The St. Ambrose School for Girls
Jessica Ward
Dedicated to Sarah M. Taylor.
Thank you for coming and finding me.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
In some causes, silence is dangerous.
—St. Ambrose
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
—Virginia Woolf
chapter ONE
The St. Ambrose School for Girls
Greensboro Falls, Massachusetts
1991
My first view of the St. Ambrose School for Girls is from the back seat of my mother’s 1981 Mercury Marquis. The ten-year-old car is utterly unremarkable except for being reliable, and the reason I’m in the back is because I put the laundry basket full of my bedding in the front passenger seat. My mother is a smoker and I can’t stand the smell. I have a theory that I can put my head out the rear window and get better air because I’m farther away from her.
I’m wrong.
We pull through a pair of stone pillars that are united by a graceful arch of black iron filigree, a necklace overturned, the perfect welcome to a pearls-and-sweater-set institution of learning. I’m being dropped off here for my sophomore year of high school. I’m a fifteen-year-old charity case on scholarship because I won a spot I was not aware of having competed for. My mother filled out the application and put a piece of writing of mine into the pool of candidates. Those five thousand words, which I had no intention of anyone ever reading, coupled with my idiot savant grades, were the key to unlock this door I do not want to enter.
“Look at this lawn,” my mother remarks. She gestures around with her left hand, the lit cigarette between the fore-and middle fingers a laser pointer with an angry orange end. “This is a lawn. I’ll bet they mow it every morning.”
I am not as impressed with the lawn. I am not impressed with any of the brick buildings or the sidewalks that wind around the campus, either. All of this, from the acceptance to the packed sheets in that basket to the two-hour trip from where she and I live, has little to do with me, and everything to do with my mother’s need to upgrade something in her life. Our tiny two-bedroom house is cluttered with issues of People, Star, Us Weekly, the National Enquirer, the Globe. Each one of them is a pulpy, soft-spined vacation into another, better world for her, and after she’s done reading them, she keeps them like they’re diaries of a trip she never wants to forget.
I wonder sometimes if she isn’t moving me out of her house so that she can use my bedroom for storage space. I know this isn’t true. The real story is that I’m the ninety-nine-cent houseplant she is shifting to a better, more sunny spot on the sill by the sink. I’m the pragmatism that I doubt she will admit to consciously, a recognition that her own life is a stagnation of going-nowhere, but damn it, she can figure out how to get her fucked-up daughter into Ambrose.
“Look at this campus. I tell you, Sally.” She flicks her Virginia Slim out of her window, ashing onto the lawn and evidently missing the irony that she’s crapping up the very thing she’s admiring. “They know how to do things at this school.”
My mother puts a push into a lot of her words, as if her tongue is frantically shoving the syllables out of her lipstick-slicked mouth, like someone trying to bail out a boat. For her, an ocean of unspoken urgency surrounds the hull of her leaky skiff of nervous chatter, so there are always words for her, and rarely a pause for consideration of content. She speaks like the magazines she reads, everything headlined, drama manufactured out of her dull and endlessly reconstituted reality of being a school lunch lady at Lincoln Elementary.
“Where are we going?” she asks. When I don’t answer her, she looks over her shoulder. “Sally, help me here. Where are we going?”
My name is Sarah, not Sally. I’m not sure how I got the nickname, but I hate it, and the first thing I’m going to do here is introduce myself as Bo. Bo is a cool name for a girl, unisex and unusual, just as I am fairly unisex and definitely unusual. Unlike the other girls I see walking around the campus—who look like they’ve stepped out of the rainbow page of a United Colors of Benetton ad—I’m dressed in black and loose clothing. I’m also not wearing shoes, but lace-up boots with steel toes. My hair is dyed jet black, although my mouse-brown roots are starting to show already, a trail of mud at night.
My mother, whose name is Theresa, goes by Tera. Tera Taylor. Like a movie star. She said she named me Sarah so it rhymed, so we could be twins forever. She’s told me over and over again she wants me to have a little girl and name it Lara to keep the tradition going, even though, technically, Lara does not rhyme with Tera or Sarah. It would have to be Lera. The fact that my mother can only get sort-of-there with her own construct is the kind of thing that should go on her driver’s license.
I’m just hoping to make it to sixteen at this point.
“Sally, come on.”
It’s pointless to mention that I have not been on this campus before either, and there’s no map to consult.
“I think it’s over there,” I say, pointing in any direction.
This mollifies her and we find the correct dorm by luck. Tellmer Hall is right out of the brochure of any New England prep school: brick, three stories, two wings, and one main entry with a limestone pediment bearing its name. Just below the slate roofline, there is a marble frieze bearing the names and profiles of musical luminaries: Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn. As I get out of the back of my mother’s Mercury, I stare up at the faces and start counting down to Thursday, June 4, when, according to this year’s school calendar, summer vacation starts.
“Look at this building. Just look at it.”
My mother slams the driver’s side door to add an exclamation point, and the sound of the hollow bang brings us attention from the other girls who are unpacking from their parents’ cars. As my mother smiles in the direction of a Volvo station wagon and then a Mercedes sedan, there’s expectation and relish in her still-attractive features, like she’s prepared to be invited to dine with the Izod-wearing fathers and the Talbots-clad mothers. What she fails to notice, and maybe this is a blessing, is that their perusal of us is of short and disinterested duration, a cursory assessment of my black Goth-ness and my mother’s synthetic-fiber, fake von Furstenberg dress. They don’t even bother to reject us. We’re not significant enough for that. We’re something they look through, ghosts of the lower middle class.
“Go introduce yourself to the girls.”
When I don’t respond, my mother glares over at me, and then refocuses on the Mercedes as if she’s trying out the logistics of dragging me to it.
She’s going to need a fireman’s hold.
“We have to unpack the car,” I say.
The Mercury’s trunk has two suitcases in it. One a battered black, the other a winsome blue that has inexplicably fared better with age—black seems like it would be stronger, more durable. I take them out one by one. As I straighten, I see around the corner of the dorm. There is a plumbing truck parked in the back. Albrecht & Sons. It is white with blue lettering, the telephone number starting with an area code I am not familiar with.
“You really need to introduce yourself,” my mother says.