Inside Madeleine (6 page)

Polly kept her eyes on the window. She had no choice really. But it soothed her, too, the blurry red lights. Like this, staring out the window, mesmerized, she fell unconscious.

When she came to, the van was backing up from her alley into a grassy part of the field. Polly wanted to say something.
This is the field, she wanted to say. This is my alley, she wanted to say.

Then she felt their hands on her. They were rolling her, rolling her out of the back of the van. She fell with a thud in the wet, cold grass. Breanna was next to her, but she wasn’t moving either. She felt Breanna’s cold arm against her own and it felt like the coldest thing in the world. She tried to move away from her friend, but she couldn’t move. Then the van lurched forward, and she watched the red taillights and listened to the crunch of the wheels on the black gravel of the alley.

“
Meet me down the alley
,” the song came to her, and she saw her father singing it to her, his eyes wet with tears. “Dad,” she had asked, “can I go to the field to play kick the can?” This was before Jefferson, before her nipples burst, but after the chicken pox. “Sure thing, sweetheart,” he said, and then he sang to her, his arms outstretched toward her as she ran out the door to go play. He sang,
“Come on and meet me down the alley, one last time … Come on and meet me down the alley, we ain’t too young to die … Come on, meet me down the alley, to say goodbye.”
And she’d play and play, damp with salty sweat, running, hiding, kicking the can, relishing the scrape of metal on cement, her heart pumping fast, listening for those words, “
Olly Olly Oxen Free
!” She was down the alley, she was in her field. But it all felt wrong, because she couldn’t move, she couldn’t climb the boysenberry tree. The lights above her, the stars, pulled her eyes to them. They glittered just like the lights of the ferris wheel, like the coming and going lights of the cars snaking along the strip. She watched them, trying not
to think how cold she was. She tried to turn her head to look at her friend, but she couldn’t. And so she did the only thing she could do—stare above at the heavens and pretend they were the taillights on the strip.

R
UTHIE
W
ATERS ENTERED HER DORM ROOM AT
L
YNDON
P
REPARATORY
A
CADEMY WITH A SUITCASE FULL OF WRONG CLOTHES AND HEAVY METAL ALBUMS
.
She sported thick black eyeliner, a lumpy, obviously padded bra, and perfectly feathered hair. She was fourteen years old, from South Bend, Indiana, and when she spoke, her Midwestern accent marked her out. But all of this had changed by Thanksgiving. The curling iron she’d feathered her hair with was buried in the closet, the albums quietly placed in a Dumpster. She had tried desperately to speak differently, and eventually she had.

In Condon Hall, there were sixty girls: the lower mid class, to which she belonged, and the mid class, which was much larger. Her roommate, Alicia Camp, was the only black girl in the dorm. They were the only two not from Park Avenue or Greenwich. Ruthie’s grandmother from Memphis was paying her tuition while Alicia was full scholarship. In fact, Alicia had grown up oftentimes homeless on the streets of Atlanta, her mother mentally ill, or occasionally taken in by her grandmother. She never
knew her father. While Ruthie had very little in common with the Park Avenue girls, she didn’t exactly have much in common with Alicia. And yet, they were both outsiders. Which was something.

That they had both been star students at their respective schools and now struggled at Lyndon was another. Alicia worked very hard and still got poor marks. This crushed her. Ruthie, not accustomed to working hard, fell in with a few girls in the mid class that liked to smoke pot all the time. She worked very little which never had been a problem before, but didn’t do the trick at Lyndon. Nancy White and Melissa Carter, a year older than Ruthie but a lifetime ahead of her, lived across the hall and schooled Ruthie on how to smoke weed in boarding school, which was very different than standing in some alley in South Bend, passing a joint around.

They introduced her to the bong. What a wonderful device! They showed her how to use a hit towel. This involved rolling up a bath or hand towel into a tightly coiled tube, and after sucking down a bong hit, pressing your lips firmly against the towel to exhale. This left a perfect brown impression of lips on the towel, but kept the room free of the aroma of weed, which of course was necessary if one did not want to get expelled. And for all the bitching about Lyndon that went on, no one really wanted to get expelled.

One Friday night, after the hall teacher, a sour middle-aged woman named Miss Cranch, who was both the field hockey coach and a lousy math teacher, had checked all the rooms and
turned in, Ruthie, as planned, snuck over to Nancy and Melissa’s room. The bong hits of boarding school! There was nothing like it. The wealthy simply had better drugs. The weed was expensive and beautiful—tightly coiled balls of bright green with tiny threads of red in it. They all got incredibly stoned. Both Nancy, from Park Avenue, and Melissa, from New Canaan, wore Lanz nightgowns. Ruthie was in a pink T-shirt from JC Penney and her white cotton underwear. They all sat cross-legged on the floor in an intimate circle and whispered, just in case, but also because they were high as kites which for some reason made people whisper.

“We need to get you a nightgown,” said Nancy, leaning toward Ruthie, her dark eyes focused but not unfriendly. She had the shiniest, thickest, black hair. Ruthie stared at her hair. She was beginning to understand so much at Lyndon. Like how the thickness of one’s hair was a testament to coming from a “good” family.

“I have a nightgown, I just hate wearing it,” said Ruthie. It was true, she had one. A synthetic fabric, embarrassing, nothing like the thick cotton of the Lanz nightgowns. Also, she always had hated wearing it; she preferred sleeping in T-shirts and underwear. “It gets all tangled up and I don’t sleep well.”

“Well, you could wear it when you come over at night,” whispered Melissa, who then looked at Nancy. They giggled in silence. This involved putting their hands over their mouths and shaking ever so slightly while smiling with their teeth shut. Then they turned their eyes on Ruthie.

“It’s just that we don’t like looking at your underwear,” said Melissa. She had waist-long hair, the color of wheat. It reminded Ruthie of a horse’s mane. Suddenly, Ruthie missed her horse, very un-creatively named Sandy, back in Indiana.

This was one of those situations that Ruthie played one of two ways; one, she could acquiesce, acknowledging the superiority and rightness of her wealthier, more sophisticated friends. Or, she could play the tough girl from the wrong side of the tracks. The latter worked only some of the time. If it did work, she would garner some fear and awe. When it failed, she was met with either pity or repulsion, or some combination of the two.

“Deal with it,” Ruthie said. She didn’t whisper as well as she should. She was naturally a very loud girl, a Midwestern trait, for sure. “It’s not like we don’t all have the same parts. Don’t be such prudes.” Then she pointed at her crotch. “You each have one of these, too. Or at least I hope you do.”

Nancy and Melissa looked stunned. Part of this was because of how stoned they were. Ruthie tried to read if it had worked or failed. Not that it really mattered. Sometimes, she just tried her hardest and hoped for the best.

“Whatever,” said Nancy.

“Oh fine, I’ll wear my nightgown next time,” Ruthie said.

The following day was Saturday, a half day of classes at Lyndon. Ruthie was not accustomed to school on the weekends and it still was a terrible affront to her. She struggled through Advanced Biology, having entered because science had once
been her best subject. Next came English, where they discussed Shakespeare’s
Richard III
. Was he a bad man? Certainly it was a little bit more complicated than that. Or at least the ways in which he was bad were worthy of discussion. Her teacher was a kind, very tall Asian-American man named Mr. Lin. And lastly, Ruthie chewed her nails through Algebra. Done! She headed back to the dorm where she changed into jeans. Only on Saturday afternoons and Sundays were the children allowed to wear jeans. Thank God Levi’s were a universally okay thing to wear. Alicia was at her desk, despondent over a textbook.

“Classes just ended, Alicia, give it a break!” Ruthie said as she searched for her cigarettes.

Alicia looked up from where she sat. “I’m going to fail. I’m going to fail everything and I have nowhere to go. I can’t go back to Atlanta. You smoke pot all day with those rich girls, and you still get better grades than me.”

“I wouldn’t say I get very good grades,” said Ruthie. She was getting all C’s, except maybe in English and Art a B. This, after being a straight-A student in South Bend.

“You’re not failing.” Alicia turned back to her textbook.

“Ask for extra help.”

“I have.”

Ruthie didn’t know what else to say. “I’m going to the butt room.”

“I figured.”

“I’ll see you later.”

The butt room was located in the basement of Condon Hall
right next to the laundry, which Ruthie greatly underused, as opposed to the butt room, which was like a second home to her. An airless, dingy room with three wooden benches and littered with cigarette butts, it had a pathetic fan that whirred on the ceiling. It was the only place the girls were allowed to smoke. Melissa and Nancy were there, puffing on Merits, which Ruthie switched to after being made fun of for her Kools.

“Ruthie, we’re sneaking out tonight and going over to Bob and Jesse’s room. You should come. They have a great weed and sometimes other stuff.”

Ruthie wanted to hug them but then thought better. “Okay, what time?”

“Midnight, meet in the common room,” Melissa said. She gave her long, straight horse hair a shake.

Midnight came and one by one the girls tiptoed down to the common room, across from the laundry room, spacious, with a few dirty couches and a small television. The windows were ground level. They all listened very carefully. Had anyone heard them? Was Miss Cranch on the prowl? After all telepathically discussing this through wide-eyed stares and deciding they’d gotten this far without getting busted, they carefully opened a window and looked outside. It was a hundred-yard dash to the boys’ dorm. Ruthie noticed that Nancy was wearing deep red lipstick that looked amazing with her dark hair, and Melissa had on delicate blue eyeliner. Ruthie had given up on make-up altogether as her orangey base and black eyeliner were not a hit. She was having a moment of envy and awe. This happened a lot.

Melissa explained, “There’s one night watchman for the whole campus. But we could get unlucky, so if it’s all clear we still need to run like hell.” And that is what they did, without coats or shoes, in the cool October night. It took minutes but it felt a lifetime, and soon the three girls were sitting on Jesse’s bed, with Bob and Martin in the room, too. A tapestry hung on the wall, another over the window. Grateful Dead posters abounded, and the song “Sugar Magnolia” played gently in the room. The boys were less fearful. Their dorm monitor didn’t give a shit. He was the junior lacrosse coach and very handsome. In fact, they claimed he occasionally got high with them. They didn’t even use hit towels.

As perplexing as the girls at Lyndon were to Ruthie, the boys were from another planet. Jesse in particular had the most intense lockjaw. Ruthie often nodded while he talked, but really she had no idea on earth what came out of his mouth. Bob was a little more normal. At least she could understand him. And then there was Martin, a dark-haired, extremely tall boy. He most exotically was from Los Angeles, a place that Ruthie imagined was like a fairy tale from her childhood, full of strange things like dwarves and unbearable sunshine. Everyone gossiped how Martin was heir to a huge department store chain. And then there was the way they dressed. They wore incredibly baggy, ill-fitting, worn corduroys, tie-dyed T-shirts, and beat-up deck shoes which were in stark contrast to the tight jeans and cowboy boots the boys in Indiana wore. She found these boys effeminate, not just because of the way they talked, nor their
slim builds—everyone was a jock in Indiana—but deck shoes? Girls wore them, too. She had never seen them before and yet everyone wore them with a sense of pride, especially if they were falling apart. This baffled Ruthie. Why would young men wear shoes that women also wore? Why were shabby things so cool? These were insanely rich boys. Why didn’t they wear nice clothes? They wore suits when they had to, but otherwise they looked like pansy slobs.

The bong got passed around. Jesse said something, and Ruthie nodded. Soon, everyone was blind stoned. Martin leaned over and opened a package which contained dried up brownish things. “Shrooms,” he said. Melissa and Nancy looked at each other nearly gasping for joy as they popped a couple of the gross looking things in their mouth.

“Come on, Ruthie,” Martin said, lifting one of his bushy black eyebrows. “Don’t you want to trip?”

Ruthie had never tripped and wasn’t so sure she wanted to, but she was a curious, adventurous spirit, otherwise she wouldn’t be in the boys’ dorm, let alone at Lyndon. How many girls from Indiana choose to go to boarding school? Because it was her choice, unlike most of the students. She reached into the package and carefully chose two of the least disgusting shriveled mushrooms. Eating them, she focused on their texture, their musty taste, and then it was over.

What a mistake. Within half an hour everyone else was exploring parts of the room with awe and wonder, exclaiming about the beauty of it all, while Ruthie sat there rigid, seeing
skeletons and blood instead of her friends, never mind her own legs, and the dark demons floating by and through everything visible. As the misery of her trip began to subside, the timid light of dawn shone through the tapestry covering the window. The girls snuck back, forgetting to worry about the guard and getting away with it. Ruthie spent Sunday in bed, only making it to dinner, and even that was a blur.