Lessons in Love (6 page)

“First — we meet back here after school, before my practice to rearrange the furniture.”

“Is that, like, Fruckner code for something or do you really mean…”

“I really mean — bed there? Table here? We’ll set it up just right.”

“And the other two things?”

“Oh,” Mary says, a slight blush creeping into her tawny cheeks. “I guess I just wanted to say that I’m glad — you know — that out of all the other girls in Fruck, that you’re the one I’m Frucked with.” She laughs.

“Nice,” I say and laugh, too. Then, because I never said it last night I add, “And thanks — by the way. I’m not sure if you’re fully aware of the extent that you saved my ass — and the rest of me — from a year of hell, but you did. So thanks.”

Mary nods. “I get it.”

I pull my bag from the bed, wondering where all the items in the room will find homes later. “So, I’ll see you later?”

“Wait.” Mary tugs at the front of my hair and then walks with me over to the front window which are blocked by our desks. Over the summer, the handymen and women, the campus clean-up crews, come into the dorms and repair anything that’s damaged. They also apparently rearrange everything so that it’s in the least convenient position. As is, my bed is blocking the non-working fireplace (my head was in a chimney last night), Mary’s bed takes up an entire wall, the bureaus are shoved together and these desks — which I’ve yet to even touch — are in front of three large windows.

“What?” I ask. “I know — I’m messy with my desk. It’s a fault.” I flash to Charlie and his immaculately arranged workspace on the Vineyard, how I bet his dorm room at Harvard is the same. The thought of that difference somehow makes me more weirded out than it should — but it’s as though his perfectly organized desk is a reflection of his too-compartmentalized brain. And which part am I in?

“No, not that,” Mary uses her body weight to slide one desk to the right and jam herself between both. “Let me move them.”

I help her, not knowing why, and we succeed in creating even more displaced furniture, with both desks at an angle. “What exactly are we doing?” I check my watch. It will have to be breakfast on the go. Normal people would probably sit and eat and not worry about the first bell, but I’m not like that. I want to take my toast and be the first to arrive.

When you get to class first, you can just sit there and wait, watching people stream in while you’re already comfortable in your chosen chair. None of those awkward
where will I sit
moments. Maybe it’s that — or maybe — it occurs to me now — maybe I just like to see each class, each encounter at the student center, as a plot unto itself. So I’m there form chapter one, from the first page. I check my watch again.

“Who knew you were such a clock-watcher?” Mary smirks.

“Who knew you were of the laid back variety?” I respond. The only time I’ve been with Mary for more than a few minutes in line at the dining hall was watching her play for Hadley — where she’s most definitely not mellow.

“Guess we’ll learn,” Mary says. “But before you go? What I didn’t show you last night and the primary reason for my psychage?”

“Psychage?”

“I like to make up words,” she says, unapologetic and grinning.

“Me, too.”

“Anyway…you should know that room fourteen comes with its privileges. Other than just the gift of rooming with me, I mean.” She laughs at herself and I join her, then follow her as she presses her nose to the windows. “See?”

Rather than simply a lovely view of the grassy oval between Deals, Bishop and Fruckner, our room’s windows are not what they seem. “What the….” I back up while Mary fiddles with a latch on the window side. With a few clicks, and a bump from her hip, the window reveals its true nature.

“It’s a door!” I can’t help but yelp. Two out of the three windows are attached, and swing open, just a crack now since the desks are in the way, but enough so that I can see the small step down to a deck.

Mary shushes me. “No kidding. This room is kick-ass and built for boarding break-outs…” She waits for me to react. “Don’t get all headmaster’s daughter on me, okay? Carlton and I didn’t make it through three years of parietals without the occasional nighttime rendezvous.”

“And everyone knows about this?”

Mary has a matter-of-fact tone. “Well, Love, the deck is made of actual wood — it’s not invisible.”

“And we’re allowed out there?”

“No. But legions of Fruckners have gone out there to smoke or make out or just gaze at the stars.”

“And that’s your plan?” I look at Mary. She seems so varsity — so rules-oriented and regulated, with her regular classes and steady boyfriend and group of sweet if generic friends.

“No. I mean, smoking disgusting.” She smiles. “But being social…” Mary closes the door-window and locks it, shoving the desks back in front of it. “Anyone can get to the deck — it takes a truly stellar planner to get down from there.”

I laugh, ignoring the seconds ticking away, and lick my lips. “No way — I had my one run-in with the disciplinary committee sophomore year…”

“Oh, yeah — with that guy — Robinson Hall?” she scoffs. “I bet that was time misspent.”

“Tell me about it — but, let it be noted that it quelled my taste for breaking and entering.”

Mary crosses her arms over the plain red t-shirt she’s chosen for today. “I’m not talking only about leaving here — who’d want to leave this palace?” She looks around our awesome room, and I have to agree. If I do get into the creative writing class — or even if I don’t — I can imagine many days spent writing here, tucked away from noise and chatter and yet still a part of campus. “Listen,” Mary says, sounding every bit like she’s thought this through. “I wouldn’t ever ask you to risk getting in trouble. But just…” she slides cherry Chapstick across her lips and shoves a notebook into her bag. “If you’re ever in a position to…um…be in a position…” she raises her eyebrows. “Just know, I’d be happy to vacate should you want a little nighttime privacy.”

She heads out before me, even though I’ve been waiting to leave. I take my backpack form my bed and I’m suddenly aware that I seriously have no idea what will happen in the space of these four walls and four windows (or um, two windows and a door). I could have fights in here, write the next American novel, find out if and where I’m going to college, pine for Charlie, play guitar with Jacob, even bond with my fellow boarders. And maybe, just maybe, I think, smoothing out my duvet even though my bed isn’t in its final position, share this bed with someone other than just myself.

Ten minutes into History of Hadley, the required elective (a misnomer itself) of all seniors and most of us are bored enough that we’re engaged in other pursuits. It should be noted that the class is unmonitored, so there’s no teacher keeping up here, but our section is shoved into a former lower school classroom in plain view of all faculty offices. On our transcripts, the class looks rather quaint and official, pulling Hadley’s name even further up the boarding school rankings — all this and no need to pay a teacher to slog through the coursework. Basically, it’s a waste of time that you can’t really complain about because if graduation is actually something you want to partake in, you have to been here.

Rather than try to escape, we’re all content to while away the forty-five minute block, crammed into chairs that were the appropriate size back in grade school.

I scan the room and watch the plot unfold. Channing is nearly asleep; his head a victim of that head-jerking dance that snaps him to attention every time his chin rests on his chest. Two girls write notes on a spiral pad in between them — one of the notes is probably about me as I saw them gesture to my new haircut and immediately write something — then again, I could be paranoid. Other students check their class schedules or doodle.

My own class schedule is so messed up I can’t begin to know one to blame — except perhaps the computer that shuffles all the classes, requirements, and requests and spits out the index-cards.

First of all, I’m listed as a freshman — which puts me in intro classes and their two-hour grammar lecture. Second of all, as I’m listed as a class IV (the technical term for a freshman), I have study halls, which you outgrow by sophomore year. And lastly — but perhaps of most crucial importance — denying my class I (the official senior term) status means that I can’t take senior classes. Meaning, I have not secured places in Literature of the Worlds (notoriously difficult to get into and taught by JP Kramer, who should have taught Ivy league long ago but chose to grace us with his cowboy-hatted presence instead) nor French for the French (the class after all your language requirements are filled in which you get to cook, talk, read short stories, and debate — all in French). And of course, there is no record whatsoever of my trying to gain access to Mr. Chaucer’s small advanced creative writing class.

My next task: skip my next class — which is Ancient Civilizations — the basic history class for all IVs — and head directly to the Dean of Students to see what I should do.

I try not to let the schedule screw-up ruin my morning, and instead appreciate the fact that as of right now, I don’t have any homework. This bliss I’m sure will last all of one period, but it’s like those last few days of break, when I just pretend the rest of life — real life — won’t bombard me.

“We’re supposed to have these,” Harriet Walters says. She places her hand on the stack of leather-bound books on the non-existent teacher’s desk and begins to hand them out. “I’ve actually already read it.”

“Of course you have, Walters,” a guy named Jimmy Kapp says. He and Harriet have long dueled it out for top ranking in our class, even though — as per Hadley’s handbook — we don’t have class ranks. Jimmy Kapp — AKA Jimmy Phi Beta Kappa — is the guy who’d lend who his class notes if you were sick in the health center, the guy teachers would choose to monitor study halls if they had to dash out, the guy who helped stage the fund-raising dance-a-thon and the ran the Boston Marathon last April. The guy you could find incredibly annoying if he weren’t just plain nice, smart, semi-funny, and quite cute.

Harriet shoves a Hadley History book in Jimmy’s face. “A little light reading for you, Kapp. Just so you won’t fail the test.”

At the end of the semester, we have to take a test based on all the exciting knowledge we’ve gained form the ancient text. Basically, if you go to Hadley, or just hear about the school from a friend, you can pass — supposedly.

“You know no one’s ever failed that test?” Jimmy Kapp says.

“Not true,” Dalton Himmelman says. He’s shrugged down in a plain white t-shirt, gazing out the window toward the quad, where lucky folks who have their free periods now are lazing about, flaunting their ease. Dalton is without his best friend, Jacob, which is unusual. Normally, I only ever see Dalton in the context of Jacob. Watching Dalton alone gives me new appreciation for him, his wry tone, his smirk, his from-the-corner comments. I guess whenever Jacob is around, I turn a blind eye to everyone else — or if not blind, a certain mutedness overcomes the rest.

“So, who failed then?” I ask Dalton. He swivels in his tiny seat, giving me a look that for some reason makes me pay more attention to him.

“Funny
you
should ask,” he says, but he doesn’t elaborate. He’s like that, filled with humor and proverbial peanut gallery fodder, but then just as likely to withhold.

Jimmy Kapp shrugs. “Everyone passes.”

“Not Parker Addison,” Dalton says. He doesn’t look right at me as he says this name, but there’s an energy floating between us. Maybe he knows Chili likes him (read: she is among the legions of girls — and a few guys — who track Dalton’s every move with their crushes). Or maybe he and I are just on some bizarre wavelength.

“There are lots of rumors about that guy,” Harriet says. “Who knows what’s true about him?”

I could speak up and say that I know about him. At least a bit. He’s Charlie’s brother and though I met him with rather unfortunate circumstances this summer (read: I thought he was Charlie and tried to grope him), I do know that most of those rumors — the stuff of campus lore — are true. But I don’t say that — because to say that means to admit how I know him, and to do that is to be one of
those
people. And I while I want my relationship with Charlie (and, by virtue of his being related, Parker), I do not want to be one of the Hadley heartbroken, who abuse the verbal privilege by bringing up their long-distance amour every chance they get. Those people — the ones who wait for the phone calls, the letters, the texts, the emails, and all while constantly longing for that long-distance love who begins to sound made up. Is that what Charlie will be? Some summer myth?

I look down at my notebook, at my current list, hoping people will go back to being quiet — reading or ignoring the text.

The page in front of me is a list that belongs in my journal, but since I refused to bring along any of them — even the latest one — to the dorms for fear of them being read, I have only pages in my notebooks to fill at random.

NEW RULES THAT SUCK (not in any order):

• No cell phones (as of this morning all phones are to be turned in to the headmaster’s office — hi, Dad! — only to be redistributed at closing of the day (day students) or Friday at four pm (boarders).
  
• Required participation in Hadley Hugs — the hippy earthy crunchy procedure that was started in nineteen sixty-eight for valid reasons (country torn apart, people divided, racial tensions, and so on) but that culminate in the hugging of every single one of Hadley’s students by every single other student. This is not optional as in prior years. Hadley did away with calling it “a non-required community-minded day” and got around the litigious parents and anti-touching laws by making it an academic necessity. Basically, it’s a morning of gropage that either ends in laughs, tears, gross-outs or hook-ups.
  
• Maximum weekends away for boarders are capped at 4 per semester. This includes holiday weekends.
  
• In light of last year’s (when I wasn’t even a boarder!) infractions, all boarders are to remain on campus after school unless otherwise approved (permission granted examples include doctor’s appointments, college interviews, and parental visits — provided you’ve asked permission IN WRITING beforehand). If my mother visits, which she has promised to do, she’ll have to plan in advance. For a women who came into my life after a near-eighteen year absence, forethought might not be her strong suit.