“I’m afraid that’s confidential.” The dean’s voice was cool. “I can assure you that we take any allegations of this nature seriously. We take our responsibilities, in loco parentis, and the health and well-being of our students seriously. Nothing matters to us more.”
“Of course,” Daisy said, thinking that the dean had just used a lot of words that told her less than nothing. The dean picked up a heavy gold lighter, spun its wheel, and applied the flame to the pipe’s bowl, moving it in circles as he puffed gently, wreathing his face in smoke and filling the room with the warm scent of burning tobacco.
“I’ve been here for almost twenty-five years, and in that time, I pride myself on being able to tell whether Emlen, with all it has to offer, is or is not the best place for a student. I think we can all agree that it’s not a matter of the best school, but a matter of finding the best place, the right place, for each individual student. And in this case,” he continued, his voice almost kind, “I’m afraid that it’s become abundantly clear…”
Oh, no, thought Daisy, as the hinges of Hal’s jaw bulged. “… that Emlen is not the best fit for Beatrice.”
“Please,” Daisy murmured, even though she wasn’t sure what she was pleading for. She suspected that the dean was probably right. Emlen had been the right place for Danny and David, and it had unquestionably been the right place for Hal, who’d made lifelong friends here; who spoke of his years at Emlen as the best years of his life. But Emlen, Daisy thought, had never been the right place for her daughter.
Hal got to his feet, unbuttoning his jacket and smoothing his tie, his lips pressed so tightly together that they’d vanished in his face. Daisy rose with him, and settled her hand on his arm, feeling the coiled tension of his muscles. She squeezed, a gesture that she hoped would communicate the futility of yelling or threats; that would speak of her desire to leave with their dignity and their daughter, even if it wasn’t Hal’s preferred outcome. This was her role in their partnership: she was the guardrails that kept Hal from veering off the road; she was the civilized counterweight to his most brutish instincts.
“Thank you for your time,” she said to the dean, and led her husband into the antechamber, to collect their daughter. She put her arm around Beatrice’s shoulders, pulling her close, and, just for a moment, Beatrice allowed the contact. “Let’s go home.”
2
Beatrice
Class, let’s welcome the newest member of the class, Beatrice Shoemaker.”
Beatrice stood up, smoothed her pale-blue cardigan, and gave her new classmates the smile she’d been rehearsing—cheerful, but not goofy; friendly but not desperate. “Good morning, Beatrice,” the kids droned. Bea waved, took her seat, and looked around. Her first period, A Block （“It sounds like jail,” she’d overheard her father saying）， was ninety minutes of American Literature. Followed by World History, followed by lunch. There were fourteen other kids in the class, a testament to Melville’s “commitment to small, intimate classes where your child can shine.” Beatrice recognized just one girl, Doff Cartwright, a former classmate from junior high. The other kids were strangers, and the school itself was a significant come-down from the Emlen Academy. Emlen had a campus, with a collection of gray granite and redbrick buildings crawling with ivy. It had three senators and a vice president among its alumni, not to mention novelists and journalists and researchers and nuclear physicists. Its motto, serve hoc mundo, meant “we serve the world,” and the dean and the teachers were forever talking about the students’ obligation to give back, to use their brains and skills and their talent to make the world a better place.
Beatrice had hated it. She’d hated the bright-eyed, well-behaved students who talked endlessly about their resumes and the colleges to which they’d apply. She hated the cold New England weather, the bland dining-hall food, the way the other kids, including her roommate Celia, treated her crafting as a waste of time. She hated, too, how she’d gone from being one of the smarter kids in her grade to average. Not even average, really. Below average. One of the girls in her dorm had won an international piano competition when she was twelve, and a boy on the next floor was the son of the Senate’s minority whip. The level of ambition, the constant scrambling after achievements and prizes, the anxiety and sleeplessness that preceded every exam or paper’s due date, the way the girls’ bathrooms would reek during finals, when the girls who threw up because they were anxious joined the girls who threw up after they binged. All the kids bragged about how little sleep they’d gotten and how much coffee they’d consumed. To Beatrice, it all felt wearying and pointless. Especially because Beatrice didn’t want to run for president or conduct an orchestra or discover a cure for cancer when she grew up. What she wanted to do was crafts. Knitting and needle-felting, mostly, but she also embroidered and crocheted, none of which were skills appreciated or encouraged at Emlen.