The private devastations I reported left my parents unmoved. I described the day when I heard a fifth former blasting my favorite song, a Kate Bush dirge, a floor below me and I went down onto her hall to tell her I loved it, and she just gaped at me—positively stone-ass blanked me—until I cottoned on that I was not supposed to even be on her hall, much less talk to her, because I was a new student. She continued staring as I turned around and let myself back out through the fire door, back upstairs to my newb bed in my newb room with my newb sensibilities, where I belonged.
My father said, “Oh, that’s too bad.”
“Maybe she’s just shy,” said Mom.
“Maybe she didn’t hear you. You said her music was loud.”
“Do you want me to call your adviser and talk about it?”
Mom would have let me come home, but Dad had a rule. “One year. You have to make it through the year, then we’ll reevaluate.”
I threw out my best shots: my roommate was mean, and when I got dressed the other day, she watched from across the room and told me she wished she could merge our bodies so that she had my tits and tummy but her thighs and butt.
“Maybe she meant it as a compliment.”
“Yes, she envies you.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Well, does everyone have a boyfriend? I should think you’d be concentrating on your studies.”
“I can’t make friends.”
“What about those lovely girls we met at Parents’ Weekend?”
“They go to the Vineyard every weekend with their boyfriends.”
“That seems inappropriate.”
“Yes, better you stay at school. Use the time to meet people!”
“I don’t belong here.”
“Oh, but you do. The school said as much when they admitted you. How bright and capable you are.”
It was cold, by then, at the pay phone. I kicked frozen gravel.
Mom said, “By the way, did you hear about Cecily?” A classmate of mine from grade school, who was among the small group from my hometown to start boarding school that fall. She’d gone to St. George’s in Rhode Island. “She just came home. Gave up. She couldn’t hack it.”
When Thanksgiving break finally arrived and we were free to travel home, I shared a car to the airport with Gaby, a fifth former from my hometown who had gone to my small elementary school. Gaby wore her red hair cut bluntly just below her chin, and when I scooted into the back of the livery car, on the opposite end of her seat, she did not peek out from behind it, much less smile at me. I was too exhausted to care. Besides, she was taciturn in a way that I appreciated—she seemed cynical, which suggested some individuality. Also, I knew a curious fact about her: she liked to wash her feet in the sink at night. I’d learned this the year before from a ninth-grade classmate, Connor, who had spent middle school loving her hopelessly. The closest he’d gotten to dating her was a nightly telephone call of the endlessly wandering, knotted-cord sort we engaged in then. During those calls, Connor told me, Gaby washed her feet in the sink. He heard the water splashing and the slap-squeaking of her soapy hands. After Connor hung up with Gaby, he would sometimes call me just to talk about her.
I didn’t mind. I wasn’t interested in Connor, and in any case I was struck by the image of Gaby, balanced before her sink, phone pressed between her shoulder and her chin, washing her feet one at a time. I was strictly a shower girl, because I was a competitive tennis player, which meant I spent summer days scalloped with crusts of sweat and sunscreen. I had never washed only my feet. It had never occurred to me. To wash only your feet struck me as so luxurious it might be inappropriate. And to do this alone, in the summer evenings, every night? It was almost a ministry of self. I loved imagining it.
Sometimes, on the phone with Connor, I’d tried putting my own toes under the faucet, but the bathroom was small and the narrow pedestal sink high, and I ended up slipping. My mother, coming up the stairs, paused on the landing. “You’re not on the phone in the john, are you?”
Before I’d left for school, she arranged a lunch with Gaby and another Chicagoland Paulie, Helena, during that summer of the foot washing. Helena was the daughter of a powerful Chicago philanthropist who chaired the boards of hospitals, schools, and museums. Like Gaby, Helena was a rising fifth former. As an older girl, a returning student, and the child of a famously giving mother, she would be welcoming and kind. I would meet Helena and Gaby downtown, where Helena lived, and have lunch with them in the city. Then Gaby and I would take the Chicago & North Western commuter train an hour back north, to our hometown, and I, before even setting foot on school grounds to begin my fourth-form year, would have two friends.
It didn’t turn out that way. In the parlor of the charity matron’s mansion, Helena asked me who my “old girl” was—the sixth former assigned to be my advocate and buddy through my first year. I’d received a nice letter from the girl chosen for me, welcoming me to the school community. She’d heard I played
