Breathless (23 page)

Merriweather Hall sits on the farthest corner of campus, between the headmaster’s house and the maintenance barn, a three-story maze of antique construction with luxury updates: a few new rooms added here and there, which spill out on three of its sides, the bell tower boarded shut to prevent secret cigarette smoking.

Merriweather is for prefect senior girls only. It has seven bedrooms, which are enough for fourteen girls, and a large downstairs apartment for the house mother, Mrs. Christianson, and her husband. It has always been Papa Rosedaddy’s last stop before bed.

For people who live at Woodsdale Academy, it becomes their world, and tonight the world has become almost silent under the ice and rain, which have been falling for days and have crusted over Woodsdale, nearly erasing the skyline. Even the lights inside the houses can hardly be seen from outside. It isn’t October yet, but already the weather is too cold. This year, there won’t be an Indian summer.

Papa Rosedaddy keeps one hand on Puff’s thick neck, as if comforted by the dog’s breath gathering in clusters of moisture. Puff’s panting is the only sign of warmth in the night. Papa Rosedaddy looks at the sky and squints into the wet. He seems to listen for a moment, then shuts off his flashlight and follows Puff toward the barn with his head down, leaving no tracks on the frozen ground.

As I watch Papa Rosedaddy from the window of my room, I think about how I’ve been here for two years now, and it has become the only home I know anymore. When I’m away from Hillsburg, I don’t remember it really—I remember more than anything how ugly it is. The way people there dislike anything different out of sheer stupidity, never realizing how pathetic their own lives are. I remember neighbors standing on their porches as my brother screamed at me to help him, to love him, all the ignorance surrounding us like a dizzying funnel that sucked our family inside and whirled it to bits. Every time I go back—for a weekend here or there, always at the Ghost’s insistence, for things like my mom’s birthday or their twenty-fifth anniversary party—I always try to bring Mazzie with me. Ever since the last time I saw my brother, I don’t want to go home without her.

Tonight it’s freezing in our room. There is ice on the insides of the windows. Mazzie and I are wearing our matching pj’s, covered in small puffy kittens, that my mom bought us for Christmas last year.

I climb into the lower bunk, beside Mazzie. “I can’t believe it’s so freaking
cold
,” I say. I cup my hands to my mouth and blow warm air against my palms.

She leans forward so that I can feel her breath in my face. It smells like fresh toothpaste. She pinches my cheek, digging into my flesh with her fingernails. “Does Drew think it’s a sign of the apocalypse? Does he think it’s going to start raining frogs soon?”

The longer I know her, Mazzie only gets meaner.

“Stop that,” I say, swatting her hands away. “And no.” What I don’t tell her is that he thinks this cold snap is good evidence that global warming is a liberal hoax.

Mazzie wrinkles her nose at me. “You smell like chlorine and barf.”

“There’s a surprise.”

“It makes me want to puke. I might have to go sleep downstairs. You’re repulsive, you know that?” I don’t think she knows how to be any other way. She rests her head on my shoulder and says, “Oh, Katie. I hate you with every shred of my being.”

“That’s funny,” I tell her, “because you’ve signed up to be my roommate again for the last two years in a row. Why would you do that?”

“Because I feel sorry for you.”

“The more you hate me,” I add, “the more I love you, you know.”

She sighs. “I know. It’s a lose-lose situation. I might as well give up.”

Mazzie’s tongue is like the kittens’ on our pj’s, small and delicate as she sticks the tip of it out at me right now. With her pinky finger, she scratches unabashedly at the edge of her nose, probing up into the nostril.

The storm outside is violent; along with the ice, there’s thunder and lightning, which occasionally makes our lights flicker. We’ve laid towels along the window frames so they won’t rattle in their tracks all night, like something’s coming for us, shaking chains in its fists.

We’re up later than usual, operating on the assumption there won’t be school tomorrow because of the ice storm. After lights out, we’re going to get drunk.

I shuffle my legs and produce a pint of coconut rum from under the covers.

Her finger is still up her nose. Her mouth opens in surprise. “Did you just pull that out of your vagina?”

“Let’s do a shot,” I say. “Quit picking your nose.”

When it’s just the two of us, Mazzie becomes a completely different girl than the one whom everyone else knows. In public, she has never had so much as a sip of a drink. She has never taken a drag from a cigarette or a joint at a party.

But when it’s the two of us, alone, she’s up for almost anything. It’s like whatever happens when our door is closed is part of a different world where we can finally relax.

We pull my comforter up to our hips and sit with our backs bowed against the wall, legs splayed and overlapping under the covers. Mazzie’s feet barely reach my knees.

Even in her slippers we can hear Mrs. Christianson—who is on her second marriage and a lot younger and more laid back than Mrs. Martin ever was—from the other end of the dorm, her ratty bathrobe dragging against the floor as she opens each door after a quick knock. She pokes her head through each room’s crack to say good night, turns out the lights, and moves to the next room.

Here’s what I love most about this place: even though it is so far from home for so many of us, Woodsdale has a way of being better than home ever was. I have explained it nicely in the Berkeley application that I wrote for Mazzie, which is in an envelope in the mailbox downstairs: students come here expecting to get into a good college and make some friends. Not only do we have that, but living on campus is practically like getting a hundred brothers and sisters. Having faculty living in the same building is like a few extra sets of parents at the ready, should we need them for any reason. It’s not like we love every single person—actually, I can’t stand most of them—but they’re always here. Like a family.

Okay, it isn’t exactly like that, not all the time. But I’m sure the admission staff at Berkeley would like to think so.

When I was writing the essay, I almost started to believe it myself. There are times when this place seems perfect, as though we are living in a tiny diorama of the Real World. It gives me a sense of relief to know there are worlds outside southwestern Pennsylvania. These other worlds are the places where people don’t look at you sideways when they hear that you go to prep school, where everyone—even me, now—owns a pair of white gloves, just in case, and knows which fork to use for each course and how to dress for each of the seasons. I like the rules here; I like knowing which ones it is okay to break, as long as everybody else is doing it, and which ones mark a person as being Trouble. I like the sense I get sometimes that other people are pretending just as much as I am. Like maybe I’m not the only one with a secret brother, miles away, whose name I haven’t said out loud in months.

Mrs. Christianson knocks twice at our door, so softly that an untrained ear would never notice. I shove the bottle underneath my pillow. Light triangles against the floor as the door opens.

She trusts us 110 percent. It’s amazing how, as long as you keep your grades up, you can get away with pretty much anything. She hardly looks into the room at first. “Good night, ladies.”

“Good night, Mrs. Christianson.”

“Good night, Mrs. Christianson.”

After a second’s pause, she squints her eyes at us, peering across the huge room into the dark. “Why are you girls in the same bed?”

Mazzie pinches my side underneath my shirt, trying to make me squirm.

I wait three, four seconds for her to answer for us before I say, “We’re just talking.”

Mrs. Christianson taps a manicured nail against the door frame. Her cat, Wonka, stands beside her, looking upward, impatient for her to move on. “Okay. That’s fine. But you girls need to go to sleep soon.”

“All right. We will,” I say.

“Good.” And she shuts the door.

We wait without talking, without even moving, until we hear her knocking, saying good night four more times at different rooms until she changes direction and heads back down the hall for the last time tonight, down the carpeted stairs, across the foyer, and we hear the click of the deadbolt in the front door. A few seconds more and then the Christiansons’ own door shuts, and the late news from the television in their apartment filters up through the ceiling. If we press our ears to the floor in a few minutes we’ll be able to hear the latest weather forecast:
Stay indoors. Keep your babies close and your kitchens stocked. Everything is about to get covered in ice.

Anybody could get the wrong idea. After almost three years in the same room, you get comfortable in ways you wouldn’t guess. The girls here get relaxed with each other in the same ways that boys on a football team do; it becomes second nature to touch each other, letting your bodies overlap without really meaning to, the same way your living space does. Without real families here, we all learn to improvise in ways that are tough to explain unless you’re here, living through it.

I rest my head on Mazzie’s shoulder. It is, for our purposes, the middle of the night—the windows are so thick with ice we can barely see outside. There is no reason to go to sleep. There will not be school tomorrow. In the dark, on nights like these, even our memories can seem like dreams if we want it badly enough.

In the morning—through my blurred, stinging vision I see my alarm clock switch from 4:59 to 5:00—Mrs. Christianson knocks at our door again, opens it just a crack, and I see that she’s still in her pajamas. I pull up the covers to hide Mazzie, who’s sleeping beside me, and start gearing myself up to swim. I start by curling and relaxing my toes, feeling the sleep slip away.

“Ladies,” Mrs. C.’s sweet voice lilts with clear pleasure, “school is canceled. Go back to bed.” This time, she doesn’t even turn her head in our direction. She’s still in her nightgown, no robe, no slippers. She’ll be back to sleep like the rest of the house in no time.

But there are things that need to be accomplished, no matter what the weather is like. I take a few minutes to stay in bed with my eyes closed, awake, wiggling my fingers and toes. Beside me, with her head covered by the blanket, Mazzie is curled into a tiny ball, almost invisible. When she breathes in and out, light and delicate, I can smell liquor on her breath. She looks so angelic like that, I don’t want to wake her up. So I get up as slowly as possible, placing one foot on the floor at a time, wincing as the floorboards creak beneath me. Almost without making any sound, I pull on my swimsuit and warm-up clothes, slip my bare feet into snow boots, pull one of Mazzie’s ski hats—it barely fits my head—over my ears, and tiptoe out the door, down the wide curved staircase, and into the coldest October day I’ve ever felt.

Aside from Papa Rosedaddy, who raises a gloved hand at me from across the street, I’m the only person outside on campus. Papa Rosedaddy and I are used to meeting this way. He doesn’t say anything as I trudge past, keeping my head down. Campus is still dark. The streetlights are no help at all, their brightness dimmed by the thick layer of ice that has accumulated on the glass. I make my way uphill, unsteady on my feet, and he pauses in his work to watch me, making sure I’m okay. I can’t imagine when the guy sleeps.

The side door to the natatorium is always kept unlocked specially for me, but even if someone forgets, I have my own key. I spend the next two hours swimming, loving the feeling of water rushing past my body, and not thinking about anything at all.

That’s not exactly true. I think about Will when I’m swimming sometimes—in fact, I think about him almost all the time, both in and out of the water, no matter how much I try to stop. He’s there in the faces of strangers, in my every memory of home, his absence always taking up space inside me.

Thoughts like these can make you crazy if you don’t find a way to keep them out. In our humanities class, we’re doing a whole unit on philosophy. We’ve been talking about things like morality and the meaning of it all and human codes of conduct, and it’s enough to make me dizzy sometimes when I think about it too much. I wouldn’t be here if things hadn’t happened with Will the way they did, which begs the question: would he be where he is, if it weren’t for me somehow? Did my very existence do something to damage him that I don’t know about? And could I have prevented it in some way, if I had known or tried?

But how could I have known? How could I have tried? Even in the water, sometimes, when I open my eyes to look forward, I see his face for just a second. But it’s not Will like the last time I saw him. It is Will at maybe fourteen, kind of chubby, his teeth in braces for the first time. Back then, his eyes still had some hopeful color to them; he still laughed and told us he loved us, and there were more good times than bad. I tell myself that it’s because there’s so much water between us—not just the water I’m under, but all the rivers and clouds between us—that this is the reason I can’t get a clear picture of what he looks like now.

I’m in the locker room, pulling on my warm-up suit, wet hair still wrapped in a towel, when Solinger taps at the door, tilting it open a crack before I can say “come in.”

“Hold
on.
I’m not even dressed.”

“It’s okay,” he says from the other side of the door, “I’m a doctor.”

“You’re a doctor of sports medicine, not a gynecologist.” I yank a sweatshirt over my head.

Once I’m dressed, I go to his office. I’ve been in here so many times—even sitting on his side of the desk, looking at racing times and merchandise catalogues and whatever—that I go ahead and perch my butt on the edge of the desk, waiting as he finishes some paperwork.

“Freshman intramurals,” he says, shoving the papers into a drawer. “They’re gonna drive me to drink. How many games of Frisbee golf can one man referee before he loses his mind?” Moving on, he asks, “How are your applications coming?”