The Eliot Girls (25 page)

“But that's all I am,” Ruth said, turning onto their narrow street. “One day, you'll be beautiful.”

 

 

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WHEN LARISSA MCALLISTER ASSUMED
her usual spot at the chapel lectern on Friday morning, it was evident even before she opened her mouth that her mood was unusually morose. Contrary to Audrey's expectations, however, the source of her gravity was not the recent bullying, but rather certain looming festivities. As principal, Larissa McAllister knew that it was her job to establish a robust morale, but she could not hide her low spirits from her captive audience. She was not altogether against coeducational activities. The blend of tenor and soprano at the Independent Schools' Music Festival was undeniably stirring. And the debate tournament counted as one of the highlights of her year. Indeed, she found her delight difficult to contain when she popped into the back of a classroom during a debate to witness one of her stars trump a male of inferior intellect. Dances, however, were the bane of her administrative agenda, and she was not pleased to be standing before her pupils reviewing the ground rules.

Ruefully, she acknowledged the necessity of dances. In abstaining, her institution would mark itself as an outcast. But insofar as dances brought out the wildness, the immaturity, the sheer inanity of her girls, their brainless appeal struck her as far from harmless. Assessing the fallout in the days after, she was even compelled to question how effectively her daily lessons on female comportment had penetrated her students' minds. Reports of drunkenness, sexual debauchery, and generally unladylike conduct were far too common. It struck her as offensive that she even had to recap the rules, which should by now be so well internalized. Standing at the lectern before her agitated audience, she was irritated. Would they not all rather be home reading fine books?

No amount of severity could dampen the spirits of the student body, however, for the George Eliot–hosted dance had finally arrived, an event eagerly anticipated in the months leading up to it and fondly recalled in the months following. At Ms. McAllister's first reference to that night's event, cheering erupted. With prim tolerance, she allowed the explosion. She considered cheering a boorish way of expressing one's enthusiasm, but understood it to be part of what she called the integrating discourse of school spirit. When the noise began to die down, she gave a short lecture reviewing the school rules with resentful precision. The most useful guide for behaviour, she advised, was for the girls to think of themselves as figures in history: let them not be waylaid by impulses they wouldn't care to see reported in the biographies of their lives.

Audrey shared Ms. McAllister's displeasure, though for different reasons. There had only been one dance, at
UCC
, near the beginning
of November, and although there had been no question of her going, the social consequences of her absence were few since grade tens commonly opted out of the dances held at the boys' school. Because the boys' schools invited only the girls' schools to their dances, and the girls invited only the boys, gender parity was impossible, and the unspoken rule was that only grade elevens and twelves were welcome. But when Eliot hosted, the ratio was finally to the girls' advantage, and everyone, including grade nines, went. Audrey had been anticipating the event with dismay all week.

On the night of the dance, Audrey expected Eliot to be a magical place, an idealized version of itself, sentimentally made over in the image of a high school from a movie. She had envisioned coloured Japanese lanterns strung across the quad, casting their mellow pastel light over the patches of snow and grass, clusters of balloons tied to the basketball hoops in the gym, artificial trees threaded with tiny white lights in the corners and a dusting of silver sparkle blanketing the gym floor. As soon as she and Ruth, who was a chaperone, turned the corner into the long driveway, however, she was confronted by the silliness of her predictions. An ascetic decorating scheme was the one way Ms. McAllister had managed to assert her tastes. Loath to create an impractical climate of love in the corridors of academics—and believing such decorations to be tacky, misleadingly celebratory, and possibly a little dangerous, nurturing as they did puerile notions of romance—Ms. McAllister had made only two concessions to transforming the place: a sign outdoors, with a slightly deflated helium balloon tied to its top, and a long drinks table in the gym wrapped in leftover red plaid Christmas paper. The girls were to remember they were in their school. Their aspirations ought always to be, first and foremost, scholastic.

But whether Ms. McAllister liked it or not, the atmosphere in the school was utterly changed. Boys were everywhere, and had brought with them a different brand of boisterousness, a physical camaraderie, as if any minute they were about to fall to the ground and start wrestling. Most of them didn't yet seem even to care about the girls. They were messy and unself-conscious, with worn rugby shirts and shaggy hair, and didn't seem embarrassed that they were already growing sweaty in the overheated gym. Immediately noticeable as well was a change in the quality of the noise, which was almost entirely male generated. Their shouted conversation rang out in the hallways and all through the quad. The girls, meanwhile, had fallen quiet, whispery and secretive, huddled in corners and against walls in protective groups. They took little notice of each other now. Absent were scathing looks at what others were wearing, the sarcastic compliments. All their attention was focused on the boys. In this, they were together, their joint sense of daring and delight, the novel intimacy of having males in their gym, the same gym where they played volleyball in their navy-blue shorts and endured Ms. Crispe's graphic lessons on
STD
s.

The air in the gym was tropical, filled with the hot breath of hundreds of dancing teenagers. A teacher had opened the emergency exit door, but no breeze could diffuse the cloud of humidity. Audrey's class had convened loosely in one corner of the gym, so she made her way there and loitered on the edges. She noted with gratitude that, for once, she was not alone in her tense observation of the busy scene. All the grade tens looked as unsettled as she. For all of them, this was a first dance, and though Ms. McAllister's rules of comportment were clear, their own were not. Where generally the girls ensconced themselves in their usual cliques, tiny, intimate provinces with boundaries as clearly defined as any country's, they had opened their enclosures, spread themselves out, together yet apart, possibly in an effort to welcome any male approach.

A song came on that Audrey didn't recognize, but everyone else seemed to, and while the girls cheered, the boys pumped their fists in the air, jumping. Most of the teachers seemed to have gone out of their way to look just as they did during the school day, though some were dressed even worse, as if heeding Ms. McAllister's caution against the hormonal male threat. Ms. Glover was wearing a pair of old running shoes, a blousy grey sweatshirt, and high-waisted, pleated brown cords, which had a huge bottle of Tylenol sticking out of one pocket. Only Ms. Howe, the youngest teacher on staff, seemed to be having a good time. In an attempt to age her naturally pixieish face, she usually wore untailored suits and her hair in a bun, but now she swayed slightly to the rhythm, her long hair halfway down her back, precisely lined cherry-painted lips lazily mouthing the words of the music, an act of self-forgetfulness that elicited an appalled double-take from the patrolling Ms. Glover.

It was hard not to notice Henry Winter at the drinks table. Tall and unmoving, gazing without focus into the middle distance, he seemed in no way engaged in his surroundings as he took little sips from a bottle of Evian water. Most of the teachers were making an effort to look watchful and concerned, to at least appear to have embraced their humourless watchdog roles. Ms. Glover paced the walls with a small spiral notebook in hand, possibly recording unseemly behaviour for later punishment. Even Ruth, whom Audrey spotted at the far end of the gym, wearing what Ms. McAllister would surely consider an inappropriately clingy white T-shirt, was looking distractedly observant, restless and agitated, as though torn between her desire to look hot and her obligation to supervise untrustworthy minors. Rather than loosening up, the teachers had lost their individuality and had formed, according to Ms. McAllister's decree, a disapproving perimeter around the licentious dance floor. What stood out about Henry was the quality of his boredom, its forbidding force field. He looked at his watch, then at the crowd, and caught Audrey staring at him. Blushing deeply, she turned away and stumbled into Seeta, who was standing directly behind her.

“Hey there,” Seeta said, smoothing her ruffled pink blouse.

“Hi.”

“Are you having fun?” she asked.

Audrey shrugged.

“Do you like dancing?”

Audrey didn't answer.

Seeta tried again. “This is a good song. Don't you think?”

“It's fine.”

“It's one of my favourites,” said Seeta.

“Actually, I hate it.” It would be preferable to stand alone, Audrey thought, than to align herself with Seeta. She stared despondently out onto the dance floor, where Kate Gibson was making out indelicately with her boyfriend, her prosthetic arm slung protectively around his skinny, pimpled neck. Audrey had seen them together before—he often picked her up from school—but not like this, woozily swaying in each other's arms in a transport that had attracted the notice of Ms. Glover, who hovered nearby, scribbling furiously in her notebook. The rest of the prefects had paired up and were doing the tango across the middle of the dance floor, weaving their way around the song's tentative couples.

“Excusez-moi,”
Arabella said as she and Whitney coasted onto the dance floor, where they entwined themselves in an ironic slow sway.

Dougie walked past wearing her dangling turquoise earrings and a red Eliot baseball cap, hand in hand with a boy.

“You've got lipstick on your teeth,” she said to Seeta, then just before they disappeared into the crowd, turned back and sang out, “Just kidding!”

Near the end of the song, Arabella and Whitney waltzed past, halting when they caught sight of Audrey and Seeta. Arabella smiled crookedly and raised one eyebrow like a soap opera star. “Having a good time, ladies?” she said.

Seeta was tapping her foot to the beat of the song. “It's really good,” she said, nodding. “I was hoping to persuade Audrey to come dance with me.”

“Aahh,” said Arabella indulgently, like a teacher listening to the long, boring story of a hyper child.

“Hardly,” Audrey said.

Arabella pivoted and scanned her grandiosely from head to toe. “So Audrey, you a big fan of the Ramones?”

Audrey looked at her shirt. Just before the dance, she had found a puzzling new outfit laid out on her bed: a cut-off denim skirt, black leggings, and a vintage Ramones T-shirt. “I guess,” she replied.

“What's your favourite song?” asked Whitney, exchanging glances with Arabella.

“I don't really have one.”

“Well, there must be one you like better than the others.”

Seeta jumped in. “I always liked ‘I Wanna be Sedated.' Maybe I'll start rehearsing it for assembly.”

“You do that,” Whitney replied.

“You girls make a sweet couple,” Arabella said, smiling. “You should go hang out with Ms. Crispe and Ms. Sampson. By the way, Audrey, your mom is over there looking crazy hot. I think one of the
UCC
prefects asked her to dance.”

“Are you sure you're not adopted?” Whitney asked, scrutinizing Audrey's face.

Before she could give good thought to what she was doing, Audrey found herself struggling against the crowd of people cramming into the gym. She burst through the double doors into the hall. The sudden brightness of the fluorescents made her squint, and she looked down the hall to the bathroom, where a long line of girls trailed out into the hall. To her left was a dark stairwell, and although students were forbidden to enter other parts of the school during the dance, she swung open the door and was swallowed by the cool silence.

On the second floor, she was disoriented by the changed aspect of the unlit halls, as though she had stepped through time and ended up in a place that ought to have been familiar, but wasn't. The known world of Eliot was somewhere here, but inaccessible to her. It must be like this, she thought, to be a grown woman returning to your childhood home, to find the rooms intact, the old furniture hidden under dusty sheets.

Night had altered her homeroom, like everything else, into an alien landscape. The slim light of the crescent moon cast a reflective blue film along the lengths of the spotless windows. All the identifying features of the class were absent, the personal clutter stored away. Ms. McAllister had made the announcement that afternoon that classrooms were to be left in states of superlative tidiness since the school was to be host that night. As they roamed the classroom under the supervision of Henry Winter, tucking books into cupboards, Duo-Tangs into desks, and recycling into the bin, Whitney said, “Okay, Dr. W., this is a legitimate English question 'cause I have a thirst for knowledge. Isn't it an oxymoron when Ms. McAllister says to get things extra clean? I mean, something is either clean or it isn't.” Arabella popped up from where she was fishing a drink box out from under a desk and said, “You mean redundant, you dimwit. Oxymorons are opposites.” To which Henry Winter replied with a curt and weary, “Just do as you're asked. In silence.”

Audrey sat now at the teacher's desk and tilted her chair back until it rested against the ledge of the chalkboard. The desk was the only surface that hadn't been properly cleared. A book,
The Rainbow
by D. H. Lawrence, lay in the middle, its back cover bent, as though it had been carelessly flung and forgotten. The distant strain of music drifted up from the gym. A headache pressed in on her.