Tags:
Fiction,
General,
Psychological,
Psychological fiction,
Coming of Age,
Bildungsromans,
Massachusetts,
Indiana,
Teenage girls,
Self-Destructive Behavior,
Preparatory School Students
and June and a little joke about every person: “Can you imagine Lindsay without her curling iron?” Then came the best part, the seniors, each of them with their own page. In addition to the standard expressions of gratitude to family members, teachers, and friends, and the sometimes-nostalgic, sometimes-literary, sometimes-incomprehensible quotations, they were filled with pictures. Many of the boys’ pictures were action shots from games; many of the girls’ showed them with their arms around each other, sitting on a bed or standing on a beach. Girls also had a fondness for including photos from childhood.
You could figure out, if you had the inclination and the time, who in a given year was friends with whom and who had dated whom, and who had been popular, or athletic, or weird and fringy. The graduated students began to feel like distant cousins—I learned their nicknames, their sports of choice, which sweater or hairstyle they’d worn on repeated occasions.
In the three most recent yearbooks, I found several photos of Gates. She played field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse, and she’d lived her freshman and sophomore years in Elwyn’s dorm and her junior year in Jackson’s. Her sophomore year, the little joke about her was, “The crystal ball predicts that Henry and Gates will buy a house with a white picket fence and have twelve kids.” The only Henry at Ault was Henry Thorpe, who I knew was currently going out with a prissy-seeming sophomore named Molly. I wondered if Henry and Gates had really dated and, if so, whether any tension of either the good or bad sort lingered between them. When they danced together at roll call, it had not seemed like it.
It was at the end of the yearbook from Gates’s junior year, which was the newest one, that I came across the picture. The final section, after the seniors’ pages, contained photos of graduation: the senior girls in white dresses, the boys in white pants and navy blazers and boaters. There were pictures of them sitting in rows at the ceremony, a picture of the graduation speaker (a Supreme Court justice), pictures of the seniors hugging each other. Among these—I was not looking for her here and might easily have missed it—was one of Gates by herself. It showed her from the waist up, in a white short-sleeved button-down. She wore a cowboy hat, and her glinting hair fell out from under the brim and spilled over her shoulders. The picture would have been in profile, but it appeared that the photographer, whoever it was, had called her name just before snapping the shutter and she’d turned her head. She might have been simultaneously laughing and protesting, saying something like,
Oh, come on!
But saying it to a person she liked very much.
I stared at the picture for so long that when I looked up again, I was surprised to see the nubbly orange couches and cream-colored walls of the common room. I had forgotten myself, and I had forgotten Ault, at least the real, three-dimensional version in which I, too, was a presence. It was a little after ten. I decided to check in early with Madame and go to bed, and I put the yearbooks away.
In the upstairs bathroom, Little stood before one of the sinks in a pink bathrobe, rubbing oil through her hair.
“Hey,” I said. “How was the dance?”
She made a face. “I wouldn’t go to no drag dance.”
“Why not?”
“Why didn’t
you
go?”
I smiled, and then she smiled, too.
“See?” she said. “But your roommate sure was excited about it. If I lived with that girl, I’d have slapped her by now.”
“She’s not that bad.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You play varsity basketball, right?” I said.
“Yep.”
“So you’re on the team with Gates Medkowski, right?”
“Sure am.”
“What’s Gates like? I’m just wondering because she’s the first girl ever to be a senior prefect, isn’t she? I know that’s a pretty big deal.”
“She’s about like everyone else here.”
“Really? She seems
personal demons by christopher fowler