The St. Ambrose School for Girls(30)
Besides, I need to use the restroom, and become focused on how I can’t really hold things any longer. Fortunately, we are at a county park that has a concrete kiosk of bathrooms. The line forms quickly, and when I finally get into one of the stainless steel stalls, I can smell cigarette smoke next to me. It has to be Strots, I decide, and I’m tempted to say her name. I don’t. Instead, I check the dispenser to my right and am relieved to find that there is a big fat roll of toilet paper locked into the car-wheel-sized holder. There’s plenty for me, and plenty to last us through the afternoon.
After I wash my hands without soap in water that’s cold as a rushing stream, I use the sides of my pants to dry my palms and go out to assess the lunch situation. There are picnic tables scattered in and among a ring of trees that boundary a shorn field. Two buffets have been set up side by side, and girls are already in line, taking paper plates and piling on sandwiches, slaw, chips, and cookies like they last ate three years ago. Under an awning, backups for the food are being tended to by kitchen staff in white caps and blue and gold Ambrose uniforms.
I let the others go first, finding a trunk to lean back against. Strots and her group get their food and pick a table not far from one of the buffets, tucking into their full loads in the shade. Greta and her Brunettes exercise strict portion control and take a table in the sunlight, pushing their salad-no-dressing around, taking half bites out of sandwiches they will not finish. The RAs all sit together, and the rest of the girls pepper the other perches.
When the coast is sufficiently clear, I swoop in, take a ham sandwich and one that has turkey in it, and find an empty picnic table down at the far end. Trying to be as cool as Strots and her crew, I sit on the weathered boards of the top, not at the bench level. As I start to chew, I notice that inside the field of cut grass, there are flags set up on poles at regular intervals.
Oh, shit. Games. They’re going to make us do something that involves a ball, some running, and going by the orientation of those markers, a certain amount of goaltending. This isn’t good news. My legs are already tired and I hate competition, but at least it’s unlikely that anyone will want me on their team. Besides, with so many of us here, there’s no way that everyone will have to play. There isn’t enough time, unless we go one hundred against one hundred—
Behind the buffets, over by the bathrooms, I see two girls arguing, and it takes me less than a second to recognize Greta and Francesca. The pair are leaning forward and talking fast, back and forth, back and forth. For once, it’s unclear who the aggressor is. Which means Francesca’s upped her game.
Trouble in paradise? I think to myself as I glance over at the table where they’d been sitting. The other girls there aren’t paying any attention to them.
When I look back, the two of them are gone.
Maybe they were arguing over who will get to throw up their lunch first. As if there is ever a real debate over who’s in pole position, though?
“I can’t have you sitting here all alone!”
I jump and nearly drop my plate. Oh, God. It’s Ms. Crenshaw.
My geometry teacher joins me on my picnic table’s top with messianic glee, her savior complex triggered by my isolation. The fact that I am quite content to be on my own doesn’t occur to her. I am the swimmer in the lake who drowns because the lifesaver buoy thrown at me knocks me unconscious.
It is upon this helpless note that I notice what she’s taken from the buffet line. She has a disproportionate, rather disgusting, amount of coleslaw on her plate, and she dives into the huge mound of sauced-up shreds with her white plastic fork. Actually, wait. The only thing she’s helped herself to is the slaw.
I hear my roommate’s voice in my head. People are weird.
As Ms. Crenshaw carpet-bombs me with conversation, talking about the walk up the trail, the view from the top, the easy-peasy of the way down, her presence beside me, so close, so intent on communication, shines a light on the both of us, two oddballs amplifying each other’s oddities, a mirror-to-mirror, ad nauseam, ad infinitum ping-pong of piss-poor reflections. We are a Charles Addams cartoon, except it starts ugly so there’s no need for a troll to peek out halfway down the declension.
“Don’t you think, Sarah? Of course you do. And that’s why Mountain Day is such an important…”
My head spins under the gale force of her pressure of speech, and the onslaught is a reminder that while I identify as a loner, I’m not sulking at my lack of friends. I’m relieved by the solitude because I am as much as I can handle at any given time.
“—did so well on that test, Sarah. You should be a tutor for math, you really should.”
Oh, she’s changed subjects.
Plugging into her new line of blather, I think of Strots and how I worked with her the night before the last exam. I am not going to share with Ms. Crenshaw that I have piloted a tutoring program and it appeared to garner at least B-level success.
“Thank you,” I say as I take a bite of my ham sandwich.
I have finished my turkey one, and I figure as soon as I dust the ham, I can leave under the auspices of having to get a refill of something, anything. I chew like I am in a race.
“Do you need help setting up?”
The question is such a non sequitur that I look over at her, but she’s speaking to someone else. It’s Hot RA. He’s approaching us with a nylon net full of raw-meat-colored kickballs and what appear to be some footballs. He’s ditched his Nantucket sweatshirt and I notice, not for the first time, that his Nirvana T-shirt is tight over his pecs, loose over his taut stomach.