The St. Ambrose School for Girls(118)

I glance around at the girls who are to’ing and fro’ing with me along the sidewalks. All my life, I’ve heard grown-ups say that youth is resilient, and I’m witnessing that firsthand. We had yet another mandatory dorm meeting the morning after Nick Hollis’s body was removed from his apartment. More grief counselors came in. There was more crying in the phone room. Classes were canceled that day.

A lot of girls went home again that weekend. But they came back on Sunday.

And now, things feel pretty close to normal. My contemporaries are laughing and talking in groups around campus. Classes and tests are the same. The rhythms of the school have resumed.

It’s not like nothing happened. But no one seems to be dwelling on it.

Well, not in my age group at least. The teachers and the administrators and the RAs are still stressed and strung out. You can tell because they’re all exhausted and distracted at the chalkboards when they’re teaching or when they’re grimly striding between buildings for meetings. I’ll bet parents are still freaking out. I know my mother is.

This stuff with St. Ambrose is the one story in People magazine that she’s said she doesn’t want to read. The point of voyeurism, after all, is that it doesn’t happen to you. It doesn’t happen to your daughter. It’s not so close. She says she hasn’t watched the evening news, either, and has no plans to for a while.

When she was here, she asked me if I wanted to come home.

I told her no. I wanted to stay.

She asked me if I felt safe in the dorm.

I said absolutely.

When I get to Wycliffe, I go in the front door and drop my book bag with the others in the open area. Through the arches of the cafeteria, I see girls standing in line at the buffet with their trays, and ones clustered around the milk bar, and others sitting at tables.

I venture into the cacophony, pick up a plastic tray, and get in the queue. The food is abnormally interesting to me, which is what happens when you eat the same three things over and over again for a week. I’ve lost some weight, and I need to get on that, but right now, I’m not inclined to push myself to do anything. I just kind of want to go along… and be normal. Whatever that means.

But I do snag that hamburger. And fries.

I’m on the way to my solitary table off to the left, by the trash bin, when I happen to catch a glimpse of Francesca and Stacia. They’re sitting with their group of girls from our dorm, and Francesca is holding court, her hands gesticulating as she speaks to her captivated audience.

Greta’s replacement has marked her territory, and successively asserted her dominion over the clique. It didn’t take her long, and part of that, I suspect, is because no one else really wanted the job, considering the last head of that lofty social circle woke up dead on the big rock down by the river.

Francesca had been waiting for her chance all along, I decide as I sit at my empty table. And I wonder if she didn’t attempt a coup on Mountain Day, couched in terms of threats about the relationship with Nick Hollis. Greta, unsurprisingly, defended her turf like a boxer.

But all of that competition is moot now, and at least I’m not worried about Francesca picking on me. I remember her face as she came down those stairs in tennis whites, and then when I was almost throwing up in the bathroom.

She isn’t as cruel as Greta was. She’s not going to give me any trouble.

The first bite of my hamburger is heaven.

I am chewing when I hear the sound of a bunch of chairs being pushed back all at once, their feet scraping and squeaking over the linoleum floor.

I don’t pay the noise any attention—

When my table is suddenly surrounded, I brace myself and keep my head down. On reflex, I pick up my tray to leave, my read of Francesca clearly misinformed.

Except then I look up… and recognize the field hockey team’s first string of players. And they all have their trays with them.

“Hey, Taylor,” Strots says as she sits down next to me. “What’s up.”

Every one of the athletes parks it along with her, even though they have to pull up an extra chair. Keisha is on Strots’s right.

“Um… nothing?” I say as I glance at the other girls.

They’re relaxed, and they start talking about nothing in particular, picking up the strings of conversations that had been briefly interrupted by their relocation. I glance at Strots. She’s making a joke with Keisha. The other girl starts to laugh, and their eyes meet for a moment. And then linger.

“Liking that hamburger?” Strots says to me when she refocuses on her own food.

“It’s really good.”

“I’m glad.”

“Ah… me, too.”

As the presence of these girls sinks in, I feel an unfamiliar sensation in the center of my chest, especially when the one to my left asks me about my history test, and then tells me she’s impressed, but not surprised, that I was at the head of the curve on it.

“You’re really smart,” she announces. Like it’s a fact so indisputable, it doesn’t need to be spoken aloud. “Like the smartest girl in the school.”

I have no idea what to reply to that.

Instead, I retreat into my own mind.

I go back to the boiler room, where I sat across from my illness and watched that version of me shake my own head. Then I think of the morning after Nick Hollis killed himself, when the truth came out in all the newspapers and on TV… the truth that he had been having an illicit affair with Greta Stanhope, and she’d gotten pregnant, and he’d killed her—and then, a few days later, hanged himself from guilt in his apartment.