New Girl

He tilted my head so that my eyes caught the light.

“They’re not just green. They have some brown in them, too. Right in the middle.” I looked at him as he studied my eyes.

“Really?” I said, even though I fully knew it.

“There’s also …” He narrowed his own eyes. “Also some blue. They’re like the color of … a pond or something.”

I laughed, and it echoed in the otherwise silent room. Everyone looked at us. I bit my lip and looked around apologetically.

Max smiled. “What?”

“A pond? So, like, the brown is mud and the green is pond scum?”

He laughed, too, sitting back down. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

I laughed and focused back on my canvas.

The end of class came, and we were able to reveal our paintings to each other. I actually kind of liked mine. It didn’t look like a photograph or anything, but it really looked like Max.

“You ready?” I asked him.

He furrowed his brow once again at his painting and said, “I guess.”

We turned around our paintings. I don’t think I’d laughed so hard in weeks. I was one big circle with pink tinge in my cheeks, little dots for freckles, and huge blue-green-brown eyes. I had no eyelids, and my lashes were like little black spiders.

“All right, all right, so I’m not an artist.” He put his canvas back on the easel. “But at least I got your eyes right.”

The rest of the week passed by in a frenzy of getting situated in classes and talking about the year full of work that lay before us. I could already tell that the huge studio was going to be my sanctuary, because as far as the other classes went, it was looking like the year wouldn’t be an easy one. Manderley had block scheduling, so one day we’d have four classes, and then the next day we’d have four different ones. Fridays we had all of them, but they were cut in half. On A days, I had English, World History, Algebra II and Painting. On B days, I had Gym (a bummer because at my old school we didn’t need to take it in senior year, and also because it’s at freaking 8:00 a.m.), Biology, French II (a breeze, since my Paris-born mother had mostly taught me the language) and study hall (which I could hardly believe was a real thing).

A couple days into this schedule, I approached Blake in the dining hall as we slathered bagels with cream cheese, and she assured me things would settle down soon.

“It’s always like this,” she said. “It’s superbusy and then teachers cool off. Trust me, two weeks from now it’ll be ten times better. It’s like they sprint and then get tired and drag their feet for the rest of the year.”

I saw her and Cam every day in the hallways and a few times during meals. They were clearly a very happy couple, and I got along with both of them. I saw a few other people in the halls that I’d met, but no one said much more than a passing hello. I didn’t see Max as much as I wanted to, but when I did, he was usually coming in from lacrosse practice with slightly flushed cheeks and a sheen of sweat on his sculpted cheekbones.

It was odd for me to be mostly solitary. Back home I was out all the time and did something at least kind of social every day even if it was just watching TV with Leah. I was missing home more each day. Every memory I had of home was suddenly set in a perfect sunny day, whereas Manderley was set to the backdrop of gray rain and cold drafts that seeped through ancient walls.

I was alone and cold, and since the food was nothing like my mother’s or what I was used to, I was hungry. Even the salad, usually a safe go-to, tasted like nail polish remover.

It was really hard to stay positive. And that’s normally a talent of mine.

Unable to simply quit school or even tell my thrilled parents about the mild disappointments of the past week, I sat by myself and read or did homework during meals, went to class alone, and then headed to my room where Dana would look disappointed to see me and then ignore me. Sometimes I wanted to just kick her in the shins and tell her to stop being such an unpleasant cloud of gloom, but then I’d remember Becca—it was hard not to, when my side of the room still displayed a wallpaper of her pictures—and feel guilty again.

So that put me in the dining hall at nine at night on my first Friday evening. I was filling my travel mug with hot chocolate. I’d decided I wasn’t ready for bed and that I didn’t want to spend time in the same room as Dana quite yet. I figured I’d read To Kill a Mockingbird and try to find the deeper motifs in the rotunda until I got tired.

It was meant to be a social place, but the chairs were clearly not built with comfort or extended sitting in mind. They were all stiff, and some of them were mysteriously itchy. The rotunda itself was pretty noisy, what with the entrance hall directly beneath us, but it was better than my room.

My hot chocolate looked thin and watery, but it was deceptively delicious. I turned to see Blake putting a piece of bread in the toaster.

I summoned the nerve and then said, “Hey, Blake.”

She looked up, and took a second to register. “Oh, hey! I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were there.”

“That’s okay, I just walked up.”

She smiled kindly. “I’m just taking this up to my room or I’d sit with you.”

“Oh, me, too,” I said, not wanting her to think I was desperate. “I’m just getting some of this and then reading a little for English.”

“I suggest reading on the second floor of the library. Have you been up there yet?”

“Not yet.”

“There are some spiral stairs near the back of the library that lead up to a bunch of study rooms. Go into the room right across from the landing.”

“What is it? Am I allowed?”

She giggled. “Yes, it’s the senior study room. There’s a gas fire in there, and a bunch of armchairs. It’s really nice. It’s empty a lot at night. Most of these kids do their homework right after classes.”

“I’ll go check it out, thanks.” I brought my hot chocolate to my lips.

“Oh, and hey,” she added quickly, “we’re going down to the boathouse tonight, you want to come?”

“Um …” I scrunched up my face in consideration.

“I know you can. Harper Lee can wait until tomorrow.” She looked knowingly at me. “You just don’t want to go. Well, look, it’ll be better this time. Last time you went, it was just a little weird. The last party we had last year was the one when … Becca went missing. Not only that, but she was the one who kind of … started the parties down there.”

“Oh …” Then the question I’d been waiting to ask all week fell from my lips like an anvil. “What … what happened to her?”

Blake’s toast popped up in the toaster. She removed it and concentrated on smothering it in butter and jelly. “She and Max got into a fight about something to do with Johnny … and it was right after Dana and she’d had a fight … and then the next thing we knew she was just gone. So was the training sailboat.” Her hand slowed on the knife. “It was really strange. There was a horrible storm brewing, so it doesn’t make sense for her to think she could go out in the boat … that would be suicide. But maybe that’s what it was … or maybe she was pushed out onto the boat. Or maybe she just left, and the boat thing was a coincidence. It’s really not clear what happened.”

Blake went silent, and it was clear to me that she’d spent a lot of energy trying to figure this out.

“That’s awful.”

“It was also the last night though, so she might have just called a cab and left for the summer. She had her purse on her. And her family is incredibly rich. I don’t know … It just doesn’t make sense. I’m sure you’ve heard all of the talk about it. All the theories.”

I shook my head. “No, not really. People talk about her a lot, but … what do you mean by theories?”

She sighed and took a bite of her toast. “She’s been missing for so many months now that it’s kind of … the longer she’s missing, the more likely it is she won’t come back.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

“So I guess …” Blake went on, “I guess people are starting to wonder if she was killed.”

“Killed? Really? By someone—by a student?”

She nodded somberly. “Yeah. It’s hard to believe, but the whole thing is so surreal.”