When Meryl Lee got back to Margaret B. Netley Dormitory after the opening ceremony, she found Jennifer combing Charlotte’s hair in her room, and Ashley sitting on the floor, and all of them laughing, laughing, laughing.
Until she walked in.
Then, quick silence.
She looked at the suitcase she had left open on her mattress.
Not everything in it was folded as neatly as it had been.
“Is your name really Kowalski?” said Ashley.
“Yes,” said Meryl Lee.
“Really? Because I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone from Eastern Europe.”
“I’m from Long Island.”
“Oh,” said Ashley.
“Aren’t you going to unpack?” said Jennifer.
Ashley stifling a laugh.
Meryl Lee looked at the closet, filled with Jennifer’s blouses and dresses and regulation St. Elene’s Academy white shirts and green and gold plaid skirts and green and gold sweaters and green blazers with the gold St. Elene’s cross insignia—eight of each—all on their pink plush hangers, with lavender, pale yellow, and light blue sweaters on the shelf above.
“Not just now,” Meryl Lee said.
She decided to make up her bed, even though she hadn’t packed anything like a green satin duvet. She put her suitcase on the floor and took the bedclothes out of one of the shopping bags, and while she stretched the slightly damp sheets over the mattress, Jennifer and Ashley and Charlotte talked about Stephanie, about how wonderful Stephanie was, about how Stephanie knew everyone and had even once met Ringo like Jennifer had, about how Stephanie always knew exactly what to wear and how she had the nicest clothes and how she would never be caught dead in a public school sweatshirt like some girls wore, about how they wished Stephanie was back from Budapest.
Meryl Lee tried to come up with some smart and beautiful and wonderful thing to say. Something like how someday soon she was going to Budapest and she would do the same things in Budapest that Stephanie was doing, whatever they were. But she couldn’t come up with anything smart and beautiful and wonderful to say, and she wasn’t going to Budapest anytime soon, and she did have a public school sweatshirt in her suitcase, and it was her favorite thing to wear mostly because she’d worn it when she and Holling . . .
She took a long time making her bed while Jennifer and Ashley and Charlotte talked about Stephanie, who had been to Brussels with Jennifer twice, and how they had shopped all around La Grand-Place and how maybe next summer they would go to London together after Stephanie got home from Budapest because they loved going to Europe together.
Meryl Lee tucked in the corners. She thought about the lunch counter at Woolworth’s. She pushed away the Blank.
When Meryl Lee finished, she said, “I’m going to go for a walk to explore.”
“Don’t you have a duvet for your bed?” said Jennifer.
Meryl Lee shook her head.
“So your bed is going to look like that all the time.”
“I guess so,” said Meryl Lee. She tried to say it with a little laugh.
None of the girls said anything.
“Anyone want to explore with me?” said Meryl Lee.
“I’d—” Charlotte began.
“I suppose not,” said Jennifer.
“We’ve been at St. Elene’s together forever,” said Ashley. “Why would you think there’s any place left for us to explore?”
“Maybe there’s something you haven’t seen before,” said Meryl Lee.
“There isn’t,” said Ashley.
Meryl Lee knelt and tried to slide her suitcase under her bed.
It didn’t quite fit, and she felt their eyes upon her as she struggled, then forced it under.
“Unless you find St. Elene’s Arm,” said Jennifer. “No one’s seen that before.”
Meryl Lee looked up at her. “St. Elene’s Arm?”
“It’s hidden somewhere on campus. Her mummified arm. Only the Knock knows where it is.”
“The Knock?”
“MacKnockater,” said Ashley, as if Meryl Lee was such a dope.
“It’s not just her arm,” said Jennifer. “There’s a ring on each of her fingers: a diamond ring, a ruby ring, a sapphire ring, and a pearl ring. And whoever finds the arm gets to keep one of the rings. That’s the school tradition.”
“So has anyone—”
“No. I told you: no one has ever seen it. But maybe you’ll find it while you explore.”
Ashley began to laugh.
Meryl Lee’s face reddened.
“I’ll keep my eyes open,” she said.
“Do that,” said Jennifer. “And if you find it, maybe we can each choose one of the rings.”
Ashley and Charlotte were both laughing now.
Meryl Lee left. Laughter followed her under the dark beams and along the soap-smooth wood floor and down the white hall, where all the doors were open and all the rooms were filled with groups of girls on their beds and on their floors and on their window seats and on their toes, holding transistor radios and dancing.
She walked past Greater Hoxne and Lesser Hoxne and past Sherbourne House, sometimes jostled by groups of girls who straddled the sidewalks and did not even see her, it seemed. She walked past Putnam Library, and past smiling Julia Chall and Barbara Rockcastle and Elizabeth Koertge—who probably smiled because they had been going to St. Elene’s together forever and who wouldn’t smile about that?
Meryl Lee walked alone, without a whole lot of Resolution.
Except she had resolved not to cry.
She walked beyond Newell Chapel and past the commons behind Newell, and past three white barns and past a couple of sheds and through a line of shady maples, and suddenly St. Elene’s was all behind her and she was out by an open field, woods beyond, and between them lots of long painted fences. Unseen, a crow was cawing, cawing, cawing, but other than that, it was quiet and still. She walked past the long fences, then steeply down a footpath that led straight toward a stand of birches, as white as the fences. She ran her hands along their papery bark until she came into a grove of firs where thin branches brushed against her on both sides.
And then, suddenly, the firs curtained open and revealed the blue waves and the green islands and the white gulls and that white and red sail scudding along and the gray rocks a-tumble down to the water and the bleached driftwood upon them.
She sat down, and even though she could feel the Blank lurking behind her, it was a little easier without Jennifer and Ashley and Charlotte from Charlotte lurking in front of her.
Meryl Lee got back to her room just before dinner at noon; Jennifer and Ashley and Charlotte from Charlotte were gone. Quickly she knelt and dragged her suitcase out from under the bed. She looked into the closet and decided she wouldn’t hang up what was in her suitcase next to Jennifer’s blouses and dresses on pink plush hangers—even if there had been room. So she stuffed everything into her dresser drawers—including her Camillo Junior High sweatshirt—and tried to fill herself with the Resolution she knew she would need to face the meal.
But when she walked into Greater Hoxne, she knew that she would need a whole lot more Resolution than she had imagined.
Orange and yellow floral arrangements. White linen tablecloths on round tables. White linen napkins. White china plates with a pale floral design. Heavy silverware. Heavier crystal. Bettye and Alethea lined the walls with other girls wearing bright white aprons over their black dresses—all of them looking down at the floor. The tinkling of glasses, the scraping of chairs. Warm Parker House rolls on the tables. Small square pads of white butter by each plate. Tiny bowls of salt with tiny silver spoons.
Upper school girls on the north side. Lower school girls on the south.
Meryl Lee sat beside Jennifer—because who else was she going to sit next to?—and Jennifer sighed and scooted her chair a little closer to Ashley and Charlotte. Jennifer wore a string of pearls. The kind of pearls that blond demigoddesses wear whenever they want. Their luster glowed like the luster of Jennifer’s blond hair.
Meryl Lee looked around Greater Hoxne Dining Hall.
Probably all the smiling girls here had sat beside all the other smiling girls for forever.
Probably all their smiling mothers knew one another.
And their smiling grandmothers, too.
Then the double doors to the kitchen opened and Bettye and Alethea each pulled out a silver cart with chilled fruit cups on white linen cloths to serve the eighth-grade upper school girls of St. Elene’s Preparatory Academy.
Ashley was the last one at their table to be served—by Bettye.
“Town girls are so slow sometimes,” she said.
Bettye leaned down and placed a chilled fruit cup in front of Ashley.
“And they don’t even know to serve from the right,” said Ashley.
Meryl Lee felt Bettye stiffen.
“That’s because they grew up on farms,” said Charlotte.
“I went down to the shore this afternoon,” said Meryl Lee.
Bettye stood and looked at Meryl Lee.
“You didn’t find St. Elene’s Arm?” said Ashley.
Jennifer fingered her pearls. “I’m missing the spoon for my fruit cup,” she said.
Immediately Bettye turned and went to fetch the spoon. When she brought it back, she did not look at Meryl Lee again. She didn’t look at anyone at the table again.
And for the rest of the meal, Jennifer and Ashley and Charlotte talked about Stephanie DeLacy and how they wished she wasn’t in Budapest.
Which was probably why Meryl Lee did not want to go back to Netley right away after dinner was finished, and the white china dishes had been taken away, and Mrs. Hannah Adams Mott, Associate Headmistress of St. Elene’s Preparatory Academy for Girls since Genesis, had given the announcements regarding the first day of classes on Monday. Arm in arm, the girls left Greater Hoxne Dining Hall in their smiling groups, but Meryl Lee wandered alone down to the main gate, walking on the loose gravel until she reached the gate and turned back toward the school; she was almost startled by how beautiful St. Elene’s looked in the long September light. The buildings glowed softly, their windows reflecting the solid yellow. Sunlight ribboned around the steeple of Newell Chapel, then bore off into the trees, where an early afternoon breeze was taking a few leaves off their branches to twirl down to the perfect trim of the green lawn.
Meryl Lee wondered if there might come a time when she would feel a part of this school. Or if she even wanted to.
And then, unaccountably, she thought of Bettye.