The St. Ambrose School for Girls(25)

Or the eyes of others.

I turn my blue memo over. There’s no label on the back where Bridget and Savannah had one.

There’s a trash bin below the corkboard where tutoring notices and school club come-ons are tacked by a revolving supply of clear-headed pins. I consider going through the receptacle, imagining myself taking off its lid and dumping out its collection of crumpled colored paper, fermenting apple cores, and empty soda cans. Compulsive as I am, I nearly get on with the impulse, but someone yanking open the dorm’s door snaps me out of that plan.

I hurry off for the stairs and decide Francesca wouldn’t be so obvious as to rip up my real memo and toss it so close to ground zero.

As I ascend, my ebullience has disappeared as if it never existed. Now my boots weigh a thousand pounds apiece, and my black clothes are the only thing I feel like wearing. Gone are the winged fantasies of my future as a fit-in as opposed to my present lot as an outcast, the lies conceived by my hyperactive brain blown out of my air space, nothing but tufts of feathers floating down, a bird caught in mid-flight by a high-bore shotgun’s blast, not just dead but vaporized.

As I contemplate my return to my dreadful normal, I have a hazy conception that the trippy, buzzy thoughts that spun out from the center of my previously singing chest were just the same as the hallucination of my hair from yesterday. More fun, for sure, and I miss them like a loved one gone too soon. But the sad reality is that I’m no more likely to sprout infinite lengths from my follicles that sink part of the United States than I am to be cured and become a spokesperson for the mentally ill as an adult.

I’m back to being me.

The idea that Greta and her Brunettes have gotten me again kicks me in the gut. The fact that I caught their trick before it hurt me doesn’t matter. That they pranked anew, and in a way I wouldn’t have anticipated, is what scares me, because my penchant for paranoia does not need the confirmation that my world here at Ambrose is tenuous and easily tampered with.

As I get to the head of the stairs at the second floor, I hear music coming out of Hot RA’s room. This isn’t unusual. He likes rock ’n’ roll, no pop for him.

Going down my hall, passing our bathroom, my heart hurts, and it gets worse as I see that Greta’s door is open.

“Hi, Sally,” she drawls. “How are we doing? See you got your mail.”

As I duck my head and ignore her, I open my door and am tired again as I enter.

“What’s wrong?” Strots asks me from her bed.

I close my roommate and me in together. “Nothing.”

I go over to my own mattress, sit down, and stare at the floor, my backpack still hanging from my shoulder, the fake memo in my hand along with the real notices I received.

“Jesus Christ, Taylor, did your mother die or something?”

I look across the divide of the room. Strots isn’t joking. She’s putting aside her hated geometry book and sitting forward, her brows bunched up hard. The fact that she honestly seems to care makes tears threaten in my eyes and I hate it.

“Why is Greta so mean?” I say without intending to. “I don’t understand. Why can’t she just… be Greta? Isn’t that enough?”

Strots curses. Then she dives under her pillow for her cigarettes and her lighter. The shcht as she thumbs the Bic seems very loud, and I worry that Hot RA might hear it and race down here to bust us both. But wait, he’s listening to rock music, and besides, I’m really not sure he’d care. As long as Greta doesn’t smell anything, we’re safe.

Strots cracks the window and blows the smoke out of our room. “What’d she do to you?”

I don’t mean to, I don’t want to, but I find myself telling Strots about the shampoo. The laundry. I hold the memo out so she can read the lie with its—not it’s—grammatical errors. I turn the blue paper around and show her the lack of a label. I review my proof for all of it, which I have to admit is rather flimsy, unless you’ve looked Greta in the eye as one of her enemies. When I’m finished, I collapse backward and bang my head into the wall.

I’m rubbing the sore spot as Strots ashes into the muck-filled soda bottle she’s been using for the last two days. Dead soldier filters float on top of the brown fluid, casualties of a flood.

“You don’t believe me,” I say with defeat.

“No. I do.”

This is such a relief that I blink fast. “Thank you.”

“But my opinion’s not gonna make a shit’s worth of difference.”

You are wrong about that, I think to myself. It makes a difference to me.

Strots taps her cigarette in the opening of the bottle. And in the silence, it occurs to me that it’s no small skill ashing into the Coke’s little mouth. I think of the way my mom burned her hand while gesturing wildly around Greta’s parents’ Mercedes.

You forget that those things are on fire.

“As for why she does it,” Strots murmurs.

When my roommate doesn’t continue, I prompt, “She has everything.”

“That’s what she wants people to think.” Strots pauses again. “I’ve heard some things about her family.”

“Like what,” I push when there’s another silence.

“People say behind her back they aren’t worth what they used to be. Guess her dad had to declare bankruptcy a couple of years ago and sold their big house in Greenwich. I don’t know any details.”