The St. Ambrose School for Girls(59)
“She’s evil,” I whisper. “She is really evil—”
“What did I expect, though, you know?” Strots looks down as she talks over me. “I mean, really, where did I think it was headed? The whole time, we kept apart outside of our room because we had to. Because it was safest that way and it was easy. She had those two suck-asses of hers, and I got my sports. With the code of conduct, it felt like a smart move to stay under wraps, but again, that was only on my side. For her? She was living her real life with those girls, that boyfriend, the perfume and the short skirt shit. I was the lie. So what did I honestly think was going to happen?”
“You can’t blame yourself.”
“I absolutely can. She might be a bitch, but I let her in, knowing what she was. A girl like her? You can see her coming a mile ahead.”
We both fall silent. I don’t know where Strots is in her mind, exactly, but for me, I’m envisioning another round of scenarios where Greta gets her comeuppance. She is married, but her husband is cheating on her. She is rich, but someone is stealing her fortune from her. She is pretty and gets caught in a house fire. Snippets of these hypotheticals flip-card through my mind, animated sequences that move in blocks.
“I won’t tell anyone,” Strots says. “About your shit.”
I refocus on my roommate. She’s staring at the drawer of my desk.
“I won’t tell anyone about yours,” I say back.
Strots nods. “Good. And Keisha doesn’t know about Greta, by the way.”
I think of how protective Keisha is of my roommate, and enjoy a momentary image of the girl picking Greta up and throwing her through that third-story window. Or a second-story one.
Any window is good, actually.
“Someday, Greta’ll get hers,” Strots says. “I have to believe this, or God doesn’t exist.”
I nod, even though I disagree with my roommate’s if-this-then-that: If somebody as evil as Greta gets what’s coming to her, then the corollaries must be true as well. All her victims must deserve what they get, and how is that right? And likewise, all innocent people must have good things come to them—and how do you square that with the fact that I was born the way I am? I’m not bad. I don’t enjoy the suffering of others, as Greta does. And yet I’m stuck with my messed-up mind. Meanwhile, that girl across the hall is fucking with people’s lives, and she has a suntan and backup singers.
Still, it would be nice to think Greta will get her reckoning, if only because it gives Strots and me something else in common.
When my roommate smiles at me, I smile back.
That’s when I realize that we’re a kind of kin now.
Which is so much deeper than friends.
chapter SEVENTEEN
It’s Saturday night. I’m in the old gymnasium at the Fall Fling, a school dance for which we get gym credit if we attend. Given that I have been excused from the year’s physical education requirement, I’m not sure why I’m here.
No, that’s not true.
My internal life has quieted, thanks to me being back on the lithium, and because cognition is like nature and abhors a vacuum, I find myself more outwardly directed and curious about my peers—and also more lonely at the prospect of everyone on campus being at a party without me. I don’t really enjoy my oddball version of extroversion as I don’t like the feelings of sadness and sense of separation that come with it. But it’s better than boiler rooms, I suppose.
I am standing off to the side, leaning against a concrete wall that’s been painted so many times, it’s as smooth as icing on a carrot cake. The lights are dim and music is playing and the bleachers that funnel down to the honey-colored playing floor are largely empty. Girls from Ambrose are dancing with each other as blue-blazered boys who have been imported from St. Michael’s Prep stand in tight groups of shifting eyes. From what I understand from Strots, dances like this happen two times per year, fall and spring.
As Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch are piped in from overhead, I look at the strict separation of the sexes and decide that all these “Good Vibrations” are a waste of a bassline if the desired result is any kind of commingling. But maybe as the night progresses things will change, although no doubt the administration is hoping they stay like this. Separate is better, even if you’re heterosexual.
The DJ who’s in charge of the music is stationed behind a folding table in the opposite corner from me, and he alternates between CDs that go in and out of a player, and vinyl records that go round and round on a turntable. He’s a robot, unaffected by the beat, although I don’t think it’s because he’s being professional. He appears to be bored out of his mind as he keeps the succession of tracks going, queueing up pop music for rich kids. There’s no Nirvana. No Guns N’ Roses. It’s Color Me Badd, Vanilla Ice, Madonna, C+C Music Factory, Mariah Carey. Every song is something that you’ve heard on the radio in the last twelve months, although evidently not on the stations the DJ likes to tune to.
There’s no theme to this dance. No streamers. No banners. No one being crowned, no court of scepter-holding princesses accepting the steady arms of their princes and forming a promenade of teenage beauty. For this, I am grateful. Although I’m even less integrated into this happening than the landlocked groups of boys and girls, I’d feel totally alien if there were formal dresses and a stage and some kind of value judgment being applied to the pretty girls, another standard I will fail to meet.