After Lights Out
The days got longer and longer: in England, the sky stays light almost all night in summer. When we went to bed it was still bright blue. The seniors had Lights Out much later — they were still outside when the sky had turned a strange silvery-white color and we were sitting up in bed, talking. If there was a pause in our conversation, we could hear them.
One night we talked, first about our running heats (we were practicing for Sports Day), and then about the Tennis Match. Juniors didn’t play tennis, but we’d all watched it, the whole school had. The look on the loser’s face was awful — and the loser was Jill, Buffer’s twin sister.
“Buffer didn’t even say anything to her,” Veryan said.
“She didn’t the day the seniors got their exams back, either,” Clare said, sounding even more critical.
I remembered Buffer running up the back stairs two at a time, so fast that she was putting her hands on the steps ahead of her, laughing and screaming: “I pahssed! I pahssed!”
Jill had not passed. She spent the whole afternoon crying in Alice and Tina’s room, being comforted by them — and Buffer ignored her.
“I hated Buffer that day,” Veryan said.
“So did I,” Brioney said.
“She was selfish,” said Clare.
I didn’t hate Buffer, but I did remember how the other seniors had acted. Alice and Tina passed, everyone knew they would; I don’t think anyone even asked them. Someone asked two other seniors if they’d passed. One looked a little embarrassed — as if she hadn’t really deserved to — and said yes. The other smiled, trying to be casual, but you could tell she was pleased. Only Buffer ran around screaming and laughing and telling people who hadn’t even asked her. I understood that you shouldn’t behave like that, ever; but I didn’t know if Jill being her own twin made it worse. I was wondering about that when we heard Matron laughing outside (of course, the windows were all open).
We all went to the same window and looked out. Miss Davenport and Matron were riding in the big meadow that sloped up to a skyline of trees. The sky was that strange light silvery color — not like day, but not like night, either — and their horses, Nella and Nike, looked silvery-white, too.
Suddenly Matron leaned forward in the saddle and shook her head, and first Nella, then Nike, GALLOPED towards the top of the meadow, stretching out their necks and tails while Matron shrieked with laughter.
Matron’s laugh got fainter and fainter as they raced farther and farther away, the horses’ tails streaming behind them.
We stood close together, watching. No one talked until we couldn’t see them anymore and were slowly getting back into bed.
“I didn’t know Matron rode,” Clare said quietly.
I hadn’t, either. I listened for Matron and the horses while the room grew dimmer; on the towel rack, I could see the white part of my towel, but not the colors of its gray and red stripes. I listened hard, but the only sounds were some seniors playing tennis: a ball being hit, someone calling “BAD luck!” and a piano — probably other seniors were rehearsing the play. None of us were in that (only one junior, a four-year-old day girl, was), and suddenly I had the idea of putting on our own play. ONLY the Night Nursery would be in it and we’d make it up ourselves.
In the morning I told the others, and everyone wanted to do it. In bed that night, we decided to make the play about doctors and nurses falling in love with each other (this, I admit, was kind of copied from an English TV show). The first thing we made up was a song about them falling in love, which Brioney and Clare and Veryan sang in American accents, one verse each. I just hummed the chorus.
Veryan made up a song to sing by herself. Her idea was that she would march down the aisle, dressed in a bride’s outfit, filing her nails with the file from my manicure kit, singing:
I’ll be walking’ down the aisle
with a smile
filin’ me nails with me file.
She got out of bed to show us. I had to laugh: She filed her nails so briskly and looked so businesslike about the whole thing, and the words were so ridiculous! Once we started working on “Emergency Ward Eleven: A Love Story,” after Lights Out was hilarious: we laughed and laughed. We rehearsed every night, and the whole school came to the performance — even all the seniors came. At the end they clapped and clapped, and some people shouted “Bravo!” and “Encore!” and “Author, Author!” Even though it was only in the Nursery, and not on a real stage, everyone acted just as if we were all grown-up and at the theater.