The Girls of No Return (7 page)

“Not even the girl's testimony?”

Jules looked at me. “Dead people can't testify,” she said. “So in answer to your question, no. No one mentions her little tricks.”

I remembered how Margaret had described Alice Marshall to me.
We're the equivalent of a misdemeanor.
Misdemeanor, my ass.

We were almost to the Rec Lodge. I could see a few of the younger girls and a couple of Seventeens clustered by the door. If they had been smoking, they would have looked exactly like a picture I'd seen once of poor farmers huddled around the employment office during the Depression. The girls all looked bedraggled and hung dry.

“Time for Circle Jerk, you idiots.” Boone walked up between Jules and me and laid a hand on each of our shoulders. Her fingers dug into the bone. I tried not to flinch.

“She means Circle Share,” said Jules, “and I don't mind it.”

“You only go for the coffee.” Boone rolled her eyes skyward.

Jules shrugged nervously. “Well, yeah. I guess I do like the coffee.”

The mystified expression on my face must have been clear enough, because Boone sighed.

“Circle Share,” she said, glaring at me. “Where you reach deep inside yourself and dig up your worst with a bloody trowel. Then you show it to the rest of us.” She released my shoulder and marched inside.

That didn't particularly help.

“This is where you talk about your Thing, if you want,” translated Jules. “But only if you want to.”

“Does anyone ever want to?” I blurted. I couldn't imagine a scenario in which I would ever, ever, ever want to open myself up to a bunch of strangers, all of whom had good haircuts and friends in the room.

Jules laughed. “It's a free-for-all in there,” she said. “You'll be lucky to get a word in.”

“Where are the others?” I asked. I hated to keep talking like this, but I hadn't seen Gwen or Karen yet.

“They're in another session,” said Jules. “Bev likes to keep the different years mixed up in Circle Share.” She lowered her voice. “Oh, I think we're about to start.”

We edged ourselves into the lodge after Boone. The room was filled with about fifteen girls from all four years. Some of them were still milling about, but a few had taken their seats already on the folding chairs that were spaced evenly in a half-moon around the fireplace. Friends sat with friends in tight little strings, scooting their chairs closer together and giggling. I slowed down so that I wasn't walking with Jules, and tried to find a seat next to no one. That was impossible. I settled for sitting down next to a girl with a red scar across her neck, who didn't even glance at me. Across the circle from me, Jules and Boone sat next to each other, not talking. Jules raised a hand to try to catch my attention, but I looked away quickly.

“Welcome, ladies.” A matronly woman who looked vaguely familiar seated herself next to the fireplace. She was short and round and had an inviting air about her, kind of like a beanbag chair. “Make sure you get a drink if you want before we get started.” She gestured across the room to a makeshift coffee station where a small tower of Styrofoam cups perched next to a couple of industrial thermoses. I could've sworn I'd never seen it there before. The woman glanced over at me and smiled. “Welcome, Lida.”

She already knew my name. This wasn't a promising start.

“I'm Amanda,” she said. “I mediate these sessions. I think you'll find that there's great potential for healing in Circle Share.” She nodded at everyone in the circle. “Great potential.”

Why did every adult at this place sound like a motivational Book on Tape? Just when I thought it couldn't get any more ridiculous, the whole group started speaking in unison.

“We are kind to others; we are kind to ourselves. We honor the Circle of Truth.”

I closed my eyes for a moment so that no one could see me rolling them.

After the incantation or whatever was finished, Amanda went on. “Today I thought we'd have an open discussion,” she said, her voice almost hypnotic. “Last week, it seemed as though many of you were ready to share, and I was disappointed that we ran out of time. So today, we're going to open the circle. Anything goes.” She smiled beatifically.

I wasn't about to share anything with this transcendental nun, but I guess I was alone in that. Almost immediately, girls started talking over one another, and Amanda had to finally insist that we take turns. Take turns, indeed. I was happy to wait them all out.

And oddly, as the hour dragged on, the whole thing started to feel slightly professional, like the chairs should have been leather and I should have carried a nice pen. A handful of the girls talked about their Things, the rest of us listening like a compassionate interview committee, and I was lulled and comforted, in a strange way, by the familiarity of what they said. While I knew the girls (aside from Jules) could be sarcastic and snide in other classes, they kept it to a minimum in Circle Share. Maybe it was the way Amanda listened. I will give her this: She was the only counselor I've ever seen who could pay attention without getting that smug “I'm just waiting for you to finish so that I can tell you what you're
really
thinking” look on her face.

Whatever it was, it worked. The girls brought their baggage into the Rec Lodge, unzipped it, and dumped every kind of drama onto the floor. There were the usual cases: drugs, mother-punching, small fires in the school library, suicide threats and sometimes an earnest attempt at follow-through. Knifing, stabbing, spitting, blackmailing, bullying, hating, hating, hating: Those were our Things.

Two girls talked about their Things like they were discussing a track meet — how long, how fast, how their feet pounded. I guessed they did this because they couldn't
not
, couldn't leave those Things in a dank cubby behind their eyes. They thought that by taking them out and airing them, they'd get a little cleaner each time.

“It's like I needed to say it, you know?” A girl with a cheerleader's face and a tiny barbell piercing her eyebrow had just finished talking about how she used to steal her mother's diamonds and sell them at the antique mart so that her boyfriend could buy meth. She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “It's like . . .” She paused and started again. “It's like, talking about it now, it doesn't seem so bad.” She caught Amanda's eye from across the circle. “What I mean is, no, it
was
bad. But now that I've talked about it, I can see that it's not, like, irreparable.”

Yes, it is.
The sentence popped into my head with such force that I was afraid I'd said it out loud, and I glanced around to see if anyone was gaping at me. But only Boone was looking at me with narrowed eyes. Could she see what I was thinking? I wouldn't put it past her. She was still staring at me when I looked away.

Eventually, Amanda looked at her watch and sighed. “I'm afraid we're out of time,” she said. “I'm sorry.” I don't know what she was apologizing for — that hour had lasted forever. She may have said something else, but I wouldn't know, since I was the first one out the door. I could already tell that Circle Share wasn't going to be my favorite class. Eventually, they'd all expect me to open up and add my Thing to the ratatouille of crap that the other girls had already prepared. And it wasn't going to happen. They'd have to cut the truth out of me.

 

 

LUCKILY FOR ME, CIRCLE SHARE WAS ONLY A WEEKLY TORTURE
session, and I skated through the first two without drawing attention to myself. That was my plan in general: Get through the next year without notice. It had worked before, and it was starting to work at Alice Marshall too. Gwen and Karen had begun shooting each other glances every time I walked into the cabin. Fine with me. Boone kept on ignoring me unless she was pointing out some flaw. Even Jules stopped being
quite
as aggressively cheerful after two weeks of my grunted responses to her lame questions. Things were beginning to feel a bit more familiar.

We were working on knots in Outdoor Ed, and Margaret had asked us to practice tying them during Toes-Up one afternoon. I didn't mind Outdoor Ed, actually. Margaret was interesting to listen to, and she didn't take any bullshit. The only time I'd raised my hand was to ask when we were going to learn how to whittle, and she'd looked at me, blinking slowly, for a long minute.

“No knives.”

Thought as much.

Then she added, “But I like the challenge. Perhaps later in the year we'll all try to whittle without knives. Maybe we'll use rocks, instead.” She nodded. “Very pioneering of you, Lida.”

Everyone else had groaned. Did I know how to play to a crowd, or what?

So anyway, I was lying on my bunk during Toes-Up with a short length of rope in hand, listening idly to Karen and Gwen as they chatted about some girl named Mariah whose boyfriend sent her a case of wine and didn't even try to camouflage it as something else. Gwen was lying on her bunk too, and Karen was sitting on the ground in a V, her legs stuck out at an angle I had only seen accomplished during Cirque du Soleil performances on TV.

“What an ass.”

“I bet Bev had a nice dinner that night.”

“Yeah. Pasta and Chianti.”

The slip-hitch knot wasn't going well. The rope kept sliding out of place every time I thought I had it. I'd pull it tight, and the whole thing would fall apart. I remembered what Margaret had said about tying knots: “It's like anything in life. If you try to force it, you'll end up with a tangled mess.” Every activity here was supposed to elicit some sort of Zen experience. I tossed the rope onto the floor.
Meditate on that, Margaret
, I thought.

I couldn't see her from my bunk, but I knew that Boone was crouched in the back corner of her bed, reading a magazine and bringing a small flask up to her mouth every so often. Boone had a way of producing a bottle of liquor out of nowhere whenever she wanted to, like a delinquent magician.

Jules flounced into the cabin dramatically, chewing on a Red Vine. She stopped in the middle of the room, ripped off a piece of the licorice with her front teeth, and said, “There's a new girl. A Seventeen.”

This bought some interest.

“Excellent,” said Karen. She stretched forward and wrapped one hand around each foot. “Anyone know where she's from?”

Jules shook her head. “Some of the Fifteens were talking about it in the Bathhouse while I was in the stall. Apparently, she's from all over. Her dad does something top secret, like in the Special Forces or CIA or something.”

“Sure,” said Boone. There was a pause while she took another sip. “Just like my brother is off ‘on assignment' instead of locked up in the state pen.”

“You don't know,” said Gwen. “He might be.”

“My brother? I hardly think that killing a redneck in a bar fight constitutes a special assignment.” Boone's laugh was hollow.

“No,” said Gwen patiently. “I mean her father. He
could
be Special Ops or something. He could be a dignitary. It wouldn't be the strangest thing. My friend Hannah's mother was a spy for the government when they lived in London. It happens.”

“Bullshit,” said Boone. “People who claim to be spies when they're at work are usually
only
who they are when they're at work. Butchers. Postal carriers. Substitute teachers.”

“Anyway,” said Jules, “she's really pretty, but in, like, an interesting way. And Tara said she'd seen her bags when she came back from Bev's —” She paused for effect. “And they were about half as full as they'd been when she went in.”

“So Tara must have seen her before she went into Bev's, then.” Boone's voice was sarcastic. Tara was an I-banker who seemed to digest gossip as voraciously as an owl, regurgitating it in the form of little pellets of dubious information. “Tara really gets around, doesn't she? Bullshit bullshit bullshit.”

Jules was undeterred. “Whatever. One of her cabinmates told me that Margaret had to pick her up at Runson Bar, because she
flew
in.” The airstrip at Runson Bar had been utilized a time or two by the I-bankers, though it wasn't generally thought of as an elegant way to arrive at the school. For one thing, the chances were pretty good that whatever back-country pilot you'd hired would crash the plane into the craggy mountains that rose up on all sides of the two-foot-long landing strip. “She was smoking as she stepped off the plane. Right in front of Margaret. And did I say she's pretty? She is.”

“Oh, for the love of Christ,” said Boone. “She's not going to get any uglier if you stop talking.”

Jules looked hurt. “Fine,” she said. “Be that way. You'll see what I mean soon enough.”

And we did. The entire school seemed to be present on the beach that afternoon during Waterfront Hour. Usually, half the girls would be asleep on the docks, even if it was cold out, and the other half would be curling their hair or talking furtively in the Bathhouse. On the day I came to Alice Marshall, for example, there weren't too many girls at Waterfront, and I sat on the sand by myself, staring across the water and trying to look as though I was thinking of something extremely important. Clearly, no one had been that curious about
me
.