little, he used to give me empty jars as gifts so I could collect money and watch it grow.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Then there’s Billy Mack, who started his own religion out of his garage, the People’s Church of Universal People. Even my grandmother, who is almost normal, poses for a formal photograph each year in a slightly revealing dress and mails said photo to all her friends and family, including my dad, who shreds it without opening the envelope. This is what my town is like.”
Jazza was quiet for a moment.
“I very much want to go to your town,” she finally said. “I’m always the boring one.”
From the way she said it, I got the impression that this was something Jazza felt deeply.
“You don’t seem boring to me,” I said.
“You don’t really know me yet. And I don’t have all of this.”
She waved at my computer to indicate my life in general.
“But you have all of this,” I said. I waved my arms too in an attempt to indicate Wexford and England in general, but it looked more like I was shaking invisible pom-poms.
I sipped my tea. My throat was feeling more normal now. Every once in a while, I would remember what it was like not being able to breathe and that strange whiteness …
“You don’t like Charlotte,” I said, blinking hard. I had to say something to get all that stuff out of my head. It was probably a little abrupt and rude.
Jazza’s mouth twitched. “She’s … competitive.”
“That seems like a polite word for what she is. Is that how she got to be head girl?”
“Well …” Jazza picked at my duvet for a moment, pinching up little bits of fabric and letting them go. “The house master or mistress chooses the prefects. Claudia made her head girl, which she deserves, I suppose …”
“Did you apply?” I asked.
“You don’t apply. You just get chosen. You don’t have to be unpleasa—I mean, I like Jane a lot. And Jerome and Andrew are good friends of mine. It’s just Charlotte, well … everything was a bit of a competition. Who studied more. Who was better at sport. Who dated whom.”
Aside from being the kind of person who used “whom” correctly while gossiping, Jazza was also the kind of person who seemed pained about speaking badly about another person. She squeezed up her fists a few times, as if gossip required physical pressure to leave her body.
“When we first arrived, I was seeing Andrew for a while,” Jazza said. “Charlotte had no interest in him until I did. But she could never let something like that go. She dated him after we broke up, then she broke up with him instantly, but … she has to … well, I don’t have to live with her anymore. I live with you.”
Jazza let out a light sigh, like a demon had been released.
“Do you date someone now?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I… no. Maybe at uni. This year, all I’m concentrating on is exams. What about you?”
I mentally paged over the short and terrible history of my love life in Bénouville. My life had been about school too. It had taken a lot of work to get into Wexford. And I wasn’t sure if a few make-outs with friends in the Walmart parking lot constituted dating. Now that I thought about it, maybe I had been waiting too—waiting to come here. In my imagination, I’d always envisioned some figure by my side at Wexford. That prospect seemed unlikely after my display tonight, unless English people were really into people who could eject food from their throats at high velocity.
“Me too,” I said. “Studying. That’s what this year is about.”
Sure, we both meant that to an extent. I had come to study. I did have to apply to college while I was here. I really was going to read those books on my shelf, and I really was excited about the prospect of my classes, even if it appeared that said classes would probably kill me. But neither of us was telling the entire truth on that count, and we both knew it. There was a look, an almost audible click as we bonded over this mutual lie. Jazza and I got each other. Perhaps she was the figure by my side that I’d always imagined.
7
NEXT DAY, IT RAINED.
I began the day with double French. At home, French was one of my strongest subjects. Louisiana has French roots. Lots of things in New Orleans have French names. I thought French was going to be my best subject, but this illusion was quickly shattered when our teacher, Madame Loos, came in rattling off French like an annoyed Parisian. I went right from there to double English Literature, where we were informed that we would be working on the period from 1711 to 1847. What alarmed me about that was its specificity. I didn’t even think it was that the material was necessarily much harder than what I had in school at home—it was more that they were so adult about it. The teachers spoke with a calm assurance, like we were all fully qualified academics, and everyone acted accordingly. We would be reading Pope, Swift, Johnson, Pepys, Fielding, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Richardson, Austen, the Brontës, Dickens … the list went on and on.
Then I had lunch. It continued to rain.
After lunch I had a free period, which I spent having a panic attack in my room.
I thought for sure that they would cancel hockey. In fact, I asked someone what we did when our sports hour was canceled because of the weather, and she just laughed. So it was off to the field in my tiny shorts and fleece, with my mouth guard, of course. The night before I had to put it in a mug of boiling water to make it soft and mold it to my teeth. That was a pleasant feeling. At the field, I was greeted with the goal-keeper equipment. I’m not sure who designed the field hockey goalie’s uniform, but I’d guess it was someone who decided to merge his or her love of safety with a truly macabre sense of humor. There were swollen blue pads for my shins that were easily twice the width of my leg. There was another set for the upper thigh. The arm pads were like massively overinflated floaties. There were chest pads with an oversized jersey to go over them and huge, cartoonish shoe objects for my feet. Then there was a helmet with a face guard. The overall effect was like one of those bodysuits you can get to make you look like a sumo wrestler—but far less elegant and human. It took me fifteen minutes to get all this stuff on, and then I had to figure out how to walk in it. The other goalie, a girl named Philippa, got hers on in half the time and was running, wide-legged, onto the field while I was still trying to get the shoes on.
Once I did that, my job was to stand in the goal while people hit hockey balls at me. Claudia kept yelling at me to repel this onslaught using my feet, but sometimes she would tell me to use my arms. All the while, rain poured onto the helmet and streamed down my face. I couldn’t move, so the balls just hit me. When it was all over, Charlotte came up to me as I was trying to get out of the padding.
“If you want some help,” she said, “I’ve been playing for a long time. I’d be happy to run drills with you.”
What was especially painful about this was that I think she meant it.
At home, I had the third-highest GPA in my class, and literature was my thing. I would do the reading for English first. The essay I had to read was called “An Essay on Criticism” by Alexander Pope.
The first challenge was that the essay was, in fact, a very long poem in “heroic couplets.” If something is called an essay, it should be an essay. I read it twice. A few lines stood out, like “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Now I knew where that came from. But I still didn’t really know what it was about. I looked online first, but I quickly realized I had to up my game a little here at Wexford. This was a place for some book learning. So I went to the library.
Our school library at home was an aluminum bunker thing that they had attached to the school. It had no windows and an air conditioner that whistled. The Wexford library was a proper library. The floor was made of black-and-white stone. There were two levels of stacks—big, wooden ones. Then there was a massive work area, full of long wooden tables that had dividing walls, so you could have your own little space to sit in, with a shelf, a light, and plugs for your computer. The wall in front of you was even covered in cork and had pins, so you could tack up notes as you worked. This part was very modern and shiny, and it made me feel like a real person to sit there and work, like I really was one of these academics of Wexford. I could pretend, at least, and if I pretended long enough, maybe I could make it into a reality.
