There are rumors the day Emily Beam arrives at the Amherst School for Girls—in January, halfway through her junior year. She doesn’t look like the other girls, who look like girls in magazines. She doesn’t sound like them, either, and she wears different shoes. As she sits on a bed she’s never slept in, in the first room she’s ever shared, Emily announces to the tall, curly-haired blonde standing by the window that she’s come from Boston. This isn’t a lie. It is where she’s stayed for the past month.

K.T. nods and looks down at Emily’s feet. “What size shoe do you wear?”

“Seven,” Emily says.

K.T. walks over to her closet and digs out a pair of navy-blue clogs with wooden heels.

“Here,” says K.T. “Wear these.”

Emily takes off her rubber-soled Mary Janes.

“They’ll be a size too big,” K.T. says, “which will make it tough to walk on those little pebbles out there, but at least no one will talk shit about you.”

As Emily slips on the clogs, K.T. takes the black Mary Janes and drops them—clunk, clunk—into the steel trash can.

“You can wear your pj’s to class if you want,” K.T. says. “A lot of us do.”

Emily takes in her roommate’s casual elegance: the untucked white button-down, the purple cashmere cardigan, the necklace of tiny turquoise beads, the brown suede boots with scuffed toes. Emily looks down at her new giant feet. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she says.

“Do you remember where it is?” K.T. points. “Just at the end of the hall.”

In the bathroom, Emily sweeps her long hair up into a messy ponytail, which is the style here, she’s noticed. In the morning—her first day of class—she’ll wear the Harvard sweatshirt she got in Boston. As far as boarding schools go, Emily has no idea how Amherst School for Girls (“ASG,” K.T. calls it—like ask but with a g) compares. Boarding school? It wasn’t even in the realm of possibilities; it wasn’t even on the radar screen. And by the time Aunt Cindy convinced Emily’s parents that it was necessary, ASG was the only school that would take her, and that was only because there was an extra bed since K.T.’s prior roommate, Hannah, had been expelled for sneaking out late at night to meet townies.

“You’re a Hart Girl now,” K.T. tells Emily on their way to dinner.

“A heart girl?”

“Yeah,” says K.T. “As in Hart Hall, where we live.”

“Oh, right,” says Emily. The dorm doesn’t look like dorms she’s seen in pictures or movies. It’s a house, a sprawling Victorian one, painted gray with purple trim, tucked behind a high row of boxwoods.

“ASG was the wrong place for Hannah to begin with. This place is about the mind, and Hannah, well, she was all about the body.”

Townies. Dorms known as halls. Cafeterias called dining rooms. To survive here, Emily is going to have to learn a whole other language.

Maybe that’s why the poem comes sweeping in that very first night at ASG. In the past, Emily Beam has written poems only when a teacher has required her to, but as soon as she lies down on her single bed under the slope of the old wooden roof, lines unspool like ribbons, and she can’t fall asleep until she ties them into bows.

Maze

At the start, she stands: an opening

between the high, chopped-off

hedges. She can walk, one

foot, then another,

over the little pebbles.

It all looks so English,

so civilized, until

the dead end.

The dead end. The dead

end. The wind lends

the hedge its own green

voice. But what human speaks

Hedge? What antiquated

map shows a girl

the way?

No exit sign in neon

points her out.

No bread crumbs

on a path. If only

she were a pencil

with an eraser, she

could draw herself

out.

Emily Beam, January 15, 1995