LAUSANNE—May 1998
“Here,” Cressida says, spritzing Kersti’s modest cleavage with her Chanel No. 5. It’s the night of the spring Charity Ball. Lille, Noa, Raf, and Kersti are getting ready in Cressida’s room. She’s got the best dresses, jewelry, and makeup to choose from, as well as the most space, it being a corner room. Alison is out of their inner circle now. She hangs out with the athletic girls.
“I think you need a necklace,” Raf says, giving Kersti a once-over.
Cressida nods and whips a stunning double strand of pearls from her underwear drawer. She puts it around Kersti’s neck, fastens the clasp, and smiles approvingly. “Perfect,” she says, her breath smelling of watermelon bubble gum. Kersti has noticed lately that Cressida is smoking a lot less and chewing gum instead. Mr. Fithern is an outspoken antismoker.
Kersti is wearing one of Cressida’s dresses, a royal blue raw-silk strapless with a bell skirt that makes her feel a bit like Joan Collins. Noa says it’s good with her eyes and Kersti has to admit, it does match them perfectly. It fits well, too.
She likes what she sees, until Cressida slides up behind her and dwarfs her. She’s wearing a black strapless dress that pushes her breasts up and cinches her waist to the size of a wrist, with a ruffle at the bottom that barely covers her behind. She wears no jewelry, but doesn’t need it. Her hair is wild, its springy coils bouncing on the slope of her pale shoulders. She’s spectacular.
She scrunches her hair and shakes it out, smacks her lips twice, turns this way and that, thrusts out her breasts. “I hope Charlie likes my dress,” she murmurs, uncharacteristically insecure.
“Isn’t Magnus your date?” Kersti reminds her, and Cressida gives her a look.
Arndt Schultz invited Kersti to be his date, but she turned him down. He’s popular at school but ugly; she didn’t want to have to spend the night fending him off or being responsible for his good time. They decided as a group—Lille, Noa, Raf, and Kersti—not to go with dates, and to enjoy their last Charity Ball together.
Only Cressida is going with Magnus; he insisted. She’s a bit peeved about it, complaining she just wants to hang out with the girls, but Kersti knows Mr. Fithern is the one Cressida wants to be with.
“You look gorgeous, Kersti,” Lille says. “You’re a Scandinavian goddess.”
“Baltic,” Kersti corrects, already starting to evaporate next to Cressida.
The ball is in the banquet hall of the sprawling Chateau D’Ouchy hotel, a turreted castle with a gray stone façade and orange-shingled tower on the banks of Lake Geneva. It’s black-tie and open bar, even for the students. Cressida hands Kersti a vodka and orange juice. They’re outside on the Lakeside Terrace, where it’s easier to spike their drinks. They each have their own flasks to make the notoriously weak drinks stronger.
“Doesn’t he look hot tonight?” Cressida says, admiring Mr. Fithern from a distance.
He’s standing at the bar with Mrs. Fithern, talking to two other English teachers. He does look good in his tux, with his dark hair gelled and spiked out, edgier than he usually wears it. He glances over at Cressida a couple of times and holds her in his gaze.
Lille stumbles over, already drunk. Her bleached white hair is piled on top of her head in a frothy Marie Antoinette bun with loose wisps curling around her powdered face. She looks like an old-fashioned, sad-eyed doll. “Hello,” she says, curtseying.
The sun hasn’t even set behind the Alps and Lille is clearly not long for consciousness. She’s never been able to hold her liquor well. Vodka nights usually end with her puking and blacking out. Tonight will be no different.
“Go easy, Grasshopper,” Cressida says.
“I can’t look Mrs. Fithern in the eyes,” Lille slurs. “She called me over and Mr. F. was beside her and I had to bolt—”
“Don’t say anything stupid,” Cressida warns, her eyes flashing.
“I’m trying not to, but it’s awkward. Aren’t you uncomfortable?”
“No,” Cressida responds. “Why should I be?”
“You could be a little more compassionate,” Lille says, her eyes filling with tears. “She’s her wife.”
“His wife,” Kersti says.
“Lille, you need to slow down,” Cressida tells her, taking the drink out of her hand. “Take a break.”
Lille snatches it back, spilling most of it on the front of her doll’s dress. “Maybe you shouldn’t be drinking,” she huffs, and walks off.
“You know how much she loves Mrs. Fithern,” Kersti reminds Cressida.
“So do I,” Cressida says. “But I love him more.”
She opens her clutch and retrieves her pack of cigarettes. She hands one to Kersti, lights both, and exhales over the railing. It’s dusk and the sky is the color of salmon. The lake is dotted with rainbow-hued catamarans, behind which, east toward Vevey, the hilly vineyards of Lavaux stretch forever.
“I’m going to miss it here,” Cressida says, her wistfulness catching Kersti off guard. “I’ve grown up here.”
Kersti will miss it, too, she realizes, gazing out at the shoreline of Lac Léman. Will she even remember it in ten years? Or twenty? Will this picture of the Swiss Riviera, with the Alps rising in the distance out of its crystal blue bath, remain as bright and vivid in her memory as it does today? She tries to hold on to it, to impress each detail into her mind, but it’s starting to sink in that what has turned out to be the happiest time of her life is coming to an end. She’s going home soon. They all are.
She can’t even imagine life without her best friends available to her at any moment, Hamidou’s ubiquitous guidance, speaking French every day, traveling, mountains, Huber House and its decrepit third-floor bathroom. She can already feel the dread of having to be wrenched away from here and sent back to the place where she never felt right, or enough.
“At least you can stay here if you want to,” Kersti tells Cressida, as a gentle breeze brings a layer of goose bumps to her bare shoulders. “You could live anywhere in the world. I’m the one who has to go back to Toronto.”
Cressida turns, about to say something, but her gaze is hijacked, settling somewhere off in the direction of the ballroom. “That’s her,” she breathes, grabbing Kersti’s arm. Her nails press into Kersti’s skin and Kersti lets out a yelp. “In the pink Chanel suit. Oh my God. It’s her.”
“Who?”
“Amoryn Lashwood.”
“Who?”
“Remember the old yearbook? She was in the picture with the two girls who got expelled. The one who bequeathed the ledger?”
As Kersti spots the woman in the pink suit talking to M. Bueche, she suddenly remembers. “Are you sure?” she says. “How can you tell?”
“She looks the same, only with shorter hair. I can’t believe she’s here. Let’s go.”
“Let’s go?”
“Talk to her.”
“About what?”
“About what happened,” Cressida says impatiently. “Don’t you want to know why her friends were expelled? And what was in that ledger?”
“You’re going to accost a perfect stranger at the Charity Ball and ask her about a ledger from almost twenty years ago?”
“Why not?”
“Well, the better question is why.”
“Something went down that year,” Cressida says, her eyes shining with excitement. “I want to know what happened.”
Kersti can tell that Cressida is drunk. She has that crazed look, which usually precedes some reckless, outrageous, and/or dangerous act, such as driving drunk or stealing a yearbook from the new library. She has another swig from her flask and pulls Kersti by the arm toward the ballroom, where Amoryn Lashwood is caught in Bueche’s snare. They wait until he finally drifts away, schmoozing and hustling other helpless alumni for more donations.
Up close, Amoryn Lashwood is still very pretty. Kersti does a quick calculation and figures she must be in her early forties. Her skin is still relatively unlined, except for two deep vertical lines between her eyebrows, which make her look concerned or displeased. The pink suit is Chanel, Kersti can tell by the large gold buttons, which are the iconic C’s, and she’s extremely thin. Her hair is bobbed and so well sculpted even the lake winds don’t move a strand.
They approach her and Cressida lightly touches her arm to get her attention. “Ms. Lashwood?”
The woman looks startled. “It’s El-Bahz,” she says, trying to place Cressida. “Mrs. El-Bahz. I haven’t been Lashwood in years.”
“I’m Cressida Strauss. This is Kersti. Class of ’98.”
Amoryn holds out her hand. A diamond ring the size of a cupcake gleams on her wedding finger. “Amoryn El-Bahz,” she says. “As you already know.”
“Class of ’74,” Cressida fills in.
“Yes. Correct.” She seems even more confused by how much Cressida knows about her.
“Lashwood House is named after your grandfather, isn’t it?” Cressida asks her, snatching a glass of champagne from one of the floating trays.
“He was a student in the late twenties, when they first started admitting boys,” Amoryn says. “My father and his brothers also went. My uncle was a good friend of Monsieur Bueche. We have a very long history with the Lycée.”
“Your year was the last year of the Helvetia Society,” Cressida says. “And you were the president, right?”
The glowing petal pink of Amoryn’s cheeks fades and she looks momentarily flustered. “That’s true,” she says, recovering her poise. “The last president, in fact. Tell me how you know so much about me. Certainly, there are more famous Lycée graduates than myself.”
Kersti looks over at Cressida, wondering how she’s going to proceed.
“Harzenmoser told us about your friends getting expelled for vandalizing the statue—”
“Harzenmoser?” she murmurs, her voice a thin leaf, floating in the air. “I’ve never known her to talk to the students.”
“She doesn’t usually,” Kersti says, her eyes bouncing back and forth between Cressida and Amoryn.
“And did she tell you what they wrote?”
“Of course not,” Cressida says, with an exaggerated eye roll. “But you must know.”
“Why are you so interested in all this?” Amoryn asks her, resting a pink tweed arm on one of her jutting hip bones.
Kersti shrinks back, embarrassed, as the conversation takes a turn for the awkward. Even she has no idea why Cressida is so obsessed with whatever it was those girls wrote on the statue and their resulting expulsions.
“I just can’t imagine what could get two students expelled from the Lycée,” Cressida says. “No one else has ever been expelled that I know of. Bueche would never willingly give up two tuitions, not over some spray paint on a statue. And Madame Hamidou was against it—”
“Madame Hamidou,” Amoryn repeats, her tone ambiguous. “How is she? I don’t see her here tonight.”
“She hates these things,” Cressida tells her. “She calls it the ‘groveling for money’ ball.”
Amoryn laughs and then her smile quickly goes away. “I don’t know what they wrote,” she says. “It was gone by morning.”
“It must have been pretty offensive,” Cressida perseveres. “Or incriminating?”
Their eyes lock then and Kersti is sure something passes between them. Some understanding, some transmuted secret that requires no spoken acknowledgment. Kersti is baffled, lost.
“You bequeathed a ledger in the yearbook,” Cressida goes on, holding Amoryn’s gaze. “All your friends did. One of them mentioned the secrets in the ledger—”
“Usually students bequeath funny memories and inside jokes,” Kersti interjects.
“Usually, yes,” Amoryn agrees. “But we didn’t.” She no longer seems upset or offended by the ambush. If anything, she seems roused, perhaps a little intrigued by Cressida’s curiosity and brazenness. “Our memories weren’t very funny,” she says, and then she holds up her champagne flute to signal the conversation is over. “Have a nice time at the ball, girls.”
As soon as she’s out of earshot, Cressida says, “Something happened that year.”
“Maybe one of them was sleeping with a teacher,” Kersti mutters, as Magnus appears before them, glassy-eyed and beautiful.
“Hello, my love,” he says to Cressida, pulling her into his arms.
She lets him sway her side to side in a silent slow dance, but her back is stiff and her face turns away from him, no doubt searching for Mr. Fithern.