The Girls of No Return (6 page)

It was even more obvious inside the cabin. Almost since the minute I woke up in the chill morning air and reached up to scratch my head, the girls were nicer to me. Not
nice
nice, like they felt bad and took pity on me, but nice in the way that soldiers tolerate new recruits after they've gone through a hazing. I knew enough to understand that they'd done the worst they were going to do.

And I hated this. Sure, those first few moments staring at the bathroom mirror were horrible; I'm not going to lie. When I saw what they'd done, I rolled my fingers into fists and dug the nails into my palms, blinking back tears (though not fast enough). But when I returned to the cabin, they were all sitting there, kind of smiling, pleased with themselves but also a little embarrassed, like my dad had looked when he finally told me about puberty. No one mentioned my hair. But they didn't ignore me, and this was even worse than the hair.

“Breakfast time,” Gwen might say, when we heard the morning bell ringing from across the school grounds. And then, as everyone scrambled to put on shoes and sweaters, Karen might turn to me: “You coming?” Jules was always nudging me and laughing at something or other, even though I never laughed with her. Only Boone didn't speak to me. She continued to act as though I was a fence post on the side of the road that she was passing at sixty miles an hour.

Frankly, I preferred her approach. It was embarrassing to see how the other girls just kept trying over the next few days, like watching the student body president dutifully show a transfer student around the high school. All that cheerful explaining —
Here's where your locker is! Here's the auditorium!
— while trying not to look at her watch. It had to be as terrible for them as it was for me. I knew that eventually they'd get it, and we could leave one another alone. And that would be a relief to us all.

Oh, I know: I wasn't the only girl to be new. Every girl at the school had, at one awkward moment or another, been the new one. That's what happens at a year-round school with rolling admissions, where new girls arrive every month or so with varying sentences. Four months. Twelve months — my own sentence. Fourteen months. (In that way, it was just like jail.) So I knew that they had all been in my position. Even Boone.

But I also knew this. Jules, Gwen, Karen — they all came from different stock. Clearly, there was something defective in them — otherwise, why would they be at Alice Marshall? But that didn't change the fact that they came from nice homes, freshly painted towns, schools in which they had friends to skip class with. Friends who called them every day, even when they were grounded. Hell-raising friends. Their
people.

I came from a nice-enough house — a little bungalow near the college — but I'd never had any of the rest of it. Quite frankly, I wasn't about to start now. People, especially parents,
especially
my father, were always saying things like, “Oh, you'll make new friends,” as though deciding what to bring to a potluck.
Terri will bring her famous coconut cake, and Lida will make friends.
Such a useless endeavor. I knew that, eventually, the girls at Alice Marshall would be able to sense what it was like for me (every word a mistake, every step a step in the wrong direction) and would leave me alone. They'd be grateful to have avoided
that
catastrophe.

But until then, I had to endure their lazy attention. And while it may have been painful, it at least allowed me to pick up factoids that I could squirrel away for later use.

Gwen and Karen were best friends, though they made an unlikely pair. Gwen was as Goth as a girl can be when her mother runs an exclusive hair salon in Beverly Hills. She dyed her hair jet black, but her bangs were impeccably even. She enjoyed death metal and televised skateboarding competitions, and poured equal amounts of milk and sugar onto her Grape-Nuts every morning. Gwen was always telling Karen about her Thing, which involved trashing the aforementioned hair salon and running away to Mexico for what turned out to be a very short weekend.

Karen was like a Joni Mitchell song compared to Gwen's Megadeth anthem. She was from a bucolic-but-forgettable town in Massachusetts, and she loved organic cotton, yoga, “natural” drugs, and meditation. Karen was prone to talking about herself in the plural first person, as in, “We're not sure that shirt is bioethical.” It wasn't terribly surprising when I found out that she'd been caught selling peyote buttons to her friends at school.

Karen and Gwen spent all of their time together, so it wasn't hard to get them to leave me alone. A few curt replies to their questions, a grunt here or there when they addressed me . . . Girls like that didn't want to be around me anyway, and I sure as hell didn't want to be around them. They'd much prefer to sit around telling one another their stories, which were about as hard-core as pudding.

It was more difficult with Jules. Friendly and perpetually sunburned, she was well adjusted, the picture of normalcy. Wore flip-flops and Keds. Really, the only odd thing about her was that she was at Alice Marshall, not twirling a baton on the dance line squad at her Denver high school. I was fairly certain that Jules didn't have a Thing. She wasn't capable of it. And that girl refused to take a hint. Jules could talk to a brick wall, I think, and never wonder why it wasn't responding.

On our way to breakfast, where we would be assigned our daily chores: “You never want Bathhouse duty. Try to have cramps whenever you get it.”

To the Waterfront for canoeing lessons: “Always sit in the middle. You won't have to paddle as hard.”

To biology: “Ms. Sterns is exactly that. Seriously. Don't mess around during Lab, and never fall behind in the reading. She'll have your ass.”

She didn't appear to notice that I never responded to her little attempts at chitchat.

And then there was Boone. Boone didn't like anyone. It just wasn't in her nature. Everything she wanted you to know about her life, she told you herself, so obviously, I knew very little. I tried to keep my distance from her, which is hard when you both live in a shoe box.

Annoying as I found their attention, I guess it was at least a relief not to walk around with the constant fear of being clotheslined or shanked or whatever else they might do. My first week at Alice Marshall was tough enough as it was. For one thing, the school was big — the grounds covered over sixty acres, with only a few of the buildings situated next to the lake for easy navigation. I eventually got the whole thing mapped out in my head, but for the first few days, whenever I found myself alone, I had to walk down to the gravelly beach, stand directly in front of the docks, and look for the giant bell next to the Mess Hall in order to orient myself.

For another thing, our schedules weren't the same every day. Our classes consisted of math, history, English, biology, and wilderness education. If you went to math on Monday at two, you might think,
Same time, same place
on Tuesday, right? And then you'd show up to what you'd thought was the math building to find a group of sullen Fifteens awkwardly discussing
The Sun Also Rises
. Eventually, I started writing down the schedule on the first page of my purple unicorn journal. This meant, of course, that I was constantly opening my purple unicorn journal in front of the other girls. I don't think I need to elaborate. (Thank you, Terri. No, really. Thank you.)

There were only a few activities that remained constant, day in and day out. First, the morning exercises. Commonly referred to as “Morning Ex.” Led by Margaret, of course. She said that the focus was on creating clarity and purpose, but I thought that she was just stalling for time while the kitchen staff finished grilling up the pancakes or bacon. We gathered in front of the Mess Hall after the breakfast bell had been rung, sluggishly touching our toes or dancing in place or doing jumping jacks until she told us we could go inside. Usually, at least one girl would balk and say it was bullshit, refusing to play. And then she'd have a choice: Walk in circles around the Mess Hall, or go back to her cabin without breakfast. Margaret was no softie. Morning Ex was a real highlight of everyone's day.

In the afternoons, we had Toes-Up and Waterfront Hour. Rain or shine. Some girls basically spent Toes-Up praying for the sun to come out. Not me. I hoped that it would rain all year. No way was I putting on my swimsuit and parading around the dock.

The other constant was more pleasurable. Mail Call. Margaret would stand on a table near the front of the Mess Hall after dinner, calling out names and pitching our letters at us before we had time to take them from her. I think she enjoyed this task as much as teaching. When that tiny woman called your name in her husky voice, it was like a starling had accidentally flown into the Mess Hall and landed on the table, roaring like a lion.

Finally, there were names for things I didn't know — or, to be more precise, things I thought I knew turned out to have different names. For instance, they called the lake Bob. Don't ask me why. “Gonna go sit by Bob,” someone would say, or “Bob looks like hell this morning.” I thought Bob was one of the part-time groundskeepers, the only men to grace Alice Marshall with their presence. I almost asked, and then was glad I hadn't when I finally figured it out.

So I started, slowly, to understand the language of this surreal place. Bob. Things. Morning Ex. And the group of girls who I kept seeing around the grounds, the ones who looked like runway models, or at least less emaciated, angrier versions of tabloid celebrities? They were called the I-bankers.

On Tuesday morning, about four days after my arrival, I was walking behind Boone when we passed a group of manicured and pressed girls hugging a slightly less attractive, younger girl, who nonetheless appeared to be wearing the same leather Pumas as the rest of them.

“Another merger for the I-bankers,” Boone said, shaking her head.

I glanced behind me. There was no one else around. She must have been talking to me. Even so, I had to admit that I had no idea what she was talking about.

“What?” I asked, but she didn't say anything else, and I didn't press it.

I decided to suck it up and ask Jules about it later that day, as we walked through the trees to yet another mystery class.

“What's up with the ‘I-bankers'?” I asked, in what I thought was a nicely offhanded way. It was the first time I'd initiated a conversation with any of my cabinmates, and I wanted to get the tone right. Nonchalant and cool. “I mean, you know, Who and Why?”

Jules beamed at me, clearly delighted that I'd finally spoken to her of my own accord. “Oh, that's Boone's word,” she said. “It pretty much sums up all of those girls who come from New York. Most of their mommies and daddies are investment bankers anyway, so it makes sense.”

“Do they mind?”

“Mind what? Being called what they are? It's fitting.” Jules shrugged. “And besides, what are they going to do? Take it up with Boone? I don't think so. Boone's been here longer than any of us. She personally ‘welcomed' each and every one of them to school.” She winked. “With a little help, of course.”

“Oh.” I touched my hair. “So it's always something.”

“Yeah, it's always something,” Jules said. “But it's different for every girl.” She wrinkled her nose. “For instance. The I-bankers just got little things, you know, because they're in different cabins. Mice in their sleeping bags, replacing the two-hundred-dollar makeup in their luggage with little jars of honey and mud . . . easy stuff that still drove them crazy. But the girls in our cabin? Different story.”

“Like?” I wanted to stop asking her questions — I knew she'd probably take this as a sign that we were BFFs or some shit — but I had to know.

“Gwen packed too much — she brought, like, eight wardrobes' worth of black shirts. We were on campfire duty a couple of times that week, and Boone would bury two or three of Gwen's T-shirts underneath the kindling while she was building the fire.” Jules smiled sadly. “Gwen was upset, you know, but what could she say? She'd packed too much.”

A chipmunk darted across the path in front of us and scurried up the side of a pine tree, chittering madly.

“What else?” I said.

Jules thought for a minute. “Karen has a retainer. She was always clicking it in and out of her mouth, and it drove us crazy. It's been ‘missing' for months. Not that she cares. She'll just go back to the orthodontist and get a new one when she gets out of here. And let's see . . .” She chewed her bottom lip.

“What'd she do to you?”

Jules looked at the ground for a minute. Then she met my gaze. Her eyes were too bright, and her face looked redder than usual. “She cut up the only picture I had of Westy.”

“Who's Westy?” It was a strange name for a boyfriend, I thought.

“My terrier. I only had the one picture. It was terrible.” For a moment, I thought Jules was going to cry, but then she cleared her throat. “It took almost eight days for my parents to send me another picture. They FedExed it, but it still took forever.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn't feel like mentioning that it would take a lot longer than eight days for me to get my hair back. Somehow, I didn't think she'd get it.

“Anyway,” she said, “you passed. At least you didn't freak out.”

I thought about the way the tears had fallen sloppily down my cheeks while I stood in the Bathhouse in the early morning light, and I thanked myself again for pulling my shit together before I walked back to the cabin.

“So Boone just . . . gets away with it?”

Jules threw me a sideways glance. “No one says anything about the things she does,” she said quietly. “Maybe it's just a rumor, but —” She glanced around quickly. “Well, Andrea — she left before you arrived — she told me that Boone stabbed a girl, long before she came here. Everyone knows about it. She wasn't caught, or maybe they just didn't have enough evidence.”