Tradition Page 7

  I couldn’t calm the nerves jumping through me, so at the end of class, I gathered my things in a rush and bolted out the door, but I got stuck in a crush of other people coming out of Mr. Wilson’s room, so I didn’t get far at all. Jules tapped me on the shoulder, and she and Aileen followed me outside, cornering me on the back steps of Childon Hall.

  “That was a surprise,” Jules said to me. “I thought for sure you were going to have your buddy Ryan’s back.”

  “He’s not my buddy.”

  “He’s on the football team.”

  “I’m not.”

  “And the hockey team.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Seriously,” Aileen said. “Somebody had to shut all that down, and nobody was going to listen to me if I tried.”

  “Well.” Jules hesitated, then drew a slow, conspiratorial smile. “What if I start doing this every class? All class, every class, all day, every day. Normalize that shit.”

  Aileen laughed. “Sounds good. After all, it is normal.”

  “Seriously,” Jules went on. “Walk into any drugstore. Makeup and candy up front, tampons and condoms in the back, by the pharmacy, close to the allergy and flu medications.”

  “Stupid,” Aileen said.

  “Well, here’s the question,” Jules continued. “Will you join me?”

  “Hell, yeah,” Aileen said immediately.

  They both turned to me, Jules cocking her eyebrow, almost daring me, but Aileen taking me in differently, almost patiently. I knew that look, and it warmed me. I shrugged. “All right. Sure,” I told them. “Normalize that shit.”

  Jules looked so determined, more than I’d ever seen her before, eyes narrowed, brows pinched, goal oriented. Focused. It was inspiring. She stood there with her hands on her hips, so certain she knew what the right thing to do was. Heather was gone—off at OSU, she was the real Buckeye, for God’s sake—but what she’d told me about listening had really stuck. Are you listening to what I’m saying? I need you to hear me. Heather had told me I didn’t have a clue sometimes. You need to be a better listener, she’d said.

  Looking at Jules, I realized she was the kind of person who just knew deep down what the right thing to do was, even if everyone else didn’t. If I gave a damn about listening, it seemed like I should start by paying more attention to her.

  Aileen too. The guys at Fullbrook made fun of her, called her the Viking, with those long braids. They always called her dumb and easy, chasing after guys’ attention, but she didn’t feel that way to me. She seemed older and wiser than the rest of us.

  “Hey,” Aileen said to me. “Don’t say you’re going to do a thing and then not do it.”

  “I hear you.”

  She nodded. She kept her hands at her side, she didn’t touch me, but the way she curled a slight smile, it felt like she’d brushed me with her fingertips and stirred a little scattershot of sparks in my stomach. I gulped to keep my voice from cracking. “I’m with you,” I told them both.

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  JULES DEVEREUX

  “You are so disgusting, it actually hurts me,” Aileen said.

  I was taking tight close-ups of a scab on her leg, and I had her flat up against the very brick wall that had scraped her. “I mean it,” she continued. “From deep inside. Not like this stupid cut. Like a deep ‘oh my God you are nuts’ kind of throb in my belly.”

  Aileen and I were in a couple of the same classes, and I’d found a way to partner with her in them. It wasn’t easy, but the time we were spending together was starting to feel more natural. There was something like warmth in the way she glared at me now. And when the class rotation put photo at the end of the day, Aileen and I usually ran off together somewhere so it was just the two of us.

  “This is a work of art,” I said. “Hold still. The light keeps shifting.”

  “That’s because I’m balancing on one leg and I’m no gymnast.” Her other leg was lifted away from her body to catch more of the sunlight, and as soon as I let her know I was done, she dropped her leg and backed away from the wall. “I’ll always remember you,” she said, tapping it with her fingers, the black nails bouncing up and down like flies. “You turned me into a model. Who knew?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Pain. If Diane Arbus can capture it, why can’t we?”

  “Yeah, well, I’m after something else for this project.”

  I rolled my eyes. “All right, I’m weird. I admit it.”

  She laughed. “But so am I.” She picked up her camera from on top of the wall. “And I need your help. I want to do something pretty risky for my project.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re doing nudes.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” She started walking away. I guessed I was supposed to follow. “Nudes?” She dismissed this with a sniff. “That’s not risky.” She shot me the most skeptical glare. It was better than anything I could give anyone. “You’re telling me no one has ever seen you naked?”

  “What? No. I mean, I’m not saying that.”

  “Please,” she said. “Only the boys are going to try something like that and argue that it’s art. Nudes. I can just hear the way they’ll justify that. Simpleminded clichés—all of them.”

  I laughed. The best thing about class had nothing to do with the work and everything to do with Aileen. I wished I’d realized it years earlier—I wished I’d made more of an effort to get to know her. Why had I put all my effort into Gillian and Shriya, who’d so quickly dropped me and were probably actively conspiring against me now? The younger girls were already glancing away from me too, hoping to avoid eye contact so I wouldn’t come talk to them. Gillian and Shriya were everywhere, parading from one moment to the next as if they’d started the tour on that first day of school and were still on it together. I didn’t want to be a part of it, but I didn’t want to be quite so isolated, either. Spending all this time with Aileen, I admired her even more. It took a certain kind of strength to navigate Fullbrook mostly on her own all these years.

  “No, I’m talking really risky,” she continued. “Like, I need your help taking photos inside Cray-Cray’s shed.”

  She nodded, her eyes wide and taunting, like, How tough are you really, Jules? And I had to admit, I kind of liked it.

  “I’m in.”

  Aileen led me around the back of the arts building and down along the edge of the woods toward the pep rally field and then down the slope to the football field. Cray-Cray’s shed was behind the stands, and it was more of a small garage than a shed. He parked one of his two security golf carts there and I had no idea what else. I was impressed. I was so sure I’d been everywhere on campus, that I’d discovered every little hidden corner and crevice. But not this one.

  “Damn,” I said. “I’ve never been here.” I walked ahead of her and tried the door. It was locked. Inside, the garage was two walls of floor-to-ceiling tools, oil cans, carpentry and electrician materials. He wasn’t part of the maintenance staff, but he obviously was enamored with their work. The spot where he usually parked one of his carts was empty; a huge amoeba of oil stained the concrete floor.

  “This is so horror film,” I said, pointing to the rusty saw hanging on the wall in the back. “Does that thing actually work?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s cool. There’s something so creepy about it all. One time I was walking by and I just looked through the window and I saw the way the light cut across the shadows, the way it fell in strips across all that metal. It was pretty cool.”

  “It is.”

  She pulled out her phone and flipped through some other pictures. Black-and-white photos of naked men, light and shadow swirling around their contorted poses. “So Mapplethorpe gave these dudes a kind of noir feel, right? Well, I want to do that with dude-like things. Cray-Cray’s shed seems like the most badass dude-cave at the whole school.”

  I couldn’t hold back. “This is awesome.” I tried the door again. “But it’s locked.
”

  She smiled. “I was walking by, looking for some place to shoot down by the football field, thought that might work, you know how boys love their balls, when I saw Cray-Cray bend down and lift this rock.” She demonstrated with her foot, turning over the rock beside the door. The key was right there. She dipped and grabbed it quickly.

  Once the door was closed, we took it all in. Sunlight cut through the window and sent rhombuses of light knifing across the garage space. “This is amazing,” I said. “But what do you need me for?”

  “To hold things.”

  She went about picking tools off the shelf, holding them in the air so the sunlight bisected them. She passed them to me, tested a few, and kept at it. I watched her work, amazed. “Oh, oh, yes,” she said, digging a canister out of the back of the garage. I recognized it as the strange watering can tool that Cray-Cray used every year at the pep rally. Somehow, instead of water, he slowly dripped fire from this can. He’d built a funeral pyre. Someone had designed an effigy of our rival, Hodges’s mountain lion, and Cray-Cray had burned the whole thing down, ringing the bonfire with narrow trenches of fire in the ground around it, like some Celtic solstice festival from two thousand years ago. He’d used this drip torch to do it all. I’d never forgotten that image of Cray-Cray getting to the end of the circuit and turning back to the screaming student body, grinning wildly in the firelight.

  That’s what Aileen was after. Taking that kind of glory from him for her photo. She gestured for me to hold it up. “That is perfect. That’s the one. Hold it higher.”

  I stood in the light too. I looked back at her through the space between the nozzle and heavy middle cylinder. She took a shot.

  “Whoa,” she said, looking at the photo on her camera. “Okay, now squat. Hold it right there, but disappear so I can’t see you.”

  I liked Aileen’s idea of taking photos of the things that were usually forgotten, the beauty of light resting on bent metal. A can of fire making it into the light, everything else a shadow—it was just like my plan for senior year: focusing on getting into college, and keeping the rest of Fullbrook in the background.

  When we were finished, Aileen wanted to do some more work in the darkroom, a different photo project for another class, so I was on my own. It was late afternoon, and not all that long before we had to get dressed for sit-down dinner in the dining hall, that hour when the teachers seem to disappear and the campus feels quiet and uninhabited, and because the sunlight was warming a golden pool around the base of the old elm outside the admin building, I almost plopped down to lean against it and read for homework, but I didn’t have Paradise Lost with me and I had zero interest in tackling calc, so I went back to my room.

  I found Mary Lyon nearly empty. The first floor was absolutely quiet, and since it felt like I might be missing some meeting I was supposed to attend, I swung downstairs to the common room. When I got there, I found a kind of meeting. Shriya and Gillian were holding court. They stood on one side of the card table, flanked by two other seniors. Their backs were to me, and I saw the horrified faces of twenty girls staring in my direction as I entered the room. I didn’t have to be a psychic to know something weird was going on.

  Gillian noticed some of the girls looking my way, and she turned with a nonchalant grace. She dropped the innocence act as soon as she saw me. “Oh, perfect,” she said. “Jules can help us.”

  We weren’t getting along. Fine. It didn’t matter that we were at odds—I didn’t like how intensely she was making me feel like a disposable rag, to be picked up, used, and thrown away whenever she felt like it.

  “With what?” I said, as if I could jump right back in and assume my place in the hierarchy.

  “Our lesson.” She stepped aside. A bowl with two bunches of bananas sat in the middle of the card table. I immediately regretted feeling left out. I wished I’d stayed back at the tree and just stared up into the sky through the branches. “Every year,” Gillian continued, turning back to the girls, “someone holds this little seminar.”

  I could taste the bitter rind from across the room. I remembered it from my own first year. I hadn’t cried, but some of the girls had. Shriya, for instance. The seniors at the time had picked on her first—the only brown girl in the room. I remembered handing her a paper towel from a dispenser by the sink. Now she was the senior squinting across the room at the younger girls.

  Gillian ticked off her instructions. “And it’s really for your own good.” All four seniors laughed. “I mean, nobody wants to feel bad about it later.”

  Most of the girls sat on the couches or in chairs, but one first year stood in front of all of them, holding a banana. Her name was Lianne and I’d seen her around. She was strikingly pretty, American, but raised somewhere in Europe, and she’d already been caught in the older boys’ hungry gazes—I’d seen them huddled around her, vying for her attention. But in this moment, her usual carefree confidence was gone. She glanced at me, terrified.

  “Go on,” Shriya told her.

  “Do it,” Gillian commanded.

  Lianne closed her eyes for a second and her face lost all expression, as if she’d aged three or four years in an instant. When she opened her eyes again, she gave a slight, frightened smile. She brought the banana up to her lips.

  If Gillian and Shriya and I had still been friends, if I’d still been part of the royalty, parading through my days at Fullbrook, would I have egged Lianne on too? Gillian hadn’t even done it our first year. I’d done it for her—that’s how we’d become friends, really. Simple as that. It scared me—I couldn’t understand why—that she might have forgotten that. Or that she just ignored it and chose to live life in the lie instead. Not me. First the student handbook, then this crap—even in a room full of girls it was all about the guys. It was infuriating. I didn’t know how much longer I could take this shit.

  “Hey, wait,” I said. “You demonstrated, right?” I said to Gillian and Shriya, as I looped around the card table. “Did I miss that already?”

  “What?” Shriya said. She didn’t say anything else. She just stood there blinking at me, disgusted.

  Gillian cleared her throat. “That’s the point,” she said to me. “I mean, I know what I’m doing,” she said, more to the girls than to me. She screwed a smile into her cheeks. “Come on, Lianne. Make it dirty.”

  A couple of the bolder first years laughed, although nervously, and they almost leaned forward, probably grateful it was Lianne up there, not them. I wondered, how did Lianne get picked?

  “Hey,” I said again, interrupting. “Let me show you all how it’s done.”

  Lianne dropped the banana immediately. The sigh that escaped her could have filled a balloon.

  I grabbed another banana from the bowl, cocked my hip to one side, made a duck face at the girls, waited for a couple of laughs, threw Gillian and Shriya the death glare, and then proceeded to peel the banana. “First of all, nobody eats the rind, silly,” I said in my best Betty Boop voice. “Then you just have to enjoy!” I made my eyes wide, then shut them tight as I stuffed as much of the banana into my mouth as I could. I moaned briefly. “Oh my God,” I said with my mouth full. “I just love bananas.” I forced myself to swallow as much as I could and I pushed the rest of the banana into the front of my teeth, banana mush dripping onto my chin and shirt. “Oh my God,” I said again. “You have more!” I grabbed another two bananas and slowly spun them around in front of my mouth. In the worst fake-sexy voice ever, I said, “I love bananas.” I moaned and spit up some and moaned more.

  Most of the girls now laughed, maybe at me, maybe with me. Only Shriya and Gillian stared at me in disgust. “Lianne probably would have been better,” Gillian said. “What happened to you?”

  I ignored her and peeled another banana and stuffed what I could into my already full mouth. “Oooohhh,” I moaned again. “Buh-naw-naaaw.”

  “That’s right,” Gillian said. “Ethan dumped you and now you can’t get any guy to like you.”

&nbs
p; “Wha?” I sort of mumbled. I stopped writhing and stared at her. “I dumped him,” I tried to say, but who knows if anyone could hear me. I started to cough. Banana bits flew out onto the floor. I sniffed for air as my throat began to burn. Nobody helped. They all just watched.

  I ran to the sink beside one of the refrigerators and began to spit up what was in my mouth, but the food wouldn’t come fast enough. I gagged. I stamped my foot, and then the rest of the banana and whatever else I’d had that day just shot up out of me, spraying the sink, my face, my shirt, and all down the side of the cupboard beneath the sink.

  Someone screamed. “Gross!” Then everyone started screaming and laughing, or they weren’t sure which, but letting loose all the same. “That’s disgusting!”

  “Well,” I heard Shriya say. “Now we know who we don’t want to be like.”

  I wiped banana mush from my face. I was crying, from vomiting, and through my tears I watched a few of the first years circle around Lianne and lead her out of the room, as if she’d been the one to go through all that. There was a smile somewhere deep down inside but I couldn’t call it up. Lianne glanced back at me once as she was led out of the room, but she didn’t say anything.

  Gillian shook her head. She and Shriya walked off together, leaving the rest of the bananas behind for someone else to clean up, and I tried to wash the banana off me wherever I could. At least a couple of the first-year girls waited for me and asked if I was okay. I wasn’t, but of course I said I was. I thanked them as best I could.

  Farah, one of the other seniors, asked me if I wanted her to go get Mrs. Attison, or if I wanted her to call the counseling center, see if someone would come over and talk to me.

  “For real?” I barked. “I work at the damn center.”

  “No kidding,” Farah said, straightening. “Well, maybe you need to check yourself in as a patient.”

  She stormed off and I felt like shit for being such a shit. I just wanted to be alone. But then when I was, and I was wiping up the banana mush everywhere around the sink, I realized I didn’t want to be alone. I couldn’t get out of here fast enough—one more year, one more year. But before I did, I wanted to do something. Julianna Devereux, a young woman who did a thing. I wanted to make Fullbrook Academy women-first for once. The tampon normalization campaign was a start. It was small, and it shouldn’t have even been a big deal, but it was at least something I could look forward to doing.