File loading please wait...

Citation preview

Annie On My Mind by Nancy Garden Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (Juv); ISBN: 0-374404143; Reissue edition (September 1992)



It's raining, Annie. Liza--Eliza Winthrop stared in surprise at the words she'd just written; it was as if they had appeared without her bidding on the page before her. "Frank Lloyd Wright's house at Bear Run, Pennsylvania," she had meant to write, "is one of the earliest and finest examples of an architect's use of natural materials and surroundings to ..." But the gray November rain splashed insistently against the window of her small dormitory room, its huge drops shattering against the glass as the wind blew. Liza turned to a fresh page in her notebook and wrote: Dear Annie, It's raining, raining the way it did when I met you last November, drops so big they run together in ribbons, remember? Annie, are you all right? Are you happy, did you find what you wanted to find in California? Are you singing? You must be, but you haven't said so in your letters. Do other people get goose-bumps when you sing, the way I used to? Annie, the other day I saw a woman who reminded me of your grandmother, and I thought of you, and your room, and the cats, and your father telling stories in his cab when we went for that drive on Thanksgiving. Then your last letter came, saying you're not going to write any more till



you hear from me. It's true I haven't written since the second week you were in music camp this summer. The trouble is that I kept thinking about what happened--thinking around it, really--and I couldn't write you. I'm sorry. I know it's not fair. It's especially not fair because your letters have been wonderful, and I know I'm going to miss them. But I don't blame you for not writing any more, really I don't. Annie, I still can't write, I guess, for I already know I'm not going to mail this. Liza closed her eyes, absently running her hand through her short, already touseled brownish hair. Her shoulders were hunched tensely in a way that made her look, even when she stood up, shorter than the 5'3" she really was. She moved her shoulders forward, then back, in an unconscious attempt to ease the ache that had come from sitting too long at her drawing board and afterwards at her desk. The girl who lived across the hall teased her for being a perfectionist, but since many of the other freshman architecture students had arrived at MIT--Massachusetts Institute of Technology--fresh from summer internships with large firms, Liza had spent her first weeks trying doggedly to catch up. Even so, there was still an unfinished floor plan on her drawing board, and the unfinished Frank Lloyd Wright paper on her desk. Liza put down her pen, but in a few moments picked it up again. What I have to do, I think, before I can mail you a letter, is sort out what happened. I have to work through it all again--everything--the bad parts, but the good ones too---us and the house and Ms. Stevenson and Ms. Widmer, and Sally and Walt, and Ms. Baxter and Mrs. Poindexter and the trustees, and my parents and poor bewildered Chad. Annie--there are things I'm going to have to work hard at remembering. But I do want to remember, Liza thought, going to her window. I do want to, now. The rain hid the Charles River and most of the campus; she could barely see the building opposite hers. She looked across at it nonetheless, willing it to blur into--what? Her street in Brooklyn Heights, New York, where she'd lived all her life till now? Her old school, Foster Academy, a few blocks away from her parents' apartment? Annie's street in Manhattan; Annie's school? Annie herself, as she'd looked that first November day... Mrs. Widmer, who taught English at Foster Academy, always said that the best way to begin a story is to start with the first important or exciting incident and then fill in the background. So I'm going to start with the rainy Sunday last November when I met Annie Kenyon. I've wanted to be an architect since long before I could spell the word, so I've always spent a lot of time at museums. That day, to help focus my ideas for the solar house I was designing for my senior project, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to visit the Temple of Dendur and the American Wing. The museum was so full of people I decided to start with the American Wing, because it's sometimes less crowded, especially up on the third floor where I wanted to go. And at first it seemed as if that



was going to be true. When I got to the top of the stairs, everything was so quiet that I thought there might even be no one there at all--but as I started walking toward the colonial rooms, I heard someone singing. I remember I stood and listened for a minute and then went toward the sound, mostly out of curiosity, but also because whoever it was had a wonderful voice. There was a girl about my age--seventeen--sitting at a window in one of the oldest colonial rooms, singing and gazing outside. Even though I knew that the only thing outside that window was a painted backdrop, there was something about the girl, the gray cape she was wearing, and the song she was singing, that made it easy to imagine "Plimoth" Plantation or Massachusetts Bay Colony outside instead. The girl looked as if she could have been a young colonial woman, and her song seemed sad, at least the feeling behind it did; I didn't pay much attention to the words. After a moment or two, the girl stopped singing, although she still kept looking out the window. "Don't stop," I heard myself saying. "Please." The girl jumped as if my voice had frightened her, and she turned around. She had very long black hair, and a round face with a small little-kid's nose and a sad-looking mouth but it was her eyes I noticed most. They were as black as her hair and they looked as if there was more behind them than another person could possibly ever know. "Oh," she said, putting her hand to her throat--it was a surprisingly long, slender hand, in contrast to the roundness of her face. "You startled me! I didn't know anyone was there." She pulled her cape more closely around her. "It was beautiful, the singing," I said quickly, before I could feel self-conscious. I smiled at her; she smiled back, tentatively, as if she were still getting over being startled. "I don't know what that song was, but it sounded just like something someone would have sung in this room." The girl's smile deepened and her eyes sparkled for just a second. "Oh, do you really think so?" she said. "It wasn't a real song--I was just making it up as I went along. I was pretending that I was a colonial girl who missed England--you know, her best friend, things like that. And her dog--she'd been allowed to take her cat but not her dog." She laughed. "I think the dog's name was something terribly original like Spot." I laughed, too, and then I couldn't think of anything more to say. The girl walked to the door as if she were going to leave, so I quickly said, "Do you come here often?" Immediately I felt myself cringe at how dumb it sounded. She didn't seem to think it was dumb. She shook her head as if it were a serious question and said, "No. I have to spend a lot of time practicing, only that gets dull sometimes." She tossed her hair back over the shoulder of her cape. The cape fell open a little and I could see that under it she was wearing a very uncolonial pair of green corduroy jeans and a brown sweater. "Practicing?" I asked. "Singing, you mean?" She nodded and said



in an offhand way, "I'm in this special group at school. We keep having to give recitals. Do you come here often?" She was standing fairly close to me now, leaning against the door frame, her head tipped a little to one side. I told her I did and explained about wanting to be an architect and about the solar house. When I said I was going to the Temple of Dendur, she said she'd never seen it except from outside the museum, and asked, "Mind if I come?" I was surprised to find that I didn't; I usually like to be by myself in museums, especially when I'm working on something. "No," I said. "Okay--I mean, no, I don't mind." We walked all the way downstairs, me feeling kind of awkward, before I had the sense to say, "What's your name". "Annie Kenyon, she said. "What ... what's that?" I said "Liza Winthrop" before I realized that wasn't what she'd asked. We'd just gotten to the medieval art section, which is a big open room with a magnificent choir screen--an enormous gold-painted wrought-iron grating--running across the whole back section. Annie stood in front of it, her eyes very bright. "It's from a Spanish cathedral" I said, showing off. "668 ..." "It's beautiful," Annie interrupted. She stood there silently, as if in awe of the screen, and then bowed her head. Two or three people coming in glanced at her curiously and I tried to tell myself it was ridiculous for me to feel uneasy. You could walk away, I remember thinking; you don't know this person at all. Maybe she's crazy. Maybe she's some kind of religious fanatic. But I didn't walk away, and in a couple of seconds she turned, smiling. "I'm sorry," she said as we left the room, "if I embarrassed you." "That's okay," I said. Even so, I led Annie fairly quickly to the Hall of Arms and Armor, which I usually go through on my way to the temple. The Hall is one of my favorite parts of the museum--one is greeted at its door by a life-sized procession of knights in full armor, on horseback. The first knight has his lance at the ready, pointed straight ahead, which means right at whoever walks in. Annie seemed to love it. I think that's one of the first things that made me decide I really did like her, even though she seemed a little strange. "Oh--look!" she exclaimed, walking around the procession. "Oh--they're wonderful!" She walked faster, flourishing an imaginary lance, and then began prancing as if she were on horseback herself. Part of me wanted to join in; as I said, I've always loved those knights myself, and besides, I'd been a King Arthur nut when I was little. But the other part of me was stiff with embarrassment. "Annie," I began, in the warning voice my mother used to use when my brother and I got too exuberant as children. But by then Annie had pretended to fall off her horse, dropping her lance. She drew an imaginary sword so convincingly I knew I was admiring



her skill in spite of myself, and then when she cried, "En garde! Stand and fight or I'll run you through!" I knew I wasn't going to be able to keep from smiling much longer. "If you do not fight me, knight," she said, "you will rue the day that ever you unhorsed me here in this green wood!" I had to laugh then, her mood was so catching. Besides, by then I'd noticed that the only other people around were a couple of little boys at the opposite end of the Hall. In the next minute I completely stopped resisting. I imagined a horse and leapt down from it, crying in my best King Arthur style, "I will not fight an unhorsed knight and me mounted. But now that I am on the ground, you will not live to tell the tale of this day's battle!" I pretended to throw aside my lance and draw a sword, too. "Nor you!" cried Annie with a lack of logic that we laughed about later. "Have at you, then!" she shouted, swiping at me with her sword. In another minute we were both hopping in and out of the procession of knights, laying about with our imaginary swords and shouting chivalrous insults at each other. After about the third insult, the little boys left the other end of the Hall and came over to watch us. "I'm for the one in the cape!" one of them shouted. "Go, Cape!" "I'm not," said his friend. "Go, Raincoat!" Annie and I caught each other's eyes and I realized that we were making a silent agreement to fight on till the death for the benefit of our audience. The only trouble was, I wasn't sure how we were going to signal each other which one of us was going to die and when. "Here--what's going on here? Stop that, you two, this instant--old enough to know better, aren't you?" I felt a strong hand close around my shoulder and I turned and saw the uniform of a museum guard topped by a very red, very angry face. "We're terribly sorry, sir," Annie said, with a look of such innocence I didn't see how anyone could possibly be angry at her. "The knights are so--so splendid! I've never seen them before--I got carried away." "Harrumph!" the guard said, loosening his hold on my shoulder and saying again, "Old enough to know better, both of you." He glared at the two little boys, who by now were huddled together, mouths wide open. "Don't let this give you any ideas," he roared after them as they scurried off like a pair of frightened field mice. When they were gone, the guard scowled at us again--he scowled, that is, but his eyes didn't look angry. "Darn good fight," he grunted. "Ought to do Shakespeare in the Park, you two. But no more, he said, shaking his finger. "Not here--understand?" "Oh, yes, sir," Annie said contritely, and I nodded, and we stood there practically holding our breaths as he lumbered away. The second he was gone, we both burst out laughing. "Oh, Liza," Annie said, "I don't know



when I've had so much fun." "Neither do I," I said truthfully. "And, hey, guess what? I wasn't even embarrassed, except right at the beginning." Then a funny thing happened. We looked at each other, really looked, I mean, for the first time, and for a moment or two I don't think I could have told anyone my name, let alone where I was. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, and I think--I know--it scared me. It was a bit longer before I could speak, and even then all I could say was, "Come on--the temple's this way." We went silently through the Egyptian section, and I watched Annie's face as we walked into the Sackler Wing and she saw the Temple of Dendur, with the pool and open space in front of it. It's a sight that stuns most people, and it still stuns me, even though I've been there many times. It's the absence of shadows, I think, and the brightness-- stark and pure, even on a day as rainy as that one was. Light streams in through glass panels that are as open as the sky and reflects from the pool, making the temple's present setting seem as vast and changeable as its original one on the river Nile must have been thousands of years ago. Annie gasped as soon as we walked in. "It's outdoors!" she said. "Like it, I mean. But--but exactly like it." She threw out her arms as if embracing all of it, and let out her breath in an exasperated sigh, as if she were frustrated at not being able to find the right words. "I know," I said; I'd never felt I'd found the right words, either--and Annie smiled. Then, her back very straight, she walked slowly around the pool and up to the temple as if she were the goddess Isis herself, inspecting it for the first time and approving. When she came back, she stood so close to me our hands would have touched if we'd moved them. "Thank you," she said softly, "for showing me this. The choir screen, too." She stepped back a little. "This room seems like you." She smiled. "Bright and clear. Not somber like me and the choir screen." "But you're ..." I stopped, realizing I was about to say beautiful--surprised at thinking it, and confused again. Annie's smile deepened as if she'd heard my thought, but then she turned away. "I should go," she said. "It's getting late." "Where do you live?" The words slipped out before I could think much about them. But there didn't seem any reason not to ask. "Way uptown," Annie said, after hesitating a moment. "Here ..." She pushed her cape back and groped in a pocket, pulling out a pencil stub and a little notebook. She scribbled her address and phone number, tore the page off, and handed it to me. "Now you have to give me yours." I did, and then we just sort of chatted as we walked back through the Egyptian section and outside into the rain. I don't remember what we said; but I do remember feeling that something important had happened, and that words didn't matter much. In a few more minutes, Annie was on a cross town bus, and I was heading in the opposite direction to get the IRT subway home



to Brooklyn. I was halfway home before I realized I hadn't done any thinking about my solar-house project at all. 2 The next day, Monday, was warm, more like October than November, and I was surprised to see that there were still leaves left on the trees after the rain the day before. The leaves on the street were almost dry, at least the top layer of them, and my brother Chad and I shuffled through them as we walked to school. Chad's two years younger than I, and he's supposed to look like me: square, and blue-eyed, with what Mom calls a "heart-shaped face." About three years after Mom and Dad were married, they moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where MIT is, to Brooklyn Heights, just across from lower Manhattan. The Heights isn't at all like Manhattan, the part of New York that most people visit--in many ways it's more like a town than a city. It has more trees and flowers and bushes than Manhattan, and it doesn't have lots of big fancy stores, or vast office buildings, or the same bustling atmosphere. Most of the buildings in the Heights are residential--four- or five-story brownstones with little back and front gardens. I've always liked living there, although it does have a tendency to be a bit dull in that nearly everyone is white, and most people's parents have jobs as doctors, lawyers, professors--or VIP's in brokerage firms, publishing houses, or the advertising business. Anyway, as Chad and I shuffled through the leaves to school that Monday morning, Chad was muttering the Powers of Congress and I was thinking about Annie. I wondered if I'd hear from her and if I'd have the nerve to call her if I didn't. I had put the scrap of paper with her address on it in the corner of my mirror where I would see it whenever I had to brush my hair, so I thought I probably would call her if she didn't call me first. Chad tugged my arm he looked annoyed--no, exasperated. "Huh?" I said. "Where are you, Liza? I just went through the whole list of the Powers of Congress and then asked you if it was right and you didn't even say anything." "Good grief, Chad, I don't remember the whole list." "I don't see why not, you always get A's in everything. What's the point of learning something sophomore year if you're only going to forget it by the time you're a senior?" He shoved his hair back in the way that usually makes Dad say he needs a haircut, and picked up a double handful of leaves, cascading them over my head and grinning--Chad's never been able to stay mad at anyone very long. "You must be in love or something, Lize," he said, using the one-syllable nickname he has for me. Then he went back to my real name and chanted, "Liza's in love, Liza's in love ..." Funny, that he said that. By then we were almost at school, but I slung my book bag over my shoulder and pelted him with leaves the rest



of the way to the door. Foster Academy looks like an old wooden Victorian mansion, which is exactly what it was before it was made into an independent--private--school running from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Some of the turrets and gingerbready decorations on its dingy white main building had begun to crumble away since I'd been in Upper School (high school), and each year more kids had left to go to public school. Since most of Foster's money came from tuition and there were only about thirty kids per class, losing more than a couple of students a year was a major disaster. So that fall the Board of Trustees had consulted a professional fund raiser who had helped "launch" a "major campaign," as Mrs. Poindexter, the headmistress, was fond of saying. By November, the parents' publicity committee had put posters all over the Heights asking people to give money to help the school survive, and there were regular newspaper ads, and plans for a student recruitment drive in the spring. As a matter of fact, when I threw my last handful of leaves at Chad that morning, I almost hit the publicity chairman for the fund drive instead--Mr. Piccolo, father of one of the freshmen. I said, "Good morning, Mr. Piccolo," quickly, to cover what I'd done. He nodded and gave us both a kind of ostrichy smile. Like his daughter Jennifer, he was tall and thin, and I could see Chad pretending to play a tune as he went down the hall. It was a school joke that both Mr. Piccolo and Jennifer looked like the musical instrument they were named for. I grinned, making piccolo-playing motions back to Chad, and then threaded my way down to my locker through knots of kids talking about their weekends. But even though I said hi to a couple of people, I must still have been pretty preoccupied because I found out later I'd walked right past a large red-lettered sign on the basement bulletin board, next to the latest fund-raising poster--walked right past it without seeing it at all: SALLY JARRELL'S EAR PIERCING CLINIC NOON TO ONE, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 15 BASEMENT GIRLS' ROOM $1.50 per hole per ear Sally Jarrell was at that point just about my favorite person at school. We were as different from each other as two people can be--I think the main thing we had in common was that neither of us quite fit in at Foster. I don't want to say that Foster is snobby, because that's what people always think about private schools, but I guess it's true that a lot of kids thought they were pretty special. And there were a lot of cliques, only Sally and I weren't in any of them. The thing I liked best about her, until everything changed, was that she always went her own way. In a world of people who seemed to have come out of duplicating machines, Sally Jarrell was no one's copy, not that fall anyway. I swear I didn't notice the sign even when I walked past it a second time--and that time Sally was right in front of it, peering at my left ear as if there were a bug on it, and murmuring something that sounded like "posts." All I noticed was that Sally's thin and rather wan face looked a little thinner and wanner than usual, probably because she hadn't had time to wash her hair--it was



hanging around her shoulders in lank strings. "Definitely posts," she said. That time I heard her clearly, but before I could ask her what she was talking about, the first bell rang and the hall suddenly filled with sharp elbows and the din of banging lockers. I went to chemistry, and Sally flounced mysteriously off to gym. And I forgot the whole thing till lunchtime, when I went back down to my locker for my physics book--I was taking a heavy science load that year because of wanting to go to MIT. The basement hall was three deep with girls, looking as if they were lined up for something. There were a few boys, too, standing near Sally's boyfriend, Walt, who was next to a table with a white cloth on it. Neatly arranged on the cloth were a bottle of alcohol, a bowl of ice, a spool of white thread, a package of needles, and two halves of a raw potato, peeled. "Hey, Walt," I asked, mystified, "what's going on?" Walt, who was kind of flashy--"two-faced," Chad called him, but I liked him--grinned and pointed with a flourish to the poster. "One-fifty per hole per ear," he read cheerfully. "One or two, Madame President? Three or four?" The reason he called me Madame President was the same reason I was standing there staring at the poster, wishing I were home sick in bed with the flu. I've never quite figured out why, but at election time, one of the kids in my class had nominated me for student-council president, and I'd won. Student council, representing the student body, was supposed to run the school, instead of the faculty or the administration running it. As far as I was concerned, my main responsibility as council president was to preside at meetings every other week. But Mrs. Poindexter, the headmistress, had other ideas. Back in September, she'd given me an embarrassing lecture about setting an example and being her "good right hand" and making sure everyone followed "both the spirit and the letter" of the school rules, some of which were a little screwy. "Step right up," Walt was shouting. "If the gracious president of student council--of our entire august student body, I might add will set the trend"--he bowed to me--"business will be sure to boom. Do step this way, Madame ..." "Oh, shut up, Walt," I said, trying to run through the school rules in my mind and hoping I wouldn't come up with one that Mrs. Poindexter might think applied specifically to ear piercing. Walt shrugged, putting his hand under my elbow and ushering me to the head of the line. "At least, Madame President," he said, "let me invite you to observe." I thought about saying no, but decided it would probably make sense for me to get an idea of what was going on, so I nodded. Walt shot the cuffs of his blue shirt--he was a very snappy dresser, and that day he was wearing a tan three-piece suit--and bowed. "One moment, ladies and gentlemen," he said, "while I escort the president on a tour of the---er---establishment. I shall return." He steered me toward the door and then turned, winking at the few boys who were clustered around the table. "Ms. Jarrell told me she would take



care of you gentlemen after she has---er--accommodated a few of the ladies." He poked Chuck Belasco, who was captain of the football team, in the ribs as we went by and murmured, "She also said to tell you guys she's looking forward to it." That, of course, led to a lot of gruff laughter from the boys. I went into the girls' room just in time to hear Jennifer Piccolo squeal "Ouch!" and to see tears filling her big brown eyes. I closed the door quicky--Chuck was trying to peer in--and worked my way through the five or six girls standing around the table Sally had set up in front of the row of sinks. It had the same stuff on it that the one in the hall did. "Hi, Liza," Sally said cheerfully. "Glad you dropped in." Sally had on a white lab coat and was holding half a potato in one hand and a bloody needle in the other. "What happened?" I asked, nodding toward Jennifer, who was sniffing loudly as she delicately fingered the pinkish thread that dangled from her right ear. Sally shrugged. "Low pain threshold, I guess. Ready for the next one, Jen?" Jennifer nodded bravely and closed her eyes while Sally threaded the bloody needle and wiped it off with alcohol, saying, "See, Liza, perfectly sanitary." The somewhat apprehensive group of girls leaned sympathetically toward Jennifer as Sally approached her right ear again. "Sally ..." I began, but Jennifer interrupted. "Maybe," she said timidly, just as Sally positioned the half potato behind her ear--to keep the needle from going through to her head if it slipped, I realized, shuddering--"I'd rather just have one hole in each ear, okay?" She opened her eyes and looked hopefully at Sally. "You said two holes in two ears," Sally said firmly. "Four holes in all." "Yes, but-I just remembered my mother said something the other day about two earrings in one ear looking dumb, and I--well, I just wonder if maybe she's right, that's all." Sally sighed and moved around to Jennifer's other ear. "Ice, please," she said. Four kids reached for the ice while Jennifer closed her eyes again, looking more or less like my idea of what Joan of Arc must have looked like on her way to the stake. I'm not going to describe the whole process, mostly because it was a bit gory, but even though Jennifer gave a sort of squeak when the needle went in, and even though she reeled dizzily out of the girls' room (scattering most of the boys, Walt said afterwards), she insisted it hadn't hurt much. I stayed long enough to see that Sally was trying to be careful, given the limits of her equipment. The potato really did prevent the needle from going too far, and the ice, which was for numbing the ear, did seem to reduce both the pain and the bleeding. Sally even sterilized the ear as well as the needle and thread. The whole thing looked pretty safe, and so I decided that all I had to do in my official capacity was remind Sally to use the alcohol each time. But that afternoon there were a great many bloody Kleenexes being held to earlobes in various classes, and right after the last bell, when I was standing in the hall



talking to Ms. Stevenson, who taught art and was also faculty adviser to student council, a breathless freshman came running up and said, "Oh, good, Liza, you're still here. Mrs. Poindexter wants to see you." "Oh?" I said, trying to sound casual. "What about?" Ms. Stevenson raised her eyebrows. Ms. Stevenson was very tall and pale, with blond hair that she usually wore in a not-terribly-neat pageboy. My father always called her the "Renaissance woman," because besides teaching art she coached the debate team, sang in a community chorus, and tutored kids in just about any subject if they were sick for a long time. She also had a fierce temper, but along with that went a reputation for being fair, so no one minded very much, at least not among the kids. I tried to ignore Ms. Stevenson's raised eyebrows and concentrate on the freshman. "I don't really know what she wants," the freshman was saying, "but I think it has something to do with Jennifer Piccolo because I saw Mr. Piccolo and Jennifer come out of the nurse's office and then go into Mrs. Poindexter's, and Jennifer was crying and her ears were all bloody." The freshman giggled. When she left, Ms. Stevenson turned to me and said dryly, "Your ears, I'm glad to see, look the same as ever." I glanced pointedly at Ms. Stevenson's small silver post earrings. "Oh, those," she said. "Yes, my doctor pierced my ears when I was in college. My doctor, Liza." I started to walk away. "Liza, it was foolish, Sally's project. I wish I'd known about it in time to stop it." My feet were heavy as I went down the hall to Mrs. Poindexter's office. I knew that Ms. Stevenson, even though she never made herself obnoxious about it, was usually right. And by the time the whole thing was over with, I wished she'd known about the ear piercing in time to stop it, too. 3 Mrs. Poindexter didn't look up when I went into her office. She was a stubby gray-haired woman who wore rimless glasses on a chain and always looked as if she had a pain somewhere. Maybe she always did, because often when she was thinking up one of her sardonically icy things to say she'd flip her glasses down onto her bumpy bosom and pinch her nose as if her sinuses hurt her. But I always had the feeling that what she was trying to convey was that the student she was disciplining was what really gave her the pain. She could have saved herself a lot of trouble by following the school charter: "The Administration of Foster Academy shall guide the students, but the students shall govern themselves." But I guess she was what Mr. Jorrocks, our American history teacher, would call a "loose constructionist," because she interpreted the charter differently from most people. "Sit down, Eliza," Mrs. Poindexter said, still not looking up. Her voice sounded tired and muffled--as if her



mouth were full of gravel. I sat down. It was always hard not to be depressed in Mrs. Poindexter's office, even if you were there to be congratulated for winning a scholarship or making straight A's. Mrs. Poindexter's love for Foster, which was considerable, didn't inspire her to do much redecorating. Her office was in shades of what seemed to be its original brown, without anything for contrast, not even plants, and she kept her thick brown drapes partway closed, so it was unusually dark. Finally Mrs. Poindexter raised her head from the folder she was thumbing through, flipped her glasses onto her chest, pinched her nose, and looked at me as if she thought I had the personal moral code of a sea slug. "Eliza Winthrop," she said, regret sifting through the gravel in her mouth, "I do not know how to tell you how deeply shocked I am at your failure to do your duty, not only as head of student council and therefore my right hand, but also simply as a member of the student body. Words fail me," she said--but, like most people who say that, she somehow managed to continue. "The reporting rule, Eliza--can it be that you have forgotten the reporting rule?" I felt as if I'd swallowed a box of the little metal sinkers my father uses when he goes fishing in the country. "No," I said, only it came out more like a bleat than a word. "No, what?" "No, Mrs. Poindexter." "Kindly recite the rule to me," she said, closing her eyes and pinching her nose. I cleared my throat, telling myself she couldn't possibly expect me to remember it word for word as it appeared in the little blue book called Welcome to Foster Academy. "The reporting rule," I began. "One: If a student breaks a rule he or she is supposed to report himself or herself by writing his or her name and what rule he or she has broken on a piece of paper and putting it into the box next to Ms. Baxter's desk in the offace." Ms. Baxter was a chirpy little birdlike woman with dyed red hair who taught The Bible as Literature to juniors and told Bible stories to the Lower School once a week. Her other job was to be Mrs. Poindexter's administrative assistant, which meant Mrs. Poindexter confided in her and gave her special jobs, anything from pouring tea at Mothers Club meetings to doing confidential typing and guarding the reporting box. Ms. Baxter and Mrs. Poindexter drank tea together every afternoon out of fancy Dresden china cups, but they never seemed quite like equals, the way real friends are. They were more like an eagle and a sparrow, or a whale and its pilot fish, because Ms. Baxter was always scurrying around running errands for Mrs. Poin-dexter or protecting her from visitors she didn't want to see. "Go on," said Mrs. Poindexter. "Two," I said. "If a student sees another student breaking a rule, that student is supposed to ask the one who broke the rule to report himself. Or herself. Three: If the student won't do that, the one who saw him or her break the rule is supposed to report them, the one breaking the rule, I mean." Mrs. Poindexter nodded. "Can you tell me," she said, without opening her eyes, "since you seem to know the rule so well, and



since you are well aware that the spirit behind all Foster's rules encompasses the idea of not doing harm to others, why you did not ask Sally Jarrell to report herself when you saw what she was planning to do? Or when you saw what she was actually doing?" Before I could answer, Mrs. Poindexter whirled around in her chair and opened her eyes, flashing them at me. "Eliza, you should be more aware than most students, given your position, that this school is in desperate need of money and therefore in desperate need of Mr. Piccolo's services as publicity chairman of our campaign. And yet Jennifer Piccolo had to go home early this afternoon because of the terrible pain in her earlobes." "I'm really sorry, Mrs. Poindexter," I said, and then tried to explain that I hadn't even noticed Sally's sign till she was already piercing Jennifer's ears. She shook her head as if she couldn't quite grasp that. "Eliza," she said tiredly, "you know that I thought it unwise last spring when you said in your campaign speech that you were against the reporting rule ..." "Everyone's against it," I said, which was true--even the faculty agreed that it didn't work. "Not quite everyone," said Mrs. Poindexter. "Popular or not, that rule is the backbone of this school's honor system and has been for many, many years--ever since Letitia Foster founded the school, in fact. Not," she added, "that the reporting rule or any other rule will make any difference at all if Foster has to close." I studied her face, trying to figure out if she was exaggerating. The idea of Foster's having to close had never occurred to me, although of course I knew about the financial troubles. But having to close? Both Chad and I had gone to Foster since kindergarten; it was almost another parent to us. "I--I didn't realize things were that bad," I sputtered. Mrs. Poindexter nodded. "If the campaign is unsuccessful," she said, "Foster may well have to close. And if Mr. Piccolo, without whose publicity there can be no campaign, leaves us as a result of this--this foolish, thoughtless incident, I seriously doubt we will find anyone to replace him. If he leaves, goodness knows: whether the fund raiser who has agreed to act as consultant will stay on--it was hard enough getting both of them in the first place ..." Mrs. Poindexter closed her eyes again, and for the first time since I'd walked into her office that afternoon I realized she really was upset; she wasn't just acting that way for effect, the way she usually seemed to be. "How do you think Mr. Piccolo will feel about asking people for money now?" she said. "How do you think he will feel about publicizing a school--asking parents to enroll their sons and daughters in a school--where discipline is so lax it cannot prevent its students from doing physical harm to one another?" "I don't know, Mrs. Poindexter," I said, trying not to squirm.



"Pretty bad, I guess." Mrs. Poindexter sighed. "I would like you to think about all of this, Eliza," she said. "And about the extent of your responsibility to Foster, between now and this Friday's student council meeting. We will hold a disciplinary hearing for you and for Sally Jarrell at that time. Naturally, I cannot allow you to preside, since you are under a disciplinary cloud yourself. I will ask Angela Cariatid, as vice president, to take the gavel. Now you may go." The leaves that had seemed so crisp that morning looked tired and limp as I walked slowly home without Chad, who had soccer practice, and the sky was lowering again, as if we were going to get more rain. I was glad Chad wasn't with me and I wasn't sure, when I unlocked the door to the brownstone we live in and went up to our third-floor apartment, if I even wanted to see Mom before I'd had time to think. My mother's a very good person to talk to; most of the time she can help us sort out problems, even when we're wrong, without making us feel like worms. But as it turned out, I didn't have to worry about whether I was going to be able to think things through before I talked to her this time, because she wasn't home. She'd left a note for us on the kitchen table: L and C--At neighborhood association meeting. New cookies in jar. Help yourselves. Love, Mom Mom always-- well, usually--baked cookies for us when she knew she wasn't going to be home. Chad says she still does; it's as if she feels guilty for not being a 100 percent housewife, which of course no one but she herself expects her to be. After I'd skimmed a few cookies off the top of the pile in the jar, and was sitting there at the table eating them and wishing the baseball season lasted into November so there'd be a game on to take my mind off school, I saw the second note under the first one: Liza-- Someone named Annie something--Cannon? Kaynon?--called. She said would you please call her, 8779384. Have another cookie. Love, Mom I didn't know why, but as soon as I saw that note, I felt my heart starting to beat faster. I also realized I was thoroughly glad Mom wasn't home, because I didn't want anyone around when I called Annie, though again I didn't know why. My mouth felt dry, so I got a drink of water and I almost dropped the glass because my hands were suddenly sweaty. Then I went to the phone and started dialing, but I stopped in the middle because I didn't know what I was going to say. I couldn't start dialing again till I told myself a few times that since Annie had called me thinking of what to say was up to her. Someone else answered the phone--her mother, I found out later--and I found myself feeling jealous of whoever it was for being with Annie while I was all the way down in Brooklyn Heights, not even on the same island she was. Finally Annie came to the phone and said, "Hello?" "Annie." I think I managed to sound casual, at least I know I tried to. "Hi. It's Liza."



"Yes," she said, sounding really happy. "I recognized your voice. Hi." There was a little pause, and I could feel my heart thumping. "Hey," Annie said, "you called back!" It struck me then that she didn't know what to say any more than I did, and for a few seconds we both just fumbled. But after about the third very long pause she said, low and hesitant, "um--I was wondering if you'd like to go to the Cloisters with me Sattrday--Don't if you don't want to. I thought maybe you'd like it since you go to the Metropolitan so much, but---oh, well, maybe you wouldn't." "Sure I would," I said quickly. "You would?" She sounded surprised. "Sure. I love it up there. The park, everything." "Well--well, maybe if it's a nice day I'll bring a picnic, and we could eat it in the park. We wouldn't even have to go into the museum. I like the museum just as much as the park." I felt myself smiling. "Just promise me you won't rearrange the statues or pose in front of a triptych or anything when someone's looking." Annie laughed then! I think that was the first time I heard her laugh in her special way. It was full of delight--I don't mean delightful, although it was that, too. She laughed as if what I'd just said was so clever that it had somehow made her bubble over with joy. That phone call was the best thing that had happened all day, and for a while after I'd hung up, the situation at school didn't seem nearly so bad any more. 4 Ms. Widmer was a couple of minutes late to English on Friday, which was my last class for the day. She gave us a quick nod, picked up the poetry book we'd been studying, and read: "Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul." As carefully as I could, I folded up the architecture review Dad had clipped for me from his New York Times--I'd been reading it to keep my mind off the student council hearing, which was that afternoon--and listened. Mom once said that Ms. Widmer's voice was a cross between Julie Harris's and Helen Hayes's. I've never heard either of them that I know of, so all I can say is that Ms. Widmer had the kind of voice, especially when she read poetry, that made people listen. "In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud." Ms. Widmer looked up, pushing her gray bangs out of her eyes. She wasn't old, but she was prematurely gray. Sometimes she joked about it, in the special way she had of finding humor in things most people didn't find funny. "What does 'fell' mean? Anyone?" "Tripped," said Walt, with great solemnity. "He fell as he got into the bus--he had a fell--a fell fall. A fell clutch would be when he grabbed



for the handle as he fell." Ms. Widmer laughed good-naturedly along with the boos and groans and then called on Jody Crane, who was senior representative to student council. "In Tolkien," Jody said---he was very solemn and analytical--"it's used to describe people like Sauron and the Orcs and guys like that, so I guess it means evil." "Close, Jody, close," Ms. Widmer said. She opened the leather-bound dictionary she kept on her desk and used at least three times every class period. She'd had it rebound, she told us once, because it contained almost the entire English language and that was well worth doing something special for. "Fell," she read. "Adjective, Middle English, Anglo-Saxon, and Old French. Also Late Latin. Fierce, cruel. Poetic--" She looked up and an involuntary shudder went through the class as she lowered her voice and said the single word: "deadly." Then she turned back to the book. "In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. "Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find me, unafraid. "It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: ..." Ms. Widmer paused and glanced my way for a fraction of a second before she read the last line: "I am the captain of my soul." "By William Ernest Henley," she said, closing the book. "1849 to 1903. British. He lost one foot to tuberculosis--TB is not always a lung disease--and nearly lost the other as well. He spent an entire year of his life in a hospital, and that led to this poem, which is called 'In Hospital,' as well as to others. For homework, please discover the meaning of the word he chose for his title, and also please find and bring to class one other poem, not by Henley, but with the same theme. Due Monday." There was a resigned groan, although no one really minded. By that time, Ms. Widmer's love of poetry had spread to most of us as if it were some kind of benign disease. It was rumored that before graduation every year she gave each senior a poem that she thought would be personally appropriate for his or her future. For most of the rest of the period, we discussed why being in a hospital might lead to writing poems, and what kinds of poems it might lead to, and Ms. Widmer read us some other hospital poems, some of them funny, some of them sad. When the bell rang, she'd just finished a funny one. "Good timing," she said, smiling at us as the laughter died away. Then she said, "Have a good weekend," and left. "Coming?" asked Jody, passing my desk on his way out. "You go ahead, Jody," I said, still thinking of



"Invictus" and half wondering if Ms. Widmer had really read it for me, the way it had seemed. "I think I'll see if I can find Sally." I smiled, trying to make light of it. "Criminals should stick together." Jody smiled back and put his hand on my arm for a second. "Good luck, Liza." "Thanks," I said. "I guess I'm going to need it." I met Sally standing outside the Parlor, the room where council meetings were held, talking with Ms. Stevenson. Ms. Stevenson looked a little paler than usual, and her eyes already had the determined look they often had when she was doing her job as faculty adviser to student council. But otherwise she acted as if she were trying to be reassuring. "Hi," she said cheerfully when I came up to them. "Nervous?" "Oh, no," I said. "My stomach always feels as if there's a dog chasing its tail in it." Ms. Stevenson chuckled. "You'll be okay," she said. "Just think before you speak, both of you. Take all the time you need before you answer questions." "Oh, God," Sally moaned. "I think I'm going to be sick." "No, you're not," Ms. Stevenson said firmly. "Go get a drink of water. Take a deep breath. You'll be fine." She stepped aside to let Georgie Connel--Conn--the junior representative, go in. Conn winked at me from behind his thick glasses as he opened the door. He was short, with a homely face covered with pimples, but he was one of the nicest kids in the school. He had what teachers called a creative mind, and he was also very fair, maybe the fairest person on council, except of course Ms. Stevenson. "Well," said Ms. Stevenson briskly when Sally came back from the water fountain, "I guess it's time." She smiled at both of us as if she were wishing us luck but didn't think it would be quite proper to do it out loud. And then we all went in, Ms. Stevenson first, with Sally and me following slowly. The Parlor, like Mrs. Poindexter's office, was so dark it was funereal. It used to be a real living room--a huge one--back when the school was a mansion, but now it was more of a semipublic lounge, reserved mostly for high-level occasions--Nike trustees' meetings and mothers' teas, but also for council meetings. The Parlor had three long sofas along the walls, and big wing chairs, and a fireplace that took up most of the wall that didn't have a sofa against it. Over the mantle hung a picture of Letitia Foster, the school's founder. I can't imagine why Letitia Foster ever founded a school: she always looked to me as if she hated kids. She looked that way that afternoon especially, as Sally



and I sidled in under her frozen hostile stare like a couple of derelict crabs. Mrs. Poindexter was already enthroned in her special dark-maroon wing chair by the fireplace, thumbing through notes on a yellow pad and looking severe behind her rimless spectacles. Everyone else was sitting around a long, highly polished table. The vice president, Angela Cariatid, who was tall and usually reminded me in more than name of those graceful, self-possessed Greek statues that hold up buildings, didn't look at all that way as we walked in. She was sitting tensely at the end of the table nearest Mrs. Poindexter's chair, clutching the gavel as if she were drowning and it was the only other thing afloat. She'd already told me she felt rotten about having to preside, which I thought was pretty nice of her. "It's like court on TV," Sally whispered nervously as we sat down at the other end of the table. I remember noticing how the sun came slanting through the dusty windows onto Mrs. Poindextcr's gray hair--just the top of it, because of the height of the wing chair. While I was concentrating on the incongruous halo it made, Mrs. Poindexter flipped her glasses down and nodded to Angela, who rapped so hard with the gavel that it popped out of her hand and skittered across the table. Sally giggled. Mrs. Poindexter cleared her throat and Angela blushed. Conn got up and retrieved the gavel, handing it to Angela with a grave nod. "Madame Chairperson," he murmured. I felt myself start to laugh, especially when Sally smirked at me. "Order!" poor Angela squeaked, and Mrs. Poindexter glared at Conn. Angela coughed and then said, pleading, "The meeting will please come to order. This--er--this is a disciplinary hearing instead of a regular meeting. Regular council business is--um--deferred till next time. Sally jarrell and Liza Winthrop have both broken the reporting rule, and Sally Jarrell has ..." "Are accused of breaking," Ms. Stevenson interrupted quietly. Mrs. Poindexter pinched her nose, scowling. "Are accused of breaking the reporting rule," Angela corrected herself, "and Sally Jarrell has--er--is accused of acting in a--in a--" She looked helplessly at Mrs. Poindexter. "In an irresponsible way, endangering the health of her fellow students," said Mrs. Poindexter. pushing herself out of the depths of her maroon chair. "Thank you, Angela. Before we begin," she said, "I would like to remind all of you that Foster is in the midst of a financial crisis of major proportions, and that any adverse publicity--any at all--could be extremely damaging to the fund-raising and student-recruitment campaigns that are our only hope of survival." She positioned herself in front of the fireplace, profile to us, looking dramatically up at Letitia. "Foster Academy was our dear founder's entire life, and it has come close to that for many of us on the faculty as well. But more important even than that is the indisputable fact that



Foster has educated several generations of young men and women to the highest standards of decency and morality as well as to academic excellence. And now,"--she whirled around and faced Sally--"and now one Foster student has willfully harmed several others through a ridiculous and frivolous scheme to pierce their ears, and another student"--she faced me now--"in whom the entire student body has placed their trust, has done nothing to stop it. Sally Jarrell," Mrs. Poindexter finished sonorously, pointing at her with her glasses, "have you anything to say in your defense?" Sally, who I could see was just about wiped out by then, shook her head. "No," she muttered, "no, except I'm sorry and I--I didn't think it could do any harm." "You didn't think!" Mrs. Poindexter boomed. "You didn't think! This girl," she said, turning to the others at the table, "has been at Foster all her life, and she says she didn't think! Mary Lou, kindly ask Jennifer Piccolo if she will step in for a moment." Mary Lou Dibbins, council's plump and very honest secretary-treasurer, pushed her chair back quickly and went out into the hall. Mary Lou was a math brain, but she'd told me that Mrs. Poindexter took care of council's financial records herself, and kept the little money council had locked up in her office safe. She wouldn't even let Mary Lou see the books, let alone work on them. "Mrs. Poindexter," said Ms. Stevenson, "I really wonder if ... Angela, is Jennifer's name on the agenda? I don't remember seeing it." "N-no," stammered Angela. "Jennifer volunteered at the last minute," Mrs. Poindexter said dryly. "After the agenda was typed." Then Mary Lou came back with Jennifer, who had a bandage on one ear and looked absolutely terrified--not as if she'd volunteered at all. "Jennifer," said Mrs. Poindexter, "please tell the council what your father said when he found out the doctor had to lance the infection on your ear." "He--he said I shouldn't tell anyone outside school what had happened or it would ruin the campaign. And--and before that he said he was going to resign from being pub-pub-publicity chairman, but then my mother talked him into staying, unless--unless no one's punished, he--he said he'd always thought Foster was a--a school that produced young ladies and gentlemen, not ..." Jennifer looked from Sally to me, apologizing with her frightened, tear-filled eyes, "not hoodlums." "Thank you, Jennifer," Mrs. Poindexter said, looking pleased under her indignant surface. "You may go." "Just a minute," said Ms. Stevenson, her voice tight, as if she were trying to hold on to her temper. "Angela, may I ask Jennifer a question?" Angela looked at Mrs. Poindexter, who shrugged as if she



thought whatever it was couldn't possibly be important. "Angela?" said Ms. Stevenson pointedly. "I--I guess so," said Angela. "Jenny," Ms. Stevenson asked, gently now, "did Sally ask you to have your ears pierced?" "No--no." "Then why did you decide to have her pierce them?" "Well," said Jennifer, "I saw the sign and I'd been thinking about going to Tuscan's, you know, that department store downtown, to have it done, but they charge eight dollars for only two holes, and I didn't have that much and the sign said Sally would do four holes for only six dollars--you know, one-fifty a hole--and I had that much. So I decided to go to her." "But Sally never came to you and suggested it?" "n-no." "Thank you, Jenny," said Ms. Stevenson. "I hope the infection heals soon." There was absolute silence as Jennifer walked out. Angela looked at the piece of paper--the agenda, I suppose--in front of her and said, "Well ..." But Sally jumped to her feet. "Mrs. Poindexter," she said. "I-I'm sorry, I'll--I'll pay Jennifer's doctor bills. I'll pay everyone's if I can afford it. And--and I'll donate the money I made to the campaign. But I really did try to be careft;l. My sister had her ears done that way and she was fine, honest ..." "Sally," said Ms. Stevenson, again very gently, "you took risks. You know your way couldn't have been as safe as the sterile punches they use down at Tuscan's." "I--I know. I'm sorry." Sally was almost in tears. "Well," began Ms. Stevenson, "I think ..." "That will be all, then, Sally," said Mrs. Poindexter, interrupting. "We will take note of your apology. You may wait outside if you like." "Mrs. Poindexter," Jody said, as if it had taken him all this time to work up to it, "is this really the way a disciplinary hearing's supposed to go? I mean, isn't Angela--I mean, isn't she supposed to be doing Liza's job, sort of, and running the hearing?" "Of course," said Mrs. Poindexter, smooth as an oil slick, shrugging as if asking what she could do if Angela wouldn't cooperate. Then she turned to me. "Eliza," she said, "now that you have had a



chance to think over our talk, have you anything to say? An explanation, perhaps, of why you didn't see to it that Sally was reported immediately?" She put her glasses on and looked down at her notes. I didn't know what to say, and I wasn't sure anyway how I was going to make my tongue move in a mouth that suddenly felt as dryly sticky as the inside of a box of old raisins. "I don't see what rule Sally broke," I said at last, slowly. "If I'd really thought she was breaking a rule, I'd have asked her to report herself, but ..." "The point," said Mrs. Poindexter, not even bothering to flip her glasses down, but peering at me over their tops, "as I told you in my office, has to do with the spirit of the rules--the spirit, Eliza, not a specific rule. I am sure you are aware that harming others is not the Foster way--yet you did not report Sally or ask her to report herself. And furthermore, I suspect that you did not do so because, despite being student council president, you do not believe in some of the rules of this school." "Out of the night that covers me," suddenly echoed in my mind from English class. "Black as the Pit ..." I licked my dry lips. "That's right," I said. "I--I don't believe in the reporting rule because I think that by the time people are in Upper School they're--old enough to take responsibility for their own actions." I could see Ms. Stevenson smiling faintly as if she approved, but she also looked worried. She raised her hand, and Angela, after glancing at Mrs. Poindexter, nodded at her. "Liza," asked Ms. Stevenson, "suppose you saw a parent beating a child. Would you do anything?" "Sure," I said. It suddenly became very clear, as if Ms. Stevenson had taken one of the big spotlights from up on the stage and turned it onto a place in my mind I hadn't seen clearly before. "Of course I would. I'd tell the parent to stop and if that didn't work, I'd go to the police or something like that. I don't think what Sally did is on the same scale." "Even though," said Mrs. Poindexter, her voice sounding as if it were coming through gravel again, "Sally caused a number of infections and in particular infected the daughter of our publicity man?" I got angry then. "It doesn't make any difference who got infected," I shouted. "Jennifer's no better than anyone else just because we need Mr. Piccolo." I tried to lower my voice. "The infections were bad, sure. But Sally didn't set out to cause them. In fact, she did everything she could to prevent them. And she didn't force anyone to have their ears pierced. Sure, it was a dumb thing to do in the first place. But it wasn't--oh, I don't know, some kind of--of criminal thing, for God's sake!" Ms. Stevenson nodded, but Mrs. Poindexter's mouth pulled into a



tense straight line and she said, "Anything else, Eliza?" Yes, I wanted to say to her, let Angela run the meeting; let me run meetings when I'm holding the gavel--for she'd done nearly the same thing to me, many times--student council's for the students, not for you ... old ... But I managed to keep my anger back, and all I said was "No," and walked out, wanting suddenly to call Annie, even though I didn't know her very well yet and I was going to see her the next day at the Cloisters anyway. Sally was sitting on the old-fashioned wooden settle in the hall outside the Parlor, hunched over and crying on Ms. Baxter's skinny chest. Ms. Baxter was dabbing at Sally's eyes with one of the lace handkerchiefs she always carried in her sleeve, and chirping, "There, there, Sally, the Lord will forgive you, you know. Why, my dear child, He must see already that you are truly sorry." "But it's so terrible, Ms. Baxter," Sally moaned. "Jennifer's ears--oh, Jennifer's poor, poor ears!" I had never seen Sally like this. "Hey, Sal," I said as cheerfully as I could, sitting down on the other side of her and touching her arm. "It's not terminal, she's going to get better. You did try to be careful, after all. Come on, it'll be okay. Jennifcr'll be fine." But Sally just burrowed deeper into Ms. Baxter's front. Ms. Stevenson came out of the Parlor and beckoned to us to follow her back in. She looked kind of grim, as if she were having trouble with her temper again. I'd heard on television that when a jury takes a long time it's a good sign for the person on trial, but when they make up their minds quickly it's usually bad, and my mouth got raisiny again. Mrs. Poindexter nodded to Angela when we came in, after looking at Ms. Stevenson as if trying to tell her that she was letting Angela run the meeting after all. Ms. Stevenson, if she noticed, didn't react. "Um," said Angela, looking down at her paper again. "Um--Sally--Liza--the council has decided to suspend you both for one week." "That's only three days," Mary Lou put in, "because of Thanksgiving." "I did not," said Mrs. Poindexter, "see you raise your hand, Mary Lou. Continue, Angela." "Um--the suspensions will be removed from your records at the end of the year if--if you don't do anything else. So colleges won't know about it unless you break another rule." "And?" prompted Mrs. Poindexter severely. "Oh," said Angela. "Do I--do I say that, too, with Sally here and everything?" "Sally," said Mrs. Poindexter, "is still a member of the student body."



"Well," said Angela, looking at me in a way that made my heart speed up as if I were at the dentist's. "Liza, Mrs. Poindexter said that because you're council president and--and ..." "And because no council president in the history of this school has ever broken the honor code--go on, Angela," Mrs. Poindexter said. "There's--going to be a vote of confidence on the Monday after Thanksgiving to see if the kids still want you to--to be council president. But," she added hastily, "the fact that there was a vote of confidence won't go on your record unless you don't get reelected." "Meeting adjourned," said Mrs. Poindexter, picking up her papers and leading the others out. Sally gave me a weak smile as she passed my chair. Conn hung back for a minute. "The key," he said to me in a low voice, bending down to where I was still sitting, "was when Angie said, 'Mrs. Poindexter said'--note 'said'--about the vote of confidence. I hope you caught that, Liza, because it was her idea and she's the only one for it. Ms. Stevenson got her to say the part about things not going on records. We all thought you should stay in office, and I bet the rest of the kids will, too. Heck, none of us would've turned Sally in either, not for that. A couple of kids said they might have tried harder to stop her, that was all, but I bet they wouldn't even have done that. Liza, Poindexter's so worried about the stupid fund-raising campaign, she can't even think straight." Conn reached down and squeezed my shoulder. "Liza--I'm sure you'll win." "Thanks, Conn," I managed to say. My voice was too shaky for me to say anything else. But all I could think was, what if I don't win and it does go on my record? For the first time in my life I began wondering if I really was going to get into MIT after all. And what it would do to my father, who's an engineer and had taught there, if I didn't. And what it would do to me. 5 I told my parents about the suspension Friday night while they were in the living room having a drink before dinner, which is always a good time to tell them difficult things. My father was furious. "You're an intelligent person," he thundered. "You should have shown better judgment." My mother was sympathetic, which was worse. "She's also an adolescent," she told my father angrily. "She can't be expected to be perfect. And the school's coming down a lot harder on her than on Sally. That's not fair." My mother's a quiet person, except when she thinks something's unjust, or when she's defending me or Chad. Or Dad, for that matter. Dad's terrific, and I love him a lot, but he



does expect people to be perfect, especially us, and especially me, his fellow "intelligent person." "It's fair, all right," Dad said into his martini. "Liza was in a position of responsibility, just as Mrs. Poindexter said. She should have known better. I wouldn't expect that little twit Sally Jarrell to know how to think, let alone how to behave, but Liza ..." That's when I got up and left the room. Chad thought the whole thing was funny. He came out to the kitchen, where I'd gone, on the pretext of getting a Coke, and found me leaning against the refrigerator, fuming. "Pretty cool, Lize," he said, flapping one of his earlobes and wearing his isn't-life-ridiculous look. "Oh, shove it." "Think she'd do my ears? One gold hoop; like a pirate?" "She'll do your nose if you don't shut up," I snapped. "Hey, come off it." He pushed me aside and reached into the refrigerator for his Coke. "I'd give anything to be suspended." He popped the ring into the can and took a long swallow. "What are you going to do next week, anyway? Three free days and then Thanksgiving vacation--wow!" He shook his head and then brushed the hair out of his eyes. "They going to make you study?" I hadn't thought of that and realized I'd better call school on Monday to find out. "I'll probably run away to sea," I told Chad. Then, thinking of the Cloisters and Annie, I added, "Or at least go to a lot of museums." School seemed very far away the next day at the Cloisters with Annie, even though at first we were the way we'd been on the phone-not exactly tongue-tied, but not knowing what to say, either. The Cloisters, which is a museum of medieval art and architecture, is in Fort Tryon Park, so far uptown it's almost out of the city. It overlooks the Hudson River like a medieval fortress, even though it's supposed to look like a monastery and does, once you get inside. I was early so I decided to walk from the subway instead of taking the bus that goes partway into the park, but even so, Annie was there before me. As I walked up, I saw her near the entrance, leaning against the building's reddish-brown granite and looking off in the opposite direction. She had on a long cotton skirt and a heavy red sweater; I remember thinking the sweater made the skirt look out of place, as did the small backpack strapped to her shoulders. Her hair tumbled freely down over the pack. I stopped for a few seconds and just stood there watching her, but she didn't notice me. So I went up to her and said, "Hi." She gave a little jump, as if she'd been miles or years away in her thoughts. Then a wonderful slow smile spread across her face and into her eyes, and I knew she was back again. "Hi," she said. "You came." "Of course I came," I said indignantly. "Why wouldn't I have?"



Annie shrugged. "I don't know. I wondered if I would. We're probably not going to be able to think of a thing to say to each other." A bus pulled up and hordes of students with sketchbooks, plus mothers and fathers with reluctant children, had to go around us to get to the door. "All week," Annie said, watching them, "I kept, um, remembering that guard and the two little boys, didn't you?" I had to say that I hadn't, so I told her about the ear-piercing incident to explain why. "Because of ear piercing?" she said incredulously when I'd finished telling her the story. "All that fuss?" I nodded, moving aside to let some more people through. "I guess maybe it is a little harsh," I said, trying to explain about the fund-raising campaign, "but ..." "A little harsh!" Annie almost shouted. "A little!" She shook her head and I guess she realized we were both getting loud, because she looked around and laughed, so I laughed, too, and then we both had to step back to let a huge family pass. The last kid was a stuck-up-looking boy of about nine with a fancy camera that had hundreds of dials and numbers. He looked more like a small robot than a kid, even when he whirled around and pointed his camera at Annie. Annie held out her big skirt like a medieval damsel and dipped into a graceful curtsy; the kid snapped her picture without even smiling. Then, when Annie straightened up into a religious-looking pose that I've seen in a hundred medieval paintings, he became a real kid for a second--he stuck his tongue out at her and ran inside. "You're welcome," Annie called after him, sticking out her tongue, too. "The public," she sighed dramatically, "is so ungrateful. I do wish Father wouldn't insist that I pose for their silly portraits." She stamped her foot delicately, the way the medieval damsel she was obviously playing might have. "Oh, I'm so angry I could--I could spear a Saracen!" Once again I found myself catching her mood, but more quickly this time. I bowed as sweepingly as I could and said, "Madame, I shall spear you a hundred Saracens if you bid me, and if you give me leave to wear your favor." Annie smiled, out of character for a second, as if thanking me for responding. Then she went back into her role and said, "Shall we walk in the garden, sir knight, among the herbs and away from these rude throngs, till my duties force me to return?" I bowed again. It was funny, I wasn't nearly so self-conscious this time, even though there were crowds of people around. Still being the knight, I offered Annie my arm and we strolled inside, which is the only way to get to the museum's lower level and leads to the herb garden. We paid our "donation" and went downstairs and outside again, where we sat on a stone bench in the garden and looked out over the Hudson River. "It just seems ridiculous, Liza," Annie said after a few minutes, "to make such a fuss about anything so silly." I knew immediately she meant the ear-piercing business again. "In my school," she went on, sliding her backpack off and turning to me, "kids get busted all the time for assault and possession and things like that.



There are so many security people around, you have to remind yourself it's school you're in, not jail. But at your school they get upset about a couple of infected ears! I can't decide if it's wonderful that they don't have anything more serious to worry about--or terrible." Annie grinned and flipped back some of her hair, showing me a tiny pearl earring in each ear. "I did mine myself," she said. "Two years ago. No infection." "Maybe you were lucky," I said, a little annoyed. "I wouldn't let Sally pierce mine." "That's just you, though. I can't imagine you with pierced ears, anyway." She buried her face in a lavender bush that was growing in a big stone pot next to the bench. "If you ever want it done," she said into the bush, "I'll do it for you. Free." I had an absurd desire to say, "Sure, any time," but that was ridiculous. I knew I didn't have the slightest wish to have my ears pierced. In fact, I'd always thought the whole custom barbaric. Annie broke off a sprig of lavender and I could see from the way she pushed her small shoulders back and sat up straighter that she was the medieval damsel again. "My favor, sir knight," she said gravely, handing me the lavender. "And will you wear it into battle?" "Madame," I said, getting up quickly so I could bow again. "I will wear it even unto death." Then my self-consciousness returned and I felt my face getting red, so I held the lavender up to my nose and sniffed it. "Good sir," said Annie, "surely so gallant and skilled a knight as you would never fall in battle." I'm not this clever, I wanted to say, panicking; I can't keep up with you--please stop. But Annie was looking at me expectantly, so I went on--quickly, because the huge family with the obnoxious shutterbug was about to come through the door that led out to the garden. "Madame," I said, trying to remember my King Arthur but sounding more like Shakespeare than like Malory, "when I carry your favor, I carry your memory. Your memory brings your image to my mind, and your image will ever come between me and my opponent, allowing him to unhorse me with one thrust." Annie extended her hand, palm up, for the lavender. "Hold it!" ordered the robot kid, peering at us through his viewfinder. "Then return my favor quickly, sir knight," said Annie, not moving, "for I would not have you fall." I handed the lavender back to her, and the kid's professional-sounding shutter clicked and whirred. It was as if the sound of the camera snapped us back into the real world, because even though the kid and his family were obviously not going to stay in the garden long, Annie picked up her pack and said matter-of-factly, "Are you hungry for lunch? Or should we go in and look around? The sad virgin," she said, looking dolefully down at the ground,



imitating one of my favorite statues; "the angry lion?" She made a twirling motion above her mouth and I knew right away she was impersonating the wonderful lion fresco in the Romanesque Hall; he has a human-looking mustache. "Or"--she stood up and glanced nervously around the garden, one wrist bent into a graceful, cautious hoof--"or the unicorns?" "Unicorns," I said, amazed at the speed with which she could go from one character to another and still capture the essence of each. "Good," she said, dropping her hand. "I like them best." She smiled. I got up, saying, "Me, too," and we stood there facing each other for a moment, not saying anything more. Then Annie, as if she'd read my thoughts, said softly, "I don't know if I believe any of this is happening or not." But before I could answer she gave me a little push and said, in a totally different voice, "Come on! To the unicorns!" The unicorn tapestries are in a quiet room by themselves. There are seven, all intact except one, which is only a fragment. All of them, even though they're centuries old, are so bright it's hard to believe that the colors must have faded over the years. Together they tell the story, of a unicorn hunt, complete with lords, ladies, dogs, long spears, and lots of foliage and flowers. Unfortunately, the hunters wound the unicorn badly--in one tapestry he looks dead --but the last one shows him alive, wearing a collar and enclosed in a circular pen with flowers all around. Most people seem to notice the flowers more than anything else, but the unicorn looks so disillusioned, so lonely and caged, that I hardly see the flowers at all--but the unicorn's expression always makes me shiver. I could tell from Annie's face as she stood silently in front of the last tapestry, that she felt exactly the same way, even though neither of us spoke. Then a woman's voice shrilled, "Caroline, how often do I have to tell you not to touch?"--and in came a big crowd of people along with a flat-voiced tour guide: "Most of the unicorn tapestries were made as a wedding present for Anne of Britanny." Annie and I left quickly. We went outside and walked in silence away from the Cloisters and went into Fort Tryon Park, which is so huge and wild it can almost make you forget you're in the city. There'd been more rain during the week and it had washed the last of the leaves off the trees. Now the leaves were lying soggily underfoot, but some of them were still bright in the chilly fall sunshine. Annie found a large flat rock, nearly dry, and we sat on it. Her pack got stuck when she hunched her shoulders to take it off, and when I helped her get it free, I could feel how thin her shoulders were, even under the heavy sweater. "Egg salad," she said in an ordinary voice, unwrapping foil packages. "Cheese and ketchup. Bananas, spice cake." She smiled. "I can't vouch for the cake because it's the first one I've ever made, and my grandmother had to keep giving me directions.



There's coffee, too. You'd probably rather have wine, but I didn't have enough money, and they don't always believe I'm eighteen." "Are you?" Annie shook her head. "Seventeen," she said, and I said, "Coffee's fine, anyway." Oddly enough, it had never occurred to me to have wine at a picnic, but as soon as Annie mentioned it, it sounded terrific. Annie carefully unwrapped two big pieces of cake and put them on neat squares of foil. Then, with no transition at all, she said, "Actually, sir knight, this plate is from my father's castle. I had my maid take it this morning for this very use. The sliced boar," she said, handing me an egg salad sandwich, "is, I'm afraid, indifferent, but the peacocks' tongues"--this was a banana--"are rather nice this year." "Best boar I've ever had," I said gallantly, taking a bite of my sandwich. It wasn't bad as egg salad, either. Annie spread her skirt neatly around her and ate a cheese-and-ketchup sandwich while I finished my egg one; we were quiet again. "The mead," I said, to make conversation after I'd taken a sip of coffee, "is excellent." Annie held up a couple of packs of sugar and a small plastic bag of Cremora. "Do you really take your mead black? I brought this in case." "Always," I said solemnly. "I have always taken my mead black." Annie smiled and picked up her cake. "You must think I'm an awful child," she said with her mouth full. "I forget most people don't like pretending that way after they're much bider than seven." "Did I look," I asked her, "as if I didn't like it?" She smiled, shaking her head, and I told her about how I'd acted out King Arthur stories up until I was fourteen, and how I still sometimes thought about them. That led to both of us talking about our childhoods and our families. She told me she had a married sister in Texas she hadn't seen for years, and then she told me about her father, who was born in Italy and is a cab driver, and her grandmother, who lives with them and who was born in Italy, too. Annie's last name hadn't started out as Kenyon at all, but something very long and complicated in Italian which her father had Anglicized. "What about your mother?" I asked. "She was born here," Annie said, finishing her cake while I ate my banana. "She's a bookkeeper--supposedly part-time, but she stays late a lot. The other day she said she's thinking of working full-time next year, when I'm in college. Assuming Nana--my grandmother--is still mostly well, and assuming I get into college in the first place." She laughed. "If I don't, maybe I'll be a bookkeeper, too." "Do you think you won't get in?" I asked. Annie shrugged. "I probably will. My marks are okay, especially in music. And my SAT scores were good." Then we talked about SAT's and marks for a while. Most of that afternoon was--how can I put it? It felt



a little as if we'd found a script that had been written just for us, and we were reading through the beginning quickly--the imaginative, exploratory part back in the museum, and now the factual exposition: "What's your family like? What's your favorite subject?"--hurrying so we could get to the part that mattered, whatever that was to be. Annie put out her hand for my banana skin. "My first choice," she was saying--the factual part of the script still--"is Berkeley." "Berkeley?" I said, startled. "In California?" She nodded. "I was born there--well, in San Jose, which isn't that far from Berkeley. Then we moved to San Francisco. I love California. New York's--unfriendly." She stuffed the empty skin into her pack. "Except for you. You're the first really friendly person I've met since high school--the whole time we've lived here." "Oh, come on," I said, flattered. "That can't be true." She smiled, stretching. "No? Come to my school next week while you're suspended. You'll see." She sat there quietly, still smiling at me, then shook her head and looked down at the rock, poking at a bit of lichen. "Weird," she said softly. "What is?" She laughed, not a full-of-delight laugh this time, but a short, troubled one. "I almost said something--oh, something crazy, that's all. I guess I don't understand. Not quite, anyway." She shouldered her pack and stood up before I could ask her to explain. "It's getting late," she said. "I've got to go. Are you walking to the subway? Or taking the bus?" The next day--Sunday--started out horribly. It was drizzling out, so we all sat stiffly around the apartment with the Times, trying not to talk about suspension or earrings or anything related. But that didn't last long. "Look, George," Mom said from her corner of the sofa as soon as she opened the paper. "The cutest pair of gold earrings-do you think Annalise would like them?" Annalise is her sister and had a birthday coming up. Dad glared at me and said, "Ask Liza. She knows more about earrings than anyone else in the family." Then Dad found an article about discipline problems in high schools, which he insisted on reading aloud, and Chad, who was sprawled out on the floor at the foot of Dad's big yellow chair, found a court case involving a kid who'd broken into his school's office safe in revenge for being expelled. When I couldn't stand it any more I got up from my end of the sofa and went



out for a walk on the Promenade, which is also called the Esplanade. It's a wide, elevated walkway that runs along one side of Brooklyn Heights, above New York Harbor and the beginning of the East River. It's nice; you can see the Manhattan skyline, and the Statue of Liberty, and the Staten Island ferry chugging back and forth, and of course the Brooklyn Bridge, which links Brooklyn to Manhattan and is just a few blocks away. Only that day the weather was so dismal I couldn't see much of anything except my own bad mood. I was leaning against the cold wet railing, staring out at a docked freighter, but really going back and forth with myself over whether I should have tried harder to stop Sally, when a voice at my elbow said, "Don't jump"--and there was Annie. She was wearing jeans again, and some kind of scarf, and her cape. "But," I stammered, "but--but how ..." She pulled out the notebook from when we'd exchanged addresses and waved it at me. "I wanted to see where you live," she said, "and then there I was at your building so I rang the belt, and then your mother--she's pretty--said you'd gone for a walk, and then this kid--your brother, Chad, I guess--came out after me and said he thought this was where you'd probably be and told me how to get here. He seems nice." "He--he is." It wasn't much to say, but I was still so bewildered and so happy at the same time that I couldn't think of anything else. "Nice view," said Annie, leaning against the railing next to me. Then in a very quiet, serious voice she said, "What's the matter, Liza? The suspension?" It was as if the script that had been written for us had suddenly jumped way ahead. "Yes," I said. "Walk with me," Annie said, stuffing her hands into her jeans pockets under her cape. "My Nana says," Annie told me, "that walking helps the mind work. She used to hike out into the countryside from her village in Sicily when she was a girl. She used to climb mountains, too." Annie stopped and looked at me. "She told me once, back when we were in California, that the thing about mountains is that you have to keep on climbing them, and that it's always hard, but that there's a view from the top, every time, when you finally get there." "I don't see how that ..." I began. "I know. You're student council president, but you're really just a person. Probably a pretty good one, but still just a person. Because you're student council president, everyone expects you to be perfect, and that's hard. Trying to live up to everyone's expectations and being yourself, too--



maybe that's a mountain you have to go on climbing. Nana would say"--Annie turned, making me stop--"that it'll be worth it when you get to the top. And I'd say go on climbing, but don't expect to reach the top tomorrow. Don't expect yourself to be perfect for other people." "For a unicorn," I think I said, "you're pretty smart." Annie shook her head. We talked about it a little more, and then we went on walking along the dreary, wet Promenade, talking about responsibility and authority and even about God--no pretending this time, no medieval improvisations, just us. By the time we were through, I realized I was talking to Annie as if I'd known her all my life, not just a few days. Annie? I'm not sure how she felt. She still hadn't said much about herself, personal things, I mean, and I had. By about four o'clock we were so cold and wet that we went up to Montague Street, which is the main shopping street for the Heights, and had a cup of coffee. We started getting silly again--reading the backs of sugar packages aloud and imitating other customers and laughing. When Annie blew a straw paper at me, the waitress glared at us, so we left. "Well," said Annie, on the sidewalk outside the coffee shop. "Their mead," I said, reluctant for her to leave, "wasn't half as good as yours." "No," said Annie. "Liza ...?" "What?" Then we both spoke at once. "You first," I said. "Well, I was just going to say that if you don't have to go yet, you could come back to my apartment and see my room or something. But it's almost six ..." "And I was going to say that if you don't have to eat supper right away, maybe I could come back to your apartment and see your room." "Supper," I said, looking up to see what color the traffic light was, and then crossing the street with Annie, "is sometimes pretty informal on Sundays. Maybe Mom will even invite you ..." Mom did, and Annie phoned her mother, who said she could stay. We had baked ham and scalloped potatoes, so it wasn't one of our informal and easily expandable Sunday suppers, which usually was eggs in some form, cooked by Dad. But there was plenty of food, and everyone seemed to like Annie. In fact, as soon as Mom found out Annie was a singer, they began talking about Bach and Brahms and Schubert so much that I felt left out and revived a friendly running argument I had with Dad about the Mets versus the Yankees. Mom got the point in a few minutes and changed the subject. Toward dessert, I started panicking about my room, which was a mess--so much so, I suddenly remembered, that I almost didn't want to show it to Annie after all. It's a fairly large room, with a lot of pictures of buildings fastened to the walls with drawing tape, and as soon as we went inside I



saw how shabby some of the drawings had gotten and how dirty the tape was. But Annie didn't seem to mind. She went right to my drawing table--that was actually the best thing about my room anyway--on which was a pretty good preliminary sketch for my solar-house project. Right away she asked, "What's this?" so I started explaining, and showed her some of the other sketches I'd done. Although most people get bored after about five minutes of someone's explaining architectural drawings, Annie sat down on the stool by the drawing table and kept asking questions till nearly ten o'clock, when Mom came in to say she thought it was time for Dad to take Annie home. At that point I realized that Annie really seemed interested in architecture, and I felt embarrassed for starting that show-off argument at dinner instead of listening to her talk. Dad and Chad and I all ended up taking Annie home on the subway, which turned out to be a longer trip than we'd expected. On the way I tried asking one or two questions about music, but it was too noisy for conversation. Just before we got to her stop, Annie gave my hand a quick squeeze and said, "You don't have to do that, Liza." "Do what?" "Talk about music with me. It's okay. I know you don't like it all that much." "Liza," Chad called, "I can't hold this door all night. Girls!" he said disgustedly to Dad when we were finally out of the train. "I like music fine," I said to Annie, falling behind my father and Chad as we all went up the stairs to the street. "Really. Why, I ..." Then I stopped, because Annie was laughing, seeing through me. "Okay, okay," I said. "I don't know anything about music. But I--am--willing to,,," "Fine," said Annie. "You can come to my next recital. There's one before Christmas." By this time we were up on the street, and for the few blocks to Annie's building I tried again to ask her questions, nontechnical ones, about the recital and what kinds of songs she liked to sing and things like that. She seemed to be answering carefully, as if she were trying to make me feel I understood more than I did. "Well," said Dad when we got to Annie's building--a big ugly yellow brick oblong in the middle of almost a whole block of abandoned brownstones--"why don't we see you up to your apartment, Annie?" "Oh, no, Mr. Winthrop," she said quickly--and I realized that she was embarrassed. "I'll be fine."



"No, no," Dad said firmly, "we'll take you up." "Dad ..." I said under my breath--but he ignored me, and we all rode silently up to the fifth floor in a rickety elevator that seemed to take long enough to get to the top of the Empire State Building. Annie's front door was near the elevator, a little to the left down a dark shabby hall, and I had to admit that Dad was probably right to have us all go up there with her. But I could see she was still embarrassed, so I said, "Well, good night," as loudly and as cheerfully as possible, and practically pushed Dad and Chad back into the elevator. Annie waved to me from her door, and her lips formed the words "Thank you" silently as the elevator door closed. When we got back out onto the street, I felt as if I were about to burst with I didn't quite know what, so I started whistling. "Liza," said Dad--he can be a little stiff sometimes-"don't do that. This isn't a terrific neighborhood.. Don't call attention to yourself." "It is so a terrific neighborhood," I said, ignoring a drunk in a doorway and a skinny collarless dog who was sniffing around an overflowing litter basket. "It's a gorgeous neighborhood, beautiful, stupendous, magnificent!" Chad tapped his head with his forefinger and said, "Crazy," to Dad. "Maybe a stop at Bellevue?" Bellevue is a huge hospital with a very active psycho ward. I made a growling sort of werewolf noise and lunged at Chad just as a bum reeled up to Dad and asked him for seventy-five cents for the subway. So I growled at the bum, too, and he reeled away, staring at me over his shoulder. Dad shot me a look that was supposed to be angry, but he couldn't keep it from turning into a guffaw, and then he put one arm around me and the other around Chad and marshaled us firmly over to the next block where he hailed a cab. "I can't risk being seen with you two," he grinned, giving the driver our address. "Can't you just see the Times? 'Engineer Seen At Large With Two Maniacs. Sanity Questioned. One Maniac A Suspended High-School Student. Ear-Piercing Ring Rumored.'" I sneaked a surprised look at Dad and he reached over and mussed my hair in a way he hadn't done since I was little. "It's okay, Liza," he said. "We all make mistakes. That was a big one, that's all. But I know you won't do anything like it again." But, oh, God, neither of us had any way of knowing that I would do something much, much worse--at least in the eyes of the school and my parents, and probably a whole lot of other people, too, if they'd known about it. Liza took



Annie's picture out of the drawer she'd been keeping it in, put it on her bureau, and went to bed. But she couldn't sleep. She tried to read and the words blurred; she tried to draw and couldn't concentrate. Finally, she went to her desk and read through Annie's letters. "I miss you," all but the last one said at the end. Liza took some cassettes from her bookcase--Brahms, Bach, Schubert; she put on the Schubert and went back to bed, listening. Maybe I should stop, she thought more than once; I should probably stop thinking about this. But although the next day she took two long walks, went to the library, and put in three unnecessary lab hours to avoid it, she was back at her desk after dinner, looking at Annie's picture and remembering... 6 Monday morning, just before first period, I called school and asked for Ms. Stevenson. But Ms. Baxter, who answered the phone, said she was home sick. I thought for a minute and then, because I didn't want to talk to Mrs. Poindexter, I asked for Ms. Stevenson's home number. "This is Liza Winthrop," I said uncomfortably. "I guess you know I was suspended Friday. I, um, don't know if I'm supposed to do homework or how I'm supposed to keep up with classes or anything." There was a pause, during which I imagined Ms. Baxter taking out one of her lace handkerchiefs and dabbing mournfully at her eyes. "Six-two-five," she said, as if she were praying, "eight-seven-one-four." "Thank you." I clicked the receiver button and began dialing again. Ms. Stevenson's phone rang five times, with no answer. I was just about to hang up and call Sally to see if by some chance she knew what we were supposed to do, when a voice, not Ms. Stevenson's, answered. "Um," I said eloquently, "this--um--is Liza Winthrop, one of Ms. Stevenson's students at Foster? Well, I'm sorry to bother her if she's not feeling well, but the thing is ..." "Oh, Liza," the voice said. "This is Ms. Widmer. Isabelle-I mean Ms. Stevenson--has a terrible cold and I was just about to leave for school--late, as you can see. Is there anything I can do?" I remembered then that someone had once said they thought that Ms. Stevenson and Ms. Widmer lived together. "Or," Ms. Widmer was suggesting, "would you rather talk to her directly? It's just that she feels very rotten." "No, it's okay," i said quickly, and explained. Ms. Widmer left for a couple of minutes and then came back and said yes, I did have to keep up and she'd send my homework to me via Chad if that was okay and wasn't it nice it was a short week because of Thanksgiving.



She suggested I get in touch with Sally to tell her it would be a good idea for her to make some kind of arrangement, too. So I called Sally--she still sounded upset about everything--and then I spent the next twenty minutes deciding what to wear to Annie's school. I must have put on four different pairs of jeans before I found one that wasn't dirty or torn or too shabby or not shabby enough, and then I darned a hole in the elbow of my favorite gray sweater, which I'd been putting off doing since spring. By the time I left, it was after ten o'clock. It took me more than an hour to get to Annie's school, what with changing subways and all. She'd drawn me a rough floor plan of the building and copied down her schedule for me, but she'd also warned me I wouldn't be able to just walk in, as someone pretty much could at my school--and she couldn't have been more right about that! As soon as I saw the building, I remembered her comparing it to a prison. I've seen big ugly schools all over New York, but this was the worst one of all. It was about as imaginative in design as a military bunker. I went up the huge concrete steps outside, through big double doors that had wire mesh over their windows, as did the regular windows, and into a dark cavernous hall with metal stairwells off it. The first thing that hit me was the smell: a combination of disinfectant, grass, and the subway on a hot day, with the last one of those the strongest. The second thing that hit me was how the prison atmosphere continued inside. Even the interior glass windows, on doors and looking into offices, were reinforced with wire mesh. And right in the middle of the hall, opposite the doors, was an enormous table with three security guards standing around it. The biggest of them strode up to me the minute I walked in. "What do you want?" he demanded belligerently. I told him my name, as Annie had warned me I'd have to, and said I was a friend of Annie's and had come to see the school. "How come you're not in school yourself?" he asked. I didn't know what to say to that. I thought of saying I was a dropout or that my school had all week off for Thanksgiving or that I'd graduated early--anything but that I'd been suspended. But then I figured I was in enough trouble already, and besides, I've always been a terrible liar, so I told the truth. He asked why I'd been suspended, so I told him that, too. And that did it. He and another guard herded me into a little office off the hall. Then he asked how I'd like it if they called Foster to verify my story, and the other guard asked if I'd mind emptying my pockets, and I said, "What for" he looked at his cohort and said, "Is this kid for real?" Needless to say, I never did get any farther inside Annie's school that day. So I left, and spent the next few hours at the Museum of the American Indian. When I got back, at about two-thirty, the guards and a couple of cops were outside and what seemed like thousands of kids were pouring out the doors--and just as I was thinking there was no way Annie was going to find me except by luck, I spotted her and yelled, waving my arms. One of the guards started edging toward me, but I managed to duck out of his way and get lost in the crowd; Annie



watched from the next-to-top step till I crossed the street, and then she came toward me, smiling. "Let's get away from here," she said, and led me around the corner to a quiet little park where there were mothers and baby carriages and dogs--a different world. "I tried to get in," I said, and explained. "Oh, Liza, I'm sorry!" she said when I was through. "I should have warned you more--I'm sorry." "Hey, it's okay!" "Those security guards are jerks," she said, still sounding upset. "They probably thought you were selling." She gave an odd little half laugh and sat down on a bench. "We could use fewer of them here at school and more where I live." "I didn't think it was so bad," I said, remembering her embarrassment when we took her home. "Where you live, I mean." I sat down next to her. "Oh, come on!" said Annie, exploding the way she had at the Cloisters over the ear piercing. "You know what goes on in those buildings, the ones no one lives in? Kids shoot up, drunks finish off their bottles and then throw up all over the sidewalk, muggers jump out at you--sure, it's a wonderful neighborhood!" "I'm sorry," I said humbly. "I guess I don't know much about it." "That's okay," Annie said after a minute. But it didn't seem okay to me, because there we were sitting moodily on a cold bench saying "I'm sorry," to each other for things we couldn't help. Instead of being happy to see Annie, which I'd been at first, now I felt rotten, as if I'd said something so dumb the whole friendship was going to be over with when it had only just started. Finis--end of script. Annie poked her foot at a bunch of dry cracked leaves near one end of the bench; we were sitting pretty far away from each other. "Somewhere out there," she said softly, "there's someplace right, there's got to be." She turned to me, smiling and less upset, as if she'd forgiven me or maybe never even been as angry as she'd seemed. "Where we lived when I was little, after we'd moved to San Francisco, you could see out over the Bay--little white specks of houses nestled in the hills like--like little white birds. Getting back there and finding out if it's as beautiful as I remember--that's one of my mountains." She flapped her arms in her coat--it was thicker than her cape, but I could see that it was old, even threadbare in spots. "Sometimes then



I used to pretend I was a bird, too, like the ones I pretended were across the Bay, and that I could fly over to where they were." "And now," I said carefully, "you're going to fly across the whole country to get to them." "Oh, Liza," she said. "Yes. Yes--except ..." But instead of finishing she shook her head, and when I asked her "What?" she jumped up and said, "I know what let's do! Let's walk over to the IRT and go downtown and take the ferry back and forth to Staten Island till it gets dark so we can see the lights--have you ever done that? It's neat. You can pretend you're on a real ship--let's see. Where do you want to go? France? Spain? England?" "California," I said, without thinking. "I'd like to help you find your white birds." Annie put her head to one side