I couldn’t think what I’d done to cause this response. Maybe there was no one there by that name? Maybe I had said it—Susie—wrong?
“Nothing,” said Helena, finally. “She’s just kind of a loser.”
“Oh.”
“She’s kind of…big.”
“Oh.”
I was either too young or too impressionable to respond to cruelty with anger. Instead I set about recalibrating my world. I concluded that the sixth former who had written to me was not in fact kind and inviting, but a big loser. I’d get to school and I’d work out why.
Then they asked what dorm I’d been assigned. Warren House, I told them, pleased that I remembered what had been written on the white form letter mailed to my home. This time their faces stayed aghast. Could it be any worse? Was I marked for misery in some way?
“No, nothing,” said Helena again. “It’s just a new dorm, way out away from, like, everything.”
Well, at least I’d know where the center of campus was, and where it was desirable to be.
“I don’t know anyone in Warren,” added Helena, as if I weren’t clear on who she was by now.
Gaby turned to her. “Kelly got shafted into Warren.”
This was the girl whose music would summon me down to her floor, and whose icing would send me wordlessly straight back up again. The knowledge of it would drop into my mind like a coin into a slot as I stood there staring at her staring at me. Kelly. Of course. You got shafted into Warren. She was a friend to these girls, but I knew nothing about any of it sitting there in Helena’s living room, waiting to head out for a summer lunch.
“Oh, right,” said Helena. “That sucks.”
On the way to the restaurant, Helena took Gaby’s arm ahead of me on the sidewalk. I kept up so I could hear them talk. “Wow, Gab,” she said. “We’re fifth formers now.”
I could think of nothing to say. I was obsessing over big Susie and my hopeless dorm. The cold exhilaration of total uncertainty had been replaced by the certainty of gloom. After lunch, which was in the café of the Neiman Marcus store on Michigan Avenue (my mother had zipped a few twenties into my little canvas purse to treat), Helena hailed a cab. I guessed Gaby and I would head back home. It was sooner than I’d hoped—nothing good had happened, and I had hoped for something good—but I’d be relieved to settle onto the train. Maybe Gaby and I could talk. We had Connor in common. We had summer evenings in our small town in common. And this big New Hampshire school, which I was slated to begin.
Helena stepped forward to open the taxi door for me—so polite, so adult—here, finally, was the daughter of the mother I’d heard so much about. I slid onto the seat. With Gaby on the pavement beside her, she called out “Chicago and North Western Station,” slammed the door, and the driver pulled away from the curb. They were rid of their charge.
The city block slid along the windshield, slipped so easily across its face as we moved forward. I was surprised by the back of the driver’s head. Would he talk to me? What should I say?
It was fine. What fourteen-year-old can’t take the train alone? Still, I piped up and asked the driver to take me to the address of my dad’s office in the inner Loop instead. Nobody but Dad expressed surprise to see me there, alone at midday, so I waited, reading in a chair, until I could ride home with him.
Now that I was an actual fourth former, in my faraway crappy dorm with my loser old girl, poor Gaby still had to ride with me back and forth to school. Our mothers had arranged this, and I felt sorry for Gaby that she had to suffer it. I’d have been happy to take the bus into Boston and transfer to Logan Airport by myself, finding solidarity in the apathy of public transportation, but that would have terrified my parents. Early on the morning that we were released for Thanksgiving, I climbed into the livery car to find not only Gaby but her boyfriend, too. He was the son of the scion, and the car was his treat.
“Huh. You’re Lacy,” he said.
I said hello. The leather seat was delicious—deep gray and soft as a cat.
“You’re also from Lake Forest,” he said.
His stating the obvious made me nervous—like he was calling my bluff. What was I supposed to say to these things?
But this boy, Stewart, was smiling. “Another Lake Forester,” he said. “Another little Lake Forest redhead.” Cajoling. I saw now why he was smiling: it was silly, how similar we all were, the Waspy girls from the same towns.
I nodded. “I am.”
“Lake Forest is like the Greenwich of the Midwest,” he mocked. Stewart was himself on the way home to Connecticut. “You guys are so sweet to be proud of your snooty little prairie town.” He nudged Gaby, and I saw through the scrim of her hair how her cheeks rose in a smile. “I always tease Gaby that she lives in a junior-varsity suburb. You’re JV Greenwich. You guys aren’t starters. But that’s cool. We like you anyway.”
I loved him for saying this. I loved him for finally calling out one tiny corner of the vast labyrinth of hierarchies that ruled the world of St. Paul’s School. Status was our first language, one that had to be learned, instantly, if you did not arrive fluent (and many students did); and it functioned like some primitive, instinctive form of communication beneath the surface of every exchange. We knew the grammar of privilege
