The Poison Apples (7 page)

“This is the most beautiful place in the world,” I whispered.

Judah Lipston the Third briefly glanced up from his comic book.

“Middleton Dorm,” the van driver bellowed, and we came to a stop.

I took a crumpled slip of paper out of my pocket and looked at it. It said: Alice Bingley-Beckerman, Transfer Sophomore, Middleton Dorm, Room 201.

“That's me,” I said, and started gathering my bags.

“Ooh,” someone said, giggling. “She got the bad dorm.”

I swallowed, pretended not to hear, and squeezed out of the van. It drove away and left me standing in the middle of a gravel path, surrounded by my suitcases.

I looked up at my future home.

It was, for lack of a better way to put it, a huge zit on the otherwise perfect face of Putnam Mount McKinsey.

Whereas every other building we'd driven by had been made out of beautiful, vine-covered brick, this building was made out of beige stucco. Whereas every other building we'd driven by looked like it was built in 1870, this building looked like it was built in 1970. It was dirty. It was rectangular. The windows were thin slits. It kind of looked like a prison.

It was obviously the dorm for the new students who didn't know any better.

A paper banner sagged in front of the main entrance. It said: WELCOME ALL. A bored-looking girl sat on the steps, smoking a cigarette. Filled with dread, I limped up the gravel path toward her, weighed down by my suitcases. The girl gazed at me apathetically. She had bright pink hair tied up in a ponytail on top of her head. She wore a T-shirt that was slashed open across the shoulder. She had a lip ring. She had about twelve bracelets on each arm. Most impressively, she had a long silver chain that connected a stud in her left nostril to a stud in her left ear.

I stood in front of her and tried to smile.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I said.

“I'm Agnes,” she said.

“I'm Alice,” I said.

She nodded tiredly, and stood up.

“I'm your RA,” she informed me, and then she picked up one of my suitcases and started trudging into the dorm.

“Cool!” I said, and immediately hated myself for saying the word. Somehow saying “cool” in front of someone so much cooler than me felt degrading.

I followed her inside, through a dank, carpeted lobby lined with empty bulletin boards, past some kind of lounge filled with orange furniture, and up a dark stairwell.

“You're the first one here,” she said as we clomped up the stairs, “which sucks for you.”

“That's okay,” I said, even though my heart was sinking in my chest, “I can just hang out.”

Agnes stopped abruptly in the middle of the stairs, turned around, and stared at me. “You're not going to be, like, clingy, are you?” she asked.

“What?” I said. “Clingy? I … no.”

“Good,” she said. “I'm your RA, but I'm not like your mom or anything.”

“Of course,” I said. Just the word
mom
made the back of my eyeballs prick with tears. I prayed she couldn't tell.

“Don't come crying to me or anything.”

I nodded.

She cocked her head to one side and looked me up and down. “You're wearing all black,” she commented. “That's kind of weird.”

I nodded. I
was
wearing all black (I was even wearing black underwear, but Agnes didn't know that). I'd always been a pretty creative dresser, but ever since my dad and R.'s wedding that summer, the only color that appealed to me was black. So I was letting myself wear black. Every day. Why not? I was in mourning, after all. Not only for my mother, but also for the loss of my old, carefree, idyllic life.

“Why?” Agnes asked, her eyes narrowed. “Are you, like, goth? Because you don't seem goth.”

“Um,” I said, “No, I guess I'm not goth. I'm just—”

“Whatever,” Agnes interrupted, already bored with whatever explanation I was going to give. “We're all good.”

Then she turned around and started walking up the stairs again.

*   *   *

I had been lying facedown
on my new bed for three hours when my roommate finally arrived. I heard the knob rattle, then the door open, and then all of a sudden a beautiful Indian girl was inside my room, dragging a pink suitcase behind her and screeching into her cell phone.

“It's so
dirty
!” she exclaimed.

I could hear the muffled voice of the person on the other end of the phone responding.

“Like
really
dirty,” the beautiful girl shouted. “There's this, like, gray carpeting? And fluorescent lighting?”

I sat up in bed and looked at her, hoping that my face didn't look too bloated and tear streaked. The girl shot me a brief but blinding smile, and then kept talking into the phone.

“Yeah,” she said, nodding and chomping on her gum. “Yeah. Totally.”

Still nodding, she lugged another pink suitcase into the room. And then another. And then another. I eventually ended up counting more than ten. Still on the phone, she began to unpack them. I watched her in disbelief. Was she even going to introduce herself to me?

“No, totally,” she murmured into the phone while she dragged what looked like a sequined ball gown out of one suitcase. “Totally, totally. I know. I feel the same way. Yeah. It's totally lame.”

I studied her. She was wearing short-shorts, a tube top, and a pair of tiny blue high heels. A pair of sunglasses rested on top of her head. Her shiny jet-black hair curled perfectly around her shoulders. Although she and Agnes the RA couldn't have looked more different, I had a hard time deciding who was more terrifying.

The girl took a shoe box out of one bag and opened it. It was full of magazine cutouts.

“Mm-hm,” she said. “Mm-hm. Blond. Mm-hm.”

Was she talking about me?

“Of course not!” she shrieked into the phone. “I would never!”

She carefully unfolded a picture of a muscled male model in a tiny red swimsuit and tacked it onto the wall, wedging the cell phone between her shoulder and chin. Then she unfolded another picture of a tanned, half-naked male model. Then another one. Then another one. They all grinned at me across the room, flashing their white teeth.

I wondered if this girl was going to talk on her phone for the rest of the school year. I decided it was a strong possibility. I sat there and waited a few more minutes while she “uh-huh”-ed and “mm”-ed. Then I gave up and lay back down, pressing my face into the pillow.

“Katie,” the girl said, “I gotta go. Yeah. You, too. You are such a lame ass. Yes. You. Okay. I love you. Swizzle sticks. Bye.”

There was a small beeping sound as she hung up the phone. Then there was a long silence. I could hear the birds chirping outside our window.

“Hey,” the girl said.

“Mmrf,” I said into my pillow.

“I'm Reena.”

I was suddenly terrified that if I lifted my face up and exposed it to my new roommate, I would start crying. So I attempted to speak without moving at all.

“I'm Alice,” I said muffledly.

“Where are you from?”

“Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn? Like New York City Brooklyn?”

“Mm hm.”

There was a long pause.

“I'm from Los Angeles,” she said finally.

“Cool,” I said. That
word
again. I had to stop saying that word. I also had to stop constantly being on the verge of crying. People could probably sense it in my voice. They could sense I was lonely and pathetic and nervous and scared.

“Want a Blow Pop?” Reena asked after a horrible pause. “I have cherry, and uh … grape?”

“No, thanks,” I mumbled, and then turned my face to the wall.

After a minute I heard her start unpacking again, and the two of us didn't speak until Agnes knocked on our door and told us to head down to the lounge for orientation.

*   *   *

The expectant faces
of thirty teenage girls turned in my direction.

“My name is Alice,” I said slowly, “and I like … um, apples.”

“Someone already said apples,” said the girl sitting across from me.

Everyone giggled.

“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Um. My name is Alice and I like…”

My mind was going blank. I liked eggplant. I liked chocolate. I liked peanut butter. I liked raspberries. Were the any words in existence that began with
A
besides
apple
?

“I like…” My mouth was dry. I blinked. I swallowed. A wave of laughter made its way around the circle.

“Do you like artichokes?” whispered the girl on my right. I looked at her, surprised. She was tiny, with thick glasses and a smattering of pimples across her nose. She looked about twelve. I exhaled, relieved.

“My name is Alice and I like artichokes,” I announced to the group.

That was a big lie. I hated artichokes. But I would have said I liked eating dog to get through my turn.

Then it was time for Reena to speak. She was sitting to my left. The two of us had been conscientiously ignoring each other ever since we left our dorm room.

I couldn't believe that my new roommate already hated me. And that I hated her.

But I only hated her because she so obviously hated me.

“My name is Reena,” Reena said, with enough apathy in her voice to make it clear to everyone that she thought the game was dumb, “and I like radicchio.”

“What's radicchio?” asked the bespectacled girl on my right.

Reena gasped. “You don't know what
radicchio
is?”

The girl shrugged.

“It's like this really, really delicious vegetable that they put in salads.”

“Oh,” said the girl with the glasses. “I guess I've never had it.”

“Well, they serve it in all the best restaurants.”

“Oookay,” said Agnes, who was sitting in the middle of the circle. “I think that's everyone. Do you all know each other's names now?”

I looked around the circle at the faces of the other girls in my dorm. I couldn't remember any of them. They all looked the same: high ponytail, tank top, flip-flops, and sunglasses on top of their heads. They also all looked way more confident than I felt.

Except for the tiny girl with glasses on my right who didn't know what radicchio was.

She just seemed kind of … pathetic.

“All right,” yawned Agnes. “What's next?”

She took a piece of paper out of her pocket and inspected it.

“Dinnertime,” she announced.

And then, like a dam had broke, everyone rose to their feet and streamed out of the room. I was left sitting on the dirty orange rug all by myself.

Why, I wondered, am I
this
person? What's wrong with me? Why am I invisible? Why am I the one who never gets swept up in the crowd? And why does my own roommate already think that I'm totally boring and lame?

Is it because I actually
am
boring and lame?

Or is it because everyone thinks I'm goth?

I shakily got to my feet and walked out of the lounge and into the cafeteria.

It was chaos.

My fellow new students had already been absorbed into what seemed like a crowd of hundreds. Everyone was squeezed around a table and talking, or yelling across the room to one another, or standing in line, or circling the salad bar and chatting. I scanned the room for one girl, just one girl, who looked alone and out of place. But everyone had already found someone. Everyone had already found
five
other someones. Even the tiny girl with glasses and zits was cheerfully conversing with a cafeteria lady.

I stood in the middle of the dinner hall, my head throbbing.

Someone come talk to me,
I prayed.

I waited around ten seconds and was suddenly jostled by a beautiful girl with red hair, holding a cafeteria tray.

“Excuse me,” she said. Her violet eyes sparkled while she looked me up and down.

“Sorry,” I said. “Um…”

Say something,
I told myself.
Say something.

I could barely choke the words out. “Um, my name is…”

But someone was already whispering in the beautiful girl's ear, and the beautiful girl was already staring at me and giggling.

“Reena,” she exclaimed to the person next to her. “You are
so bad
!”

Then the two of them walked away, arms linked and heads bowed together, their shoulders shaking with laughter.

I held my tears back just long enough to grab a handful of croutons from the salad bar, sprint up the stairs to my room, and fall face-first onto my pillow.

FIVE

Reena

Okay, so boarding school
wasn't exactly what I expected.

Is it wrong that I hoped my dorm room would have wood floors? and a fireplace? and maybe the stuffed head of a mountain lion hanging over the mantelpiece?

Instead I got dirty gray carpeting, streaky walls, a buzzing fluorescent light, and not much else.

And is it wrong that I hoped my roommate might be a nice, normal, friendly person with whom I could hold an actual conversation? Maybe even a cool East Coast girl who could teach me how to roast chestnuts and make really good hot chocolate?

Instead I got a sulky blond chick wearing all black who looked exactly like a younger version of Shanti Shruti. And even that would have been okay, if she had deigned to talk to me. Instead Miss Cooler Than Thou lay on her bed and ignored me for hours while I unpacked. Well, fine. I didn't need her. I could make friends on my own while she sat around and looked down her nose at everybody. And it made total sense when she said she was from New York City. New York City kids—I'd always imagined—were ten times more sophisticated than everyone else. But Alice Bingley-Beckerman was sophisticated in a bad way. I could tell that she thought I was immature and dumb.