These girls called me “Lace” and patted their beds to invite me to sit. Shivery with hope and envy, I pressed my palms into their quilts. They were new students too, and their attentions allowed me to imagine a benevolent map of the school, beginning with this dorm and the tremendous luck of the room draw that had put them on the same hall. My exclusion was awful but thrilling: these girls were here together, I figured, because of some virtue mysteriously apparent before they’d even arrived on campus. I felt I belonged with them. The school had not. I could not work out the mix of luck, legacy, and smart manipulation that allowed students to flourish or doomed them to fail through the school’s opaque administration. But I had no doubt that everything was coded. Everything offered tells, if only you knew where to look.
Take my big-city friends, New York and Washington. Was it coincidence they ended up assigned to the same room, where they could stay up all night swapping couture blazers and plotting trips to islands? I tested this theory with the Kittredge girls, who thought these two were bitchy and strange but were fascinated to learn the tips I’d received, like how to give a hand job in a yellow taxicab or which debutante balls were not worth bothering with. In quieter tones I revealed to them rare moments of vulnerability. I lowered my voice almost to a whisper when I told them about the late night back in October when the senior girls on the third floor had come into my big-city friends’ room to do facials. This was the invitation New York and D.C. had been waiting for. The seniors in Simpson House were glamorous and highly styled. They came in fully equipped and took the new girls’ faces in their hands. They steamed their cheeks with warm towels and covered their eyes with lavender-scented muslins from the most luxurious cosmetics lines. They tipped my friends’ heads back into their laps, massaged their soft skin, said it was time for the world’s most nourishing mask, and lovingly applied plaster of paris instead.
The Kittredge girls could not speak when I told them this. Cruelty was electric. Its proximity enlivened us and drove us closer together.
I remember one evening in this first winter, when the Lower School Pond had frozen over sufficiently that the crew had set up hockey boards so we could play outside. Saturday night there were lights, and long card tables propped on the frozen grass to hold tankards of hot cocoa and red paper cups. Some of the theater kids dragged out stereo equipment. I met the Kittredge girls at the edge of the pond to lace up. Skating without pads or a helmet, in jeans and a jacket and soft red gloves, made me feel like a passenger who got to shake off the jet and just soar. The ice was knotted, and in the spotlights it was impossible to work out depth of field. We skittered and zoomed. Above us towered the illuminated steeple of the chapel, whose bells marked our hours. For a while we batted around some pucks. Brooke and Maddy, who were the best of us, joined the boys for a bit. But eventually we set all that down and just skated. The pond was frozen across to the far woods, but away from the lights the ice seemed to disappear. We giggled and called to one another. Sometimes we lost sight of a friend, who’d then return, squealing, racing in from the dark distance. I remember feeling that my friendships had come to life. I remember going very fast, closing my eyes, and imagining the deep water beneath me completely still.
In the wintertime, Seated Meal dropped to two nights a week, on the theory that it was too dark and cold for us to have to dress up after sports every evening. Nights we did not have Seated, we could shuffle up to the dining halls and choose our spot among the two rooms set aside for cafeteria dining—they were called Middle and Lower. Middle was brighter and larger than Lower, though still, on winter evenings, almost industrial in the way the black windows glowered at us. Lower, with its accordingly low ceiling, was positively denlike. Overflow panels of alumni names were pegged along two of the walls here and downlit, creating a spectacle of departed alumni. These belonged to far more recent classes, including some older brothers and even sisters of kids we knew (it took a lot of hallway before female names began to show up). By unspoken compact, Lower was a fifth- and sixth-form haunt, but my friend Brooke thought this was bunk.
“Why not?” she asked, tray in hand, loaded with fruit and whatever protein was identifiable, and she headed down the long, forbidden hall.
We followed her past the tanks of milk and the toasters, which were always running (toast was a reliable source of basic sustenance), and into the oddly lit room. The walls were bright, the center dark, and your eyes seemed never to adjust. This was probably why the older kids liked it—there was room for uncertainty, like hanging out in the shadows or at the back of the bus. As we came in, heads turned, mostly male. Caroline in particular could send
