Viola in Reel Life (4 page)

I’m a little late to pick up my class schedule, but not so late that anyone notices.

The lines inside the Geier-Kirshenbaum auditorium are long. The longest are for admission into the gut courses: Blog This; TV & Me, from
Lost in Space
to
Lost
; and Makeup for Theater. These are probably all easy A’s but it doesn’t matter. You can’t sign up for them until tenth grade. The freshman class assignments were made prior to our arrival. All we have to do is officially register and by lunch we’ll know where we have to be.

“Whatcha got?” An upperclassman takes my computer printout of my classes from my hand. She’s very Upper West Side of Manhattan. Casual. “Wow. You got Dr. Fandu for horticulture.” She whispers, “We called it ho-hum.”

“Great.”

“I’m Diane Davis.” She extends her hand. “I hear you have a video camera and that you make movies.”

“How did you know that?”

“Your profile.”

“Oh yeah, right. I forgot about that.” Now I could kick myself for being so eager to share my interests on the school Facebook page. What was I thinking? It’s private of course, but not private enough if Diane could get her hands on it and then act all chatty with me about the information I put there.

“We could use your help for the Founder’s Day events.”

“Founder’s Day? It sounds lame.” I shrug.

Diane throws her head back and laughs. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. We could use your expertise.”

“Well, okay.” I agree to help, but I feel like she sandbagged me. The only thing I’ve signed up for officially is the pizza club.

“I’ll email you,” she says and walks away.

Marisol joins me with her schedule. She looks down at her list of classes with the books needed for each in bold letters beside them. “You wanna go to the bookstore?”

“Sure.”

I follow Marisol out of the auditorium and down the stairs to the bookstore in the basement. We have most of
the same classes, so we each pick up a plastic basket in the front of the store and, with our computer printouts as guides, begin to fill them with the books we need.

“I don’t know how they can call this a store. It’s a storage room with shelves in a basement,” I complain.

Marisol gives me a copy of
The Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks
and an anthology by the poet Rita Dove. “And even paperbacks aren’t cheap,” I tell her. “They’ve got us right where they want us—we have to shop here. We can’t drive to the mall.”

“We can’t drive period,” Marisol reminds me.

“Besides the point. Don’t you get it? We’re retail hostages at this school.”

“We’ll survive,” Marisol says. We load our math textbooks into the plastic baskets.

“Marisol, may I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Do you ever have a bad mood?”

Marisol laughs. “Yeah.”

“It doesn’t seem like it.”

“Everybody has bad moods,” she says practically.

“But what about you?”

Marisol looks up from her list. “I’m a survivor.”

“You are? How, exactly?” For a moment, I imagine Marisol swinging from ropes on an obstacle course on
a reality television show. I bet she could win; she has guts.

“Well, I’m Mexican and in Virginia, there aren’t too many of us. So I had to learn how to make friends with people who might not normally know or like any Mexicans. It’s sort of a challenge to me to make friends.”

“No way.”

“I’m always sure to speak first, and be friendly. And if I click with someone, I try to support them. You know, like I do with you and your camera work.”

“That’s very mature,” I say thoughtfully.

“It’s not hard to be your friend, Viola. You have a lot to offer. You’re just scared. But we all are. So you shouldn’t feel like you’re the only one, because you’re not.”

“Thanks.” If there was a basket by the check-out counter that I could fill with the shame I’m feeling right now, it wouldn’t fit through the doors. I haven’t taken ten seconds to look around and see what the other girls are going through. I’m a total Mimi. Me. Me. Me.

“Besides…” Marisol checks Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
off her list, then looks at me. “Does it make it better to complain? I mean, we’re here for the duration and I don’t want to be miserable. Do you?”

I follow Marisol to the check-out line. And for the first time since I’ve landed at Prefect Academy, I feel a
little twinge of belonging, as though maybe I can make this work until it’s time to go home and go back to my real life in Brooklyn. It’s just like my mom always says, “You can make friends anywhere in the world. Just say hello.” Well, this is taking a lot more than just hello, but I’m starting to get the hang of it.

Mrs. Carleton is one of those teachers who, when you’re sitting in class and only half listening, you imagine a beauty makeover for her. She has potential with nice features like pretty brown eyes and brown hair and a petite figure. But her eyes are all bleary and red from being
up all night (she has a new baby), and her haircut is a bob that’s all uneven on the bottom (she probably cuts it herself with nail scissors), and she wears khaki pants with a baggy seat and one of those XL sherbet-colored sweaters that seem to be so popular on the Indiana side of the dividing line of the French and Indian War. She starts out the period wearing peach lip gloss, but by the end she’s bitten it all off, and then she has absolutely zero makeup on.

Mrs. Carleton requires us to leave all cell phones and BlackBerrys in a basket on her desk before class begins. On the first day of class, a couple girls left their phones on vibrate and the vibration actually made the basket walk off the edge of her desk and fall on the floor with the phones going everywhere. All twelve of us ran to pick up our phones to make sure they weren’t damaged. Now, when Mrs. Carleton collects the devices, she leaves the basket on the floor by the door so if anything vibrates it will just shake the basket, not hurl it into infinity and beyond.

Mrs. Carleton wakes me from my daydreams of makeovers. “Viola, tell us about the ghost in
Hamlet
.”

“Well, he’s Hamlet’s father, who was murdered by his brother. Now the evil brother will be king in Hamlet’s father’s place.”

“Why do you think Shakespeare chose a ghost to deliver the prologue?”

“Well, he probably needed a character to get everybody in the audience up to speed. And a ghost is as good a way as any.”

Marisol raises her hand. “It was inventive.”

“And why is that?” Mrs. Carleton leans against the desk. Her khakis are baggy in the front too, where her knees bend. I don’t even know how you’d fix
that
saggage problem in a beauty/fashion makeover. You’d probably just have to spring for new pants.

“When someone dies in real life, sometimes the essence of that person remains,” Marisol says.

“That’s very interesting, Marisol, the idea that a person’s essence lingers in the ether after they have died.”

“It’s creepy,” I blurt. The girls in the class laugh.

“It’s supposed to be creepy.” Mrs. Carleton paces before the class. “The father has been murdered but he wants to help his son, who is still living, make important decisions, so he appears to warn and to guide him.”

Mrs. Carleton checks the clock. “I think this is an excellent avenue for our next discussion. I’d like you girls to research the role of the supernatural in
Hamlet
and write a one-page essay about it for our next class. Here’s a hint, I happen to know there is an e-book of an
old book called
Life in Shakespeare’s England
in the library. And I’d like you to take a stand in your essay. Argue that there are ghosts, or argue that there can’t be. And back it up with research.”

At the end of class Marisol and I stand on line waiting to pick up our phones. We pick them up and commence scrolling through our messages as we walk out of the building and into the cold. There’s a text from my grandmother.

“Newsflash. Cookies coming from my grandmother,” I tell Marisol.

“Great.” Marisol tucks her phone into her pocket.

“She didn’t bake them but they’re not exactly store bought. She got them at Balducci’s and they make their own food. So it’s sort of homemade, once removed.”

“I’m sure they’ll be delicious,” Marisol says.

This is definitely something to like about Marisol. It takes very little to please her. There is not an ounce of snark in her entire body, and just the word
cookies
puts a smile on her face. I wish I had some of that bottomless cheer.

I text Grand.

“How many people have an actual actress for a grandmother?” Marisol asks. “That’s so cool.”

“She’s a character. That’s what my dad always says about her. And I always found that such a funny thing to say: Grand is a character and she plays them. How weird is that?”

“It’s fabulous. Are you kidding?” Marisol smiles.

“She’s been on Broadway. But you know? She doesn’t even care
where
she acts, just so she gets to be in a play. She even loves dinky productions where she travels to Queens and they lift up the back of a truck and turn it into a stage and she does monologues from the classics for free. She is totally game for anything.”

We walk to the dining hall as fall leaves, gold and red, swirl around us in the wind. They crunch under our feet on the winding sidewalk. Sometimes the Prefect Academy is downright pretty. Like now. It’s twilight and
all of our campus turns deep blue. The lights from the dorm flicker in the distance like stars. The air is crisp and smells like sweet vanilla.

I’m lucky that I have most of my classes with Marisol. I think they deliberately put a Brooklyn girl with a Mexican girl for a reason. Diversity. Marisol and I have discussed it.

Marisol misses Richmond a lot, and her grandmother who lives in Mexico. It’s hard for her as the days get colder. She’s a warm-weather person, which is why it’s so insane that out of all the boarding schools in the world, she picks this one in freezing South Bend, Indiana. I don’t mind winter and I sure don’t mind autumn at all, because it means soon it will be Christmas break, and I can see my parents and my friends and eat sesame noodles until my stomach explodes.

We bury our hands in our pockets and make our way down the path. “Do you believe in ghosts?” I ask Marisol.

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“For sure. My friend Caitlin Pullapilly says there’s a whole pecking order in the spiritual world. They have pictures and everything. She’s Hindu.”

“Cool.” Marisol shrugs.

I haven’t thought about ghosts much since that first night when I was looking at the footage and saw the Red
Lady. It’s a funny thing—when something like that happens, and you can’t explain it, you put it aside in your thoughts and then, as the days go by the memory of it fades and I wonder if it
ever
happened. Maybe I
did
make it all up.

I was so freaked out that first day—it was probably my imagination playing tricks on me. At any rate, I’ve decided I’m not a very spiritual person. I don’t really know about other worlds, times, and places—though I sort of wish that all that stuff were true. If it were, it would mean that time as I know it doesn’t exist, that my mother and father aren’t half a world away, that Tag Nachmanoff really isn’t too old for me, and that the hands on the clock are spinning so fast that I’m already back home at LaGuardia and in my old routine.

“Can I tell you something?” Marisol pulls her hat down over her ears.

“Sure.”

“I hate Shakespeare.”

“Me too,” I admit. “Why do they teach it?”

“It’s classic literature.”

“Who said so?”

“Everybody. I mean, every school teaches Shakespeare.”

“Maybe it’s just us.” I shrug.

Marisol pushes open the door to the dining hall. We are greeted by peals of laughter and loud conversations as pretty much every girl from ninth through twelfth grade is either on the line to pick up their dinner or at the salad bar or already at their tables eating.

A warm blast from the overhead heater by the entrance warms us as we go in. It’s tetrazzini night and I can see wedges of apple pie for dessert. Yum.

Marisol and I usually study the forthcoming menus in the online school newsletter as though we are archaeologists on a dig unearthing something wonderful—we discuss it, ruminate, and get excited when the menu lists something we like.

Marisol hands me an orange tray, and places her own on the ledge, filling it with utensils and a napkin.

I wave at Suzanne and Romy, who have saved seats for us by the window at what has become
our
table. It’s so funny. My mother told me it would take exactly two weeks for me to like the place. It’s been almost a month (let’s face it—I’m a hard sell) and I guess boarding school is sort of growing on me. It’s little things, like dinner with my roommates when it’s cold outside, or assembly on Fridays when they have lame speakers and we drive them nuts with questions afterward, or in class, when I’m learning something I know I’ll use in life—these are
the moments when I know I kind of like it here.

Prefect Academy has turned into a family in a strange way with many moving parts and different points of view. Yet, we crave the familiar and stake out our tables and seats and sit in the same ones every night. All the girls do. It’s part of a routine now, and it reminds us that we depend upon one another now, and whatever makes us feel secure is best.

Marisol and I wave to our neighbors from down the hall.

“Did you hear about Missie Cannon on Third South?” Marisol whispers. “She went home to Pennsylvania.”

“What happened?”

“She was caught drinking.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. She’s in tenth grade and she snuck in a bunch of wine coolers and gave them out and somebody reported her.”

Marisol and I lift our trays and snake through the round tables to our roommates.

“Okay, we’re all going to this.” Romy holds up a flyer.

DANCE
Freshman girls are invited to attend!
November 15, 2009

Grabeel Sharpe Academy for Boys
Lakewood
Buses depart at 6 p.m.

“I am
not
going to Drab Dull for a dance,” I tell the girls as I put down my tray and backpack.

“What’s Drab Dull?” Romy asks.

“It’s like the law of the jungle at PA,” I explain. “I hear the upperclassmen say it all the time. Finally I asked one of them what it was, and she explained that’s what generations of girls have called our brother school. So count me out. I’m not going.”

“Oh, probably some disgruntled girl got burned by a Grabeel Sharpe guy a hundred years ago, and she started a campaign to diss the school forever. Guys can be idiots. But not
all
guys,” Suzanne says diplomatically.

I’m not about to explain the real reasons I won’t get on that bus and go to their dance. They do not need to know that I will never go to a dance until I can go with the likes of Tag Nachmanoff. I don’t settle in any other area of my life when it comes to excellence, so why should I lower my standards when it comes to boys? I don’t use a crap camera, I don’t eat junk, and I’m not going to a dance where the boys are bores.

“You snap judge,” Marisol says to me.

“I do not,” I say, taken aback.

“Viola, you
totally
snap judge. You thought Mrs. Carleton was a fashion disaster because she wears Land’s End khakis.”

“I modified my position when she wore Levi’s.”

“I know. But you still had a week where you were doubting everything she said in class because she didn’t dress cool.”

“You make me sound awful.”

“If the yellow patent leather flats fit…,” Suzanne jokes.

“I haven’t worn them since the first day,” I say defensively.

“Everybody makes mistakes,” Romy says. “Even you.”

“Okay, okay. I suck. I get it.”

“Not in every way. Just in your snap judging,” Marisol says kindly.

“Viola is slightly sheltered,” Suzanne says in a matter-of-fact tone.

“What does that mean?” I’m almost shouting, my anxiety level on orange.

“Oh, don’t worry about it. It just means that you’re an only child, and you don’t have siblings who push you to do things.”

“Okay. Fair enough.” I shrug.

“Look, here’s the deal about boys,” Suzanne begins.

Marisol, Romy, and I lean in, because in our universe, Suzanne is The Great and Tall Blond One, who knows much more than we do about the intricacies of romantic relationships. She’s definitely got the upper hand when it comes to boys and there are two reasons for that. One, she has two older brothers who are hot and in college, and two, pretty girls like Suzanne are pursued, so they get to pick the boys they want first. It’s not like they ever pine, because they don’t have time to. They’re too busy fielding offers. I guarantee you that Suzanne does not have a Tag Nachmanoff-style crush on any boy in Chicago. She is way too cool to waste her time on something that might never happen. So when it comes to boys, dances, and the players at Drab Dull Academy, we have to defer to Suzanne. She has an inside track.