The Twisted Thread (6 page)

The scuffling resumed a little more loudly, and suddenly frightened, Madeline sprang up and yanked open the door. Hissing in surprise, she found Lee Hastings, Suzy Kim, Portia Hall, and Olu Obodone standing there in a shifting clump. “Miss Christopher?” said Lee. “Can we come talk to you?”

Which was how Madeline found herself spending the evening with four girls in pajamas seated on the floor around her coffee table. She put out cookies and made them tea, which they accepted with grave gratitude. They were Portland's most formidable, apart from Claire. Lee was brilliant; Suzy a superb chemistry student off to Yale; Portia an English girl heading first to Brazil for a year and then to Oxford; Olu a Nigerian heiress bound for Wharton. These girls had possibilities at eighteen that Madeline could barely fathom. Unlike her sister, she'd been addled and thrown off track during her parents' multiple divorces and remarriages. All that domestic turmoil had affected her notions of how much grades mattered, and as a consequence, it was clear she didn't stand a chance of becoming Armitage material. By the time she'd recovered herself, she was ensconced at a private school outside Boston where the head was thirty-three, long-haired, and called Duff-Man or Duff-Meister even by the vice principal. An institution where they started the day with a quasi-Quaker assembly that featured a lot of acoustic guitar and harmonica playing. Teachers often slept through it, and dogs frequently burst in and scampered across the floor. A friend of Madeline's had gotten full credit for an English class by going to women's marches in Washington and memorizing some Adrienne Rich.

A far cry from Armitage, with its assumption of worldly success that students like these girls seemed to treat as their birthright. But watching their frail collarbones through their pajama tops made Madeline aware that they were still teenagers and fantastically inexperienced. They'd certainly never dealt with anything like a classmate dying just a floor above their heads. That event appeared momentous enough to dislodge their considerable poise.

“Have the police talked with you yet, Miss Christopher? I mean, have they really interviewed you?” Lee asked. Being addressed so formally still took her aback. Yet any means to distinguish herself from the students was useful. She'd hung on to the “Miss” for dear life all year, despite all the Jodis and Lilas who'd taught her in high school. When Madeline shook her head, Lee said, “You should hear what we know before they do.”

It was about what had happened to Claire, of course. They—by this, Lee meant the four of them—had guessed a long time ago that Claire was pregnant. Suzy cut in and said they'd suspected as far back as October, but Claire wouldn't say anything, even when they found her throwing up in the bathroom.

“But that's not unusual around here,” Portia said flatly, assuming correctly that Madeline would know what she was talking about. Bulimia was rampant. Nina the counselor had warned Madeline early on to pay attention to toilets that seemed to flush a lot or at unusual times of day.

“She barely gained any weight,” Suzy continued. “Only about ten pounds, and she needed to gain ten pounds. And once she was through the first part of the second trimester, she felt better.” By March, she'd grudgingly admitted what was going on. She refused to go to a doctor, but she had stopped drinking coffee and begun to take prenatals. “We made sure she ate and drank a lot of water,” Suzy added.

Second trimester, prenatals. These girls were as comfortable with the terminology as a brood of newly married women. Madeline began to see that Claire's pregnancy had become a kind of dorm project. “Why didn't you tell anyone?” she wanted to shout, as before. But knowing if she revealed anything but studied interest they would clamp the story shut, she simply drank her scalding tea and nodded vigorously.

As if anticipating Madeline's queries, Olu said, very softly, “One of the reasons we didn't say anything was that she told us if we told anyone—parents, teachers, anyone—she'd give herself an abortion.” The girls looked at one another then, and no one spoke for a moment. Madeline could imagine Claire saying this in her clear, low voice, and worse, she could imagine her doing it. There had been something profoundly detached in Claire. Madeline might have believed her, too. These girls, socially and intellectually as suave as the dead girl, wouldn't have been intimidated in the same way that Sally Jansen was, however. They weren't Claire's vassals, they were her equals. And still they'd been in her thrall. Or maybe in the thrall of someone caught inside an unequivocally adult situation.

“But there's more to it than that,” Portia said quietly and looked at her friends to see if they'd permit her to keep speaking. “We tied the thread with her about the pregnancy, and then she violated the terms.”

“The thread?” Madeline asked, wondering if this was yet another piece of teenspeak she'd missed out on.

Lee took up the story. “You know about traditions?” she asked Madeline.

Madeline said, “Well, I know what they say in the faculty handbook,” an answer that made the girls exchange tilted, smirking smiles. Traditions were discussed on one page, deep in the document's interior, and referred to as “activities and informal gatherings that students engage in year to year.” In slightly sterner language, the handbook noted that hazing and other forms of unacceptable behavior had once been linked to some of these experiences, but any form of harassment was not to be tolerated and was to be reported immediately to the dean of students. But the knowing glance the girls gave one another confirmed Madeline's suspicions. An entire river of activity flowed on below the more obvious daily competitions that animated Armitage.

“Most of them,” Lee continued, “are pretty sophomoric: new kids get assigned to older ones and they do things together. Some of the dorms have a history of doing pranks at certain times of the year.” There were historic rivalries for reasons no one could remember, like between Dunlop and Cantwell, two of the girls' dorms. “But there's only one or two any of us takes seriously.” Lee's voice grew even lower.

“The Reign was the big one. I know this will sound weird. It's something we don't really describe to people outside.” Here she did waver slightly. She took a sip of tea and then said, “Claire was the head. She was Robespierre.”

“Robespierre?” Madeline asked. “The French guy who cut off the king's head?” When Lee first said “reign,” Madeline had thought she meant “precipitation,” curious as it sounded. The Head of the Rain? Was it a regatta, like the Head of the Charles? This, however, was immeasurably more disturbing. The name Robespierre conjured a vague memory of a powdered wig, sharp nose, and then, of course, the phrase
Reign of Terror
. The pale napes of duchesses waiting for the slanted descent of the guillotine in the Place de la Concorde. Madeline gobbled another cookie to keep herself from shouting. A secret society called the Reign of Terror had operated under their noses, and Claire, known as Robespierre, had run it? And all this time she thought they were only fretting about getting in early to college.

Madeline knew she had to appear impassive or the girls would stow the entire story and flee. “Go on,” she said, sounding only slightly strangled, she hoped. Slowly, Lee began to speak again. Every year, the head of the tradition picked the next one, and “they were always girls like Claire.” Which meant, Madeline assumed, beautiful, rich, and terrifying.

“Had she chosen her successor?” Madeline asked, and Suzy shook her head. “That was something that happened the very last day of school. We have no idea who she had in mind. She had stopped talking to us about anything.”

That was the problem, Lee interjected. When you belonged to the Reign, you had to secure permission from the others to enact certain of its rituals.

Rituals. Secrets. Permission. Madeline felt goose bumps rise on her arms despite the heat. She had attended schools so ridiculous merely getting students to come to class on a regular basis had been the primary focus of every teacher there. Kids had generally been so sloppy about everything from what they wore to the completion of their homework, they would never have been able to summon the energy, much less the guile required to form a quasi-governmental force orchestrating all kinds of activities without any supposed grown-ups cottoning on. A little more subtle probing revealed that the Reign was basically a way, sometimes a rather frightening way, of establishing the hierarchy of old girl versus new girl, a way to be sure that no one stepped out of her social place and that the powerful remained so. The girls tried to downplay any real influence the group had, though Madeline suspected they and anyone else affected took the whole experience to heart. But there were other aspects to it. A group of girls served as its central committee, and these, too, were chosen every year on the last day of school. All four of the girls in front of her were members, confirmed with solemn, rather prideful nods when Madeline asked.

“And that was it. There are ten of us on campus, with Robespierre in charge. No members allowed to leave, and no one else can join.” They sat there on Madeline's less than vacuumed floor and looked at her with their wide, calm eyes. She wondered if their contingency plans might ever include armed insurrection against all the dense adults around them. What would they have been like in, say, Congo, with some rifles, revolutionary theory, and true oppression to motivate them? It was a very alarming vision, and at that moment, she would have thought them capable of anything.

She forced herself to look unsurprised and asked something she hoped wouldn't be seen as too prying: How long had the group been around? Lee shrugged. She thought since the seventies, when girls were first admitted. And it had died out when there were more girls, but someone in the nineties had revived it.

Lee said then Claire had invoked one of the most sacred of the Reign's rituals, which was the making of a braided thread—always red, and braided with a few hairs from the members' heads—that meant those who wore it vowed secrecy for life about a certain topic. Then they were to wear it until it wore off, naturally somewhere outsiders weren't likely to see it. “When you twist the thread with the Reign, you have to vow not to tell roommates, boyfriends, anybody. Even husbands, later.”

“And you can't just use it for something ordinary,” Portia added, “like going into rehab. It's only for really important things.”

Madeline thought rehab sounded pretty important, but she took their point. A few weeks drying out somewhere was numbingly common for kids not only in the shabby schools Madeline had attended but here, where even more money created even greater ease of access to illicit substances. And she could understand that getting and remaining pregnant probably constituted something many teenagers would want to keep secret. She also couldn't help but notice that the list of people not to tell included all grown-ups: parents, teachers, advisers. Yet they were so palpably not useful as confidants they hadn't even merited mentioning.

But the way Claire had invoked the thread had broken an essential rule. “She twisted it with us first, and then she went outside the Reign. She never told us she had done it. She totally abused her position,” Portia said accusingly. “She went to Sally, Margaret, Kelly, and Anna, and initiated them without asking us.” It still made them angry, these tall, beautiful girls, to have those lesser beings violate their private clan. Or were they upset more because Claire simply hadn't chosen only them to share the secret with?

“We figured it out pretty quickly,” Olu said, with a certain satisfaction. “Sally couldn't help but show hers.” She almost snorted, and they all shook their heads in mild disgust at Sally's inability to control herself. Still, Claire's betrayal irked them.

“We don't know what Claire told them exactly, if it was any different from what she said to us,” Portia said. “Even Sally refused to talk.” Madeline did not quite want to imagine what they might have said or done to Sally to get her to that point. The memory of the girl's shaking shoulders, her deep grief, was still ringing through Madeline's own body. Claire must have been desperate to reach so far beneath her and to have turned so abruptly from her natural peers.

An uneasy stillness settled in the room then. Madeline searched for something that might keep them talking and asked if everyone, even those outside the group—she couldn't bring herself to say “the Reign”—had known that Claire was pregnant and that she had had a baby. It struck her, too, that the girls hadn't needed some clandestine group to preserve silence. That had happened quite effectively on its own.

Most did, Lee said, but there were always a few who were kept out of the loop, and Madeline could guess which ones before Lee told her. Priya Srinivasan, who was fifteen, a math and piano prodigy, probably somewhere on the Asperger's scale, and certainly no one these girls would confide in. And Allison Hartley, who had spent most of the semester either smoking pot or getting caught at it. She'd been suspended the bulk of the last two months and was rumored to be drying out somewhere in the Berkshires. She was also the student with whom Madeline had felt most comfortable. Allison's body was swathed in layers of Indian skirts and chunky wool sweaters, and she had hair that had probably once been blond and was now a mouse brown, dreadlocked hive. But under all those clove cigarettes, Fred had noted, you could still smell Greenwich.

Minus Priya and Allison, however, by this spring, everyone had been aware that Claire was pregnant and had twisted a thread with girls outside the Reign. Still, the question remained. Why hadn't Claire taken the easier route and obtained an abortion to begin with?

When Madeline voiced that concern, Lee said, “This is something we've talked a lot about. I think it was too late by the time she figured it out. A second- or third-trimester abortion is an entirely different kind of procedure,” she said sternly. “She just couldn't believe it was true,” Lee finished.