LAUSANNE—June 1998
Cressida holds the leather ledger in the palm of her hands with great reverence, as though it’s some sacred text, the Bible or one of the Vedas. It’s brown with embossed gold letters on the cover that say ledger. It reminds Kersti of her father’s old bookkeeping ledgers when she was a kid. He used to sit in the den after supper with a cup of vodka and piles of receipts and invoices, and enter numbers into columns. He’d have a black pen and a red pen, and there were always a lot of red numbers on the pages.
Cressida opens it slowly, her fingers noticeably trembling. On the first page, tucked deep into the fold, there’s an old photograph, square with a white border and the date in typeface. April 1974.
Cressida pulls it out. It’s a picture of the Helvetia statue, flanked on either side like sentinels by two long-haired teenage girls, their solemn faces backlit by the pale moon, their hands placed defiantly on their hips. The statue has a helmet of black hair spray-painted atop, which, Kersti thinks, must have been a bitch to clean and restore in a single night. There’s a word spray-painted on the Swiss cross of her shield, but it’s impossible to read in the dark, grainy picture. The engraved plaque at Helvetia’s feet is also defaced. Certain words in the slogan, which they can’t read but know by heart—“Preparing Young Women to Become Citizens of the World”—are crossed out and scrawled over with other words, also illegible.
Cressida turns it over and discovers a handwritten note on the back.
Do with this ledger what you wish. I’ve got no objections whatever you decide, only personal regrets. Amoryn El-Bahz.
“What does she mean by that?” Kersti asks her.
“I don’t know,” Cressida answers, but her voice has a strange tremor. “There must be something in here. . . .”
Lille is silent.
“What did they write on the statue?” Kersti says, holding the picture right up to her nose. “Can you see at all?”
“No. Can you?”
Neither Kersti nor Lille can make out the spray-painted words in the picture.
“Why would she send this to you?” Lille asks Cressida.
“I guess because I asked her about it.”
“Why would they expel those girls for spray-painting a couple of words on the stupid statue?”
No one responds. Cressida opens the ledger, handling the thin yellow pages carefully between her fingers.
September 18, 1973. 23:00. Frei House.
Minutes:
Present:
Amoryn Lashwood—President
Brooke Middlewood—Vice President
Tatiana Greenberg—Secretary
Caris Yaren
Fernanda Manzanares
Karen Kim
Donna Murthy
Agenda:
Initiation/ Pledge Night. Sept 30
Dinner for new Taps. [Beside which various restaurant options were scribbled]
Autumn Charitable Events:
Lycée’s own Battle of the Sexes?
“Watergate” Ball ?
The dinner bell rings while the three of them still have their noses buried in the ledger, before they’ve even managed to get beyond the first page.
“Bring it to the dining hall,” Kersti says.
“Are you crazy?” Cressida snaps. “I don’t want everyone to see it.”
“Who cares?”
“I have to go through it page by page.”
“There’s a lot,” Lille says. “All the minutes from every meeting—”
“She wouldn’t have sent this to me if there wasn’t something worth finding in it,” Cressida says.
“Check the very last page,” Kersti says, growing excited at the possibility of discovering some potentially epochal secret.
Cressida quickly turns to the back page, searching for whatever shocking secret she believes lies within its hallowed pages. It’s dated April 4, 1974. It says only Easter Cuckoo Festival, Sunday Ap 14.
The rest of the page is blank.
“Mesdemoiselles!” Hamidou shouts from the hall. “Souper!”
Cressida slaps the ledger shut. “Meet me back in my room after study hall,” she tells them.
“I’ve got an AP tutorial,” Lille says. “I’ll come here straight after.”
“I’ve got a volleyball match at Aiglon,” Kersti says. “Playoffs.”
“Then we’ll meet after lights-out.”
“Aren’t you sneaking out to see Magnus?”
“I’ll wait for you,” she says impatiently. “Just come to my room as soon as you can. I’ll have found something by then.”
Something. That voluptuous secret, with its claws already in their flesh. What is it Amoryn Lashwood wants Cressida to know? And why Cressida? Simply because she was the one audacious enough to ask?
It’s all Kersti can think about as Cressida shoves the ledger under her duvet and they file out of the room silently, giddy, conspiratorial.
On the dinner chalkboard downstairs, Charcuterie.
“Cold cuts,” Lille mutters. They groan and split up, heading off with resignation to their assigned tables.
As Kersti rolls a cold ham slice around a cornichon, making a wet slimy cigar that she dips in hot mustard, her mind goes back to the ledger and the scandal they might uncover inside it. She wonders if Cressida is somehow connected to it. Why else would Amoryn write a note like that to her? Do with this ledger what you wish.
Kersti’s excitement begins to turn to unease, a languidly creeping fear with tendrils reaching into every part of her body. She doesn’t know why but she feels an ambiguous sense of dread. There’s a voice in her head telling her that Cressida is somehow mixed up in something bad. Why else would she be so inexplicably consumed with what happened to those girls unless she had a personal, vested stake in it?
Kersti looks across the dining room and finds Cressida. Her heart surges. In spite of everything that’s happened over the last four years, she knows they’re kindred spirits. They always have been. Their friendship isn’t something Kersti ever sought or had to work hard for; it simply was, from day one, when they shared chopes and secrets. Cressida is the one person who’s always understood Kersti, who never judged her or expected anything from her other than for her to simply be Kersti. Cressida’s done hurtful things, she’s made mistakes, but her love for Kersti has never been in question.
Their eyes lock. Kersti smiles but Cressida’s expression is remote. She doesn’t smile back.